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As I drove to Andover (I am doing this week’s gigs without a tour manager) I was trying to remember the last time I played this venue. I was also trying to remember which venue it was. Everything blurs into one on tour and even though I have visited this theatre quite regularly (just not for a while) I couldn’t picture it. Was it the one in a church with steep raked seating? Or the one down the long windy road outside of town? Would I be able to park outside or was it one where you have to park on the pavement and then unload and drive the car somewhere else?
I knew it was the venue where I had been presented with a realistic looking British Comedy Award by long-term fans Rob and Debbie, (because we’d named it the Andover Fist), but that still didn’t help me work out where I was heading.
I was, it has to be said, pretty tired, but I don’t think that was the reason for my inability to recall. Venues blur into one, weeks merge, years clump into a ball. Out life moves relentless onwards until suddenly we run out of floor and we find ourselves falling to our doom.
When I got to Andover it started to come flooding back. It was the one where I used to park in the magistrate’s car park. The drive in and the one way system were familiar, but why hadn’t I played it for so long?
This time I accidentally managed to find a little back route to the stage door, where there was a space for my car and once inside the venue I recognised the foyer and a couple of members of staff. I asked them when I was last here and they remembered that there had been a bit of a furore over Christ on a Bike. Was that the reason I hadn’t been invited back for a while?
But when I got into the distinctive dressing room it all clicked. The last time I had played this venue was four days after my wedding. We had got married on the Saturday, gone to Paris on honeymoon from Sunday to Tuesday and then been back in time for me to go to Andover to perform to about 100 not massively enthusiastic Andoverans.
It was practically the third anniversary (and I had forgotten nearly everything else in that Warming Up entry too - my brain is clearly decaying). I was wearing my wedding suit tonight, coincidentally, which is still a bit loose, but not as loose as it was (though the new regime of no sugar or booze has held up well for two days now).
Perhaps the reason why I hadn’t been invited back had been that unusually flat “What is Love, Anyway?” gig. The three year hiatus has not made the people of Andover any keener to see me and though I’ve done well at gigs in nearby towns, this was the lowest attendance of the tour, with probably only about 80 people in. To have got this far into the tour and not had a sub-100 audience is quite impressive though and this time we had a much nicer time together. Well the audience enjoyed it (though not raucously) at least. I was really feeling the effects of lack of sleep and driving and working in the dressing room beforehand. I felt light-headed and a bit shaky and made a few minor errors. I felt like my eyes were sore and my eyelids drooping and was worried the audience might spot this, but I think I managed to disguise my fatigue and perform well. There weren’t too many frills or thrills, but I fought through the tiredness and got to the end and there were lots of encouraging comments afterwards. Maybe a bigger crowd would have lifted me and made me forget about sleep and thankfully I haven’t had to do the whole tour to crowds of this size, so my head didn’t drop, even if my eyelids felt like they might.
On the way home I listened to a brilliant episode of Teenage Diary on Radio 4 Extra in which Robert Webb read back his entries about his bitterness towards the girls who didn’t fancy him (not a million miles away from my own diary) and then segued into a very affecting description of his mother’s illness and death. I realised that this was the show that had beaten RHLSTP to Sony silver and quite right too. Great radio.
