Friday 7th April 2000

The album’s coming along nicely. Very nicely. Nearly finished.

The new picture on the front page, by the way, is a still from the Warhol-like, early 80s low-budget film, “Liquid Sky.” It’s one of those films that either enchant you or annoy you. “Velvet Goldmine” being another. I am firmly of the former camp.

The film features aliens, androgyny, heroin, New York club life, sex, death, lots of make-up and a relentlessly intrusive cheap, early 80s, avant-garde synth soundtrack. Plus the line of dialogue “this pussy has teeth.” I’m thinking of using that for a Fosca t-shirt.

Friday 24th February 2000

In answer to your emails, I don’t of course, write these diaries myself. They are the exclusive creation of a Mrs Brian Silt, of Sevenoaks, Kent. I am in fact entirely fashioned from Fuzzy-Felt.

No Moonbase Alpha. No cities on Mars. No perspex bubbles over St Paul’s. No electric, sleek, pod-like cars. No matter transporters. No post-nuclear wastelands. No Statue of Liberty buried in sand. No Millennium Bug riots. The only thing that feels vaguely futuristic about living in the early 21st century is this very medium.

The Internet is unavoidable. The billboard or TV ad break that doesn’t feature a dot.com address is a rare creature indeed. It’s also been a while since watching a news bulletin that doesn’t refer to getting rich on the Net, being ripped off on the Net, selling music on the Net, broadcasting on the Net, shopping on the Net, big companies merging in order to control the Net, buying and selling shares on the Net, dealing drugs on the Net, bidding in auctions on the Net, spying on the Net, stalking on the Net, courting on the Net, marrying on the Net, cruising on the Net (in both the South Seas and the Hampstead Heath sense) banking on the Net, wanking on the Net…

But some people still refuse to admit its accelerating and ultimately permanent effect on the world and everyone’s lives. Certain friends of mine used to scorn my love of the Net, calling it the “CB of the 90s”, storming out of cybercafes with a camp flourish, shouting at the customers “Why don’t you use a bloody phone to talk to people? And while I’m at it, those horseless carriages will never catch on…” Such people are currently scouring search engines for the barest mention of their own name, furious that there’s a chat forum in Arizona that isn’t talking about them.

In one of my current haunts, an all-night Holloway Road cybercafe run by friendly Russians, some inebriated and fully Tommy Hilfiger and Pungent Kebab kitted-up Shouting Men, on the way back from the clubs, put their heads round the door and shout “NERDS! NERDS! GET A FUCKING LIFE!”

Why is it that the sort of people who use phrases like “Get a life” are invariably intolerant fashion casualties and stereotypes kidding themselves they’re individually-minded? “You’re free, to do what we tell you. To be like WE are.” Presumably for the same reason that members of pro-censorship lobbies, complaining about too much sex on TV, are invariably no oil paintings to look at. Unless you count Francis Bacon.

The truth is, the Net is not replacing anything, it’s enriching everything. It’s giving a new lease of life. To those for whom shouting in the street on a Friday night would be… out of character. Some of us just prefer to spend Friday nights surfing Hal Hartley fan sites and replying to emails from troubled 17-year-old misfits in Sri Lanka, that’s all.

Bald Shouting Men want me dead. They kill my kind for our thick pelts.

Why do these people still wear Tommy Hilfiger? Did Ali G die for nothing?

And what is the first Fosca EP’s connection with hip comedy TV? The answer is that while we were mixing the songs, Mark Gatiss, the tallest, thinnest one out of the League of Gentlemen, was in the studio next door performing in a Doctor Who spin-off radio play he’d written, and that would also be mixed by the same engineer as us. Before his comedy career took off, Mr Gatiss was known to me and a small group of what my shouting friends would also have termed as “nerds”, as a novelist, producing cult Doctor Who adventures with one hand, and gay erotica with the other. I was meant to go round his to watch “The Seeds of Doom” with him a while ago. Recently he and David Walliams, another New Acting-Based Comedy name, wrote and performed a few sketches on the BBC’s Doctor Who Night. I am convinced one of them was based on a conversation I once had with Mr Gatiss about my slightly worrying obsession with Peter Davison, the Fifth Doctor. In it, two troglodytic fanboys, their appearance and mannerisms a painfully familiar brand of arrested development common at science-fiction conventions, kidnap the real Mr Davison and get him alone in their Dalek poster-covered bedroom…

