11/08/07
Lessons Learned -
Categories: Jack Bauer may well save my life this Edinburgh. Thursday night at The Zone was a rude awakening, and perhaps a well needed one. I’d started to get quite preoccupied and stressed about my first solo show, which may sound ridiculous but is inescapable when doing something like the zone. It’s a halfway house between a fortnight Edinburgh fuckaraound and your first proper show. As we have little stress regarding press, sales etc, you have to use the extra time to learn as many lessons as possible from other peoples shows; what rooms are good, what agents and publicists are most successful, time-slots, extra gigs, posters, flyers, intro music, eating patterns, sleep, the list goes on. The mistake I made was going one step to far and thinking, ‘hey Robins, here’s an idea, why not get even further ahead of the game and treat the Zone as an Edinburgh preview?’
Well, for one very good reason, people don’t come to see the Zone for downbeat confessional stand-up, they come to see young tits-to-the-wind jonny-come-latelys donning a set of balls and doing their best stuff. It was made even tougher by the fact there were only 35 people in, which makes it a tough old room. Joining these punters were Sophie Church from Hannah Chambers and Christian Knowles, so I’d arranged to do a set, my second of the run. The first one had been awesome, and I did the same stuff, but this time with a different mindset, and it showed. I treated it like a preview, they reacted likewise, I stopped telling the stories and began presenting them, which is a huge difference, and they’re really not tight enough to be presented or sold yet.
So, afterwards I went for drinks with Richardson and Matt Forde, got a bit emotional about the whole affair. Fordy forced me to go to the Dome at 3am, and I do mean forced. I was in no state of mind really, he then beat me in an Alan Partridge rap-off. Fordy’s got early Alan Partridge nailed, the KMKYWAP era. I’m more of an IAM season 1 and 2 man, but it cut me, deep. And so home, almost broken, but with a few lessons to be learned. Those lessons were put into practise yesterday and followed a strict 3 point plan
1. Don’t leave the house until 9.30pm
2. Watch at least 5 hours of 24 Season 4
3. No drinking, except shandy
All instructions were followed to the letter and the gig was awesome. Sold out, those extra 140 people really make themselves known.
Now all I have to deal with is the stark realisation that the most exciting moment of my life may well have occurred during an episode of 24. Seriously. Tony Almeida rocks.
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