Well, it’s been a day of unrelenting arse in Blue Man Towers, one that’s tested
even my almost limitless depths of cynicism. The morning started as it meant to
go on, with the news that the company who interviewed me yesterday afternoon, for
the first job that’s come up in this whole miserable month that I’d actually want
to do, aren’t going to take me on because they think I’d get bored with the only
position they have to offer – if they had anything more senior, they said, they’d
have hired me on the spot.
This is some sort of first – missing out on a job because I sold myself too well.
I considered assuring them that I really wasn’t as much of a catch as they might
have thought, letting them know that, for example, I could be comfortably relied
upon to torpedo any morale that they might have in the office with a combination
of pointed sarcasm and dedicated nihilism. But in the end, I elected to cling on
to whatever tattered dignity remains to me.
I may end up eating dignity on toast come the end of the month.
Never mind, I thought, I’ve always got the firm that I’ve internally nicknamed Successories-Lovers
to fall back on. The agency had already called twice to let me know how keen this
mob were on me, and I’d set up an appointment to go in tomorrow and complete the
fifteen-minute test that, I was assured, was the last formality before they made
me a job offer. Alright, so I’d be looking at soul-destroying corporate drudgery,
but as against that I wouldn’t be looking at, say, starving to death in a gutter
with a bottle of meths and a sign that reads Will Rant For Food.
Then, at half past five, the agency call again. Successories-Lovers have extended
a temp’s contract to fill the job I’d interviewed for, so there wasn’t a position
to fill any more. No, there’s no other vacancies they need in the near future. Yes,
they’d been impressed and would hang onto my CV.
Well, whoop-di-fucking-doo.
So, Skid Row beckons once again, and the only crumb of comfort is that it’s Skid
Row the metaphor for impoverishment, not Skid Row the bloody awful Nineties hair-rawk
combo.
The England cricket team are currently buying into the day’s general theme with
what can only be described as a shameful, spineless capitulation to India in the
World Cup. And my bag of comfort-food Crunchie Bits has gone mysteriously missing.
If anyone needs me, I’ll be... well, bloody surprised, given the events of the last
twenty-four hours.
Oh, before I go and try and drink myself to death – the observant among you may
have noticed a few new links on the spiffy sidebar on the left of the screen (or
the right of the screen if you’re reading this standing on your head). The big one
is The Ossuary, which is where my posts will disappear to when they disappear from
this page. I’ve also added permanent links to Dark
Times, the best Bill Hicks site on the net, and Demotivators,
who were mocking Successories a long time before I got in on the act. Bastards.
Tomorrow, since I suddenly have time on my hands, expect me to finish the FAQ I’ve
been fiddling with all week, and to add the second season of my
Madden Bengal franchise to the archives. I might even get around to sorting
out the little niggles with the site’s visual format that have been bugging me,
but at the end of the day I’m very, very lazy, so don’t hold your breath. Now, if
only I’d thought to share that last insight with my interviewers yesterday...
To make up for the infrequency of recent updates - it’s a long one tonight. Stack
up on Kendall Mint Cake, crampons, oxygen tanks and nice warm clothing, then report
back here. Ready? Here we go. A prize goes to anyone who makes it
all the way to the end
Today marks the 9th anniversary of the death of Bill
Hicks. The most brilliant, incendiary comedian I’ve ever seen died of pancreatic
cancer at his family home in Little Rock, Arkansas on the 26th of February, 1994,
just as he seemed on the verge of translating his long-time cult following into
full-on mainstream success. Hicks was 32.
If you’ve never seen or heard
Hicks in full flow, your life is the poorer. I was 16 when I first saw Revelations,
the brilliant TV special he produced for Channel 4 here in the UK, and it had an
effect on me like nothing I’ve encountered before or since. Bill Hicks was not a
remarkable-looking man – possibly one of the reasons his work appealed as much as
it did. Like me, Hicks was shortish, scruffy and awkward-looking, carrying too much
weight and wearing his hair at an untidy mid-length that was impossible to coax
into any style that seemed even remotely fashionable. Unlike me, he seemed completely
fearless - utterly indifferent, or even actively hostile, to his audience and what
they might think of him or what he had to say. Laugh or no laugh, nervous applause
or shocked silence, Hicks didn't seem to care, arrogantly stalking about the stage
like the T-Rex at the start of Jurassic Park - the one that you just know is going
to trample those electric fences and scarf Tourist McNuggets by the end of the film
- delivering his material between obscenities in an unhurried Texan drawl. And what
fucking material. The LA riots, American Gladiators, the assassination of JFK,
using terminally ill people as stuntmen, fundamentalism, the excesses of the media,
sex, drugs and rock and roll stars sucking Satan’s cock... To a socially inept,
desperately naïve teenaged boy in a medium-sized commuter town just outside
London who was still a year away from having his first girlfriend, it was like this
man had beamed down from another fucking planet.
Some say that his work seems dated now, which just goes to show the extent to which
some people need things fucking well spelled out for them. To me, re-watching Revelations
or Relentless, Hicks’ routines seem eerily relevant – all you need to do is change
the names of the players. For Debbie Gibson, read Britney Spears. For the Gulf,
read Afghanistan. For New Kids On The Block, substitute whichever boy-band is currently
enjoying their five minutes of semi-fame. For George Bush, um... well... just go
with Bush 2.0. Like Shakespeare,
Bill Hicks is not of his time, but for all time. He, along with my dad, defined
my moral universe, shaped my sense of right and wrong. Like my dad, I didn’t agree
with everything Hicks said, but like my dad, he changed the way I looked at things,
he changed the way I thought about things – bottom line, he changed me. For better
or worse, I’m still not sure.
