Gradually advancing through the lower levels of the stand-up circuit, taking on my first pro middle spots, means waiting in the ‘green room’ with other comics before coming on. Priding myself on always being a grounded guy, this always strikes me as a bit ‘big time’. But I get that’s the way these things are done. Personally, I prefer to just be able to sit in on the show with the audience right now and observe them as the night progresses before I go on. I like to gauge things and though from the ‘green room’, the acts could see the comics on stage, of the 50 – 60 audience members there, you could only see a handful, including the left leg of one regular heckler whom the opening act, arguably the headliner, dealt with brilliantly.
Full disclosure* - I should tell you that the ‘green room’ was nothing more than a narrow corridor that backed onto a communal external iron staircase that linked the venue to a bunch of flats, and which the landlord had told the promoters that acts weren’t allowed to use. Within the corridor, there was plenty of mouse bait, a sight which living in a Victorian building I am all too familiar with, and once we ventured outside, despite not being allowed to, from the top of the iron staircase one could see huge rat bait points several floors down just by the back entrance to the flats.
One of the acts told me that where you get mice, you don’t get rats. I’d never heard this before. I’ve forgotten why that is though, the information, as interesting as it was, completely overshadowed when I discovered the comic who’d imparted this nugget of data was just 21-years-old. It’s hard being an older comic and these moments never help. I’m starting to think I’d welcome age categories for comedians. Under such a set-up, one would never appear on a night outside of their age category. If a younger comic has had a brush with death, maybe they get a free pass onto a night with the older comics, but otherwise we all stay within our respective age groupings. Just an idea here.
The gig itself went well though I wasn’t as sharp as I should’ve been. The various things I’ve got going on right now, the things keeping me awake at night, were to blame for that. I wasn’t nervous on stage and right now, I’ve really conquered that by gigging relentlessly since February, but with a packed venue, maybe I could’ve done with a little bit of nerves just to appreciate the difficulty of what I was doing. I felt at times I was going through the motions. I messed a couple of moments up, though only I would’ve been aware of that, and curiously, for the first time, I seemed to run out of time with this particular set. Lit up by the promoter a minute before the end, while shocked at realising I’d have to miss a chunk of the set out for the first time, I now have the skill and confidence to do this, so long-term, this was a good thing. I just wish it hadn’t had happened on one of my biggest gigs to date. The audience wouldn’t have known I’d had to cut the set short, but I did. Something to think about. Perhaps it was down to making a conscious effort to slow the set down. Grassroots comedy is so badly supported now that often, on the smaller nights, I’m going through the motions. It’s a weakness to address. ‘Be like Bowie at Wembley stadium’ is what one MC has told me, regardless of how big or small the audience is, and I need to remember that. I need to become good enough to work a small room. Last night was a bigger room, and while I responded to that, and slowed things down, it did cause an issue with the set that I’ll need to fix. I’m pleased I’m aware of these things. I did well, got plenty of laughs but I know I should’ve done much better. It irks me that life and its worries starts to impact on these opportunities. I need to shut out the noise when on stage.
This morning, I was up early, as usual and took a roundabout walk to my café, trying not to brood on last night’s minor issues with my set. As I happened upon South Lambeth Road, heading northbound to the café, I noticed the Ukrainian flag hanging outside the window on one flat had now lost its yellow half to the elements. That’s how long the war has been going on now. Is it a ‘war’ or a ‘War’? I think it might be the former as I’m not sure that ‘war’ has been officially declared. Isn’t that how it works?
A minor pedantic point on this conflagration is the altered pronunciation of ‘Kiev’ now to bring our pronunciation in line with that of Ukraine. I’m not quite sure of the logic behind that. Doesn’t that mean we should do the same for every foreign city then? So, Munich would become ‘München’, Rome ‘Roma’ and Lisbon ‘Lisboa’? Do we not do this until these cities and its inhabitants are having the hell bombed out of them?
In the early noughties, in the UEFA Champions League, Swiss side Basle were regular participants in Europe’s elite competition. Up to that point, the ‘S’ in Basle had been pronounced. Suddenly football commentators were omitting the ‘S’ and giving us the ‘Bahl’. Two decades on, the ‘s’ has been reintroduced and we’re back to the ‘Basle’. This is the kind of nonsense that really aggravates me. I can handle the ‘Keev’ if that’s it from now. If two decades from now, we’ve gone back to the ‘Ki-ev’, I hope those who’ve pushed through the ‘Keev’ are made to explain their 2022 actions.
As I walked by the flag, I peeled the second banana of my walk. I never enjoy eating on the road but wanted to fill up my stomach before pulling a long writing session in the café this morning. Eating on the filthy streets of south London though makes the external snacking even more difficult. I’d seen a café regular as I embarked on my peel. They hadn’t seen me, or maybe they had. Either way, I would get a greeting out of them.
