I am scared.  The blue man is angry.  He's picked up a table and is wielding it above his head, a leaflet stand clatters to the floor splaying its contents in a haphazard fan.  I cower in the sofa, the interview is going very wrong, very early.  I haven't even asked him what his favourite colour is yet.
It would take a seclusion of Diogenes-like intensity to not have encountered these curious, blue, bald-pated neo-vaudevillians.  Playing in 7 cities for over 10 years, they have performed on Leno's Tonight Show 16 times.  They have been eferenced in Angel and Family Guy the movie, they have made  appearances on Arrested Development in which an entire sub-plot is devoted to Tobias's attempts to join them, they can even be seen playing continuously on a security video at a Las Vegas airport.  All this without even mentioning their music, collaborations with Moby, Dan the Automator, Gavin Rossdale, and Dave Matthews amongst others, their latest album going gold in 2005, the DVD of the tour going platinum.  There are Intel and Swatch global marketing campaigns bearing their bizarre, stark-eyed countenances, this October will even see the release of a toy range -  truly the canvas of contemporary media is aggressively speckled with blue.
Back in the theatre lobby the blue man is busy apologising, kneeling down to pick up the spilled leaflets.  A large man of solid musculature he explains that he was simply moving the table in order to sit on it, the sofas aren't big enough for all of us.  His name is Dave.  Kuba and Aki, the other two blue men come over to join us, dressed down in loose fitting sweatpants and wifebeaters. You can tell they are performersof some calibre simply by the way they move.  Aki's loping grace oozes kinaesthetic sense, and Kelvin hurdles the sofa arm and is into a perfectly comfortable seated position in the time it takes most people to reach for the remote control.  I shift lumpenly in my seat and feel like a proprioceptually-challenged outsider in a world of perfect poise.

Fortunately one of the main themes addressed in the Blue Man show is that of the outsider.  From the beginning it worked best with three blue men, precisely because three is the fewest number of people within which you can have an outsider.  Looking into this microcosmic formation, we can see the organising of distance and proximity, how our full-fledged membership of a group often involves being outside of it and confronting it.  The Blue Men as a unit of course are perennial outsiders.  Not recognised as an ethnicity, with seemingly no cultural history to call their own (being mute one suspects their cultural history remains pre-historic), they spawn rootless across the world's media. Yet however omnipresent they may appear, little is known about them. Their origination remains cloaked in mystery.  Perhaps they are aliens. 'They are not necessarily aliens but neither are they one of us.” Kuba explains, “a Blue Man doesn't have the same experiences and the same preconceived notions about things as we do, a lot of his actions come out of a place of extreme curiosity and innocence."  Dave continues "And although they are different there are recognisable similarities between them and us.  Throughout the show the audience make a connection with them, they sympathise and empathise with the situations that the blue men find themselves in.  Their blueness is what makes them different, but it's also what enables the audiences empathy.  It is neutral, a blank canvas.  Strip them of any ego, pretence or attitude, things that can get in the way, take away what would be recognisable as a person."  Would white not work better? "White has a lot of theatrical connotations" Aki explains "It's been used for centuries.  What the blue men require is something that isn't iconic, that doesn't carry history".  So the blue man is an object of empathy, he forges connections with others and has a natural inquisitive bent.  He is almost human.  "He is very nearly human" but does he have a soul?  "Sure he has a soul.  C'mon have you heard his music?" exclaims Aki.  Undeniably he got soul.  Of course a soul isn't always such a great thing to have, how would a blue man fare in hell?  "I've never been there. but it's not going to be hotter than a stage" deadpans Aki "I think he'd treat it much like anywhere else" ponders Kuba "he'd probably find the wailing and gnashing quite percussive, but I think he'd explore the rules, he'd experiment and learn.”

