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…

Thursday August 24th 2000

I’ve come to a decision: Radiohead are a national embarrassment and must be shot at once. Or at least deported. To Middlesborough.

Don’t get me wrong (said in my best Alison-Steadman-in-Abigail’s-Party voice). I actually quite like a couple of their songs. But as an ideology, they are singlehandedly ruining British music and British youth, by inspiring impressionable sixth-formers all over the country to equate faux-angst overcooked wailing, bad lyrics, entirely devoid of wit or humour (even Cohen has wryness, even their beloved U2 and REM don’t take themselves too seriously), and plumping for general self-deluding po-facedness with some ill-conceived idea of actual worth. Radiohead gave us Muse and JJ72. Thanks. Radiohead would explode if placed near a Motown record. Diana Ross’s “Touch Me In The Morning” contains more angst then they’ll ever contrive to disport.

Even their name is taken from a late Talking Heads song. A really naff one. Early Talking Heads would be fine… So why, then, are they allowed to live, worse, actively encouraged, unanimously, by the biz? Simply because they are at the heart of far too many people’s livelihoods: too many people in the Serious Rock Industry have vested interests in the perpetuation of both the band and all they stand for, every dour, dreary trapping. Result being: that dreaded phrase “Much Awaited New Album” everywhere I read, every week for the past year.

Not much awaited by me, dears. You’ll be the first ones up against the wall when the pop revolution comes. Small black schoolgirls on Tottenham buses are laughing at you.

Until that day of reckoning, Radiohead are continually held up as a precedent, nay, an acceptable, even preferable role model for glamour-free white boys with their irony-free Marshall amps and eyes set on the corporate Alt-Rock stadium career trajectory. I’m too fazed to even yawn.

Dear Susannah Yorke, if you genuinely hate your situation so much whilst being so concerned about cruelty to others in the world, please do us all a Benefit and stop making music. Signed, the entire population of Tibet.

Thursday August 3rd 2000

This week’s Most Hated Thing: men who spit loudly and manfully in public urinals. Why do they do it? Repressed foreplay for cottaging?

There are rumours circulating about certain band rules we have in Fosca. Yes, the one about the ban on trainers, long hair and facial hair is true. Every rehearsal, any band member caught “slumming it” has to run four laps of the car park chanting “Cleanse! Tone! Moisturise!” before we can begin. It keeps the grooming standards up for me and my doughty pop sentinels of love.

My dancefloor moves are entirely inspired by a lifetime of buying underwear in charity shops.

I’m reliably informed that Daphne & Celeste, the Proper Chart Pop Stars That Ageing Indie Boys Can Also Enjoy, have bought the Orlando album. I’m not sure to be more impressed by the fact they wanted to own a copy, or by the fact they found a shop selling it. Apparently they refer to me as “Dickly.” Which makes me sound like a cartoon dog with its own strip in the Daily Mail. Named and shamed!

I’ve had an interesting evening at the Borderline venue in London, where I had hoped to catch an excellent set from the Trembling Blue Stars, but instead found myself loitering at the back of the venue chatting to one David Gedge by the t-shirt stall. For some reason I got into a heated argument with him about which Altered Images songs The Wedding Present had covered. I was sure that, in addition to “Happy Birthday”, they had also recorded a version of “See Those Eyes”, while he insisted the track I was thinking of was in fact “Think That It Might”. “I should know, I was there”, he said with threateningly conclusive zeal.

Thankfully, I managed to swiftly change the subject by relating a recent comment my next-door-but-four-neighbour had made on listening to Fosca. They had maintained that my vocals strongly resembled, to their ears at least, “a gay David Gedge”.

“I don’t know about that”, the Gedgester retorted. “I mean, if “This Boy Can Wait” isn’t laced with latent homoeroticism, what is? Now push off, you’re casting a louche shadow on my Cinzano.”

And, do you know, he was right.

Wednesday 12th July 2000

Hello again. It’s your Host with the Least. And today you find me harbouring graphic designs. On a graphic designer.

I’ve been asked why I’ve adopted the soubriquet of “Dickon Angel”. As usual, it’s never one sole reason. I was in a bar with Stevenson earlier this year when I decided on it. I was discussing how less and less I felt like “Dickon Edwards”, especially now that the other Dickon Edwards, an actor, had started cropping up in magazines: he’s even the same age as me, has an equally sexy square jaw hinting at unbridled manliness within, and who has the temerity to also come from East Anglia. I occasionally receive e-mails getting the two of us confused. Plus I felt more and more that the human “Dickon Edwards” was dead, and engraved on his hypothetical tombstone were these words:

“Here Lies Dickon Edwards
Cancelled due to Lack of Import.
Still, at least he never worked with Dave Stewart”

With my new white suit, and being a fan of “Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased)”, the original series with Kenneth Cope mind you, I toyed with the thought of being my own ghost.

