I had an online chat today with the lovely Rob Halden. He's someone that's on my list of people to collaborate with, when I've worthily prepared enough to do so. That's a list where the title is the longest part of it.
He recommended that I take up a writing habit of talking about my day, and also constructing material-shaped reactions to the day's news. I'd report what he precisely said, but go and ask him yourself, and pay the man. He's brilliant.
I shared with him the game I play when MCing, which I should probably call the Jokes You Can Never Use Anywhere Else generator. It's a game that Ian Fox taught me many Edinburgh Shows ago. You get the audience to provide a famous person and a household object and then you have to write jokes bringing them together. I now have notebooks full of a series of what's the similarity/difference between jokes that are impossible to bring up to an audience, because they'd be too busy wondering why you want to know the difference between Nigel Farage and a Spanner to care what the answer might be:
One rights wing-nuts, the other's a ring-wing nut.
A joke that's also deeply flawed, because you don't use spanners on wing-nuts... but I digress.
I'm writing a quick account of some stuff from a booth in the University Library here in Preston where I've been for the last few hours.
They have a sign up where you can text a special number if there's too much noise and they'll come and sort it out for you. I wonder if I could use it when my kids are being annoying.
Libraries are a massively underrated resource. They're a place you can sit for hours on end and not be interrupted by anyone else's noise. Essentially, they're coffee shops without other people's annoying families... and coffee... unless you count the vending machine, which is pushing it beyond the point of credulity, in my opinion.
I was amazed that I was able to get into this library by showing the library card from a different library in Gloucestershire, which I never go to. That's amazing. That's almost the equivalent of being allowed in to see Les Miserables in London, because you can show them a ticket stub from a school production of Joseph that was cancelled owing to the pandemic... or something like that.
Remember, I've been advised to write and make jokes... forgive the points where this looks overwritten... given that nobody but me reads this blog these days, I don't expect it to go unforgiven.
The above picture is from a brief visit I made to St Anne's on the Sea, a destination which was a favourite for family holidays when we were kids. It's notionally still the same place it was, based on my limited memories of it. I didn't go down the pier - the weather was bad, and I was there for the selfie opportunity more than the deep nostalgia.
Bizarrely, the place I thought of to go for a coffee and a bite to eat is somewhere that wasn't even there when we used to go there. I've revisited St Annes a handful of times in the last 20 years and gone there as a new tradition... or something like that.
To be fair, it was nice to try to remember where the old places were, but it wasn't really a big deal. Just a break from the gloom of being on your own in the 20 or so hours between leaving the gig and going back.
Last night's gig was fun. It could have been a bit daunting playing a new venue to a limited number of people. New venue to me that is... it's been a venue for a while. It could also have been a bit more daunting doing the latest version of my set along with a new bit, but I just threw myself into it.
I've been struggling a bit since the pandemic started. I've been unclear where I want to pitch my comedy in a world where the pandemic is happening. Go into detail and depress everyone? Pretend like nothing's happened? Neither seem good options. Similarly, where there's some material which I wrote in the last 5 years, a lot of what I'm doing is getting really old. On the one hand I can play it expertly, on the other, it doesn't quite seem to fit me anymore. Not all of it.
One trick I've learned over the years is to freshen up even the oldest material with a new line, a replacement WORD, or even a change in the timing. What my set has needed has been an injection of new something-or-other into it.
That said, I've had a bit of a mindset change recently, and I owe it entirely to my last visit to the Holly Bush... along with the fact that I now run a regular monthly gig which means I can no longer rely on my old bankable material, since I've already used it up there.
My visit to the Bush started with leaving home early. I had a 10-15 or so slot to play, and my goal was to go with two new songs. There was only one problem. When I left home, I hadn't written either.
So, under time pressure, I sat in Starbucks in the services and quickly wrote two songs.
I doubt I'll perform either again.
That's not the point. I also had to set myself up to do a set that I wouldn't normally do around these songs. This gave me a chance to select the other things that I wanted to do from my back catalogue. It gave me a chance to rework some material that had half worked new at the gig I was MCing, and then put in context with some more solid material.
I did the gig, got good reactions for much of it, but didn't fall in love with either of the songs.
Perhaps a rewrite of one of them will work... the other was already a reheated versions of a reheated version of an old Eurovision Song Contest song - http://ashleyfrieze.co.uk/media/sounds/eurovision-clean.mp3 - which dated horribly because of Brexit, and then the rewrite dated after Brexit moved on, and then the rewrite of the rewrite... well, perhaps a 3rd generation mutant of a song doesn't need to be kept alive.
When I did the next gig, a few days back, the newly restructured set made sense to me. I'd ditched some material I wrote long long ago and had been finding weirdly out of date, and replaced it with some other stuff, and now I was doing something that interested me.
Then I wrote two more songs.
One of these is still not quite where it's needs to be, but the other was performed last night at the gig. It is also already recorded... which is unusual. Normally I'd not record a song written for the stage until trying it out. Normally, stage songs are questions - is this funny - and then when I've got the audience reaction and the rewrites in, then it becomes something I'm going to keep.
However, the Bossa Nova inspired song about ... whatever it's about... wanted me to record it. I just like the Bossa Nova, and it's got a great middle 8. So I learned to sing it from a fully produced version where I'd even autotuned my own vocals to teach me what I was supposed to be singing...
And last night it did ok... and in places I forgot bits, or lost control of the performance... it's a tongue-twister of a song... But it's been out there, which is great.
Also last night, I discovered the perils of washing your hands. The toilet had hand soap, which I applied before discovering that the sink didn't dispense water. So I was running around the venue with dirty hands, trying not to spill a gloop's worth of soap from them before I found a disabled toilet that did have running water.
Oh, the glamour.
Yes, there is a punchline to the sticky hands set up, but I'm too polite to bring it up here.