This time I was going to Edinburgh glistening with notoriety because of Big Brother and tabloid guff and being on Jonathan Ross. The previous year I’d had a cult following; girls would turn up, giggly and available, and boys would nod. There was a buzz about me, and famous people were in the audience; but this year, 2006, I was famous.
I was playing a run of one week of gigs, seven nights in a fifty-seater theatre at the Assembly Rooms and four in this thousand-seater venue and that was the biggest room I’d done – the Edinburgh International Conference Centre. The little fifty-seater room had been initially booked early in the year, then the thousand-seater had to be added. On four of the nights I’d do a gig at the small venue, then go down to the Conference Centre.
The first night as the intro music played I heard the crowd scream. This had never happened before, and Nik and I turned to each other and registered this shrill gear-change. It’s very odd when you realise that you are the unknowing participant in millions of relationships and that the natural conclusion of these bizarre non-consensual marriages are teenage girls hollering or a teenage boy blandly asking you to recite a few words out of context – the catchphrase. In my case they could not be more daft. Here are some: “Ballbags, dinkle, if anything, ’citing.” Out of context they aren’t that funny and, in truth, there is no context that could justify them. Once you’ve said the catch-phrase, what then? Where do you go to, my lovely? In front of fifty people you can cater to the natural appetite for repetition, but across town in the enormous Edinburgh International Conference Centre, no longer a cult comic in a cosy den but a prowling digi-god in front of screaming (what is that?) fans? Man, I love that screaming. Truly I wish I could have them all, I wish I could take that crescendo to a fluid conclusion because for a lot of my life that acceptance, that yearning, has cradled me, papering over the cracks of my maudlin, porcelain adolescence. In their howls I found the teeth to fit the wound. An audience behaves entirely differently as numbers increase, like a mob with diminished responsibility. Those shows were thrilling. Nik said that was when he knew we were getting through. People were paying money and turning up and screaming. Luckily I am a highly disciplined man who would never exploit this crazy new resource, this oestrogen goldmine.
I was in Edinburgh with Matt Morgan and Trevor Lock as we were making the 6 Music radio show. We were staying up there in a flat that wasn’t quite big enough for my rapidly expanding ego; it was above a trendy urban bar which could comfortably accommodate seventy people. After the Conference Centre gigs, Icarus-high and with Herculean hubris, I would invite the entire audience back to this bar. I’d say, “We’re going to have an after-party now, it’s going to take place downstairs from my house,” then I’d give the address of the bar. This tiny poncey drinking den would be stuffed like a foie gras goose disgorging people pâté on to the pavement outside. Then I’d wander downstairs like a toff with a willy for a cracker and guzzle down the best bits. Of course when one starts treating the bar below as a kind of harem/wine cellar it’s pretty bloody obvious that some universal adjudicator will soon step in to give your bloated “ballbags” the kicking they deserve. But this was no time to contemplate lurking karmic consequence, I had carousing to do.
Now, I find myself writing one of those passages that makes me look a bit of a bastard, and this is my book (y wook) so I’m entitled to give a good account of myself – Lord knows, once this is out there back in the clutches of the snides, I’ll have no right of reply, so let me get my justification in now – while I own the page. I get accused of “banging on about sex” a lot – well, there’s a few reasons for that. One is that people (journalists) are always asking me about it. They’re right pervs – “How many birds? How many orgies? Gissa look at your helmet.” I, being polite, especially when fame first came a-calling, would acquiesce to these requests – particularly the helmet one. Soon, though, I realised that chatting about birds – if not done carefully, i.e., using the word “birds” – makes me look bad. But I’m not bad, I’m analytical, self-obsessed and randy but, to paraphrase John Lennon, “I’m not the only one.” I even worry about the Kate Moss chapter that opens this book – is it indiscreet? Will she mind? I hope not, because to be honest the whole affair was a tidal wave of flashbulbs and adrenalin, and I just felt like I was at Thorpe Park and had managed to get off the ghost train in the middle of a tunnel and see how the celebrity caper worked.