It was a typical Dickon-like occurrence, bumping into Mr Gatiss in a tiny Fulham recording studio like that, but then this week I also bumped into Bob Stanley of the group Saint Etienne, while going to the cinema in Soho. He was buying tickets for “Limbo” in Screen One, I was off to see “Wonderland” in Screen Two. He was with someone, I was alone. The connection was timely, as I’m about to go into the studio with his old producer, and will doubtless be spending the latter half of March in front of a mixing desk, gazing up at a wall strewn with various gold discs of Mr Stanley’s chart hits….

I mentioned this coincidence, then made my excuses and went out to phone Rachel about rehearsals. This has always been a dilemma of mine, sensing whether the aquaintance one bumps into really wants to have a conversation with you or not. There’s always an uneasy silence before one of us, usually me, has to say “well, must get on”… Am I saying what they want to hear? Are they happy to see me, or irritated that their otherwise pleasantly-planned day has been rudely interrupted? Do they really want to discuss “so what are you up to…”, like wary small-talkers at some hateful school reunion, nothing in common but the increasingly unfocussed past? Exchanging phone numbers out of courtesy, both parties knowing full well such dutiful digits will never be used? Is it any wonder I’m spiralling into a vaguely misanthropic, reclusive existence? Can anybody help me? Do I really want them to? It’s the inner voice again. How long can you keep this conversation up? How long can you keep smiling and nodding, putting on a Brave Face? How can you get through this? Why aren’t those pills working? Why do you have this overwhelming sense you’re hurtling towards something… an ending? A reckoning? A new start? When do you get Your Go? Has it gone for good? Were you looking the other way at the time? Oui, je regret tout…

Calm. Down. Dickon. It’s not artistic temperament. It’s just indulgence. Keep writing the diary. Keep Marking Time, and forget that Time. Marks. You.

Okay, then. Distract, distract. You’re not the only one. Stick to what you’re good at: being the doomed loner. Doomed because, aside from anything else, I can’t sleep if there’s someone else in the bed.

“Will you go to bed with me?”

“But what if you toss in your sleep?”

Melody Maker has gone up in both circulation and price this week, now costing more than NME. Railing against the British music papers is such a tired, lazy action, like despising tabloid newspapers while reading them in order to “keep up”. Still, I must wean myself off the weeklies, they are too expensive and too quick to read. If I limit myself to only buying one when there’s something about me or an act I like in them, that should mean I only buy an issue once every… five centuries.

But it’s true, magazine buying has been a vice of mine that’s proven particularly hard to break off. Along with the Net. I am a self-confessed information junkie. And overdosing leaves one nauseous… I must have read dozens of pieces connected with the film The Beach, and now I can’t do what they want me to do, which is actually go and see the wretched film. Because my head is fit to burst with it all. Why is there this relentless rush for the media to all cover the same single product, while others, often of greater worth, vanish into the night unnoticed? The arts scene is more diversified than ever, but why doesn’t the media reflect this?

This relentless rush is more than simple hype, it’s downright in-breeding, And that can’t be healthy. Just look at the Royal Family. Like them, magazines just become increasingly unattractive, chinless and thick. But no one minds, everyone buys it and will continue to buy it, fearing they’ll be stuck for a common talking point come the next social gathering. Is Posh eating enough? Here’s your limited list of what to talk about. No, you can’t deviate. Get a life. As long as it’s not your own. Get off the Web and choose our ways. You are free. To conform. It’s the natural order of Things. “The failure of the English Revolution is all around us”. That’s from “London”, a film you’ll have trouble finding in Blockbusters. Because the media barely touched it. J’accuse, J’accuse, the weekly news…

The tone of many reviews of the new Oasis album leaves me equally jaundiced. And I don’t want to be, honest. No one can actually bring themselves to actually give it a bad review. They instead opt for… constructive criticism. Of Oasis! Presumably still terrified they’ll lose their Oasis privileges, meaning they won’t be able to get a circulation-upping cover story and interview with the Krays ever again. The last album was sent out to journalists with a legally binding agreement preventing the hacks from looking at it in a funny way. It worked: not one review was damning. Now, of course, the world and Noel’s wife has virtually disowned “Be Here Now”. So if their judgement is that wavering, should we believe the consensus this time? Oh yes. Some boys can cry wolf for as long as their lungs allow. Time Out: “[one song] tells of the emotional turmoil Noel suffered because of his coke habit…you can’t help but feel sympathetic… the two new members [drafted in post-recording] will hopefully add a new depth to the one already hinted at… Oasis might deliver another classic yet.”

