The plan had been to watch A History of Paper during the Fringe but then I learned it was on in Glasgow and that seemed safer. Olly and I spent our twenties taking plays to the Edinburgh Fringe, him writing, me directing. We watched more plays there than I can possibly remember and were vicious about most of them with the confidence and certainty of youth. There are other reasons I’m skirting the Fringe for a while, but this emotional motherload is the main one for watching this elsewhere.

In Iz, the first play we took to the Fringe, three men attempt to reckon with the loss of the woman they all loved. One of them, her husband, finds a book, her diary of notes and scraps and hopes, and realises – shocked - he barely knew her at all. I thought of this scene while watching A History of Paper, in which the experience is inverted: the tragedy here is that though the husband knew her so well, their time was still too short. This month it’s twenty-six years since Olly and I met on our first day at Leeds University, but our time was still too short.

Watching A History of Paper was strangely like the experience it described. Even the stuff about Pizza Express, a chain Olly introduced me to in 1998 and remained obsessed with for the next 25 years, is echt  Emanuel. I loved this feeling of being close to him, of recognising him in his rhythms and obsessions. At the same time I yearned for something of the Iz experience. I wanted him to surprise me as he did so often, with a completely untenable opinion or an outrageous statement. My knowing my friend was not yet complete. Our time was too short. And of course I wanted to be hurt by this play, which I deserve for remaining alive. 

Such is grief. No-one knew that more than Olly. People often say that he wrote a lot of plays about grief. Actually all of them are about love. But there’s no love without grief, and loss makes love shout louder.

So I went in prepared for emotional bruising, but wasn’t the obvious things that hit me. When she died I was unnerved by being unmoved. But every time I laughed out loud I was suckerpunched. Is this the last time Olly makes me laugh? Every moment of beauty was outrageous in its finality. How dare this be the last audacious pulling together of disparate threads in a joke that makes me laugh and choke? How dare the universe.

Everyone filed out at the end and I couldn’t bear to leave the theatre. In the final sequence of the play the male character had made faltering steps to move on with his life. Even though he wrote it before he knew he was ill – before he was ill at all, maybe - it’s too tempting to see it as Olly’s message to us. ‘Feel grateful for the time we had, not the time we didn’t. Take a deep breath and do it.’ But I’m not ready for the play to end.
​
Finally dragging myself from the room, an usher outside was packing up from selling copies of the text. I asked to buy one and it took what felt like fully five minutes for her to get the ipad back online and connect it to the card reader. She kept apologising. I would have stayed all night.

When answering the question of why so many dramatic writers are fans of Test cricket all sorts of theories come up. Five days allows the stakes to ratchet ever higher. Narratives can ebb and flow like a Homeric epic. There’s even a theory that the supposed longeurs of Test cricket are the birthplace of the Pinter pause.
 
I think it’s simpler than that. A sport that lasts five days – what better vehicle for procrastination? You can tell yourself all of the above is true (and all of the above is true) while getting absolutely nothing done whatsoever. It’s as tactical as chess - played out in a series of explosive athletic bursts! It’s a team game – played in a series of individual battles! The richness, the complexity, how Shakespearean! Oh look, it’s Thursday. Oh well, might as well tune in for the final day, then I’ll have three days to catch up on work before the next Test. 
 
When Pinter and Beckett were writing a lot less cricket was played. Now games of cricket come not as single spies but in batallions.  It would be so much more convenient if they could start at 5am, and clock up a couple of hours’ play before the kids get up.
 
This Arts Council application will have to wait until tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. The script will still be there after a pause. How did I get to 87 without meeting a single deadline, sans eyes, sans teeth, sans taste, sans everything?

On Thursday 8th June at 8pm I'll be premiering two new short films.

The event will be online and you can book via Eventbrite here.

Attendees will get to see both films, followed by a Q&A with me and filmmaker Bevis Bowden.

If you're unable to get to the premiere, the films will be on YouTube from that same evening. You can watch them below if you like.

Here's a bit of blurb for the curious:

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​Bevis Bowden and Daniel Bye present world premieres of two new films.

AS IF OUR LIVES DEPENDED ON IT. A group of fell runners play out a thrilling game that brings centuries-old manhunting adventures into the climate crisis era.

LEARNING TO FLY (AGAIN). In this meditation on illness and recovery, writer Daniel Bye returns to run a favourite hill after a long period on the sidelines.

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​They are both really gorgeous things. I hope you can come.

 On Saturday 1st April I'm making a film. Wanna be in it?

