I was on at the Ashcroft Arts Centre in Fareham tonight. When you tour it's very hard to remember individual venues sometimes as they all blend into one and I wasn't sure that I had been here before. One Arts Centre can blend into another and when a town is an easy drive from London, one tends to arrive just before the gig and leave immediately after and you see nothing of the town.
When I pulled into the car park of the venue it seemed vaguely familiar, but it wasn't until I got to the dressing room that I started to think I had been here before. It was lined with posters from shows that had been put on at the Ashcroft. If there had been a poster of me up there, then that would have solved the riddle, but I felt as if I had looked at these images before, though it's not impossible that that happened in a different dressing room in another theatre where the staff had had the same idea. If I had to guess I would say that maybe I did "Talking Cock" here, but only because that was long enough ago for me to have forgotten.
It was fascinating looking at the posters though, which seemed to go back over many years. There was one night where a young looking Ludovic Kennedy was introducing a night of music and poetry featuring Molly Weir who used to be in Rentaghost. Also there was a poster for "The Two Marks" who broke up in the early 90s (one of the Marks was Mark Heap from Spaced and so on) and a tattered one for Mike Harding, the production values of which suggested it was from 1990 at the latest.
There were also some friendly faces there - Ben Moor had been there to do one of his charming one man shows and Jim Tavare had been there some years ago, at a time when he was supported by Julian Dutton, one of the writers of the seminal radio comedy "That's Wiggins Yard". A few blasts from the past had temporarily slipped my mind. Alison Goldie, who I had known quite well in the early 90s was there (I think she appeared in one of the Newman and Baddiel series). I haven't seen her for ages. I wondered what she was up to. The Mighty Boosh had also signed a big poster of their show "Arctic Boosh" and it was good to see that no-one had tried to steal what would probably be quite a valuable artifact.
But it was a great mixture of people who have gone on to be stars, being who have carved out fruitful but less showy careers and those who are no longer working or have slipped off the radar (or in the case of Linda Smith whose poster I noticed quite late on - a gig that had been tellignly rescheduled due to illness- are sadly no longer with us). It made me think of that Paul Simon song where he sings "Here's to all the boys who came along" which mournfully remembers the journeymen of music and those that came and went. Show business is a strange and ephemeral profession and it's odd to think that some people who I have worked alongside have passed into that status where they are from the past. Sometimes you go to theatres with really old posters and 95% of the names mean nothing to you. That's show business.
Many of the posters were signed and it was heartwarming and made the dressing room a fun and interesting place to be, which is unusual, as most of them are quite cold and unpleasant places.
Annoyingly though, some former occupant of the room had chosen to deface a few of the posters in a pathetic and childish way, generally by drawing big cocks on some of the performers and speech bubbles about anal sex. It's the kind of pathetic puerility that might have amused me in another context, but it felt very disrespectful in this context, like smashing things at a museum or drawing a cock going into the mouth of the Mona Lisa (though if you managed to do that I would be so impressed that I would probably find it funny) especially as it was almost certainly done by another performer. It was a small cloud over what was an enjoyable fifteen minutes going from wall to wall and manageing to spot another half-forgotten masterpiece.
The gig went OK. There weren't too many in and a couple of smart arses on the front row slightly spoilt the flow of the old people on the bonfire by mis-timed interjections, but it's another one down and in twenty years time will just be another poster on a wall which will remind someone that I had existed and wonder what I am up to now.
Well it might have done, except the dressing room walls are full now so it won't.
