I get no kick from cava, mere alcohol is a total palaver
The party's over now. People have burnt out all their enthusiasm and energy; some wander like drugged zombies, some sit, heads down, in a state of catatonic comedown. Five hours ago, when the doors opened, the place was flooded with bright young things, smiling, confident, exuberant, looking spick and span in their ball gowns, black tie and newly done hair. Now they look jaded, tired, unhappy. The tuxedoes are in a corner somewhere, the bow ties are undone, the top button loosened. In the gents, the urinals have been cordoned off because they are blocked with vomit and food. People are hunched over the sinks, refusing to move, although each patron has a couple of St John's Ambulance people trying to gently coax them away; "We'd feel much happier if you would just come with us".
The Vichy Government have to go onstage in about 15 minutes' time.
We'd been asked to play our first ball at Cambridge University. It was only one of the second-tier, fifties-built colleges on the outskirts (Churchill; brutalist architecture and a strong bias towards science) but it was a new experience as I'd always refused to set foot in any balls when I was a student myself. I was a bit miffed that we weren't getting paid, as they were charging £70 a ticket and £12 for a "queue jump", but they had already spent their budget on the Foals and 9 Black Alps by the time the ents officer had come across us. It turns out, however, that you get paid in access to the vast quantities of food, drink and other curio.
Not having been told when to arrive, we showed up at 6pm. On arrival, it appeared to be a well-drilled military operation. There were at least three different colours of wristband issued and it took a little bartering before we were allowed to smuggle in our guest, Holly, who apparently should have been on the list. There were a surplus of workers being asked to escort performers to and from stages and waiting rooms. We were whisked up to the "green room" and left there. It was a wood-panneled room with chairs and tables. Other acts were also deposited time. People with walkie-talkies kept asking us when we were soundchecking, and grimacing when we said we hadn't been told. We were told that we had to stay here until our stage time, but promised that "food, drink and entertainments" would arrive. When we sneak downstairs to see what's going on, a tall man in a rugby shirt clocks us and very forcefully requests that we wait for our food and drink in the green room until we are summoned to play.
When drinks arrived, my heart sank- a shopping trolley full of coke and lemonade bottles. I'd been presuming that drinks would mean drink, as we'd walked past seemingly infinite crates of cava on the way up. Someone produces a barely legible itinerary, from which it appears we are on stage at 1am. Surely not? We have to stay in this room for seven hours and drink fizzy pop, so that we're still sober enough to perform? As we're trying to take this in, some kind soul makes a decision that we should be given green wristbands instead of purple wristbands, which will allow us liberty of movement to join in the ball. Other bands on earlier are not so lucky, and have to stick with their purple wristbands, poor sods. Though they do have runners to send out for food expeditions once the ball begins.
The theme of the ball is Japanese and it's called 'Neon Sunrise'. There are giant sumo fat suits, sushi and sake, free video games, a Jungle Jim's style ball pit, a casino, and other oddities. We head straight for the cava, which is practically on tap all night; waiters behind a trestle table continually opening bottles. You find yourself picking up a glass every time you walk past this point. We go upstairs to check out the dining hall, where we'll be playing. It's a great big canteen with vertiginously high ceilings, a stage at one end being shown up by the rooms' centrepiece- 15 foot tall geishas made out of different-coloured ballons. Programmes inform us that we've been billed as "comedians with a synthesiser". Some mischief is afoot here.
The noodle dishes in the dining hall are all beef/pork, so I head downstairs to queue for the sushi. The young man in front of me tells his ladyfriends, in an ostentatiously loud voice: "Oh God, I can just see that I'm going to be up all night. At 3pm tomorrow, I have to be at the Cannon Club to meet the Rt. Hon. Mr Cameron, leader of her Majesty's Opposition." I fail to supress a snigger.
We play a video game where I am Pikachu and I have to twat Robin Hood with a light sabre. I don't know what's going on. We check out the Silent Disco, where you're given your own headphones on entry. The music is awful glitchcore nonsenese and only one person is dancing. It could have been fun if they were playing real disco, but it's not much cop. I queue for some donuts to soak up the cava. Seeing donuts get made in front of you is the least appetising experience in the world; a slop of wet cement is dunked into boiling oil for two minutes. Another room has five chocolate fountains, spouting liquid chocolate of different varities. You grab a plate of grapes and stick them under, and you feel rather ashamed at yourself for all of this.
