Liverpool 9th November 2013

Liverpool 9 November 2013

Before Gig.

This gig is in a room above a pub. This gig is how gigs used to be. This pub is how pubs used to be. The pub has a wonderful dingy quality to it.  The pub still sports a threadbare carpet. The pub has a wonderful heavy atmosphere. The pub is pre-smoking ban, I find it hard to believe that no one is smoking in here.  I feel like I am back in the mid-nineties. It reminds me of pubs in Scotland where I first cut my teeth as a drinker. It reminds me of the comedy venues I used to visit as a punter when I first moved to London.  I feel a certain excitement that I haven’t felt for a while. A certain raw energy, a certain feeling there is going to be an event. Many gigs now seemed to have a sanitised quality, I didn't notice it until now, but something seems to have been lost. 

Last year I gigged in Liverpool and came a little unstuck with the audience doing a joke about gay marriage. That particular gig is recorded elsewhere in this blog. This event is at the back of my mind now. I wonder whether I should do a shorter truncated version of that routine tonight or whether to do it at all? I am of two minds. On the one hand I want to learn from my mistakes and on the other hand I don’t - - or rather, I don’t want to learn the wrong lesson from my mistakes. Ideally I would like to come back to this city and make that routine work.  This is after all a different audience but then on the previous occasion my experience was repeated over two nights. I also have a niggling worry over my routine about chatting to a kid and the paranoia we now feel as a society regarding kids. I am also aware that this is the city where Jamie Bulger was murdered. My routine doesn’t go anywhere near that area but I am wary. A previous acts strays into this unwittingly. He does a joke about kidnapping kids (the act is from Germany, the oversight is understandable), but I must be somewhat vigilant. 

I feel a conflict between the risk-taking part of my brain and the safety-conscious part. My instinct is to take the risk, after all doing stand up is inherently risky, it is putting oneself out there, shouldn’t you be bold? On the other hand the logical part of my mind thinks I need to be tactical too, calculating, sometimes dare I say it, risk averse.  

During Gig

I am the forth act on tonight and the audience feel that they are drunk and tired when I take to the stage. The applause doesn’t last long enough for me to get to the microphone and it is a short walk from the curtain. The opening is strong and well received by the audience but even at this early stage I can tell they do not have much attention span. There is chatting in the audience and people shouting things, not quite a heckle but more than a stage whisper. I can feel the audience lose focus between part of a routine and another. I also feel I have to win them with every routine, they may forget they like me a second ago. 

My instinct is to go up in energy and increase the level of aggression in the delivery. Logic tells me to lower the aggression, quieten the delivery, make them listen, draw them in. I go with instinct. 

An arms race develops, louder from me, louder from them, so I up the volume more and so on. For the time being, they are noisy and I battle on with my bombastic delivery. I notice a time delay in the reaction of the audience, a time delay characteristic of very drunk audiences. I say a punchline it gets nothing, I cannot quite believe it, I pause, the laughter comes, slowly at first and then it builds and hits like a wave. Playing giant arenas is like this, apparently: that is the word on the street in any case. This particular rhythm of time delay is very familiar to me. I remember it from a late night gig in Glasgow about three or four years ago, when on that occasion I experienced an almost identical reaction. That audience too were very drunk but In Glasgow it was also later in the evening. Tonight Liverpool appear to reached the same level of inebriation in a shorter space of time.