It's impossible to overestimate the effect the Perrier Best Newcomer Award had on my career. Before August 2003, I was an underachieving data entry clerk who occasionally did strange things on stage and once made a low-budget animation about a boy nobody likes. By the end of the month, I was an award-winning professional comedian, the celebrated 1980s parodist Gary Le Strange, who left the Edinburgh Fringe clutching a ream of five-star reviews and a stack of job offers that would keep him out of data entry for the rest of his life. All I needed to do was follow it up with an even better show which everyone agreed was several hundred times better than my award-winning five-star mega- triumph and the world would finally be mine for the taking. From my success-addled point of view in the summer of 2003, this didn't seem difficult. After a month belting out Polaroid Suitcase night after night, I was all too aware of its shortcomings. The live show was a rigid character monologue, interspersed with songs, in which a failed pop star catalogued dreadful incidents from his life. An earth-shattering success in its own small way, but the general consensus told me the talky bits between the songs weren't quite as entertaining as the songs themselves. And when it came to the music, I knew I could do better. Gary Le Strange's first album had been an introduction to the character, a series of snapshots painting a broad picture of who he was and what he liked. The second, I reckoned, would be a much deeper affair, a fuller exploration of the character and the world around him, a dynamic experience which brought the character firmly into the present day and placed him right in the centre of your brain. There were plenty of other things I wanted to change too. Cut his hair, for one thing, and get some better clothes. Widen his sphere of influences so it wasn't so rigidly stuck in 1981. I wanted to demonstrate to people that I wasn't just a vapid 1980s-obsessed nostalgia merchant and that Gary Le Strange was a formidable comedy character who could go anywhere, do anything and had a lot to say about the world around us. I wanted to make him more confident, more approachable, more real, to delve deeper into his psyche and become one with the character. I wanted more songs, more chat, more ridiculous dancing and more work at the end of it. In truth, I wanted nothing more complicated or ambitious than to improve it in every respect - better writing, better acting, better music and better comedy, made by a better professional who was better than anyone else. But I was way too busy for that. Overnight, I shot from try-out spot to headline act, doing countless gigs up and down the country and giving countless interviews to publicise them. Within two months of winning that award, I'd landed a script development deal with the BBC and a regular role in a new radio sketch show, managed a sell-out run at the Soho Theatre, met Tony Hadley on a chat show, had dinner with Steve Strange and performed my entire show to a packed house at the Palace, where they usually did Les Miserables. Over the course of the year, I did a national tour, wrote a half-hour TV script, made several TV appearances, did a video taster tape for the BBC and appeared in twelve episodes of Radio 2's The Day The Music Died, supplying an original three-minute pop song each time. Finding the time to write and record a new album while devising and rehearsing a new hour- long show would be a challenge to say the least. The only solution was to start straight away. Thankfully, it didn't take me long to find the starting point. At the end of my 2003 show, Gary had invited the audience to throw off their shackles and join him in his crusade against conformity. The obvious next step would be to show that plan coming into action. And what better way to illustrate the shackles of conformity than by looking at the state of the music industry? In a stroke of unlikely good fortune that adds weight to the idea that I am merely a two-dimensional supporting character in someone else's TV series, in October 2003 I landed a job on a music-based sketch show for BBC Radio 2 called The Day The Music Died. Presented by Andrew Collins with special weekly features from Jon Holmes and Robin Ince, the first two series featured Gary as a recurring guest star, who, each week, sings a crazy new song shedding witty light on some hilarious facet of the music industry. This forced me to focus on the realities of what was happening to the music business in 2003. Things like falling singles sales and whether or not downloads would catch on, or the cultural reassimilation of 80s-style electronica and whether it could truly survive when stacked up against the ubiquity of hip-hop and boring guitar bands who all sounded like Travis. None of which really interested me. But there was one thing at the time which stood out above everything else, something Gary was exactly the right person to explore, something I passionately loathed and which I felt represented the first step towards the utter destruction of our society. Pop Idol. Formerly known as Popstars