News
Dave Cohen has a funny story to tell about love, music and how Phil Collins drummed up support
October 14, 2010 10:33
Comedian Dave Cohen, a writer on the hit BBC panel show Have I Got News For You, is taking to the stage this evening for the first time in 15 years.
Mr Cohen, 52, will be performing My Life As A Footnote - an epic poem or, as he puts it, a string of rhyming gags, about young love, great music - and pop star Phil Collins.
In the 50-minute set, he tells of when he was once "spared a prison sentence" by Collins after being caught up in a potential financial scandal while helping to organise the World of Music Arts and Dance (WOMAD) music festival.
Mr Cohen tells People: "In 1982 I helped out at the Womad Festival having helped set it up a few years earlier. I was asked to pay the acts but the people who ran it were out of their depth financially meaning I was giving out cheques for money that wasn't there. I didn't know this at the time."
The festival lost about £250,000 that year, and although there was no police involvement, Mr Cohen was told by an accountant that he could have faced a jail sentence for handing out money that did not exist.
"Fortunately, Phil Collins organised a one-off Genesis concert which paid off all the concert debts," he says.
The poem is also about Mr Cohen's "unsuccessful love-life at the time and my inability to have relationships in my early 20s. It's a one-man show. I guess it's the equivalent of my mid-life crisis. Most people have an affair or buy a Porsche - I decided I wanted to go back and perform."
The show is on at the Poetry Café in London tonight, tomorrow and on October 18 - two weeks before the 25th anniversary of the Comedy Store Players, of which Mr Cohen is a co-founder. Other original members include Paul Merton, Neil Mullarkey, Kit Hollerbach and Mike Myers.
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