There is nothing quite like the sound of splashing vomit echoing round the rain-sodden streets of Swansea city centre at 11pm. You know you have had a good night when you are lucky enough to witness this. A guttural grunt followed by a gut full of undigested lager cascading against the concrete. And it may be poetic fancy, but I think the Swansea streets have a different timbre to those of any other town in the UK. Spew on Swansea is like a kind of ethereal music. I believe I could identify the sound if I were played 100 recordings of sick hitting the paving slabs of every major urban shopping centre in the country, in an as yet unimagined edition of “You Bet!”. “That’s Swansea,” I would say, “I will remember her sweet melody until I die.”
Of course itÂ’s all the more satisfying when the sick is being chundered by a member of an audience that you have just entertained, with whom you are heading out for another drink, even though he for one has clearly had enough and even though he slept through most of the second half of your show. But life on the road is so lonely and you become so desperate for human interaction of any kind that even the company of a practically comatose man, who is so inebriated he is unable to understand a word you are saying or remember anything that occurred even five seconds before, like some gigantic, crapulous goldfish is preferable to heading back to the poor quality Dolphin Hotel on oneÂ’s own.
To be fair his mates were less drunk and one of them had gone to my school and used my dadÂ’s name as a password on his computer, so it wasnÂ’t all bad. And I couldnÂ’t face going back and sitting in my dated hotel room, waiting for sleep to overpower me.
It had been possibly the gig with the smallest audience of the tour – around about 80 (so maybe Keswick was less, but only because the theatre didn’t have that many seats) and had felt like the hardest work. I think the crowd stayed with me (when they weren’t asleep) and there were some funny new moments, but in a week all I will recall is the sound of heavy rain thundering on the roof all the way through the proceedings, like some sarcastic distant applause for every bon mot that spilled from my lips, from an audience ten times the size of the one I had, who had perversely chosen to watch the show on TV, on the roof of the theatre.
I remained professional and gave the performance my all (at least most of the time, though perhaps my head dipped in places) and looked forward to tomorrow night when I would be back at home in a bed, which if it had any dubious stains on the bedspread, they would at least be my own.
I had a couple of beers with my new Welsh friends, before finally biting the bullet and heading back to my room. As I walked through the empty shopping centre, a flock of seagulls were swooping in the glare of the streetlamps, just near to Primark. They called out to each other as they flew and their white plumage flashed in the light. There were hundreds of them. It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.
The streets of Swansea may be coated in sick, but there are more wonderful sights and sounds to experience in the heavens above.
And whole universes of strange and tiny life-forms on the bedspreads at the Dolphin Hotel.
