Wednesday July 11th 2001
A beggar sits against a wall in Leicester Square Tube Station, chatting to a tall man who I assume is a passer-by giving him money. I catch a line of the conversation as I walk by:
“So, are we okay for tennis on Tuesday?”
Sitting at a table in a quiet pub in Highgate by myself, nursing a sullen pint. I’m not wearing any make-up. I am “off duty.” Despite this, a man opposite on a bar stool, stares directly at me for ages. I look away. He suddenly shouts at me, “Are you gay?” I say nothing. A pause. “You look it.” Woman next to him says “Shhh.” The pub becomes quiet again.
This sort of thing happens to me all the time. Dickon Edwards: Celebrating Nearly Thirty Years Of Being Out Of Place.
The whole point of me realising that I have this innate talent for Inviting Comment is that I chose to put this talent to good use, to get it to work for me rather than the other way round. I look like that Dickon man because I am that Dickon man. Somebody has to be. Hence the Fosca lyrics: one one level they are adverts for my own persona, explanations as to who I am and why I am who I am. The records are out there now, and there will be more. The work has only begun. I have too much unfinished business with this world. If only for the sake of providing an answer to strange men in Highgate pubs.
Awake from a dream which, unusually for me, I recall vividly. I am quietly ejected from a shop via the staff entrance, on account of “ruining it for the other customers” and “lowering the tone”.
The shop is Woolworths.
Thursday April 26th 2001
I firmly maintain that a person’s possessions should reach a designated limit. This is one of the reasons I chose to live in one room. So when I have to find space on my crammed shelves for recently purchased records, rather than finding new storage space, I have to remove an equal amount of old records and dispose of them in a uncontrolled environment. Record and Tape Exchange, Camden Town branch if I’m feeling hungry. Local charity shops if I’m not.
Today I can’t make my mind out which CDs to dispose of, enema fashion, to make room for some newly-procured Monochrome Set albums. So I eject all those knowingly recorded by lead singers with beards. It seems as good a reason as any. Out goes everything by Shack and Nirvana and the last Scritti Politti album. Serves them bloody well right.
I spend Easter staying with my brother Tom’s family, and their over-excited Pomeranian, Silver, at his home in Ipswich. On a hungover journey to the nearest grocer’s shop, Tom, who like me feels nervous and vulnerable in shopping environments, forever falls foul of the herd instinct in others. We both loathe being in queues, believing that the unobserved shopping life is the only kind worth living. To this end, our inclination requires us to gather our goods as quickly as possible, but then wait and pretend to browse futher, while keeping an eye on the counter until it’s definitely free, preferably with the shop empty as well.
Only then, of course, as soon as we approach the till, a huge queue IMMEDIATELY forms behind us, seemingly from nowhere. “There’s that Edwards boy,” think all other shoppers within a square mile. “Quick, now’s our chance to make him feel even more nervous. Let us instantly fill the shop with a intimidating queue behind him, and sigh loudly with umbrage as he rummages desperately through his bag for that fiver he could have sworn he had on leaving the house. Let his debit card refuse to swipe in public view! Let us tut in choral unison as his cheque book pen runs out halfway through!
Tom’s ordeal on this particular occasion is newly compounded by cries from a gang of nattering Suffolk old ladies, who seem to spend their days loitering by cash registers, conspiring with assistants and passing judgement on the inconvenienced convenience-store shopper. “OOOOH…” cackle the cake-hatted elderly hooligans, as Tom’s blushes reach levels of puce to rival those of a vicar caught with his hand up a chorister’s cassock. “DUNNEE LOOK LIKE JAMIE OLIVURRRR?”
My brother’s features, it has to be said, do indeed vaguely resemble those of the UK’s most famous Mockney TV chef, though I can thankfully report he doesn’t share Mr Oliver’s uncommonly fat tongue.
Tom’s “look” may accidentally approximate this current fashion amongst trendy young media things to wear their hair in a permanently spiky, uncombed, “just-got-out-of-bed” manner, but the reason for him is usually because he HAS just gotten out of bed.
