[1][2] In 1997 he first met Mighty Boosh collaborator Noel Fielding when they both appeared on the same comedy bill at a pub in north London.

We thought we’d make inroads into the jazz scene in London – we’d read biographies about guys who got gigs at Ronnie Scott’s and got spotted and immediately taken into someone’s band.

[2] It was further commented that "He initially thought he’d be a musician and set off as a teenager... [with Barratt saying] ...'You know the well-known saying: leave home at 17 and make your fortune in London as a jazz drummer...'".

But I watched a lot of stand-up at uni – people like Mark Lamarr, Sean Hughes, Eddie Izzard, just standing on a stage doing these phenomenal routines.

"[2] It has also been commented that this occurred "...during his first standup sketch at Reading University..." and that he "...ran through the back door mid-act and through fields to a lake.

It was a validation of what felt like a long process of growing up, coming up against all these difficulties if you’re shy and you have all these dreams and thoughts you can’t communicate.

"[2] In 1997 Barratt first met Mighty Boosh collaborator Noel Fielding when they both appeared on the same comedy bill at a pub in north London.

", with Barratt responding that "We were both doing quite surreal stuff, eh...", with Fielding adding "It was quite weird wasn't it, alot weirder than the show in a way...", with Barratt continuing "...but we sort of, when we first met we kind of liked each others comedy but we didn't know that it would work, we didn't know whether it was gonna cancel each other out and make....", with Fielding responding "Yeah, too weird to make sort of, straight...", with Barratt continuing "...might just become geography or something else or... this sort of thing, but it worked for some reason...", with Fielding adding "We had quite a good chemistry straight away.

"[14] On the day they met they both went back to Julian's place that night where Barratt played music on his Akai sampler whilst Fielding used a ping-pong ball to make an eye patch.

"[9] They also found they both shared common interests in comedy including Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer.

[4] Dave Brown who also collaborated on the Mighty Boosh with them commented further on their time at the Hen and chickens which is a theatre bar in Islington, London, "They would use the Hen and Chickens as this kind of... place to, a platform to just try stuff out and it was just a great little place they could do a regular spot... ...where they would probably write and have ideas in the week, try stuff out for half of that and then for the rest of it, it would just be improv and mucking about.

And then we used to put potted plants all around the gig and music on... ...to try and make it into a sort of play... people couldn't believe the audacity.

"[4] Fielding has commented further on their first live show, The Mighty Boosh, “Julian had a song about a mammoth that he wanted to sing to a girl in the audience, and I had a few ideas for some weird sketches... ...We started working on our ideas together... ...We were zookeepers and we got sucked through our bosses’ eyes and into a magic forest..."[15] In 2001 The Mighty Boosh became a six-part[5] radio show on BBC London Live, later transferring to BBC Radio 4[5] and Barratt has humorously commented that "...so we did a radio show, we did, we sort of recorded it in a sort of old railway sort of arch...", with Fielding adding "in Shoreditch"... with Julian continuing "...built our studio out of weird... little children's toys...".

[4] Barratt and fielding have also commented on the process of moving the show from the stage to TV, with Barratt commenting "...we wanted to get on TV but it'd been a lot of trouble because they thought it was eh, the scripts we sort of gave them were sort of like massive epic adventures that sounded like it would cost them a million pounds to make so they said this isn't, I don't know how this is going to work on stage, well actually what happened is..." with Fielding adding "We wrote it for Channel 4 originally", and with Julian continuing "...[we spoke to them] before we'd done a stage show and they said how is this going to work on TV cos it is ridiculous.

So we wrote, we did a stage show and then they said hows that going to work on TV because its really good live, so, perhaps we should've done it inside a television set.

It went on and on.”[15] Barratt has also commented that “Me and Noel went to HBO once and pitched this really ludicrous idea about us driving around in a haunted car and they just stared at us.

...Luckily, we were together so we could laugh about it..."[6] In the Mighty Boosh, Barratt plays the character Howard Moon opposite Noel Fielding's Vince Noir.

Howard labels himself a "jazz maverick" and claims to be a multi-talented intellectual, calling himself a "man of action", but he is actually unsuccessful in his literary and romantic ventures.

One was a "Rocky Horror Picture Show type thing," according to Fielding, in which Barratt played a character who has woken up believing himself to be the last man on earth.

After three weeks of this I started to feel unusual so Ivana Zorn, who is Nigel Coan's partner, now does a majority of the painting and I just design the main characters.

[12] Fielding also made drawings that formed a basis for the characters costumes and make-up in the Mighty boosh TV show.

[26][12] Regular Boosh collaborators include Michael Fielding, Rich Fulcher, Dave Brown,[23] Nigel Coan,[23] Richard Ayoade, Matt Berry[4] and Ivanna Zorn.

Vince Noir is quite modern, a bit of an indie kid; Howard Moon is... ...eccentric... ...and we rely heavily on Julian's music and my animation...

He starred as Dan Ashcroft, a frustrated magazine writer, in the Channel 4 media satire Nathan Barley, and appeared in the surrealistic black comedy series Asylum alongside Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson (who wrote and starred in Spaced).

Before this, Barratt was one half of an experimental comedy duo called "The Pod" with friend Tim Hope, in which they billed themselves as a "Cyberdance Collective".

Barratt made his directing début for Warp Films with theatre director Dan Jemmett.

He appeared in the music video for Mint Royale's "Blue Song", alongside Noel Fielding, Nick Frost, and Michael Smiley.

He also narrated the BBC Two documentaries The Route Masters: Running London's Roads and The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway.

From 3 June to 9 July 2011, Barratt played the Mayor in a production of Nikolai Gogol's classic comedy The Government Inspector at the Young Vic Theatre.

Van Halen was a big influence... ..And I played a lot of long, fast guitar solos.