Morrissey, Manchester Arena, 28 July 2012

When they erect statues to the heroes of modern Manchester, Sir Alex Ferguson is probably guaranteed a place in the pantheon and so, if results continue to go their way, is Manchester City's manager Roberto Mancini.  A spot is possibly also reserved for Morrissey, who carries the flame for his home city around the globe.  But whilst there may be 'no place like Hulme', he archly informed the audience at the Manchester arena that whilst he had recently been given the keys to the city of Tel Aviv, no such honour had yet been forthcoming from the good burghers of Manchester.

It may be that heroic status will be denied Morrissey because of his apparent willingness to grasp the  nettle of controversy whenever the opportunity arises.  His drummer's bass drums sported the Israeli national flag despite the mixed feelings some fans may have about him touring there.  If that were not provocative enough, the band were sporting 'We Hate William and Kate' t-shirts and the singer acerbically remarked that he hoped his audience had survived the 'moronic Diamond Jubilee'.

His audience of devotees lapped it up.  If Morrissey was not complaining about something, then that would suggest that their hero was not well.  As it was, he seemed to be in fine form, launching into You Have Killed Me and Every Day Is Like Sunday before moving on to I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris and Ouija Board, Oiuja Board.

If anything, the band were too muscular, with plenty of mid set guitar histrionics wailing over material that was unfamiliar and bludgeoning the crowd into submission.  The audience wanted to singalongaMoz but this was a request the self styled most curmudgeonly man in rock seemed disinclined to indulge.  For much of the middle of the set he belted out less well known songs, making for a leaden twenty minutes or so, whilst the big screen video on factory farming that accompanied Meat Is Murder did nothing to lighten the mood.

But finally Morrissey relented and opened his box of magic tricks. The fairy dust that he can sprinkle over any performance is, of course, selections from the Smiths' back catalogue.  After years of denial, these songs have increasingly featured in his concerts in recent years and the first to be unveiled was a pulsating How Soon Is Now, which ended on a throbbing synthesizer riff, to be followed later on by Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me before the show concluded with the massed choirs of the arena belting out the words to Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want and an encore of a vibrant Still Ill.

His legions of adoring fans will continue to follow him, but if Morrissey wants to attract gig goers other than those who merely wish to worship at his shrine, he needs to polish up that set list.

Russell Kane Chorley Little Theatre 20 May 2012

Russell Kane packed more into a sixty minute set at Chorley Little Theatre than most stand ups manage in two hours but, as he said himself, he does talk at twice the speed of most comics.  He was off to Blackpool for a charity gig after his Chorley appearance and the rate at which he delivers his act was like being on a seaside rollercoaster.


Barely pausing for breath during his Manscaping set he leapt about the stage in an athletic performance.  He mimicked everything from Olympic mum door knocking, which featured audience members Amanda from Chorley against a woman from North Carolina, to Lancastrians being poisoned by drinking Yorkshire Tea.  He also collapsed to the floor as he imagined Northern women crawling gratefully out of the bedroom and into the garden to hug a warm rock because their men won’t.


In truth, it wasn’t just Northern men who were the subject of his material but men in general.  He talked about his relationship with his father, how women deal with relationship crises better and mothers’ relationships with their sons.  He painted telling portraits of men getting grumpier as they get older, which for some reason led my partner to prod me quite hard, and how they find his material less funny as the evening wears on and their bladders get fuller.


Going to the loo during a Russell Kane set is a risky business, as you are likely to be teased as you leave the room and talked about when you're not in it.  When one woman admitted that the man next to her was her brother but that she didn't know him, Kane wondered if they'd been brought up at different foster homes.  Even the intelligent looking chap who tried to make himself inconspicuous by ducking down as he left the auditorium was not immune, with Kane imitating him wondering 'is he going to do anything with prime numbers?'  On learning that a teenage audience member he was talking to was called Cavan, Kane wondered if he'd been found in a cave and went off on a riff about how Lancashire children are discovered near the cliffs: 'And this is our daughter Igneous Bed.'


He finished with a story about the snobbery that he encountered on a first class train journey to Cambridge with a final twist that, although slightly predictable, was still funny.


