New - 19th April 2013 - Cardiff

Gig Report Friday 19th April 2013

Tiger, Tiger Cardiff. 

For me, weekends are a thing of the past. There are just days. And some of the days I work and some of the days I don’t work. The days I work are invariably what real people call the weekend. Tonight’s gig is in a night club where real people go at the weekend to forget about their week. 

I drive past the venue looking for a parking space. I look at the people queuing outside the venue and I judge them. There is a guy in a checked shirt. There is a woman dressed up to the nines. There is another man who looks like he may have committed an atrocity in Iraq. Tonight, these are my people. They are alien to me. Was I ever one of them back in the days when I had a proper job?  Has the life of a comedian taken me away from my roots? Or was I never one of them? And why am I, a man with no insight into their lives, here to entertain them? I am amusing myself with sarcastic comments in my head. I am speculating whether the nightclub name came from the William Blake poem “Tyger, tyger burning bright”  I am going on to speculate whether anyone in or near the nightclub has even heard of William Blake? Take that people in the street! with my internalised insults! To be honest, ten years ago, when i was the same age these clubbers, I hadn’t heard of William Blake either. 

Before Gig

I park the car. I enter the nightclub. It’s not my cup of tea. It’s all a bit too Heironymus Bosch for my tastes. There are many floors to this night club. I remember when nightclubs were just one room. Now they are sprawling multiplexes. This place is massive. Smokers have to walk many miles to find the outdoors. There are many different rooms, all catering to slightly different tastes in bad music. There are many different bars. They are all the same. People drink shots. There are no optics on the spirit bottles. The bar staff measure the spirits out in giant thimble things. Why no optics? There are curtains and drapes rather than just doors between the rooms. Are they trying to recreate Lawrence of Arabia? Surely the curtains are a fire hazard?  I am led through the various levels of the club to the gig. 

During Gig

I shamelessly play the celtic card and open with how the Welsh speak Welsh  if they want to freeze the English, whereas the Scots merely have to speak English with a Scottish accent for it to be impenetrable. They like this. Never underestimate anti English sentiment - even in England. Perhaps I could do this is England? 

Two things worthy of note. 1) this audience are nice. 2) the audience appear to have suffered some kind of stroke. They are effectively paralysed down the one side. The left hand side - the healthy side - is responding normally to stimuli, jokes, witticisms, banter. The right hand side, while still alive, is slower, more mute, less responsive. My automatic tendency is to play to the healthy side more. It is just a natural response (no one is attracted to the sick, except Jesus), but the paralysed side need more attention (joke therapy). I have to force myself to minister to them too.  The healthy side are also heckley whereas the paralysed half have lost the ability to heckle. This is the opposite of what I want. Heckling and the subsequent response from the comedian breaks the ice and builds a rapport. So this is happening on the good side, making the good side even better while the bad side languishes further and further behind. It is like some metaphor for a divided society if I could be bothered to make it. Similarly I try chucking out open questions  to the audience but they are invariably answered by the good side. I am trying to hook in the bad side. 

I accidentally stumble into a stag do. Either the compere failed to unmask them or I wasn’t paying attention but they are an undercover stag do. Five guys are on the front on the paralysed section but they don’t seemed affected by the malaise. They are the life and soul of the party (They should really be sitting on the healthy side). But even their high spirits are insufficient to carry the bad half of the audience. I start ripping into Swindon (for some reason? it seems artistically justified at the time) and it turns out coincidentally that they are from Swindon. They take it in good part. I am gigging in Swindon tomorrow. I take their approval of anti Swindon material to represent the attitude of the whole of Swindon. Tomorrow, based on this flimsy data, I will think it is a good idea to open a gig in Swindon with an anti Swindon section. Is the decision wise or unwise? That is for another blog. 

The front seats of the healthy side are taken by a mother and daughter duo who are both out on the pull. I never go on the pull with my father. It wouldn’t enter my head. Neither would I dress the same as my father and pretend we were both brothers to unsuspecting women. There is a conspiratorial relationship between the mother and daughter particularly to do with anything sexual. The mother seems disappointed by a line about beer containing more water than humans. She groans slightly. Not enough to be heard by most of the audience but enough to make me notice. It’s not a groaner line. I can’t think why anyone would groan at that line even if they didn’t like it. But she seems satisfied by the next joke about the alcohol content of whisky. When I mention pornography the mother groans and says, “That’s it”.

“What’s it?” I ask. 

“ I had you down as a porn man.”

“Is there any other kind? Why a porn man? Was it the beard?”

“The things you said.”

I don’t know what things I said. But the mother seems satisfied like there has been some settling of some private bet. She seems pleased. Maybe her groan wasn’t a groan at all. Some people express amusement in weird ways.  Perhaps the paralysed half of the crowd are expressing amusement by being disengaged? 

After Gig  

A man comes up and says, “You did a good job”. I think I did but it rather indicates a lukewarm attitude towards me. Who ever says. “You must go see A. Comedian. I saw him once, he did a good job.”  No one puts on their posters, “Good work. Well done.” I think the fact that he identified it as a job at all highlights the problem. 

“What bit of the audience were you sitting in?”

The man looks confused but answers, “That bit there.”

“Ah, thought so.”