The gist of the review, like many of the others, is that one should buy the album… because the next one might, that’s “hopefully” might, be actually any good. And that we should be sympathetic of millionaire rock stars. What’s the point? It’s a bad record, be honest. And that’s okay. No one will lose their jobs. Really. It’s okay to bring yourself to dislike a record. You’re a reviewer. Let me help you with that all that fear and received opinion, I can see it’s weighing you down… Oasis aren’t important any more, and if you all stop pretending otherwise, they just might go away. No one will mind. It’s okay. But you will so insist on minding, won’t you?

A: “Get a life!”

B: “Get your OWN wretched life!”

What would I miss if I stopped getting the music press? Muse. Terris. Travis. Bevis. Hovis. These careerist, bland little bands are like buses. I shouldn’t worry my fluffy little head about them. There’ll be another one, exactly the same, along in a minute. And they have the gall to slag off chartpop boybands for looking and sounding the same…

I comfort myself with Old Music. A little vintage Orange Juice. The Postcard Records releases on the compilation “The Heather’s On Fire”. Wise and witty lyrics, knowing grins, camp strangeness in the mix… “No More Rock And Roll For You…” Alex Sharkey says I sound a little like Edwyn Collins when singing. By that he means I can’t hit a single note without wavering a semitone or two both sides.

Suzy Woods told me at school “Your trouble is you think too much”. No one likes a smart-ass. Look at Momus. The new Aqua album gets a slating for being too “knowing”. This country likes its thickies. But don’t be liked, be wise. Fame doesn’t have to equate with being liked. You’ll enjoy your own wisdom more than your apparent popularity, which will only be fleeting and suspect anyway. And remember that the adjunct of intelligence is wit. Anyone can be serious. Only the wise can be witty. And vice versa. Nicky Wire of the Manics goes on about how intelligent he is, yet his lyrics are rarely anything to smile about. So by all means be profound, but don’t forget to tell a few jokes. And don’t be fashionable. Be stylish. Fashion is following others, Style is following yourself. Suede is Fashion, Bowie is Style. Vengaboys are Fashion, Aqua are Style.

I will end this entry on a note of hope. Ask for more. Live beyond your means of cross-media cultural rationing. Deviate, experiment, be strange, be the most like thyself. What was it Norman Tebbit said in the 80s? Get on your bisexual and look for work.

Thursday February 17th 2000

I spend Valentine’s Day 2000 in a cramped van full of tired Spearmint types, traipsing across Europe. It’s not terribly romantic or glamourous, the touring life at the lowest, and necessarily most economical level. No one gets to see any of the three Scandinavian countries the band is touring in apart from the view from the tourbus window. All spare time is taken up driving from venue to venue: the concerts are spaced far apart and there is no day off.

My one abiding memory of travelling to, from, and within Scandinavia: there is a branch of McDonald’s everywhere you look.

One girl comments, after the sold-out show in Stockholm, “It’s such a shame you were all so tired… I mean, people PAID…” Despite her words, she is smiling in a friendly, sincerely approachable fashion.

The Swedish, on evidence of a week spent in their country, tend to say what they think with a lack of tact that never fails to startle. Having gone to the trouble of learning technical fluency in English, it appears that incorporating the language’s normally attendant and essential attributes such as tact, diplomacy, euphemism, politeness and manners of any sort is overdoing it.

Perhaps this would go some way to explain that, of all the people who have attempted to chat me up, most of them have been Swedish girls. In Camden, usually.