High street chemists currently stock a new type of hair wax for this very purpose. The jar actually reads “for that Just Got Up look”.
“Who would buy that?” says Taylor. “The whole point of dishevelled, slept-on hair is that it remains exactly like that all day naturally.”
Saturday February 10th 2001
I’m feeling terribly alone. I seem to be the only person in the UK with no stand to take on Eminem. For the simple reason that his work is rap music, and I’m not a fan of rap music full stop. You’ll be amazed to hear. In much the same way as I don’t care for heavy metal. To me, rap is a genre entirely based on a fixed style of cock-of-the-walk macho attitude and rulebook aggression; of employing a regimented, limited set of hand movements at the audience; of wearing ugly shapeless clothes and backwards baseball caps; of swearing constantly (while only using US rap-approved statutory swear words) and of raising one’s middle finger and thinking such a pose is a serious statement of defiance, rather than a quick, surefire way of selling records to the “Kevin and Perry” set, the fat, ruddy-faced fourteen year olds in tatty black t-shirts down the front of the moshpit at Reading Festival. Eminem, for all his supposed originality, still works firmly from this rap rulebook, including the comedy middle finger part, and as a result can find no place in my meek and gentle heart. I’m sure he’s upset about that. Though I do prefer his videos to, say, Westlife’s, if forced at gunpoint to admit it.
I have no idea what Eminem really thinks, I don’t know him. So, actual music aside, I don’t have an opinion on whether he’s okay to like or not. Unlike everyone else. What amuses me is the hilarious rash of embarrassing bleatings by defensive Eminem apologists, speaking on behalf of someone they’ve never even met. Weird. You don’t have to apologise for liking Eminem. You don’t have to apologise for liking any music. Just enjoy it, for goodness’ sake, if you must, and let any implications take care of themselves. No one will die because of what music you listen to. God knows, if I had to defend my love of “High Fidelity” by the Kids From Fame…
Apologies for this diary entry taking so long. Belated Merry Christmas. Tidings of comfort blankets and joy. Here is a bumper entry to warm you up.
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And so the year of the Monolith came, nudging the human race onto the next evolutionary step, onto higher planes of intelligence and civilised thinking.
And so, Melody Maker had to go.
1985: I am Second Trombone in Great Cornard Upper School Orchestra, Sudbury, Suffolk. I have a secret crush on First Trombone. He is older, taller, darker, richer, a popular boy with popular hair and all his own teeth. He swims like a fish. He reads trendy magazines I’ve never heard of. The one nestling under his sacred stackable orchestra chair this afternoon is big and inky, has a ‘Spitting Image’ puppet of Bob Geldof on the cover and is called Melody Maker. The boy ignores me and talks to his gaggle of female admirers. I am spotty, boring and alone. No one likes me.
1989: I start buying Melody Maker every week. I have left home, left school, and have started to wear long black overcoats. That’ll teach ’em. Unfortunately I do not care for The Mission, the main group associated with MM at this time, but that hasn’t stopped me pointing to various pictures of pop stars within its pages and thinking “that’s me, that is”. I’m hoping to attract cool young things in Ipswich. I throw my one and only house party, and invite everyone in my trendy drama class at Suffolk College. No one comes. No one likes me.
1993: I start writing letters to Melody Maker, usually pretending I’m a fat black goth girl from Bury St Edmunds. I chastise them for lusting after token girls in bands like the female keyboard player from World Of Twist. They print pictures of her alone rather than the rest of the group, for purely dirty-old-man reasons. I have my favourite writers: Simon Price and Taylor Parkes. I write them countless letters about this band I’m starting, Orlando. I never send a single one of them. I am living alone in a bedsit above a joiner’s shop in Bristol. I am hit on the head by a flying Marathon bar at a Voodoo Queens gig. I begin wearing make up, originally to cover up occasional bouts of acne, but I get hooked. I dance regularly at all the Bristol indie discos, in the hope someone will notice my nifty foxtrot to “Falling” by Chapterhouse. No one does. No one likes me.
