March of the Lemmings Read online

  Chronicle of May’s fiasco foretold in a urine stain

  11 June 2017

  It’s 8.29 a.m. on Friday now, and I have to file this column in two hours, thirty-one minutes. I awoke at 6 a.m. to watch the bloody election results coagulate, in a hotel room in Tunbridge Wells, a town so solidly middling it has been twinned with a branch of Carluccio’s.1

  But last Sunday, I had seen Chris Martin from Coldplay cavort before a global TV audience of more than ninety nations with a visible urine stain to the right of his fly. Evidently, a poorly self-milked penis, presumably his own, had made damp contact with the inner side of his trouser.2

  In the run-up to the election, commentators used polls to predict the future. But I felt I had divined something of the unexpected flavour of our forthcoming fate from my own little set of signs and wonders. On Friday of last week, I found a mummified newt beneath a Frisbee in the nook where I store rakes, betokening woe.3 The following day, I saw Tom Stoppard staring hungrily at soup in Norfolk, prefiguring a light lunch.4 And on Sunday, I saw Chris Martin from Coldplay with a urine stain on his trousers.5

  Mark E. Smith of The Fall appeared at Glastonbury in 2015 in apparently urine-soaked slacks,6 but I believe this was a deliberate piece of stagecraft, designed to provide fans with a comical anecdote, and detractors with confirmation of their prejudices. Such is Smith’s commitment to his shaman-clown persona.

  Chris Martin from Coldplay’s urine stain, however, was all too real, and indeed it was hard to imagine how a liquid so base as urine could mark the garments of a man who seems almost angelic, as if woven from lamb’s wool and light.

  The stain was an omen, certainly, but what did it mean? Was the urine stain of the Tories going to remain on the Chris Martin from Coldplay’s trouser of British politics for some time yet? Or did Chris Martin from Coldplay’s spreading urine stain portend a spread of hope and sunshine? Either way, it was all yellow.7

  Yesterday morning, Thursday, I took a massive diversion from a Wednesday-night stand-up show in Colchester (Leave) via my North London Metropolitan Liberal Elite home (Remain) to vote in my safe Labour seat, a typically British odyssey involving multiple cancelled trains and a bomb scare in Trafalgar Square, where I understand there are now plans to fill the fourth plinth with an uplifting effigy of Chris Martin from Coldplay in urinestained trousers.

  I arrived at my Tunbridge Wells (Remain) hotel at 5 p.m. The young woman on reception said she wasn’t voting at all, as ‘they are all as bad as each other’. But they aren’t. Boris Johnson, for example, himself a lying columnist for the lying Daily Telegraph, is currently the worst one of ‘them’ all by some distance.

  At 6 p.m. on Thursday night, a world away now, I ate a soggy salad and found myself thinking about The Medusa Touch (1978), arguably Richard Burton’s finest movie, in which he plays a tortured writer of fiction whose ability to imagine terrible disasters convinces him he may actually be willing them into being. Lee Remick plays his psychiatrist. And the newsreader Gordon Honeycombe is, cruelly, cast as an actual piece of honeycomb named Gordon.

  For the last nine months, like Burton’s paranoid novelist, I have been selling the same stand-up routine nightly to audiences, advancing the idea that the secret Tory steering committee always intended Boris Johnson to be leader of the party, and that Theresa May had been put in place only as a kind of palate cleanser, a nasty-tasting mouthwash that you swill around your gums before being forced to eat actual human shit.8

  While he himself is doubtless clean as a whistle, Johnson’s renewed public appearances these last few weeks have displayed the violently belligerent and incoherent sweatiness that people with a cocaine problem take as a sign that it’s time to stop partying and seek help.

  And at 7 p.m. on Thursday, remembering Boris rampant and evidently ambitious once more, a frothing jackal circling the expiring wildebeest that is Theresa May, I found myself fearing my own Medusa Touch. Do my jokes make these awful things happen? Who am I? Should I take this minibar corkscrew and trepan my own brain to stop my worst fears becoming reality?

