Tuesday January 15th 2002
Terrible Things Done In The Name of Charity, Part #1468: The sleeve of the newly released “My Sweet Lord”
My jaw dropped and my stomach turned. It’s exactly the same design as “Candle In The Wind 1997”.
Except, instead of a rose, it’s a Hare Krishna lotus flower. The People’s Beatle.
“A spokesman for EMI said the company had decided to delay the release until early 2002 in the name of good taste.’It takes time to get a record out,’ the spokesman said. ‘Rushing it out in time for Christmas could have been seen as bad taste.’ ”
As Mr Fry once memorably remarked, sometimes there really is not enough vomit in the world.
Wednesday December 26th 2001
I’m writing this while watching the sun come up over North London on a bright and glacial Boxing Day morning. I’m listening to the first part of John Peel’s Festive Fifty, which I taped last night while falling into a slumber induced by a day of drinking Baileys, Babycham and Beecham’s Flu Plus.
I find myself cheering aloud when “Someday” by The Strokes comes on. I had tried hard not to like the Strokes, resisting their relentless hyping by the media, but the sparky charm of their more catchy tunes (like “Someday”) finally got to me. I do love their album, though it’s not in my Favourite Albums of 2001, which are:
1. Stina Nordenstam – “This Is Stina Nordenstam”
2. Daft Punk “Discovery”
3. Life Without Buildings “Any Other City”
4. A Camp “A Camp”
5. Barbara Cook “…Sings Mostly Sondheim”
Favourite Songs of 2001 Not On The Above Albums:
1. The Avalanches “Since I Left You”
2. Kylie Minogue “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head”
3. Trembling Blue Stars “The Ghost Of An Unkissed Kiss”
4. The Strokes “Someday”
5. Mercury Rev “A Drop In Time”
FILM of 2001: “Chuck and Buck”. The makers must have been reading my diaries.
BOOKS of 2001: I read dozens of books this year. Sadly, they were mostly all published before 1939. I don’t seem to have much faith in modern novels. But I did enjoy JT LeRoy’s “The heart is deceitful above all things”
I awoke in the middle of the Night Before Christmas thanks to a coughing fit, and found I couldn’t get back to sleep. I flicked on the television, something I’m making a concerted effort to avoid over the season, and watched “O Lucky Man!”, one of my favourite ever films, which one of the channels had decided was the perfect film to show in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve. They were quite right. The young Malcolm McDowell embarks on an odyssey of mid-1970s Britain, in a similar vein to Candide or Pilgrim’s Progress. He starts off as a coffee salesman (which may or may not be the same character he played in “If….”), then goes on to have various adventures and career changes… at a nuclear power station, in an experimental genetics laboratory, in politics, in prison, in poverty, even dying several times. There hasn’t really been anything like it in British cinema, before or since, although Mike Leigh’s “Naked” comes to mind as a more recent example of a “British Odyssey” film.
“O Lucky Man!” has the rulebook-trashing air one of those countless 60s and 70s French surreal films, but without the handicap of actually being French. Despite the fact that I already have it on video and have seen it many times, I lie in bed and watch it as transmitted. Like “Ghost World”, the film is not the least bit Christmassy, but it is absolutely, searingly appropriate to the mood I’m in this season. Mr McDowell wandering around the English countryside in a gold lame suit, wondering what will happen to him next, means the whole world to me.
Yesterday I was doing my bit to counteract the cruelty afforded to the bird world on millions of dinner tables yesterday. By feeding the ducks in my local park after a meat-free meal. Like all my meals. I don’t like to describe myself as a proper vegetarian, because I’m sure I’m being cruel to animals somewhere along the line. I have leather shoes and belts, and I don’t check for gelatin on the wrappers of biscuits. But I can’t bring myself to knowingly eat meat or fish any more.
L emails to assure me that he too wasn’t eating turkey yesterday…. just roast duck.
Tuesday December 25th 2001
Here is my Christmas Message.
I’m writing this on Christmas Day, alone in my room in Highgate, where I have decided to spend the season to be cheerless. I’m also consumed with flu and am feeling even more rotten than usual.
