Change at Slough

Sometimes, I question my life choices. Just the other day, I was standing beneath a clutch of faux palm trees made of straw, inhaling a heady concoction of Malibu and baby oil, in the flashing lights of a steaming club surrounded by steaming punters, doubting. To be, or not to be the comedy fluffer before a hen do’s disco, that is the question, I thought, as I was introduced to a stage whose proportions seemed designed to remind me, even as I took the mic, that I’d risen exactly six inches from where I started stand up on a stained pub carpet, many, many years ago. 

It can’t be ego, I decided, looking at the vacant faces of the front table, as another quip floated over them like so much hairspray. It can’t be the money, I admitted, making the quick cost calculations a desultory titter afforded me. It’s not the adulation, I accepted, reading the sash of a bride to be, whose head was bobbing beneath a plastic tiara and a surfeit of prosecco. 

It’s the anonymity, I concluded, as the restless room mindlessly appraised me. Stand up requires that you tap dance within specific confines: the first impression you make on a given group of strangers, their attention span, and their intoxication level. The day you accept how you are seen, you start to build a persona, then you learn to express yourself in that persona, and finally you become an alter ego you find amusing, who can catch a wave of drunkenness and ride ebbing currents of awareness. The jokes are secondary. Until people come back to see them. Then you need to write new ones. That’s where I am. Between albums. My problem is you need to work stand up out on stage. The stage is the studio. But when I’m on stage I cling to my back catalogue. I have shows I actually want to do in my diary. I need a new catalogue.

An ice bucket rattles as someone moves to replenish their glass. I’m a whore for attention. I know it. I like the laughs. But I either keep on winning them in shit holes like this, knowing I’ll be forgotten tomorrow, or I use shit holes like this to work out something different, hoping I’ll be forgotten tomorrow. I do both. With half my mind on the emergency exit and when I should use it. 

They can’t tell the bloody difference, I realise, as I watch a clawed hand tease a sullen crotch. They’re not here for me. I start to enjoy myself. Some of the new stuff is going to work.

I leave by the front door. Linger for a compliment. 

Waiting at Slough, I feel reflective. Maybe there isn’t anywhere better to test material than a cheap Ibiza simulation in a sweaty cave full of people that instinctively loathe you. It was the right choice to come tonight. What a club. I need to get a few more dates in.