Part 1 cont'd

D – Well then, now that you are a con veteran - you are actually teaching a workshop. Tell us about the acting workshop.

M – Well, basically it was… instead of doing another Q&A this year, I just thought well, everyone knows so much about me anyway and, you know, although there’s new people coming this year, so many people have already heard all the anecdotes and stories, it’s just a bit boring after a while, do you know what I mean? You know for all the people who’ve been to this thing a few times. And I just thought well, instead of doing that I could do a workshop for an hour and just, you know, for say about 25 people. You know, the first, kind of, 25 who sign up. And just do some… a few techniques, a few tips and just kind of focus on… initially I was thinking of doing Shakespeare as a main thing for it since that’s kind of one of my passions. But I was lying in bed last night thinking about it and actually it might be more fun just to kind of have no format and just see what people want to do. And you know, and just some of the tips and some of the games and confidence builders, the improv. I mean, an hour – you can’t really do much in an hour.

K – Have you taught like an acting workshop before?

M – Yeah, I did. Yeah, I kind of… back in England, quite a lot do workshops and stuff like that. And it’s really cool. Some of them are just amazing because you get people who come in and wanna maybe go into acting but don’t have the confidence to do it. And after just a workshop even for an hour you can kind of get people loosened up enough to just walk out the room thinking “actually yeah, that wasn’t too bad” so… Yeah, I kind of want to do that for about an hour and just have a closed room, have no one filming it, have none of the cast there so no one’s feeling inhibited and yeah, just…

D – Except for you of course.

M – Yeah, except for me but … yeah, I don’t think they’d be… I don’t think anyone’s intimidated by me anymore. Or they probably weren’t from the beginning. But you know, yeah but and just do an improv. There’s some really good physical kind of stuff I want to do, some vocal kinds of exercises and you know, just some ideas I had that I really kind of I feel quite passionate about and want to share from the people who taught me and inspired me about acting. And I just thought that would be kind of… I don’t know, I thought that would just be more useful than just…

D – No, it is. It’s really cool.

M - …telling some stories that I’ve told for three years running. Because you do, you know, you don’t want to repeat yourself kind of thing actually, it should be a bit more than that so…

D – Yeah, we agree. We know all about that because we wrote your questions last last night because we were just like, well shit, we’ve interviewed him how many times now? Three times…

M – Yeah, still here – unscathed.

D – Yeah, plus I was a mod last year, I was on staff last year and the year before so it was just kind of like what else do we do now, what… where do we go with that?

M – We go back to your first question.

D – Yes. Well, we’re uh… we’re going to get there because we thought what we could do this time around is that you could ask us some questions and then somehow…

M – Oh, okay.

K – We’ve spent so much time putting you on the spot.

M – Yeah yeah yeah. Payback!

K - So start thinking now because at the end you get to payback.

M – Oh all right – at the end of this session?

K – At the end of this session.

M – Oh, all right. Okay.

K – So uh, are you glad you’re not performing at the Masquerade this year?

M – Fucking hell yeah! That was the most… I don’t think John and I had ever been so scared last year. On the Saturday when we were in our room and uh, neither of us spoke to each other and it was as if we were going to like a funeral. Do you know what I mean? And like even…

D – Kelly and I felt like we were going to a funeral. We were like this (mimes gripping the seat) in our chairs.

M – Ah yeah? And it was that kind of moment of just… even the people who had heard us at the concourse you know, who gave us really cool feedback… you know, everybody was like “errr, yeah but it’s not really the kind of music that people here like.” You know and I’m thinking – it’s not really gothic, it’s not metal-y, it’s kind of… ugh, we could just die a death. And honestly, we went for a swim and a sauna before and I think if we could’ve just, you know, like faked an accident… I mean, we would’ve. And the most nerve-wracking thing…

D – Is that why guys were really drunk?

M – Yeah, that’s right. That’s why we got pissed. And we just normally kind of had maybe one beer and then we were just kind of like…because we had so long to wait. It just went on and on and everytime we thought we were going to go onstage, on would come another costume and on would come another thing. And so suddenly we realize we’ve drunk about 5 or 6 beers and you go… and we went onstage and they had that fucking cartoon playing…

D – Which is extremely popular.

M – Extremely popular. We knew nothing about it. And you’re suddenly sitting there and we got booed before we even played a note.

D – I know, it’s horrible.

M - Do you know what I mean? When they turned it off I just remember sitting there thinking “Oh fuck, turn it back on. Turn it… somebody turn it back on.” It’s just like… you know cruelty to animals. But… and it went all right. And I don’t think… you know, I don’t think it was quite you know Oasis at Knebworth or the Rolling Stones but uh… but it went… we kind of left the stage and thought, you know, we didn’t get pulled off by a Stormtrooper which would’ve been quite painful and ummm…

D – But memorable. A story to tell the grandkids.

M – Yeah, and I’ve still got a picture looking out there at 4 thousand people watching us. And think, it was our first and only gig of last year and to suddenly play for that many people and actually all the Tribe fans were so vocal and made so much noise that we actually… I don’t know, we kind of really enjoyed it. It was over so quick though, three or four songs and that was it but… Yeah uh, it was memorable but it’s kind of nice to not have the pressure like last year – just play the concourse which is much more intimate. And you know, the main thing this year is we’ve got the album to sell and we’ve got the song which are so much more… you know, yeah, they’ve just got more weight to them. So yeah, it kind of feels more relaxed.