Happy Mondays

I have had the most amazing three consecutive Monday poetry gigs - all fantastic but almost totally different in their nature.

Three Mondays ago, I played the Reckless Moment comedy club, in the vaults bar at the Robbins Well, Leamington Spa. As I have written before, the Reckless is one of my favourite comedy clubs ever.



It is brilliantly run by two post-graduate film students, my dear friends Tom Hughes (pictured above with an act at the Fringe this Summer) and Pete 'The Meat' Falconer, and has a great atmosphere and beautiful audience. Which is just as well as performing poetry in a comedy club can go down like a string quartet at a heavy metal gig.



I was as nervous as hell, even though I had spent weeks writing material and poems for the gig. I was also surprised to find myself headlining the first half the show, going after proper (and brilliant) comedians such as my old mate Gary Delaney.

In the event I reckon my act went fairly well. Some of my comedy material got laughs (and some bombed), I kept going, despite nerves, and the poems were generally well received.

I kicked off my set with Probably Not, followed by some baldy material about Byron's love life, Loving You and a new (and I guess un-reuseable) poem about Byron's alleged sexual perferences!

I also did Cook and Drive and my comic poem Fat Ambulance, to which the audience joined in admirably.



My new slam poem shocked them a bit, I think, but my gentle send-up of Pete the Meat (pictured in the guise of Prince) - complete with consumption of a Class 1 English carrot - went down well. Overall, I felt it had been a good night and I really enjoyed the rest of the show and the remainder of the evening. And the fabulous comany!

The following Monday, I stayed in Lewes and performed an updated version of my bonfire poem, Advance Southover.




It went very well. I launched into the poem at the Southover War Memorial, after the minute's silence and revalie, at, I reckon, just the right moment. I felt confident, vital - bolstered by a stiff brandy or two. Afterwards, the mainstays of the gloriously reformed Southover Bonfire Society, of which I am sort of Poet Laureate, seemed pleased.



Bonfire in Lewes seemed especially good this year. It was the first year that the Southover Bonfire Society had a firesite. We didn't march but helped out marshalling at the site.







The Grand Parade was also very good and, when we eventually went to see the fireworks, they were awesome. (Images of the night are scattered through this blog).

A quintessential sea of hue and cry. A skyscape of colour. It was not a long display, but it was amazingly memorable. The images do not do it justice. Afterwards, people around us were saying it was the best fireworks display they had ever seen. I would not disagree.



The third consecutive Monday, this last Monday, I was in Oxford for a gig at the Gardeners' pub in Jericho, Hear The Word, a Christian-powered, unplugged, spoken word club celebrating its sixth birthday.

It was another extraordinary night. Cold out, but with great warmth in the long, narrow backroom of the pub.

I was highly flattered to find posters, complete with four little Byrons, being circulated to promote my next gig in Oxford, at the superb Back Room Poets, at Far From the Madding Crowd, on another Monday - 26 November.



The Hear The Word gig seemed very 'Oxford', a catholic mixture of story-telling, folk music, and poetry of many forms. I enjoyed all the acts and the featured poet was particularly special.

It seemed a tad strange standing in the little room with people on every side but I tried my best to turn around to see everyone.

For the first time ever, I performed, Last Day, my first poem which got me started in poetry. I also did another Catholic poem Lose Hill and Botley Cemetery Tennis Club, which is not quite right yet, but went all right.

I really liked Hear The Word. It has a surreal quality about it - such as a Mohican (young female) chef walking into on the poetry to deliver a basket of chips which were duly passed round; its Christian community quality with a large dollop of tolerance and a hectoring Marxist thrown in for good measure.



The evening was absolutely wonderful. I felt so happy afterwards, driving back from the Leckford Road to the Leamington Garret, into the broad, red, ribbed sky with the love-jazz on the wireless.

Mondays are meant to be blue, but these three Mondays on the trot have, for me, been a veritable oasis of happiness.

Why People Do Stand-up Comedy

Why People Do Stand-up Comedy

This week I returned to the comedy stage for the first time since I closed my club, Joe's Comedy Madhouse, in November 2005. It was a weird and beautiful experience.

Tom Hughes and Pete the Meat, who run The Reckless Moment in Leamington Spa, kindly allowed me to do 10 minutes of comical poetry, which came as a shock to the audience but went not too badly. I did about nine poems, including Probably Not, Women, Cook and Drive, Loving You, Barthday and Chav. I also did one inspired by a new word I had learnt at the club the previous week, Fluffer (don't ask), and one dedicated to Pete's meat mania (Meat Elegy).

