They met in a Cambridge chapel, singing sixteenth-century polyphony in cassocks, and decided - reasonably enough - that this would not do. What young man wants to be caught in a cassock when he could be suave? So they discovered a mutual and abiding love of Frank Sinatra, formed a two-man Rat Pack backed by a jazz trio, and set about singing standards to their bedraggled friends at four in the morning. The immediate incentive, it should be said, was that performers got into the May Balls free.

From that piece of undergraduate liggery grew Bounder & Cad: the "supremely entertaining" musical-comedy duo whose lyrics Downing Street once tried to censor, who have sung on the Onassis yacht and in the library at Highclere, and who now hold a monthly residency at Piccadilly's Crazy Coqs. Adam Drew writes the words - the Prince Harry rap that started it all, the deathwish ditty about Vladimir Putin, the Reformation battle in which Luther and Leo X trade bars. Guy Hayward, when he is not being a Bounder, directs the British Pilgrimage Trust and evangelises for choral evensong.

One is intentionally amusing. The other, by his own admission, is accidentally so. They are, in the great tradition, a perfectly matched pair - and, being both Eccentric Club members, exactly the sort the magazine exists to celebrate. We put the questions to both.

Have you been thought eccentric?

ADAM: Some people may have considered me ek kentron, yes. As a schoolboy I kept out of the kentron by being rather studious and serious - I made up for it at university, though still quite eccentrically. It was around then I developed my obsession with unusual colours and their combinations, and a lasting desire to own shirts and socks in every possible shade.

GUY: I first noticed it at university, about fifteen years ago. Usually it's just a passing comment rather than a thing. A friend said to me as he graduated, "More than most people here, I'm intrigued to see where your life takes you in twenty years" - and my joy at hearing that made me realise I didn't want to be normal.

It became official only recently, in a Financial Times feature about the Pilgrimage Trust, where the journalist called me "mildly eccentric, with the voice of an angel." I rather like the "mild." I don't go out of my way.

Have you found yourselves? Or did you do it your way?

ADAM: I hope for more life still - but yes. I'm glad to have pursued the arts my way, as an actor, writer and musical-comedy-performer. Bounder & Cad is an especially happy combination of things I love. And Sinatra played his part, since Guy and I started out in a Rat Pack act.

GUY: I love the drastic balance between my irreverent life as a Bounder and my slightly more reverent life as a pilgrim. Around twenty-seven I really started doing things my way - to the point that my parents, and my girlfriend at the time, threw up their hands and said that if I went down these paths, they'd have no choice but to send me on my way alone.

Which they did. It was the making of me.

Where does the work come from?

ADAM: Money. I had to work for free starting out, and sometimes still do things for their own sake, but I feel no shame in saying I'm most creative when I'm being paid. A deadline and the expectation of delivering the goods is a real spur - and I like a brief. Working within limits is oddly freeing. Beyond that, I take inspiration from being around people and things I find surprising and delightful, and I try to invest those qualities in the work. Not so long ago, I wrote a Christmas song and video so high-energy I feared it might give the intended audience a seizure.

GUY: In my pilgrimage life, the inspiration comes from listening to everyone in the network and then tuning in to intuition for the next step. In Bounder & Cad, since I'm the co-performer rather than the writer, it comes from my ability to be myself to an extreme degree and let people laugh at me. I'm told my everyday humour is saying the thing everyone's thinking but no one feels they should say.

Is the vision eccentric or traditional?

ADAM: A bit of both. I read Classics, so my love of language and sense of drama come from a traditional place, and I learned to sing in choirs. But I'm most excited when old and new collide - witness our decidedly arcane Reformation rap battle between Luther and Leo X. Though antithesis is an old trick too, I suppose.

GUY: I'd call it eccentrically traditional. I try to reimagine tradition in radical ways, but only if those ways have their lineage in tradition. Our Reformation rap works precisely because the diction and rhythm come from being trained as choirboys and Cambridge choral scholars. The precision is the joke.

Now. The most eccentric thing you've done.

ADAM: Tricky. But in my last year at university I hosted a Trimalchio's Dinner for eight friends, where nothing was as it seemed - purple potatoes, a bird-within-a-bird-within-a-bird roast, a cake made from sausages. I hired three neon-coloured songbirds to sing for us, two fire-breathers performed after the main course, and a songwriter friend played a spooky set in the burnt-out Victorian basement.

Another time we threw a Bacchanalia for around a hundred, with a gypsy-swing brass band on the roof. The neighbours on our little terrace rightly ensured nothing similar ever happened again. I'm keen to host like that once more, when I have the right place for it.

