Rob Manuel

On 26th June we woke up to the news that Michael Jackson was dead. By 6pm I was standing in a crowd of nearly 2,000 people at Liverpool Street Station. One tweet made that happen. I wrote it for a laugh and the result was what the media have described as “London’s biggest ever flashmob”. Let me start at the beginning.

Jacko is dead. Blimey, this is news. Proper news. News on the scale of Die-Di-day and 9/11. My 4 year old son changes the TV channel, he’s not interested in the looped footage of an ambulance leaving Jackson’s home, but wants CBeebies. Tough. He can watch that upstairs – we want to know what happened to Jacko.

We deposit son at school and go to the local Co-op to buy supplies for lunch, and I as I do every day, walk to the newspaper stand to do a headline check. Nine headlines, one story, and again I’m reminded of Diana, I remember seeing a similar slew of headlines on that day and suddenly I regret not having a camera in 1997, and what an interesting little photo I’d missed. So, using all the power of the 21st century, I get out my phone and snap.

In the local cafe they are playing tributes to Jackson, not his songs but My Way by Frank Sinatra. It’s a fantastic and moving performance and again I’m reminded of Di-Die Day. Radio 1, if I remember rightly, appeared to spend a day playing sombre ambient house. Nothing too upbeat.

I say to my wife, “You know there’s going to be one of those internet flash mobs over this. People are going to group up and moonwalk or something.” “You should organise it”, she says. “Yeah, but I don’t really want to. I’m just saying it’s probably going to happen.”

Checking Facebook I have a message from an old school friend Joseph Lenham: “I’m disappointed at the lack of comment on tonight’s news, oh Gingermeister. I came straight to your page to hear the truth.” I’m struck that there is a weight of expectation on me – this is the kind of day people want B3ta – the site I co-founded to be doing something – and I’ve done bugger all.

I get on B3ta and check, yep people are photoshopping bad taste Jackson images, of course they are, so I quickly whip it up into a challenge and mutter that it’s my “historic duty” to collect this stuff up.

My other bastard child, Sickpedia, is where people who like sick jokes go when there’s a big news event. It crashed when Jade Goody died and it’s crashing today. I hammer F5 and eventually get a few jokes out of the smoking server. “Day 96 in Jade Goody’s Coffin. Jade has a new house-mate.”, “Gary Glitter has won the auction for Michael Jackson’s PC.” and “An English man, an Irish man and a Scottish man walk into a bar. The English man turns to the Scot and says, ‘Do you think the person reading this will really think this jokes not going to be about Michael Jackson?’”

I check Twitter – really the world is melting down with Jackson overload. One friend is writing, “remember, the dead can’t sue for libel” and I’m reminded how I once wrote something that casually referenced Jackson as a “notorious paedophile” and my boss brilliantly subbed it to “child enthusiast.” That’s not going to happen today.

My thoughts return to the flash mob idea. I’m theorise that maybe if I put the idea out there it might snowball and I won’t have to personally run around saying, “roll up! roll up! Rob is having a big naff Jackson party and you’re all invited.” Because, well, that would be completely horrific and I’d rather cut off my cock and stick it in a breville.

So I post, tentatively, “If I claimed there was a mass moonwalk being organised for 6pm at Liverpool Street Station would anyone believe me?” and sit back to see what happens next.

I’ve got about 2000 followers on Twitter, not exactly Ashton Kutcher levels, but enough people to cause trouble and the retweeting starts.

Points to note here are firstly that I’m being retweeted by a fictional character from Peep Show, he follows me, regularly retweeting my posts. I’ve found this alarming for quite a while, I like the show but err really, I can’t ever reply to you. You’re not real.

Secondly is Milo Yiannopoulos. This is a name I recogmise, he emailed me a couple of months ago to say he worked for “special projects” at The Telegraph and wanted “to discuss a potential b3ta/Telegraph blogs tie up.” This struck me as extremely unlikely to happen, as experience tells me that B3ta is far too wayward to get into bed with big business.

(Another time I’ll tell you about Disney wanting to give us a small fortune to run an image challenge to promote kids film, Chicken Little. If only that had gone ahead, it would have been LEGENDARY. Imagine, thousands of Disney’s characters, covered in photoshop cocks and Disney having to pay for the pleasure. Brilliant.)

Presumably Milo has similar thoughts and I assume I will never hear from him again, until he twitters me that is. And over the day the message is retweeted numerous times, quickly losing the “If I claimed” caveat and being presented as truth. I sit back, nervous, and watch the messages pile up. Oh my god, something really is going to happen and I’ve started it. How exciting.

