karaoke

weekend advice!

Before we start:

I had the nicest chat with Rosie and Chris on Shagged Married Annoyed this week. They are just so so funny.

I went on Pappy’s Flatshare Slamdown and laughed so much I had to take paracetamol afterwards. That song round absolutely killed me. The last time I had to take paracetamol from laughing too much on a live podcast was the last time I did Pappy’s Flatshare Slamdown.

Still some tickets left for the tour in Glasgow and London. There are like 3 left in Canterbury. 10,00000000 left for the autumn shows because the rooms I’ve booked are too big what was I thinking.

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Last weekend I was quite bleugh about the state of the world, so tired I couldn’t see and had been offered a free karaoke slot with pals two hours away from my house in exchange for hot ‘tent (content).

Karaoke is impossible for me unless I’m drunk and in Melbourne with my sister in October 2024. It’s extra impossible when I’m on tour, which I currently am, because I don’t have the ability to be Fun Stevie in a social setting. All my Fun Stevie juice (eurgh) is used up on stage or promoting being on stage by appearing on 650 podcasts. Last weekend I felt I could only handle gentle socialising with people I know very very well.

I wouldn’t call sober karaoke on a Sunday gentle socialising. Plus, quite a few people had dropped out and my friend Lou had invited other people I didn’t really know so well - basically I was hoping Lou would be the ringleader (she is naturally the most fun person ever) while I got away with pretending to be fun but mainly going for a lot of toilet breaks. But not so many that people would think I had a problem. Three long ones and one short one? Unsure.

Anyway let’s pretend this is filmed ‘tent (considering thats how I paid for the karaoke) and I have done a jump-cut to halfway through the two hour session. I am screaming down the mic (microphone) with a person I don’t know very well, and we are both singing a song nobody in the room knows at all. I am euphoric. I am maybe twelve? At one point I thought ‘this is living’.

It helped that the person in question (his name is John, if that adds depth to the anecdote) just happened to pick a Crowded House song, a band that automatically reminds me of singing in the car on family holidays and watching Farewell To The World on VHS so much that I wore the tape down and Neil Finn’s face started oscillating.

Let’s do more jump cuts! My friend Lucy making me cry laughing singing We Don’t Talk About Bruno from Encanto with a sort of transcendental intensity bordering on religious zeal. Having a go at Arctic Monkeys Do I Wanna Know - complete with ‘tomorra’ accent - with my friend Celeste, both of us thinking it’d be quite cool and then afterwards agreeing that it was not cool (karaoke can never be cool, which is the joy of it, I’m realising). Me and Celya shouting NONNNNN RIEN DE RIENNNNNNN NONNNNNN JE NE REGRETTE RIEN in each other’s faces because she is French. John committing so hard to a Frank Zappa song that it deserved some sort of award for Services To Bodily Movement. Lou putting Justin Bieber Sorry on because ‘I know all the words to this’ and not being able to to sing a single line of it. Like, not even one bit. Thank you The Star by Liverpool Street. They haven’t asked me to write a Substack post, this is genuine and from the heart because I had such a surprisingly nice time.

At one point I got giddysweaty like I used to do during lunchbreaks at school when someone had come up with an especially good game. We had one called Ghosthunters, the rules of which were unclear other than the fact we rode around on horseback (?) trying to find various boys hidden around the playground acting as ghosts. I remember the game was better without the boys because they’d get bored and wander off while we strategised capture techniques, discussed what colour our horses were, and worked out other crucial world-building elements of the game. Either way I’d end up so excited I’d get sweaty but only, oddly, under one arm. Never both.

I suppose what I’m saying is it’s often better to go outside and do things than not do things. Wow, what an earth-shattering laser beam of profundity I have fired into your frontal lobes! I should write a book called Do Things and it can be sold in Oliver Bonas to people waiting for trains. No shade on those books, I wrote one of them in 2021, fair play to us all (and the publishing industry).

It’s true though - the friction-maxxers are obviously onto something. It’s so easy to hibernate and stare at the news and become overwhelmed and convince yourself you’re too tired to do anything, but that never leads anywhere. I don’t know why I keep thinking I’ll suddenly leap from my sofa filled with vigour after two days of staring at a wall. You have to be your own vigour! That’s my point! Which is, if we’re honest, quite weak but I’m writing this during the first week of the tour and my brain is fried so many apologies. I have also done 210 podcasts today (one).

On the way back from karaoke, by the way, Lou got a flat tyre so we stood on the side of a motorway for an hour and a half in the freezing cold waiting for the AA - who she’d told I was pregnant to avoid a much longer wait. I then spent the subsequent 45 minute drive with a scarf up my coat fielding questions such as ‘when is it due’ and ‘is it your first’ from a lovely man who dropped me at my door. The fear that he would realise I had a scarf up there, oh my god. Imagine. Thankfully I managed to do some world-class acting (‘six months’ and ‘yeah’), and I don’t think my neighbours heard him shout loudly outside the house ‘Good luck with the baby!!’ as I closed the front door. My partner did, sure.

If you’d told me the evening would end like that, I probably would never have hit those sweet michaels (microphones) in the first place but on reflection if I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing. It was so worth it.

Friction-maxxing is something I am going to try and do this weekend too, but maybe I’ll call it something else because all the -maxx suffixes make my bodily organs cringe. It’s a bit 1984 ‘plusgood’ ‘doublethink’ isn’t it. Maybe I’ll call it ‘doing social things that aren’t easy but I know ultimately have value’. Join me! Not physically! And not spiritually either if you don’t want to! I’m just saying ‘let’s all friction-maxx’ so there’s some satisfying narrative conclusion to this post. By all means, live your life with as much or as little friction as you require. You might have had an incredibly friction-ful week and, in which case, are looking forward to a weekend smoother than an otters silky wet pelt. Good for you man. Good for you.

Not sure how to end this so:

Best wishes lots of love joy and peace

Steven xxxxxxxx