I am gigging every night for the next 19 nights on a journey that is going to take me all over the country. It's a little bit daunting from this end, but at least once it is over I will be much closer to the end of the tour. I think maybe next year as well as having someone to do the driving I might have to insist on a day or two off each week. I am not as young as I used to be.
But nor are you, which gives me some kind of schadenfreude style solace.
As I headed out of the hotel to begin my short drive up to the Blackwood Miners' Institute I was surprised to see a gaggle of people with cameras and autograph books were waiting outside the hotel. They didn't seem very excited to see me, so I could only assume they were conflicted fans who loved me enough to track me down to where I was staying, but also wanted to appear nonchalant and so didn't make a fuss when I finally appeared.
That was the only explanation wasn't it?
What a bunch of weirdos. Make your minds up guys!
Of course in reality I realised that someone famous was staying at the hotel and that gave me a slight jolt of excitement. I wondered who it was and whether I'd bump into them in the bar and become friends with them and then they'd whisk me off into their celebrity world and I could leave behind all my humdrum normal friends and family and just hang around with people who were featured on telly or in magazines. What a wonderful vacuous life I would lead!
Passing a group of someone else's fans made me think back to one of the Lee and Herring tours of the mid to late 1990s. It might have been the last one we did. I think Kevin Eldon and Richard Thomas were with us on that one. And we had a little joke for such circumstances, where we acted a bit out of Spinal Tap. In the film they are in a hotel and a small number of excited women come running towards them and they say "Uh oh, here we go" preparing themselves, with feigned reluctance, but clear excitement to be mobbed by these "tiresome" fans. But then the women run past them to another properly famous rock star behind them. It's a beautifully observed moment, showing however much the band pretend to hate the attention that they really want it.
On the occasions that we were staying in a hotel or appearing at a venue where fans would be gathering we could actually be certain they weren't for us, so could have fun quoting that part of the film, as if we imagined the fans were ours, but knowing in our case that they weren't. Perhaps secretly we would have liked them to be, so maybe the joke was still on us. But it was fun to do and it happened a few times so would always make us laugh.
Until one day we pulled into a venue (I think it might have been the Reading Hexagon, but can't be sure) and there was that familiar sight of a group of five or six teenage girls, obviously bunking off school and waiting for someone like Boyzone. "Oh dear, here they come," we all remarked in usual fashion.
Except on this occasion we opened the doors of our tour minivan and the girls came running over to us. To our complete surprise these youngsters were waiting to meet us. We were astonished and amused and maybe a little bit flattered. Was this it? Had we made it? We would laugh for the moment, but was this now going to become a regular occurrence, an actual annoyance, that we would start to hate and only begin to pine for once, like for Spinal Tap, it no longer happened.
We were all genuinely wrong-footed by this eventuality, but chatted with the girls and signed some autographs before heading into the theatre, maybe feeling a bit pleased with ourselves underneath our disbelieving self-mockery.
Whatever the case, it didn't turn out to be the first sign of our approaching super-stardom. In fact it never happened again. Our moment at the top was very brief and transitory.
But as I made the old joke to myself as I passed what I believe were in fact some fans of Lady Gaga (and given that there were embarrassingly few of them really) I thought back to the girls who had once waited for us and chuckled to myself.
Thanks to those young women (who will now be in their thirties I guess, and possibly mums and almost certainly they are less likely to remember this incident than I am) for giving us that brief taste of the high life. I am rather glad that it didn't become a regular occurrence, but I am also slightly pleased that it happened once.
Accidentally I might have hit the exactly perfect level of notoriety. Enough to make a living, not enough to have my hotel staked out by the slightly obsessive. Still excited myself to be staying in the same hotel as someone famous (even if I know nothing more about them than they might have a cock), yet still friends with people who I have chosen on the basis of their personality, rather than because they are on TV or in the charts and drink at the same bar as me.
Yes Lady Gaga might have played to more than 80 people tonight and probably didn't have to do her show in the bar. But it's quality not quantity Lady Gaga. And did you have a member of your audience who ate a whole tub of supermarket doughnuts by himself during your show.
Well I did.
I think his name was Gareth, but I might be wrong - I had to sign the empty tub for him. One of his friends came over to ask me to sign it for him and pointed over to a group of lads explaining what one of them had done. He was going to point him out personally. "Don't worry I should be able to tell," I observed. And indeed, it was the fat one.
Good work fella.
I hoped to get a glimpse of Lady Gaga back at the hotel and perhaps find out by hook or by crook what kind of genitals she had. But she wasn't in the hotel bar. I guess she couldn't be. If you're that famous you can never sit on your own in a bar again. But I could. And no one even noticed me. Apart from some men at the bar who obviously thought that my moustache was a bad idea.