  Alone in my Tunbridge Wells hotel room at midnight, snorting a snowdrift of uncut Dimbleby in my post-show adrenaline high, a storm raging over the multi-storey car park, I wondered what kind of fudge of an Observer column I could concoct to file on Friday morning, when everything was uncertain and it now looked like a hung parliament was in the offing. Luckily, I had seen a urine stain on Chris Martin from Coldplay’s trousers the previous Sunday and imagined writing about that might fill a few hundred words near the start.

  Long after midnight, I ate my Marks & Spencer Harissa Spiced Roasted Almonds and weighed up a half-bottle of champagne in the minibar, which I eventually chose to ignore. I was, literally, if not a Champagne Socialist, then at least a Harissa Spiced Almond Anarchist, alone and on the loose in a hotel room in Royal Tunbridge Wells as the arrogant presumptions of the Conservatives turned to tatters. And it felt good.

  I have a show tonight in Basingstoke (Leave) and I’m mentally ticking off lines that are invalidated or changed by the shock result, but I expect the audience will be in a state of hysteria. And look at this joyful chaos! Laura Kuenssberg looks like her cat just died. It’s 11 a.m. on Friday and there’s apples all over the road. Emily Maitlis is scrabbling around to pick them up. And in a red dress, of all things.

  What was this supposed because I certainly hope it wasn’t supposed to good. Gtardkgb

  Dear me, what a typical show of nasty arrogance. P4451d

  When Coldplay performed at the One Love concert for victims of the Manchester bombing, you mean? Chris Martin is a very easy target at the best of times, but like you say, you had a deadline to hit. ID3122d

  Utterly puerile. Hexagon Nipples

  One thing for sure is no one will have pissed themselves laughing reading this. Youcantalk

  Repulsive piece and utterly unfunny as ever. Tony35

  What on earth is this tripe published for, surely it can’ t be normal, milking penis’s, what an awful picture that paints! Old Franky

  1 Theresa May had called a snap election, thinking that Labour was now so unpopular it would consolidate her majority and enable her to push through a version of Brexit unopposed. Increasingly now, I found myself writing columns that were about the very act of trying to write a column against the backdrop of Brexit. At this point, I was about halfway through the 250 or so dates of my tour, and I was surprised that the show, assembled a year previously, had not fallen completely apart in the face of events. Surely this snap election was going to kill it off, and propel the story forward in a way that rendered it irrelevant? And yet, the following morning, Theresa May’s slim victory only deepened the Brexit inertia and made even more of the material depressingly relevant. Nearly two years later, as I write this, the same personalities and the same situations remain ridiculous and awful in all the same ways.

  2 Martin was appearing on TV in live coverage of a benefit for the victims of the Manchester Arena bombing.

  3 This was true.

  4 This was also true. It was in the café of a stately home in Norfolk called Houghton Hall, which was exhibiting the sculptures of Richard Long. I took the kids there to see the abstract land art. Don’t you wish I was your dad? I first saw a Long sculpture in a gallery in, I think, Lucerne, on a school trip to Switzerland in 1983, and have loved his work ever since. I was in the school Mountain Walking Club, with some of Napalm Death, and I ended up running it. Long made it look like walking was a work of art, and there was a pig-headedness about what he was doing that appealed to me, as if the works would be completed anyway, with or without anyone’s approval. He’s the one artist I will travel to see, and I suppose there is a certain primitivist megalithic vibe to his oeuvre that chimes with lots of my other obsessions. Much of Long’s art is about the journeys that complete the finished work itself. The process is indivisible from the end product, and he often makes technique and theory explicit within his pieces. Come to think of it, I�
�ve really ripped him off, but just done it really badly, in a worthless medium.

  5 This was also true.

  6 So was this.

  7 And they say I can’t write jokes.

  8 This sentence became stand-up material. I said it 250 or more times in the end. It appears a second time later in this book. Look out for it!

  ‘Oh, Jeremy Clarkson.’ Is that any better as a Glastonbury chant?

  2 July 2017

  Jeremy Corbyn appeared at the Glastonbury CND festival, as part of an ongoing comeback more surprising than Dylan’s 1997 Time Out of Mind turnaround. Like Dylan, a contrary Corbyn refused to give his enthusiastic new fans what they wanted. A last-minute set amendment pledging to block Brexit would have displaced even The Wombles1 from all-time Glastonbury CND festival top fives. But Corbyn didn’t deliver. Once he had Islington in the palm of his hand, the New River ran through every day. He must have been mad. He never knew what he had, until he threw it all away.