At this point Milo sees an opportunity and decides to take over. He puts up a blog post with more details and a phone number and emails me to ask if I’m going to come. I’ve got no choice really.

I have stuff to do, I have a newsletter to write and a meal to cook for my wife. She’d demanded Spaghetti Bolognese and tells me, “you cook the best spag bog in North London.” She delights in calling it “bog”, it’s her reference to my Midlands origins, and she never misses an opportunity to mention it. Hence we then spend the next 30 minutes imagining a soap opera set in Birmingham called “Brummies” featuring a 38 year old bloke called Dave, who’d obsessed with Neds Atomic Dustbin and lives with his keeping-up-appearances mother. Dave has dreads, wears long shorts, and tries to be down with the kids by handing up C90s of mash-ups based upon early 90s greebo culture. You see, we were busy.

At five I get the tube to Liverpool Street Station. I read iWoz whilst traveling and think about Steve Wosniak’s almost sociopathic pranks where he spent a year interfering with the reception on a communal college TV set, making people madly bang it whenever he pressed a concealed gadget. I wonder if there’s a connection – a delight in making people dance to your own tune when in real life you feel a bit ignored.

Liverpool Street is rammed with police. Everywhere I turn there are yellow jacketed coppers talking on walkie-talkies. Suddenly I feel deeply paranoid and I do a circuit of the station and worry that I’m going to be arrested on terrorism charges. I panic and get the first train out of there – I even take the wrong line.

One stop in the wrong direction later and I feel a bit calmer. There’s no way I’m about to moonwalk in public – the horror of that literally makes sweat drip from my armpits, but maybe I can lurk to the side and noone will arrest me. Also I’m making a conscious effort to write at the moment, and if I duck out at the climax of the story, well there’s no story is there?

Back in the station I make my way to the meeting point Milo mentioned, by McDonalds, and gosh, what a huge crowd. There must be one or two thousand people here, all crushed up, all holding camera phones, all straining to see the centre of the action. I’m reminded of the passages about herd instinct in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point where if one animal looks like it’s engaged in killing something then others crowd round for scraps, as this is more efficient than hunting for food themselves. There is literally nothing to see, other than the spectacle of the crowd.

A sharp poke in my ribs and a middle aged business man shouts, “Excuse me, this is a public walkway you know.”

I drift amongst the people overhearing snippets of conversation, “Flashmob” “Michael Jackson” “Twitter” and most of all, “Do you know what’s going on?” which mostly the answer appears to be, “no.”

Media are out in force, I spy two outside broadcasting trucks and numerous self-shooters with lenses too large to be consumer equipment. I blink, all this happened, because I thought it would happen and mentioned it, and yet nobody knows who I am or (quite rightly) cares. I briefly entertain fantastical notions of grabbing one of the news crews and telling them my story, but assume they’ll just think I’m a nutter trying to claim credit, as it’s quite obvious who’s in charge – that would be the bloke in the centre holding a microphone.

Milo has organised a P.A system and occasionally says things over it, which I can’t actually make out, but people cheer. Someone mentions something about “there’s a look-a-like!” another “Michael’s in a limousine” but I can see nothing and I’m reminded of those rumours that sweep crowds at music festivals. “Shaun Ryder is dead!” or “The Beatles are playing.”

Eventually some music starts up – it’s the one Jackson tune I unequivocally love, Billie Jean. It’s the bass-line that works for me, once described by the KLF’s Bill Drummond as like a “lynx on the prowl”. It’s perfect, not a note wasted, and unlike much of Jacko’s later work it tells an engaging story, a deranged fan claiming Jackson is the father of her child.

I can’t tell if people are moonwalking or not. All I see are people holding cameras in the air and trying to photograph the middle of the crowd. This must be the real story, and I turn around and attempt to take photos of the crowd instead of the back of people’s heads. Then I feel dreadfully self conscious and worry about someone thumping me and I stop.

Getting bored now so I check twitter on my phone, hopefully someone I know is around. There’s a message saying I’ve been spotted on CNN. Ha. There’s something for the TV researchers to dig out if I ever become a serial killer or something – a fleeting glimpse in a crowd. Like that photo of Hitler standing among the crowd in Munich as war is declared in 1914.

We have four songs, and then Milo tells the crowd that the police want to all to end and everyone should go home. It’s not quite as dramatic as when the police stopped the Beatles playing on the Savile Row roof in 1969, nobody arrests Ringo or anything.