and soon to be usurped by The X Factor, the talent competition for wannabe singers had taken a vicious stranglehold on British culture and represented everything that was wrong with modern pop music. It wasn't that it wasn't entertaining or that the participants had no talent. It was more that it removed all of the danger and creativity from pop music. In its mission to appeal to as many people as possible at any one time, it created a new lowest common denominator form of entertainment in which singing someone else's song rather than writing your own was prized above all else, in which the tastes of millions were dictated by a panel of judges and the guy with the cutest smile and least weird haircut was probably going to win. It glorified karaoke over artistic expression, the extravert over the introvert. To me, it seemed like proper democratic pop music had died and been replaced by an evil cabal of shady businessmen intent on filling the charts with cheap disposable rubbish, and I just didn't think Gary would stand for it. Such concerns formed the philosophical basis of my work for the coming year. I reimagined Gary not as a failed pop star, but as a ridiculous revolutionary. In the first show I had christened him a 'Face Warrior'. In the second, I would declare a 'Face War' on the music industry. Gary Le Strange would be the creative alternative to Pop Idol, the anti-Will Young. Working titles for the new show included Captain Peacock, Escalators to Glory, Silicon Warlord and Dancing in Disguise. But a misreading of the BBC's short-lived Pop Idol clone Fame Academy gave me the title I needed. The new show would be a lecture at the Face Academy, in which the audience would be Face Cadets, training to be Face Warriors at the onset of the Face War. It was just like all those things I'd adored about Adam Ant when I was a kid. He didn't just write 'music' for his 'fans'. He wrote 'Antmusic' for 'Sexpeople'. His Prince Charming tour wasn't a gig, it was a 'revue'. This was the kind of pop star I wanted to be. The kind who didn't give a shit what you think about him. The kind who had fun with ideas. Returning to the Edinburgh Fringe the following year was a fixed point, a deadline I couldn't miss, so if I wanted to record a new album too, I had to start straight away. Even then, I had my work cut out. The previous eight-track album had taken me roughly eighteen months to write and record. To aim for ten tracks on the second was tantamount to insanity. But I was sure that, if I stayed focused and stuck to my schedule, my lofty ambitions would somehow translate into a tangible achievement. So on January 2nd, 2004, I set about recording my second album. Musically, Face Academy is bolder, sleeker, more Spartan than its predecessor. With Polaroid Suitcase, I tried to ensure that each song had its own unique sound. Face Academy began in the same way but early demos proved both disappointing and time-consuming. So, for practical reasons as much as anything else, I decided to give all the tracks a uniform production style. Inspired by Japan's Tin Drum (one of my favourite albums and arguably the best album made by any of the so- called New Romantics), I wanted to de-clutter the soundscape by limiting the number of instruments. In my head, Face Academy was played by an imaginary band of four musicians - a drummer, a bassist and two synth-players (one of whom is probably Gary). It's rare that you'll hear more than four sounds at any one time. This gave the music more room to breathe and forced me to be more creative with my arrangements. Realising also that I didn't have the gear to reproduce the sound of Tin Drum exactly (though I had a good go at emulating Mick Karn's quirky bass-playing on Electric Dance), I spent a lot of time listening to other early 80s tracks to find something my PS2 software could safely copy. In the end, I decided to aim for a sound somewhere between The Human League's Mirror Man and a song called After a Fashion by Midge Ure. Even down to the stereo spacing of where the instruments sat in the mix. This still didn't mean I had it easy. I hadn't the time or the money to update my studio set-up from the previous year, so I made the second album in the same over-complicated, idiosyncratic way I made the first. The basic backing tracks were all created over 12 exhausting days in January 2004 on a program called MTV Music Generator for the PlayStation2. Over the next few weeks, between other jobs, I transferred each track in real time, on an instrument by instrument basis, onto a Minidisc, and then retransferred them all manually in real time onto my PC, where I edited each of them, one by one, in a sound-editing program called Sound Forge, adding effects like EQ, compression, reverb and distortion, before reassembling each song, instrument by instrument, in a film-editing program (Adobe Premier if you really want to know), which allowed me to mix each song down to a finished track. All I had left to do was write the lyrics, record the vocals, edit and process the vocals (again in Sound Forge), add the vocal line to the backing track and whittle