James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes

by James Acaster

  The didgeridoo-ion stood up, his body rigid. He lifted the didgeridoo above his head with both hands and threw it down on the ground (if you’ve ever been present when a didgeridoo bounces on the ground you’ll know it makes quite the satisfying ‘doink’ sound). Then he fixed both eyes on Melissa, took a deep breath and let it all out.

  ‘I ALWAYS KNEW YOU WERE AGAINST ME FROM THE VERY START OF THIS YOU’VE BEEN PLOTTING BEHIND MY BACK AND TURNING THIS BAND AGAINST ME I WILL NOT LET YOU TAKE THIS AWAY FROM ME YOU CAN’T HAVE CONTROL JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE FROM ITALY AND STUDIED AT SOME FANCY SCHOOL OF MUSIC I ALWAYS KNEW YOU WERE GOING TO ORGANISE A MUTINY YOU THINK I DIDN’T SEE IT COMING I SAW IT COMING A MILE OFF AND I TOLD MYSELF I WOULDN’T STAND FOR IT AND I’M NOT STANDING FOR IT NOW SO YOU CAN FUCK OFF I WANT NOTHING MORE TO DO WITH YOU EVER DO YOU UNDERSTAND I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU EVER AGAIN FUCK YOU!!!!!!’

  There was a pause, then a tiny voice said, ‘Mum?’ We all looked at the lady’s phone. ‘Mum, are you there?’

  She left to talk to her son outside while my angry bandmate packed up his didge in fury. He stopped in his tracks just before he walked out the door and looked at me. ‘Do you want a lift home?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve got to go and meet some friends nearby.’

  Later on when I told Melissa that this had been a lie she called me a genius and said that thinking of that lie on the spot had been very, very clever. Having Melissa praise my lies made me feel better about not being completely open with her, and made me consider the possibility that telling her the truth about the most shameful day of my life might not be completely necessary. Although if I was ever going to bring it up I probably should’ve done it there and then. As soon as that guy told her to fuck off and stormed out of her house I should’ve casually said, ‘Oh by the way, once I let myself in when you were out, had a poo in your downstairs loo but wiped my butt in the upstairs loo and walked round the house in a state of undress between the two.’ She wouldn’t have loved it but it would’ve been less of a big deal when coupled with the conspiracy theorist’s aggressive outburst and the demise of the band. Maybe he was right – maybe my timing was off. I only wish he was the scariest bandmate I’d teamed up with that year.

  Festival

  The didgeridoo/flute/conga jam band (clearly we should’ve been called DidgeriFlute) turned out to be the first of two brief musical ventures after the demise of The Wow! Scenario. The second occurred at a festival.

  One of the best festivals in all of Britain, in my opinion, is/was the Greenbelt Festival. I haven’t been for the whole weekend for a long time so can’t vouch for what it’s like these days but I used to go every year. It was at Cheltenham Race Course and classes itself as a Christian festival. I was raised Christian and continued to be so throughout my teens but I am now agnostic. Greenbelt is pretty much the reason I could never be an atheist or a Christian. It was a wonderful place, great atmosphere, full of kind people sharing ideas and having discussions and disagreeing with each other in a respectful manner. I’m sure it didn’t mean to teach me this but it taught me that I can never be certain about anything, that leadership in churches is often pretty dodgy, and that there probably is more to life but I will never truly understand it or fully know what it is. Although reading that back I’m not sure if I learnt that at Greenbelt or if that’s the kind of philosophy you adopt after numerous scrapes have befallen you. Once you’ve scoured the county for W’s and attended Kettering Board Games Club you accept that you will never be able to fully comprehend the universe.