I spy Paul Carr, the only man I know to ever be sacked from a company he started himself, and he ushers me into the inner circle amongst the cops. “This would never happen in San Francisco. I mean the media wouldn’t bother turning up, we do stuff like this almost every Thursday and nobody cares”, he claims.

“You live in San Francisco?” I ask. “Yeah, but I’m back for Glastonbury.” I wonder about the great mystery of how Paul Carr funds his life, he never appears to do any real work. Maybe we can drum up a Guardian expenses scandal?

Milo is on the phone, I wave at him and I’m shushed by someone telling me, “he’s talking to the BBC”. Milo is beanpole thin, extremely tall and looks like he should be running for headboy at Hogwarts. He’s glorying in the attention, being pulled from one camera crew to another and eventually he finds time for me.

“I mentioned you three times”, he says. “I bet they cut it” I reply. “No I managed to get you mid sentence so you can’t be cut.”

I spot Alex Tew of milliondollarhomepage fame. He’s grown a beard and I ask him about his current project Popjam. “Yep it’s going great, but it’s tricky trying to compete with Facebook.” Alex asks about Sickipedia and I tell him that it’s spent most of the day crashed due to the increased traffic caused by Jackson’s death, and it’s a pig of a site because although there’s apparently limitless demand for sick jokes, it’s impossible to grow it as no advertiser will place their clients near it.

Alex suggests I get B3ta to buy advertising on it, which I suspect is the crazy accounting methods that probably caused current global economic breakdown.

I hang around a bit, realise nothing more is going to happen and decide it’s time that I get home so I can take the Spag Bog out of the oven, share a bottle of wine with my wife and tell her all about my rather odd little world.

* * *

The next day during my headline watch I notice that The Guardian is running one of the most confusingly worded headlines I’ve seen for a while. How can anyone read this and not think of Timelords?

Recently been reading Philip Norman’s “John Lennon: The Life” a fantastic autobiography that makes Lennon really come alive, especially in its depictions of his childhood, but the reference that really caught my attention was that John named his 14 month booze bender The Lost Weekend after the 1945 film of the same name.

I like addiction stories so I sought the movie out and I couldn’t help but notice the amount of places that the hero stashes drink, so in the spirit of helping any alcoholics who are still simply leaving their drinks on open display here’s how to hide your booze – a guide according to The Lost Weekend:

Underneath apples, implying you’re just shopping for healthy groceries.

On a rope hung from your apartment window.

Inside the hoover. This made me laugh out loud.

On top of the light fitting.

Or even in a special booze-hole behind the bath.

Coincidentally I was recently chatting with my chum Joel Veitch on a similar theme and he says it’s common for alcoholics to use water bottles filled with vodka so they can swig away in the office. So if you’re an alcoholic who likes to stash booze, like squirrels hiding nuts for winter, then please share your secrets here, I’m all ears.

Mostly the B3ta lot live online – a youtube video here, a flash game there, but occasionally some of them can be arsed to leave their spunk encrusted bedrooms and venture outside for a real world project.

Some such guys are John Hopkins and his friend Richard Glover, who plan to get the web to pay for a yacht so they can sail to the Edinburgh festival. The video caught my attention as it reminded me of a comment Ben Goldacre made about moving to live on a boat, “I’ll become London’s novelty shag.” And it’s got a great title: With Sails & I.

I feature the video clip in the newsletter and forget about it until one morning and I’ve got three excitable emails from Hopkins, the last one most worryingly going, “I’m about to pass out on the Hamble river.” But what really shocked me was that he phoned me at 8 the following morning – I assumed these were drunken ramblings.

Hopkins is affable and excited on the phone – he’s hasn’t got a boat yet but he’s been learning how to sail via donated lessons. “The company wants their name promoted – it’s on the side of the boat.” Ah, something for the video editors to pixel out should this ever reach TV.

He keeps stressing how foolhardy his plans to sail from the South Coast to Scotland are and how little he knows. And how likely he is to die.

The plan is to pull off a comedy fundraiser, “Like Live Aid” he says, to raise the cash needed and he invites me to attend the event.

Not a big one for nights out at the moment – two young children mean I need to be up in the mornings but I’m curious – who is this John Hopkins? My mental image is a 30 something bachelor who’s looking for the big project to make sense of his life, when probably what he really needs is good stiff talking to about family values.

I meet John at the venue – he immediately demands a bear hug which startles me a little, he’s excited and nervous, I recognise the weird flighty energy people get before going on stage, this stuff really is a drug – it’s as addictive as cocaine and makes people just as hyper. I’m bundled down the stairs and introduced to passing people, “This is Rob Manuel from B3ta” Hopkins shouts, “So that’s what you look like!”, another says. Well yes. This is what I look like.

