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I've not blogged in absolutely ages, not properly anyway. Since the start of the year I have been taking stock of where my life is going. It's now three years since I quit my job in the City and in that time I have done a lot of fun things, I've been on the radio and the telly, toured internationally in a rock band and as comedian, written a stage musical, performed a one-man run at the Edinburgh Fringe, been on the telly and the radio. However, I'm horribly, horribly skint. While the showbiz world pays well every so often, I've had to come to terms with the fact that I'm never really going to be able to earn any kind of decent living. It's never really going to be much more than an occasionally lucrative hobby, so for this reason I've gone back to work full-time. They're OK about my taking the odd day off for mysterious projects, and I hope I can make it work, at least until I've paid off the credit card and cleared my backlog of rent. So while it's nice to be finally getting a regular income, the resignation has been a bit of a downer.
My performing experiences of late have been confusing my emotions still further. The last few months have seen some of my worst and best experiences on stage. I've been determined to get away from doing the zany cover versions as that was making me bored and lazy, so I've been trying to come up with new spoken and sung material to do in a comedy context. My solo show 'Do Something, Martin!' was a good excuse to write some jokes, and helped me gain confidence at engaging with an audience without playing the accordion, but that's a whole hour which is difficult to break up into free-standing chunks. I started this year with the resolution to work something new into every set I do on stage, which had wildly varied results. For The Real Daniel O'Donnell Show at the Albany back in January I wrote a medley from an imaginary musical based on The A-Team. This was an energetic piece at the piano which went down very well with the crowd and got me all excited about writing stuff. For a gig a week or two later called Pubstock, also at the Albany, I hastily re-wrote Bruce Springsteen's 'Brilliant Disguise' as 'Rubbish Disguise', turning the song into a list of rubbish disguises. Re-writing pop songs with hilarious alternate lyrics, Weird-Al-style, is one of the lowest forms of humour, and my laziness was repaid tenfold by the horrid silence of the audience. It made me realise that the set I did at the Y in Leicester before Christmas hadn't actually gone as badly as I thought it had. At least people had actually laughed then - they just hadn't laughed as much as I was used to. This time there was complete and utter silence. 'Brilliant Disguise' isn't as well-known a song as I thought it was, and even Richard Herring deemed it a tough gig but that's no excuse - I was hopelessly bad. Thankfully my next gig was Scaledown, a very friendly gig, where I felt perfectly at home and confident with the audience, and the work I've done after that has seen my confidence grow a lot, but apart from the occasional gig that pays travel expenses there's no way I'm ever going to pay the rent doing it.
At new show 'The School For Gifted Children' at the Battersea Arts Centre I devised a way to build some spontaneity into my act by writing a song from scratch with the audience, and it was the most fun I'd had on stage in a long, long time. (I'll be doing the act again at Barden's Boudouir this coming Friday on a wonderful bill with Ben 'Bad Science' Goldacre and Alexei Sayle, if you're interested).
Another wonderful gig which looked like it was going to be a disaster was a posh cabaret night called Speakeasy in Piccadilly. Jeremy Limb plays the piano there and had recommended me to the lady who promotes it, and so I turned up with the accordion prepared to play some ditties. However the venue had stupidly double-booked the cabaret with a private party and so we were out on our ears. Standing in the street, we were about to call it a night when one of the people who had come to watch said "Oh hell, let's all go back to mine and do the gig there." I exchanged sceptical glances with the other musicians, and then the lady said "I'll just call the staff and get them to lay on some food and drink." How interesting! We all piled into taxis and alighted in one of London's poshest squares, just opposite Tony Blair's house, and ended up doing the gig in the upstairs parlour of a multi-millionaire philanthropist! Food and wine flowed - not only had the performers been invited, but all the people who had paid to see the gig, so these millionaires had very generously opened their house to a bunch of strangers. It was an extraordinary evening, and the goodwill rubbed off on the audience, who were most responsive and generous in return.
And last weekend I revived 'Do Something, Martin!' at the Leicester Comedy Festival. It was an odd feeling doing this hour-long rant against the rat-race when I had, in fact, gone back to having a 'proper job' only a couple of months previously. I suppose the Do Something philosophy is still the same though. It's just that it's become 'Do something aswell' rather than 'Do something instead'. The show was very well-attended - although there had only been six advance sales I was excited to see friends from Nottingham, Northampton and Leicester in the audience, and several people told me afterwards that they had come to see the show based on my turn at the Y back in December, so it all worked out nicely, and I was on good form as a performer, my stage persona more easy-going than it had been during the Edinburgh run.
The trick now is to keep these two parts of my life balanced comfortably. While it's nice to have the financial pressure taken off (and perhaps it's that which is making me more relaxed on stage: I don't have the worry of where my next meal's coming from preying on my mind), I'm worried that I'm going to wear myself out working nine to five, and then seven till midnight. Something's going to have to give...
And there's still plenty in the pipeline, creatively. I've just finished recording an EP of Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra songs - we did the brass last weekend and now the mixing is in progress.
There's a MFMO gig coming up too - at the Soho Revue Bar this coming Sunday the 24th, at 7.30pm on a bill with magicians Barry & Stuart, rapper Doc Brown and idiosyncratic spoof poet Tim Key. I'll be backed by full string and woodwind sections and Ms Kate Dornan on tuba! It will sound amazing. Please come!
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martylog's journal