But for some reason I’d also been watching a lot of films which had angels in: “Barbarella”, “Wings of Desire”, “Dogma”, “It’s A Wonderful Life”. Suddenly, the analogy was obvious. Angels appealed more than ghosts: they had never been human in the first place. Angels had never “gotten a life”…

And I thought how much more I identified with the concept of being an angel (a fallen one, naturally) than as a human. Specifically, angels as lonely, pontificating, sidelined observers, lurking in the wings (rather like… online diarists), doomed to never take part in the action, in the Real World, while still stuck with actually being in the damn thing, being at its mercy, watching on, watching on…

Orlando was a failed attempt to affect the Real World, directly speaking to people from my point of view, with my then current concerns as a fellow human, albeit a pretty strange excuse for a fellow human: a human with no life to speak of. Fosca songs, however, are more removed. After wailing “I coulda been a contender!”, I’m now resigned to being a Non-Participant in the grand scheme of things, and yet I’m still here, still a Big Fan of the world, still hoping to influence it, if only in a very small way. And so, my own present existence being little more than a vacuum (abhorred by Nature, it says here in Magnetic Poetry letters on some Islington fridge), Fosca songs are inspired by other sources: either by observing people I know in modern London (helplessly!), or finding my own childhood and memories of growing up in Suffolk have started to haunt me more than they used to, as if my distant past has taken up the section in my brain really meant to deal with my present life. But, of course, for me there is no present life. And so, when not in Samuel Pepys mode, I find myself in Brideshead Revisited and A La Recherche… (the Ladybird version) mode. One of my most abiding and happiest memories was playing the Archangel Gabriel in Bildeston Primary School’s nativity play. I was the only boy who wanted to be an angel rather than a Shepherd or Wise Man. I led a choir of girl angels. I can even remember the dance moves.

It’s since occurred to me that the bar in which I made this decision to go with “Dickon Angel” was the Heavenly Social…

Oh, all right. The real reason is because I was hoping Robbie Williams would be loving me tonight…

Matt from our record label wants me to go out and shamelessly network with the movers and the shakers on the London music scene, securing much-lacking reviews and publicity for the Fosca records. I did it before with Tim for Orlando, up there in the networking-as-an-art-form stakes with Menswear, so why can’t I do it again now? I feel like telling him things are different, I’m not a inside participant and face on that scene anymore, I’m an External Angel, old thing. But that would sound silly on the phone. To put it Wildely. Because Fosca had zero press coverage at the time, Matt asked me to unearth a handful of glowing Orlando reviews to help convince the shops to stock the record, much to my chagrin. Since then, Fosca has finally made its press debut in Melody Maker this week, albeit as a standout track on the Shinkansen label’s various artists compilation album, “Lights on a Darkening Shore”. The rest of the album gets damned, but we emerge relatively unscathed (it’s like Romo all over again…), made officially Okay To Like, and get called “beautiful.” Not a bad start.

Sadly, it really isn’t enough to just make records, send them to journalists, even with nice personal covering letters reminding them of that promise they once made that time you rescued their Pomeranian from a hedge, and be confident of a review, even a damning review. The message comes back that the record isn’t getting a review, because it isn’t “important” enough. Promotion, or rather, the right kind of promotion, is sadly as important as the music. The right Press Angle, the right PR backing, the right press officer, the right media pitch, the right deal, the right people behind you, the right “buzz”, the right radio airplay (the Fosca single being played by John Peel thrice and counting? Not good enough!), the right pre-sales orders interest from the shops, the right midweek chart position, the right Received Opinion, the right consensus, the right target market in the right media campaign, the right amount of money behind it all… all just as important as the right vocal take, the right chord change, the right lyric… And in, say, Coldplay’s case, why bother making an even half-decent record if you’ve got the publicity part sussed? My dog can write better songs than Coldplay, and he’s a snappier dresser. He just hasn’t got the right PR.

The upshot of this depressing state of affairs is that you get critics writing about bands with piles of money behind them (or piles of money about to be behind them) , saying they’re “promising”… “this time next year they’ll shine, or at least be on a Shine compilation”…. “the fifth album will be a corker, probably”… Meanwhile there are exciting groups out there NOW who already are delivering their potential, in spades. But there’s no money behind them, so they’re Not Important Enough to get written about. I realise this is not a wholly original complaint, that it’s the Order of Things, it’s the Name of the Game, but that doesn’t stop me gritting my teeth in foppish frustration behind my fluttering fan. I don’t want to be a kind of powdered Billy Childish for the rest of my life, but if the Arab Strap fits…

And here I’d like you in indulge me in quoting a Sondheim song about this dilemma, “Putting It Together”. It’s the version sung by Barbra Streisand on “The Broadway Album” (I once parted company with a guitarist because he said Moonshake were better than Barbra Streisand, but I digress). This one goes out to the New Wave of Ikea Rock: Coldplay, Doves, My Vitriol, Crashland, Badly Shorn Beard… etc etc ad badly-dressed over-rated corporate lager-sponsored major label alt-rock three-year-development deal festival tour-support-funded-free-CD-stuck-on-the-cover nauseam…: You have to advertise your music as having money behind it, so it can get a decent expensive promotional campaign to advertise it further, and one day, if you’re very lucky, you’ll get chosen to soundtrack an Ikea advert on TV. In order to pay back all that record label promotional campaign money that they couldn’t recoup. Serves yer right.