In the film a mixed-ability team of runners will run up High Cup Nick, in the north Pennines. There'll be a game format to the chase up the hill. The film is being shot by the brilliant Bevis Bowden. It'll be an absolute blast.

What's it all about? In Edwardian times, and even now, runners have played 'fox and hounds' type manhunting games in the fells. Academic Jonathan Westaway has written extensively about these, thinking of them (among other things) as rituals of post-imperial anxiety. 'What if', he said to me one day, 'we were to devise a comparable game that got people to engage with anxieties about climate breakdown?'

So that's what our game will aim to do. We'll have some fun running up and down the hill. We'll also play out a scenario that pushes us into confrontation with the consequences of man-made climate change. Fun, and meaning.

The finished film will be shot to very high standards, and beautifully scored. We intend to enter it into festivals such as Kendal. For examples of two other (very different) films I've made with Bevis in the past, see below.

We'll gather in the morning of Saturday 1st, to film through the day. It being film-making, there'll be a certain amount of stopping and starting and retaking, and an inevitable amount of waiting around in the cold. We will look after you, though! We'll confirm exact times with people as they express interest, but we anticipate needing people roughly 10-5. More on the details of this, and what to bring and wear, to follow for those who express an interest.

We can cover people's travel expenses and will also provide some food.

To express an interest, send me an email.

For what may be the final time, These Hills Are Ours is back out on tour for one week only, at the beginning of December.

6 December - Greenwich Theatre, LONDON
7 December - West End Centre, ALDERSHOT
8 December - Ventor Exchange, ISLE OF WIGHT
9 December - Forest Arts Centre, NEW MILTON
10 December - Guildhall Studio, PORTSMOUTH

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“What you see is what you get with me.”
 
Liz Truss has no hidden depths, and proud of it. Drop a stone in her and you’ll hear nothing but the faint thunk of pebble on pavement. There the stone will sit, having made neither ripple nor splash. Liz Truss is a moral and intellectual puddle. She’s the dialectical equivalent of a brick wall, countenance unchanged by facts, counterargument or the complete reconstitution of her own opinions and beliefs. Abolish the monarchy! Lavish the monarchy! Bring the Bank of England under control! Don’t even express an opinion on inflation: that’s a matter for the Importantly Independent Bank of England! Do nothing about the cost of living crisis! Do something about the cost of living crisis! LibDem! Tory! Remain! Leave! May! Johnson! Me!
 
Except it’s wrong to talk of “beliefs” with Liz Truss. She has no such thing. She is an ideological revolving door, attached to no buildings, all exit and no entrance. She barks about cheese and VAT, supremely uninterested in pretending she means or understands even half of what she’s saying. Liz Truss is the epitome and culmination of the Oxford PPE graduate, motivated not by the content or import of any argument, only by whether this is the argument that will get her a good grade. Then she can be happy again, like she was once, as a girl, just after getting her GCSE results, being told by the teacher how clever she is.

We have an album out!

No Masters records have released this beautiful limited edition booklet and 8-song CD and we couldn't be more pleased with it.

The CD features all eight songs from These Hills Are Ours, specially recorded and mastered for this release. But if you no longer have a CD player and any CD will essentially be a shiny coaster, this release is still worth getting for the book.

We didn't want to just release a half-arsed version of the text from the show, with gaps where there's usually audience interaction and a series of jokes that don't work on the page. So we've created a brand new version of the text for book form, including a fair bit of new material that will never be seen on stage.

It's beautifully designed and put together and I hope you love it too.

You can buy it here.

There was never anything cool about Meat Loaf. He was a beacon to those of us who were always, whatever we did, just a little bit naff. Twelve-year-old boys attempting to grow their hair while playing Dungeons and Dragons. Girls with T-shirts showing wolves and full moons in forests. But yeah, mostly the boys. Before Peter Jackson made it ok for grown-ups to like elves and orcs, Meat Loaf was there living a life full of leather jackets, loudly revving motorbikes, B-movie horror and flames. To all of us geeks, nerds, dorks and misfits, he brought the bombastic revelation that feelings are always bigger than their containers, that you can be sincere and preposterous at the same time, that alpha masculinity isn't the only kind. He seemed at ease with his contradictions in a way I wanted to be.

To twelve-year-old me listening to Bat Out of Hell II, Meat Loaf offered a way of being a man that didn’t fit in in some of the same ways I didn't. He was straight, but not in the usual ways. You can paint your nails, and have feelings, and wear velvet trousers and seventeenth-century shirts, and still be a man. Let’s not pretend Meat Loaf’s material, or his life, is a model of anti-patriarchy, but for me he did enough to point the direction.
 
