Due to my friendships with funny colleagues like Mark Lucey and Matt Morgan and strategists like Nik, the ol’ work was going in the right direction. The Big Brother show was a cult hit, my stand-up was improving and we were deluged with further opportunities. I was even offered the chance to host the NME Awards, a notoriously difficult gig where the baddest, drunkest musicians of the year nonchalantly RSVP, then indifferently attend a debauched, yet carefully staged, indie rock and roll award show.
This was a month before I’d appeared on Jonathan Ross’s show or been kissed into the mainstream, which was unfortunate because I could’ve used any extra status available to control a very difficult room. The NME Awards were challenging because, like all the awards ceremonies I’ve hosted, I was not quite famous enough to do it. If Jonathan Ross is hosting an awards show, everyone there accepts his authority, we all respect him and sit down and shut up. But when I hosted the NME Awards, around half the people there didn’t know who I was. Bob Geldof, for example, began the evening not knowing who I was and concluded it deciding I was a cunt. I know this because he said so when he collected his award.
Matt, in spite of spending much of his life skulking about like a menstrual Hell’s Angel, frequently says things that are apposite and profound. Once, when we discussed negativity towards others, he said that we ought imagine that we each have an individual connection with a God or higher power through “a Doc Brown from Back to the Future-style metal helmet” (bear with me) that has an electric tendril that reaches up through the sky, puncturing the ozone layer, into the heavens, past the Milky Way, right into the mind of God. Like them hairdrying plastic mushroom contraptions beneath which elderly ladies sit in hairdressers, but instead of being attached to a plug socket, they are attached to God. When someone, a critic, a teacher or an enemy attacks you, it’s as if they are petulantly disgruntled and dissatisfied with their own connection to the universe and like snitchy little berks, reach over and yank your tendril. We are all connected to an objective higher mind and through that to each other, so why bother jerking around with other people’s connection? It’s a senseless interference. We all do it, but really what’s the point of sniping at our fellows? You may as well go into your garden and holler abuse at a nasturtium. In the end it’s between you and God.
The NMEs were my first high-profile job and a significant breakthrough. Handled correctly these risky gigs can propel you into ever more exciting yet futile stratospheres of success. My career has certainly been expedited by three notably tricky industry galas; first the NMEs, then the Brits the following year, and more recently the MTV Video Music Awards. All three events were just beyond my reach, so were bloody difficult and combative. Good televised award shows need an element of chaos, you need to feel that at any point they could descend into a food fight or gratuitous nudity. Think of your favourite moments from ceremonies gone by – Liam Gallagher spitting, Madonna and Britney kissing, Jarvis Cocker getting his bum out at Michael Jackson, and possibly when Bob Geldof called Russell Brand a cunt.
The NME Awards were held at the Hammersmith Palais, which was also the venue for those ridiculous “School Discos” in which grown women cavort in schoolgirl uniforms and baffled paedophiles puzzle over boundaries. “Is it all a big sexy laugh or am I a demon?” they must think.
Do we humans yet properly understand the notion of the future? It doesn’t seem that we do. I’ll agree to almost anything as long as it’s in the way-off yonder – secretly believing the allotted time will never actually arrive.
“Russell, will you castrate this pig with your molars?”
“When?”
“In February.”
“February? The existence of Februaries has never been categorically proven – I’ll do it!” Of course when February comes, as February must, I regret my blithe agreement and sneak off behind my vegetarianism.
My excitement on learning that Nik and I had secured the NMEs duly ripened into horror as the day drew near – it became an ordeal. The room would be chock-a-block with alcoholics and alcohol and eccentricity and egos, and everyone would be trying so hard to be so cool that our common humanity would be as relevant to the assembly as a recipe for a damn good moussaka. On an inexplicable whim the editor of New Musical Express (the magazine behind the ceremony), the boyish Conor McNicholas, decided the set should resemble the inside of Dr Who’s Tardis. So at one end of this flat, dank booze hall was a sci-fi set that to me seemed non sequitous and pointless and looked like it wanted the attendees to love it. The nerdy set that would be providing my backdrop made me more nervous. Staring at it with impending dread, I reflected. Life is not a postcard of life, life is essential and about detail, minutiae and trivia. Tiny anxious pangs, heartburn and stubbed toes. “There’s something in my eye. My mouth tastes funny. Have I chipped my tooth?” Titchy, Prufrock facts. Not a broad sweep of a Rothko brush, but pop art dots, like Liechtenstein’s.
As was my custom at that time I was with Sharon (cockney boxer, Babs Windsor laugh, Kathy Burke warmth), my stylist, Nicola (flirty young mum, everyone’s nan, lickable skin, loves indiscriminately), who does my make-up, and Matt (same twerp from Chapter 1). It was necessary then as now to ensconce myself in familiarity, estuary accents, working-class values, because after all, it’s all just a bit of a fuckin’ laugh, all this, innit? You don’t wanna take life too seriously. If you don’t laugh you’ll fuckin’ cry. I need that kind of attitude around me as I approach the stage, because within it’s all Mozart’s Requiem for Death and livid Francis Bacon pinks. I lay charred birds at Tiresias’s feet as I stare down at the beast. I need ritual. Theatre was born of ritual, religion was born of ritual. If I should die think only this of me, “I thought it would be funny.”
The yips, the condition that afflicts darts players and golfers, is the inability to let go of the dart or to take the final putt. Darts players before throwing the dart see a line leading from the tip of their arrow to the treble twenty or the bullseye. (As a child I always thought of the bullseye as more important, as it’s got a better name. When I discovered treble twenty’s superiority I thought, “The dog out of Oliver is not called treble twenty, it’s called Bullseye.” It’s a good name and an evocative image, the eye of the bull. Treble twenty is just arithmetic.) The perfect visualisation of that line sometimes makes it difficult for them to relinquish the dart and I understand that. It’s acknowledging the point at which you interface with reality. Most sports are reactive, interactive, a giddy blur of controlled chaos like football or boxing, you against a swirl of oppositional energy. But the dartboard is never going to come hurtling towards you and slap you round the chops, so unless you seduce it, unless you part the thighs of the oche and make that move, nothing’s going to happen. Ritual is necessary to cope with that obligation.
At the time of the NMEs I began to accumulate the people, the things and ideas that I need to succeed. Sometimes I have cause to reflect, as I walk out in front of 5,000 people or host a big event, “Fucking hell, it is still just me in a toilet,” the same as it was the first time I went on to a stage at Grays Comprehensive School to chubbily inhabit Fat Sam in Bugsy Malone. Then as now, my bowel having loosened, my heart palpitates faster until eventually my mind moves into alignment and focus.
Now I’ve conducted that ceremony in thousands of toilets to ever-growing numbers of people, but ultimately it’s for the same purpose of motivating myself into a position where I can legitimately ask things to go well because I’m in tune with something higher.
Often when I’m nervous before a show people will say, “Why are you worried? What’s the worst that can happen?” The reason I’m nervous is that I think something unlikely, implausible but utterly awful will happen. The sort of thing that happens to me quite often. Sufficiently often for me to accept the necessity of rigorous preparation. Something, in fact, like this.
It was a good script that me and Matt knocked up, funny, with good jokes. The New York band the Strokes were there: “Oh, my nan had a stroke, I think that’s what killed her – what was Julian Casablancas thinking? She was ninety years old! And she was a lesbian!” Actually my nan did have a stroke and it was that that killed her. She wasn’t a lesbian though.
Jokes