It's now a year since I last had a hair cut. I last had it done in Brighton during the last festival and haven't let a hairdresser near me since. It may be time to hand my head over to a professional (hopefully with the rest of me still attached), but it has been an interesting experiment. And I have discovered that if you don't get your hair cut, your hair gets really long.
I got just ridiculously drunk last night and that somewhat clouded my day, which passed by in a daze.
When I got to Brighton station I had a few minutes to kill and went to sit on one of the circular benches to read my paper. I was surprised to realise that I was sitting right next to
Nick Cave. He was sitting on his own reading the Guardian (all the cool cats get this paper!), looking very debonair, but in his own space, not drawing attention to himself. Indeed no one seemed to notice this legendary musician sitting in their midst. I found it genuinely surprising, not that he would only be taking the train rather than be chauffeured around in a massive limo full of bimbos (a limbo) and drugs, but that he didn't have a team of hangers-on looking after him. And I liked him for that. And that he was just being left alone. One wonders how many other major music stars could just travel around incognito if they weren't constantly drawing attention to themselves. My encounter with
Coldplay suggests that being mobbed in public is down more to the way you deport yourself, than with who you are.
I have a couple of Nick Cave albums, but don't know too much about him and he looked like he was enjoying the best paper in the UK, so I left him to it, without being the dick who says, "Hey, you're Nick Cave! What are you doing in a train station?"
I was disappointed when someone else seemingly let the rest of us down. "Mr Cave! How are you doing?" he asked, before going in for a hug. But it turned out that this was a friend of his. So that was allowed. Apparently I discover Cave now lives in Brighton. Which goes some way to explaining his presence here. And maybe the locals' familiarity with him being here.
Perhaps he was sitting there thinking - "Is that Richard Herring? What's he doing in the train station? Where's his limbo? I'd love to talk to him about his role of Percy the shepherd in Servants, but I don't want to look like a dick. Oooh he reads the Guardian too."
But I'm guessing probably not.
Later dicking around on Youtube in a hungover haze I discovered that someone had put up a brief video clip of
Collings and Herrin podcast 31, which looks like it was fun. And James, I'm guessing, at Fistoffun.net has put up a lot of quite obscure clips involving Stew and me, including
this interview with Late Edition from 2006 that I don't even really remember doing and this
very poor quality video of me on the rubbish breakfast show RI:SE. I like the bit where I am sticking up for Billie Piper, who the tabloids are being sarcastic about because she's having a go at acting. Isn't hindsight a wonderful thing?
It's incredible the stuff that is turning up on the internet.