1995: Orlando get their first mention in Melody Maker. It is a half-page live review by Simon Price, with a big picture of Tim to boot (and many readers do just that). I start pointing to various pictures of Orlando printed subsequently, and think “that’s me, that is.” I begin to go to countless aftershow parties and play gigs around the country. I am signed to a big major record label and release records. I have Gucci loafers and Hamnett suits and appear on televison. I meet and befriend Taylor Parkes. No one likes me.
1999: Price and Parkes no longer write for Melody Maker. It has a relaunch, becomes small and tacky, and starts regularly printing pictures of token girl in band Charlotte Thing from Ash, rather than the rest of the group, for purely dirty-old-man reasons. In its “look back at the Nineties” feature, the magazine officially wishes me dead. I start a new group, Fosca, and release my first records as a lead vocalist. I can’t even get them reviewed. No one likes me.
2001: The last ever issue of Melody Maker has a two-page spread on how fanciable Muriel Thing, the token girl in JJ72 is, with helpful comments from the editor of Loaded. The last ever cover star is Fred Durst from Limp Bizkit. This is the way Melody Maker ends, not with a bang but a wanker. Taylor Parkes currently uses my tumble dryer and owes me money. I am a purely dirty old man. No one likes me.
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Select Magazine ask me to become a regular columnist for them, along the lines of Dickon’s Zany Sideways Look At Life.
Being a columnist is actually something I’ve always thought I’d drift into naturally. I’d assumed that if you stood too long in one place at a London showbiz party and mouthed off your ill-informed generalisations, you were given your own weekend broadsheet column by default. Columnism is a very widespread concern at the moment. Even Q Magazine have employed Alex James from Blur to be their mock Jeffrey Bernard. Everyone who’s anyone either has their own column or TV cookery programme, or both. And seeing as I never cook, the column has to be it. Well, I suppose I could present a show about how to spend all day in cafes where the seats are bolted down, on one cup of tea.
In fact, Select want me to replace Him Out Of Mogwai. The one who unfortunately resembles the type of plump little boy popular in borstal sodomy sessions.
I send off my first column. Select Magazine reacts like Quentin Crisp did when I was going to meet him… by promptly taking the easy way out and dying.
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Eminem’s book is called “Angry Blonde”. Blonde, with an “e”, usually refers to a female with blonde hair. Yellow-haired men are blonds. Perhaps he’s just a big girl after all.
It does seems very fashionable at the moment for literary people to talk, quite seriously, about what a wonderful lyricist he is. Typical excerpt of his work (from “Amityville” off his latest album):
“My words are like a dagger with a jagged edge / That’ll stab you in the head / whether you’re a fag or lez / Or the homosex, hermaph or a trans-a-vest / Pants or dress – hate fags? The answer’s “yes” / Homophobic? Nah, you’re just heterophobic / Starin at my jeans, watchin my genitals bulgin (Ooh!) / That’s my motherfuckin balls, you’d better let go of em / They belong in my scrotum, you’ll never get hold of em”
The Spectator magazine compares him to Gerard Manley Hopkins.
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Tim shows me Digital TV. He is the only person I know to have it, and lets me watch David Walliams & Matt Lucas’s “Rock Profiles”, a series of extremely silly parody interviews of pop stars that was broadcast on UK Play. Their take on Blur is a riot, with Walliams as an outrageously gay Alex James. They perform a version of “Song 2” where, at the famous chorus, he flips his wrist, rolls his eyes, and, coos “woo-hoo!” in full Larry Grayson mode. I’ll never be able to hear that song in the same way ever again.
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Sophie Dahl, previously famous for being the only model in Christiandiordom that wasn’t stick-thin, is now famous for playing with herself, wearing nothing but high heels and a necklace (and having lost lots of weight), in a billboard advert for a perfume with a Frenchman’s name. It is the most complained-about UK poster advert in years, outraging radical feminists and Tory Wives alike, and embarrassing parents who have to explain her “act” to their children. One piece of graffiti, scrawled across a hoarding carrying the advert, reads: “PORN = ABUSE”.
