No, really…
Lockdown is easing here in the UK, and I'm lucky enough to live by the sea, so I went for a walk, had a hot donut, and thought about how it feels to be out and around people again.
Sometimes it’s not until you’ve got really good at something, that you realise it’s not something worth being good at.
90% of what I know about performing I picked up from my two decades as a busker, but it also taught me a few things about real life, too. In this video I'll let you in on 8 things I learned about life, from being a busker.
It’s been about a year since things changed, so here’s a little video I made about the one thing I’m missing.
And if you haven’t already, please do subscribe. Thanks!
Did you know that one of the most famous battles in British history was started by a juggler? IT’S TRUE!
I took my hat and my cane into an empty venue, and had a little play. Be nice when they’re full again.
Big thanks to everyone over at my Patreon who helped me make this video. Hope you like it - give it a share if you do :)
They invited me to fly to Beijing and be on the Guinness Book of Records TV show. Then things went sideways. Here's the story of the worst gig of my life.Ple...
For several years, in the mid 1980's, my family took our annual Summer holiday in the North Yorkshire town of Whitby. Known as the setting for the opening scenes of Bram Stokers “Dracula”, and sitting its splintered rocky coastline on the icy North Sea, it was obviously, a perfect place for a relaxing beach vacation. I'm being cruel for the sake of lols. It's genuinely a beautiful town, and one that I have much fondness for, for reasons I'll explain soon enough.
The Whitby Summer tourism schedule was tentpoled by two events, each a week long, which ran consecutively. The first was the Regatta – a fun and exciting week of boat racing, fireworks, airforce flybys, fake helicopter air sea rescues, and a fun fair that stretched all the way along the West side of the harbour. The second event, which happened right after the regatta, was the folk week, where the town would turn into a celebration of the traddest of trad folk musics. A banjo in every pub, and morris dancers on every street corner. No lie. So many morris dancers.
My parents, who, for the other 51 weeks in the year showed about as much interest in folk music as they did in wingsuit flying, for some reason, always booked us to go on holiday to Whitby for the folk week. We'd hire a poky little holiday apartment with a pull-down bed in the lounge for me and a mostly trustworthy balcony that looked out over the harbour. Which meant that every year, after a train ride from our house to Kings Cross station, another, much longer train ride from there, through several changes, to Whitby, and then a long slog dragging our cases up cobbled hilly streets to our little flat, I would walk out on the balcony just in time to see the regatta fun fair packing itself away into its trucks and leaving. There's nothing like starting your weeks holiday with a feeling of certainty that you just missed something fun.
This is not to say that I didn't find things to do during my week. Mostly, the things I'd find to do were inside the three arcades that lined the bottom of the West cliff. The only neon left after the funfair's departure, these were the places, shoddy and smelly and marvellous, in which I'd make my grandma's holiday money last. I loved these games so much. Still do. The early 80's were the heyday of classic videogames - a group of beatnik geniuses from California and Japan, filling painted wooden cabinets full of loud, glowing, throbbing electronic joy. There I'd be, leaning in, my wide eyes staring at the screens, my hands sticky on the controls feeling the heat of the electronics, the vibration of the sounds. In those waterside arcades I enlisted to fight on the frontline of galaxy-wide battles, I redlined screaming racing cars around tracks that didn't exist, I sent giant apes tumbling from construction sites. I jumped, skidded, punched, kicked and flew. I became other things. More heroic, cool, colourful and spectacular things. 10p by sweaty 10p, my motivation to get good was the prize of extending the contentment of my own company. I got really good. Still am. All I wanted was to be sucked into the screens like Flynn, and stay forever in that beautiful pyrotechnic world. But my 10ps would always run out, and I'd always have to step out of the warm, cacophonous palace and back out into the street, where it would usually be raining, there would usually be a stiff wind coming from the sea, and I'd usually have stayed out longer than I was supposed to.