Whilst there was plenty afterwards, there wasn't a lot of applause during Russell Kane's set - he just doesn't give his audience time to stop and reflect before firing off the next gag.


Trains also featured in the set of Kane's support, Iain Stirling, or more particularly getting locked in the toilet of one with a fellow passenger.  The story had the person next to me crying with laughter. Edinburgh born Stirling also neatly wove together stories about his Auntie Pam, a drunken punter at a Newcastle gig and his mate's posh girlfriend.  Stand ups at Chorley don’t always feature a support act, but Stirling was well worth his twenty five minute slot.


Together, Kane and Stirling were a winning combination and the best night's comedy at Chorley Little Theatre for a while.

Shappi Khorsandi, Chorley Little Theatre, 18 May 2012

Comedian Shappi Khorsandi was nearing the end of her act at a packed Chorley Little Theatre when a group of men trooped in from the bar carrying drinks. Her gentle chiding of their decision to put lager ahead of laughter – ‘you’re like characters from Viz’ - won her sympathetic applause from the audience, most of whom were enjoying the show. Chorley Little Theatre plays host to a lot of comedy, but a comedy club where the punters can wander freely to and from the bar while the stand up is in mid flow it is not.

In truth this was another coup for Chorley Little Theatre and a full house had turned out to see Ms Khorsandi, who wanted to know who’d heard her on Radio 4, seen her on Michael McIntyre or ‘just been dragged along?'

She hadn’t heard of Chorley - ‘I thought it was somewhere near London’ – and engaged with members of the audience throughout the auditorium to find out who was there with friends. When one woman explained that she’d met her friends through Rainbows which were 'little brownies' Khorsandi replied: 'I thought we'd got past all that.'

It was her first foray into tackling the casual racism she has encountered since arriving in the UK from Iran in the 1970s with her parents. As a child her brother responded to taunts of 'Oi, Gandhi! with 'Oi, Churchill!' and she recently criticised a national newspaper for allowing its dating site members to choose the skin colour of potential partners. When the man handling her complaint suggested a date she wrote back declining his offer: 'Too brown.'

Khorshandi handles the subjects of parenthood and moving to another country with aplomb. Her riff on the topic of siblings, the central theme of the show, started off as an affectionate portrait of her older brother Peyvand, but made some wry observations on the attitudes of parents towards growing numbers of children, and how the third child of the family gets neglected, a comment that resonated with my youngest-of-three-siblings partner.

Going through a divorce, she revelled in explicit details of her adult sex life, including a fling with a rock star, and some audience members will never be able to watch The Good Life on TV in the same light, but her gag about the Edinburgh Festival puppeteer who tried to put his hand up her skirt (‘you’re not at work now’) was the highlight of this section.

Her strongest and most distinctive material revolves around her family and her stories of arriving in England from her time in pre Revolutionary Iran, including watching children’s television: ‘We had the Magic Roundabout but Florence had to wear a hijab’. The Wombles was also different, Orinoco being blown to bits after the family were forced to serve as minesweepers in the Iran-Iraq war. Morph was the first non white person she saw on English television.

Her father was once the subject of an assassination plot and even this gets woven into the act. The 10 year old Khorsandi writes to Ayatollah Khomeini, apologising that she hasn’t written in Farsi but ‘I’m dyslexic in two languages’ and pleading that she loves her dad ‘but I love my brother more.’ He didn't write back. But when she later visits Iran she’s pleased to see that on the signed execution warrant the Ayatollah had underlined that the children should not be harmed.

Other vignettes included her auntie visiting England and, after experiencing ten years of the Iran-Iraq war in a bomb shelter, going out on Bonfire Night and throwing herself to the floor at the first sound of fireworks.

At the conclusion of a ninety minute set, she appeared genuinely pleased at the reception she’d received. ‘You're nice, Chorley,’ she said, and seemed to mean it. A shame those members of the audience who chose to go to the bar couldn't have paid her the same respect.

