My career was transformed when I repeatedly punched a melon with the face of Vernon Kay amateurishly scrawled on it. A shamanic spell perhaps?
For the first 11 years of my standup life, I was moving further and further away from that teenage excitement I experienced when I sat in a basement room and saw The Joan Collins Fan Club (now Julian Clary), Kit Hollerbach and Jeremy Hardy for the first time. I had increasingly become lazy in my thinking and accompanied by a perpetual hangover.
In 2004, I ended up punching a melon on a nightly basis as the messy crescendo of my first Edinburgh fringe solo show, The Award Winning Robin Ince, star of The Office, Series one, Episode 5 (First Bit). The show was merely meant to be a bit of silliness in which I arrogantly and self-deceivingly layer out my hackish career as a TV writer, standup and guest on satellite TV shows, as well as my short appearance in The Office.
I still receive repeat fees of up to £12.41 a year.
The show was not a success. Those who liked it really liked it, but many were left baffled and scared. It was a depressing experience, made worse by the flat I lived in for the rest of the year flooding with sewage, though the water company insisted it was rainwater. It was just that this rain had a lot of excrement and toilet paper in it. I am sure you’ve been caught in one of those showers. The depression meant I could only talk to people if I was on stage. Socialising was impossible, replaced instead by weeping in Greyfriars cemetery.
But it turned out to be a vital failure.
After the fringe, I killed off much of what I had been before and started an alternative variety night called The Book Club. This was where I started my working relationship and friendship with Josie Long.
My problem had been trying to make myself into what I thought a standup was meant to be rather than using standup to be me.
For the last 19 years, I have been shushing the unhelpful, aggressive critical voice with increasing effectiveness. I wasn’t made for the mainstream. I think of Urban Spaceman Neil Innes who thought that when you played in rooms with more than 200 people, the connections start to fray. As he said: “Before you try and become rich and famous, you should find out who you are, because you might find out you are someone who doesn’t want to be rich and famous.”
My inner critic was trying to turn me into what I wasn’t meant to be.
I remember one night at the Tobacco Factory in Bristol. It was my first tour date of a new show having only finished touring the previous show 48 hours before. It was chaos. I was not certain what had happened or how it had been received, but when I walked into the bar it was filled with elated people who wanted to talk. In all the cacophony, they had found honesty that directly connected to them. What my professional mind saw as a terrible failure to follow the rules, my amateur mind saw as potential.
One of my favourite reactions was when a parent after a gig said: “My daughter just told me, ‘Dad, that’s what my head sounds like.’”
Though another favourite was the 75-year-old retired bricklayer who said, “I didn’t understand a word of that, and I’ve had a lovely time.”
In the last two years, I have never been happier as a performer. I am always excited to get on stage, to find out what happens, to not feel that you must chain yourself to joke after joke, that you can go other places too, as long as you are not being boring. I still follow my three cough rule.
One cough from the audience, I think: “Well, people do sometimes have a tickly cough and the venue is a bit dusty.”
Another cough immediately after the first: “Just a coincidence these coughs are too close together?”
Third cough straight after: “Nope, this means people are noticing the irritation in their throat more than the irritant on stage – time to reinvigorate.”
I am excited to return to the Edinburgh fringe this summer. It has been 12 years since my last full run and, what’s more, in one of the shows I will be regularly punching a melon again.
It will be the first Edinburgh fringe where I will be comfortable in my skin on and offstage (most of the time at least). I have realised that I prefer talking about my enthusiasms than about my dislikes. After shows, people will often say, “you must be exhausted”, but it is quite the opposite. I am more excited to be alive.
When I was, like so many other comedians, diagnosed with ADHD, I thought my wife would be cross and just think I was showing off. I am not easy to live with. Instead, she smiled broadly and said she had always thought I was bipolar.
Now, I find more often than not, I am brimful of joy and riding a manic phase. When I recall all those fringe years where I was paranoid, anxious and so sure of my failure, I now know that those failures were just what I needed and if I fail again, I will fail better.
