Random Burblings

My second year of taking part in Swiss Toni’s shufflethon, and I was very much looking forward to finding out what kind of disk the post would bring me. My hopes were very much that it would introduce me to a few new bands that I would want to explore further, and maybe increase my appreciation of some older ones. I am pleased to announce that the compilation received from Bedshaped has done exactly that.

For the information of those unfamiliar, the idea of the shufflethon is that everyone makes a disk, and sends it to the recipient randomly chosen for us by ST. Then when we receive the disk from our selected sender, we pop a review of it onto our own site. It’s that simple.

The disk came wrapped in clear plastic with a note scrawled on the front in felt marker telling me that the track listing would be posted on his site one he knew I had the disk. This was a good thing, as I had opened the envelope with trepidation, trying not to catch a glimpse of what the disk contained, determined to listen to it blind the first time through. In fact, in the end, I had listened three times through by the time I found out the identities of most of the tracks. There were three on there that I already owned, and so recognised straight away, and two more where I quickly identified the band. But the remaining eleven was a bit of a guessing game, and one I enjoyed playing and discovering them slowly.

So, on with the review.

1. Thru the Glass – Thirteen Senses

When this first started I was a bit worried by the slow synth opening, knowing nothing of Bedshaped’s tastes, that this was going to turn out to be a disk of terminally hip tracks that would leave me a bit baffled. Then the guitars kicked in and I instantly decided I was in good hands. A nice indie-ish feel, but not in a “want to be the Libertines” sort of way, and definitely the sort of thing I would usually listen to. I’m not rushing out to buy one of their albums, but I’ll probably be keeping an ear out for their music again in the future.

2. Lisa – Albert Hammond Jr

Apparently Hammond is a member of the Strokes, a band I’ve never really got on all that well with. But I liked this, although in my initial notes I did wonder if it was Snow Patrol. It’s a kind of bouncy number which combines rock guitars with a bit of a ska type beat. Nice.

3. George Lassoes The Moon – Elbow

What with winning the Mercury Prize, Elbow are a band that seem to have risen in prominence in the last year or so, which makes it quite surprising that, to the best of my knowledge, this is the first time I have heard a song by them. My initial reaction was of a heavy Radiohead influence, but in a good way, for once they seemed like a band that could bear the comparison. I am liking this song more with every listen, and I’ve already been out and bought a couple of their early albums which I look forward to exploring.

4. Duchess – Genesis

Once the two minutes or so of ambient music that forms the intro to this one had finished and the vocals kicked in I instantly recognised the artist, and that it was a song from what I’d describe as their middle period, after Phil Collins had taken over the vocals, but before he realised how much money there was to be made from the singles market and watered down their sound to so much commercial pap. Actually I was vaguely aware that I knew the song, but hadn’t heard it for many years. In fact, I actually saw them on the tour that supported Duke, the album this comes from, so I probably saw them doing it live. I think a lot of people either forget or don’t realise how much good music they produced during this period. A nice reminder, and an inclusion I hardily approve of.

5. The English Way – Fightstar

I know next to nothing about Fightstar except that they were formed by a former member of Busted. Which was certainly enough to put me off straight away. But this is actually quite good. Quite a straightforward, commercial sounding rocker, and it doesn’t inspire me to go out and seek any more of their music, but it’s something I wouldn’t baulk at listening to any time it popped up on random play.

6. How We Operate – Gomez

Gomez are a band I always enjoy when I hear one of their songs, and yet strangely I’ve never actually got round to owning any of their stuff. That is a situation I intend to rectify. This song has a bit of a Pearl Jam feel to it,

7. Lazy Gun – Jet

A bit of a stompalong, this begins with a riff that sounds like it belongs on a Gary Glitter record, and with the vocal it sounds a bit like Oasis gave up on their sixties obsession and moved on to the early seventies. It’s okay, certainly listenable, but doesn’t really grab me.

8. Last Flowers – Radiohead

It took me about thirty seconds to recognise this one, and shamefully I have to admit I had to go and look up the title. It’s from the bonus disk from the In Rainbows limited box-set release, but it sounds kind of OK Computer era. Either way, it’s Radiohead, and that’s always a good thing!

9. Love Is the Law – The Seahorses

Second song in a row that I already owned, but I haven’t listened to the Seahorses album in a long time, and I’d forgotten what a good band they were. Kind of sixties psychedelia throwback. Nice choice.

10. You Will Make It – Jem featuring Vusi Mahlasela

On my initial notes I wrote “Very clean sounding voice. Good diction. Shit, I sound like my old vocal coach.” It’s a piano ballad featuring a female vocalist who I’ve not heard of before, and it’s quite pleasant but a bit nicey-nice for my tastes.

