Imagine the clouds dripping.Dig a hole in your garden to put them in.

"From the first day I started doing Colin Hill's drama group, I remember thinking, 'This is fucking brilliant - why on earth didn't I do this before?' There were all these girls, for a start. It attracts girls, drama. It's not for boys. Well, there was one lad from the year below me, Jeff Bell. He was really good actually. He played Bugsy Malone, and then there was me playing Fat Sam and loads of girls.

A consequence of involvement in this drama group was you'd get to see girls in bras - I suppose they were changing into costumes. The sight drilled itself so deeply into my mind that vital faculties had to be removed to allow it to flourish. Dancing and the ability to form intimate bonds were quickly sacrificed so that the 'girls in bras' department of my brain could be given extra floors and its own DJ; 'Boobaloo' he'd holler when he saw some knockers he liked. He's still in there now, spinning the same discs night after night and keeping me tuned in to the screaming frequency of Libido FM.

I enjoyed the rehearsal process enormously. But on the first night the terror I felt was almost transcendental. Euphoric fear, so vertiginous, awesome and profound that I felt it could only be a prelude to death. I now know that the adrenalised fever is my body's prepatory method and is responsible for the energy and speed I can produce on stage. Once or twice I've sought out a reference or a joke in my mind while on telly and it's seemed like an age or, perhaps realistically, twelve seconds, at the time, but when I watch it back it's an imperceptible beat. Everything about the school seemed different that first night. The hall, which had been empty when we were rehearsing was now full of lines of plastic chairs and the air was neon and flashed with expectation.

All the parents came. I don't know how many people that would've been - I supposed about a hundred. But it seemed to me like a riot in a straightjacket. I locked myself in a lavvy and evacuated liquid dread. 'God, what are you doing?' I asked myself. 'I don't have to do it,' I reasoned. Locked in the lavvy, locked in negotiation with myself. 'Scared, SCARED. RUN!' sang my unconscious, with backing vocals from my bowels...I went behind the curtain on the stage, and listened to the audience on the other side of it.

This is a noise that I'm really familiar with now. It endows me with mingled excitement and glee. I want to grasp it and have that moment. The anticipation and anxiety becomes almost unbearable as it builds and builds - 'Oh, Fucking hell! All them people. They're just there living their lives now, talking to each other, but in a minute I'm going to have to go out in front of them and perform.' This was where that first scorched into me. It burnt...There was five minutes more, standing there with the tension,stifling the urge to vomit, already drained - nothing left to give but a performance. And then I walked out onto the stage for the first time in my life. The light. The light is so bright that all that remains is you and the darkness. You can feel the audience breathing. It's like holding a gun or standing on a precipice and knowing you must jump. It feels slow and fast. It's like dying and being born and fucking and crying. It's like falling in love and being utterly alone with God; you taste your own mouth and feel your own skin and I knew I was alive and I knew who I was and that that wasn't who I'd been up until then. I'd never been so far away but I knew I was home...

I once heard Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols say that he thought David Bowie and Marc Bolan had come from space - because they were so weird. Well, I fucking never. I thought, 'I'm one of them. That's what I am. I'm that.' They didn't seem foreign or alien at all.

What was alien was being ordinary, being humdrum, being trapped into appeasing Colin, having to crush and stifle my opinions, not being allowed to be brilliant, tricking myself into mediocrity. And somehow, in this most ordinary, banal of moments - the school play - I felt immediately unshackled from all that...

When the last performance came to an end, though, I felt utterly mortified. I went back with him to stay at my nan's in Dagenham and ended up sitting on her settee, completely desolate. I just didn't gave any way of coming down from that high. A couple of years later - once i'd crossed the line from child to drug addict - I would have doped myself to sleep. I was inconsolable.

How could I get back the feeling I'd had in front of that audience? That was all I cared about. Accessing previously untapped resources of drive and focus, I found out what I had to do and got on with it. Within just a couple of days, I'd started applying to extra agencies and stage schools. My Fat Sam experience had given birth to this ridiculous dream of salvation through fame and success. And ever since then, that vision has been the one thing - apart from the love of my mother - that has been utterly unwavering for me.

It's difficult to be honest about this sort of thing though, because in cold print it seems serious and egotistical. If you strip away self-effacement, charm, and the spirit of mischief - qualities that make determination and ambition tolerable - you're left with a right arsehole."

I really enjoyed this bit of writing by russell brand, some rehashes of his life made me feel utterly sick, the way he treated people and all that, but this bit made me choke up a little...i wonder if i'll ever feel that way about something? in any case, he really has a way with words.