To me, she resembles that dancing woman in the credit sequence to her late grandfather’s 80s TV series “Tales of the Unexpected”.
When Roald Dahl depicted her as the little girl in his children’s book “The BFG”, I wonder if he ever imagined she would grow up to distract the nation’s lorry drivers in such a manner? Bet that was “unexpected”.
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I’d been previously aware of a gay Doctor Who fanclub called The Sisterhood of Karn, but I’m now told that there’s a London-based society of lesbian Star Trek fans called Deep Space Dykes. Their slogan is, naturally, “boldly going where no man has gone before.”
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People who make records on an independent, professional or semi-professional level have to fill out PPL forms. These are for officially declaring who plays what instrument on whichever recording. Every instrument has to be included, even if it’s things like handclaps and fingerclicks. The PPL print a 48 page booklet listing all the various “contributor category codes” that one has to allocate to the various performers on a track. The following are genuine codes from the booklet:
FEE – feedback
FST – foot stamping
FTA – foot tapping
AMN – animal sounds
BRM – broom
BLR – bullroarer
QFG – quintfagott
As far as I am reasonably conscious, I have yet to suck on a quintfagott. Or indeed, roar up a bull. But I’m thinking of starting up a quintfagott-and-broom experimental jazz duo, solely to liven up the PPL admin clerks’ day a little.
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Sad about Kirsty MacColl’s death: her last album, the Cuban-inspired one, is really witty and tongue-in-cheek. I bought it at one of those “V Shops” that used to be Our Price. It’s hard to find the back catalogue CDs once you’ve gotten past the mobile phones, DVDs and Playstation Twos. Poor old pop music.
After MacColl’s album and radio series on Cuba, plus the “Bueno Vista Social Club” craze among the middle class Islington dinner-party set, Cuba has become gruesomely fashionable. So much so, that it warrants a mention on the last Half Man Half Biscuit album:
I still don’t wanna go to Cuba
Cause Cuba’s the new destination
Cuba’s the new Iceland
And it’ll be full of Italian Cockney Rejects
But the Manics heed not the words of Nigel Blackwell, and, seemingly keen to please the Chattering Classes against the Masses, are launching their latest album on Castro’s rock. “Boyo Vista Social Club” hasn’t appeared as a music paper headline yet, but it’s only a matter of time.
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I was recently asked to comment on the well-publicised romance between the 18-year-old Billie Piper and 34-year-old Chris Evans. I actually find the age gap (as opposed to the far more significant wage gap in Ms Piper and Mr Evan’s case) difficult to condemn as unhealthy, seeing as I number among my own friends one or two girls who only socialise with much older men, as well as several examples of men pushing or past thirty, who only deal with girls substantially their junior. Unkind friends have described that both types do in fact have one thing in common… they’re both self-deluding fools, and therefore deserve each other.
For my part, I was going to speak in defence of such couplings. I was going to quote The Virgin Suicides (“clearly, doctor, you’ve never been a teenage girl”), state how, in general, teenage boys are far less attractive (in so many ways) to girls of the same age than older men, and wax lyrical about a teenage girl’s sense of wonder and playful exuberance lacking in counterparts of said men’s own generation…. but then I realised I sounded like Peter Stringfellow.
I am, I hasten to add, currently single myself. “Blond suit-wearing performance artist, 29, with comedy teeth and curmudgeonly bent seeks similar of same or near age. Gender not essential, but helpful.”
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I meet a Rock Party Girl who tells me she once went up to Fred Durst and deliberately mistook him for Fred Dineage. The perplexed bearded rock star had to respond to questions about what it was like to present “How?”.
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Walking along Holloway road in the dead of night, my appearance solicits this response from a stranger:
“I’M SORRY MATE, BUT YOU LOOK LIKE MAX HEADROOM.”
I haven’t heard that one before, actually. Yet another one for the list.
