mostly david ephgrave

It’s hard to fathom, but in a few months it will be a decade since my old band Big Day Out got together one last time for a special reunion gig to raise money for Glyn’s and my first Edinburgh Fringe. I don’t how it can be so long ago; it’s frightening really. And that anniversary’s just the half of it, as while our reunion gig may have been ten years ago, we actually officially split up six years before that. Sixteen years have passed since we were still a going concern, which is as long as I’ve been out of drama school too. It was a sad end to something very special that, at the time, meant the world to me. When we broke up I was ripped apart, and what made it worse was I was the reason it ended, after the two consecutive UK tours I took after leaving college left the rest of the band thinking they could no longer wait for me. In retrospect this seems silly when, in reality, we could have easily found a way around it. But back then, faced...

I booked my train tickets for Edinburgh today, so it must be happening. I also managed to fit in listening to the first three parts of BBC Radio 2’s four-part series ‘Paul Merton’s Beatles’ around working on my show; I wonder if you can guess what band the programme was about? More specifically, it's built around the fictional premise that - after putting aside their business differences - The Beatles briefly reformed in 1974 to release a new album (called ‘All Made Up’) and stage a reunion concert. The first two episodes consist of solo live performances from John, Paul, George and Ringo that have been edited together to sound like a single gig (with Merton supplying the excitable commentary of a journalistic witness) and the final two are built around studio recordings from the post-Fab Four that have been collated to sound like the album the group might have made. Paul Merton is famously a big Beatles fan so I knew it was likely to ...