everything down to a final mix. So long as I didn't experiment or deviate from my plan and I came up with amazingly funny lyrics to match my marvellous tunes, I reckoned I could get the whole thing finished by the end of April, leaving me a whopping three months to write and rehearse the show. You don't have to be Mystic Meg to predict how that turned out. The rational side of my brain sometimes tells me that, had I not recorded the album, I would have had more time for everything else, and life might have turned out slightly better. But the rest of my brain knows that's sacrilege. Of all the things I did that year, the one thing I never doubted was the album. Again, my rational brain tells me that's stupid - no one was ever going to buy my album if they didn't know who I was, and telling people who I was meant I had to get off my backside and crawl up and down the country trying to make people laugh in pubs. But that was never going to work. It didn't take me long to realise I hated the stand-up circuit. Unsurprisingly, a bloke in tights and make-up singing weird songs about ballet and toasters and reciting subtly-shaded character monologues about his failure to succeed in the music business turned out to be a bit of a Marmite act and invariably ended in plentiful jeering. On one occasion, booked to play in a packed rowdy student bar, I was so hated by the audience and so stubborn in my refusal to leave the stage that, by the end of my set, there were only two other people left in the room. Given that the bar was serving free alcohol at the time, I consider this one of my greatest achievements. I was under no illusion about any of this. I never wanted to be a stand-up and, though I respected and enjoyed a lot of stand-up comedy, it wasn't what I was trying to break into. I was an actor playing a part, not a stand-up telling jokes. I was hyper-aware that the only reason I got the gigs was because I'd won an award. But I'd won the award for writing an hour-long theatrical monologue, not for doing a twenty-minute set in a pub. I hated being bad at it and seriously wanted to be better, but life on the road just wasn't much fun. I don't drive so if I couldn't car pool with another act, I had to spend most of my time - and my earnings - in trains and hotels. More work meant less time spent with my wife, with my friends - I started missing important birthday parties and on one occasion missed my own when I failed to turn up to receive a Chortle Award. If this all sounds ungrateful, I was certainly always mindful that my new job was much better than being a data entry clerk. But after a while I realised that, in terms of not doing what I wanted to do (and instead doing what I thought I needed to do in order to pay my share of the rent), stand-up and data entry were pretty much the same, except stand-up is more lonely and humiliating. It may not be the popular choice - it's usually either Polaroid Suitcase or Beef Scarecrow that people ask me about - but of the three albums I made as Gary Le Strange, Face Academy is probably my favourite. It came closest to achieving the vision I had in my head and, at the time, I considered it far superior to its predecessor. The lyrics were cleverer, the arrangements cleaner, the performance more confident. My new microphone (a Chinese mic called a Studio Projects C1 which I still use today) added a professional sheen to the vocals and made the whole thing sound much more intimate. With ten tracks and a running time of 45 minutes, this was far more like a proper pop album than my first had been. Where Polaroid Suitcase was a set of disparate song parodies sung by a hopeful amateur, this was a solid, coherent album made by a fully- rounded character with his own distinctive voice, and I really, really liked it. Lyrically, Face Academy is all about conflict. Though Warriors of Style and Photocopier are the only songs to deal with the music industry directly, all the other songs are about war or despair, depicting outsiders standing at odds with the society they live in or losers who don't understand why they lost. Metal Boy is about a bunch of slaves rising up against an evil overlord. Electric Dance is about a virulent dance which destroys the whole of Europe (whether this is meant to be Nazism or Pop Idol is anyone's guess, but I imagine Gary can't tell the difference). Even the buoyant Heart of Tears ends with the singer committing suicide. And The Golden Age speaks of a wonderful halcyon time which, by the song's end, obviously wasn't as glorious as everyone makes out. Where Polaroid Suitcase had all been about the lovely silly things Gary liked - triangles, ballet, Japan and the colour grey - this was all about the things he hated, the things he suffered and the things he opposed. The humour may have been more subtle and the jokes less obvious, but it wasn't any less real. The packaging was much better too, having had way more time and money spent on it. The superb photos, snapped by the brilliant Andy Hollingworth in April 2004, show a much more confident and dynamic Gary than the previous year. Gone is the man who