The Horned God

The difficult second album. The difficult second series. The difficult second season. Every artist or sportsperson or person or person or person says the second time is always the hardest. I lost my virginity to a one-armed woman called Bruce in a skip at the Flemish-French boarder-check. I was 31. My second time was with a blood-relative. Yeah. I guess you could say the second time was the hardest.
We really struggled to care much about what happened to our show at Dalstone initially. Half of us were still high on the fumes of Brixton the previous weekend. The other half had crashed and weren’t ready to hit again (with the exception of Panos. He’d fallen asleep on the night bus and was now writing letters full-time to his new pen-pal he’d met at Colliers Wood tube station.) We feared that we were about to lose control over our show as we were backed into a corner by time constraints and the physical and artistic demands of the new venue: this time we would have to take the show to our audience with no dark corners to hide away in like in Brixton – this would have to be theatre on their terms, not ours. And we had 5 days to make it all happen. From scratch.
In the end the restrictions were a blessing. Entering the audience’s space meant we had to please them. Pleasing the audience is not a founding tenant of theatre. Look closely and you’ll see that most theatre, most art, is made for the indulgence of the artist. It’s masturbation. Artists are wankers in the most literal sense. But we weren’t wankers.
We were prostitutes.
And since money and sex are the only things that really exist anyway, prostitution seems a pretty honest art form. To me. But then what do I know. I was a virgin at 31. Arriving at Dalstone there wasn’t the calm that there had been the previous week. We weren’t well rehearsed this time. Materials were missing, scripts were unfinished (some hadn’t been started), and there was total disagreement over the dramaturgical purpose of the show. Some personal relationships had been challenged since Brixton, you couldn’t say this was a ‘happy’ group. At 8.00pm, 2 hours before show time I left my shit in the hands of Providence and bunked off to watch a lecture by a man who reckoned he’d discovered pyramids in Bosnia that were communicating extra terrestrially. He was dressed well and spoke without an accent. He reminded me of Tom the gardener who used to do our lawn when I was a child. When Tom was arrested they took his computer and external hard-drive too. I ate 3 donuts and left.
The thing that struck me most about the show is how every single person I met that night will remember me forever. I don’t remember a single one of them.
Maybe I am a wanker.