Elvis Costello - Manchester Apollo - 12 May 2012

Like a fine wine Elvis Costello justs get better with age. That's the only sensible conclusion anyone who witnessed his two and a half hour show at the Manchester Apollo could reach. Bringing his Spectacular Spinning Songbook tour to town after an extended 2011 US tour, Costello (as his alter ego Napoleon Dynamite) arrived with his backing band the Imposters, a big wheel containing a selection of 40 songs or song themes and a go-go dancer in black fishnet stockings and red PVC high heeled boots.  Add to that an encyclopaedic musical knowledge, a full house of Costello fans and a chart history stretching back 35 years, and the audience were in for a treat. From the opening bars of Hope You're Happy Now through to Pump It Up, Costello roamed through his back catalogue via Cilla Black and Charles Aznavour's She, and even managed to throw in a version of the Rolling Stones' Out Of Time.  The big difference between this and most shows you'll pay good money to see is that the set list hadn't been typed out and gaffer taped to the mic stand beforehand. Instead audience members were invited up on stage by Costello's gorgeous female assistant to spin the wheel, with the point at which it stopped determining which songs the band tackled.  "Where it stops nobody knows", said Costello, but the wheel picked out hit after hit from Alison to Oliver's Army. With an ethusiastic and energy that would put entertainers half his age to shame (to call him a mere musician or singer/songwriter would be to understate the role he undertakes each night as emcee cum ringmaster in curating the show), Costello prowls the stage like a cross between Jerry Springer and a black panther, wisecracking as he goes and descending into the audience to sing some of the numbers, even appearing in the balcony. At one point, Costello span the wheel himself and artificially stopped it in order to land on the theme 'Joanna' ("well if you can't cheat in Manchester, where can you?") enabling keyboard impresario Steve Naive to launch into a couple of songs.  A personal highlight was a joyous Talking In The Dark, but in a set of this length there were several high points. Anyone returning to Costello's career after 35 years will be surprised to see the angry young man of My Aim Is True having mellowed into a vaudevillian entertainer who so obviously enjoys entertaining his audience.  But it didn't seem incongruous that he could play Tramp The Dirt Down (which envisages the day that a former prime minister is finally buried) and yet have his audience leave at the end of the evening to Morecambe & Wise's Bring Me Sunshine.  This was rock'n'roll as wholesome family entertainment with something for everyone.  Long may the Spectacular Spinning Songbook continue to revolve.

Mark Steel, Chorley Little Theatre, 21 April 2012

Chorley Little Theatre was predictably sold out for Mark Steel's In Town tour when it, er, hit town.  Steel is a stalwart on the comedy circuit with a left wing credibility that would make Ken Livingstone blush.  However on this tour he played down the socialism to highlight some of Britain's lesser known towns with accompanying slideshow and following his successful Radio 4 series on this theme. The audience was treated to tales about the Get Carter car park in Gateshead and a drunken Education Minister on the Isle of Man through to Walsall's hippo (don't rush). Steel mused on the perils of delivering a tailor made show to a local audience: 'As I was leaving Winchester, a chap said to me "Good job you were playing Winchester, seeing as how you have such a lot of Winchester material in your set".' Steel had not been to Chorley before.  Prior to arriving on stage he spent the day getting to know the town, learning about Vimto and the history of unrest from two centuries before.  He had also done some exploring.  'I like how all the shops are closed.  Stops people getting in your way.'  A highlight was wondering why the Mormons chose to build their UK church in Chorley.  When the audience volunteered that the founder of the Pilgrim Fathers was a local he went off on a riff about Chorley as the focal point of all religions.  'I suppose Jesus was from round here?' He also spent part of his afternoon watching Chorley FC: 'I was late.  The gates were locked, to prevent a huge queue of people from getting in' and hoped that the Magpies might get promotion to a more attractively named division than the Evostik Premier, 'like the Superglue League.' It was an instructive evening for Steel, who learnt that what differentiates Chorley cakes from Eccles cakes is that they're made from short crust pastry.  Aside from the local jokes, he also reflected on hitting 50, having a grumpy teenage son and the perils of cycling.  With a show weighing in at over two and a half hours, he might have kept going had a woman on the front row not pointed out that she had missed the last bus home to Astley Village.  'Where Cromwell lost his shoe,' said Steel.  He had done his homework, and his audience went home entertained and educated.

