My Booky Wook 2 Read Online Free Page B

February.”
    “February? The existence of Februaries has never been categorically proven – I’ll do it!” Of course when February comes, as February must, I regret my blithe agreement and sneak off behind my vegetarianism.
    My excitement on learning that Nik and I had secured the NMEs duly ripened into horror as the day drew near – it became an ordeal. The room would be chock-a-block with alcoholics and alcohol and eccentricity and egos, and everyone would be trying so hard to be so cool that our common humanity would be as relevant to the assembly as a recipe for a damn good moussaka. On an inexplicable whim the editor of New Musical Express (the magazine behind the ceremony), the boyish Conor McNicholas, decided the set should resemble the inside of Dr Who’s Tardis. So at one end of this flat, dank booze hall was a sci-fi set that to me seemed non sequitous and pointless and looked like it wanted the attendees to love it. The nerdy set that would be providing my backdrop made me more nervous. Staring at it with impending dread, I reflected. Life is not a postcard of life, life is essential and about detail, minutiae and trivia. Tiny anxious pangs, heartburn and stubbed toes. “There’s something in my eye. My mouth tastes funny. Have I chipped my tooth?” Titchy, Prufrock facts. Not a broad sweep of a Rothko brush, but pop art dots, like Liechtenstein’s.
    As was my custom at that time I was with Sharon (cockney boxer, Babs Windsor laugh, Kathy Burke warmth), my stylist, Nicola (flirty young mum, everyone’s nan, lickable skin, loves indiscriminately), who does my make-up, and Matt (same twerp from Chapter 1). It was necessary then as now to ensconce myself in familiarity, estuary accents, working-class values, because after all, it’s all just a bit of a fuckin’ laugh, all this, innit? You don’t wanna take life too seriously. If you don’t laugh you’ll fuckin’ cry. I need that kind of attitude around me as I approach the stage, because within it’s all Mozart’s Requiem for Death and livid Francis Bacon pinks. I lay charred birds at Tiresias’s feet as I stare down at the beast. I need ritual. Theatre was born of ritual, religion was born of ritual. If I should die think only this of me, “I thought it would be funny.”
    The yips, the condition that afflicts darts players and golfers, is the inability to let go of the dart or to take the final putt. Darts players before throwing the dart see a line leading from the tip of their arrow to the treble twenty or the bullseye. (As a child I always thought of the bullseye as more important, as it’s got a better name. When I discovered treble twenty’s superiority I thought, “The dog out of Oliver is not called treble twenty, it’s called Bullseye.” It’s a good name and an evocative image, the eye of the bull. Treble twenty is just arithmetic.) The perfect visualisation of that line sometimes makes it difficult for them to relinquish the dart and I understand that. It’s acknowledging the point at which you interface with reality. Most sports are reactive, interactive, a giddy blur of controlled chaos like football or boxing, you against a swirl of oppositional energy. But the dartboard is never going to come hurtling towards you and slap you round the chops, so unless you seduce it, unless you part the thighs of the oche and make that move, nothing’s going to happen. Ritual is necessary to cope with that obligation.
    At the time of the NMEs I began to accumulate the people, the things and ideas that I need to succeed. Sometimes I have cause to reflect, as I walk out in front of 5,000 people or host a big event, “Fucking hell, it is still just me in a toilet,” the same as it was the first time I went on to a stage at Grays Comprehensive School to chubbily inhabit Fat Sam in Bugsy Malone. Then as now, my bowel having loosened, my heart palpitates faster until eventually my mind moves into alignment and focus.
    Now I’ve conducted that