11. Decode – Paramore

My initial reaction was that this was one of those Scandanavian or Northern European “operatic metal” bands like Nightwing or Within Temptation. Repeated listens made me think more of My Chemical Romance with a female singer. Either way, it’s okay, but nothing about it really jumps out at me.

12. Inheritance – Talk Talk

I saw Talk Talk back in 1982 at Milton Keynes Bowl at the Six of the Best gig, the gig where the original Peter Gabriel line-up of Genesis got together for a one-off show. They had had their first chart hit at the time and were still trying to be a kind of New Romantic synth-pop band. The lead singer wore an all white suit and within minutes of taking the stage it was covered in stains from the food and drink that they were bombarded with throughout their set. A few years later I felt sorry for them over that, because they were clearly a talented band who were initially shoe-horned by their record company into trying to be something they were not. But shorn of the pressure to have commercial hits, they became a really interesting and quite experimental group, and this song is a perfect example of that. Another excellent inclusion.

13. Magic Door – Portishead

Recognised this one straight away. From the new album. Great album. Great song. Enough said.

14. What Have I Done – DJ Shadow featuring Christine Carter

One of the problems of this shufflethon business is that you feel entrusted with someone else’s musical taste, and you don’t want to let them down. But on my initial notes from the first listen to this song I wrote just two words. “Pretentious wank.” Sadly, my opinion of it hasn’t improved with repeated listens. Sorry, I tried to find something to like in it, I really did, but it just sounds to me like something put together by someone full of their own self-importance and totally up their own arse. I guess you can’t like everything, and one song out of sixteen ain’t bad!

15. It’s All Over – Broken Family Band

Now this is much better. A nice slice of jangly guitar pop, nothing spectacular but it gets you tapping your feet.

16. Epitaph – Leaves

And what a great way to end. If Elbow was the find of the disk for me, then this runs it a very close second. I’ve never even heard of Leaves, but if this is representative of their music I’m going to hear a lot more of them. A dark and brooding number that builds and builds into a magnificent crescendo before dying away again. Fantastic, this one is going to be on my playlist for a long time to come.

So there we go. Thankyou Bedshaped, it’s a disk that I’ve really enjoyed exploring, and with only one song that I didn’t at least enjoy listening to I’m marking it an unqualified success. If I had to give an overall impression, it is of a disk put together by someone not trying to impress me with their musical taste, but trying to enthuse me into joining them in it.

And thanks also to Swiss Toni, I hope you do this again next year, I’m looking forward to it already.

Okay, better late than never, it’s time for my round up of the last year and to hand out my awards. So, where to start. Let’s go with the visual first.

Film of the Year

I’ve probably not seen as many films in the last year as in previous years. Too busy in the evenings, but one film stands out from the pack, and it keeps up my record of never yet presenting this award to a Hollywood movie. Instead, this year, it wings it’s way to Ireland and to one of those “little films that could”, the tale of a couple of hitmen hiding out in a foreign country after a job that’s gone wrong. It is, of course, In Bruges. Interestingly, the director Martin McDonagh presented a guest lecture to my university class.

I knew I was going to love this movie from the moment I first heard about it, from a little documentary presented on one of the Sky Movie channels before a showing of his earlier Oscar-winning short Six Shooter. And I was right. The mixture of slightly bizarre and surreal but still believable storyline, excellent performances from, and chemistry between, the three leads, and fantastic dialogue that could only have come from the pen of an Irishman, made for the perfect combination. And how can you not love any movie featuring a racist dwarf?

TV Show of the Year

But just to show I don’t have an anti-American bias, I’m going across the pond for this one for the second year running. It’s a sitcom that’s been running since 2007, but I only got into it this year, thanks to a Scottish stand-up named Stu Who? raving over it. And it is a demonstration of why the Americans have now overtaken the British in terms of making great television. If this show was made in the UK it would be painted with such broad strokes and populated with such over the top grotesques that it would be virtually unwatchable. But the Americans have figured out that the best comedy comes from creating strong, believable characters first and then letting the humour grow out of that. And so they can create a domestic comedy about super-genius geeks and make it accessible to all.

I am talking, of course, about The Big Bang Theory, the story of two Caltech physicists sharing a flat, and their cute blonde waitress neighbour from across the hall. What makes this show so great is first that, despite the traditional domestic situation, it is still an original idea, and secondly the dynamic between the three main characters with Penny, the non-genius, taking almost the role of mentor and “real life coach”, Leonard being the geek who likes being a geek but is self-aware enough to know how he appears to the outside world and to want to present an image of normality even though he can never quite pull it off, and Sheldon, the obsessive compulsive borderline autistic super geek who, despite being one of the most annoying human beings in existence, still manages to be strangely endearing in a way that makes you understand why these characters would allow him in their lives.

