Off the Wall On the Wall

September 09, 2010 02:14 PM Comments - 5

Got to do a run through of my show Off the Wall  on Monday, a nerve wracking event, as my audience will be my two partners from Speakers from the Edge; Rebecca and Kerry.  These two are probably the most critical people you could ever meet, and never hold back on giving ‘constructive’ criticism (Kerry was an officer in the Army, so she can be very scary!).

They don’t except crap slideshows. 

In the last few years they’ve picked through talks by Stephen Vendables, Andy Cave, Kenton Cool and Tim Emmet, giving feedback aimed to make what climbers do more inclusive of non climbers.  Talk of grades or altitudes is out, along with multiple shots of summits, walks in’s and maps.  Sometimes I wonder if they are in the right game, after all these things are what climbing slideshows have always been about. 

The norm when I was young were talks that were light on laughs or introspection, but big on ego and willy waving, and with crappy slides.  If you were lucky you might get some music mixed with slides - perhaps a track off Dark Side of the moon, but generally it was a bloke standing (or sometimes sitting) and telling the story of one expedition from the beginning to the end, sometimes - god forbid - several expeditions.

I can remember my dad sending in a mock obituary for an entire audience to High magazine once after a particularly bad slideshow.

There were good slideshows back then, and I wish I’d seen John Barry, Willians or Joe Tasker speak. There were ground breaking shows, such as John Beatty’s, that mixed stunning images with music, and verged on performance, and let us not forget the infant terrible of the climbing slideshow; John Redhead (Hull’s number 1 climber!).

Tales of his shows are legendary… if not infamous, with his gig in Leeds during the the eighties only being trumped by his show in Kendal a few years ago.  Anyone who can have a line about simulated rape using a watermelon is sort of ‘special’ - especially in a climbing slideshow.

So what’s Off the Wall about?

Off the Wall is primarily about climbing in Yosemite (just as When Hell freezes Over was about Patagonia), but begins with my mini rescue of the Eiger, and leads to a bunch of stories about a place where you can do hard stuff without feeling as if you’re going to die (all the time).  The sub plot is how - on my first route up El Cap - I saw Steve Schneider and two partners climbing the Shield in under 24 hours (we took 4 days), and this inspired my to strive to climb El Cap in a day (but not by the Nose).  I made two attempts, both failures - one which is probably the closest I’ve come to pegging it (and I don’t mean placing pegs!), until I eventually climbed it in 19 hours this year (Zodiac). 

But before this had happened my objective had progressed to the dream about soloing El Cap in a day (Steve Schneider was the first person to solo El Cap in a day as well), a utterly, utterly, utterly stupid dream considering I had yet to climb it in a day with a partner (soloing a wall takes 3 times as long, so I’d have to climb 3 times faster then I couldn’t yet climb).  And so this show is fundamentally about forever overreaching and striving for ‘impossible dreams’ I guess.

There will also be stuff about pooh - and perhaps Alex Huber the musical.

All dates are here (some have sold 50% of their tickets already).

Plug Alert - I'm still trying to raise funds for my daughter's cheerleading squad (Cheermania!) with sales of my hand strength ebook, so if you've got £3 spare than please buy one here.

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