One of the few things Glasgow and Edinburgh share, other than latitude, is the Stand Comedy Club, a chain of venues where both beginners can try their hand at stand-up comedy, and seasoned professionals can test out a minute or two of new materials to help decide whether it should make the cut and become part of a new set.
I’ve walked by both the Glasgow and Edinburgh venues many times, each time struck by their distinct ident, which looks as shown at the start of this post.
So, a goofy looking kid, dressed as a cowboy, grinning awkwardly in a harsh blue spotlight. The ident is familiar to me, but also not. It triggers, for me, my own variant of the Mandala Effect, of distinctly remembering how the past used to be distinctly, definitively different to how it’s now presented as being and always having been.
Search online for The Stand (Edinburgh or Glasgow) and this same ident -the goofy, blue-light bathed cowboy kid - tends to get returned. It’s largely only my memory that tells me this ident wasn’t always this. It used to be different, in one specific but important way.
The Stand’s past has largely been erased. But not completely. This story from the BBC shows how this ident used to be.
This was the mural at the back of the stage. From memory (imperfect as it is) the bluetone ident was similarly different too. Originally, the ident for The Stand was a boy dressed as a cowboy, with a revolver to his head.
This one difference, to me, made all the difference. It said something, memorable engaging, harsh, arresting. And it said it instantly. What the original ident said to me was the following:
If you go to The stand, you might see people die on stage. If you perform at the Stand, you might die on stage. You’ll die on stage because you weren’t prepared, because you’re just pretending to be able to do this to engage and entertain others - but you can’t really do this.. You are, in fact, just a cowboy. Not even a cowboy; a make-believe cowboy. However, because you’re just playing, don’t worry. You’re not a real cowboy, and what you’ve put up against your head isn’t a real gun, even if you do really put it up against your head and pull the trigger. You aim. You miss. You die on stage.
But you don’t actually die. After ‘dying on stage’, you’ll feel terrible. But then you get to slump off, put yourself together, and try to die a bit less next time. Eventually, you might even learn to become what you’re only pretending to be.
Perform at The Stand: The stakes are real. But they’re also just make-believe.
Though I can understand why the revolver was deleted from the ident, all I can now think of when I see the new ident is the old ident: the ident that told a complex and arresting story in a single image, the ident that had meaning beyond its being a recognisable brand or identity. On its own merits, without its buried history, the new ident says or means very little, and isn’t something on its own I’d find very memorable. At most, I might just think “isn’t that just a cheap rip-off of the Mad TV kid?”
Coda: The Stand aren’t completely in denial about their past ident. I walked by the Edinburgh venue recently, and saw this poster. The clue’s in the cake!
