16/11/06
Big And Daft (Part Five) -
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Right, this is the last bit so don't panic.
I'm fairly certain that neither myself Rob or Jon have ever spoken about the end of B.A.D in a public way. I might be wrong, but that was the reason I started writing these five (technically six) parts. I wanted to put it on the record somewhere. We did just slip away as a three.
So after our Christmas Show in Edinburgh 2001 we went on tour, which sounds far more grandiose than it actually was, but it was a tour nevertheless. The tension between the three of us had reached a fever pitch though, and I found myself increasingly unhappy with being a part of it.
The management situation remained unresolved, and all our conversations appeared to be going around in circles. There was a brief moment of clarity and happiness as we began to rehearse our tour show, as it consisted of our favourite sketches and it was back to just the three of us again without any interference. It became a laugh again, but for the shortest time - as soon as we were actually out on the road and cabin fever set in there was only one direction this would ever go.
I'd gotten it into my head, almost obsessively, that Big And Daft would end on my terms. I started it, I was going to finish it when the time came. This thought had been preying on my mind for a long time, and I sort of decided that after the tour that would be me. I had given up on our little project ever coming to true fruition - I felt we had missed the optimum time to make our mark.
The other thing that was beginning to eat away at me was our ages. I felt we were simply getting too old to be acting so childishly onstage. That sounds weird but I know what I mean - I perhaps haven't explained it too well. I just reckon that once you hit thirty, there's something a little sad about acting silly for laughs - there comes a point when you need to move on and develop yourself creatively rather than rely on the same old fannying about. The knock on effect of these thoughts I was having was that 'fannying about' started to become incredibly irritating to me, and my displeasure at it was not without pomposity. Problem was, I was actually in a show that was based on 'fannying about' so was confronted with it on a nightly basis.
Big And Daft became a victim of itself. I always thought it could have been exceptional if it was just tightened up some, if we instilled a bit of discipline in it. Yet the looseness and lack of discipline was what attracted much of the audience. It was a no-win situation. We couldn't reach our potential without destroying the 'magic'.
I walked off stage at the Komedia in Brighton on 11th October 2001 and told Rob and Jon that I was done with it. I'd gotten myself proper angry and pissed off during the show, and decided enough was enough. On that evening I wasn't even sure that I would do the rest of the tour - there were still seven dates or so left - I'd really had enough. We had a blinder of a row in the dressing room when I dropped my bombshell.
Jon was pissed at me in a major way, saying that my actions were leaving him in the shit, but there had been opportunities for our collective problems to be resolved that I had been more than willing to take. I felt for Jon mind, and tried to take his anger on the chin despite feeling it was misdirected. Rob was holding it together pretty well but he was clearly upset, much of my frustrations had been aimed his way - I laid a lot of it at his door. He took my anger on the chin despite no-doubt feeling it was misdirected. It was a bizarre and destructive three-way in the dressing room that night. I wasn't budging on my decision though - the end of that tour was going to be the last time I performed on stage with Big And Daft.
From that night on the rest of the gigs were a joy. All the pressure was off, there was simply nothing to argue about any more and we could just get back to having a laugh like we had done all those years ago. Added to that the fact that we now knew it was almost over, and we started to make the best of the limited time we had left with each other. On the good days, being onstage with those two was about as blissfull a performance experience that one could ever wish for - and this was no more apparent than when the tour arrived in Edinburgh for a one night performance at the Gilded Balloon studio.
It was completely sold out, full of 'fans' from our fringe shows, Gilded Balloon staff and friends. There had been stuff in The List and the local papers praising us and speculating that the end of Big And Daft was imminent. We'd hinted at this in interviews but never confirmed it. Actually, we never confirmed that Big And Daft was ever over. It would have been an ideal show to end on, but we had a couple more to do in far more vague Scottish towns. In my mind, returning to the site of our best show ( Big And Daft In Space at the Studio), and doing our best work to people that cheered and laughed despite the fact that they had already seen it before, was as fitting an end as any.
The last show we did was at Carnegie Hall in Dunfermline. We arrived at the theatre and walked into the vast auditorium. I think it holds about six hundred or something, it would have been a great stage to say goodbye on. But the person that was running the gig just carried on walking - right through the proper theatre and into the cafe at the side of it, informing us that this was where we would be performing. No stage, no lights, no mic. Perhaps that was the fitting end. Five years on and we were back where we started.
Before we did our final show, Rob and I sneaked into the main theatre and onto the stage. We stood in front of hundreds of empty seats, he played his guitar brilliantly and I sang Pinball Wizard better than it had ever been sung. You'll have to take my word for that, I can't prove it - problem was there was nobody there to see it.
Read into that what you will.
We went home from Scotland and got on with our own stuff. We were offered the radio show on BBC London and did it for seven months or so, but despite managing to fake it for a while, the all important relationship between the three of us was gone. The early radio shows are great but they diminished rapidly as time went on, and you could hear that we perhaps didn't love each other as much as we had.
Rob went on holiday, Jon and I were to be presenting the show together in his absence. Saying goodbye to each other in the BBC car park after Rob's last show was the last time to this day that the three of us were together. We got a call on the Monday before the show to tell us that it was canned. It was only annoying because I had already worked out the date of my own last show and was working my way up to telling them.
Rob's management asked me not to speak to him until they had because he would be 'upset'. This fucked me off no end, because he was my friend and I should be able to speak to him whenever the fuck I wanted to. I did as I was asked though. Rob and I have never discussed what happened at the BBC. I've only seen him three times since - all at gigs where we have been on together.
Which is three times more than I have seen Jon. Jon and I had been to college together - known him for years and years - the overriding sadness of the death of Big And Daft has been the death of the friendship. It's hard to work so closely with people for so long and to go back to being friends again. It really is like a marriage - virtually impossible for the three of us to be mates as we were before we fell in love - not least because there would always be the chance that we would have been tempted to go back to bed with each other.
Can I just point out that this is a metaphor by the way - don't want you thinking we ever did stuff like that. Although, interestingly, Rob and Jon did once discover they'd had a wank at the same time and finsished at the exact same moment. It was when Anna Friel was getting her bosoms out on telly. I've never been interested in Anna Friel so was not a part of that.
But, contrary to whispers I occasionally hear from others, my personal feelings towards both Rob Rouse and Jon Williams are nothing but positive - it was just something I needed to exclude from my life in order to move on professionally. I never wished them anything but love and success, and that is true to this very day. I do miss both of them an awful lot, but I don't regret ending it in the slightest.
My career choices since then have been the antithesis of what B.A.D was in theme, but effortlessly true to what it was in spirit. We always wanted to do only good stuff, only stuff we would have enjoyed ourselves if we watched it. That's no guarantee that the stuff you do would be any good (see Terrorville), but the intent was pure. It was never about cash, never about fame or wanting to be celebrities - we hated the idea of celebrity and were far more interested in kicking against it. There was little danger of us selling out, and the self-destruction was perhaps a neccesary evil to stop that ever being a risk.
I know that sounds dreadfully arty and wanky, but the simple truth is, it's not that difficult to remain true to the reasons you began something in the first place - not that hard to remember.
It was always merely about being funny and doing what genuinely made us creatively happy.
It was about being big and daft.
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