First full day. Comedy, grammar lessons and walking through walls. And booze. Lots of booze.
The day started with a healthy(ish) nosh up in the amazing Poon Street Cafe, which was then walked off along the coast for the obligatory photographs next to Dylan Thomas’ writing shed.
We then wander back to take our seats in the tent out the back of Brown’s, the pub where Dylan (Thomas, not Bob) used to drink. It was briefly owned by Morrissey (Neil, not Morrissey Morrissey).
First on our list is Tiffany (Murray, not the shop) author of ‘My Family and Other Rock Stars’. Tiffany’s mother was formerly the chef at the legendary Rockfield Studios in Monmouth. The book is a memoir of her childhood growing up with Bowie, Ozzy and Dave Edmunds at the dinner table, playing rounders in her garden and generally getting her young heart to flutter.
It’s a pleasant hour listening to stories of a young, innocent girl on the edge of rock and roll debauchery, and rock and roll history in the making.
From the extracts she reads out, it’s clear that it’s written in beautiful prose and we find ourselves queuing up for our first book purchase of the weekend. Even though I’ve already got the Kindle version.
A swift pint fills the gap between Tiffany and Stewart Lee. We are in the magnificent Congregational Church for this event, and it is full twenty minutes before the show is due to start. Rather than keeping us waiting Stewart kicks off early, a policy I think more artists should adopt.
Lee (Stewart, not Bruce) is getting ready to tour with a new show, so this is a session testing out new material. He’s doing it again tomorrow and, in true Lee Style, jokes that don’t get a laugh are literally crossed off his pace notes as he goes along. Crowd two will never hear them. His interaction with the crowd is exactly what you would expect from a Laugharne crowd
“That’s such a Laugharne heckle. In Glasgow people randomly shout things at me like ‘fuck off’. Here we get people shouting out abstract nouns like ’empathy’.”
We get a story about a restaurant that serves reindeer penis and at the end he gets out his guitar and…. I’m not going to spoil it for you. Go and see him.
If I had to list my favourite comedians they would be, in no particular order, Mark Thomas, Mark Steel, Alexi Sayle and Stewart Lee. Of those four, I’ve seen three of them at Laugharne. Two of them in one weekend. In fact one year Lee interviewed Sayle. If that’s not enough of a recommendation for this event, I don’t know what is.
We go for beers whilst waiting for John Shuttleworth, then decide to go to see comedian Susan Murray doing a set about the fear of flying instead.
I’m sat down the front with the most travelled couple I know, and one of them hates flying.
“You hate flying but your holiday-loving wife made you go on thirty three flights last year. And because she’s a psychiatric nurse she can (allegedly) get you drugs to cope with the flights.
Can you come along to all my shows? “
Alan Wicker goes for a piss, then five minutes later walks back in through a seam in the tent wall. Sue is annoyed that he gets a bigger laugh than any of the jokes in her set.
We have an uproarious hour then head to Poon for our reserved table. We give our order but the owner forgets about us. Not to worry, the waitress sorts us out after seeing us sat without food. The delay means we miss the amazing John Higgs, but it’s the sort of event where you have to accept you cannot see everything.
We go to the pub and get settled. Wicker and Chalmers head down to see The Comic Strip Presents, whilst we keep their seats warm in the pub. They eventually return and are, shall we say, disappointed. So we help them drown their sorrows with Jägerbombs. Our children express disappointment with their parents via social media, we get a taxi home and raid the vending machine in the hotel lobby.