I didn’t listen to him much after the age of twelve or thirteen. From fourteen to sixteen I listened entirely (I'm not kidding) to either heavy metal or showtunes, when I could have got both at once by just continuing to listen to Meat Loaf. The monsters and posturing of Iron Maiden were just as daft as Meat Loaf’s wolves and strut, but the New Wave of British Heavy Metal wasn’t complicated by anything so troubling as real human emotion. Cats and Starlight Express, on the other hand, boil down emotion to the size of a sweet so that it doesn’t ever have to touch the sides. Both these things filled a need in me that they couldn't on their own. I was sixteen before I got into anything I'd still listen to, but before that point everything was just variations on Meat Loaf (and Queen, I suppose, but that's another story).

From his obituaries I learn that Meat Loaf was in about seventy movies. Somehow every time I saw him in one I thought it was quite a coup for them to have got him. In the same way as Tom Waits gets cast by directors who want to signify a kind of hardboiled drunken rapscallionism, hoping (usually forlornly] that Waits’ unrelenting wit and invention will somehow wash off on the movie, so Meat Loaf’s job on screen was simply to signify himself. He represented, and represents, a particular kind of technicolour masculinity. Somehow he was always playing a bouncer, even when he wasn’t. He was operatic, yet reassuringly beery. He might not quite fit the normative behavioural categories of cishet masculinity, but in the end you couldn't say he really disrupted them that much.

My move away from him (and from a lot of other heavy rock) coincided with starting to paint my nails and experiment with eyeliner. The Manic Street Preachers were as swaggeringly preposterous as Metallica or Guns N Roses, but instead of beer they had glitter; instead of monsters they had politics. Meanwhile, Meat Loaf’s politics were awful. He endorsed McCain and Romney, he praised Trump. He was an anti-masker and reportedly an anti-vaxxer. The world he performed in his songs was a 1950s WASP world of drive-in movies and endless highways, Friday night dances without Bruce Springsteen's working week, a male-gaze world where women always offer their throat to the wolf with the red roses. I can't deny that world formed me. But I don't want to live in it.
 
Still, this morning, for old time's sake, we put on “Bat Out of Hell” and danced to it with the kids. It’s even more dizzyingly ridiculous and propulsive than you remember. Longer, too. It spends the first two minutes introducing four separate musical themes, all of them foaming with adrenaline, before the vocal even comes in. A decade earlier (unbelievably, this is only nine years after "Hey Jude"), pop songs were mostly done inside three minutes; three minutes into "Bat Out of Hell" we’re not even at the first chorus. Five minutes in, the structure can't bear any more weight, it starts to crack open, it grinds to a halt. In any normal song this would be the end. At this point "Bat Out of Hell" erupts, spewing out testosterone and lava for another five minutes of motorbikes guitar solos, and keening laments where even the slow bits are unnervingly uptempo, revving up, screeching to a halt, revving up, then slamming through another wall. LIKE A BAT OUT OF HELL. Andrew Lloyd Webber's rock operas are relatively restrained; this is Wile E Coyote's Acme rock opera, on heroin, standing on the seat of a motorbike, hurtling the wrong way down Route 66. LIKE A BAT OUT OF HELL.

Lots of bands and artists have that one song they do that's immensely long. "Bohemian Rhapsody" (a mere six minutes), "Stairway to Heaven", "Rime of the Ancient Mariner", "Hey Jude". With Meat Loaf outlandishly long songs aren't statements, they're the norm: "I Would do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)" is eight minutes, as is "Paradise by the Dashboard Light", though some versions are as long as twelve. "Dead Ringer for Love" and "Two Outta Three Ain't Bad" are unusually short at a mere six and five respectively, but they still seem amped up on steroids, out of proportion with normal songs. There's nothing of restraint here. It's all far too much. The Hammer nonsense, the melodrama, the nerve. It’s in absolutely terrible taste. Despite everything I find I still love it. 

Do you love me? Will you love me forever? Do you need me? Will you never leave me? I’ll probably never listen to Meat Loaf again, but I don’t need to. It'll make me so happy for the rest of my life just for having been there thirty years ago when I needed it. The music you get into at twelve stays part of you: I don’t ever need to listen to “Bohemian Rhapsody”, “You Give Love a Bad Name” or “Summer of ‘69” again either. There’s nothing cool about any of this, but fuck cool. Music is a way of learning how to be yourself, if you let it, and Meat Loaf was an important stage of that for me.