In Stockholm, I meet up with Rory, Linda, Simon and Mel, people I’ve known from London gigs and house parties who by coincidence are visiting the Swedish capital on the very day I play a concert there. I am …. very tired. They invite me out to a club elsewhere, but there’s no time. We have to do an overnight drive to Malmo for the next day. Still, I’ve brought my Abba video with me to watch on the bus. And there’s a nice picture of me with Spearmint on the cover of a Swedish newspaper’s weekend supplement. With my newly-shorn haircut. The blond has gone for now, in order to let my hair breathe a little after two years of solid punishment. It is the first time my hair has been like this since the photo shoot for the Orlando album sleeve. I look … normal. Which is, of course, extremely misleading. So the make-up goes on even thicker than before.

I am approached only once on this little tour: by a boy in Malmo who is a fan of the 1995 Shelley single. He has not heard of Orlando. I get back to find Tim Chipping has emailed me the URL of a particularly articulate review of the same record, on a webzine. It all augurs strangely for Fosca’s imminent appearance on the record label that descended from Shelley’s label, Sarah: Shinkansen.

We are currently preparing to record the debut album “On Earth To Make The Numbers Up”, with Ian Catt, producer of Trembling Blue Stars and St Etienne. Alex Sharkey, once of the Sarah band Brighter, is also involved. And Fosca play their next concert supporting Trembling Blue Stars on Thursday, March 23rd, 8pm, at The Spitz Club, Old Spitalfields Market, 109 Commercial Street, London E1 (Aldgate East or Liverpool Street tube).

Discussions on the new Fosca songs. Question: is it possible to make a modern dance pop song with (deliberately, naturally) soulless male vocals and not make it resemble New Order? “This above all, to thine ownself be true…”

People keep inviting me out, but I keep not going. I had to spend the Christmas and New Year period in Bildeston, with my parents, away from it all.

My New Year’s Resolution: Read fewer Greta Garbo biographies.

Go to see “Dogma” at the new Ipswich multiplex, by the big McDonalds. Disappointed. Would have made a better comic book than a film.

The fuss over the Government’s plans to repeal Section 28 depresses me immensely, particularly the fact that the House of Lords have just bounced the bill back at them. And websites like this one.

Apart from the fact that the Section is nothing short of legalised bigotry, anyone who has ever been a schoolchild knows full well how cruel kids can be to each other, and how much the word “gay” is used as a term of abuse, of humiliation and of intimidation. Anyone who, like me, finds themself today surrounded by schoolkids simply by accidentally catching a bus in North London between 4 and 5pm, knows that despite that post-AIDS and post-Thatcher, things have changed very little in the trials of the playground:

“Urgh – you don’t like football… you must be gay.”

and, of course, the classic:

“Urgh – you hang around with girls… you must be gay.”

Schools, private and public, are by nature homophobic: it’s the default sentiment whenever you shove a group of disparate kids who just happen to live in the same area together. The scrapping of Section 28 is not nearly enough: it should be replaced by active education in sexuality and toleration from the off.

Thank god we only have to survive school at the beginning of our lives, because there’s no way we’d survive it any later.

Saturday November 27th 1999

Six days before I finally get to meet Quentin Crisp, and he must have heard I was coming, because he ups and dies. The easiest way out of being in the same room as me. Not to mention the easiest way out of Chorlton-cum-Hardy.

Kept from many of the front pages by Jeffrey Archer’s troubles, The Guardian manages, in time-honoured fashion, to get all the dates mixed up in its little piece, saying he moved to New York in 1972…. Even the Pink Paper consigns him to page 3.

I’m happy that Quentin has finally embraced Death, “the only friend” he spoke of meeting for so long. I just wish he could have postponed the meeting for just one more week. So he could embrace this friend first.

There’s people I’ve admired whom I’ve never actually wanted to meet. I’ve been in the same room (as opposed to concert venue) as, say, the Spice Girls, Laurie Anderson, Ivor Cutler and Lou Reed, but I’ve not wanted to ask them anything in particular. With Quentin there was so much to ask, and yet I’d had his phone number in my book for years, between Taylor Parkes and my dentist. I should call them more often, too.

I’m hoping they’ll now reprint his many out-of-print and never-published books like “Love Made Easy”, but I’m not holding my breath.