And then, on the way back from the arcade, to lessen the slump, there were the fish & chip shops. You can't argue with a good chip shop on holiday. 50p kept back from the arcades for a large chips with scrappie. Scrappie being the slurry of bits of deep fried batter that gathers at the bottom of the fryer, shovelled on top of your chips, with way too much vinegar. There are plenty worse ways to put off the inevitable return to whatever my parents had decided we were going to do.
And mostly those things involved being taken on long drizzly countryside walks, or watching what my dad had decided was the best morris dancers. So many morris dancers. I wasn't massively unhappy, but, I wasn’t massively happy either, and like many teenagers on holiday with their parents before me, I was bored.
I wasn't allowed to go to the arcades as much as I wanted to. My parents were happy to tell me how it was the kind of garish rubbish that would surely rot my mind, so I'd usually end up curled up at one end of the sofa in the apartment scribbling ideas for my own videogames into my notebook while the sounds of bells on middle-aged mens ankles would drift through the window from the cobbled lane outside.
Once in a while, when I'd used up all my 10ps for the day, but was starting to feel stir crazy again, I'd find something in the Folk Week guide book to tell my parents I was going to go and watch. Very rarely did I actually go and watch these things, but picking out a show designed for young people was a pretty reliable way to escape my parents without being overly questioned. Early in one of the first weeks we spent on holiday in Whitby, I played this trick with a group of performers I'd found in the guidebook who were called “The Fabulous Salami Brothers”. They sounded, to me, like the worst kind of pretend-wacky children's show, but if my parents would buy that I wanted to see them, I'd be allowed out. Even better, they were performing at a pitch just around the corner from the arcades. Perfect. Little did I know they'd change my life completely, and forever.
I almost walked past them. They hadn't even started their show yet, but they were talking to the smattering of people who had got there early. Something made me stop and watch.
The Fabulous Salami Brothers were a group of street performers. Each one a member of the fictitious Salami family. Maxie Salami, Mussalami, The Great Salami, Ricardo Salami. They all played something musical, even if it was just banging a huge old drum, and they each brought a different turn to the show – feats of strength, escapology, fire eating, juggling. They could have been awful, but they were perfect. Dressed in vaguely matching waistcoats, but displaying perfectly matching brash charm, they grew that handful of people into a huge crowd, and did things that were, to my young eyes, magnificent.
But, like all great performers, it wasn't so much what they did, as it was how they did it. They felt like a punk band – dangerous, anarchic, cheeky. Whatever the style of theatre they were doing, it was something I'd never seen before. The shouted, sweated, ran around, climbed things, teased the audience, ate peoples chips, and did incredible tricks. The seemed, like all good circus and variety acts should seem, as if they were from a different place. That our rules didn't quite apply to them.
I watched their show. I clapped, cheered and sang along. I forgot that their show was just a ruse to get me out of the holiday apartment, and was soon back there, over-excitedly jabbering to my mum and dad about all the silly and amazing things they did, and how funny they were. Then I had the Folk Week guidebook, and I was using my dads green pen to underline all the other times they were doing shows. I didn't want to miss one.
That was the first year I discovered them. The second year, my dad applied to get the guidebook sent to our house before we left, and I was overjoyed to see that they would be back. All their shows underlined before we even got on the train.
By the third year, something had started happening in my head. I still went to see every show they did, and still adored them, but I'd started to think that perhaps I didn't just want to be their biggest fan. Perhaps I wanted to, somehow, be them. Or be like them, at least.
Ricardo Salami was my favourite. The juggler. Tall, cocky, quick with a joke. Not the best juggler in the world, but he could sell a trick like nobody's business. Slowly I realised: I wanted to be him. I wanted to be able to make people laugh, and clap. I wanted to have the confidence to stand in front of people, and be relaxed enough that they’d like me and I’d like them back. I wanted to be from a different place, where your rules didn't quite apply to me.