Television Moment of the Year

Runaway winner in this (new, specially created) category has to be Andrew Lloyd-Webber for very clearly ejaculating in his own pants while Jessie Buckley sang “The Man That Got Away” on I’ll Do Anything

Only narrowly, however, beating into second place Lloyd-Webber again, on the final of the same programme, along with Cameron Mackintosh, trying desperately to pretend to be delighted that the British public had decided not to vote for the clearly awesomely talented sexy, bubbly Irish redhead, but had instead plumped for the sour-faced northern baggage with legs like tree-trunks. Thus demonstrating once and for all that if you want to win a reality talent show in this country, you’d better make sure your sob-story beats everyone else to the punch.

Stand-up of the Year

It’s been a “different” year for stand-up, as I’ve been experiencing it from behind the mike a lot of the time, and there have been some great moments watching other acts on the bill with me. Special mention has to go to Johnny Showaddywaddy Sorrow, a comic virtually unknown outside the Midlands live circuit, but who, when I did a gig with him, made me laugh so hard I think a little bit of wee came out. It has been a damned good year overall, what with seeing Chris Rock twice, managing to catch David Alan Grier in Nashville, and managing to meet and perform with one or two of my own comedy heroes, but for this year I’m righting a wrong, and giving my award to someone who I think was not only robbed of the if.comedy award at the Fringe this summer, but in not even being nominated, tarnished the reputation of that award for me as clearly being run by people who don’t understand good comedy. Step forward Jason Cook.

Gig of the Year

No competition here. Not just gig of the year, but gig of the last several years. Ten years after their last shows, Portishead re-emerged for a short tour and blew away all competition. Even the horrible school assembly hall like structure of the Edinburgh Corn Exchange couldn’t diminish what was a triumphant performance, perfectly balanced between new and older numbers, with Adrian grinding astonishing noises from his guitar, Geoff flitting from instrument to instrument, controlling the action while Beth slumped over the microphone as if the weight of the world was on her shoulders, producing a vocal where every word was not just sung, but filled with heartstopping depth of emotion. Magical.

Album of the Year

Last year I featured a top ten rundown, but last year was a good year for albums. This year, not so much. So I’m going to have to stick with five, simply because I can’t really think of ten that are worthy of being included.

5. Vampire Weekend

Despite sounding like a great name for a goth band, the self-titled debut by this New York band is a fusion of styles which range from African tribal to English folk music. Eclectic but somehow brilliant. (Video)

4. Kings of Leon - Only By The Night

I bought their first album, and hardly ever listen to it. But this is a band who seem to get better album by album. Good old-fashioned straightforward rock, no frills, no gimmicks, just good. (Video)

3. Los Campesinos! - Hold On Now, Youngster

At a time when every indie band sounds like every other indie band and they all want to be the Libertines, how refreshing is it to hear a new band that sound utterly unlike anyone else out there. Quirky, fresh sounding and with some great lyrical touches, this bunch deserve big things to happen to them. (Video)

2. Fleet Foxes

Sounding like Jethro Tull mixed with a baroque choir, Fleet Foxes are a weird throwback band that shouldn’t work but do. Their self-titled debut is a constant surprise and a delight. (Video)

1. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!!

An obvious choice, I’m afraid, but Cave never disappoints and this is his hardest edged album for a long time. 11 tracks of pure perfection.

Isn’t it nice when you go looking for help and you manage to speak to someone with a brain in their head? Step forward Jamie from the DVLA., who not only dealt with my enquiry very simply, informatively and with a minimum of fuss, but has a very sexy Welsh accent into the bargain.

Pity about the hoops I had to jump through in order to get there.

So let me go back to the start of the story. Not having had a car for some considerable time, and not one in this country for considerably longer, I’m not that familiar with the procedures for car ownership any more. So last night when I spotted that my tax disk expired today, I figured I just needed to nip down the post office and renew it today.

I wandered down there this afternoon, luckily turning up at twenty to four, luckily I say because in this one-horse town the post office had decided to close early for New Year at four. So I asked the girl behind the counter where the forms for the tax disks were, and she said they weren’t needed any more. I just had to show them my renewal reminder letter or my insurance certificate. But my insurance certificate is in Edinburgh. Four hundred miles away. And as I’ve been at my folks place in Gloucester since last Tuesday, the reminder is presumably there also.