This is the one excuse for wanting to be famous. So that one is allowed to look like oneself. For once.
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Monday November 6th 2000
Dear World,
It had been made abundantly clear to me that it really is just me that doesn’t much care for Radiohead. All my friends seem to like them, even John Peel has started playing them, and people have pointed out to me that “at least they promote experimentation and intelligence, Dickon… there are worst targets for your vitriol. What is your problem? It only reflects badly on you. You’re just jealous of their worldwide success and the reverential consensus they inspire. And it’s all very well writing cowardly entries in your online diary. I bet if you met one of them in person you’d see just how wonderful they are. Shame on you.”
So this week, at an aftershow party for the Magnetic Fields, I stand in one place for too long and therefore qualify for shaking the hand of Colin Greenwood, the bassist and official Nicest Man In Rock. And he is, of course, perfectly charming. I try to blurt out something about how can his group be anti-corporate when they’re signed to EMI, and he replies that it’s about reaching the masses. It’s the same explanation as Chumbawamba (who I do care for) and I can’t argue with that. Just as well he didn’t phrase it as the old interview cliche “we just do what we do and if anyone else likes it it’s a bonus….” It’s not, after all, their fault that they’ve created a monster that can’t help but guzzle column inches, record and ticket sales and has set the rules for all current guitar-based groups to conform to and be compared to if they’re going to get anywhere. Fair enough. I concur to this.
And so, I’m loath to quote that sleeve note from Tom Lehrer: “if anyone objects to any statement I make, I am quite prepared not only to retract it, but also to deny under oath that I ever made it in the first place.”
There. Now, O Gentlemen of the British Press (a contradiction in terms, but still), as I’ve paid my respects to your Sacred Cow / Golden Calf (delete as applicable), any chance of mentioning that the new Fosca album, “On Earth To Make The Numbers Up”, is out? Not euphemistically “exclusively available via the Internet” (though you can buy it from Amazon.co.uk or the Shinkansen website , and sundry online shops), but actually on sale on the shelves of all the proper shops like Virgin Megastore and HMV, as well as the usual indie outlets. Which is far more than my last record, with Orlando, managed. Orlando had a fair amount of press coverage in an inverse proportion to availability of the actual records, and now, it transpires, the reverse is true with Fosca. You can buy it, but the press refuse to mention it’s even out.
The UK music press tends to have a political bent leaning towards the left, presumably agreeing with the concept of the redistribution of wealth. But in this media-saturated age, people have to realise that part of the world’s wealth isn’t just money, it’s publicity. And there’s a severe imbalance. Radiohead and others have been made the Millionaires Of Coverage, while Fosca are paupers, kicked down and denied even a few scraps from the deadline table. And there’s no Robin Hood figure to balance things out a little, to steal just one sentence from the rich- any of countless that refer to “Kid A – their lowest profile album yet… exclusive interview- their only one this year, except for all the other ones in every other publication”… and give to poor Fosca, threadbare in their reviewless rags. No reviews, not even bad ones, not even a single mention that “On Earth” even exists.
This is despite Shinkansen sending out umpteen copies to every vaguely receptive hack under the sun. And despite numerous follow-up calls and emails to said writers. No replies, no acknowledgement. And so, as might happen to yourself if no one returned your calls, my mind races within the realms of extreme paranoia. Is there a conspiracy? Did I offend some movers and shakers in particular that they’ve seen fit to put Fosca on some kind of blacklist?
Wait a minute, now I get it…. they’re deliberately making me paranoid so that the next Fosca album will only be able to resemble… “OK Computer.” And then they’ll review it.
My New Defensive Epitaph:
Here Lies Dickon Edwards
Space Did Not Permit.
“Oh well, there’s always reincarnation”
I’m overdoing it a little. The album did solicit two reviews in the UK press. Gay Times’ one consisted entirely of quotes from the lyric sheet (is this a record? can I invoice them?). While Uncut magazine called me…a gay virgin. Which really says more about them than me. But I am proud of the album, and want people to know about it, hence this little drama queen tantrum. It’s a good album. It comes complete with no duet with Thom Yorke. But please don’t hold that against it.
