I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey (23 page)

‘No,' Delphine continued. ‘There's a whole new wave of alternative comedy in the club scene, it's really growing.' I looked quizzical. ‘I'm going to open a comedy club in London. I've been running them at university,' she said.

‘That would be amazing!' shrieked Michael, clapping enthusiastically.

‘And I want you to be the resident MC,' Delphine continued while smacking down her margarita.

‘What's an MC?' I enquired, genuinely wondering if it had anything to do with MC Hammer.

‘You know. The host. The guy that introduces the comedians.' I racked my brain to recall any stand-up I'd seen on TV that had an MC. Nothing came to mind.

Delphine went on. ‘Just think about it. Let's exchange numbers and get together in London.'

With that, we exchanged contact details and Michael was genuinely excited and pleased that a connection of sorts had been made. I put Delphine's details away in my wallet, nestling between the remaining few dollars I had to spend and my credit card (which was now for emergencies only!) and I thought no more of the conversation.

Fun times in New York were over far too quickly and I was back in London, with my younger brother safely in tow. I almost lost him altogether on our last day when we had a huge argument. I can't recall what it was about but I was probably suffering from the overprotective older brother syndrome and was telling him off over some trivial thing. We were riding the subway together still smarting from the argument and the next thing I knew, he'd disappeared.

Good. At first I was pleased that he'd fucked off because that meant I had won the argument and therefore been proved right! But after a little while I panicked. He may have stormed off in a teenage huff but I had no idea how to find him. He'd gone and I wasn't even sure if he knew how to get home. The only thing I was completely certain of was that I was not leaving this country on my own.

I'd witnessed lots of people haunting the underground network and drinking from mysterious brown paper bags while shouting maniacally. At the time, New York was not a safe place for a young foreign black man to go out in alone. And after seeing the overzealous arrest of the taxi driver at the airport, I was always on the lookout for trouble. Several times I'd crossed the street when I saw an undesirable type walking towards me. It was mostly the uniforms and the badges that were offputting.

Honestly, I don't know what I feared for the most: the loss of Chris if I couldn't find him or the loss of my life, when my mum found out. Losing one son in a bizarre accident is one thing, but killing another son as punishment? I didn't know if Mum would go that far but it was a definite possibility. In a panic I got off the carriage to begin looking for him. As the train pulled away, I looked behind me for a split second. Chris was still in the same carriage as before but had just moved to a seat further away from me. We both realized what had happened but it was too late. The train had moved on.

I decided to catch the next train as I hoped he would get off at the next stop and wait for me like any naughty brother would. When we slowed down at the next station, peering out of the window, I saw Chris, and a huge sense of relief washed over me. The look of relief suddenly drained from my face however, because my train did not stop. I had inadvertently got on a fast train on a different line heading straight for the airport. Disaster!

This was in the days before we all had mobile phones, so I had no way of contacting him. Besides we were underground, so they wouldn't be a lot of use anyway. Chris couldn't be relied upon to know where we were staying and I didn't think he had any money to get a cab either. There followed a distressing three hours of two lost Englishmen in New York playing a game of cat and mouse chasing each other round the subway and the city. It was a nightmare, but on the plus side I now know the Manhattan underground transit system really well.

He wasn't at the hotel that we were staying at and finally, in despair, I went to where Michael lived. I'd done all I could and, as I got off the train, I was practising what I'd say to Mum, while also thinking of what to write in my own farewell note. But there on a bench by the exit I saw a familiar and exhausted face. While I had been frantically retracing our steps Chris had sensibly found his way to the stop that we always got off at for morning brunch. It took three hours out of our day to reach this point but at least we were both going to stay alive. We laughed, embraced and neither of us could remember what the argument had been about in the first place.

This was just one of the many stories that I regaled to Dustin when I got back to London. For weeks afterwards, I could see the envy in his eyes. I'm pretty sure that had he known how much fun we'd have, he would have taken some time off work or even gone halves with me on the Hoover. However, he didn't say anything and I respected that. It fits in with a never apologize, never admit you're wrong way of thinking.