So I explained all this, and was told that in that case I could not be sold a tax disk. So what do I do, I asked? I need to get the insurance certificate, she tells me. But I can’t get the insurance certificate without using the car, and it will be illegal to use the car after midnight, and even if I could get to Edinburgh before then, there wouldn’t be anywhere open for me to get the tax disk. But sorry, I was told, there’s nothing we can do.

Now, that would be fair enough, if there was nothing they could do. But surely, working at the Post Office, the place where they sell the tax disks, shouldn’t it be part of your job to be able to advise me of what I can do, if there is something I could do. Which it turns out, there is.

I get home and phone DVLA. I explain the situation. And again, sorry, I’m told, nothing we can do. There must be something, I say, otherwise you are effectively telling me that even though I am trying not to break the law, I am forced to break the law because I can’t prove to you that I’m not trying to break the law. This conversation went round and round in circles for about ten minutes, with me asking such things as if they could register that I had attempted to buy the tax disk so that if I was stopped I could refer the police to them, or if I could call the police and explain the situation and they could register it somewhere, but to each enquiry the response was the same. Sorry, nothing we can do, we can only advise you not to use the car until you have a valid tax disk. Then, after all of that I mentioned once again that even if I drove to Edinburgh right now, there would be nowhere for me to purchase a disk.

You could purchase it online, she said.

Well, can I phone up my insurance company, find out the number of the policy, and then purchase it online from here then, I asked?

Oh, you don’t need the insurance policy number if you purchase online, she replied. Just the log book number.

WTF??? Why didn’t she suggest this in the first fucking place then???

So I hang up, go out to the car, and find out that I don’t have my log book with me either. I go online to see if I can look up the log book number somewhere, but no go. So, not hoping for the best, I phone the DVLA up again. And then I get Jamie on the line.

I explain the situation.

No problem, she says. I’m not allowed to give out that information, but if you give me the car registration number and can answer a few security questions, I can sell you the disk right now. And she did. With no fuss, no bother, no going round the houses, just a quick and simple transaction that took two minutes.

Some days you just want to kill everyone in the entire world, don’t you. Except Jamie. She gets to live.

Anyway, I will return in a few days with the 2008 Sharpie awards. Until then, Happy New Year everyone. Hope 2009 is a good one for you.

It’s my Birthday!

I’m 45 today, unemployed, unwell, and I’m going to be spending my evening telling bad puns to Glaswegians while wearing a kilt.

I’ll explain the last thing another time. As for being unwell, I have a bad cough which I’ve been trying to blast away with loads of vitamin C, max strength lemsips, cough syrup and whisky. Not worked so far though.

And I’m unemployed because my contract at The Company That Shall Not Be Named expired on Friday. My Project Manager wanted to renew me, but he didn’t have the budget for it, so he put in a recommendation with the resource board that they find me another project to move on to. But I wasn’t really expecting that any project would want to take on someone new a few days before Christmas. I’m hoping they’ll have something for me in the new year, because now really isn’t a good time to go looking for new work. On the other hand, I’ve got a lot on in January with the new book coming out, so maybe a few weeks off wouldn’t be a bad thing. I’ve got enough money put aside to keep me going for a couple of months, probably.

It also means that, rather than rush down the shops yesterday and into the horrendous melee that is the pre-Christmas weekend to buy my last few presents, I can do it tomorrow when hopefully a few people will still be at work and it won’t be quite so bad.

I’ll be spending Christmas and the New Year down south with the folks and the kids. H arrived back here from Manchester yesterday and will be travelling down with me.

Anyway, for those who have been asking for it, I’ll leave you with this little clip of video of me, performing at the Funny Farm Comedy Club in Atlanta. Enjoy.

Last Friday has to go down as one of the strangest gigs I’ve done. And one of the most memorable, although not always for the right reasons.

So I was contacted half way through the afternoon by a guy called Jon Stanley who runs a gig at the Gramafon in Glasgow. He said he was short of acts that night, and could I come along and do a set, as a favour. Now I had been planning to go to the Edinburgh vs Wasps rugby match at Murrayfield, but I don’t like letting people down when they ask me for a favour, so I agreed.

As it happens, I don’t think it was so much that he was short of acts, rather that he needed a few reliable ones. When I got there, there were plenty of other acts on the bill, but apart from the headliner I think there was only myself and a guy called Roddy McInnes who had done more than a handful of gigs. And while there were certainly a few on the bill who showed promise, it’s more an insurance policy that if the night starts to go tits-up, you don’t want to be relying on newcomers to try to turn it around.