Despite my illness, I forced myself to leave the house this afternoon in order to feed the ducks in Waterlow Park, who remain my only true friends.
The park was full of adults with children in tow. A father and daughter try out what are presumably brand new Father-and-Daughter Rollerblades together.
As I break up and scatter bits of bread to the hungry birds in the pond, one family behind me are continuing their Christmas Dinner Table discussion loudly behind me while their children join me in playing Santa to waterfowl. It’s a September 11th debate, predictably. The gist of his rant was “haven’t we gone on about it enough? More people die in the Third World every year due to US foreign policy…”. That sort of thing. Presumably the topic was sparked off by the content of today’s Queen’s Speech.
I didn’t hear much in the way of retorts from his wife behind me, or even any noises of agreement. It was one of those conversations that aren’t really conversations. Where one person performs and the other is the audience under duress. It’s the way I imagine many marriages and relationships end up going. It’s the sort of thing that makes me glad that I live alone, in a lifelong marriage to myself. I say a quiet prayer and give thanks that although the Lord has had it in for me on many occasions throughout my lifetime, He has not been so unkind as to ever inflict upon me a Proper Relationship. That would really trump my own personal Book of Job. A few ill-advised flings, tentative trysts of curiosity, doomed attempts at True Love, and entirely alcoholic assignations aside, I have been extremely lucky. My principal aim for now is keep up that status. And also to stay slim, otherwise I fear I shall resemble Boris Johnson.
I spent Christmas Eve shopping in Central London. For myself, naturally. I was after a copy of Gavin Bryer’s “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” on CD, plus Stephen Malkmus’ single, “Jo Jo’s Jacket”, sample lyric “Stay inside on Christmas Day / And make believe you are my candy cane”. Not the most Christmassy of songs, but the CD single does come with my favourite pop video of recent times. It’s got kittens in it. Playing drum solos.
Navigating my way through the hordes on Oxford Street, one young couple holding hands are coming the other way, and there’s not enough room on the pavement for me to side-step them. They have to disengage their hands in order to get past me, and for me to get past them. I’m literally breaking couples up now. It’s my life’s work! Oh, the poetry of it all…
I spend the afternoon of Christmas Eve in a cinema, watching Ghost World, starring two teenage girls who don’t have mobile phones. Steve Buscemi’s character confesses at one point that he feels he doesn’t have anything in common with 99% of Humanity.
I heartily recommend this film to anyone who thinks “is it just me…?” The answer is no, you’re not the only one. You’re just heavily outnumbered by those who think they know better.
Ignore them. Live alone. Live deliberately. Merry Christma
Sunday November 18th 2001
Charlotte Coleman dies of an asthma attack, aged 33.
Many of my generation grew up with her, fondly following her TV roles as the child actress of Worzel Gummidge and Educating Marmalade (as Marmalade Atkins, The Worst Girl In The World), later graduating to Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and Four Weddings and a Funeral. Her wide-eyed, uncommon features set off by her childlike frame gave Ms Coleman a tendency to be cast as Unusual Girls: tomboys, lesbians, eccentrics who refuse to grow up, loud quirky best friends, thieves, murderesses. Recently, she appeared as a female gladiator in a Radio 4 play set in Roman Britain, Matinee Performance.
Even when playing relatively conventional roles, like the gentle rural schoolteacher of How Do You Want Me, Ms Coleman gave the character a palpably unique and personal air, that of a schoolgirl adventure forever continuing. Charismatic, ego-free, and lovable, she was someone that many either wanted to be or wanted to befriend or wanted to have adventures with. A genuine original.
Monday October 29th 2001
Involved as my country is in “The War Against Terrorism” (does Mr Bush know that its acronym is “T.W.A.T.”?), I myself am concerned with “The Waugh Against Terrorism”. Swanning around, dressed like a character from “Brideshead Revisited” may not be the most obvious route to surviving and staying happy while all around is misery, death and fear, but it is a Pretty Good Start. I’m fighting against the atrocities of World Trainer Culture.