The other reason I harp on about the how’s yer father is that it’s bloody interesting and confusing and along with violence and death one of the more captivating elements of our experience on this dirty little circle. I also talk quite a lot about football and cats, but these are not topics that define our species. Of course sex is not a straightforward topic, not for me, not for any of us, and the injection of fame and availability was about to produce some diabolical consequences.
Alan Yentob, a man in his fifties, former BBC Director of Programmes and cultural commentator, came along to the final Bacchanalian late-night gig that concluded the Edinburgh run, then joined us backstage afterwards. Then, insanely, this rather demure and sophisticated gentleman was invited to our after-party. As you know, our after-parties consisted of little more than an ill-disciplined, over-excited sex-pert pied-piping strangers off a street and onto a nearby duvet. I imagine the kind of after-parties Alan Yentob must be used to include canapés and harpists and a chap performing close-up magic; well, at our do, the canapés would’ve been kicked off the tray by Matt, Trevor would weep at the genius of the conjurer and I’d get the harpist pregnant.
Once out of what was surely Alan’s first minibus, we romped on to the street. “Right, this is the after-show party, Alan – oozing from the bar.” The audience spilled like a slick from a tanker run aground. I skidded off. “See you later, Alan,” I brayed, then wandered into the bar and started chatting up girls.
One of the things I ought work on is my extreme distillation of seduction. I have created a seemingly irreversible dichotomy between love and sex, so if I’m romantically involved with someone I’ll spend all sorts of time chatting them up and talking to them. But if I only want to sleep with someone I approach the affair like a harassed secretary confronting a bothersome franking machine. I don’t think of it as being particularly curt or anything, I just think of it as efficient, like nature should be, like evolution is. One night we had a party upstairs, we didn’t invite any men so it was me, Trevor and Matt and about twenty girls in sectarian pockets loose in our flat. Alan Yentob was nowhere to be seen, he was probably scrubbing a cormorant clean somewhere.
In the flat the atmosphere was not good. Matt must have had a girlfriend as he was “umming” and “ahhing” about “right” and “wrong” as often he does, and Trevor was dancing in the corridor. Because I don’t drink I’m a lousy host. I forget that most people need a stiffener before an orgy, whereas I white-knuckle my way into the mayhem with sobriety gleaming like frost across my brain-scape. We got some gin and tonic from the bar downstairs and Trevor became a clumsy, bespectacled nit version of Tom Cruise in Cocktail.
Trevor Lock is an interesting cove, he’s married to a Peruvian lady, and spent time in her country learning at the feet of shamans. They must’ve been baffled by him – he’s hyper-intelligent, analytical, sensitive, spiritual and naturally quite brilliant, funny, gentle and quick and nimble and a good performer. I really enjoyed working with Trevor Lock, a good chap and a good person to take the piss out of, a lot of fun to ridicule.
STUDIO. DAY.
RUSSELL
Are you alright, Cocky-Locky?
TREVOR
I am. I’m feeling much better, been a little bit ill this week.
RUSSELL
Oh, I’m sorry to hear that but not that interested.
STUDIO. DAY.
TREVOR
I was born in Lincoln.
RUSSELL
You say born, Trevor, you were more created in a Petri dish by a pervert.
He’s very situate
d, very English and provincial, you could imagine him wearing brown brogues and having a bicycle with a basket on the front and pushing his glasses back on to the bridge of his nose, saying “Oh blimey”, the sort of egg who would get a bit hot under the collar. One would be very surprised to encounter malice from him, he’s a very positive person. Which made it all the more astonishing when he was accused of rape.
There are a lot of people who quite pointedly don’t introduce anything negative into my experience or my life. I have some friendships that are quite complicated and difficult, but one of my best qualities is that I’m very good at selecting people to have around, people who won’t fuck me up. I’m aware of what my deficiencies are, so I surround myself with people who are fully formed and developed in the areas where I am lacking, self-assuredness perhaps sometimes, and a grounded consistency. That is not a ubiquitous verdict on all the people around me, but there are certain shared traits and one of them is a lack of negativity. I like people not to be negative or down, and Trevor was positive, positively charged energy to be around.