I went home from that holiday with that thought rattling around in my head. It just wouldn't go away. The next time my dad gave me £5 for helping him on his allotment, I went to the pet shop at the bottom of the hill we lived on, and bought three hard rubber dog balls. I started teaching myself to juggle.
Years later, when actors equity told me I had to choose a stage name, I just made my birth name a little more Italian and circus sounding, and in doing so, paid tribute to the man who inspired me first.
I never met Ricardo Salami as an adult. I never got to tell him any of this. He died a few years ago. I wish he was still here, so I could.
I still remember the jokes the Salami Brothers told, and the music they played. I will never, ever forget the feeling of being in their audience – it's all I ever want for my own crowds. And whenever I write my name, I'm also writing his, as a way of saying thanks for giving me a life, for letting me move to a different place, where rules quite didn't apply.
Thanks for reading, if you enjoyed that, please do consider supporting my work on patreon, and subscribing to my YouTube channel. Thanks!
Like Kirby Ferguson says, culture is remix. But what does that mean in the world of cabaret and variety? And how can it make you feel better, more motivated ...
Come join me at https://www.patreon.com/matricardo
Hello!
Quick message - what with live shows not looking like they’re going to be back to their old levels anytime soon, more and more of my creative energy is being directed to online content - particularly my YouTube channel.
So I’d really appreciate it if you’d consider subscribing - you can do it simply by clicking here.
And if you need more convincing…
About ten years ago, I appeared in a TV ad, talking about the importance of having a back-up plan.
It felt like the right time to make the sequel…
And, for context, here’s the original…
Times have been tough in the world of independent grassroots live performance, so I thought I’d get a few of my talented cabaret compatriots in front of a lens, and let them tell you how they feel…
See, this is what you get if you make a circus idiot like me self isolate…
Sometimes when you do a trick enough times, you can't stop yourself from thinking of ways to make it even more annoyingly hard than it is already. That's wha...
Here's what it feels like to do my first proper gig since March, and for that gig to be a TV show in a whole different country!
If you'd like to see me live - my one man show is in London's West End, one Saturday night a month from the 26th of September! I'd love to see you there - more info at www.matricardo.com/live
Please do like and share this video and subscribe to my YouTube channel, and if you want to help me make new stuff, buy me a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/matricardo
Trigger warning - Mental health, depression, talk of the outside world
Seriously – you don’t need to read this.
It's all changed, hasn't it? Right from the basics, on up. The answer you give when someone asks "how are you?". it's not the same answer we used to give. These days, at best, it's some version of, "well, y'know, still here", or "ups and downs", or the usual vague platitude, but tagged with "..all things considered"
Well, today, I'm not very ok, and frankly, I don't have the gumption or the will to pretend even to that mediocre level at the moment.
It's not that both my parents, and a couple of friends have left us over the last few months. Although that absolutely sucks, and at some point, when this is all... less, I might get around to processing it.
It's not that all of my work, my artform, the career I've spent my entire adult life building, honing, practising has just evaporated. Leaving me with no outlet, no income, no purpose, and a severely limited definition of what I am. I'm 51, and I haven't gone this long without doing my thing in front of a crowd since my damn teens. I feel like my dreams have been kidnapped. But it's not that either.
And it's not that I'm still isolating, wearing a mask when I go out, and not venturing too far when I do, while all around me, it seems like everyone else thinks things are peachy. Terrifyingly blasé masses who choose now to believe what the government is telling them, after a lifetime of throwing the side eye on their every other pronouncement, purely because it'll let them go to the fucking pub?
The teacher stinks of booze and has never taught a class, so maybe don't take their assurance that children should run with scissors as the word of bright authority. Maybe they just figure that if a few children fall on a blade, there are less to teach.
I miss my friends. I miss the privilege of gossiping in warm messy dressing rooms with the glamorous, talented and interesting. I ache to travel – to nourish myself with adventurous trips that would shake away the repetitive screensaver that is lockdown. But it’s not that.