We investigate the karaoke room. A pretty blonde asks if I'll sing 'Beautiful' by 'Christina' with her. "You've pulled", sniggers Andrew. She then goes through the book pointing out her favourite songs that we could sing, glossing over all the Glen Campbell and Gilbert O that I would fancy doing. Eventually I have to stop her and say- if it came out in the past 10 years, assume I don't know it. We reach a (mutually dissatisfying) compromise by choosing 'Don't Speak' by No Doubt. Our turn comes, and the girl is a seasoned balladeer who tackles the two songs with gusto. I try to hold the microphone an appropriate distance away, and feel like Neil Hannon doing that backing vocal on the Robbie Williams song. Andrew tells bystanders, "See that bloke? He's my lead singer". The blonde dissolves back into a sea of Quality Street-wrapper dresses.
There's a certain verve at this point in the evening, when people are high on the cava and still exploring all the nooks and crannies and the diverse activites on offer. But all this is long, long gone by our stage time of 1:15am. The food has largely run out, people are being sick everywhere and I'm thinking to myself that this country really needs a good, long, bleak recession.
On we go to face our fate. The dining hall is cavernous but there are only about 30 people in there; chatting, picking at their food, slumped in a chair sleeping off the drink. Andrew has decided that we will open our set, as we've recently been in the habit of doing, with Death of a Mummy's Boy- an eight-minute spoken word piece imagining my suicide and subsequent life as a ghost, with the drum machine replicating a ticking clock and no music whatsoever. It's brave and potentially suicidal, even at the best of gigs. The city boys-in-waiting sitting before the stage don't like it. In fact, the whole 8 minutes through they keep banging the table and maintaing a constant chant. I can't work out if they're shouting "You're shit!", or "Bo-ris!". Could be either, I re-bleached my hair a few days earlier. I find it very hard to get through the monologue without giggling. Needless to say Andrew can stare anyone out.
After the track I tell them that it's a great honour to be invited to play at Mickey Mouse College. They respond with an aerial bombardment of empty water bottles and chips. During Serbian Warlord, our third song, they walk out. It isn't as much fun after this. We're left with about three people paying attention and our modest 8-song set drags on and on and on. By the last song I'm changing the lyrics to "None of this bullshit matters/and we might as well be playing in Andrew's bedroom/For all the fucking difference it would make to anyone". At the end, I thank them for all the free cava, but tell them that the really ought not to be calling it the champagne stand because you're not allowed to call sparkling wine champagne unless it was produced in the French region of Champagne, and embark on an extended rant about regional protectionism. When I finally step off stage, Andrew stays on. Holly and I watch him ad-lib instrumental covers of A Whiter Shade of Pale and Hey Jude. At some point, an official comes on stage with a concerned expression and says a few words, looking as if he thinks Andrew might turn around and bite him.
"What did he say to you, by the way?"
"Oh, he asked if I could play some easy-listening music."
While I'm here, I'm moving house at the end of the month:
It's about three doors up from The Chernobyl. Went there a couple of times when I was flathunting in the area, I'm not sure how I feel about my new local seemingly being the point of origin for Private Eye's It's Grim Up North London strip.
The Vichy Government have to go onstage in about 15 minutes' time.
We'd been asked to play our first ball at Cambridge University. It was only one of the second-tier, fifties-built colleges on the outskirts (Churchill; brutalist architecture and a strong bias towards science) but it was a new experience as I'd always refused to set foot in any balls when I was a student myself. I was a bit miffed that we weren't getting paid, as they were charging £70 a ticket and £12 for a "queue jump", but they had already spent their budget on the Foals and 9 Black Alps by the time the ents officer had come across us. It turns out, however, that you get paid in access to the vast quantities of food, drink and other curio.
Not having been told when to arrive, we showed up at 6pm. On arrival, it appeared to be a well-drilled military operation. There were at least three different colours of wristband issued and it took a little bartering before we were allowed to smuggle in our guest, Holly, who apparently should have been on the list. There were a surplus of workers being asked to escort performers to and from stages and waiting rooms. We were whisked up to the "green room" and left there. It was a wood-panneled room with chairs and tables. Other acts were also deposited time. People with walkie-talkies kept asking us when we were soundchecking, and grimacing when we said we hadn't been told. We were told that we had to stay here until our stage time, but promised that "food, drink and entertainments" would arrive. When we sneak downstairs to see what's going on, a tall man in a rugby shirt clocks us and very forcefully requests that we wait for our food and drink in the green room until we are summoned to play.
When drinks arrived, my heart sank- a shopping trolley full of coke and lemonade bottles. I'd been presuming that drinks would mean drink, as we'd walked past seemingly infinite crates of cava on the way up. Someone produces a barely legible itinerary, from which it appears we are on stage at 1am. Surely not? We have to stay in this room for seven hours and drink fizzy pop, so that we're still sober enough to perform? As we're trying to take this in, some kind soul makes a decision that we should be given green wristbands instead of purple wristbands, which will allow us liberty of movement to join in the ball. Other bands on earlier are not so lucky, and have to stick with their purple wristbands, poor sods. Though they do have runners to send out for food expeditions once the ball begins.