I gave them the morning, they saw me, smiled, and gave me the full ‘Good morning’. Buoyed by the greeting and having done my bit for community interaction this morning, I completed the peel then commenced the actual banana consumption. Within two bites, I’d sighted the first bit of dog muck on the muck-heavy streets of SW8. I just don’t know how south Londoners can be such enthusiasts of the on-road eating with these kind of visuals. I haven’t made it through an entire banana on a walk without seeing muck since March 2020, a week before the first lockdown The food plus muck tableau doesn’t work in any setting. If you were in a restaurant eating a meal, having muck on the table, that doesn’t work. I don’t see why eating on the road should be any different. How can our roads STILL be so filthy in these supposedly enlightened times? How have we still not reclaimed our streets from dogs?
I arrived in the café just after 10am. One of the café regulars, the one trying to persuade me that drinking onion juice last thing at night will improve my sleep and brushing aside my concerns it’ll destroy the little social life I’ve managed to rebuild in the last year, hasn’t left me alone since I got here.
Sleeping right now is even harder than usual with everything I’ve got going on. I’m not talking in terms of how busy I might be. I’m not doing that self-important thing. I’m talking more the life admin and health-related stuff. So that’s all keeping me awake at night. I try to avoid using the mobile late at night, except to listen to shows, and tend to read up until midnight or 1am before making an effort to try and get some sleep. If I was to visit that unsettling website where you can calculate when you shuffle off this mortal coil, that premonition that I had when I was just 8 years old that I would live until 2053 would be seriously tested, I suspect, by the insomnia that has plagued me since I moved into my teens. I’m aware that a lack of sleep plays a part and it’s a huge issue for me. Even if I could do the full 8 hours (I rarely manage 5), I just don’t enjoy sleeping. I like being awake. I like being busy.
The last few nights, I’ve been waking up regularly and not wanting to listen to another podcast or radio show that I’ll doze off to and have to revisit again, I’ve simply tried listening to a couple of tracks before making another effort to grab an hour or two before I next wake up.
At the moment, my default go-to track is Depeche Mode’s brilliant 1993 live version of ‘In Your Room’ from their Songs of Faith and Devotion tour just around the time Dave Gahan began his descent into heroin addiction, some seven years after most of us had seen what happened to Grange Hill’s Zammo and learned heroin was something to avoid.
What I particularly like about this superb 7-minute live version of this track is two things: Alan Wilder, the musical brains behind the group who left shortly after the tour, took up the drums for this particular album. The band had never had a drummer and the drums in this live version, though uncomplicated are outstanding. And then there’s Martin Gore’s falsetto vocals. I do like the secondary vocalist in a band and more often than not, they tend to be the songwriter. They’re more comfortable in the shadows, existing behind the EXTROVERT singer, but Gore’s backing vocals on this live concert are so impressive. I’ve been watching/listening to this performance for over a quarter of a century now and rarely tire of it. Watching it in the early hours of the morning though is probably not advisable. What can I say? I just can’t sleep.
Meantime, back in the café, and Mr Onion Juice is continuing to interrupt my work. His friendship with Not Mick (Fleetwood) is a fractious one and as usual they are arguing. They know one another too well and when this happens, close friendships can all too often fall into the bickering category. This guy knows how to play Not Mick and also relishes playing to the gallery. Every time he deliberately aggravates Not Mick, he turns around to look at the rest of us with a smile. Even during the composition of this paragraph, three lines back, he has stalled me with his incessant chat.
The first coffee of the morning, my one proper ‘caffeinated’ latte, is a good one to get me going. Phil Collins, the little waitress, one of the finest members of staff this café has ever had (she earned the moniker after making a similar move as Phil Collins when he transitioned from drums to lead singer of Genesis, in her case moving from the kitchens, reluctantly, to waiting tables) has pushed another table next to mine to give me a four-seater. She thinks, rightly, I should spread out with my work and the café is unlikely to get busy before lunchtime. It’s a nice gesture on her part. I live for these gestures. Years ago, the old owner who built this wonderful café up from scratch 28 years ago, and who suddenly passed away in 2015, used to give me a tall glass latte gesture when I used to come in first thing in the morning. Initially, she would mime ‘latte’ too. When she abandoned the mime, there were times when her tall glass gesture complete with wrist movement could’ve been misinterpreted as a touch naughty, but there have been some dark times in my life, and that simple action, remembering my regular order, meant something to me. Probably more to me than the average person and here I am, over ten years later still recalling it.
If I’m still knocking about circa 2032, and it’s a big ‘if’ right now, I’m sure I’ll be recalling Phil Collins’ table-extending gesture. Together with Seb K, with whom she runs the café in the mornings, she’s formed one of the café’s greatest ever duos, coming close to the level of arguably is greatest twosome, the old owner and the Veteran Waitress who ran the café so brilliantly for over two decades.
*Americanism
Please subscribe to this newsletter and share on social media:
In other news, look out for Ep 400 of my Daniel Ruiz Tizon is Available podcast later this week, which will include a momentous announcement.
Twitter: @1607WestEgg
Podcast: Daniel Ruiz Tizon is Available
FB: @DRTcomedy
Instagram: @1607westegg