  Nonetheless, Nigel Farage, a stateless Twitter golem,2 its task complete but still rampaging around the Internet with a torn-up Daily Express between its teeth, was instantly furious about the BBC coverage of Corbyn’s set. And rightly so. It is wrong of the BBC to use the licence fee to give airtime to politicians, and Farage has proven this more convincingly than anyone.

  Suddenly, cross Conservative commentators nationwide all knew what the Glastonbury CND festival was supposed to be, and who should be allowed to be on there, despite never having expressed any interest in attending it ever, because it obviously isn’t for Daily Telegraph readers, bastards and people who hate humanity.

  It would probably have been better, apparently, if the Saturday mid-afternoon slot had seen Dan ‘Dan’ Hannananananan, dressed as a pound note, introducing Mike Read singing a racist calypso in a Jamaican accent,3 over footage of migrants being beaten back into the sea with rolled-up copies of the UKIP conference brochure. I am sure the audience reaction would have been memorable.

  Personally, I think the Henley Regatta, instead of having loads of boats in it and being by a river, would be better if it featured Napalm Death, Kunt & the Gang, Yoko Ono and some Grayson Perry plates that mocked sailing, and took place in a landlocked desert full of ferocious wolves. I suppose it’s not aimed at me.

  Know this! There is a genuine photo online of Jeremy Clarkson and David Cameron shooting the breeze at the cheese bloke from Blur’s cheese and music festival in Oxfordshire in 2011. This image, more than any other, which should never have happened, told us that the ’60s were finally over. Did Free Festival founder Wally Hope die so Jeremy Clarkson could eat a Groucho Club cheesemaker’s pop cheese?4

  Tories like Cameron and Clarkson should not be at rock festivals. If two such turds had turned up at Glastonbury in the ’80s, they would both have been fatally stuffed face-first into a deep trench latrine by hordes of psilocybe-crazed convoy-dwellers, the sound of Black Uhuru’s Youth of Eglington5 growing ever more faint as their fat pink ears filled with festival-goer faeces.

  Ironically, Clarkson would have then escaped the far more ignominious fate of spending his twilight years manufacturing bespoke controversy to an ever-diminishing audience of impotent Level 42 fans who think ice cream is gay, like a failed dictator awaiting arrest, yet still making futile proclamations, in his supermarket denim-lined Amazon firestick bunker.

  You! You awful people! You cannot have our festivals! You have taken everything else! Our health service! Our libraries! Our very air! Even our future! Leave us our filthy fields! We will always have Glastonbury! No pop music for you!

  But what do I know? I attended the Glastonbury CND festival a dozen times or so, usually as a performer, from the mid-’80s to the mid-’00s. Every year, the late Malcolm Hardee would host the comedy tent and open by observing, ‘I remember when this was all fields.’ It never got old.

  In 1992, still awake, I saw the sun rise over a misty morning meadow, profoundly empty except for Jimmy Pursey from Sham 69, sitting high on an upturned wheelie bin, heroically topless, dragging on a cigarette and staring blurry-eyed into the distance, as if searching for an answer that had always eluded him. Either that or he’d forgotten where his tent was.6

  But eventually, rather than being a cut-and-paste Shangri-La of freak rock and folkies and topless hippy chicks, the Glastonbury CND festival came to feel to me like it was full of music I didn’t like any more, squares taking ironic pictures of themselves in front of Lionel Richie, and privileged young people wandering around eating expensive street food, while looking at their phones and saying how funny they thought Hayseed Dixie were.

  The crusties were cleared out and the hipsters had moved in to gentrify their abandoned haunts. To be fair to the Glastonbury CND festival, I now feel the same about much of London, which I once loved beyond all reason, the city redeemed in comparison to the festival only by the quality of its toilet facilities.

  The Glastonbury CND festival was changing. And I was changing too. At least we parted as friends.