In Edinburgh that night, a night that we would forensically discuss and be forced to recall in excruciating detail, I had foolishly created a harem that lacked the facilities that would have been imposed by any half-decent sheikh. Surprised drunk women who moments before had been in a bar and before that were in an audience, were now in a shabby, badly run party that even Alan Yentob had swerved. Occasionally I’d sidle off with someone to a vestibule and have a canoodle and then return to the party for fifteen minutes.
I do enjoy the fifteen minutes after an orgasm, the rationality that follows, the calm, patient, reasoned man that I become, liberated momentarily from the razor-sharp biological imperative – I really hope my biological nature appreciates what I do for it because I ain’t half a diligent servant. It’s as if my biological nature went, “Procreate, Russell, we must continue to procreate.”
“Oh yes, sir. Yes, m’lud.”
I’m the most obsequious creature, utterly enslaved by that need; I do whatever it wants, it’s ludicrous, the level of servitude and the mastery over me that it has achieved.
If only one day I could find love and, like Rapunzel or some other fairy-tale twerp trapped in a phallic tower, be released from ploughing this seedy trench.
As I mooched about, snogging and seeking salvation in all the wrong places, Matt and Trev and the hostages tried their best to conjure up the atmosphere of a party in what should more realistically be considered a sexual buffet. I would have written “smorgasbord”, but it’s one of those words that gets used a lot in comedy situations because people obviously like it, it is a nice-sounding word but some things get tainted, “smorgasbord” being one of them, which is a shame because it’s a pleasant word, but there’s no going back; although, I never thought I’d use the exclamation mark again, but now I use it in texts and letters and Post-its!!! I’ll tell you why, because in text communications these days there’s so much lol-ing and gsoh-ing and :) and :( – wow that’s literally the first time I’ve ever done that – and smiley faces in my day just used to mean “Aciieed!” or “Mr Happy” – that now the vulgar exclamation mark resembles a modest grammatical quirk, not the great, big, goofy, upside-down truncheon-phallus, gooning its way into a sentence, announcing its presumed humour. If the exclamation mark is now comparatively subtle, so I can use them again, perhaps “smorgasbord” too will make its way back into polite society, but until that day let’s say it was a sexual buffet and people were trying to conjure up the atmosphere of a party.
I don’t know if Russ Abbot’s “What an Atmosphere” was playing, but in these situations my brain usually provides an appealing score.
“Oh what an atmosphere, I love a party with a happy atmosphere, what’s Russell doing now?, he’s just drifting from room to room like a land shark – ‘Oh let me take you there, and you and I will be dancing in the cool night air’ – is he in the bathroom again? Yes, yes, I think he is.”
Whilst this was going on, a girl who worked in a local bar had ambled into the tragic-comic upstairs VIP area. She was drunk, too drunk to be behind a bar. I myself was an alcoholic barman and it’s the last place you should be. Or the first – there’s two ways of looking at the situation and it depends what results you’re trying to achieve. If it’s drunkenness, get behind a bar; if it’s sobriety, get out.
This girl was drunk; she was beautiful and I flirted with her for a while and enjoyed her company, she seemed sweet. I was by no means on the precipice of a great love affair, but I thought the two of us might be able to create a mutually beneficial diversion from the looming shadow of death, or to give him his proper name, Matt. No, not really, I do genuinely think of sex as a legitimate and fun way to avert the mind’s eye from impending doom. The fact that I was chatting up this girl was by no stretch an “Excalibur” situation, where a union would signify a magically ordained bond, because I was marching around yanking cutlery out of every bit of granite in that city, there can scarcely have been a fork or spoon left un-man-handled. “Perhaps this is the sword,” I’d announce, “or this, or this or this one.”
