Read How I Escaped My Certain Fate Online
Authors: Stewart Lee
As I tentatively crept back into the clubs to assemble my new hour, now brazenly endorsed by Ricky Gervais, in short spots on regular comedy nights, I found the
flavour
of the London circuit had changed subtly. Sure, there were still lots of packed rooms of lads laughing at jokes about football, and I went to silence before some City types somewhere out east, and died so badly in a room in Hammer smith that a member of the audience took me to task afterwards, refusing to believe that I had ever made a living out of comedy. But the appliquéd surrealist Josie Long was running evenings with an almost arts-and-crafts flavour during which young weirdos read half-formed ideas off crumpled bits of paper, Robin Ince had started his unashamedly pretentious Book Club nights, and pre-TV
Miranda Hart was fronting a vibrant women’s comedy night downstairs at The Albany Arms, where I was allowed to be the monthly guest man.
There was now an obvious split in the circuit. You could make a living doing your regular twenty minutes at
Jongleurs
and The Store, with some lucrative Christmas
corporate
gigs thrown in during the festive season, and never bother to go north to the Fringe. Or you could shuffle about in what seemed to be this new underground scene, and take your show to Edinburgh at a massive loss, and get written about in a broadsheet, and try and get some arts centre gigs, and let nerds all over the land know about your work via these newfangled social networking sites that I, like a nut-hungry ape staring at a nutcracker, was just beginning to see the possibilities of. If the phrase hadn’t lost its meaning once already, you could almost say we were witnessing the birth of a new Alternative Comedy, in opposition to the crowd-pleasing composite that the
Alternative
Comedy of old had become.
The same trend was evident beyond the M25. Most major cities now had a branch of one of the big chains of comedy clubs, a Comedy Store or a Jongleurs, showcasing simple man-and-a-mic stand-up to audiences of stag and hen nights. But the ubiquity of these big chains meant that in every city that had a Franchised Laff Retail Outlet™, at least one alternative venue seemed to be thriving in
opposition
to it, such as XS Mallarkey in Manchester, or The Glee Club in Birmingham, or The Comedy Box in Bristol, none of which had much crossover with the franchises in terms of acts or audiences. It was the same sort of schism that, thirty years ago, pitched the non-sexist and
non-racist
Comic Strip against Bernard Manning’s old-school Embassy Club.
These counter-Jongleurs were the places where I needed to be playing. Instead of going on for guaranteed fees in empty council venues and failing to build an audience, or boring the shit out of Friday night punters who just wanted to have some fun between work and the disco, I needed to be in the dedicated comedy clubs that had flourished in my absence from the circuit, playing for smaller fees to smaller crowds composed of people that would get it and would come back next time with a friend. Could I have a second chance at building the following I had failed to find in the previous decade?
My management had a new live booker, Charlie Briggs, a young woman whose favourite act was the sentimental misanthropist Daniel Kitson, as everyone’s should be, and who had thought, in the light of watching how this fiercely independent comic conducts his business affairs, that there may be a live model that suited me better than my
management
’s usual telesales approach to booking dates. Charlie knew all these small and sussed venues, and she travelled the country to check them out on her own time, without any encouragement from her employers, even though these places weren’t all going to pay the kind of big fees that the telesales-style bookers needed to bump up their turnovers. With Charlie happy to eschew the larger fees I might have made by selling me on underwritten guarantees to big empty spaces, and booking me instead at this sustainable lower level, I thought I could get on the road after an
Edinburgh
Fringe run and maybe, before it was too late, claw myself out the beginnings of an audience that might stay with me for life. That was, if the August shows went well.
So in early 2004, I began to scrape together a show from the few bits of my vast back catalogue that I could still stand to repeat and some ideas I’d had during my time
off. I called it
Stewart Lee – Stand-Up Comedian
as a blunt statement of intent and a method of sidestepping the fact that I had no idea what it would be about as the Fringe
listings
deadline approached. My management winkled out an offer from a relatively new venue on the Edinburgh Fringe, the hip subterranean firetrap called The Underbelly, which was keen to have what it viewed as a big name, and the deal was weighted favourably enough to mean I wouldn’t
actually
lose money on an Edinburgh show they promoted for the first time in fifteen years.
