Warming Up

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Tuesday 6th May 2003

Back to my UK tour with a gig rather reminiscent of the Melbourne run. I was in a thousand seater venue in St Albans with around about 100 people in the audience. This kind of gig is meat and potatoes to me now. How nice of the people of St Albans to stay away so that I would feel at home.
Through bleary-eyed jet lag I performed my little heart out and they weren’t a bad crowd. Though my head was thumping and my ears were ringing (and still a bit blocked from the descent of the plane on Sunday) so I couldn’t quite work out if it was the sound department that was awry or my own brain that was frazzled (it was the latter).
I battled on, but with the bits I cut for Australia re-instated the show suddenly seemed very long to me. It was fun to suddenly remember bits that I hadn’t thought about for nearly two months.
The best and weirdest thing about this show, though, was the shouting out bit at the end. I may have written about this before, because there have been gigs where I’ve struggled to get people to join in, so forgive me if this is repetitious, but it was quite exceptional.
First I get men to shout out “We love our cocks!” The men of St Albans did this reasonably loudly.
Then I get the women to shout out “We love your cocks!” They really went for it. It was very funny.
Then I get gay and bi-sexual men (and any man who accepts that there is a part of him that is gay) to shout out “We love our cocks and your cocks!”
Quite often no-one shouts out on this one. This happened tonight.
As usual I explained that someone had to shout it out for the show to continue and added the usual incentive of explaining that if you were a straight man and did it, what happens is you get a massive round of applause and nine times out of ten a woman in the audience will have sex with you. I said I would wait.
And I did.
I waited for a long time. There were pockets of giggles from people as they waited for someone to do it. But no-one did. Previously I have had to wait maybe 30 seconds for someone to relent and join in (which is a long time to have nothing happening in a live gig), but it seemed that easily a minute had passed and no-one had chimed in. I chuckled under my breath and now extra tired after 75 minutes on stage, the whole experience was made especially surreal because of the effects of jet lag.
But I was determined to win this stand-off. I waited and waited. It was pretty funny. I laughed, laughter smattered round the auditorium. It was actually quite an exciting theatrical experience. I looked at the floor, looked up, made an expectant face, then stared hard into the faces of some of the cowardly men who weren’t even prepared to do this simple thing in order to get out of the theatre and into the pub.
It went on even longer. Reluctantly (because I would have loved just to keep the silence going in some ways, but felt the situation needed comment), I remarked “The men of St Albans. So macho, they can’t even let the idea of being gay into the public arena” (or words to that effect) and told them that the show was over unless someone shouted it out, which would be a shame.
Eventually (and I wish I’d had a clock in this, because it felt like three minutes or more, but time stands still when a theatre is silent) I heard a bloke tut and make a sort of “all right” noise and he shouted out “We love our cocks and your cocks!”
The audience cheered with relief. He held his arms aloft.
Disingenuously, I broke into his celebration. “Usually I’d let you enjoy that,” I said, “but to be honest you waited so long that I think you should be ashamed, rather than proud.”
Maybe I was a bit harsh on him. And there was an odd, but slightly exciting atmosphere in the air.
Weirdly as I took my bow the house lights (the lights in the auditorium) came up. This doesn’t usually happen and was obviously a mistake on behalf of the lighting technician. But I got to see the faces of everyone in the audience. A ragbag of St Albans’ people spread out in clumps in this massive theatre.
I got to look them in the eye and telepathically chastise them for their yellow bellied behaviour (only the men, of course. The women had been fantastic!).
But I liked them for it too. We had played a game of chicken and I had won.
Though I felt like I’d been hit by a lorry when I came off stage so maybe it was a Pyrrhic victory.