7851/20792
It's been a couple of weeks since the last gig and if you think I haven't done anything in that time, I have created a civilisation that not only conquered the entire world, went to Alpha Centuri and in which nearly every city has all the amenities possible and the citizens are all very happy.
I was going to the Bloomsbury in London - a venue that I haven't played for something like a decade (I think Lord of the Dance Settee was my last gig here - did we film the DVD here?) but which I used to play quite a lot. We had some great AIOTM gigs here. Back in the 2010s I could fill this venue, but it was probably only about a third full tonight. I am doing another gig in London on Sunday at the Leicester Square Theatre and in hindsight it was a mistake to do two so close to each other. We could have combined those audiences in to one pretty full room, but instead I will be doing two smaller gigs.
BUT tonight's crowd were fab and made it feel like the room was full and I had a pretty good time. The only reason I didn't have a very good time was because after that fortnight off I wasn't on top of the material as I had been.
In the olden days when my brain was young and sharp I could leave a show for a few days and it'd all be there ready to go, I'd just have to look into Richard's mind and there it was. I didn't bother to think over the show beforehand tonight and almost immediately regretted it. I may know all the lyrics to Richard Cory, decades after the last listen, but my current stand up show is not as embedded. Similarly it was coming to me as I got to each section, but that's a scary place to be when you're standing in front of paying customers. In a way it made the performance better, as I really had to work at it and sell it (to myself as much as anyone else) but it was a sickening feeling to be in this position and a couple of times the ant trail went cold and I didn't know what I was meant to say. I recovered quickly - quickly enough that I don't think anyone would have noticed - but from my perspective it was like the show was lagging and I had to jump over one bit because I didn't know what I was meant to say (it came back to me in the interval and it was one of the better jokes, so that was annoying).
The second half, which I am still generally less confident about and which hasn't entirely settled into its more or less final form yet, probably came out better than the first, but I didn't like the feeling. It was as close to the dream of being on stage in a play that you haven't rehearsed as I am likely to get. Right Bollock was on good form though - apparently his memory still works fine, though he did chastise me for forgetting where I was at one point.
I shouldn't have to experience this again on this tour as I am now back into pretty intensive gigging - the end of June and start of July sees a gig almost every day. And I think the audience liked it, though as it was too expensive to sell merch here I didn't get a chance to meet then afterwards which might have added to the slight feeling of anticlimax for me.
As always the battle in the mind was between the part of me that feels that after all this time I should be able to sell 500 tickets a night in London and the part of me that can't believe that after all this time I can still sell 200 tickets in London (and let's not forget that I sold out the first gig - there's about 800 people in this city of 20 million who like me enough to pay to come and see me, which is both useless and amazing, just like me)
I then went to a house party, something that I haven't done for a good while and it was fun meeting up with some old friends and meeting some new people. In the toilet queue I met a woman who can drink a pint in 3.6 seconds. She didn't have a pint on her, but she showed me a video. Was that 3.6 seconds more entertaining than the 100 minutes I'd done on stage? Perhaps but she'd surely struggle to make a show out of it. Though a show were a woman drank 2000 pints of beer in 100 minutes would definitely sell out.