Oh, and the Magnetic Fields show was terrific, by the way.
Saturday September 23rd 2000
I’ve decided to make a New School Year Resolution. No more being nasty to other bands. Partly because when I was interviewed recently, my unkind thoughts on other groups dominated the interview, when really I would have much rather talked about, well, Fosca. Partly also because there’s a wonderful website / online diary in existence called I Hate Music which does it so much better than me.
This is possibly as its writer, Tanya Headon, doesn’t have my somewhat mitigating status of being a Frustrated Rock Star to taint the credence of her relentless vitriol. She is not personally envious of the airplay, TV play, press space, chart space and shop space being taken up by whichever undeserving whelks feature on this week’s dartboard. Quite simply, she hates everything musical ever. Unfortunately for her, she actually knows an awful lot about music, thanks to having dated record collectors in the past and picked it up by osmosis, whether she wanted to or not. When one breaks up with a normal person, there’s often a particular record or two that can never be enjoyed again. If said former beau (and they are always male) is a record collector with wide tastes, whole reams of musical genres may become indelibly despised for the rest of time. It’s the other side of the High Fidelity coin. Read her separate article on the plight of “vinyl widows” here, and weep.
I wouldn’t see myself as an intentional record collector: my room is only crammed with large amounts of CDs and LPs because I simply can’t bear to throw anything away. I don’t like most of them. I do however, confess to making compilation tapes for others (the Spearmint tour bus, in particular) out of some kind of innate territorial grasping, and pathetic attempts at aligning those I’d like to be better acquainted with to my own ridiculous taste. I’ll never learn. It’s a cry for help!
Wednesday September 20th 2000
And now, Celebrity Ansaphone Messages. This week: Jamie Theakston:
“Hi, this is Jamie. I’m not in right now, but whatever it is, I’ll do it. BEEP.”
Maybe I should just watch less TV. Clearly it’s getting to me. Mr Theakston seems to be on everything. Except the phenomenally successful Big Brother. Which reminds me of “The Living Soap” palaver of yesteryear.
“The Living Soap”, unlike Big Brother, was not at all successful. In fact, it was an unmitigated disaster, meeting a new pitfall every week. Which made it all the more interesting to watch. It appeared on BBC2 in the early 90s and was inspired by the success of the US show “The Real World”, where a houseful of young people would be filmed as they went about their lives, and the results were broadcast weekly to the nation.
But for reasons presumably to do with national differences in character, innate exhibitionism and attitudes towards being on TV between Americans and the British (see also Jerry Springer), The Living Soap proved somewhat more short-lived than its US counterpart. In America, everyone is on TV, indeed prefers to discuss their life-changing marital disputes on air, and no one bats an eyelid when a camera crew follows someone in a supermarket. In Britain, we have a much more complicated attitude to television and the art of being on it. We are both resentful of other people being more famous than us, while obsessed with celebrity gossip and still secretly dying to be on TV ourselves, if only to shout “hello mum” (and nothing else… no TV-as-confessional fans, us). If the events shown on a docusoap have already happened sometime ago, (as in “Paddington Green, “Airport” etc), things tend to be straightforward; reality stays fairly real. If it’s ongoing, though, and not sealed hermetically from the outside world like Big Brother, disaster is guaranteed.
So once the first edition of The Living Soap’s Manchester house full of first-year students appeared on the box, the occupants’ “real world” was turned into a farcical contrivance of reality. People did turn a hair when a housemate and their attendant camera crew walked into their local pub. The house’s location was quickly discovered and besieged: a brick thrown through a window proved particularly memorable. One of the show’s “stars”, an Asian girl called Spider, thought that the missile was a racist attack on herself. That might have been true, but no less likely was the possible reason that, thanks to the programme’s mercilessly edited portrayal of her, everyone in the country thought she was a bit thick.