So I arrived and, as is usually the first thing I do, confirmed with Jon where on the bill I was being placed. Many comics have a routine, a ritual they go through to get in their own heads and get ready to go on, and I am no different. So it is important to know when you need to start that. I was to be first on in the second half, I was told. Fine, that meant I could enjoy the first half and then get myself up for it during the interval.

Except that half way through the first half, Jon suddenly announced the next act to be “Alan Stewart.” And when nobody moved, and everybody had started looking around to see who this Alan Stewart was, he pointed at me and said “you!”

My reply, obviously, was “that’s not my fucking name. And I’m not supposed to be on now.” But he just said, “well you are on now,” and I had to go for it.

Which meant that I had to go on unprepared, without having gone through my usual pre-gig rituals. Also I had a prop, which I had left in my coat, and now had to go and get in full view of everyone, thus removing the element of surprise when I produced it.And worse, because I was driving I had been leaving it until the interval to get myself a drink, meaning my mouth was a dry as old assholes. And that I ended up having to stop and ask for a glass of water during my closing rant because my mouth had dried up so much I actually couldn’t get the words out.

Admittedly that last one I should blame myself for. I should have found a way to do it before, but had decided to plough on and hope for the best. And I did manage to get some laughs, although it was tough going and I had to work hard for every one. So, despite coming off stage in the foulest mood imaginable, it wasn’t a total disaster. But just let me say this. Jon is a nice guy, and he runs a nice little gig, and I like him a lot. And if he ever does that to me again, he is going to be going home with a pair of the sorest knackers in the history of Christendom.

However, the night wasn’t over yet.

Fast forward to the second half, and Roddy has now gone on stage. And just begun his set when a guy enters the room, takes a painting off the wall, and makes to leave again. Well, obviously nobody is going to let that one go, and within a few moments Roddy has him on stage explaining. It turns out he is the artist, and is going to give the picture to his girlfriend. And he gets a few good quips out as Roddy conducts an impromptu critique of his work.

Eventually he leaves, and Roddy start trying to get into his flow again, when there is a shriek from the back of the room, and a cry of “Oh my good fucking Christ!” And we all turn round to find that the bar is on fire.

What has happened is that there is a sign on the bar illuminated by candles, and one of the candles has fallen over and set light to a stack of beermats, and now it’s out of control.

So Roddy runs over, microphone still in hand, shouting for water. The girl gives him a bottle of wine. “You don’t throw alcohol on a fire!” he shouts, “we need water.” Replies the girl, “I don’t know if there is any!” “It’s a fucking bar! There has to be fucking water!”

Eventually a bottle of mineral water is acquired and the flames quenched.

The rest of the weekend was good. I had gigs both Saturday and Sunday, both nights coincidentally supporting a pro-comic from Manchester. Saturday was a paid gig, performing the opening fifteen at the State Bar in Glasgow. It’s only the second opening fifteen I’ve done, but I think it went quite well. I was worried after I came off that the laughs hadn’t been flowing quite as I’d hoped, but everyone else including headliner Roland Gent had the same struggle with the audience, so it was just one of those nights.

Sunday it was a club called Squirrels in Manchester, which is part of a fresher’s Hall of Residence for Manchester University. It was a barn-like venue with the sound coming from huge gig-style speaker stacks and about 300 punters in, none of them much above the age of 19. Vince Atta was headlining, and Sully O’Sullivan did the opening spot and did some material remarkably similar to what I was planning to do, meaning I had to swiftly rearrange my set during the first interval. But it is always great fun to have an audience that size and I enjoyed it immensely.

After my set Vince came over and said he had enjoyed it and asked if I minded him making a suggestion. No problem, I replied. It’s a visual joke you might want to think about, he said. Okay, I replied. “Aragorn has really let himself go,” he said.

Charming.

I was intending to post this yesterday afternoon. But then I lost my internet access. Which, you will realise once you have read it, is highly ironic.

Basically, it was a news story which caught my attention yesterday morning. Others may have spotted it, but just glanced at it, maybe shrugged and said “huh,” without recognising the significance.

But the thing is that, having spent the last decade or more working mainly in the area of debit and credit card systems, it’s a subject that I know bizarrely far more about than could be called interesting by any reasonable human being. And one of the things I know, which is actually a little interesting, is that the busiest hour of the year for credit and debit card transactions would have occurred either between 2 and 3, or 3 and 4, on the afternoon of the Saturday just gone.

Why? Simple, and obvious when you think about it. Because these are the peak buying hours on the first Saturday after the last payday before Christmas.

But this news story yesterday, without mentioning that fact, pointed out that the busiest hour for credit and debit card transactions this year was expected to be between 1 and 2 yesterday afternoon.

