I am packing to go to Edinburgh tomorrow. It is quite a funny experience to be going back to perform on the Edinburgh fringe after 19 years!! There are a lot of memories flooding though my mind's sluice gates.
Mostly I have been thinking about how I am coming full circle artistically. I strated off at the Fringe in 1984 doing cabaret, with Victor and Barry. Over the years we refined and honed our act but we never quite lost the thrilling aspect of often, especially when opening a new show at Edinburgh, going onstage and not being utterly confident of knowing how it ended or even the chords of some of the songs! That feeling of leaping off a cliff is partly what I wanted to revisit with my own cabaret show.
Of course, Victor and Barry were characters who were very different to Forbes and I, and so now, with the show just being me, me and more me, I feel I am coming back to the style of performance of my roots and also making it even more personal.
But when it comes down to it it's still just a daft boy singing some songs and chatting. To wit, here is a little vid I made in the dressing room of the theater on Fire Island the other week, as I was warming up for the performance...