In fact, all the students quickly became aware that the country saw them as self-deluding, naive stereotypes (it’s difficult to be a teenage student on TV and not look a naive idiot), and the numbers in the house started to dwindle. The inital lure to a student of living rent-free and poverty-free for a year in exchange for being filmed had lost its appeal. Even starvation and homelessness seemed more attractive than being on TV, if it had to be on such terms. Dan, the “Nasty Nick” of the house, was a wily and charismatic middle-class Tory boy who saw what was happening, and got out fast. His place was taken by Colin, a camp opportunist who knew exactly what was going on, and allegedly signed secret sponsorship deals with various firms to product-place their pizzas or trainers to the cameras as much as possible. Previously the show had been no fun for the housemates, but great TV for the rest of us. Once Colin moved in, it just wasn’t fun for the viewer either. The jig was up. The housemates moved out, few wanted to move in, the series spluttered and died months ahead of its intended one-year time span, finally reduced to a couple of late-night “highlight” specials narrated by that student nostalgia icon, Brian Cant.
Since then, British docusoaps (with the exception of Big Brother), are filmed in blocks of entire series before being broadcast. The main subjects also tend to be at least 29 and hence have worked out who they exactly are and how to present that persona to the cameras, so it will survive even the most brutal editing. “Nasty” Nick knew exactly who he was and what he was doing. And unlike Colin, he had the decency to be in his early 30s. British TV viewers prefer to love-to-hate someone who’s not too young, rather than someone who’s actually young, who they just hate. For being young. Still, the joy of watching young adults being beastly to each other in their formative years on TV has turned up again on Channel 4’s “Shipwrecked” programme, earlier on this year. It was a kind of updated version of “Minipops”… As far as TV exploitation goes, you’re a child until you’re the wrong side of 25. After that, don’t fret, you can still go on nostalgia programmes and talk about how great Space Dust was.
Saturday September 16th 2000
October 2nd sees the release of at least three Decent British Pop Albums. Oh yes! Aside from the Fosca debut long-player (from which John Peel has already played “The Millionaire Of Your Own Hair”) , there’s the latest offering from Spearmint, “Oklahoma”. A few of the songs on “Oklahoma” were previewed on the tours I played with the group in my role as Other Guitar, not least an electrifying ditty called “The Locomotion” (no, not the Kylie-covered one), plus “Oklahoma” itself (no, not the Rogers & Hammerstein one) . I’m agog to find out if the recorded version of the title track will use the sample from a late 70s disco hit whose name escapes me, as said hit seems to keep cropping up on TV shows such as “I Love the 70s”. I now always associate it with my time in Spearmint.
The other recommended release, out the same day, is “The Handy Wah Whole” – 2 CDs of the best of Pete Wylie, covering all his singles from the early 80s till the present. A testament to one of the most criminally unsuccessful pop stars ever. My unplayably scratchy 7″ copy of “The Story Of The Blues” can finally be replaced. Thank you, Mr Record Company, whoever you are.
The current Top 40 in this futuristic year 2000 has to date featured versions of A-Ha’s “Take On Me”, Cyndi Laupers’ “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, one song sampling Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Relax” , another sampling the same band’s “Two Tribes”, one remixing Gary Numan’s “Cars”, one new dance version of Madonna’s “Dear Jessie”, one dance version of Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World”, a girl group created by OMD (Atomic Kitten)… There have been times where I’ve been criticised by lazy, myopic fools for being “too 80s”. Clearly I’m not nearly 80s enough, or I’d be at Number One by now. If only for one week, like nearly every other Number One this year. Make room! Make room!
Still, the new Teenage Fanclub single reminds me that the 60s will never end. And why should they? If your band uses guitars, you’re drawing on something from the 60s or 70s. If your band uses synths and sequencers, you’re drawing on something from the 80s or 90s. It’s that simple. The only original factor that you CAN bring to your songs is your own splendid, unique persona. Which is why I’m constantly surprised so many current bands insist on being quite so very persona non grata…