Why? Because that was the first Monday lunch-hour after the last payday before Christmas. And everyone was using their work computers during their lunch hour to order Christmas presents off the internet. The estimate was that around £360 million worth of business would be done on cards in that hour. That’s approximately £6 each for every man, woman and child in the country, all in that one hour.

A seemingly innocuous news story. But it represents a fundemental change in the way we live our lives. I was watching a recent episode of the BBC’s new post-apocalyptic drama Survivors, and one of the characters was asked what he missed most about his old life. His reply, “my laptop.” I wonder how many of us would have said the same thing. I suspect the answer is, more of us than would like to admit it.

I had a pretty successful weekend all in all. Gigs on Sunday and Monday night, both went well even though the second gig had an audience of seven. Also got paid a little money for one of them, which happens rarely enough to make it an event. In a way it’s a good thing, but at the same time I have a lot of people telling me now that I should be thinking about making that step up to doing paid gigs regularly, and that’s actually a bit of a scary thought. While you are still doing open spots, you can fuck up and it isn’t an issue. But when you are getting paid, they expect you to do the business, every time.

Monday night’s gig was useful for another reason though. Peter Buckley Hill, the originator of the Free Fringe, was there doing some new material, and in the interval told me how much he liked my set and how he would be happy to have me as part of the Free Fringe this year. By the end of the night I had my Fringe show for next year pretty much sorted. I’m going to be doing a triple-header show with Jason C. Murphy, who was one of the other comics in the show I did this year, and Scott Forbes, who is an experienced MC who has been going for about four years. I put the official proposal in to PBH last night, so now we just await what happens next.

This weekend will be another busy one. I’m doing the State Bar in Glasgow on Saturday night, then on Sunday I’m travelling down to Manchester for a show. A bunch of Scottish comedians are heading down to do King Gong at the Comedy Store. I didn’t fancy it much, having done it twice before, the most recent being last month. I’m probably going to do it again in January, as it is the only way to get noticed by the Store and get on their midweek bill, but it is a stressful experience and I think once every couple of months is plenty.

But I managed to pick up a proper gig in the city, at Squirrels Comedy Club which is in a halls of residence and has what has been described to me as a “depressingly young” audience. The gig draws about 200 punters in, though, and I do love big audiences. However, the average age will be about 19. That can be difficult for an old fart like me, but for the last few weeks I’ve been doing a routine which is essentially a long rant about everything that is shite about Christmas, and that’s a subject that is pretty universal. I did it at another university gig the week before last, and they lapped it up, so I’m hopeful I can get the same reaction again.

In other news, I managed to buy three Christmas presents this weekend, which is highly organised of me as I usually buy them all on Christmas Eve. And I’ve been spending some time organising my disk for this year’s shuffleathon. I did this last year, for anyone who remembers. Organised by Swiss Toni, basically you get given a name, drawn from a hat, that you have to make a compilation CD for and send it to them. In turn, you randomly get sent one by someone else, and have to review it. I haven’t received mine yet, but have finally, after a typically blokish almost surgical procedure, created my definitive disk, and burned it, and will be sending it off in the post tomorrow, so I look forward to the verdict when it arrives at some distant doorstep.

Yes, I’m aware that I fell silent again there. I’m also aware that when I do post, it seems these days to be on a single subject, and therein lies the problem. I worry that I’m being too single focussed and boring everybody. And I really shouldn’t, as I think the whole point of blogging in the first place was that everyone writes what they want to write and if people are not interested, they just don’t read. I’ve never seen myself as being competitive as a blogger, as being desperate to play to an audience, and perhaps these long silences mean that I am being that, far too much.

So I’m going to start to get this place back on a more regular footing. But I’m afraid most of what I write will be about comedy and performing. Because that’s what I do now.

Since the Fringe, and apart from my soujourn in the States, I’ve probably been averaging about two to three gigs a week, including doing ridiculous things like spending six hours driving in order to spend ten minutes on stage in the upstairs room of a pub in Hartlepool on a wet Sunday evening in front of about twenty people.

Last night I played Trader Joe’s in Glasgow. That was a bizarre gig. It’s what’s known in the business as a bear pit gig. Basically, the performing area is off to one side in the main body of a large pub, rather than being in it’s own room, and hence you have to perform while competing against the general noise coming from the rest of the clientelle. Furthermore, we also had to compete against customers pushing their way through the audience to reach the toilets.