There is a certain empiricist cast to the Blue Man evident throughout the show.  Confused by Mr Kipling a cake bar the boys in blue set about various ways of opening it, from inept wiggling of the packet to violent evisceration with a chainsaw.  They appear to employ observation and inductive reasoning to surmount the multitude of pantomime obstacles they face. Kuba: "We often think about him in terms of a mad scientist or child. Those two helpful images to get into his mindset, everything is new but also there is reason for doing everything,  there is a focus, even if we  don't know what the focus is on there is a systematic approach to everything they do. And that innocence and focus is contained within this drive.'  As elequoent and thoughtful as Kuba is he can’t help but oscillate between the first and third person when talking about the character.  “He’s inside of all us and like most parts of ourselves we aren’t able to fully understand him.  When he goes on this scientific journey of discovery sometimes we are not sure where he’s taking us.”

All this talk of hell and science leads naturally to the question, what course might a blue man take at LSE?  "Probably something like anthropology, although he'd like a hands on approach." But what about the music?  Rumour has it than in his more outlandish moments Paul Gilroy will twang a guitar to accentuate points of the African Diaspora but there is no actual music course.  "Music is important" agrees Aki with coy understatement.
The show features a band, dressed in neon-skeleton clothing, bobbing supernaturally whilst pounding on drums, synths and guitars.  The Blue Men themselves have an approach to music characterised by an exculisve fondness for found percussion.  Unwieldy components of industrial debris are DIYed with workshop precision to create pitch-perfect instruments of extravagant visibility.  A case in point is the drumbone. An enormous length of large-diameter PVC tubing, it has moveable sections to alter the pitch.  “It is a percussive instrument, but with pitch-slides like a trombone, hence the name.” Within the performance sections are added and taken away, as it is being played,  in an orgiastic dance of assembly and dissemblage.  "It's not the most satisfying instrument to play, but it is massive, which gives another kind of satisfaction" Aki says.  An instrument that never made it into the show was the Piccolem.  Ostensibly something musical, the Piccolem consists of a flat surface comprised of a number of circuit boards, murderously over-pumped with voltage.  On top of this mic-ed up sausages are placed to spit and frazzle.  The acoustic result is something like one might hear on Brainwash vol. 5 - mixed by DJ Soviet Techniques of Torture listened to stamped on headphones at vol.11 by an inpatient at an audiological clinic.  An atonal polyrhythmic mess of noise with sound waves shaped like splintered daggers.  I asked Dave if he had ever played the exploding sausage. "Not at work".

Underneath the razzle, dazzle and sausage frazzle, the blue man show harbours weightier, cerebral aspirations.  Dave takes this one up - "The Blue Man group sees itself as a responsible member of society, with a show  that questions everything around us.   There are questions about art, nature, society, emotional response."  Kuba continues "as the show progresses there are different elements which interact and relate to one another, a series of overlapping questions which hopefully amount to something like an examination of contemporary culture.  We deconstruct a little bit, we play.'   These interrogations include a questioning of mass consumption and the postmodern cavalcade of information overload.  With a global Intel advert and a current heading of a Swatch campaign, has the blue man group not become a piece of mass culture itself, it not now just one of the competing messages that it deems obfuscating to genuine communication?  "We are in the interesting position of having become part of what we're observing that's true, but there is not necessarily a contradiction there.  The show itself is where we can critique contemporary culture, we can examine how we relate to one another in these mass urban environments, whatever corporate concerns are out there it doesn't affect the message contained in the performance.  And rather than presenting a direct criticism it's more about exploring the way things are, making it apparent that these things are out there, giving people a framework".  Dave takes over "You go to all types of theatre, new shows ancient plays adapted, and most of them are passing comment on something.  Most of them are driven by ideas.  At the end of the day the Blue Man Show is fun, it's an entertaining show  to come to, let your hair down at, and forget about the outside world.  You're not forced to think about anything in any particular way, you are forced to have fun and come away with a smile on your face. "There is still one question that has to be asked.  My uncle is blue and bald and mute, and he doesn't get any groupies, it must be different for the Blue Men.  "I think they're a bit weird for sex. Imagine them in your bed, they’d probably just want to drum parts of you that shouldn’t really be drummed”.  And are they blue all over?  That apparently would be telling, i simply want to know if they have blue cocks, but there are some secrets that the Blue Men shall never reveal.