This is cut and pasted from my fosca.com diary, in order to see what it looks like. If I DO find it aesthetically preferable, and find myself writing more often, then I'll use LiveJournal proper for diary entries. Despite what I've said recently.

In the Observer of a week or so ago, Barbara Ellen, the Julie Burchill you can eat between meals, <a href="http://www.observer.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,738178,00.html">criticises the male dominance of Meltdown</a>, the annual unabashed middle-class, middle-aged, but definitely not middlebrow music festival held on the South Bank. This is the big London arts centre where everything is taken very seriously indeed. The people there even know how to mike up live bands properly. Despite my aversion to the general air of snobbiness, of an elitism that is genuinely connected to the real elite, the people who actually do run things (it includes the Royal Festival Hall, after all), I do prefer it to the more smelly venues in town, and would be quite happy if Fosca could play there forever.

Meltdown is 'curated' by a different person each year, usually a well-known figure of a certain age and the right kind of reputation: Scott Walker, John Peel, Nick Cave, Elvis Costello, Robert Wyatt, and now David Bowie. Mr Bowie has a new album out, the critical consensus calling it euphemistically "his best for years". Which is what they've said about every single album of his since "Tin Machine 2".

Once appointed, the curator then gets to choose the bill of the festival. And then a man in charge reminds them that their best mate's favourite Nigerian gargling jazz quartet are all very well, but they need to sell some tickets here. The curator then suggests Level 42, featuring Mark King's effortless mastery of the slap bass. The man in charge shakes his head sadly and draws out a list of a few choice crowd-pulling, but broadsheet-compatible names from the world of Fashionable Rock. "Whatever", shrugs the curator, and mutters sadly into his cocoa about how things were better in the old days when you could leave your paedophile unlocked and still get change from a pound. Later, he does an interview about how he was always a big fan of The Radioheads ever since their first album, "Dummy" was played to him by his granddaughter Plectrum Adenoid.

Barbara Ellen complains that, in ten years of Meltdown, only one curator has been female: Laurie Anderson, "who nobody remembers or cares about". She doesn't mention that earlier curators Magnus Lindberg, Louis Andriesson and George Benjamin aren't exactly household names either. And <i>I</i> care about Laurie Anderson. And I think Lou Reed does too. So that's at least two.

She goes on to bemoan the male dominance of the Matedown bills over the years, and equates this with misogyny. Misogyny is one of those strong words frequently misused and freely bandied about a little too quickly by columnists who hope that by doing so, they'll be immune to such accusations themselves. Foreign regimes punishing adulterous women with public stonings might be more deservedly described as misogynist. Booking Supergrass and Coldplay over Pam Ayres or Maureen Lipman is just careless.

Ms Ellen finally extends her complaint to the implicit sexism of the music business, which is fair enough, except that she claims female artists get overlooked in awards and critics' polls. This is quite untrue. Every time Polly Harvey gets out of bed she wins some tacky gong somewhere. And Kate Bush recently received a Q Magazine award for not even doing that.

So, there's really nothing to complain about after all. Ms Bush gets an award without having to make a record for years, Ms Ellen gets her column done without having to check her facts, and I get something to write about in my diary without doing anything involving heavy lifting.

Am extremely happy with my hair. It gives me an inordinate amount of pleasure and is my one true friend.

Because it's currently as short as possible, the minimum length for forcing a side-parting, I haven't recently had any Andy Warhol or David Sylvian catcalls on the street from strange men of no woman born.

No, instead, on my way to Baxendale at 93 Feet East, I got "Fucking Hell – It's Pee Wee Herman".

Pee-Wee Herman isn't even <i>blond.</i>

<a href="http://www.sweetbutdeadly.co.uk/">Kate</a>'s flyer for the next Fosca gig is wonderful:

<img src="http://www.fosca.com/bullandgateflyer.jpg"></img>

Sunday June 16th 2002

In today’s Observer, Barbara Ellen, the Julie Burchill you can eat between meals, criticises the male dominance of Meltdown, the annual unabashed middle-class, middle-aged, but definitely not middlebrow music festival held on the South Bank. This is the big London arts centre where everything is taken very seriously indeed. The people there even know how to mike up live bands properly. Despite my aversion to the general air of snobbiness, of an elitism that is genuinely connected to the real elite, the people who actually do run things (it includes the Royal Festival Hall, after all), I do prefer it to the more smelly venues in town, and would be quite happy if Fosca could play there forever.