Stand-Up Comedian
hit the ground running, in the
corrugated
silo of The Underbelly’s White Belly room. I was thrilled to be away from negotiating the needs of the
massive
cast of the opera and to be back on my own. Now that I had been ladled with theatrical accolades, previously
puzzled
critics had to assume that my apparent inability to write and perform stand-up properly was in fact the result of positive artistic choices, rather than an indication of a basic lack of ability, and they adjusted their star ratings accordingly. Plus in my absence I had been fêted by their new favourite, the mid-noughties sensation Ricky Gervais.
I took every small-hours Fringe festival club set going, revelling in my freedom, choked ecstatically on a million fags, long after midnight, in steamy attics and dripping
cellars
, turning comedy fat back into tentative muscle. And I saw dozens of superb new acts I’d never seen before, like the disarmingly honest Chippenham skinhead Will Hodgson and the brilliantly realised character comedy of Will Adamsdale in
Jackson’s Way
, which I attended half a dozen times at least, and which was to alter the whole way I thought about performance. Watching Will, an un categorisable Etonian performance-art eccentric who never blinked in the face of audience disbelief, maintaining the most improbable and engaging of conceits in the face of mass irritation and total audience boredom proved to me that one man on a stage in a room could be anything at all, go anywhere, say anything, suggest anything, do
anything
. This was what I needed to see.
Comedians’ memoirs, about how they got back on the road after a lay-off, or their fully approved fly-on-the-wall documentaries on the same subject, tend towards the
sentimental
journeys of thoroughly made millionaires, peeping out from their Chelsea penthouses and Hollywood Hills adobe ranches to try and recapture their youth.
Understand
this: it was not nostalgia that drew me back to
standup
. I was pushing forty. Nothing had worked out, not even the theatrical hit of the decade. For the middle part of my thirties I’d been barely earning a living. I was like a
punch-drunk
prizefighter with no other viable skills who thought maybe there still might be a battle to be won. And I
realised
that stand-up was just one man on a stage in a room. And so stand-up was infinite. And I had been a fool to doubt it. I might never be a proper comedian, like friends and acquaintances who had achieved fame and wealth and mass acclaim, but perhaps I could still be an Alternative Comedian, which, I gradually remembered, was what I had wanted to be in the first place.
A transcript of the show recorded on 10 March 2005 at The Stand, Glasgow
PRE-SHOW MUSIC: ‘THE BREATH OF COLDNESS’
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‘The Breath of Coldness’ is a ten-minute saxophone solo, using the circular breathing technique, from the album America 2003 by the British free-jazz saxophonist Evan Parker, with whom I share a birthday. During the missing years of being an award-winning opera director who once shook hands with Michael Portillo at a buffet at the National Theatre, I’d moved to Stoke Newington in Hackney. Stoke Newington is the spiritual home and elephants’ graveyard of British free improvised music. In Stoke Newington, the streets are littered with puzzled musical mavericks still trying to figure out how to improvise non-idiomatically within a now
established
idiom.
I was first exposed to this kind of music by my flatmate, the
guitarist
Michael Cosgrave, in 1992, when he was briefly press-ganged into the musique concrète noodlers Morphogenesis, who described themselves, with hopefully knowing humour, as ‘Britain’s most theoretically rigorous group’, an epithet I subsequently cannibalised into my own late-nineties poster strapline ‘Britain’s most
theoretically
rigorous comedian’. I’d attended the Red Rose Club’s out-there Momposo evenings when I lived in Finsbury Park in the mid-to late nineties, and I’d seen the ever open-minded Sonic Youth jam with representatives from the scene at various events in the
nineties
, and made curious trips to London Musicians’ Collective events at the ICA and the South Bank. But in Stoke Newington, gigs at The Vortex and improvised music club nights at The Red Lion and Ryan’s Bar meant I was now regularly immersed in splurge and
skronk. Evan Parker was a monthly fixture at The Vortex, a listed building a few hundred yards from my new flat that was
eventually
demolished under mysterious circumstances to make way for a Nando’s, and I saw him dozens of times in the first few years I lived there. And this stuff got under my skin.