cobbled together his costume in Oxfam and painted his face with make-up stolen from his sister's drawer. This version of Gary is a professional pop star, a true dandy warrior complete with expensive leather jeans and bespoke military greatcoat (designed by my Dad's wife Debbie). Perversely, however (though still in keeping with the anti-commercial theme and Gary's pretentions), all these things are eschewed on the front cover. For some reason, it amused me that the central image for an album called 'Face Academy' should be just a quarter of someone's face. A terrible idea for an Edinburgh Fringe poster but a great image for an album cover. Shame I can't reproduce the whole package for a digital download but look in the Gallery section on my website and hopefully it will make itself known. Time ran away with itself. The gigs, the tour, the TV script and my steadfast refusal to ever make things easy for myself all conspired to push back the deadline. In the end, I didn't send the master CD off for duplication till June 19th. Instead of my whopping three months, I was left with only five weeks to write and rehearse the show, during which I had to undertake a hefty series of press interviews, write and record four more songs for a second series of The Day the Music Died, rewrite and re- record two of those songs when they were deemed unsuitable for broadcast, deal with a massive heap of admin and website maintenance and replace a broken tooth which fell out from all the stress. But I was Gary Le Strange, the pop star superhero who didn't need sleep or days off, or teeth. Somehow, I managed not only to write my show, but also to preview it a whopping five times, all of which went brilliantly. When the pop journalist Andrew Eaton hijacked his own article in The Scotsman on July 30th to rave explosively about my new CD, calling it "inspiring" and ending with the words "The campaign starts here. Gary Le Strange will have a Number One hit. He shall go to the ball. Oh yes," I was utterly convinced I had a surefire hit. All I needed to do now was conquer Edinburgh and collect my prize. Next stop, Everlasting Fame and Glory! Sadly, it was not to be. Lots of people enjoyed the show and the press was generally positive, but Face Academy didn't quite set Edinburgh ablaze. Apart from the odd one or two nights, audience figures were low, some shows pulling in as few as 15. Over the course of the month, I fell dreadfully ill, lost my voice, spent several days being followed by a stalker and generally had a deeply miserable time. The Face War failed to ignite and I left Scotland at the end of August utterly disillusioned, anticipating a debt somewhere in the region of four or five thousand pounds. When a show fails, everyone involved starts flailing around looking for someone to blame - the venue, the management, the press, or more often oneself for being rubbish at making shows. Looking back at Face Academy nine years later, it's far clearer what the problem really was. Success killed Face Academy. The previous show had done so well that I was inundated with work, to the point where I had very little time to put into the sequel. Looked at like that, It's a miracle I managed to do it at all, and an even greater miracle I managed to make an album to go with it. The cruel irony is that, because the second show didn't catapult me to the next level or create any serious new buzz, all those job offers started dropping away. And when that dried up, so did the requests for the album. My year as the Next Big Thing was officially over and now it was someone else's job. I wasn't totally unaware of this. I had closed my Polaroid Suitcase show with an invitation to join me in my crusade against mediocrity. I closed Face Academy with the idea that I didn't really want to be a leader, and that people should find their own way to fight mediocrity from now on. I've no idea whether I knew it at the time, but subconsciously I was preparing to relinquish my year of Everlasting Fame and Glory and fade back into the shadows. Success wasn't anywhere near as much fun as it looked and, to be honest, I needed a break from it. Not that I expected the break to be permanent, but you don't always get more than one shot at Everlasting Fame and Glory. But Gary wasn't beaten yet. The BBC bosses gave my TV script a thumbs up and asked me to write another one. I decided to give Edinburgh a year's break but I knew I'd be back again in two years with a new show - a better show with better writing, better acting, better music and better ideas. But now it wasn't all about the show. Gary Le Strange made albums too. For the first time in my life, I was regularly making music, and once I'd started, I couldn't stop. From now on, I would make more music - my music - better music with better lyrics, better equipment and better tunes! I would start my own comedy club, make my own TV series and finally conquer the world!! Gary Le Strange may not have been the Next Big Thing anymore but he was far from dead. He'd barely even started. If only I'd known about the battering to come... TO BE CONTINUED Waen Shepherd, May 2013