THE thing is with Noel Fielding you either go with him – or you get lost along the way.

Only by suspending your disbelief for the evening can you navigate his wonderfully whimsical flights of fancy and the bonkers characters along the way.

But mostly, the Mayflower’s audience took the ticket to ride thanks to the sheer comic brilliance of his performance.

Granted a hardcore were Fielding fans. The feather haired, flat nosed one clearly attracts something of a cult following. But everyone else clearly lapped up his bizarre style which dispenses of logic in favour of a surrealist paradise.

The comedian is more recently known for being a wisecracking panellist on the more conventional BBC2 show Never Mind the Buzzcocks.

Others will know him for his surreal musical comedy hit, The Mighty Boosh. Fewer will know him for his Channel 4 show Luxury Comedy, however, which did not pull in the ratings.

Once freed from his Boosh partner, Julian Barrett, his brand of comedy fell way off the wall into an abyss of strangeness.

And it is in the vein that last night’s performance proceeded.

The best way to describe it is “artcom”, with many of his characters resembling drawings, some made of plasticine.

But the night began with conventional stand-up.

The free-wheeling hipster kicked off with selfdeprecating banter about the march of middle age – as despite his tight pants and glam rock sparkly boots, he is now 41.

Yet this regular stand-up act is just a trick. For all the while he is lulling you deeper into his pleasantly strange universe.

Before you know it you are being drawn into his dream of being a herbal teabag that has been marooned at the back of the cupboard since the 1980s and has now lost its identity.

Then, lamenting still about his ageing state, which he likens to a deflated helium balloon, he recalls his childhood in the 1970s when he was a “chicken boy”.

It then seems perfectly conceivable that Fielding should start tempting the plasticine punk rocker Joe Ramone out of his stop-start animated world with a bag of Harabo.

If that was not enough strangeness for one evening, Fielding began recounting being cuckolded by a triangle, before taking the aggressive cockney shape on in a fight.

Later Fielding is apparently kidnapped by the angry triangle and taken into the plasticine world of Joey Ramone.

Only “Fantasy Man”, from the Luxury Comedy series, can save the day but first he must find a “Steve” from the audience.

Alas the Mayflower audience can only produce someone whose middle name is Steve, who then becomes the hero of the show by rescuing Fielding from the animated world.

As far out as this all sounds, never do you lose the plot – as bewildered as you are by the surreality.

Throughout the genius of Fielding manages to draw you into an illogical and abstract, deconstructed evening of comedy.