I had forgotten how depressing touring can get. It sounds like it should be exciting, but thereÂ’s a lot of travelling, a lot of waiting around. You hope you will get whisked away on some exciting night of adventure after each gig, but instead you generally find yourself sitting in an empty hotel bar with the person youÂ’ve just spent all day sat in a car with.
We got to a cold Wolverhampton about six hours before the gig was to start, already aware that the ticket sales were poor (even by the medium standards of this tour). I was going to be performing on a very high stage, in a large echoey hall, without any real prospect of the bodies of the audience deadening the sound. It didnÂ’t augur well.
Simon wasnÂ’t in the best of moods either, but I was irritable and low (I had had a couple of drinks on both Friday and Saturday and wondered if that had had some kind of depressant effect). I decided to head off and look at what shops Wolverhampton had to offer on a Sunday afternoon.
I bought a book about the Yorkshire Ripper investigation, which was my cheery pre-show reading material. Probably didnÂ’t help to lift my mood. Nor did the news that we had sold only 63 tickets, which Simon cheerfully made worse by telling me how many thousands of seats Dave Gorman had sold in the bigger theatre next door just two nights before.
But the gig was actually pretty good. They were up for it right from the start which is always great and I had fun, though it was weird looking down on so few people from a stage that was about ten feet above them. It felt like a very unsuccessful Nazi rally (you know, except about cocks, not racial hatred). Rather than the scale of the stage making me look powerful or important, it made me feel a bit pathetic. Especially given I was looking at a massive room, a quarter full of chairs which were themselves about a tenth full.
It’s like putting the statue of Nelson on a massive column, rather than a regular plinth, is so grandiose, that it begins to look sarcastic. “Oooooh, look at me. I’m Nelson. I’m so important I have to have my statue on a stand that is so big that you can’t even see me.” That’s not a statue, it’s a bird-perch.
One day I will return to Wolverhampton, and that auditorium will be full. Either that or IÂ’ll just invite the audience down to the dressing room and do the show there, standing on a milk crate.