And most bizarre of all, we were performing in front of a large plate glass window which opened out onto a busy Glasgow street with the Theatre Royal across the road, which emptied out half way through my stage time. I didn’t know that this was happening, as I had my back half-turned away from the window, but I was instantly aware that half the audience had just started staring intently out of the window, which left me with a dilemma. Should I look to see what was happening, and comment on it? But what if it turned out that nothing was happening, and they had just all simultaneously got bored with me? In the end, the fact that I was in mid extended-rant mode and it would have ruined the flow of what I was doing decided me against it.

I did have some good news last night. I discovered that the two gigs I did in Atlanta were filmed by a company called Rooftop Comedy, and they are going to send me a DVD of the performances. Nice to have proof that I actually did it!

It’s all going pretty well at the moment, I have to say. I’ve got to that point where I can pretty much reliably make an audience laugh nineteen times out of twenty, which is where you need to get to in order to progress from open spots to getting promoters to pay you actual cash money. I’m eight months in, so I’d say that’s about right. Some people manage it in less time, some never get there, but I think I’m about where I should be, I can do a good ten minutes, a decent fifteen, twenty is probably beyond me at this point but it will come.

Anyway, enough about me. How are you?

They say history is written by the winners. It is also written according to the point of view of whoever is writing it.

I had to laugh yesterday as I was looking round the Harry S. Truman Presidential library in Independence, Missouri, on the outskirts of Kansas City. I went there kind of by accident. In that I was planning to go to another museum in Independence, one on the pioneer frontiersmen, but decided to stop off and take a photo of President Truman’s grave first (you all know about my morbid passtime of taking photos of famous graves, right?) and found that you couldn’t actually get to it without going through the exhibit first.

Anyway, so the first part of the museum took you through Truman’s years as president. And as you got to the post-war years, there was an exhibit on the boom of the late forties in the US. All brightly coloured posters and products of the consumer society, smiling women with their new electric fridges and televisions and cars looking as if they had, indeed, never had it so good. And then you walk from there into the exhibit on post-war Europe. Suddenly you are in a dark tunnel, with damp walls, crumbling brickwork and the sound of a mournful wind howling around you, while television screens show men and women with miserable scowls, dressed in rags looking like disaster survivors.

The contrast is bizarre. And, of course, slightly dishonest. Actually there were a few things about the museum that I found a bit dishonest, but to be fair there was a disclaimer at the start telling you “this is one interpretation of the history of the period, there may be others, equally valid.” Still, I found it quite manipulative in painting Truman as a great statesman rather than the politician he undoubtedly was.

But then, I imagine that if you visit the other presidential libraries, you get very much the same effect. I imagine even when George Dubya has his built, it will focus on what a great leader he was, and not on how he ended up the least popular president in the history of the country.

It’s quite interesting being here during the last weeks of the presidential race. Especially here in the midwest, which is very strong in support of McCain, although even here I am hearing people expressing concern over his choice of Palin and how they wouldn’t especially like to see her as their country’s leader should anything happen to him while in office.

One thing I find funny is the yard signs. Of course, we have these in the UK, but I find them funny there as well. I can’t quite see the purpose, especially in what is essentially a two party race. It’s not like someone is going to be walking (or driving, this is the US remember) down the road, see a sign saying “McCain Palin” and think, “hmmm, well I was going to vote for Obama, but now I’ve seen that sign it’s all making much more sense to me….”

Anyway, to catch up, I did my second gig at the Funny Farm which went almost as well as the first (not quite, but it was a good one nonetheless.) A certain commenter came along to see it and seemed to think I was okay! And Gary Gulman said “hey, good show man” which, coming from someone who has had his own HBO and Comedy Central specials, I’ll dine out on for a month.

Then I headed to Kansas over two days, arriving on Saturday and heading to the NFL game on Sunday. Two things about this. First, it all seems a lot smaller than it does on the TV. Really, it seems smaller even than a UK football or rugby match, mainly, I think, because with all the players lined up at the sides, the pitch area just seems crowded. The second thing is, I probably couldn’t have picked a worse game to go to if I’d tried. The Tennessee Titans were totally dominant, the Kansas City Chiefs didn’t seem to know what they were doing, and the result was that in a stadium packed mostly with fans of the quite obviously “going to lose” team, the atmosphere was as dead as a dodo. Of the 70,000 odd crowd, by the time the match ended there must have been less than 5,000 still in the ground.

Much more fun was watching the “tailgaters” in the car park before hand. I didn’t quite understand what this was when I saw you could buy a “tailgater” ticket. I had only ever heard the term before meaning getting too close to the car in front. But in this context, it basically means that they bring along their barbeques, half a ton of meat and a cooler full of beer and have a big cook out right there in the parking lot before the game starts.

