Don’t you dare reproach yourself, you brilliant man,” says someone on the front row. Suddenly the forty-nine that remain are my chaperones, my indulgent aunties, my wing men.
I carry on as best I can, focusing on a job in which I’ve been unwittingly relegated from protagonist to extra – like Rosa Parks’s bus driver, one eye forever on the door, and eventually Kate Moss blessedly returns from her inexplicable and disruptive sojourn, having missed a good bit of stand-up. Drat. I finish, bow and go backstage, like normal.
When I come off stage, regardless of its dimensions, I’m in a fragile, volatile state. The most natural thing to do, it seems to me, is to take heroin. This is no longer an option, so I generally like to have sex. Sex is usually quite captivating and distracting and, unlike the other option that people frequently suggest – a brisk jog – it ends in orgasm. The moment of climax is like pulling a rip-cord that helps me to parachute down to earth after my on-stage “Mr Fahrenheit” excursion. The Queen song to which I refer, “Don’t Stop Me Now”, is by all accounts Freddie Mercury’s elated description of a night in Rio de Janeiro where his tour manager sweetly lined up eighty rent boys for Freddie to back-door diddle while coked up to the ’tache.
Now that is a bloody good way to relax yourself after a gig, and I for one would like to commend not only Freddie, for his commitment to promiscuity and his ability to transform the experience into a thrilling pop hit, but also the unsung hero, the tour manager who had to source eighty lads up for a bumming so that Freddie could, in his own words, “have a ball”. In the absence of Freddie’s excellent entourage, however, and the decadence of Rio, a meeting with Kate Moss is a lovely way to celebrate after a show.
Kate and Sadie await in the tiny, musty, black-box theatre, black paint and atticy drapes, fag-burned seats and a lighting rig than can be adjusted by reaching upward sans ladder. My mate and Radio 2-show sidekick Matt Morgan is waiting there too with Ian the Gruff, northern promoter, the pair of ’em ransacking their limited small-talk closets for the biggest inconsequential natter of their lives. “Oh, hello Russell, that was a good one,” says someone, but not Kate, who is smoking, ignoring the regulation that you mustn’t smoke, along with the unwritten rule that you ought compliment people after a gig instead of driving juggernauts through their yearning hearts. If you go and see a stand-up comedian or any kind of performer, let me tell you what they want: they want specific compliments to actual bits of material you’ve seen, not just a generic “it was good”, no. They need specific, positive criticism. “You know that bit where you talked about Freddie Mercury bumming Brazilians, that was heavenly” – that is the sort of compliment you ought offer me should we meet and discuss this book.
It becomes clear that we are not about to conduct a post-show salon, the five of us – me, Matt (highly gaff prone in a pressure situation), Ian (incredibly brusque and clumsily blunt around new people), Sadie (shy), and Kate Moss (icon of perfection) – when Kate says, “We’re going to Annabel’s night club to a charity auction. The top lot is a kiss. With me. Philip Green the Top Shop entrepreneur is bidding. Currently it stands at £40,000. Would you like to come?”
Obviously I want to come. At this stage I’ll do anything, I don’t feel I’m in a position to negotiate. I’ve just performed for her, her own personal jester (Depeche Mode – fancy a remix? Your own personal jester. Someone to make you smile in medieval style. Reach out and touch japes. I’m riffing), if she now wants to attend an auction where billionaires vie for the treasure of her kiss I’m not about to shake my head and suggest a kebab. I don’t know why I assumed low status so swiftly, I mean she came to see me, right? I could’ve played it cool, but as an unbelievably eloquent yob once said to me before punching me in the face, “You can’t play the hero if you don’t know the lines.” So Ian is dispensed with – he was never gonna cut it with the in crowd, even the out crowd find him a bit annoying – and we order a cab.
Every so often, in the back of the cab, she receives a call on her ever-chiming phone. “The bidding’s gone up – it’s fifty grand now.” God. As I look into her eyes, this woman who’s just come to see me in a 50-seater venue, there is literally now an auction that has gone into tens of thousands of pounds for a momentary kiss.
Utterly unfamiliar, we un-jam from the car. Me and Matt have exchanged a few glances, acknowledging the madness of our new circumstances, all the while trying to act normal. But me and Matt ain’t normal, we’re weird – even when doing something utterly mundane like going for a dental check-up or feeding a cat we act freaky – so when descending the stairs into Annabel’s glamour palace with a Goddess there’s a real possibility of meltdown.
Posh people, people you don’t recognise but who you know are important, are everywhere. People who themselves know they’re very important, have always known, jostle for an audience with Kate, and soon Matt and me are just loose in this place so foreign to me it might as well have been made of edible jewels and run by an arrogant dormouse. I think Jemima Khan was there, and Philip Green, not people I recognised but that’s my fault. It’s certainly not their fault I don’t recognise them. “You’d recognise them if you knew what to recognise, you poor suburban, arriviste twit, wandering around Annabel’s not knowing who to recognise, you better act like you recognise them; you’re only making it worse for yourself.”
The auction has come to a climax at £70,000. Philip Green nobly decides to donate his kiss to Jemima Khan. So adorning the front cover of the London Evening Standard the next day is a photograph of Kate Moss kissing Jemima Khan, a kiss that I’d witnessed, and seeing it rendered on the front page the next day makes me relive the moment. It felt like the Standard was addressing me personally – “And do you remember last night?” the front page seemed to be saying, “Remember her?” – and of course, for once, I did.
Matt is not a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, so he disappears into chinking of glasses and glinting of sequins. I am, so I have to conduct this operation without an anaesthetic. SHE CAME TO SEE ME, I remind myself – amidst the glitz and the stink of inherent unobtainability is the inescapable fact that she must want me here. Terrifying though it is, I resolve to go and talk to her. I mean she is just a bird, right? From Croydon with its trams and Nestlé headquarters. She’s a bird from south London. I have chatted up and seduced birds from south London before, and by jingo I can do it now. Denied vodka, I gulp down the intoxicating air and walk over to where she is, led by the glow.
Any chair on which she sits becomes a throne ennobled by the presence of her arse. That’s why they need her on the front of Vogue and next to handbags and holding lipstick, because her magic is transferable. I approach and then, against all odds and everything my life has taught me until then, an anomaly occurs. The universe tears and light bursts through and falls upon me and her gaze follows, she parts the crowd around her like Moses and indicates with an eyelash that she wants to talk to me. I follow her to an empty corner of the empty club. It is all empty now. Phantoms dance and drink, but all that’s real is her. To have her attention is spellbinding. You have to go into overdrive to sustain normalcy, to be normal around her is a tremendous effort – she exists beyond her own being, photographed to endorse and beautify products. The potency of her beauty is so great that anything she touches will become beautiful, be it a wristwatch or a blouse or a fucking shampoo, if it’s near her it is by association beautiful, so tonight I am beautiful, I am rendered beautiful by her company.
The tricky thing with chatting up the world’s most beautiful woman is – WHAT THE FUCKING HELL DO YOU SAY TO HER THAT SHE HASN’T HEARD UMPTEEN TIMES?
INT. NIGHT.
RUSSELL
You’re pretty.
KATE
Yes, it’s been mentioned.
You could try something from the bible