Thanks, Bill. For everything.
Most of all, though, thanks for dying young.
I mean, yes, on the one hand it’s nothing short of tragic that you were cut down
at the height of your creative powers, when you had so much more to offer. And yes,
I’d give a hell of a lot to have heard your take on the circus act that was the
Clinton administration, on New Labour’s Third-Way doublethink, and, especially,
on the “War” On “Terror”.
But on the other hand, your conveniently premature passing has spared me from watching
your slow descent into becoming everything you ever hated, and everything you ever
made me hate. Your cruelly random shuffling off of this mortal coil means that you’ll
always be the rebel devil on my shoulder whispering that none of what I’m being
told is real, that I need to trust nothing and find my own truths. You’ve joined
the pantheon, with James Dean and Jimi Hendrix and Marc Bolan, of idols who’ve never
had time to reveal their feet of clay, who’ve never had a chance to sell out, who’ve
never appeared in a film like Armageddon,
or whored themselves to sell fast-food or mobile telephones, or released a fucking
triple album... Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Because they all do, you know. Every man has his price, and sooner or later, if
you’ve had a modicum of success in the popular eye, they’ll find it. Oh, I know
there are a few superstars who are sans reproach, who have always followed their
own muse irrespective of where the money is or, in some cases, irrespective of good
sense – David Bowie, John Lydon (Note - this piece was written before Johnny
L's appearance on car-crash TV spectacular I'm A C-List Celebrity, Get Me Into The
Tablods. Even the Blue Man gets it wrong once in a while), Peter Gabriel, Iggy
Pop – and I suppose, Bill, that you could have been one of those. But I can’t risk
that you’d have let me down like so many others have, and so I’m glad you’re dead.
It would have killed me – metaphorically speaking, of course, I don’t mean to be
insensitive toward your vitally-challenged status – to see you go down the same
road as, say, Ben Elton, who was a pant-dampeningly funny political comedian throughout
the eighties and early nineties, but whose recent career includes writing the lyrics
to an Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical that was piss-poor even by Andrew Lloyd-Webber
musical standards. Or Ridley Scott,
Ridley-fucking-Scott, who gave up any sort of artistic pretension years ago, and
is now plainly just chasing the gross. Gladiator,
for fuck’s sake. Hannibal! Don’t
get me wrong - I don’t expect performers with political opinions to starve to death
in the gutter, of course I don’t, but it still bites when I see people whose work
I’ve enjoyed, even admired – Rik Mayall, PJ O’Rourke, Alexi Sayle, John Peel – selling
their objectivity and integrity to become hucksters. Fuck it, Bill, I don’t need
to tell you this, it’s something you taught me...
“Here’s the deal, folks. You do a commercial, you’re off the Artistic Roll-Call
– forever. End of story, okay? You’re another corporate fucking shill, you’re another
whore at the capitalist gang-bang, and if you do a commercial there’s a price on
your head, everything you say is suspect and every word that comes out of your mouth
is now like a turd falling into my drink.”
I can’t afford for you to do a Levellers on me, hocking your music to sell soup.
I still remember the shock of discovering that Terry
Gilliam had made an ad for Nike. Nike, of all contributing-nothing-but-false-aspirations-to-the-world,
3rd-world-labour and inner-city-urban-poor exploiting people! Terry, Terry, why
hast thou forsaken me?
Then there’s U2. Christ. I mean, love them or hate them (and I went for both options
over the course of their career), you couldn’t ever point the finger at U2 and accuse
them of doing anything but practicing what they preached. Wherever there was war
or hardship, wherever rainforests were being destroyed, or wherever man was being
generally shitty to his fellow Man, there was Bono boring us all to fucking death
about it. You might not agree with his politics, you might sort-of see where he’s
coming from but think he’s a tosser anyway, but what you couldn’t do was
question his integrity.
Then came last year’s Superbowl. The high temple of material-driven capitalism.
The most sacred shrine of those companies whose raison d’être is polluting
our physical, social and spiritual world. And in the middle of Operation “Enduring
Freedom” (aka Operation Two Wrongs Don’t Make A Right), U2 appear as the centrepiece
of a tribute to the armed forces who were at that very moment bombing the fuck out
of an impoverished nation whose terrorist government those same armed forces had
put into power twenty years previously. This, lest we forget, is the band who once
released the classic anti-Troubles anthem, Sunday,
Bloody Sunday, an irony that seemed to pass everyone by:
“And the battle’s just begun – There’s many lost, tell me who has won?”
Sting repeated the trick this year, but, you know, I could give a shit about fucking
Sting.
You’re Peter Pan to me, Bill. The little idealist who’ll never grow up. And I need
that. Because the sharpness of my resentment, the strength of my sense of betrayal
when these people abandon the principles they held when they were younger to suck
on the corporate teat isn’t because they’ve let me down – it’s because I can see
my own standards changing, pragmatic compromises creeping in as I get older and
lazier and more apathetic. Their hypocrisy reflects my hypocrisy, and I need something
to hang onto, a lighthouse beacon to guide me, steady and unchanging, if I’m not
going to go under altogether.
You’re pretty damned dark as guiding lights go, Bill. But I know you’ll never change.
