Do you know what I’m doing today? NOTHING! You hear me? Nothing at all. Absolutely zilch. I mean, not actually nothing, because that would be impossible. I will still be doing some breathing, sitting and eating and those are technically doing things. If you look at it like that, it is actually very difficult have a day off of doing anything. Unless you die. But then you have died, which is doing something. Decomposing also counts. Really no one can ever have a day off ever. Thats a bit depressing. Unless you are lazy and then its probably gratifying. I have found that lazy people often try to justify laziness with the most simple excuses. They will say that they are not just sitting, but they are wearing the sofa in. Or conserving energy which is environmentally friendly. I am going to attempt to do as little as possible today. I feel like I probably deserve it a bit as I haven’t had a day off in ages and won’t get one for ages and ages after today. I know you are all saying, ‘but all you do Tiernan is sit around then gig and stuff?’ Yeah, but sitting around is tiring. Think of all the sofa wearing in I’m doing. And all that energy I’m conserving. I’m knackered.
My knackerdness came into play heavily last night at the Norwich Playhouse. It was a nice venue, and certainly bigger than any playhouse I’ve ever seen. Although it lacked a slide or climbing frame which was definitely a downside. Still as a theatre venue it did very well. It could seat 350 people and being as popular as we were, myself, Andre Vincent, Junior Simpson and Pippa Evans had drawn a mega humungous crowd of 120 people. Of those people, only 6 sat in the front row, and the rest spread themselves out over the seating plan, creating the impression that there was even less of them than then were. It was a bit of an anti-climax after a fun journey there involving Andre dancing to Joe Jackson as though he had serious brain and rhythm problems, and various discussions about what summer music is. I had been playing them my Summer Fun Junkie mix, which has now been received and liked by the two people I sent it to. Andre was critiscing my choices as apparently I had ‘confused summer music with any music’. I disagreed and he played his idea of summer music which including California Dreamin’, a song about the Autumn. Instant fail as far as I’m concerned. Then the gig. To call it underwhelming would be like saying the news coverage on Michael Jackson’s death was minimal and appropriate. I put that comment up on Twitter last night and suddenly got lots of MJ followers that I didn’t really want. I told them to ‘beat it’, but it hasn’t worked. Its amazing how Twitterers see a key word and home in, without seeing the context in which the words were said. I once tweeted something fairly derogatory about Britney Spears and yet instantly Britney’s fansite retweeted it. Then again she has already proved she will do anything for publicity, including showing her vag and going nuts. If we all teamed up on this, we could destroy the stars using this against them. All we have to do is constantly post really shitty things about them and they will retweet. I might start by later posting ‘Tim Westwood: Wish that attempt on my life hadn’t gone wrong. I am a failure and one day hope for a life where I can either talk properly or never speak again.’
Andre insisted on introducing me onto the stage which is never a good idea. He said, from the backstage mic, that the crowd would have seen me in top sitcom ‘two and half men.’ I wouldn’t have minded but as I walked onstage most of them did not realise it was a joke and just looked at me as though they couldn’t work out if they’d seen me before. I then took the mic, the lead fell out and it felt like the sloppiest start ever. From then on the crowd made a real effort to not make much effort. They would laugh really hard and then stop and be silent for 5 minutes, as though they had forgotten why they were there. Everyone did their best and we just ploughed on through. We left feeling completely devoid of any of the usual post gig adrenaline rush. Norwich had sucked our life energy away. Pippa said she felt like she was the old dude in Cocoon giving his life source away. Then we left, having got absolutely zilch from the evening. I have often heard bad things about Norwich, but I’ve always enjoyed gigging there in the past. It seems like a nice enough town and last night I discovered that was what the problem was. It’s nice. But nothing more. Nice like that neighbour that has a five minute conversation expiry time. If you go past that you find they have a weird interest in taxidermy and hanging out in school playgrounds. Nice like the Christmas present you receive that has no use whatsover, gets looked at for 2 minutes then put on a shelf for 4 years till it gets given to a charity shop where it stays forever. Nice is often not that nice at all. Thankfully the car journey back involved more japery including Pippa’s tales of her friend in A&E removing a dead hamster from someone’s arse and some chat about this:
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/06/13/bloop/
Which is just terrifying and means I will probably never go in the sea ever again.
Time to start doing nothing. First stop moving from the chair I am in and going over to the sofa. It needs wearing in and there is energy to be conserved.
