原文地址：http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=140713037&blogID=358816365

Monday, February 18, 2008 

Manchester Part 2
Category: Music

Originally posted in the members area of Darrens Official Fanclub 'Delicacy' Feb 6th 2008.

Ok so I'm just in from the gig.
I probably should just tell you what I told my sister.. great crowd.
No, amazing crowd.
I always love Manchester and the North because we get such a generous amount of affection from the audience.
But there was one WANKER.  Or shall I say a gaggle of wankers.
2 or 3 of them.  Maybe 4.
(see what I did there?)
Anyway maybe they were drunk.
Maybe they were just really excited.
Or maybe they'd stumbled in for free.
I don't know.
But they were so rude.  Talking LOUDLY in the quieter moments.   Heckling.  Yelling out song requests and at one point yelling 'Boring!' during my story..

My sister said, what did you do?

And I told her.

I said to the crowd, and I quote
"I'd sleep with pretty much 99% of the people in this room but I'd like to physically
hurt the person who is being rude".

With that the entire crowd cheered and the people closest to the WANKER cheered the loudest.

I basically said if they didn't shut up the people next to them would physically remove each of their eyelashes one by one.

They behaved themselves after that.

It was so weird too because I was just about to sing '100 Challenging Things', which is really one of the saddest and most personal songs I've ever written.  I was telling the tale about how it's a song for a Mother and a Father who died too young and left their son here to remind me that my own problems pale into insignificance.  When the hecklers stopped I explained how the Father was a coal miner who hated the dark and the Mother was a stranger in a foreign country and that they worked all their lives to escape to the sun.
And the sad irony is the minute they made it, and only in the 50's – she passed away suddenly and he died of the C word but I suspect more from a broken heart.

Anyway the point of the song is that, upon meeting their son who survived – and seeing the sparkle and the joy in his eyes and witnessing his positive outlook on life I felt ashamed to have gone on so much about my own woes in life.  That at least I had the luxury of parents alive whom I could blame for what was wrong with me.  And that's when I fell in love.

So the gig – on fire, alive, tense, intense, cheeky, flirty, heartfelt and a bit of a struggle physically (said to my sister it's like a runner after training for a few days – suddenly all the muscles ache a few shows in and you start to feel the hard work of singing taking its toll).

But it wasn't really about any of that.  Because afterwards I met the family of the courageous Amanda whom many of you will remember spent some of her last moments on stage giving me a cheeky hug during the Time Machine Tour.

I'd kept in touch after the funeral and because Amanda had bought tickets to this tour, her husband and sister went in her memory.

They gave me the biggest hugs (must run in the family) and once again I was reminded of how lucky we all are and how our problems pale into insignificance when we are confronted with true loss.

And I felt glad I'd experienced tonight, and told my stories and sung my songs.

With love
Darren