GUY: I once paddled a canoe under the Rialto bridge in Venice, improvising to "Greensleeves," accompanied by a medieval cittern played by the founder of a psychedelic folk band. A crowd gathered to cheer. Later that evening I paddled across the lagoon from the Doge's Palace to San Giorgio Maggiore - no lights, boats whizzing past at sixty miles an hour. I arrived back to a naked man who leapt into the canal trying to capsize us. He was arrested by the Venetian police and fined four hundred euros.

Quite a night. Now I realise how dangerous it all was, legally and physically, I might not do it again. But I certainly want to.

What do you make of the Eccentric Club?

ADAM: I only discovered it recently. The Club's diligent Secretary posted one of our songs - "Puttin' Up the Brits" - on the Facebook page, and I thought Guy and I ought to join, not least so we might one day perform for the Club as members ourselves. The annus horribilis Covidi has prevented me attending many events. But I was delighted to find several people I'd already met through B&C are members - the painter Christian Furr, the designer Nicky Haslam, the restaurateur Ranald Macdonald, the dandy Ray Frensham.

GUY: I've not been to many events either - but I heard about the Club from Christian Furr more than ten years ago, attended one odd meeting in Bloomsbury and have been intrigued ever since. The Pilgrimage Trust made Steven Payne our Pilgrim of the Year in 2016, and I saw him recently in your pages. On that small sample, I reckon I'd like most of them.

[Ed: Guy first found us in the early days of the revival, at a Bloomsbury meeting in 2008 or 2009 which, thanks to a miscommunication, drew a grand total of four people - two of them Christian and Guy. He and Adam - Bounder & Cad, that is - returned in finer style one bitter winter's night, when the club convened at the London residence of the celebrated milliner and fashion designer David Shilling, our member, and sang a cappella to the accompaniment of the guests' chattering teeth. We have also seen them on other occasions since this interview took place. As for Steven Payne, on September 18, 2020, he was crowned the Greatest British Eccentric of the Year for the exceptional challenges and eccentric adventures he undertook in recent years and the charitable work he did for the homeless.]

Does the world need an Eccentric Club?

ADAM: Yes - for eccentrics to converge, which may be a contradiction, and to joy in recondite pleasures.

GUY: Of course. If belonging inspires people to be even more themselves, that increases creativity, and thus the evolution of humanity.

Is your art relevant to the modern world?

ADAM: Some of our satire is inevitably political, and some of the film and TV scripts I'm writing have "meaningful" messages smuggled in. But the work is intended, primarily and unashamedly, to entertain - and entertainment is needed more than ever. How would I like to change the world and people? Hmm. Make 'em laugh.

GUY: Pilgrimage matters because people need to reimagine the age-old practice of walking a physical path, with intention and destination, to find their true inner one. And Bounder & Cad matters because seeing the comic tension in everything is one of the best ways of dealing with the psychic conflict inherent in the world. Seen rightly, the world always produces laughter.

I love the scale of cultural evolution social media makes possible. I dislike its power to narrow horizons rather than broaden them.

How would you use a time machine if you had one?

ADAM: Easy. The Roaring Twenties - the 1920s, that is, though I'm sure the 2020s will roar soon enough. For the jazz, the cocktails, the Deco, the dancing. Pretty much as Owen Wilson had it in that film.

GUY: I'd only go backwards - the future is too unpredictable, and I wouldn't want to influence it. Florence and Venice in their heyday, I think, at the burgeoning of the sacred importance of art.

Three wishes from a genie.

ADAM: First, for everyone to accentuate the positive. Second, to host an obscenely riotous party at Versailles - the Rat Pack, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones and James Brown would play, in that order, dress code "Party Like It's 1699." Third, too private.

GUY: Pure intuition. The wisdom to know what matters. And always to be able to laugh.

What's next?

ADAM: Getting a screenplay produced - several prospects underway - and more screen acting. And Bounder & Cad playing at the Eccentric Club, surely?

GUY: School pilgrimages, which will take a great deal of eccentricity to work nationally. And more clowning music videos - if any Club members fancy helping, we'd be keen to talk.

Bounder & Cad hold a monthly residency at Crazy Coqs, Brasserie Zédel, Piccadilly. Adam Drew's screen roles include Nero, the Spitfire ace George Beurling, and Boris Johnson. Guy Hayward directs the British Pilgrimage Trust and co-authored Britain's Pilgrim Places.

https://www.bounderandcad.com/