I don't think the audience quite knew what to make of it. Some of the poems were funnier than others, and I was, as always, very nervous, my leg shaking within my tartan trousers. But they were a kindly audience and I think it added some variety to the evening.

Afterwards, Tom said, 'That was beautiful, Oliver!' which was too kind. The evening itself was a beautiful occasion. The comedians seemed to be unburdening themselves of their angst in a most poetic fashion. A big, grizzly Welshman made his woes seem like song, and a huge, ugly Cornishman told profoundly moving stories about his screwed-up, violent past.

It occurred to me that no one up on that stage was doing it purely out of a desire to entertain an audience. We all had sad-limned issues drifting to the surface; a need to be up there in the spotlight to have people love - or at the very least listen - to us. That's why people do stand-up comedy. I have met very few stand-ups who were not in some way screwed up.

This thought regularly occurred to me during the five years I did stand-up comedy on the London circuit and the eight-and-a-half years I ran Joe's Comedy Madhouse, also in London. But most of the time I was drunk so I didn't dwell on it. Performing stone cold sober is a far more frightening and fascinating experience. But like the rest of the line-up, I still wanted to be there. I wanted the attention!

The good thing about the Reckless Moment is that it is so supportive. Tom and Pete take an almost irenic approach to the club and its performers. They want everything to be beautiful and so it is. Tom, I think, is really a physical comedian waiting to break out while Pete is quick of wit and musical (although not as musical as Prince who also seems to turn up late).

A beautiful thing happened last night. The man-mountain Cornish bloke was edging into some material comparing white people with black people when he spotted a couple of black guys in the audience. One of them seemed to be inching forwards towards the stage, his friend trying to hold him back. The guy got near enough to speak quietly and be heard and, to a hushed silence, spontaneously performed a brilliant piece of rap poetry about how it was cool for the comedian to talk about black people. The applause afterwards was deafening.

So sublime a moment, I wish I could have bottled it.

The Reckless Moment

The Reckless Moment

Leamington Garret. Leamington Spa has a wonderful little comedy club called The Reckless Moment. It is run by students who attract a remarkably strong line-up of professional (or semi-professional) turns and only charge the punters a quid on the door.

It is 13 months now since I closed Joe's Comedy Madhouse – London's, and probably the UK's, craziest comedy club – after eight unforgettable years.

After that I suspected I would rarely again visit comedy establishments.

But espying a sign for a comedy club called The Reckless Moment – even on a Monday night when I was dog-tired from having risen at 5am to get up to Leamington from the South Coast – I could not resist.

I was amazed to find that the club, in the vaults at the Robbins' Well in the 'well rough' end of Leamington, was populated with old mates.

Punmeister Gary Delaney (pictured left) is a regular there. He now lives in Leamington, having apparently quit the converted lock-up that he used to inhabit a stone's throw from my house in Stoke Newington, London N16.

My dear friend Andrew O'Neill appeared during the current season. I had not seen Andrew since this year's Edinburgh Fringe where I reviewed his show Winston Churchill Was Jack The Ripper (see Edinburgh Nights. It was great to see him and I was impressed by how great his straight stand-up set now is.

I was also stunned the other Monday to be rounded on by Anthony Miller, who cut his comedy teeth at Joe's Comedy Madhouse performing weird songs about molluscs.

Now he is much more mainstream, even attempting some interaction with the audience. He certainly managed to embarrass me by revealing to a packed room of students my past as the Catholic Church's King of Spin in England and Wales.

















The Reckless Moment is run by compere Tom Hughes, who looks disturbingly like Jack Black (JB) from the awesome new movie Tenacious D with his baby face, wrestler's bulk and mop of brown hair. He is assisted by his housemate 'Pete the Meat' – a highly intelligent carnivore. Against all odds, they are the stars of the show!

The acts can also be wonderfully quirky, such as Ivan the deranged hospital radio presenter, or the bloke who stripped down to his knickers and cowboy hat with hardly a line of (comedy) material to support his new character act.

Their courage certainly reminded me of the oddball new acts I used to promote at Joe's Comedy Madhouse, such as Daniel Kitson, Jimmy Carr and the Comedy Terrorist.

Tom Hughes carries his MC-ing by sheer dint of personality (and probably has a bright future in comedy) while Pete the Meat entertains by eating large plates of exotic meats (generally venison or offal). This may not sound funny but combined with music and a running commentary, it is hilarious.

Pete also rounds off the show by reappearing having donned a celebrity mask to butcher one of their hits. On the last of the run, it was Prince doing Purple Rain.

Superb stuff!