I’m not entirely joking. Given that there’s little you can do to prevent most of the rest of the world hurting each other (if Mr Bono has failed to do so, how can you?), the one world you can do something about is your own. Like Mr Jackson says, you have to start with The Man In The Compact Mirror. Only I would add, that’s where you should also stop. The world won’t thank you for your endless work for children’s charities: it will only assume the worst about your intentions towards the children themselves. His fellow Motown star Mr Gaye should have sung “The World Is Like a Great Big Ingrate”.
Unlike Mr Jackson, I can’t yet afford plastic surgery to make myself resemble an angular Manga cartoon creature of a different race, gender, and species to the being I started life as. Though it is on my “To Do” list.
However, I can afford make up, hair bleach and old suits to feed my lust for my own powdered appropriation of the Waugh Effort.
I also have this personal rule of not going to concerts where the performers appear less glamorous than I am. It’s not been easy.
I had to walk out of the Divine Comedy’s recent gig at Brixton Academy: Mr Hannon’s long hair and scruffy rocker shirt was too much for me, especially after years of seeing he and his band dressed immaculately in suits and short hair. What’s gone wrong? But the rest of the audience seemed happy enough. They were happy with his trainers, and they were happy with their trainers too.
Modern Trainers. The Default Shoe. I railed against them on a music discussion board on the web recently, and I was received with so much venom and personal abuse that I may as well have been recruiting for the BNP. People really love their trainers. It’s so sad.
Let me say it again, then. RUNNING SHOES ARE FOR RUNNING IN. NOT FOR PLAYING GUITAR IN.
This then, is one of the few remaining taboos in music. You can wear make-up with long gothic hair, or a dress, onstage at Reading, wield a chainsaw and an ice hockey mask, and you are perfectly acceptable. But wear make-up with short hair and a suit… and have a ban on band members wearing trainers…. and out come the burning crosses of Indiepop and Indierock for Mr Edwards. No wonder Fosca rarely get offered support slots from other bands in the UK. Our image as pop pariahs isn’t a pose: we really are outcasts in our own land. It must be the lack of trainers.
Trainers control the world. But they don’t control my world. Therefore, I win.
Still, at least Sweden seems to have “gotten” Fosca more than the UK has. Maybe it’s for the same sort of reason that the hotel TV in Linköping showed adverts for the new Leonard Cohen album (his first in nine years), while in the UK you’d be forgiven for not knowing it was out at all. I’m not saying I’m akin to a blond Cohen fronting Abba…. but as tenuously deduced comparisons go, again, it’s a Pretty Good Start.
As it is, I thoroughly enjoyed myself on Fosca’s first Swedish tour. The Swedish audiences appeared to worship me as a Norse God. Which was an aspect of myself I’d only hitherto suspected.
As far as boosting one’s self-belief goes, there’s nothing like hundreds of people in Stockholm’s equivalent of the Royal Festival Hall effectively telling you that you were right all along. I highly recommend it.
The Swedish tour was entirely organised at the behest of Swedish fanzines and fans of the group. No managers, no agents, no music industry types at all. We went because we were invited.
I far prefer this rather than have to organise concerts myself. But now I am back in London, where I am known on the hipster gigging scene chiefly, if it all, for being unpopular. Mr Haynes wants me to hustle for new Fosca gigs in London to keep people aware of the group and the records, but I’ve never been very good at phoning strangers up and demanding they book me, grovelling, pleading, trying anything to convince them that people will come if they do so. I’m far too passive. And I’m never certain that anyone will come. It’s a deadly circle. To gain a loyal London “fanbase”, Fosca have to play concerts, but to book concerts I have to convince promoters that we have a fanbase. My life is tragic enough with people I like failing to return my phone calls, let alone gig promoters too. O misere…
This, then, is the spirit in which you find me.
Wednesday October 10th 2001
My brother rings me and tells me of this rumour going around that the terrorists are “doing” London tomorrow. People being told “Don’t Be In London on Thursday 11th”.
I myself have to be in the City for a few minutes in order to catch the 9.30am Stansted Express from Liverpool Street, then a few hours at the plucky little Essex airport begging Ryan Air staff to let me carry my white suit on the plane with me. “No, it isn’t impregnated with anthrax… and I’m going to Sweden.”
