HeadSpill

(Submission piece for The Scotsman)
August is fast approaching already I’m packing and racking my brains to make sure I’ve covered everything. clean underwear, check. Digs, check. Multimedia bells & whistles, check. Tightly written hilarious Show, check (I hope).
I’m taking my first full stand up show to the fringe, and to be honest the thing stressing me out the most isn’t submerging my brain into the all encompassing creative din of sound, colour and taste. Or my show, which still needs work, but is robust enough to set sail on the sea of competitive mirth. The cause of my furrowed brow is the multimedia elements that go with the show. Also being the control freak I am it’s all triggered by remote control instead of having a tech on hand.

Comedy and technology aren’t exactly a marriage made in heaven, one is born of sponteneity, adaptability and  tangents that creates humour, the other is about order and numbers, and safe predictability. Arriving at a recent preview show, loaded with AV gear like an powerpoint terminator, one of the others comics, armed with only a handful of written notes made the comment ‘how can I compete with that?’ and as much I as I understood the question, it’s a bit of a moot point.

Multimedia Bells and whistles are exactly that, and shouldn’t be a distraction. If anything he’s far better equiped, and purer to the art form of stand up. Good writing is the core of any show, and if the show can’t be done without multimedia, then arguably it’s not straight stand up.

Increasingly comics at the fringe are using projection and multimedia elements to enhance their shows, and I’m biting off a sizable of in mixing character comedy, stand up and multimedia together in a themed show about eczema. Did I mention my show was about eczema?

The previews I’ve done so far already I’ve pressed the wrong button good few times. Ironically pressing the wrong button is getting a big laugh, which is a result, but not what I’d planned at all. As long as I don’t do it too much, I might just keep it in the show.

‘John Cooper: The 30 Year Itch’ is on at the Canons Gait at 7.15pm from 2nd - 25th August and is free.

I got the chance guest on the new Alfie Joey afternoon show on BBC radio Newcastle on friday, so I took it. We talked about the Edinburgh show, and it’s the first time I’ve tried to succinctly leap the verbal hurdles of ‘yes, it’s a comedy show about eczema’ and ‘eczema’s not funny’ its more about the experience of living with it and growing pains.

Before all that however, I remember I went to school with one of the presenter’s at the station, and on Alfies’ questioning, called Gilly Hope ‘posh’, which was probably not entirely true. I think I meant to say ’smart’, as she always had pig tails in, but then I had a big basin cut. Anyway, after the interview I called in on my mum, who as well as being a teacher at the school we both went to way back, was all to happy to dug out some embarassing old photos at my request.

If you’re reading this Gilly, it’s just a bit of fun.
Here you are behind and to the left of me. twice.

BEFORE.

AFTER.

oh yeah, my mum thinks Aflie is one of the ‘more sensible’ DJ’s on the radio.

Sometime last year I think I fell out of love with comedy. There were no signs, I didn’t see it coming. Everything in my personal life was great. better than great. Comedy was work, good work, but work all the same. I moved in with my girlfriend, and that was, and still is utterly splendid on many levels. In hindsight it’s a simple trap I suppose, sex vs the adrenaline rush of comedy. Why go to a gig for that fleeting but massive adulation of a job well done, or on occasion feint praise and a three hour drive, when there’s a steady flow of love at home, like having a lounge bar in the front room. I got sloppy, was making notes, but not really writing and over the relatively short space of 6 months my set became unpolished and flabby.

When I was single I was singularly motivated, I went to gigs and worked, and when I wasn’t gigging I went to gigs anyway as it was better than sitting at home.
Living with someone else changes that. It sounds obvious, but you don’t quite know how and what shape you’re life will take until you’re in that position yourself. You can’t just do stuff when you want like before, you just get in each others way, or don’t each other at all.

I read that back and it sound’s terrible, but it’s not. When you live with someone in ‘togetherness’ your stuff and her stuff start off sitting next to each other on bookcases, but eventually overlap, and when there’s no room left, you have to assert that that space on the shelf is for your Beat Takashi films, and not her Monkee’s DVD’s.

In the five months since moving in there’s a facet of me that wasn’t there before, well rounded isn’t the word, a difficult birth of compromise and assertion, tolerance and aggression.

There’s a difference between what you want and what you need.

When I was single I had a point to prove, a good point, but a point nontheless, comedy was my passion, and performing my outlet.

Finding your bestest partner, and someone who loves you regardless, I forgot the point I was trying to prove, and the dawning horror that I might not have actually had a point to prove at all, I just liked making the funny on stage.

I never planned to get hooked up and settled, it just kind of happened. I once said quite loftily ‘a successful relationship is by it’s nature compromise’ and still think that rings true. However a good relationship is also life experience and experience is good.

I’ve started writing loads again, I’ve started writing a about something very close to me, which might be quite painful in places, but it isn’t born out of proving a point, just wanting to live life better and more than I currently do. Not that anything was bad before, by my actions and experience I’m just a little more defined.

Leicester summer sundae festival. It’s cult rock poet John Cooper Clarke! How we laughed at the naming similarity. Well, not really. But how rock is he? Well on close inspection most of his face is made of gold, even his eyes. I was impressed.

I am becoming addicted to Hopi ear candles. I had my ears done with them and now I don’t feel like my ears are properly clean without having them done at least once a fortnight. I’d wanted to try them ever since I saw the picture in the holistic therapy shop of an old woman lying peacefully on her side while an unidentified hand holds a lit a candle made of beeswax in her ear, like her head’s a big waxwork cake, or she’s just died and they’re having some sort of weird party.

I also didn’t understand how they work either, and in my speculation before I got the courage to use one I made up my own theory about how they worked. What they actually do is create a kind of vacuum chimney in your ear because the candles are hollow so it gently sucks the wax out of your ear, but not knowing this I came up with the idea that their must be some kind of really long wick on the bottom that is pushed into your ear like an enema and all the wax drips down and mixes with the wax your ear, then cools down and you pull the whole thing out like one big plaster of Paris mould of your ear drum which you could keep and put in a jar.

Since I came back from the US I have work coming out my ears. Some good, and some utter bobbins-but-needs-doing-to-pay-the-bills. Gigs are slowly picking up as the new season approaches, and there’s been plently of freelance stuff on, but some things still need doing, like the small matter of looking for a flat with my partner of seven months, she’s in Edinburgh at the moment and I’m not. Not that I’m jealous or anything, I’m not (Grrrrrr). When she returns we begin the hard veiwing and staring and looking process. Having done one viewing myslef recently just to familiarise myself with the process, i now have my bull**** meter turned up to eleven to dismiss anything and everthing I hear from anyone from a lettings agency. If and when I, er, we, find somewhere we like, I reserve the right to fiddle with taps, poke things down radiators, sniff paint and afterwards drive to the property at night to measure the distance to the nearest shop selling fresh bread and monitor how long it take for two kids to drive past that constiutes ‘gang activity’ until I am wholely satisfyed that the new abode is a silent but accessable stealth castle, in which the feng shui will prevent all arguements from ever happening, and there is a wall big enough to for me to hook up my projector to my HD laptop with the Geforce 8600gt inside it and play Oblivion with the widescreen settings on, 8ft wide, like it’s on at the IMAX down the town. Such a place exists, I just need to find it.