Tonight, I did a
short spot at the open mic night Big Nose Comedy in Kilburn – and it’s fair to
say that the stars aligned for me in both a negative and positive way, as the sad
passing of George Martin this week resulted in it being a Beatles-themed gig; a
subject that’s right up my street; my zebra-crossinged-in-1969 street.
(I’m referring to
Abbey Road.)
I was second on
in the first half, which was nice, as it meant I could relax fairly early on in
the evening, rather than spending the whole night trying to keeping my brain in
gear. For some reason, I was very nervous just before I went on, to the
point of having the shakes. I made sure I psychologically knocked these jitters
on the metaphorical head with a mantra the Maharishi would have been proud of:
“David, you’ve played bigger rooms than this. David, you’ve played bigger rooms than
this”. I’ve performed at the Liverpool Empire as a fucking Beatle, damn it, so
I can riff a bit about them for five or so minutes.
In the end, it
didn’t go too badly, considering the brand spankingly barely-in-my-head
nature of the material. If I’d had a little more stage time, I could have
settled into what I was saying, and squeezed more humour out of it. I
stand by the opinion that it’s hard to be funny in five minutes, as you barely
have time to get your personality across – and I’m
bloody hilarious at the five-minute ten-second mark.
I took my laptop
with me tonight, to use it as a substitute to working with a projector, so I
could get a couple of slide-based gags across. It didn’t work as well as
I would have liked, as the screen was a tad small for the room, but it still
reminded me how much more comfortable I am doing stand-up with visual
assistance, particularly when I’m doing a short set. This could either be down
to habit and experience, or it could be symbolic of the direction my solo work
should go in. It’s the closest I can get to working as a double act without my
partner on stage, and I like to have something to work off of – even if it’s a
picture of a wet-look mulleted bored-looking Beatles lead guitarist I’m feeding from. I’ve now got an mental image of a lactating George Harrison that I’d
really like to shake.