Aside from that I also drove up to Kearney, a town just north of Kansas. Or rather a city, because everywhere is a city in America, even though Kearney only consists of one main street and a bunch of farms. But Kearney has a famous son, which was my reason for going. Jesse James, and brother Frank of course, were born and brought up here, and the farm is now a museum dedicated to them. I also found his grave (yes, another one) in the local cemetary. I love these little regional museums in America, I’m even thinking one day I would like to write a travel book about them. They’re always small, but well looked after and run by the friendliest people you could hope to meet. This one was great, starting with a film about the James boys’ life, then an exhibit featuring such items as the boots Jesse was wearing when he was killed and the lid of his original coffin (his body was later moved.) And then a guided tour of the farm itself, filled with furniture which once belonged to the family. If you have any interest in the old west, I highly recommend it.

Anyway, I’m in St Louis now, sitting in a hotel overlooking the river and right by the famous arch. I’m here because WW is also here on a business trip, staying in the same hotel, so once she finishes working we can go see a bit of the city together. Just four more days in America to go. I’m going to miss it.

Yesterday I headed into Atlanta where, among other things, I visited the Sweet Auburn district, where Martin Luther King was born and brought up, where his father preached and later he did likewise, and where he is now buried. I saw his tomb, the home he grew up in, the chapel where both generations preached, and visited a museum dedicated to his life. King is, of course, an American hero. In the UK we know about him, but it takes a visit to this area and watching the interactive displays of first hand testimony to those who lived through the civil rights struggle and those who knew him, to fully understand what a great man he truly was.

Which made all the more ironic what happened before. King was a man of inclusion, he wasn’t just a black hero, his goal was for all races to be integrated equally. Although a man of God, his hero was Ghandi, a man from a whole other religion and culture.

As I walked along Auburn Avenue towards the district, I was approached by a poorly dressed black man carrying his home in a rucksack. I knew he was taking advantage of me right from the beginning, but he was a really nice guy who just seemed down on his luck. He was friendly, interesting, pointed out things on the way along that I would not have noticed had I been on my own, told me a bit about the history of the district. As we approaced the Ebeneezer Baptist Church, where both Kings were preachers, he told me he couldn’t go any further. If he was seen talking to a tourist further along the road, he would get in trouble, maybe be arrested. He asked if I had some money so that he could buy dinner for himself and his daughter. I gave him a twenty, and I didn’t think twice about it.

He was right, as well. He would have got in trouble. The area was kept under strict control by park rangers of all people, and was covered in signs warning “no verbal solicitation” and threatening dire penalties for this. I realise that not all street folk are as nice as this guy was, but it just seemed wrong to me, that an area celebrating a man whose message was one of inclusion, should behave in such an exclusive manner.

Later on I did my stand-up show at the Funny Farm. It was a nice show and went pretty well. The audience seemed to lap up my “Englishisms” and so I went down a storm. It was a very different kind of night to what I’m used to in the UK. There was no interval, drinks being served at tables throughout, and by the end the audience were getting noticeably fractious. What didn’t help was a redneck calling himself Scott the Barber who managed to kill the room stone dead.

I’d realised Scott was going to be trouble from the word go. He came in like a force of nature, all “hell yeah, we are gonna rip this place apart tonight guys!” He clearly already had a few drinks in him, told us all how he’d done his first gig a few weeks earlier and stormed the place, how he didn’t need to prepare material because he was just so naturally funny. People like that tend to be the ones that die on their arse quite quickly. But the thing with Scott was, he had packed the place out with his extended family and friends, and overran his time on stage by about three times the length he was supposed to do, ignoring flashing lights and signals to come off until they eventually turned the lights off and put the music up. He was right, he didn’t have any material. In fact he just shouted, talked to his friends and relatives, pointed them out to the rest of the audience, and gave them “shout-outs.” Then when he was finally dragged from the stage he proceeded to talk to them all in loud voices when the next acts were trying to perform, until they finally left, as noisily as possible.

So I felt sorry for the acts who had to follow him, particularly as the next guy on was a Russian who spoke in faltering English and so was never going to pick the crowd back up, and after him a professional act with his own radio show who also struggled but won them round in the end.

But anyway, the good news is that I’m still in Atlanta, although I was supposed to be heading off today. And this is because at the end of the night they asked me if I was going to be around for a few days, and when I said I could be, they asked me back tonight, when I will be joining the support bill for Gary Gulman, a name that might not mean much in the UK but he’s pretty well known over here and has done a Comedy Central special and most of the major talk shows, which is pretty much when you know you’ve arrived in the States.

I like America.