Meltdown is ‘curated’ by a different person each year, usually a well-known figure of a certain age and the right kind of reputation: Scott Walker, John Peel, Nick Cave, Elvis Costello, Robert Wyatt, and now David Bowie. Mr Bowie has a new album out, the critical consensus calling it euphemistically “his best for years”. Which is what they’ve said about every single album of his since “Tin Machine 2”.

Once appointed, the curator then gets to choose the bill of the festival. And then a man in charge reminds them that their best mate’s favourite Nigerian gargling jazz quartet are all very well, but they need to sell some tickets here. The curator then suggests Level 42, featuring Mark King’s effortless mastery of the slap bass. The man in charge shakes his head sadly and draws out a list of a few choice crowd-pulling, but broadsheet-compatible names from the world of Fashionable Rock. “Whatever”, shrugs the curator, and mutters sadly into his cocoa about how things were better in the old days when you could leave your paedophile unlocked and still get change from a pound. Later, he does an interview about how he was always a big fan of The Radioheads ever since their first album, “Dummy” was played to him by his granddaughter Plectrum Adenoid.

Barbara Ellen complains that, in ten years of Meltdown, only one curator has been female: Laurie Anderson, “who nobody remembers or cares about”. She doesn’t mention that earlier curators Magnus Lindberg, Louis Andriesson and George Benjamin aren’t exactly household names either. And I care about Laurie Anderson. And I think Lou Reed does too. So that’s at least two.

She goes on to bemoan the male dominance of the Matedown bills over the years, and equates this with misogyny. Misogyny is one of those strong words frequently misused and freely bandied about a little too quickly by columnists who hope that by doing so, they’ll be immune to such accusations themselves. Foreign regimes punishing adulterous women with public stonings might be more deservedly described as misogynist. Booking Supergrass and Coldplay over Pam Ayres or Maureen Lipman is just careless.

Ms Ellen finally extends her complaint to the implicit sexism of the music business, which is fair enough, except that she claims female artists get overlooked in awards and critics’ polls. This is quite untrue. Every time Polly Harvey gets out of bed she wins some tacky gong somewhere. And Kate Bush recently received a Q Magazine award for not even doing that.

So, there’s really nothing to complain about after all. Ms Bush gets an award without having to make a record for years, Ms Ellen gets her column done without having to check her facts, and I get something to write about in my diary without doing anything involving heavy lifting.

Wednesday June 12th 2002

So sorry for the delay in new entries. With me, the more I leave things, the harder I find it to approach them again.

But there’s more to my reluctance to update than good old lethargy.

When I first started this diary in 1997, when the Internet was in black and white, when you could leave your wife unlocked and still get change from a fiver, online diaries were a comparative novelty. I was even something of a Minor Internet Celebrity by default. But now these things called “web logs” or “blogs” (I do hate that word) are everywhere, and everyone is crying out like at the end of Death Of A Salesman: “ATTENTION MUST BE PAID.”

Before the Internet, people knew full well they were simply one of billions. They just didn’t let it bother them too much. Now, they go to their computers, log on, gaze out at a sea of a billion faces and find out to their horror that the world doesn’t revolve around themselves after all. And it terrifies them.

If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound? And what websites was it looking at? And what kind of day did it have at work? And what did all the trees in all the other forests say about it?

Now everyone is talking and commenting till they are blue in the wrist, armchair experts and desktop columnists to a man. They natter on their mobiles, on their text-messaging and on their blogs, which as far as I can tell are just ergonomic diaries with adverts. I keep thinking about taking the plunge and converting this one to a blog by way of swimming with the tide but faster, but the third-party host feel of them puts me off. And the feeling of subscribing to a sponsored web community, signing up to an “account” (I am allergic to accounting of any sort), where you are invited to link with other “bloggers” and cross-pollinate comments, giving each other virtual high-fives and hollow hugs, REALLY puts me off. I’ll keep things as they are for the time being. I need to keep some way of feeling vaguely disconnected, being as I am from another world.

But I do like this recent development, and spend many enjoyable hours a week reading the web journals of strangers and acquaintances. I’m not telling you which ones, though.

Last night, as part of my continuing lifelong defiance of the laws of nature, I got something for nothing. I attended one of the much-gushed-about, quickly-sold-out concerts by Mr Brian Wilson, the one who once led the group The Beach Boys. This was despite not buying a ticket when they went on sale, because I’m not a big enough fan of The Beach Boys to warrant spending £40 (that I can’t really afford) on a concert ticket. It is a lot of money for a gig, even (as some people said it was) the greatest gig ever. I balk at paying anything over a fiver for anything.

