Vigorous showering as winter closes in, coffee, bad musical tastes and gigs
Recalling some bad music and the challenge of gigging
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Monday.
Quick showering will be key to being able to keep the heating off for as long as possible going into the winter. New windows put in a couple of winters ago made the bathroom on the Hoth-like flat I live in even colder. It has to be one of the coldest bathrooms I’ve ever had, and let me tell you, the bulk of the bathrooms in my life have been cold. Vigorous back scrubbing action, jaw set hard, I kept telling myself in the shower this morning that it was the height of summer. Mind games, etc.
I followed up the shower with some brisk towelling action. I must’ve flayed my back. It’s going to be a long winter. I can’t even find my indoor hat right now. I’ve already taken to wearing 5 tops, though by December, this will be up to 8. It’s the most Spanish thing about me, an inability to handle the cold. I don’t mind feeling cold outdoors. I like heading out into the winter with loads of layers and a big winter coat, pockets stuffed full of notebooks, pens and a good book for the bus. But I don’t like being cold indoors. I think that’s perfectly normal.
I’ve got a hectic week ahead. Loads of gigs. I’m taking the advice of promoters and stand ups I respect and gigging as much as possible but financially, as I try to move up to the next level, it’s not easy to afford it. This is probably why you don’t see too many working class comics at this level of the circuit now.
Meantime, in the café this morning, I had two impressive SMALL talk interactions with Future Me. Well, more than SMALL talk. My future self (he has a better social life than me despite being 4 decades older) was delighted his hometown Plymouth beat Ipswich yesterday in their League One encounter to leapfrog the men from Portman Road and go top of the table. Of immediate concern to Future Me is where he can watch tonight’s England v Germany match. The Channel 4 coverage has somehow managed to prove itself worse than ITV’s and that’s saying something.
Sticking with football briefly, I’m hoping to release a new episode of my retro football podcast When Shorts Were Short later this week as a pay-only download. The days of releasing free podcasts are gone. It’s hard for indie shows and in my 15 years of podcasting, the landscape has changed so much. As a one-man band with often superior content to bigger shows, the reality is it’s impossible to compete against shows that are staffed by half a dozen people or more and my provider did nothing to promote the show. It’ll be interesting to see if listeners support the show. I think at the end of the day, when you release as much content as I have online over the years, your readers and listeners can take you for granted. Few grasp the reality behind the words and the audio, which is someone creating work that people enjoy but finding that doesn’t equate to a living. At the end of the day, EVERY creator needs to be paid for their content. We have bills and rent to pay too. If our work is valued, I think it’s reasonable to charge for it. And if people don’t think the show is worth paying for, that’s fair enough too. It’s all about choice and my choice is no more free podcasts.
The café’s entire playlist is something of an earworm for me right now. Even songs I don’t like and never particularly liked from the time they were released, such as Heart’s overblown 1987 hit ‘Alone’, I can’t get rid of them. Richard Marx’s cheesy ‘Right Here Waiting’, just coming on now, is another one. Released in the summer of ’90, around the time the BBC finished showing the final (underrated) series of Miami Vice, I’ll admit that at the time, I liked this song. But then I did have terrible musical taste as a kid. Most kids inherit their good musical tastes from their parents or older sibling. My parents were Spanish, so that avenue was closed off to me, and I was the older sibling. It was through my younger sibling and a close friend, now sadly deceased, that I began to correct my musical tastes by my late teens (though I still like a bit of Belinda Carlisle and Five Star…). Though not necessarily a huge fan, my sibling did like The Smiths. While to this day I’m not overly-familiar with their catalogue, I do feel Smiths fans can be trusted on having good musical tastes. They tend to be serious about their music. I’ve known too many of them to know that to be true.
Back to the Richard Marx. ‘Right Here Waiting’ was beloved by another close friend, Lopez, whose story I told on my 2013 Resonance FM radio series ‘The Letter’. Lopez got me into this song back in ’90, so let’s blame him for this musical aberration. Lopez passed away in my arms in June 2009. It’s a weird thing to have lost two close lifelong friends so young. I find myself wondering if Lopez were around now, would he, like me, now regard Marx’s song as cheesy nonsense?
One song I do welcome being played here is Springsteen’s ‘Tunnel of Love’. I think I’ve mentioned that before. I love a synth and while, despite being a writer, I’ve never been one for music lyrics, I love the writing for this particular song.
My bank card finally came. I’d spent over a fortnight with limited access to my account after the original replacement card failed to arrive on time. This was cancelled and then what I thought my new card turned up. Only it was the cancelled card. Meantime, clever guy that I am, I’d cut up my old bank card, found the ‘new’ card was declined everywhere and suddenly I had no card. It’s been a serious pain in the proverbial.
I’ve got a 10k run planned later today. Then I’ve got a long trek to N21 tonight for a gig. I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve been to that part of London before and I’m trying to find the time to write new material for 15 and 20 spots coming up in the next couple of weeks. It’s exciting, it’s daunting, it’s also physically demanding. I’m chasing my tail with a lot of things so finding the time to focus isn’t easy. I also remain very concerned about the lack of time I have for my ‘proper’ writing this year. Stand-up just takes over your life. I’ll say this though. Stand-up over podcasting any time. It’s far more fun and (most of the time, anyway), you have an audience.
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