I can't believe that I am back on tour - though luckily the next few months only see the odd gig here and there and it's not full on until February 2013. But this was going to be a full on day as I was planning to drive home from Liverpool after the gig, hoping that that would be easier than trying to battle my way through traffic tomorrow (I have a Leicester Square Podcast tomorrow evening and didn't want to make that more stressful than it is already). I had been told that the Liverpool comedy festival only wanted an hour long show, which meant that I should be on the road by 9.30pm and home by 1am.
But of course, as this involves me, it was never going to be that easy.
I am going to have a tour manager/driver for the main body of the tour, but am doing the 2012 gigs on my own, which I was already regretting as I loaded up my car with programmes, merchandise and my projector and screen. On the drive there I played a recording of the show that I'd made on the last day of Edinburgh (something I often forget to do) hoping that would help me remember the show, which I have to admit felt a bit like a distant dream. I could hear the tiredness in my voice and was reminded of how tough the Fringe had been. In the end I hadn't enjoyed doing the show as much as usual and the prospect of doing it another eighty or so times was weighing me down a little bit. I had had such fun with the previews, but the combination of smaller audiences and external noise had made the show difficult to perform and in the usual pre-gig paranoia I wondered if the truth was that the show just wasn't good enough.
The Epstein theatre is one of those rare venues that has no parking space for loading and unloading, so I was going to have to take my chances on double yellow lines. I had been told to head for School Lane, but when I got there I saw it was a one way street and I was at the wrong end of it. I always panic a little bit driving around in unfamiliar towns and I thought that with a bit of luck I'd be able to drive around and find the right end of the road. Instead, of course, I got stuck in Liverpool's one way system and ended up driving for 20 minutes (with my petrol gauge flashing at me, almost on empty) before getting the message to head to Hanover Street. When I finally got there I realised that this was exactly the spot I had passed nearly half an hour ago and that the theatre was right on the corner. A man helped me unload and I parked the car. I didn't get a ticket, but I was hot and bothered.
The screen and projector needed setting up and as always this took some doing and things went wrong, but luckily the tech staff were adept and sorted the issues out. I set up the clicker system, only to find the clicker that I had finally found the other day wasn't working. I changed the battery and saw that the battery that was in there had corroded somehow in my bag and coated the inside of the compartment with sticky battery acid. I put in a new battery (impressed that I had one) and got the thing working, but it was acting up a bit, whisking back through slides when I didn't want it to and then refusing to back up at all and then finally conking out. Of course I had bought a new clicker. But of course I had left that one at home. I was going to have to operate the show like they did in the good old days (of the early 2000s) by using my hand.
The other issue was that the venue were expecting a 90 minute show with an interval. Not only would this mean I was driving home an hour later than I'd planned, but it also meant that I had to extend the show in the time available to me. This was something I'd been planning to do for the non-festival shows coming up soon, so it was a bit of a push to do it now with around about an hour to go to show time. But I worked out some bits I could add and tried to estimate where a good place to put the interval would be. It was all a bit seat of the pants.
But as it turned out everything went fine. The 250 strong audience were enthusiastic from the start and I remembered what was good about the show and it cheered me right up. The great thing about touring is the very fact that you're not confined to a time slot and I was able to slow down and let ideas develop. I managed to work up the Icelandic Phallological Museum routine and reinstated some other older bits and it worked very well with the interval. The first half was about 45 minutes (which is ideal), the second half a bit shorter, but that is also for the best. I had a great time and suddenly the tour didn't seem so daunting. Although the drive home did. Though at least I found an open garage in time and filled up on petrol (and Minstrels).
But even that wasn't too bad. It was like the old days of 2005 when I rarely used to stay over anywhere and did a lot of long, late night drives. It's not something that I could do all the time any more, but just this once careering through the darkness and watching the time left tick down impossibly slowly on the sat nav was enjoyable. The roads were empty and although I didn't get home until two and was too jittery to sleep til three this was vastly preferable to spending six hours on the road tomorrow, failing to do any work on the podcast and then rushing to the Leicester Square Theatre in a sweat.
It will be very good to have a tour manager next year as 90% of the stress of touring is the driving, unloading and setting up. There were points today where I'd have given somebody £500 just to be where I needed to be with no more fretting.
Apparently I had played this theatre before - when it was called the Neptune - with the first run of Talking Cock. One of the guys who worked there remembered me coming there, although I did not and unusually even once I as inside the building there was nothing I recalled about it. Alas that gig took place in the months before I started the blog so I can't go back to check how I did. I suspect it would have been attended by about 50 people back then (because that was the case with most of the gigs). So I had (perhaps) five times as many people tonight, showing the slow but steady progress of a decade of hard work. I have earned each one of them in the sweat of my face and I can't say it hasn't been a slog. The nine or ten hours around the performance were hard. But the actual job I do in between all that shit is delightful. I am a tired and lucky man.