Then a whirl of people I don’t know – an attractive blonde comes to our table, “Hi, I’m Alexa, I’m here to look after you tonight.” Awkward at being schmoozed, it’s fight or flee. What’s this all about, I think to myself. I’m Rob from some stupid website, I’m not a commissioning editor from Channel 4, he’s over there, pointing vaguely in my mind, at home watching TV. But I say nothing other than, “um yes, I can’t really refuse beer.”

“Hey Rob, I know you, I worked at Comedybox, you did a song for us – about wishing your wife was a horse. But I gave up my job to film these guys. How could I say no?”, says the camera operator. Er.. Because you were made redundant at a guess, again I mutter in my head, as who’s going to give up a proper job in the current climate?

Lenny Beige is comparing, he’s like Mike Flower’s Pops with scissor kicks. I like the scissor kicks, they’re exciting. Each time he kicks – boom – excitement. Next time I do a Power-Point presentation I’m definitely going to liven it up with a few scissor kicks.

Then our new boating heroes take the stage to do a few skits – the most amusing bit involves drinking spunk, not so much the semen itself but the apology to the girlfriend’s mother about the sketch. Aha, so he’s not a loveless bachelor then.

Other guests include um, some other guys who sing and dance a bit. My friend Mike comments, “it’s a bit like a school play isn’t it? They’re playing to their friends who already know the jokes.”

Hopkins does a series of thank-yous to people who are helping the project, “…And Rob Manuel from B3ta… Anybody know B3ta?” Tumbleweed and the longest five seconds of my life as nobody knows B3ta. My personal version of hell will have that 5 seconds played over an eternity. Thanks for that.

He also mentions that I’ve got ginger hair and it waves like the blowing wind, even when I’m inside. Glad to have made an impression.

Phill Jupitus on next and he’s a bit of a worry. With his gigantic girth and a pork-pie hat, he does the right thing and acknowledges his size this to preempt the audience,”I’m 47 years old, 22 stone and a hamburger away from a heart attack.”

A startling joke as it’s true. He needs to look after himself better. I like Phill and I don’t want him to die. We met once for working reasons and we talked about our kids, “having children is a great leveller” he said. Yes Phill, and your kids want you alive, so lay off the family pack of Kit-Kats.

Phill hasn’t done stand-up in 7 years and is anxious about it – he needn’t be, he’s great, his powerful delivery is in stark contrast to the other acts. He storms it.

He does a gag about his daughter bringing back her first boyfriend and he threatens to “cut him up if he so much as touches her… He starts crying? Sheesh – six year olds today.”

His material is 12 years old he tells us, his daughter is now a young adult who has sex with her boyfriend under his roof. The roof his comedy paid for. This makes him very angry. The joke here being presumably, that this is not a joke.

His turn finishes in 15 minutes to loud applause which he takes badly. He’s horribly self critical – he complains he doesn’t deserve it as good stand-up should be faster and it’s all about speed, then mutters something about being a “pathetic excuse for a human being” and wanders off the stage. Come now Phill, save the self-hatred for your shrink, your public loves you.

And now for a final sing song – all the comics shuffle back on to the stage and launch into a ramshackle medley that lurches between Blondie’s The Tide Is High and The Specials Message To You Rudy depending on who took the mic.

A special guest joins – it’s Pete Bennett from Big Brother. Another disturbing figure – he’s dressed in a figure hugging Lycra with S.P. emblazoned on the front. Super Pete presumably.

He does a growling ragga thing, like Shaggy toasting over a Culture Club 12″ – “I met them on a beach in BrightON. They wanted a boat that they could get ON”

Pete has an electrical energy about him, a fizzing spark, a short circuit. I worry for him – I reckon you could persuade him to do anything – the 14 year old boy who runs across a railway track because you dare him. I hope he doesn’t mix with people who do.

Wanting a big finale for filming reasons, John Hopkins apologies on stage, “we have to do this bit” and launches into Rod Stewart’s Sailing.

Some girl is plucked from the audience and suddenly she’s singing like Janis Joplin. She’s not bad and presumably is a plant.

Time to sneak off before I’m collared by Hopkins and strong-armed – in the nicest possible way of course – into promotion for his project for the rest of my natural life. However I’m interested to see where their story goes next: will they get a boat? Will the coast guards have to save them? And how many times? And will the end result have a certain story-telling charm? I think the answer to the last bit will certainly be yes.

http://www.withsailsandi.co.uk/