It's not even that on top of all of this, out there in the outside world, people who are anything other than straight, white and cis are routinely having the idea that they could be considered equally human, met with state mandated, heavily armed, actively weaponized hate. At least much of the world, especially the younger half, seem to be reacting to this by standing up, standing firm, and saying no. There’s potential for growth, but with growing pains, for sure.
It's not even that wrestling - the thing that has for so long brought a dumb grin to my face with its beautiful soap-opera spectacle - has recently become exposed by a hashtag-lead thread of unimaginably brave (mostly) women, telling their stories of sexual abuse and harassment from many who work throughout the industry.
How this affects me is literally the least important part of that whole painful but righteous movement, but severing ties with people you considered friends because of deeply shocking revelations hurts. It hurts because you feel stupid that you should have realised. It hurts because you feel stupid that maybe you missed something that you could have stopped. And it hurts because you liked them, dammit, but it turns out you didn't really completely know them.
With luck and work and help and hope, the movement will generate some positive change in that world, but for now, for me, it all just feels too dark to enjoy. But it’s not that either.
It's not any of those things. It's all of them. And more. It's just.. a lot. And sometimes it feels like too much. And it's been feeling like that a lot lately. I'm exhausted. Every so often, I find enough motivation to make something, usually for my youtube channel, but then, I’ll be running on empty again for a while. I force myself to exercise, knowing the little dopamine hit I'll get in return, which might carry me to lunchtime, when I can comfort eat and nullify that workout. Generally, though, I’m spending much of my time just..pottering around. Waiting for things to not be like this any more, and trying to talk myself out of the constant, depressed assumption that they always will be. That this is what things are now. All the days running together, blurred and meaningless, until they stop.
I am, of course, aware that this is not a particularly happy piece, and I wouldn't have blamed you for not getting this far. But it's honest. And I'm writing it in the hope that, perhaps, if this strikes a chord with you, if you're feeling similar to me, well, as my therapist once said to me - this is how you probably should be feeling. If you were witnessing all this stuff happening - the illness, the hurt, the injustice - and you were bouncing out of bed with a spring in your step and a song in your heart every morning, well, I think you might have a bigger problem than me.
Needed to get that off my chest. Needed to let the black dog have the mic for a while.
This is, as should be clear, me at a low ebb. I’m not always so gloomy. This is, to an extent, just negative filtering – a cognitive distortion I am often guilty of. The thing is, though, filtering the negatives wouldn’t work, were there not so many negatives there in the first place.
I’m generally very lucky. I live with a lovely Welsh lady and a defiantly odd cat. I am fed, and safe from the elements. But sometimes one part of your soul can be full, while other parts are empty. The chambers inside are sealed, one part can't fill up another.
Hope you're staying afloat, even if it's only just, and you're only able to keep afloat by doing a lot of panicky splashing.
If you want to talk, you know where I am on the internet.
What does a live variety comedian do when there’s a pandemic, and all of his work for the foreseeable future is cancelled?
He makes use of the only venue still open..
New videos every week. Please do like, subscribe and share. Let’s see how this goes…
Image by Paul Monckton
Here’s the joke. The joke is that the way you’re probably feeling now – washing your hands all the time, staying indoors as much as possible, nurturing a growing suspicion and fear of all other people, having a base level of heavy dread that the end of the world might be slowly happening, and constantly, obsessively thinking about death – you know – those thoughts? The joke is that that’s the way people like me who live with anxiety disorder and OCD feel pretty much all the time. Funny joke, no? Well, no. And it’s also guilty of using mental illness to be smug, which probably isn’t for the best. But, as someone who does feel some of those things, even on a normal day, maybe I can suggest some coping techniques if you’re a little newer to the party. Some guidelines that I, your internet pal, Mat Ricardo, regularly fail to follow!
