I’ve just conducted a snap telephone poll of friends and family in an attempt to discover what they know about the band Half Man Half Biscuit. I wish I hadn’t. I feel so alone. By and large, those under 25 or over 45 had never heard of them, while those in between had basically filed them away in that most damning of categories: the novelty band. I used to think much the same before I rediscovered them in the late 1990s. In the 1980s, they recorded humorous songs that contained some spectacularly good jokes, laced with swearing and some occasionally lazy celebrity-bashing. I assumed they had fizzled out, but then, one day in 1997, I happened upon a new album, Voyage to the Bottom of the Road, hiding in the racks at my local CD emporium. I wasn’t disappointed by my purchase. Far from having fizzled out, they’d improved immensely. The songs were drier, wittier than before, and more tuneful, too.

I bought the album two weeks before taking a one-man show to the Edinburgh Fringe. I love the Fringe. For a whole month, a city teems with theatre, music, dance, puppetry, comedy. Of course, with thousands of performers crammed into one place, the one thing it overflows with is ego. A kind of Fringe madness consumes normally sane people, as everyone becomes convinced that their show is The Most Important Thing in the World.

Watch a comedian reading a newspaper in Edinburgh. He’ll skip past the headlines, turning straight to the reviews in the hope that he has been awarded those elusive five stars. Failing that, maybe his rival has received a one-star drubbing.

In 1997, however, my festival flatmates and I were immune to that phenomenon, thanks in no small part to the HMHB song Bad Review. It’s written from the point of view of a musician smarting at a bad write-up, and I challenge any performer not to recognise a bit of themselves in it, and not to feel ridiculous as a result. As you hear the song veer from denial (“I only read the gig guide anyway”) to threat (“I know what you look like, so don’t ever come near Stroud”) to displacement (“my girlfriend’s fuming”), it becomes impossible ever to think any of those things again. We played that song to every caller at our flat during the festival and, as a result, everyone left their ego at the door. It was the friendliest festival I can recall.

The Dave Gorman Collection is released on DVD tomorrow; www.davegorman.com

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