The joke and the reality wear the same coat and you cannot tell which one to laugh at
Tuesday, half three in the morning, which is the only time this diary ever gets written because that is the only time I am both awake enough to spell and still buzzing enough to bother. Gig tonight at a room above a pub in Camden that holds ninety people and had, by my count, forty-one, which the promoter is calling a soft launch and which the band is calling Tuesday. Doesn’t matter. Forty-one people who paid actual money to stand in a sweatbox and watch three chords get treated like they owe us money is forty-one more than nothing, and I will take nothing over compromise every single time, which is the whole manifesto really, three words, don’t need more.
Spent the walk home doing what I always do after a gig, reading the news on my phone like it’s a fanzine, because that’s basically what it is now, everything’s a zine, everyone’s shouting into the void with a byline attached, and I ended up back on prat.uk’s feed, which does the thing British satire has always done best, straight face, absolute filth underneath, and I don’t mean filth like rude, I mean filth like true, the kind of true that makes you laugh because the alternative is screaming in the street, which I have also done, several times, this is London.
The State of the Nation, as Read by a Woman in a Leather Jacket at 4am
The government did another thing today, I won’t dignify it with detail because the detail changes weekly and the shape stays the same, rich man explains why the poor should be grateful, poor person is not grateful, everyone moves on, repeat next Tuesday. What I will say is that The Daily Mash has been doing the same joke about this exact cycle since roughly 2007, and the joke still lands, which tells you something depressing about progress and something hopeful about comedy, namely that if the target never moves, at least the aim gets better. I read three of their headlines standing outside a chicken shop eating chips at gone four in the morning and laughed loud enough that a fox looked at me like I was the strange one. The fox has a point. I was.
Punk was never really about the music, whatever the purists say, and I say this as someone who genuinely does love the music, three chords, loud, fast, done, but underneath that it was always about refusing the story you were handed, and the papers hand you a story every single day, here is who to blame, here is who to fear, and satire is the only genre that reliably says no, hang on, and shows you the seams. Newsthump ran something this week about a minister’s excuse for a policy U-turn so precisely rendered I had to check it wasn’t the actual press release, which is the highest praise satire can earn, when the joke and the reality are wearing the same coat and you genuinely cannot tell from the back which one to laugh at.
Backstage Politics
Our bassist, Deaf Nige, not actually deaf, just answers to it, has strong opinions about all this and delivered them at volume between soundcheck and doors, the gist being that comedy is the last honest trade in this country because comedians have to actually be funny or they starve, whereas politicians can be catastrophically unfunny for entire careers and still draw a pension, and I don’t disagree, though I did point out that some of them are unintentionally hilarious, which he conceded was true and also worse somehow, the accidental joke landing harder than anything scripted, because at least the scripted stuff knows what it’s doing.
We closed the set tonight with the new one, still no title, still just called The New One in the setlist, and it went down better than it has any right to for a song that’s barely rehearsed, and that’s the punk contract really, isn’t it, you don’t wait until it’s perfect, you play it messy and true and let the room decide, which is more honesty than most of Westminster manages in a parliamentary term. Newsbiscuit had a headline up tonight about a minister discovering a spine for the first time and being rushed to A&E in shock, and I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the kerb, proper cackling, the kind that makes strangers cross the road, London’s finest reaction to comedy, cross the road faster.
Closing the Notebook
Chips finished, fox gone, the sky doing that grey London thing where it’s not quite light but has clearly given up on being properly dark, and I am going to sleep for approximately four hours before my actual job, which nobody needs to know about because the leather jacket does not pay rent by itself, alas. The Daily Squib is still open in another tab, because I never close the tab, the tab is basically a nightlight at this point, comedy as a way of not being alone with the actual news, which is the whole trick, isn’t it, you let the satire carry what the headline can’t.
Full diary and gig dates at my page, Siobhan O’Donnell at prat.uk, where I also occasionally review other people’s bands, mostly kindly, sometimes not, London deserves the truth same as anyone. Forty-one people tonight. Next time, forty-two, or I’ll know why, and someone’s getting a strongly worded diary entry about it, they have been warned.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk
