The spring tour of the band I’m in is winding down: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Winchester, Brighton, and back to London. The next time we get out there, things will be different. There will be new songs, and some long neglected tunes will be resuscitated. But the chat between the music – the jokes and anecdotes and wordy introductions compiled and adjusted over the course of the tour as part of the necessary grease to keep things moving – all that will get binned.
Most of the jokes have done a year’s service, and been around the country once. The pockets of the clothes I wear on stage are stuffed with scraps of paper covered in notes. One scrap contains a banjo joke allegedly written by AI (it’s not; I made it up). Another holds a long-winded explanation of why the aforementioned AI joke is funny (it isn’t, and neither is the explanation, according to the bass player). On a good night I might not need to resort to any of it, but if somebody breaks a string, I’m ready.