Sold out concerts in London are not necessarily packed out. One reason is that industry guest lists at London gigs are typically huge, and many designated places are left unclaimed, based as they are on the off chance someone terribly important might feel the inclination to attend, along the lines of “Madonna Plus One”. And even the lesser media people are famously fickle anyway, asking for a guest list place, then feeling a bit fragile on the night and plumping for a date with the telly.

Another reason is that large amounts of tickets to any event with a vague air of popularity become quickly snapped up by hairy-palmed touts of no mother born, in the hope of reselling them for a tidy profit on the streets outside. In this case often £200 each. They do not always succeed. Whether put off by the rain or the touts’ badly judged prices, I heard from reports of previous nights that a fair few tickets remained unused. “Free” is my favourite price for a Brian Wilson gig, so I made my way to the venue with no ticket and, aided by a kind friend who DID have a ticket, sat in an empty seat once the concert had started. The ushers seemed quite happy about this and didn’t bother to check, as long as I didn’t smoke or take a glass bottle in with me.

All those beautiful songs, pretty much ALL of them too, plus the whole of the “Pet Sounds” album performed in full, sounding just like the record, except being recreated live by the main creator himself plus a faultless backing band. Suffice it to say, the show was the best £40 I’ve never spent.

Tuesday February 12th 2002

Some people assume the reason Fosca have no bass player or drummer is entirely down to our anti-rockist aesthetic, but that’s not entirely true. One reason I didn’t want a bass player was because I find bass guitars to be extremely ugly instruments. Those thick, thick metal strings… I’ve never liked the look of them. They give me the screaming ab-dabs. Plus bass guitars require unwieldy, huge bass amps to play through, which I’ve always found baffling and unnecessary. They take up so much room and refuse to go on public buses. Who the hell do bass amps think they are?

As for real drums, I do actually like the look of drum kits onstage. A spider-like silver machine at the back, all metallic angles and circles and levers and arms and nuts and bolts. It’s like a Victorian invention of unfathomable purpose, from a HG Wells story or a Heath Robinson illustration. No, my aversion to real drums is partly that carting the things around is even harder than for bass amps, but mostly because of the drum soundcheck. An eon to unpack and construct the thing, then another eon to check each part of the kit.

This is what a drum soundcheck sounds like:

Engineer: Can we hear the bass drum, please?

“DUHMF.”

“DUHMF.”

(minutes later)

“DUHMF.”

(even more minutes later)

“DUHMF”

(even yet still more minutes later)

“DUHMF.”

Engineer: Okay. Well it’ll sound better when the room’s got people in it. Snare?

“CHAKK.”

“CHAKK.”

….and so on. It’s excruciating. When Fosca played in Stockholm the other month, all the bands on the bill were drummer-free. Bliss!

The only reason I can forgive bands having drummers is if the drummer in question is aesthetically pleasing too. Last night Fosca played on the same bill as Stephen Nancy, whose drummer has incredible muscles. Like the line by DH Lawrence, his arms entirely fill his sleeves. Sharing a soundcheck with him could almost be described as a sensuous experience.

It’s the same with U2. Surely most people would rather look at the Dorian Gray-like drummer than at Nosey, Baldy or Speccy? His drum riser is more than a plinth. It’s a shrine.

Saturday February 2nd 2002

Well, I had a nice enough time recently. I went out to the Stay Beautiful Club in Caledonian Road, where lots of young freakish things gather at night and dance to loud pop music. I spent an hour standing against a pillar and playing “Spot The Gender.” Chatted to Matthew from the band Jack, who was in a sulky mood. He said something about me wanting to a ‘pop star’ while he was more of an ‘artist’, which was the point where I should have said something unkind about his beard, but you know me.

I had one girl come up to me just to say “my boyfriend fancies you”. Minutes later a boy approached and said “my brother fancies you.” A typical night out for me.

A Swedish girl extolled the virtues of buying Snakebite and Black, because it’s apparently illegal in Sweden. They wouldn’t dare make it illegal in Ipswich.

Someone with all their own hair told me about the This Is Romo website, so I took a peek. Archives of joy. I’d forgotten just how extreme some of the crowd at Club Skinny dressed. The Stay Beautiful regulars have some way to go if they really want to emulate that. There’s a decent book to be made about it all. And a film. And a musical. Happy times. Good times. I was there, you know. The ones who hated Romo were just the ones who couldn’t get on the Club Skinny guest list. Or pass the dress code. A common misconception is that we were celebrating the 80s New Romantics. The truth is we were celebrating our own wonderful selves, and each other. And the rest of the world could get knotted.