  Greenbelt used to have a chai tea tent every year where people would drink chai tea (not me because it’s gross) and every now and then they’d hold a djembe5 workshop out the front of the tent where everyone sat down in a circle and all played djembes for ages while an old white guy with dreadlocks conducted them. This is why I can never justifiably make fun of hippies or new age types, because I have joined in with that djembe workshop and I totally get why people love it. The djembe jams (let’s call them what they are, dJAMbes) would go on for hours and were never interrupted by a didgeridoo player telling you to speed up or slow down – you just did as you pleased. Maybe I should’ve formed a twenty-piece djembe jam band called dJam and released albums that sound identical but by their very nature cannot be replicated. I could’ve worn a multi-coloured woven hoodie and grown a little chin beard and changed my name to Leaf and been a vegan. But I didn’t do any of those things and now I’m writing a book about how much of a joke my entire life has been.

  One year the chai tea tent was also host to some open mic. You could put your name on the chalkboard next to an allocated time and then you could stand in the corner of the tent and play whatever you felt like. I was standing next to the chalkboard one morning, watching the djembe players, when a lady, roughly in her forties, with short hair and wearing a big red leather jacket that was maybe two sizes too large, approached the board and let out a sigh.

  ‘Hmmm I want to do open mic but I need a percussionist,’ she said to no one, but kind of to me and my friend Matt who had also been drawn in by the djembe players (this is the same Matt who had once harboured a W for me in the bedroom he shared with his wife). It was quite odd hearing her despair about a lack of percussion when the djembe djam was in full flow in front of us; it was a kick in the teeth for the djembe djammers, openly letting them know that she didn’t consider a single one of them to be adequate percussionists even by the standards of the chai tea open mic. You’d think Matt, who had now turned to speak to her, would suggest she ask a djembe player to accompany her since they were so readily available, but instead he said, ‘James is a drummer, he can do it.’ She looked at me, waiting for my answer. I wracked my brains. There was nothing in particular I had planned to do that day, so I said yes because who knows, maybe this will be the band I had finally been waiting for, not The Wow! Scenario, not DidgeriFlute; maybe she was the next Joni Mitchell and I was just in the right place at the right time. She put her name on the board next to 16:00, which gave me five hours to find a percussion instrument that wasn’t a djembe. (Djembes were for the djembe workshops only: they had a strict no borrowing policy and that included chai tea open mic, despite the fact they were both run out of the same tent by the same people.)

  I can’t remember where I got it from but I managed to borrow an egg shaker from someone. That is, a shaker in the shape of an egg, not a contraption that shakes eggs. That was all I could find at a Christian festival! You would think there’d be tam-bourines falling out of everyone’s pockets at a Chrizza Fest but how times have changed.

  I made it to the chai tea tent at 15:50, worried that I had not brought enough percussion with me. I didn’t want to let this lady down, after all it was her name on the board and not mine, and it was her reputation on the line if we choked up there and sounded like garbage. But then she arrived.

  From a distance it was difficult to make out what she had brought along with her. I realised I had never asked what instrument she played so had no idea what I’d be accompanying. I had assumed she was a guitarist earlier but she appeared to be carrying a big red bean bag in her arms. It couldn’t be a drum because she said she needed a percussionist. As she got closer I could see that she wasn’t carrying one big thing but lots of smaller things and they were all wobbling and shaking in her arms as she struggled not to drop them. As she approached the tent all become clear. She was carrying about twenty coat hangers in her arms. A huge pile of red metal coat hangers. It was at this point that I started to worry. I half expected her to start pitching me a sitcom: Miss Marple is a deep sea diver and finds buried treasure but keeps on slapping mermaids, for example.

  She entered the chai tea tent and didn’t even smile or say hello to me. She just said, ‘Come on then,’ and I followed her to the part of the tent reserved for the open mic performers. She moved a small wooden coffee table into our performance space, looked at me and said, ‘Do you want to start?’ Start what?? I thought we were going to be
playing some songs she had written; I didn’t think this was another frigging jam band. I’d had enough of jamming!!! All I wanted to do was play a song that had been planned out in advance that preferably wasn’t a much loved classic I was unfamiliar with. ‘I like to jam,’ she said, confirming my greatest fears. ‘You start.’

