An Open Apology to Sir Lenny Henry

Don’t Lean on me, I Might Fall Over

I often liken the feeling following the end of a tour, or after playing an important one-off gig as like having fallen down stairs. Both physically and emotionally. The physical sense of having taken a tumble down a few flights after my most recent gig at the Gigantic All Dayer was perhaps more understandable than usual.

I didn’t exactly fall down the stairs in Bristol last Saturday, but I did fall over in the car park of a Premier Inn on the outskirts of Swindon on the way home.

Me and Swindon have history. Although Carter carried on as a band for a while after playing in Swindon, the jig, as they say, was pretty much, as they also say, up. There’s a chapter in my first book Goodnight Jim Bob: On The Road With Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine all about it. The chapter is titled ‘Anytime Anyplace Anywhere But Swindon’.

After falling over in the Premier Inn car park on Saturday, I threw up a little bit and then inexplicably started crying. Properly sobbing in a way that I hadn’t done since my Mum’s funeral. I don’t know why I was crying. I’d always thought of tequila (did I mention the tequila?) as a happy drink. Like in the songs

I wouldn’t want a margarita now particularly, but I don’t think this experience has put me off tequila for life. I once drank and threw up so much Southern Comfort and lemonade that I missed my tube stop home and an elderly homeless man told me to get up off the floor of the platform at Collier’s Wood station and sort my life out. I can’t look at a bottle of Southern Comfort now without feeling nauseous and ashamed. And I doubt I’ll ever return to bloody Marys. So much red. You would have thought I was bleeding to death from the mouth. When I was at school, Pernod was the popular never again drink. Being taken to the hospital to have your stomach pumped of aniseed was practically part of the curriculum.

When I woke up in room 53 of the Swindon Premier Inn last Sunday morning, I felt surprisingly not too awful. And…bonus – I was already dressed. I checked myself for injuries. I had a bruised hip and three circular grazes on my elbow that made me wonder what it was I’d fallen onto or into the night before. There was a Mikhail Gorbachev style wound on the side of my forehead that a couple of days later on I would notice also bore an eerily similarity to the shadow that Mark Reynolds had drawn on my forehead in the artwork on both sleeves of my new albums over a month ago. I’ve asked him for tonight’s lottery numbers.

I don’t remember a massive amount about the hour or so leading up to my fall in the car park of the Premier Inn on the outskirts of Swindon. Apparently, I’d also fallen over in the dressing room earlier in the evening. I’m reminded of the Australian television comedy No Activity about two police detectives in a car on a stakeout. One detective named Stokes tells the other detective, Hendy, that he’d recently fallen over.

“No, mate,” Hendy says, mocking his partner’s age. “You’ve had a fall.”

The last things I remember from Saturday night was watching a bit of The Inspiral Carpets, posing for a photo with Ned’s Atomic Dustbin and having a chat with Bez, which all sounds like it was also taken from my Carter USM memoir, or at least a memory from a lot longer ago than last Saturday.

Other than that, I remember in the Premier Inn car park, how Jen had consoled me as I cried my eyes out like Melania Trump on her hen night. And I was told the next day that Marc and Lindsey had helped/carried/dragged me to my hotel room.

The moral of this story, apart from to drink responsibly, is if you are going to fall over in a hotel car park on the outskirts of Swindon, it’s best to do it surrounded by your friends.

Live photo – Kolab Studios - Francisco Vicariaa or Giulia Spadafora