I do appreciate it’s always dangerous, and potentially shaming, for comedians to claim inspiration from great musicians, or indeed any other legitimate artists. When TV’s Russell Howard cites, in an interview, Bob Dylan’s mantra ‘every great artist needs to be in a permanent state of becoming’ as an influence, one wonders what relationship this profound phrase has with appearing on Mock the Week and making fun of Susan Boyle for having a hairy face?
But I feel that the sheer bloody-mindedness of the free-jazzers was something of an example, as was their take-it-or-leave-it
attitude
to critical and public approval. One felt, romantically I am sure, this music had to be made, and would somehow issue forth whatever, out of sheer necessity, irrespective of people’s response. Listeners had to come to it on its own terms, suspend their
expectations
and forget what they had learned. I’ll never be one of those comics who genuinely jam a whole set off the top of their heads, like the mighty Phil Kaye or the fiery and fluid Ross Noble, but I admired the musicians’ fearlessness in the face of apparently
perilous
artistic precipices.
Thus it was a very deliberate and self-conscious decision to use the Evan Parker solo, on a loop, as the pre-show music for Stand-Up Comedian. The normal pre-show procedure for stand-up is to play something upbeat and jaunty, slightly too loud, through the PA. (The Amused Moose Club’s endless repeat plays of that Supergrass song about something pumping on the stereo to introduce every act is a case in point, and I am always inwardly amused, whenever I do gigs there, to slouch on as non-triumphally as I am able.) But in the small and stifling space of The Underbelly’s soggy dungeon, The White Belly, in August 2004, the Evan Parker solo was a warning, before the show began, that this was not intended to be like other stand-up shows.
Playing the Parker solo was also a good way of identifying
troublemakers
, of spotting punters that had probably come to the wrong gig. I’d stand at the back of the room watching the audience
file in. Anyone who got up and remonstrated with the sound guy, insisting that the music was turned off, as some would, was
probably
not going to go for the show. In New Zealand, some English fans of Peter Kay and the sport of rugby accidentally arrived at my show as a result of a wrongly assumed national kinship. It was their furious reaction to the Evan Parker solo that immediately alerted me to problems ahead, which eventually and inevitably ruined the show (see Appendix II).
Since 2004, I’ve always thought very carefully about pre-show music. It’s all part of set and setting. A show begins the moment the audience walk into a venue. When Jerry Springer: The Opera was at the National Theatre, the grandiose vibe of the building and the dignity of its discreet and helpful staff were already heading the audience into a beautiful crossfire of high cultural
surroundings
and low cultural content. But when the show transferred to the West End and punters trooped in past loads of people shouting at them and trying to flog them Maltesers and souvenir hats, this was lost, and the initial impact of the show suffered as a result.
In essence, I don’t want the pre-show music to seem like I am eager to please. I want to start wrong-footing the audience before they’ve even sat down.
STEW APPEARS. MUSIC CHANGES TO ‘MR. LEE’ BY THE
5.6.7.8’
S
.
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I chose this Japanese garage-punk song because it is fast and exciting and the ladies’ foreign accents are funny. Is this lacist? I am
velly solly.
STEW INVITES FOUR PEOPLE ONSTAGE. HE GIVES THEM PARTY POPPERS AND TELLS THEM TO EXPLODE THEM ON HIS SIGNAL. THEY DO SO AND RETURN TO THEIR SEATS, LEAVING STEW ALONE AT THE MIC, A FEW STRANDS OF PARTY STREAMER DRAPED OVER HIS HEAD.
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