I was really regretting having a gig in Northamptonshire tonight. It had been booked in before I knew England would be playing. But after the rigours of the tour I had vowed not to take any out of town gigs for a while. But when my management had rung me up and said there was a festival in Northampton that wanted me to headline I couldn't resist the prospect of performing in the land of Andrew Collings' fathers. I guess I thought it might be good comedy value, but now I was going to have to miss the game as well as having a four hour round trip the day before I was meant to be writing AIOTM.
I did see the first five minutes of the game, which given England scored, should have been exciting enough. I had started watching on ITV1, but then realised that I could see the game in HD and turned over. Pretty much as soon as I did the channel cut to some adverts. I thought for a second that I had pressed the wrong button. Four minutes into an international match is not a good time for a break, unless ITV are very desperate for revenue. I turned over to regular ITV to see if this was happening on their channel too to see Stephen Gerrard running away from the goal in celebratory fashion. England had managed to score in the opening minutes of a world cup game and I had missed it thanks to the ITV HD idiots. But still, one-nil up. And anyone can make a mistake.
Not that the English are very forgiving of such a thing, as we would find out later when our goalkeeper made a schoolboy blunder. I enjoyed listening to 5Live on the way home and hearing the anger of people about both mistake on the field and the broadcast, presumably from people who have never made an error in their jobs. I can understand everyone's frustrations because I shared them, but the English make me laugh. Especially their ability to switch from unrealistic over confidence to petulant fury after just one match. Almost like we've never seen a World Cup before. Even before the USA equalised the commentators on the radio seemed furious that we were only one nil up. No one is satisfied unless we're winning 5-0. I am not sure that any other country expects so much (especially with such a poor track record). Let's see how it goes. It was rubbish listening to this on the radio, but on the bright side the roads up to Northamptonshire were clear.
I wasn't even playing in Northampton though. The gig was in a Working Man's Club in a place called Earl's Barton, where, in spite of the football it felt like the whole village had turned up to see the night's entertainment (though in fact about 150 of the 5000 inhabitants were there). There was an unusual atmosphere and an odd mixture of acts, some that were attempting material that was probably too offensive (and in some cases unamusingly so) for this mixed crowd. I have played all kinds of gigs over the last six years and it was certainly more professionally organised than some. But doing this odd gig on the night of a football match when I would much rather have been at home allowed me to think to myself "I used to be on TV" and give a sardonic chuckle.
But I was here now and England had drawn their match and I appreciated how funny it was in many ways to be playing this tiny arts festival, but also that people probably appreciated my attendance more than I appreciated being here so I was going to make the best of it. I looked up
Earls Barton on wikipedia to discover that there wasn't a lot of material to play with. The village has a rare example of an Anglo Saxon church (though it amused me that there was another similar, and reading between the lines possibly superior one in nearby Brixworth) and they make shoes there. A bit more interestingly the film Kinky Boots was inspired by a business in the village that presumably made reinforced high-heeled shoes for drag acts and some of the movie was filmed there.
I managed to scrape together some material out of all of this, mainly suggesting that a man in the front row had only moved here because he'd assumed the place was full of big transvestites and I also made a pretence that the church was famous all over the country (but not as good as the Brixworth one). The audience seem that impressed by my efforts, even when I told them I had crafted this stuff especiallly for them and it had taken me literally minutes on wikipedia to come up with it. But they enjoyed it more towards the end when I lambasted them, saying I had thought I was playing Northampton which would have been bad enough, but here I was in somewhere that makes that town look as sophisticated as Paris. I also found out that Isla St Clair lived in the village, though I think they would have to admit that that is not as good as Northampton which has spawned the new Dr Who, Alan Carr and of course Andrew Collings, when presumably Isla St Clair wasn't actually born here. And they did at least enjoy my opening remark that I had always dreamed of playing the working men's club in Earls Barton. Though my anti-barley material (again meticulously researched) was not greeted so well. Sometimes it's hard to take the things that you love being mocked. And the people here love barley and transvestites.
In the end it was a fun gig and it sounds like the England match was shit, but I had made my difficult weekend more complicated still by agreeing to do this and resolved to stick to my guns and not take any more gigs in the autumn (except in exceptional or profitable circumstances) so I can concentrate on some writing. And had my workload not been quite so relentless I could have enjoyed my trip a lot more and maybe also gone to see the Anglo-Saxon church - the one in Brixworth.