No trainers! No untucked shirts!
NO SMILING ON THE DANCE FLOOR.

… but in our hearts we were smiling like hyenas.

One of the Skinny regulars was the legendary Jim Rattail, who is to London indie gigs what the ravens are to the Tower of London. Ubiquitous, even omnipresent, he takes photos at most of the hundreds of gigs, club nights, and other events he attends every year, then puts them up on his website. Here you can find pictures of bands that often have no other Web presence. Bands that are just starting up. Bands that are people who are trying out Being In A Band, to see if it’s something worth doing between now and the grave. Bands that want to Make It Big. Bands that don’t. Bands that only ever played one gig and no longer exist. They’re all there, preserved and embalmed through his eyes. Especially bands with girls in them. Fosca included. Each performance also gets his own star rating: one for boring, two for okay, three for good. He’s given three stars to every Fosca gig he’s been to so far, so it only seems proper that I salute him. The question is, though, is he a valuable chronicler of otherwise entirely undocumented artistry? Or is he actually God?

Bought a new Crombie coat. Sherry’s in Carnaby Street seem to be the only shop in London that sell the red lining ones I like. They smell of autumn men. Which is deliriously comforting if you’re an old maid like me. I turned up at rehearsals with it, and the others in Fosca bleated “but it’s exactly like the old one!” “Except newer,” I concurred.

Similarly, this is how you find me in 2002. I am older, but feel newer.

Fosca have made their debut appearance in a national UK newspaper, thanks to a live review by Simon Price, who also gave Orlando their ‘big break’ in the Melody Maker in a past life. He makes it quite clear that Fosca haven’t yet stolen his heart in quite the way Orlando did. After initially folding myself into a predictably hysterical ball of sobbing mascara, I eventually accentuate the positive (‘a rare treat’, as more inarticulate journalists say), and concur that at least it sets Fosca up for less promises to break. The duck references are water off a Dickon’s back. And the piece is otherwise very kind: he quotes some lyrics, which is what they’re there for.

I am intrigued, though, that he thought my lyrics sounded “like a throwback to a less liberated age”. My intention, at least as I see it, is to depict a strain of English self-repression that I am convinced DOES prevail today. It’s the one that meant that the UK Big Brother show was the only one among all the European versions to feature a courting couple who shared a bed but didn’t have sex. It’s not just me. Liberation is all around, but the fact that English people (as opposed to the Dutch or Danish) choose to retain a few sexual shackles here and there fascinates me as a lyricist. That and my love of innuendo as metaphor. That’s what I’m trying to do, anyway.

And the protagonist of “Supine…” isn’t meant to be me at all. They could just as well be female. If I wrote songs about myself, they’d all be about staying indoors reading Saki, drinking sake, and being sarky, and looking haunted on Archway Road. And only some songs are like that. Honest.

After the recent news concerning members of Feeder, EMF and Big Country, I note that I can’t possibly commit suicide just yet. Or people will accuse me of trying to Join In. Over my dead body!

Wednesday January 23rd

The papers have lately been full of accounts of Prince Harry behaving like his Shakespearean namesake, Prince Hal in Henry IV. Also known as the inspiration for Keanu Reeves’ character in My Own Private Idaho. Young, good looking and rich, who can blame him?

It reminded me of when myself and the rest of Fosca went for a meal in Kentish Town before our recent show at the Verge. We went to Pizza Express, as all the cafes with bolted-down seats that I like (and prefer) were closed. Behind us was a table of a dozen VERY well-spoken thirteen-year-old-girls all out to celebrate a birthday, but seemingly without a chaperone or adult in sight. I know that’s perfectly legal as long as they don’t try to buy alcohol, and perhaps a few of them were actually a bit older than they looked, but it was still vaguely unnerving. They were all dressed in glitzy off-the-shoulder designer tops, drinking water and Coke like wine, and applauding the jazz singer raucously as if they were any gaggle of twenty-something women on a girls’ night out. Except they were children. In number. With no adults in charge. With their own money. And plenty of it. A dangerous combination. Hence I’m not in the least bit surprised at Young Prince Hal. It’s only a matter of time before his party friends will be getting the “I know thee not, old man” line.

Wednesday January 17th 2002

My predictions for 2002?

Everything will get worse.