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Back to work as the tour started up again with a trip to Colchester Arts. This is a very familiar stop and one of the venues I have visited annually for maybe ten years now. In fact, as I noted to the crowd tonight, I’ve got the address in my favourites on my satnav, which is not true of many venues. As I drove to the town I tried to work out if that was a positive or a negative thing, because it’s sort of both. I know that there will always be a place for me at this arts centre, and yet there’s also a tacit acceptance that as far as this town goes, the 300 seater former church is as big as I am going to get. So the rapidly fading ambitious part of me (now just a faint echo of the arrogant youthful zeal that was once inside me) wonders if it is mildly tragic that I keep trudging round the country to small to medium sized venues with little hope of progressing upwards, whilst the rest of me thanks God that there are still over 200 people who want to see me in most towns and remains hopeful that I can keep touring my shows at this level until I die.
As I still have a chunk of money to pay back from my Edinburgh experiments it’s vital that this tour makes a good profit and yet I am aware that I am competing in an increasingly crowded market place (at last count 110 comedians were touring last autumn and this spring). It’s still too early to call whether numbers are up or down on the past, but it’s looking like it’s going to be OK. Numbers were slightly down on
last year in Colchester - but not significantly so and I’ve already sold over 300 tickets in Exeter on Sunday, which counts as a major success. Basically 100 tickets sold in a town will keep me ticking over, 200 plus means it’s going to be worthwhile touring and anything over 300 is a bumper pay day. Other comedians would laugh at these numbers (though plenty more would envy them), but as I battled between wondering if I was a faintly tragic journeyman or a battling, self-made success (having grafted my way through years of driving round this country to achieving reasonable crowds without massive TV exposure), today I came out thinking I was closer to the latter than the former. Many times over the last 25 years my head has dropped and I’ve considered bailing out and giving up, but every time I have picked myself and pushed onwards. The risks I took last year did not seem to pay off either financially or more importantly artistically: I hoped the play would make people take me seriously as a writer and that Meaning of Life might be seen as a bold attempt to push back the boundaries of what could be achieved on a budget on the internet. Neither of those things have happened, but fuck it, how much better to have given it a go than to have not bothered? And how much have I learned? And though I feel like I am getting old and maybe many of my ships have sailed, here I am still going and preparing myself to push on and have another go. Perhaps with a bit more perspective now I have a defenceless little baby waiting for me at home.
So, in the end, I decided that returning to Colchester Arts Centre every year, getting more people in some years and less in others, but still enough to have a cracking time, is a win. The fact that I know my way to the dressing room and that I am happy to see the mournful monuments to the war dead staring down at me, the fact I have to unload my car and then drive it to a car park and walk back to the venue, the fact that I have 200 loyal audience members and up to another 100 floating voters in a town like Colchester. I don’t think I will ever need to take this venue out of my sat nav and today I felt at peace with that.
I was worried about this little run of gigs. Due to personal reasons my tour manager had had to drop out at the last minute and so it felt like it made sense to do this run of four gigs on my own. But would I be tired enough from the new baby to make the driving I’ve got to do too laborious or even dangerous? Luckily we have the flexibility with our self-employed jobs to cut each other some slack, so after I did the nappy changing and feeding at midnight, my wife let me sleep downstairs for the rest of the night and I got a reasonable rest. And in the short term at least, being back out on the road alone again felt rather good. I was, as this blog attests, alone with my thoughts and weariness did not overcome me (though getting the car loaded and having the stress of trying to remember everything I had to take was a bit bothersome).
I am surprised to discover it’s almost exactly a year since I’d done Colchester. It felt like weeks ago that I was here, but I was in good time and recorded some stuff for the Lord of the Dance Settee podcast and caught up with my blog as sad statues of the ghosts of a soldier and a sailor looked down at me. And the show was a good one. I am really finding room for light and shade in this show now and I was overall very pleased with the performance. It’s a much subtler show than I’ve done for a while, but again a bit cleverer than I think most of the critics gave it credit for. Having stepped away from it for a while, it is able to surprise me a little bit and I can admire the “writing” of it as it no longer feels like something I did, but I like the bravery of going in a bit more gently and of not chasing the laugh. In some ways it feels like it could be a bridge to a more theatrical and story-telling kind of show in the future. I was a massive fan of Ken Campbell and one of the greatest compliments I got was from a friend of his who compared my work to Ken’s. In spirit at least. I’ll keep battling away and trying stuff out and hopefully the audience I have will stick with me and I can carry on. I am very excited about having another 50 or so goes at kicking this show around and finding new avenues to explore.
But maybe I am unduly tired and emotional. On the drive up the song “Dance Yourself Dizzy” came on the radio - it was one that I missed for my dance-based audience walk in music and I am not a great fan of the disco genre, but I found myself being massively impressed with it, almost to the point where I thought it was high art. It might be the perfect disco song - most pop songs have one hook or a chorus that you’ll remember, but this light and frothy song about dancing the boogaloo, unexpectedly has hooks all the way through. The chorus is solid, but the verse is even better. The repeated “Tonight!” and the way it changed emphasis unexpectedly the third time,. They could have stripped this down and made three or four serviceable disco hits out of it, even the strings arrangement, a throwaway background thing is incredible. As I marvelled at this song that I have heard many times and dismissed as vacuous pap, I wondered if this was a sign that I was over tired or just getting old or was overly emotional because of the events of the last few days. Or maybe sometimes you don’t see something good because of your own prejudices or for fear that you will be laughed at for being uncool. I mean obviously in a lot of ways “Dance Yourself Dizzy” is a terrible piece of froth. But it’s one with an unnecessary amount of craft and skill in it. And maybe that’s the lesson.
And I had an awkward moment in the second half of the show where I forgot what came next and spent a minute or so attempting to pull myself out of the black hole. Of course the audience enjoyed it and I got some mileage out of it, but it was properly terrifying. What would I do if I couldn’t find the ant trail through to the rest of the show?
I recorded the show on my phone tonight, so hopefully (if I can transfer it across) I can put that clip on the podcast too. I also forgot to turn off the recording and recorded me signing programmes afterwards and going to get my car and the drive home, which I could also put out as a very boring podcast to show what life on the road is like. It’s mainly me listening to Josie Long’s Radio 4 show about doubles and dopplegangers and a man who sits in his attic doing an audio ventriloquist act with himself - I wonder why it resonated so much. Can’t believe they didn’t have Me1 and Me2 on it as well. But I absolutely loved it. It was amazing. As good as Dance Yourself Dizzy.
Oh God, having a baby has turned me into an idiot, drugged up on happiness, unable to tell good from bad. And I love it.
I will be in Aylesbury on Saturday - still a few seats left -
book here.