  So I started to shake the shaker. Just a standard 4/4 rhythm, accentuating the first beat of each bar, classic stuff, playing it safe. She didn’t join in for a while; she just watched me. She was the only one watching me too because no one else could even hear me – they were just drinking chai tea and chatting, no idea that a gig had even started. And then she lifted all twenty of the coat hangers above her head, took aim and threw them at the table. It was so similar to how the didgeridoo player had thrown his didgeridoo on the floor that I thought she was quitting the band immediately and was about to launch into a rant about how I was trying to turn the whole band against her. But no, this was apparently how you play the coat hangers. The moment the coat hangers clattered against the wooden table was when everyone turned to look at us. Coat hangers were scattered all over the shop now. She got down on all fours and gathered all of the coat hangers on to the table and started moving them around on the surface while making moaning noises. I maintained the 4/4 rhythm of the egg shaker. Every now and then she would throw another coat hanger at the table or make a high pitched noise like a kestrel swooping in for the kill. After ten minutes (!) of this, she introduced some lyrics to the song. The lyrics were simple and she would shout them every now and again whenever she felt like it. The lyrics in question were ‘Reflective surfaces!’ and ‘Conjoined twins!’. ‘Conjoined twins’ was always delivered in a much more menacing manner than ‘Reflective surfaces’, although I feel like if our song had a name it would’ve been ‘Reflective Surfaces’; it just suited the music better I think, plus ‘Conjoined Twins’ would’ve been a pretty full-on title for a debut single. Maybe ‘Conjoined Twins’ was the band name, there were two of us after all, although we had never even hung out together before this performance so calling us conjoined was a bit of a stretch.

  She then started doing that thing that horses do with their lips, when they vibrate them and make that horse noise (maybe she did this as an homage to the horses of Cheltenham Race Course, I’ll never know) but she did it constantly, spitting everywhere, mainly all over me, mainly all over my face. At one point she picked up a coat hanger and smacked it against the table over and over like a hammer. I thought back to the days of Pindrop and suddenly Lloyd didn’t seem that bad. Compared to this he was a consummate professional. And then she closed her eyes and made a low humming noise that only I could hear and stood there swaying on the spot. At this point I did think to myself, WHY DID SHE NEED A PERCUSSIONIST?!!?? Honestly, what part of this performance would’ve suffered without the egg shaker???

  I was still keeping a steady beat with the shaker, watching her as her hum got gradually quieter and her sways got smaller and smaller, until she was standing still, eyes closed, in silence. The jam ended when I dropped the egg shaker. I had carried on shaking the egg for a while when she had her eyes closed but then decided I would quite like to stop the jam now, so I just let go of the egg and as soon as it hit the floor her eyes opened as if woken from a trance. She blinked, scooped up the coat hangers and left without saying goodbye. One person was applauding us, my friend Matt, tears of joy streaming down his face. At that point he was probably certain that God existed whereas I had most likely lost my faith for ever – vintage Greenbelt.

  Walking back to my tent I noticed something that looked a little out of place. There was a short tree, about six feet tall, completely bare, with a dozen branches of varying lengths. The tree looked as though it had been sanded down. It was very smooth and had been sectioned off with tape, as if it was the scene of a crime, and there was a notice on a post next to the tree. At the top of the notice there was a picture of the tree, only it looked different in the picture. In the picture the branches weren’t as bare as they were now; in the picture the branches had about twenty red coat hangers hanging from them and under the picture was a paragraph about the tree which, it turns out, was one of many works of art created especially for the festival

  Modern art

  She had stolen them. She had stolen the coat hangers from an art installation piece and thrown them at a small table in the chai tea tent as part of an open mic performance. It was a crime and I was an accessory. And at a Christian Festival at that – whatever happened to thou shalt not steal?! Fortunately for her, Christians are also pretty big on forgiveness, although after the reaction our song had received moments earlier you wouldn’t have known it.

