LIVERPOOL: FRIDAY 30TH OCTOBER 2015

30th OCTOBER 2015

BABY BLUE - LIVERPOOL

BEFORE

I am running late to this gig. I am driving to Liverpool from London. I left at 2pm. It is not time enough. It should be ample time but this is Britain on a motorway on a Friday, there is no such thing as ample time. The show starts at 8.30pm. I will not be there on time. There is no “incident” on the road. It is just volume of traffic. This traffic jam represents everything that is wrong with the transport system, Britain, the comedy business and my life in general. How can I justify spending seven hours in traffic just to get to a gig and spend 20 minutes on stage? Also it is Halloween weekend. So it will be a twat fest. I already know this gig is going to be a disaster. I arrive at 9pm. The show is already in full swing. I am stressed. I am hungry. I down a Coke for a quick sugar hit. It is clearly some inferior brand it is some inferior brand. 

Further problems: The compere is Jonathan Meyer. He has a great rapport with the audience and they are loving his act. Just before he brings me on, he talks about being in a same sex marriage. This worries me because I have a routine where I talk about gay marriage from a heterosexual point of view and wanting to marry my friend so I can get rid of him. It somehow feels illegitimate to joke about same marriage when I have no prospect of ever being in a same sex marriage, meanwhile here is a comedian who is talking from life experience. 

I can see the cracks in my routine opening before my eyes. His is based on actual life. Mine is based on stuff I have thought in my head. Hardly comparable. Fuck.  My set is a pile of superficial fluff. Fuck. If they like his take on gay marriage how can they take my musings?  

DURING

I take to the stage too quickly. Sometimes I take to the stage too slowly. It is difficult to get it right. Tonight there is intro music, which I hadn’t realised (I wasn’t here at the start of the gig, was I?) I therefore get to the mic way too quickly and I don’t have time to soak up the intro music. I also launch into my material too quickly. I should have taken longer to settle in on stage and take my time, own the stage, build up the expectation. But it is too late now. I am already launching into the first routine. But have they caught the set up properly? I should have given the audience longer to absorb me visually. Let them get used to looking at somebody new and having judgements about me before giving them words to process, one thing at a time.  The punchline lands - relief. Perhaps I judged it right after all? I am able to build momentum steadily in the first ten minutes. Things are flowing nicely in that way where every routine seems to roll off the back of the previous one, giving the illusion of continuity. I feel I need to build up as much trust as I can. My routine about dumping a mate has never tended to work as well in the North of England. Particularly around the former industrial heartlands. They seem to view friendship differently and my very mention of getting rid of a mate, seems to indicate I am untrustworthy and possible southern in some way. I am concerned that when I reach this bit, the set will take a hit. Of course I could just not do it and do something else. But for some reason I feel that is a cop out. 

I am performing a bit of material about being dumped by a girl and tonight on stage I find a different accent for the girl in the routine, I don’t know where the voice comes from? It just appears from nowhere and fleshes out the character of the girl. In the character of the girl I am putting myself down on stage and it feels great and raises the whole routine. Just by playing with a different accent I am able to raise and lower the status of my character. 

This also gives me great impetus going into the dumping a mate routine. And the audience decide they love dumping a mate. I was preparing myself for a dip but the energy continues to build. It also has a satisfying frisson to it. Different bits of the audience are buying into at different moments so there is a delayed effect in some quarters. Some parts of the audience enjoy it in spite of themselves. There is nothing better as a comedian than audiences buying into material against their better judgement. So the laughter is going at different speeds in different parts of the room and I am not sure of my timing and when to come in with the next line. It is like joining a moving skipping rope, just got to judge the rhythm right and jump in at the precise moment. I just act all oblivious to the hilarity and try to time the line right. I don’t think I do get it quite right but it doesn’t really matter, the momentum is with me now. When I hit the gay marriage section it goes up a notch further. Interestingly the stag do are enjoying the gay marriage material the most. So this routine does work in the North. Maybe material is not region specific after all? 

I don’t want to get off I am enjoying it so much. It can’t be twenty minutes already. 

AFTER

It is a mistake to think audiences have a sense of coherent narrative, that they expect all the acts to be consistent. That is palpable nonsense. Audiences regularly enjoy material that is contradictory and acts whose world view is incompatible with each other. And comedy does not rely on audiences agreeing with what the comedians says. Comedians have the chance to create their own reality during their set. 

I have learned to sell this routine to the North of England in a way that I didn’t used to. It is a performance thing and not a change in the material. I don’t know what I am doing right exactly but I think I signal my intention to the audience more clearly now. That routine is really about me sabotaging myself and tying myself in knots and not about lecturing them on progressive values and showing how right-on I am. Now that the audience understand this they go with it far more. 

There is a whole subtext going on under the actual words, you’ve got to indicate to the audience what you are going to do. 

On the other hand social attitudes are in constant flux and it is possible that this routine and subject matter simply resonate with audiences in a different way now. Society has changed. This routine may just be more palatable to them at the moment. Equally attitudes may change in the future that result in this routine being flushed down the pan. For a brief moment in time this routine really connects with a certain part of the country. So perhaps it is nothing to do with my improved performance but I am happy to take the credit. 

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.