Red Lion, Soho
Ever since an ex-girlfriend had given me the idea for Pulp Boy about a year ago it has been a rumbling mini side project, just a thing to use as procrastination to avoid planning an Edinburgh show.
But I have since gathered a worrying habit of procrastinating to avoid writing Pulp Boy, meaning my flat is the tidiest its been for ages, but the pages are still blank.
I had cobbled together a draft of this story of a boy who speaks in Pulp lyrics, if not only becuase in a couple of weeks I’ve been booked in to do it at the Leicester Comedy Festival, no idea if it will be one of those big deals or just another gig in another room, but better to be safe than sorry.
So this evening I rocked up to the old faithful Red Lion pub in Soho to preview a show I’d barely written. The audience had just sat through an hour with Phil Klein and were somewhat restless… I wished I’d stayed at home.
I started, they were bantery, this suited me my twenty minutes of calming them down were twenty minutes of a delay before I started reading Pulp Boy and they started to jeer.
I exhausted nearly every trick in the book, but eventually thanks to my cunning (but albeit accidental) use of reverse psychology they were demanding I start reading it.
So I did
And, they loved it this braying mob turned into a bunch of kittens as I read this story- well most of it, I skipped past acres of typing that only in the pressurised environment of reading out in front of strangers became apparent were dull and pointless.
But it went down well, I had some confidence in the idea again, should have done this months ago.