4545/17464
After a long run of gigs in smaller venues (or bigger venues with small audiences) it was a fucking delight to come to a sold out Leeds City Varieties to perform in front of 465 people (well that's how many bought tickets- they didn't all turn up). This is the best medium-sized venue in the country and it's always a blast, but I really enjoyed myself tonight, especially when suggesting that they weren't impressed with my charming story of inter- generational kissing because Jimmy Savile had lived in Leeds and he was a local hero for being the most prolific paedophile and necrophile in the world. Maybe you had to be there. I told them I didn't approve of their hero worship of this evil man. What he did was very wrong.
Jimmy Savile nearly took his revenge from beyond the grave, something he's really good at. If he is sitting burning in Hell he must be laughing his char-grilled balls off at getting off scot-free himself, but having caused the downfall of Harris, Hall, Clifford and Travis. From Savile's point of view this couldn't have worked out much better. Apart from now being on fire for eternity. But you can't win them all. Anyway, as I signed programmes and people took selfies with me after the show, a man asked if I would recreate a photo he had of himself and Leeds' most famous resident, Jimmy Savile. In the photo the man was shaking hands with a track-suited Savile. I was a bit tired and couldn't take it all in. "Copy what he's doing with his finger!" the strange man demanded. It took me a while to work out what he meant, but Savile was pointing into the camera. So I tried to do the same thing. A man seemingly in the queue , who I initially assumed was the sick man's friend said, "Who are you pointing at?!" as if pretending to be affronted and wanting a fight. I laughed because I was inadvertently pointing at him, but he kept up his act of being paranoid and angry and telling me to stop pointing at him and as I looked at him properly I quickly realised that he wasn't an audience member, or pretending to be crazy. This was clearly a man who had walked in off the street to see what was going on and had seen me seemingly pointing at him and was now about to kick off. But politeness meant I still wanted to get he photo done so I adjusted the direction of my finger so it was pointing at someone else. The man was still furious and I was, of course, in a very vulnerable position. If he had decided to pull me to the ground and use my head as a football there was not much I could do. And if I had been seriously hurt or killed then the newspaper reports would have had to say that my last action was to attempt to emulate Jimmy Savile which is not something I'd really like as an epitaph.
I looked around for any theatre staff who might be able to help me and spotted the manager with the Cannibal in the stairs and managed to get their attention.
They finally intervened (or at least asked him to leave) and distracted the troubled man, who told them about the demons that were plaguing him ( not figurative ones) as they managed to eject him back out on to the streets. Which was, of course, just moving the problem on to somewhere else. And I was channeling the spirit of Savile at the time he freaked out on me, so who is to say he couldn’t see demons? I am. He couldn’t. But if he’d known that fact it might have given him more justification to turn things from aggressive talk to aggressive actions.
I went back to my hotel alone. Bizarrely for some reason original tour manager George had booked me into the posh Malmaison and himself into the Holiday Inn. I don’t know why. I always stay in the same hotel as my tour manager. It’s a dangerous place to get to when you set yourself apart from the other people working on your shows. If you want to stay at posh hotels then you really have to have your crew staying at the same place, or you have become a reprehensible monster. And I don’t want to stay at posh hotels. I am trying to save money on hotels and so would happily have stayed in the Holiday Inn (which would usually still be at the nicer end of the places we’d stay). Occasionally you can get a good deal on a posh hotel (I think I stayed at a Malmaison on the last tour for just £70), but this hotel was not on a cheap deal. But nice of George to give me this little present at my own expense. With his insistence on getting venues to provide details of an emergency masseuse and trying to drive a wedge between Giles and me, I wonder if he only took on this job initially to attempt to make me look like the biggest diva in show business. What an over-inflated ego Herring has. He performs to about 100 people a night but wants to be treated like Shirley Bassey (I believe she famously requested her own toilet that no one else could use at a Festival gig, but I totally get that. The loo is my fortress of solitude before a gig and I like to stay in there longer than necessary and know I won’t be disturbed. I am putting that on next tour’s rider too).
As the Holiday Inn room was not able to be cancelled this meant Giles was now staying in a different hotel to me. Which added a nice dynamic to our relationship. I told him that I liked it and that for the next tour I would spend our £200 hotel allowance on a luxury £180 room for me and a £20 bed and breakfast room for him and then see how we were getting on by the end of the tour. If I am going to have the reputation of being a monstrous diva I might as well earn it.
It did mean that I got to indulge myself by sitting alone in the bar and drinking a couple of vodka martinis. Drinking alone in hotel bars used to be the most depressing thing about touring, waiting for the adrenaline to subside and feeling alone and sad. But now I quite like this time. I am happier with my own company, but also my whole life, so an hour of indulgent solitude is rather pleasurable. Especially when imagining my own tour manager sat in a hotel bar sadly drinking a beer surrounded by hen nights and stag parties and looking miserable. Not as miserable as he will be next year when sitting on an uncomfortable mattress on top of a stained blanket staying in a room next to a man who thinks he can see demons.
As it turned out staying in a posh hotel made things seem much brighter. And on a night like tonight I could afford it (and the £3.50 bar of chocolate I drunkenly scoffed from the minibar). Back to normalcy tomorrow with a low turn out in Peterborough and a pack of Monster Munch and a Ribena from a garage on the way home.