A couple of weeks later I had the pictures from our trip developed. Now that does seem like an outdated thing to say. To the kids reading this: look it up! That's how we did things in the olden days. Some of the pictures were blurry and others had just my brother's finger on them. That was the problem with old rolls of film – you paid a flat fee to get them processed but out of a typical twenty-four exposures, eight could be put straight in the bin.

The handful of photos that did come out were a great talking point for the next few weeks when mates came round to visit. I think they only put up with me sharing stories about my trip to New York because they also shared my enthusiasm for New York brunch. It was during one of these boozy evenings that the phone rang and it was Delphine on the end of the line. She called totally out of the blue and, to be honest, it took me a while to recall who she was. She suggested demurely that we meet for coffee but I don't drink coffee and suggested a proper ‘. . . drink! Like the ones we had in New York!'

‘Then we can go to a comedy club too, so you can see one in action for yourself,' I agreed and we arranged to get together that Friday night. I was intrigued as to why Delphine thought that I could be a good MC. Dustin thought she may be a little bit arty and crazy perhaps or even simply after my pants, or, more accurately, what lay beneath.

We met in a pub in Putney, South London and I arrived early, looking earnest with notepad and pen in hand. When Delphine arrived, she was all smiles and acted as though we'd not been apart since New York, which by now was nearly a month ago. I was taken aback at how much she believed in me, bearing in mind she had never seen me on-stage before. I couldn't help thinking it was a great risk to open a new comedy club with some new bloke at the helm, who had never, repeat never, ever, done it before.

‘You'll learn as we go on,' she said encouragingly.

‘I hope so,' I replied sheepishly.

‘You can help me set it all up, get as much out of it as you can. Come on, let's go upstairs, the show's starting,' she continued.

All I could think was, What the fuck. What I have I got to lose? You don't know until you try. When we went upstairs, I witnessed live stand-up comics on-stage for the first time. The amazing thing was I didn't hear a sexist, racist or homophic word uttered. I was hooked.

The next week I saw my second ever stand-up night at the Big Fish Comedy Club in Richmond from the unique position of actually introducing the acts. All of my best mates turned up and laughed uproariously at everything I said. I thought I was a dab hand at this. The second gig didn't go so well. The crowd in Richmond could be unpredictable. Sometimes it would be mixed and sometimes (the worst times) it would be the posh locals. It was my second gig ever and I stood there trying to banter with a bunch of people who just weren't having it. I didn't really have much material back then and I was just riffing with them when I said, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen! While I'm standing here talking to you, all my mates . . . are robbing your houses.' One woman put her hand up (very posh for a comedy club) and said, ‘Excuse me? But isn't that rather racist?' I said ‘No . . . What are you saying? How do you know these friends I'm talking about aren't white.' And I won them back. Most of the best gags come to you when you go with the flow and that was one of the first lessons I learned in comedy.

These days, comics start out doing five minutes, then ten minutes, then twenty. Once they've found their comedy voice through doing rehearsed sets then they can start compering, where you have to play it fast and loose and be in the moment. But I did it the other way around. I started out compering. So I never had to rely on scripted material and never had that white heat moment when you forget your next link or your punchline. Likewise, I've never had that long drawn out painful death when no one likes you or your material and you've got no option but to power through twenty minutes while getting nothing back from your audience (except undiluted hate). It was a baptism of fire, but it suits me to riff and play around with people and their expectations of me. I'm glad that I never listened when teaches or parents told me to sit down and shut up because now I'm never lost for words on-stage and I like it best when I can chuck the rehearsed set out the window and just have fun.

So just like that the Big Fish Comedy Club was launched upstairs in that pub in Richmond. Our budget was non-existent, so just like when you are decorating your house, mates and favours were called in. The Big Fish theme was extended to give the venue an identity and it was decorated like an underworld cave in the sea, with nets, plastic fish, seaweed and shells. Dustin got his class to do a project making fish of all different shapes and sizes to be hung around the venue. I told him how creative I thought the idea was; others may see it as free child labour.