But if I do have to perish tomorrow, O Lord, please take the Stereophonics too. And anyone in Embrace. And Starsailor. And that band who were rehearsing next door to us last Sunday that were doing a 14-minute version of “Knocking On Heaven’s Door”. And anyone wearing a hilarious “Porn Star” t-shirt. And a few music journalists I could mention. I have a little list. No, I have a Very Long List.
I’ve just had my hair cut, so they can say “At Least He Died With No Split Ends”.
Oh well, there’s always reincarnation. If so, I hope reincarnation gives me a miss.
So long, I love you, Keep On,
Dickon x
Wednesday September 26th 2001
While panic grips London, and gas masks are advertised on the Shopping Channel, I too prepare for war.
I go out and buy six month’s worth of peroxide.
Meanwhile, a charity recording of “What’s Going On” is about to be released by Bono and diverse other self-important pop stars, who after much thought have decided that the best way they can help victims of the terrorist attacks is by reminding people they’re famous. I have just heard the record, and, needless to say, it is an atrocity of its own. Haven’t people suffered enough?
And there was I thinking there had been too many three-minute silences of late. I could have done with another one there.
“War is not the answer”, they sing. And immediately Messrs Bush & Blair drop what they’re doing and hang their heads in shame… No, of course they don’t. World leaders have never had their minds changed by music in the past and they’re certainly not going to start now. Least of all by hasty, ill-advised, self-aggrandising charity records.
Natalie Imbruglia is at least honest about the egotistical intentions behind the big “America’s Heroes” benefit telethon that was broadcast on TV recently. She uses her slot on the show to premiere her latest single.
Elsewhere, the Rev Jerry Falwell, friend and influential supporter of Young Mr Bush, appears on an American Christian programme and quickly indentifies the culprits behind the terrorist attacks: “I really believe that the abortionists, the feminists, the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle… I point the finger in their face and say: ‘You helped this happen’.”
I imagine Mr Bush, being that renowned expert of world geography, subsequently clicking his fingers and threatening to bomb the people of Lesbia if the Lesbianese government doesn’t hand over Osama Bin Lesbian.
Wednesday September 12th 2001
Thousands die in a series of terrorist-related attacks on the US.
And in music news:
“MTV have dropped all their shows for the rest of the week and instead will broadcast videos of “unobtrusive adult orientated hits” such as Dido, Travis and Madonna.”
I walk the streets of North London and people don’t seem to be hanging their heads in collective misery any more than usual. The animal welfare charity subscribers are still out in force on Muswell Hill High Street:
Women With Clipboard (to passers-by): Can you spare a minute? Animal Welfare, can you spare a minute? Excuse me… Can you spare a minute…?
(Dickon passes her, looking the way that he does, not unobtrusive, not orientated to adults)
Woman: Can you spare a – Oh! You’ve put me off now.
Saturday September 8th 2001
After the Manic Street Preachers launched their last album with a concert in Cuba, Fosca are launcing the new EP with a tour of Sweden.
I am reminded of my disappointment at watching the documentary “Our Manics In Havana”, and seeing Nicky Wire dress down for his excursion, eschewing his usual dress and make up. Any fool can wear panstick and drag on an English rock festival stage. Many fools do just that. Surely it’s far more interesting to do it, if you have a fleet of journalists and camera crews to record the occasion, in a country where despite the improvements made in the last ten years, homosexuals and transvestites are still regularly detained by the Cuban police. Dressing down with a bad beard to meet a dictator who once commented approvingly on rural life that “in the countryside, there are no homosexuals”, seems to me a wasted opportunity. Apparently Mr Wire is aware of Cuba’s record on such issues, yet deliberately refused to ‘Stay Beautiful’ in Castro’s presence because “that would be disrespectful” to the dictator. Pity. I will not forgive him.
Sunday July 15th 2001
Two comments from strangers yesterday.
Walking on Archway Road. Young man in baseball cap mutters at me as I pass, finishing with “….batty boy.”
Later, a stranger in a club hisses to me: “You’re one of those that only act gay in order to pull a better class of girl.”