  Maybe I’m romanticising things. The festival movement was always, if not middle class, then at least more bohemian than Bolshevik. After my Glastonbury CND festival sets, I was paid in food vouchers by the festival’s co-founder, an ex-debutante philanthropist called Arabella Churchill, granddaughter of our national icon, who still oversaw the circus and cabaret tents on what were now the site’s fringes, her death in 2007 severing a seam that ran back to the sensibility that first shaped the event in 1970.7

  Each year, as I signed my chit, I amused myself by trying to sneak Churchillian rhetoric into our perfunctory conversation. ‘How was your show?’ ‘We’ve all been finding it hard, Arabella, with the flooding this year, but you know what it’s like. We will never surrender.’ Arabella Churchill just smiled wryly, stubbing out her massive cigar as she petted her poodle.

  In the London Evening Standard, a weak anti-Corbyn humour piece by a man called Nick Curtis mocked the Glastonbury CND festival’s ‘perfect spread for ordinary, young, working-class music fans who can afford £238 for a ticket plus the cost of transport, organic falafel, and reiki sessions’. In the same awful paper, there are restaurant reviews for dinners for two that cost more than that, and they don’t come with thousands of different acts over hundreds of different stages. They come with some bread. And the tip doesn’t go to Greenpeace.

  This year, Jeremy Corbyn’s logical appearance at the Glastonbury CND festival seems to have reminded people that ’60s and ’70s festivals emerged from an actual un-co-opted counter-culture. Maybe they, and their attendees, will now re-embrace the radical spirit that spawned them, alongside the apparently unavoidable twenty-first-century follies of glamping, Goan seafoods and selfies with Jack Whitehall.

  Oh, the times they are a-changing. Jang jangy jangy jang jangy jangy jang jangy jangy jang!

  Lee occasionally slips in something quite funny, but mostly he slips in dog shit. Freddy Starmer

  More left wing chip on shoulder rubbish. Johnnyboy

  1 The Wombles were the first band I ever saw live, with my mum, at Birmingham Bingley Hall, circa 1974, and one which I now realise probably included, inside the furry suits, Chris Spedding (Colosseum, Geoff Wayne’s War of the Worlds, Sex Pistols), Stoke Newington’s Clem Cattini (drums on all 1960s and ’70s British records), Ray Cooper and maybe even Robin Le Mesurier, son of John Le Mesurier and Hattie Jacques, although he was kicked out of The Wombles at some point for marijuana possession. (This book’s editor, Andy Miller, adds: ‘The Wombles was my first concert too, at the Fairfield Halls in Croydon. The support act was pianist Bobby Crush. Someone on Twitter told me that it probably wasn’t Spedding etc. in the suits because there was a legally questionable rival bunch of Wombles on the road at the same time. Maybe it was The Pretty Things.’)

  2 That golem image again!

  3 Former BBC Radio 1 DJ Mike Read recorded a funny song in a Jamaican accent to raise money for UKIP. It was political correctness not gone mad.

 
4 Wally Hope, aka Philip Russell, was the founder of the Stonehenge Free Festival and died under mysterious circumstances in 1975. Penny Rimbaud says he inspired him to form the anarcho-punk band Crass.

  5 In my early teens, if ever I had a high temperature at night, I would suffer hallucinations in which I was crushed by falling rocks, dead animals or human bodies, and the visions would always be accompanied in my mind by the song ‘World Is Africa’, from Black Uhuru’s 1980 album Sinsemilla, or the instrumental bit from the end of ‘Youth of Eglington’. My mum would come in and have to pretend to move all the dead bodies and rocks off me until I was all right.

  6 I did actually see Jimmy Pursey doing this. He looked amazing. I can’t help thinking that on some level, he was consciously creating an iconic punk-rock image for the benefit of any stray early-morning passer-by, offering me a memory and an anecdote to keep for life. And here it is. The first time I interviewed Julian Cope, he stood over me on a chair, leaning down towards me with one booted foot up on a work surface, dressed in First World War flying ace uniform. And he was in his own kitchen! He was giving me an anecdote. It’s all showbiz.

  7 It was Arabella who ran the cabaret and circus fields. I am really glad I met Winston Churchill’s actual granddaughter.