The theme of the ball is Japanese and it's called 'Neon Sunrise'. There are giant sumo fat suits, sushi and sake, free video games, a Jungle Jim's style ball pit, a casino, and other oddities. We head straight for the cava, which is practically on tap all night; waiters behind a trestle table continually opening bottles. You find yourself picking up a glass every time you walk past this point. We go upstairs to check out the dining hall, where we'll be playing. It's a great big canteen with vertiginously high ceilings, a stage at one end being shown up by the rooms' centrepiece- 15 foot tall geishas made out of different-coloured ballons. Programmes inform us that we've been billed as "comedians with a synthesiser". Some mischief is afoot here.
The noodle dishes in the dining hall are all beef/pork, so I head downstairs to queue for the sushi. The young man in front of me tells his ladyfriends, in an ostentatiously loud voice: "Oh God, I can just see that I'm going to be up all night. At 3pm tomorrow, I have to be at the Cannon Club to meet the Rt. Hon. Mr Cameron, leader of her Majesty's Opposition." I fail to supress a snigger.
We play a video game where I am Pikachu and I have to twat Robin Hood with a light sabre. I don't know what's going on. We check out the Silent Disco, where you're given your own headphones on entry. The music is awful glitchcore nonsenese and only one person is dancing. It could have been fun if they were playing real disco, but it's not much cop. I queue for some donuts to soak up the cava. Seeing donuts get made in front of you is the least appetising experience in the world; a slop of wet cement is dunked into boiling oil for two minutes. Another room has five chocolate fountains, spouting liquid chocolate of different varities. You grab a plate of grapes and stick them under, and you feel rather ashamed at yourself for all of this.
We investigate the karaoke room. A pretty blonde asks if I'll sing 'Beautiful' by 'Christina' with her. "You've pulled", sniggers Andrew. She then goes through the book pointing out her favourite songs that we could sing, glossing over all the Glen Campbell and Gilbert O that I would fancy doing. Eventually I have to stop her and say- if it came out in the past 10 years, assume I don't know it. We reach a (mutually dissatisfying) compromise by choosing 'Don't Speak' by No Doubt. Our turn comes, and the girl is a seasoned balladeer who tackles the two songs with gusto. I try to hold the microphone an appropriate distance away, and feel like Neil Hannon doing that backing vocal on the Robbie Williams song. Andrew tells bystanders, "See that bloke? He's my lead singer". The blonde dissolves back into a sea of Quality Street-wrapper dresses.
There's a certain verve at this point in the evening, when people are high on the cava and still exploring all the nooks and crannies and the diverse activites on offer. But all this is long, long gone by our stage time of 1:15am. The food has largely run out, people are being sick everywhere and I'm thinking to myself that this country really needs a good, long, bleak recession.
On we go to face our fate. The dining hall is cavernous but there are only about 30 people in there; chatting, picking at their food, slumped in a chair sleeping off the drink. Andrew has decided that we will open our set, as we've recently been in the habit of doing, with Death of a Mummy's Boy- an eight-minute spoken word piece imagining my suicide and subsequent life as a ghost, with the drum machine replicating a ticking clock and no music whatsoever. It's brave and potentially suicidal, even at the best of gigs. The city boys-in-waiting sitting before the stage don't like it. In fact, the whole 8 minutes through they keep banging the table and maintaing a constant chant. I can't work out if they're shouting "You're shit!", or "Bo-ris!". Could be either, I re-bleached my hair a few days earlier. I find it very hard to get through the monologue without giggling. Needless to say Andrew can stare anyone out.
After the track I tell them that it's a great honour to be invited to play at Mickey Mouse College. They respond with an aerial bombardment of empty water bottles and chips. During Serbian Warlord, our third song, they walk out. It isn't as much fun after this. We're left with about three people paying attention and our modest 8-song set drags on and on and on. By the last song I'm changing the lyrics to "None of this bullshit matters/and we might as well be playing in Andrew's bedroom/For all the fucking difference it would make to anyone". At the end, I thank them for all the free cava, but tell them that the really ought not to be calling it the champagne stand because you're not allowed to call sparkling wine champagne unless it was produced in the French region of Champagne, and embark on an extended rant about regional protectionism. When I finally step off stage, Andrew stays on. Holly and I watch him ad-lib instrumental covers of A Whiter Shade of Pale and Hey Jude. At some point, an official comes on stage with a concerned expression and says a few words, looking as if he thinks Andrew might turn around and bite him.
"What did he say to you, by the way?"
"Oh, he asked if I could play some easy-listening music."
While I'm here, I'm moving house at the end of the month:
It's about three doors up from The Chernobyl. Went there a couple of times when I was flathunting in the area, I'm not sure how I feel about my new local seemingly being the point of origin for Private Eye's It's Grim Up North London strip.