the new-build estate adjoining a once remote little village south-east of Worcester to which she’d retired. I pottered weakly about the empty house, all tidy and quiet, eating baked potatoes and sluicing myself with pints of Malvern water. I was still on a lot of painkillers. I tried to drink but it flattened me. I’d lost so much weight I felt like I was in a different man’s body, or mine, twenty years ago, when I looked like the young Morrissey. I had to pee every twentyminutes. If I wanted to smoke, I had to stand in my mum’s garden. I was thirty-six years old. One day, I drove to Hay-on-Wye and looked for Arthur Machen books, staggering about in a half-dream in the shadow of the hill. One night, I watched Master and Commander on DVD, and I enjoyed it, which is unlike me. And from the window of the white fluffy bedroom, always open because the stifling heating was jammed on and no one has ever known how to turn it off, I looked out at the Malvern hills.
Everything was wobbly and trippy. The fields buzzed green and black. I felt ashen and pin-eyed, like an actor pretending to come down from a rave in an early-nineties ITV police drama. The skies out there seemed grey and enormous, as if they were coming to crush me into the floodplain of the Severn, deep down with the civil war dead in the flatlands all around Cromwell’s, the insensitive ly named Indian restaurant, and Powick hospital , where a Dr Sandison dosed 683 schizophrenics and depressives with LSD in the fifties. I tried to go for walks, but the paths along the sides of the roads petered out or led nowhere, and lorries rattled past alarmingly, because the new-builds had been new-built where no new-builds should be built. I could just about make it as far as either a duck pond in the middle of a cul-de-sac, or an electricity substation on the edge of a sheep field, or a shop staffed by bleached women who sold pork rolls to lorry drivers who had stopped in the lay-by, or to the village pub, now a swanky restaurant, the die-hard drinkers crammed around what was left of the bar, trying to avoid eye contact . So, after a while, I went home.
In January, I set off to tour the cool hipster comedy venues the uncharacteristically sympathetic booker Charlie Briggs had scoped out. I was determined to downsizefrom the scale of the ‘comedy is the new rock and roll’ era, which was when I’d last toured a show, and to do everything myself, to see if, this time, I could make it worthwhile . I was booked into nearly thirty rooms of between one and two hundred seats, hand-picked by Charlie as a base to build from. Advertising was minimal, because suddenly there was MySpace and a website with a mailing list, new methods of direct mass communication that hadn’t really existed last time I’d been on the road. I drove from Travelodge to Travelodge in my Mini Metro, listening to The Fall and John Lee Hooker albums from the fifties. And the blurb I wrote for the tour flyer and press release read like a personal manifesto: ‘After an enforced lay-off from performing, and bewildered by critical acclaim in a world he never made, the “fifth best stand-up of his generation” returns in search of clarity, self-respect, and immediate sensual and intellectual gratification.’ * (The ‘fifth best stand-up of his generation’ was an unattributable quote I made up, to combat the fact that everybody seemed to have similar things on their posters these days.) And after years in the slow, detached process of commercial theatre with Jerry Springer: The Opera , I was, genuinely, in search of ‘clarity, self-respect, and immediate sensual and intellectual gratification’.
* The bit about ‘a world he never made’ is a nod to Steve Gerber’s seventies Howard the Duck comic, a sacred text to reach for whenever you feel lost, like a giant speaking alien duck might if it found itself in disco-era Cleveland.
I asked Josie Long to open for me, a young comic who talked about
Everything was wobbly and trippy. The fields buzzed green and black. I felt ashen and pin-eyed, like an actor pretending to come down from a rave in an early-nineties ITV police drama. The skies out there seemed grey and enormous, as if they were coming to crush me into the floodplain of the Severn, deep down with the civil war dead in the flatlands all around Cromwell’s, the insensitive ly named Indian restaurant, and Powick hospital , where a Dr Sandison dosed 683 schizophrenics and depressives with LSD in the fifties. I tried to go for walks, but the paths along the sides of the roads petered out or led nowhere, and lorries rattled past alarmingly, because the new-builds had been new-built where no new-builds should be built. I could just about make it as far as either a duck pond in the middle of a cul-de-sac, or an electricity substation on the edge of a sheep field, or a shop staffed by bleached women who sold pork rolls to lorry drivers who had stopped in the lay-by, or to the village pub, now a swanky restaurant, the die-hard drinkers crammed around what was left of the bar, trying to avoid eye contact . So, after a while, I went home.
In January, I set off to tour the cool hipster comedy venues the uncharacteristically sympathetic booker Charlie Briggs had scoped out. I was determined to downsizefrom the scale of the ‘comedy is the new rock and roll’ era, which was when I’d last toured a show, and to do everything myself, to see if, this time, I could make it worthwhile . I was booked into nearly thirty rooms of between one and two hundred seats, hand-picked by Charlie as a base to build from. Advertising was minimal, because suddenly there was MySpace and a website with a mailing list, new methods of direct mass communication that hadn’t really existed last time I’d been on the road. I drove from Travelodge to Travelodge in my Mini Metro, listening to The Fall and John Lee Hooker albums from the fifties. And the blurb I wrote for the tour flyer and press release read like a personal manifesto: ‘After an enforced lay-off from performing, and bewildered by critical acclaim in a world he never made, the “fifth best stand-up of his generation” returns in search of clarity, self-respect, and immediate sensual and intellectual gratification.’ * (The ‘fifth best stand-up of his generation’ was an unattributable quote I made up, to combat the fact that everybody seemed to have similar things on their posters these days.) And after years in the slow, detached process of commercial theatre with Jerry Springer: The Opera , I was, genuinely, in search of ‘clarity, self-respect, and immediate sensual and intellectual gratification’.
* The bit about ‘a world he never made’ is a nod to Steve Gerber’s seventies Howard the Duck comic, a sacred text to reach for whenever you feel lost, like a giant speaking alien duck might if it found itself in disco-era Cleveland.
I asked Josie Long to open for me, a young comic who talked about
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