Robin Ince, Chorley Little Theatre, 19 April 2012

Thanks to Robin Ince I'll be drinking black coffee tomorrow morning.  Not because I was put off drinking milk by his sketch asking how many audience members would eat something made from human breast milk (more than in Wolverhampton, apparently, and the highest number so far on his Happiness Through Science tour) but because I came away from his gig at Chorley Little Theatre with a reading list going round in my head running from Carl Sagan to Noam Chomsky and Stephen Weinberg by way of Erwin Schrodinger's cat.  The mental cataloguing of the names of three Nobel Prize winning physicists caused me to forget on the drive home that I needed to buy milk for breakfast. This show was as far from the Jim Davidson branch of stand up comedy as it is possible to get with dark matter, stellar nurseries and the Large Hadron Collider all thrown into the mix.  Add a dash of Laurel and Hardy and a pinch of Melanie Phillips baiting (she of the Daily Mail) and you begin to get a flavour of what Robin Ince's act is all about.  Or perhaps not. Described as a 'militant atheist', although not a label he accepts, Ince brought his two hour show to a two thirds full theatre comprised largely of an older audience no doubt attracted by his Radio 4 programme The Infinite Monkey Cage with Dr Brian Cox.  The programme's title attracted complaints two months before the show was written, complainants to the BBC apparently not understanding the theory that an infinite number of monkeys given an infinite number of typewriters could produce the works of Shakespeare.  'Ninety typewriters,' suggested Ince, 'and you'll get a Dan Brown.' I can't ruin Robin Ince's act by reproducing his material word for word because I couldn't keep up with the torrent of ideas pouring from the stage, and because I'm not a scientist. Neither is Ince, but his enthusiasm for his subject, whether it's explaining the reptilian brain or why he doesn't believe Mr Potato Head would stop to offer Barbie a lift in Toy Story 2, meant that two hours flew by. It's a very rare stand up gig indeed that ends with the comic reading a passage from a book written by US physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman about the death of his wife.  Ince finished by saying 'I've stolen two hours of your life, Chorley, and you're not getting it back!'. I for one was happy to be robbed.

Mike Gunn and Sean Collins

Mike Gunn & Sean Collins
Chorley Little Theatre
3rd February 2012

Chorley Little Theatre is becoming a regular stopping off point on the Northern comedy circuit, punching above its weight by attracting household names such as Jeremy Hardy and Jack Dee, whose recently announced gig sold out in two hours.

Sadly the venue was a long way from being full for Mike Gunn and Sean Collins, which can only be described as a missed opportunity for Chorley comedy fans who decided to pass on this one. Not that it put the performers off. Comedians do like to make audience members the butt of their humour and in a less than half full theatre it's like shooting fish in a barrel. In Chorley the fish were leaping out of the barrel with targets painted on their bodies, with one man admitting to taping old episodes of Ground Force so that he can ogle Charlie Dimmock.

Gunn could hardly miss when presented with that target, and maybe it's the readiness of Chorley stand up fans to be humiliated that makes the venue such a hit with comedians. Gunn is a Londoner with a dry delivery somewhat reminiscent of Jo Brand and the looks of one time 'They Think It's All Over' regular Lee Hurst. Admitting he is 'married to a ginge', he hopes his children get their genes from him on the basis that it would be better to have no rather than red hair.

Unusually, they played this as a two hander, with Collins warming up for Gunn in the first half and Gunn returning the favour at the start of the second before both men appeared on stage for the last 25 minutes. Collins is a reflective Canadian who has lived in the UK for eight years and loves how we expect our train service to be terrible whereas querying if his train might be late in Germany led to the rail officials thinking he was a terrorist with some prior knowledge of a delay. He’d done his research on Chorley and 'there's no other night life, right?' His second half set was performed sat on a stool a la Dave Allen.

The show ended with them on stage together playing comedy tag, with one cracking a gag before handing the topic over to the other, a format they said they enjoyed. This was less successful than each on their own, partly because neither man had the chance to get into the flow of things before it was time to hand the baton back.

All in all, a good night's comedy. A riff on bingo and paedophilia and some advice from Collins on how to get a girlfriend in Canada using a bear trap ('after 3 or 4 days stuck in that they'll do anything you want just to get out') closed the show and left the audience happy. Just a shame there wasn't more of one.