I never for one second thought of it as a potential career opportunity, but Delphine and I worked together over the next couple of years and, before I knew it, there were four more clubs called Big Fish dotted all over South London and I was compering four nights a week. To this day, I am eternally grateful to this woman, who came into my life and led me down this extraordinary path. Delphine quite literally turned my world around. And to think how differently things would have turned out if I hadn't got that bloody Hoover!

B
IG
F
ISH SEEMS LIKE
a long time ago and I quickly moved from being a compere to being a regular touring comedian. I love travelling around the UK but it's not all glamorous by any means. It's actually a lot like being a long-distance lorry driver. We both know the quickest route from Ipswich to Lowestoft at three in the morning. We both know exactly where all the petrol stations on the M1 are. We have an uncanny ability to tell exactly how many miles we've still got in the tank when the petrol gauge reads zero. When we see an empty Coke bottle we see a mobile toilet.

It can actually be quite boring constantly trawling up and down the motorways, but you can find comedy in the most unexpected places. For example, I recently saw a motorway sign about a mile outside Oxford that made me laugh. It said: ‘Emergency Toilets 30 Miles Ahead'. Excellent news! That's just the sign that you're praying for when you're weighing up the dangers and merits of pulling onto the hard shoulder and reliving yourself three feet away from passing articulated lorries.

When you're travelling all over the UK, you develop a fondness for some places. Lowestoft is one of my favourites. Other than at the theatre, they seemed to have no actual people living there. Why would they? When I was there last, I read in the local paper that traffic in the centre of town was being suspended for a day so the council could have a terrorist bomb attack drill. I peered out the window at Lowestoft and thought, It looks like they've already been.

Seaside towns can be the most fun places to visit. Even better than Lowestoft is Rhyl. Affectionately known by the residents as the ‘wart of Wales', you may not have heard of it, but it's only a stone's throw from Liverpool. A Molotov cocktail toss from Chester. A baby hurl from Anglesey. And a dog lob from Wrexham. Don't blame me – that's how they measure distance in Wales. It was in Rhyl that I took a stroll down at the beach and found a shop that, honest to God, sold nothing but golliwogs. Hundreds of them. I wasn't going to stand for that: I bought the lot and I set those fuckers free.

And you get to sample the delights of local cuisine when you travel around a lot. I was in Belfast and I went to the local chippy and got a big fish supper.

I asked innocently, ‘Do you have any tartare sauce?'

The man behind the counter looked at me like I was from the future. ‘No. But we do have Lilt.'

At the gig in Belfast, I got on stage and before I'd finished my first joke someone had placed a pint of Guinness at the front of the stage. Everyone was shouting, ‘Down it! Down it!' By the time I had ‘downed it', nine more pints had appeared on stage. I actually got a bit drunk and was mortified when I had to run off-stage in the final five minutes to take a hard-earned piss. ‘Music on please!' I shouted to my tour manager and ducked off stage. To add to the horror, I'd forgotten that there was no toilet back there. I had to run back on stage and grab a handful of the empty pint glasses. This turned in to an imprompto cue for the audience also to go to the toilet or the bar. An unplanned interval, much to the delight of the crowd.

I've been lucky enough to play at our best music festivals. I went to Glastonbury and when I got there they told me that I'd have to camp. I looked at them and said, ‘Me? A tent? On the ground? I don't even caravan.' So they found me a hotel nearby. I've got say that I didn't go there for the music. I went there for the extracurricular activities and for the party. At about three in the morning, I was in the comedy tent and my friend comes up to me looking like he was tripping. And not the light fantastic. He said to me, ‘Steve? Steve? Am I inside or outside?' I said, ‘You're inside.' He said, ‘Steve? Is this a coffin?' Being a good friend I said, ‘Yes! He asked, ‘Steve? Am I dead?' I replied, ‘The name's God!'