  I was told that she had been sighted later that day returning the coat hangers to the branches one by one. I wish I had seen her positioning them on the tree, then checking with the picture to see if it looked right, then rearranging, over and over again. To be honest, though, putting coat hangers on a tree and calling it art is incredibly pretentious and who among us hasn’t seen a work of modern ‘art’ and not wanted to take it apart and throw it at a table? Sometimes I see works of modern art that wind me up so much I want to go back in time and tell that woman that she’s my hero and pledge to back her up at any gig she performs at from now until the closing of the Tate Modern. I once went to the Tate Modern where one of the works of art on display was a mirror. Just a normal mirror. Not even a mirror with a frame. A rectangular mirror. In the Tate Modern. The plaque next to it described the work as ‘genius’ because the viewer creates the art themselves. If I could’ve thrown that ‘art’ at a table and spat all over it while shouting, rather ironically, ‘Reflective surfaces!’ then I absolutely would have. But as we all know, breaking a mirror is bad luck and I don’t know if I need many more scrapes in my life. Although it would help me write a second book.

  Anyway, shortly after the gig in the Greenbelt chai tea tent, I decided to commit to doing stand-up comedy. Because after the string of ludicrous bands I had now been in, it actually seemed less stressful and more sensible to get up on my own in front of strangers and try to make them laugh.

  Basingstoke

  The main reason I started doing stand-up was because I hadn’t got any better ideas. The attempts I’d made to continue playing music with people had been disastrous and I’d done stand-up back when I had my mid-life crisis (at eighteen, yes) so thought I might as well do that for a while until I figured out what I really wanted to do with my life. But I quickly became obsessed with stand-up comedy and the open mic circuit (how I was able to do open mic again after Greenbelt I don’t know) and found myself trying to get gigs every night of the week almost compulsively. No matter how hard things got I had this urge to get back on stage as soon as possible and give it another go. Even after the somewhat negative experience in Basingstoke that I’m about to relate, I still carried on doing gigs every night.

  I had been doing stand-up comedy, unprofessionally, for a couple of months (some people would say that I am still doing stand-up comedy unprofessionally but those people are haters) and as we’ve already established I accepted any gig offered to me – no matter where the gig was and no matter how much money I lost in the process. This is how I ended up in Andover. I got the cheapest train possible, which meant I arrived in Andover at two o’clock. My stage time was nine o’clock and Andover does not have a cinema.

  I really can’t stress enough how boring this particular day was. At one point I killed an hour by sitting on a bench. I didn’t normally regard sitting on a bench as a leisure activity but in Andover I chose to make an exception. Alongside me on the bench was a big tough-looking gentleman who would shout at people he knew as they walked past. At one point a lady came over and started chatting to him. Midway through the conversation she received a phone call and informed the person on the other end of the phone that she was currently talking to ‘Gary and one of his loser mates’. This was hurtful because I had been called both a loser and one of Gary’s m
ates, but what confused me the most was the fact that Gary didn’t attempt to correct her. Clearly it was good enough for Gary just to have people believe that strangers were his mates, even if those mates were absolute losers who people slag off openly right in front of them before getting to know them. Weirder still was that when she left, Gary continued to ignore me. But of course he did – I was a loser.

  I did have one job I needed to do in the daytime though – I needed to buy a dress. I had written a short film and had roped in a bunch of friends to help me make it and now I was in the process of buying the wardrobe for the cast. I should point out I hadn’t made a film before and didn’t have the first idea how a film was made. As I said earlier, I was still unsure what I wanted to do with my life and so was trying out all things remotely creative to see what I was capable of. And as it turned out, I was not capable of making a short film. It never got completed and to this day I have no idea where the footage is. We filmed it at the William Knibb Centre (where The Wow! Scenario used to have band practice). We filmed it overnight and while we were there some thieves broke in and stole one of the centre’s computers without any of us noticing. Actually, one of the actors did see a robber but wrote them off as a ghost. I wish I was making that up.

  I left Gary in charge of the bench and found a little vintage shop full of old clothes, properly FULL of old clothes. The room was extremely tall: clothes hung from the ceiling and stacked up on the floor; sometimes they met in the middle like stalactites and stalagmites (I have lost count of the amount of caves I visited as a child but the only piece of information I have retained from all of those caving tours combined is that stalactites hang from the ceiling, stalagmites come up from the floor and sometimes they meet in the middle. The rest of those tours could’ve been the tour guide repeating their own PIN number over and over for all I know; I retained none of it).