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Eddy Says
Eddy Says: By the skin of my teeth
By Eddy Temple-Morris | Published on Thursday 4 November 2010
Are you the kind of person who leaves everything to the last minute? I am. I struggle to get anything done without a deadline looming over my head. Eddy is the same, as he explains this week. Although I’m not sure the deadline he had last Friday is one I’d want to hang around for.
This week, allow me to give you a cautionary tale, which revolves around what happened after the show on Friday. But you know me, I do ramble, so here’s a little explanatory background.
I’ve always winged it. Last minute. That’s how I roll. That’s how I’ve ALWAYS rolled. Exams, job interviews, work, you name it, I do it at the last possible moment.
‘Do you not have a script for your show?’ I’m often asked by the many bright sparks who come in for work experience on The Remix. My bumbling alone is surely proof of there being zero script? Hell, I only started having a running order relatively recently, when The Remix ‘went network’ on Xfm.
I remember the good old days of going in with a ‘yes’ pile and a ‘maybe’ pile and seeing what happened as the show unfolded.
Granted, having a script would make the show OK every single time, but that’s all it would be. NOT having a script makes it fucking awful sometimes and fucking brilliant other times. Actually, it’s never that bad, purely because the music is so good, but as the glue that holds it together, I can vary widely.
Friday was a hard show, I’ll not lie. I was distracted all the way through by an ominous and increasingly painful pain in one of my teeth.
My winging it, sadly and badly, includes my health. I’ve had this pain for six months. It started as a dull ache and increased, little by little, over time.
When I did my last link on Friday and headed through the Leicester Square munters, the adrenaline of being on air started to seep away, and at that point I realised the severity of the pain I was in. By the time I got home I was in agony. I’m not exaggerating here, I mean proper fucking biblical pain.
Now, I have experienced more than my fair share of pain over the years. Head-on collision with a car when I was on a motorbike. Piles. Pneumonia. Dengue fever. Fissures. Broken ribs, broken wrist, broken collarbone, broken toe, carpal tunnel syndrome, shingles. Cricketball in the love-spuds… This was THE WORST. By a mile.
My poor girlfriend watched me writhing around, unable to even think and decided, quite rightly, that this was an emergency. My skull felt like it was going to explode. Even stacking different painkillers had no effect, the pain was spreading around the right hand side of my head. Remember that film, ‘The Mummy’? Omid Djallili’s character had some horrid little scarab burrow into his foot and work its way up to his head. He sprinted, screaming like a man possessed, past Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, headfirst into a stone wall. THAT is what I felt like doing.
While I contemplated hurling myself at the brickwork, Clare found a 24 hour dentist in Baker Street. Thank you, London.
The dentist bragged that Madonna had been there, under similar circumstances, and explained calmly that I had a cracked tooth that had been sealed unwisely, and that the nerve had become infected, swollen with horridness and, with nowhere to go, put increasing and eventually massive pressure on the nerve. I would have to have root canal surgery. It was now 4.30 am.
It turned into the most expensive Friday night I’ve ever had. For what I spent, you’d expect to be, at the very least, high on extraordinarily good quality class A drugs, drunk on vintage Bollinger and impaling a Russian prostitute with direct lineage to Tzar Nicholas.
Me? I had to make do with my first McDonalds breakfast since August 1983. I remember this so well because I got salmonella from an Egg McMuffin the last time I voluntarily walked into the Golden Arches Of Misery.
But I would have actually paid anything to take that excruciating pain away.
There was a happy ending, and it came in the form of Gypsy And The Cat. I was still able to walk, so buzzing off my nuts on a cocktail of painkillers and antibiotics, I made it to Freeze Festival to see them open up the main stage, where I’d seen Chase & Status rock a crowd of thousands when they played second from top on the bill at the same event last year. This time it was 1.45pm, but still the crowd assembled for Gypsy And The Cat’s set were loving it. That’s right, the entire crowd – Me AND Clare.
By the end of the set they had lured an actual crowd of several hundred, with their incredibly uplifting, surprisingly powerful, live show. These guys make music for stadiums. Imagine if Fleetwood Mac had discovered ecstasy and synths at the same time. Its not music for nightclubs or little gigs, this is huge music for huge stages.
I was mesmerised, and I know it wasn’t just the painkillers. Gypsy And The Cat deserve to be huge and, listening to the live versions of these gorgeous songs I’d played as demos or singles, I think it’ll be hard for them not to be.
Back to the dental mentalness and I’ve learned a valuable lesson. Yes, it’s great to just fly by the seat of your pants for some parts of your life, but you can’t just apply that outlook to everything. My leave-it-to-the-last-second rule, that’s seen me through nine O-Levels, four A-Levels, and a relatively successful career, had a major FAIL on Friday, and I need to learn from that. Please don’t make the same mistake as me. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.
Well, actually I would wish it on one person, but since he got fired from Xfm for stealing CDs off his colleagues, I’m guessing the humiliation is pain enough until he gets a fully deserved one of these things.
Eddy x
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