“Mr Brand, you’ve got your foot in my fork drawer and your hand is groping the coal scuttle.”
“Yeah, well, that’s the way I roll, I’ve got four limbs for a reason, and that lady in the lake was alright, can you get me her number?”
Ghastly business really, but such is the nature of single life at a Scottish arts festival.
“Come on, shall we go and kiss each other?” I schmoozed. Luckily for me she said, “Look, I’d like to talk to you first.”
I think my face must have frozen and I must have rolled my eyes, chuckled and murmured, quietly I hope, something along the lines of “OK, I’ll be moving along to this person a yard away who, hopefully, won’t make such outrageous demands on my time.”
I like a good chat, a chinwag, a lovely conversation. When I want sex I want to be physically involved with someone, and that too is communicative, good kissing and good sex is communication beyond language. I love language, I like sexual communication with beautiful women and I don’t think it’s invalid. I don’t think it’s any lesser and I don’t know how it’s been tainted by morality and adjudged to be somehow lower. I know it’s animal and it’s primal, but there’s certainly an argument that it’s a purer form of communication, that there’s less duplicity. I don’t try and mislead someone with my sexual communication. I purely communicate, by holding on to them, by dancing my way through them, by kissing them and adoring them.
This glorious ritual could be devalued by enquiring, “Will this lead to a marriage?” The answer is no, but why ask that question? Why not ask, “Will this lead to a space mission? Will this lead to us going on a tropical quest or us setting up an accountancy firm?” No! No! No! But ought we let that undermine one of the best damn hobbies known to humankind?
That girl said, “Do you want to have a conversation?”
I said, “No, I do not want to have a conversation.”
Men did not evolve over millions of years to have an inconvenient sack of chemicals dangling between our thighs that compel us to have conversations.
“Go forth and converse” is not in the Bible. I’ve checked it, I’ve double checked it, I’ve gummed the pages together because I’ve checked it so thoroughly that I had to have a wank while reading it because of the human biological imperative to go forth and multiply.
“Take that back, Gideon, I’m going to need another one.”
So I went and slept with someone else who had a bit more of a gung-ho attitude to these matters. Matt skulked off and ended up in a lap-dancing club with some interesting fella, a peripheral chancer we met, a driver; we were always meeting strange drivers around Edinburgh. Trevor ended up chatting up that girl and going to bed with her, and what happened is subject to legal dispute. Trevor says, and I believe him, that they had consensual sex. It sounded rather comical actually – until we heard her version of events FR
OM THE POLICE!!! (Go, exclamation mark.)
When we awoke, the previous day’s shadows lay heavy upon the walls and floors. Mementoes scattered as if they contained, locked within, the memories of the nocturnal events. By this time I had acquired a PA, a personal assistant – which now, some years on seems unremarkable, which is a fair barometer of the changes in my life. A personal assistant is a barrier between you and the world – it’s not the same as a secretary, their duties are mostly clerical whereas a PA will bat away, like tedious gnats ballsing up the paradise of your holiday-life, any chores that you’d rather not do. From paying the phone bill to sending flowers to collecting prescriptions, all can be swerved once a PA is recruited. Now I know that this is an alienating reality, that I now write from behind a platoon of mollycoddling adult nannies and this may put some distance between you as a reader and me as a spoiled arriviste brat. But know this: I am aware how ridiculous it all is, the money, the fawning, the girls, but what does one do? And believe me it comes at a price. Privacy and sanity are not commodities to be traded lightly. That said, having a PA is fucking brilliant.
At that time I had a lesbian PA called Helen, perhaps unconsciously I was trying to balance some of the marauding misogyny that had inadvertently come to characterise my life – I needn’t have bothered administering punitive measures to myself because the cosmos was soon to make its judicious presence felt. Helen and her bird, Shaz, awoke us from the debris of the final night and we hurtled towards Princes Street, keen to board the King’s Cross train before the festival officially concluded and we were turned into pumpkins.
Booky Wook 2: This Time It's Personal Page 7