I did a gig this week on my own. Without any collaborators or friends on stage. I’ve never done it before. And it was scary and fascinating. I’d been booked to do a musical set at a festival, but my brother, who always plays guitar with me, and sings harmonies (and usually learns the songs properly) was on holiday that day. So I thought “I’ll turn it into a storytelling set, and busk between bits of chat”, like an old folk gig. How hard can it be? I know the songs, I’ve done this hundreds of times, and it’ll just be a bit more sparse.
But singing and playing the guitar on my own for the first time, every time I leant back, metaphorically, to fit around someone else, there was nobody there. And I kept (metaphorically) falling over. I fluffed and stumbled chords and words that I know really well. A few times I forgot where I was. It wasn’t a career-making show or anything, just a warm set in front of a friendly crowd at a cosy festival, and I’m certain nobody minded. In fact it went down well, and the people were lovely, and I enjoyed it enormously. I’m only chewing it over because I realised I’ve done loads of performances, but I’d never done a show alone before.
It felt so… strange. I was simply used to being up there with a friend. What struck me is that this weird, lonely space is where stand-ups and solo musicians are all the time. I’ve wondered sometimes if I could do it. But now I know what would be the worst thing about it: being alone. Because I think making any art is very different with a friend or two by your side.
Talking about the pop group Wham! to Jude Rogers for my Comfort Blanket Podcast, we discussed the role of Andrew Ridgeley, that even if he never played or wrote a note, he was there to make the band work, partly by his very presence alongside his best friend. The band’s magic was a contract with the audience that George and Andrew were mates, and if they – the fans – ever transcended singing into a hairbrush in a mirror and became superstars, they’d also be able to bring their best mate along for the ride.
It’s the promise of The Spice Girls, even what their first hit was about, doing it with friends. It’s what sold the Beatles, when they invented being a bunch-of-mates-taking-on-the-world instead of a Tin Pan Alley professional combo coolly assembled by a cigar-chomping impressario. It’s important. On stage are some friends, doing it together. They’re sharing space, maybe even sharing a microphone. There’s a relatable magic in watching people in co-operation and collaboration, and from the other side of the exchange, from the stage itself, it makes the job very different.
When The Pet Shop Boys played Glastonbury last year, and Chris Lowe found himself trapped, Spinal Tap-style, behind an elaborate bit of stage scenery, so he couldn’t join his bezzie Neil Tennant out front, the band were simply not as good. They sounded the same. I’d seen them a few months earlier at the O2. It was the same show. But this time Neil, the one who does stuff to draw your eye and ear, was on stage alone, and it felt… wrong.
The joke with the Pet Shops – as with Andrew Ridgeley – has always been that one of the duo ‘doesn’t do anything’ on stage. But without the pair of them in vision, that band, with one of the best back catalogues in pop, is simply not the same. The moment a few songs later when Chris escaped his Tap trap to take up his usual position, at the back, moving as little as possible, the sky was the limit. Neil wasn’t alone. The audience and the performers relaxed. The endorphins hit. We felt the communal rush, alongside them.
Even the most manufactured of bands will have a period, often in their pomp, where they get that Platoon look in their eyes. They’re in the eye of the storm, the rest of us are just watching the twister. At that point, only friendship can help. Because the artistic collaborators have seen the madness of their success from a position that nobody except the rest of their group can share. It’s a grand expansion of the feeling of any creative act; that there are people around any piece of art who know what it felt like to be making it, and then there is the audience.
I suspect that’s what Paul McCartney’s new National Portrait Gallery exhibition of photos of Beatlemania from his own camera is about. Perhaps he’s trying to find more people on earth to share his experience, now that there’s only one person left who knows. It must be lonely. On touchdown, the Apollo 11 astronauts dusted off the ticker tape and sadly mused to one another that maybe they’d ‘missed it’. Aldrin, Armstrong and Collins were humanity’s loneliest supergroup, responsible for our species’ ongoing bout of Difficult Second Album Syndrome. Only they know what that feels like. But at least they weren’t alone.
I’d often wondered about the psychology of performers who can work alone, because I’ve never done it. I’ve never wanted to be a solo musician or a stand up comedian, or even a cartoonist or a novelist (and when I’ve thought I could be, and tried it, I’ve learned quickly that I don’t want it at all). I need, and love, collaborators. I want a gang, or some friends, along for the ride. I think it’s why I do anything in the first place.
What struck me most coming off stage having been on it alone for the first time, is that performing solo is tough, but that’s not the worst part. The hardest part is having performed alone.
If your stand-up show or your book launch or your gig went well, and you did it solo, you have nobody to celebrate with. And if it went badly, you have nobody to commiserate with. Worst of all, if – as is usually the case – if the experience of making art in public was a mixture of good and bad moments, it’s hard to find someone to help calibrate the creator’s usual complicated balance of elation and frustration. It’s better when you have someone with whom you can go over what went right and what went wrong, and cheer one another up. “Nobody noticed you fluffed that…” “Oh, it was fine.” “Bloody hell! That was good.”
Because one of the most disorientating experiences is to have loved playing a show, and an audience not responded. Or to know you have performed poorly, and an audience to still love what you did.
If you run up to a star you love after their show, or just a mate who’s done a set down the pub, and they seem a bit weird, to not quite be able to talk to you straight away, or take on board your enthusiasm for their performance, it’s because you were both at different events, and there’s no way of crossing that divide.
Any creator looks at what they make through very different eyes to the audience. As Chris Addison brilliantly said, there are two ways into a theatre: through the glitzy front-of-house, all drapery and gold rope and suited ushers, or in through the stage door, which smells of sweat and old wigs and where the magic chariot is held up with gaffer tape. I don’t know if I could survive owning the knowledge of the process, the elation and disappointment, privately. It feels healthier to share. Knowing I sucked, and sensing that only I knew, would be as terrible as knowing I’d stormed it and seeing that nobody cared.
If you don’t make art with a few friends, or learn to share the process (with a trusted editor say, or a backstage collaborator, like Elton John and Bernie Taupin) the disjoint between the making and the consumption of your art will seem like a delusion, or a hallucination. The audience are applauding. Or maybe they are booing. Are they mad? Or are you?
It suddenly struck me as a terrifying thought: what if you couldn’t ask anyone?
Would you be unhappy, or angry? Maybe you’d seek solace in something to numb that feeling of alienation. Bob Monkhouse – a fine solo performer – used to say ‘never go on alone’, about the triple whisky he’d drink before a show. Maybe, as many solo performers do, you’d reach for the only friend who did understand - that big whisky - and make really good friends with it offstage. Or maybe you’d seek comfort from the audience, needing them to come home with you and keep providing that the buzz of slightly empty approbation-without-comprehension.
If solo artists weren’t making stuff in isolation, maybe it would be easier. Maybe having an Andrew Ridgeley, or a rest-of-the-Beatles, a best mate or two, along for the ride makes it easier to stay sane. Maybe it’s why when bands and collaborators and sketch groups and all these creative gangs stop being mates, able to trust each other’s view from the stage, when they break into solo acts, they start to go a bit mad and fly apart. If you’re not standing in exactly the same place, looking out, side-by-side, able to ask each other what you can see, you won’t trust each other’s take on the work you make, and you’ll lose something vital in negotiating the disjoints between making stuff and consuming stuff.
Perhaps that’s the key to the strange, brittle, pain of the stand-up and the solo performer, the loneliness of the writer in the garret. That they have to negotiate their reaction to their own work, and process that weird, lonely comedown without anyone able to see the world from their point of view.
I wonder why people do it.
I bet it’s really hard.
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