Instant Karma’s gonna get you. As that Nike advert used to go.

Be NICE, girl
You have to pay a price, girl
They like to give advice, girl
Don’t think about it twice, girl
Art isn’t easy
A vision’s just a vision
If it’s only in your head
If no one gets to hear it
It’s as good as dead
Putting it together
That’s what counts
Takes a little cocktail conversation
But without the proper preparation
Having just the vision’s no solution
Everything depends on execution
Link by link
Making the connections…
Drink by drink
Taking every comment as it comes
Learning how to play the politician
Like you play piano, bass and drums
Otherwise you’ll find your composition
Isn’t going to get much exhibition
Keeping at a distance doesn’t pay
Still if you remember your objective
Not give all your privacy away
A little bit of hype can be effective
Long as you can keep it in perspective
Even when you get some recognition
Everything you do you still audition
Art isn’t easy
Overnight you’re a trend
You’re the right combination
Then the trend’s at an end
You’re suddenly last year’s sensation
All they ever want is repetition
All they really like is what they know
Bit by bit
Putting it together
All it takes is time and perseverance
With a little luck along the way
Putting in a personal appearance
Gathering supporters and adherents
Even if you do have the suspicion
That it’s taking all your concentration
The art of making art
Is putting it together
Bit by bit
Beat by beat
Part by part
Sheet by sheet
Chart by chart
Track by track
Reel by reel
Stack by stack
Meal by meal
Deal by deal
Spiel by spiel
and THAT
is the state of the art.

Rachel’s had a complaint from one of the hapless victims portrayed in her diaries recently. I am terribly jealous, it’s been ages since anyone’s complained about mine. I’m clearly being much too nice. Kenneth Williams used his as a weapon. “If you’re nasty to me, it’s going in the diaries, you know.” But his were published posthumously, and after the publisher’s libel lawyers had gone through them with a fine-toothed blue pen. The thing about online diaries is that your thoughts about others are instantly in the worldwide public domain. One can try and be a World Wide Wellington and just say “Upload and be damned!”. But a certain amount of care and tact has to be employed if it’s people you still want to get on with. Thankfully for me, I prefer keeping my friends as semi-strangers, and strangers as semi-friends. And after my former attempts at Getting On in Showbusiness failed, I’m really past caring about offending anyone now.

However, I tend to only get complaints from people who are hurt that they’re not in the diaries.

Watched a programme about the comedian and actor Alan Davies. Many women are interviewed about how sexy they find him, and how he’s a “perfect modern man”.

Some men, like Robbie Williams, are widely as attractive to both straight women and gay men. Mr Davies, though undoubtably charming, charismatic and cuddly (if not actually side-splittingly funny per se…it’s just the affable way he tells ’em), is rarely to be found in the readers’ polls in gay magazines. Gay men are still Men, and so tend to be far more aesthetic and mercenary (and obvious, I’m afraid) in their choice of desire than women. And Mr Davies, despite being found in possession of a Nice Smile, has Brian May curly hair and shapeless mumsy clothes. Anathema to the streamlined silver dreams of your average 21st century fag. Not when there’s Adam and Becks and Jude and Ryan and Matt and Ben and Robbie.

You seldom find men lusting after someone mainly because they’re “kind” or have “kind eyes”.

Not that this necessarily puts women in any better a light. I’m reminded of a rather cruel quote by Alan Bennett: “One inscription at the cemetery reads HE WAS KIND…which is the sort of thing women who don’t like sex say of a forebearing husband.”

I’m in a good mood, because John Peel played our new single the other day. I feel a bit guilty about not liking football now, typing this in a cybercafe while the England-Germany match is going on. Quite a quiet atmosphere outside in Holloway Road. Mainly women and Australians. For some reason.

Go to The Good Mixer for the first time in about three years. A few Britpop clothing types there. Except, of course, it’s like the Mods and Punks in Carnaby Street. They’re now either waxing nostalgic or are tourists (of one sort or another), pining for the good old days when Echobelly and Menswear were all the rage. Actually, Simon Menswear is still standing outside, still the Friendliest Man In North London. No one is wearing nice three-button suits, though, so I guess I’ll have to see that new film, “Gangster No.1″… Start wondering if I could be a stunt double for Spike in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. I’ve even got an unconvincing British accent. Despite being born and braised in East Anglia, this week someone asks me if I’m Swedish. Again.

The next Fosca show is on Saturday August 5th, at The Verge, 147 Kentish Town Road, Camden, London. It’s as part of a club night called The Fanclub.