One of the reasons this is hard is that it's new. Most of us haven't ever experienced anything remotely like this before, so we have nothing to judge it against (except movies and TV shows that use something broadly similar as a jumping off point for visions of empty cities and a cliché yet bloody, violent breakdown of the human race. And that ain’t helping anyone). We're scared because we don't know what the end to this looks like, or when it might happen. We have the anxiety of someone worried about what might be around the next corner.
I’ll tell you what my therapist used to tell me. It’s true, you don’t know what’s around the next corner. It might be something bad. It might be something wonderful. But judging by previous experience, it’ll probably be neither. It’ll probably be just some more street and then another corner. So you have the simplest choice – either you keep moving forward, or you choose to stop. And the thing is, if you choose to stop because there might be something bad around the corner, you’re making a big choice based on limited information, and the place you’ve stopped might itself be bad. The fact that you’re standing at this corner means that there wasn’t anything bad enough to stop you at any of the countless previous corners, so the chances are that this one’ll be ok too, right? This is a long-winded way of saying what Robert Frost said in 1914 – “The best way out is always through”.
It feels odd writing this when something palpably, obviously, enormously bad has, in fact, happened. But as so many sufferers of other bad things know, it’s about getting through today as well as you can, and doing the things that science tells us will help bring a faster end to the awfulness. Those things are not difficult to do – washing your hands and staying at home are simple tasks. And this, by the way, is where my OCD really shines. Being introverted, seeing things in absolutes, being inflexible in following instructions? All things that usually make me less fun, but right now – this is my time! What makes it difficult isn’t the complexity of self-isolation, it’s the worry and boredom. And those things don’t play well together.
Your mood is going to jump around. You’ll think you’re doing ok, and then you suddenly won’t be. That’s what it’s going to be. Your feelings are allowed and valid. Share them with people who’ll understand – you’ll feel less alone. Personally, I’m veering wildly. One moment I’ll be thinking that this is a great opportunity to create stuff for people to watch or read online, and that I’ll read some books, and finally start suffering and write that symphony. But the next moment I’ll be convinced that I’ll never do another show again, I’ll never feel the warmth of a live crowd in front of me, never hang out with my friends, or travel somewhere beautiful - that this is what life is now, until it’s not anything at all. But the reality is, at least for the moment, it’ll just be more street and another corner. The chances are that we will get out, by going through.
Sorry. I'm aware that this isn’t a particularly hilarious or maybe even insightful read. Sometimes a writer writes just to get the words out of their head. I'm going to try to make this the last self-indulgently negative thing I make for a while, but no guarantees. I think if there's anything that's been of worth about my writing over the years, it’s been that I've always tried to be honest, so if I'm feeling scared, or sad, or whatever, I'm probably going to talk about that - and in doing so, it'll help me, and, with luck, also you. Make sense?
And the bottom line is: I am feeling scared and sad. I miss the feeling of community that lives backstage and the feeling of validation that I see from that stage. For better or worse, I feel the most complete version of myself when I’m performing, so when that is out of reach for a while, it’s easy to feel that there might be, somehow, less of me.
I’ve lost a few people close to me in the last few months, and the voices in my head every so often make me think about what it would be like to lose more. I’m trying to distract myself by doing and making, and it’s sometimes working, but sometimes its not. Sometimes I just see all tunnel and no light. And I remember another thing my therapist used to sometimes say – “Well, that sounds like the right thing to be feeling”. It’s true, right? If you were being super chill during this world-changing event, then that would be the worrisome thing.
I’m going to try to keep making all kinds of stuff, mostly because people probably need things to watch and read, and partly because it’s what I know how to do, and I need to be doing things. For all of my life, making has been my safe place, so that’s where I’ll be.
Keep in touch – keep commenting, sharing and suggesting things – let me know I’m not just shouting into a void. If I know someone’s watching, I’ll try to keep making.
PS: Here are some things I’ve been making while on lockdown…