Hey, there are some great Lee and Herring based downloads to listen to/watch - including an audio of
the recent Lyric gig at the rather fine
fistoffun.net downloads page. There's a comprehensive collection of old (and new) radio shows, as well as stuff like a pdf of the Fist of Fun book. This morning I listened to
this old and forgotten (by me) interview with Steve Wright from 1993. Not only is it quite funny, it's also quite strange to hear my old high pitched squeaky voice, which I did not realise was at all weird until someone mentioned how much it annoyed them in the Fist of Fun radio shows. How had I got through my life with no one taking the piss before that?
And you can hear
the first ever recorded chat between me and Andrew Collings. Thanks to James and whoever else puts the thing together. There's lots of other stuff too and the perfect starting point for those three people who have discovered me thanks to my recent appearances on Buzzcocks and Argumental. I am very glad that some of our fans bothered to catalogue all that Lee and Herring stuff, because we never did. In fact a couple of weeks ago I was rueing the fact that beyond the
disappointing live video we never actually recorded any of the Lee and Herring live shows ourselves. Fistoffun.net does have
this ancient recording. I wonder if any of the other shows got bootlegged. Would love to hear them if you illegally taped them or know someone who did. I am listening to the 27 year old me at the moment, talking to a slightly underwhelmed audience of young people, who will now be well into their 30s. So the joke's on them.
And if you really want to go back a long way you can hear us when we were about 20
doing sketches with the 7 Raymonds.
Funnily enough I was back in Oxford tonight gigging at the excellent Free Beer Show. As usual walking through these streets took me back twenty odd years to my student days. I have probably written about them all before - probably the last time I was doing this gig. I nearly popped into the Carfax chippy, where I ended many miserable, lonely nights drowning my sorrows...with chips. And it's hard to drown in chips. Though the Carfax chippy chips were quite oily.
I also passed the Pizza Hut, which has somehow survived the decades of change. In my first year at college I had shaved my head to play a skinhead in Brecht's "The Threepenny Opera" (I had decided that he would be a skinhead, which he didn't need to be - it was a very minor part, but I made a lot of it). One Friday night I met up with a friend to go for some food and we headed down the steps of the underground Pizza Hut, when a member of staff stopped us and told us they wouldn't be able to serve us as they had run out of pizza bases. We had left and gone over the road for a curry, without thinking too much about it. It was only when we observed other people going into the Pizza Hut and not being turned away that we a) began to question whether it was possible that a pizza restaurant would run out of pizza bases on a Friday night (and aren't pizza bases just made out of dough, which can surely be created quite easily by a restaurant specialising in pizzas) and b) they had in fact turned us away because they had been intimidated by my skinheaded appearance. I had been a victim of prejudice. Slightly ironically as they had probably thought I would be the prejudiced one and so hadn't wanted me in their fine establishment. And what if I had just had chemotherapy? Because aside from the haircut I was the most unthreatening figure you could hope to see.
Still we had a nice curry instead. The Indian staff, ironically enough, did not object to a potential racist came into their restaurant. You'd think the Italian based food store would have welcomed a possible fascist. Ah well. It was 21 years ago. Let it go.
Gigging mere yards from where the 7 Raymonds first performed (and down in a basement just as we had been then) I had a lovely time. I am better than I was back in those days and felt confident and relaxed and did a good job. I am increasingly comfortable with leaving the script behind and somehow got round to talking about two of the least funny news stories of the week. And managing to be quite funny about them. I won't write the jokes down, because they were totally unacceptable and if the Daily Mail ever found out I'd be hung from a lamppost. But maybe some naughty person was recording me and the stuff will turn up on the internet as well. And then the lamppost hanging will become a reality. Luckily the audience understood that I was joking and didn't really think the subjects were funny. And none of them slapped me. Which is why Oxford is best than Nottingham.
And just for your information, the new DVD and book from Go Faster Stripe should be available on about the 10th December. Of course I will keep you informed, but you will definitely be able to get them in time for Christmas. In fact everyone who orders both the book and the DVD in the first five days of release will be put into a draw to win the actual "Free Hotdog" T shirt, as featured in the DVD. So probably worth buying a copy of both for yourself and all your friends and family! You get all the old shit for free, so hope you don't mind paying for some of the new shit. Let's see if Freeconomics works.