The Spearmint job has so far taken me to many wonderful places I’ve never been to before: Tokyo, Amsterdam, Middlesborough…

The flight to Japan is ardous, stressful (ten hours in economy class, cramped seats, fruitless attempts at sleep, tempers frayed) and delay-strewn. But the rest of the trip is an absolute joy. In Tokyo, we all go off to Club Pop It!, where the walls are covered with Spearmint sleeves and posters, and we are all but mobbed as we go in. I’ve never signed so many autographs in my life, and not just as a Spearmint member: I am handed several Orlando records to put my inky scribble on. Turns out they often play “Some Day Soon” there, and they do so on the night I am there, following it up with McCarthy’s “The Well of Loneliness”, Haircut 100’s “Favourite Shirts” and Aztec Camera’s “Boys Wonder”. I sign the back of someone’s mobile phone.

After one in a long series of TV and radio station idents (“Hi, We’re Spearmint, and you’re listening to….”), one interviewer offers us some dried, salted prunes packaged like boiled sweets, which we accept graciously if gingerly. Ronan the drummer stands there chewing, then after a while says, “Does it get any better?” This becomes my personal motto for the whole tour (UK included), sometimes said optimistically in the face of despair (or Hastings), sometimes joyously amid the surreal scenes of pop-fandom in Japan. People waiting outside the hotels and venues, Jemina the sound engineer having to drag us away from the Nth autograph or photo so we can all actually go and get something to eat. In Japan, Spearmint are as big as Catatonia and Supergrass. Being bigger in Japan, it’s an old cliche. But it’s a nice cliche.

At Osaka’s Quattro Club, the dressing room walls are covered in the usual band graffiti, but this time going back for the best part of a decade. On the other side of the world I realise I am standing on the same bit of stage as Charley must have when Gay Dad played there the month before. Not to mention the Manics…. in 1992. There’s still some of Richey’s and Nicky’s graffiti there… “I HATE NEDS ATOMIC DUSTBIN”… and from Carter USM: “GERIATRIC TERRORISTS”…

One morning Spearmint play a special acoustic instore at SYFT Records in Osaka, which reminds me of Rough Trade Records in Covent Garden. The band play without microphones, just acoustic guitars, glockenspiel and melodica. They stand up at one end of the shop, the audience are seated on the floor. I get to introduce each song. Afterwards Shirley describes it as a school assembly hosted by Kenneth Williams. I buy the Girlfrendo album on vinyl before leaving. Contrary to what I’d previously thought, vinyl is still very popular in Japan.

One fan gives me a heartfelt letter comparing me to Rimbaud. It comes with a Hello Kitty plectrum. And a portable ashtray that goes round your neck like a Jim’ll Fix It medal. In Japan, cigarettes are £1.25 a packet. There’s a brand called Caster Mild that are particularly nice.

The 24 hour convenience store nearest our Tokyo hotel stocks hair bleach for men. It’s called Gatsby. The concerts are sponsored by a Gap-type store called XXYY, who give me a brand new cream-coloured suit for nothing. I like Japan.

The Japanese Times has a motto printed on the top of ever issue: “All the News Without Fear or Favour”.

On our night of departure, we go to a proper Karaoke bar, where you book into a hotel-like room for just yourself, your friends, your own singing machine with mics, and all the drink you can phone down for. I get to do The Carpenters’s “I Need To Be In Love” and Abba’s “Thank You For The Music”, dedicated to the rest of Spearmint, naturally. “I’ve been so lucky/ I am the girl with golden hair/I want to sing it out to everybody/ What a joy, what a life, what a chance!”.

In Amsterdam, I meet up with Simon Kehoe, who gives me his non-tourist tour. I am nearly run down by fleets of cyclists at every turn. You’re never quite sure which bit is the pavement: there’s a bike lane, a tram lane and a car lane. In that order. Everyone dresses casually, ie badly. When you go to the pub, you sit at a table and wait to be served. The beer comes in smaller measures, but is far more potent. We stay in a hotel that is a glorified hostel: the TV remote control is attached to the wall by a chain. At the Rijksmuseum, you can buy Rembrandt mousemats.

Next stops with Spearmint:

30.11.99 Paris, Elysee Montmartre
2.12.99 Nantes, Olympic
11.12.99 Stockholm, Fritz Corner
18.12.99 London, Blow Up (The Wag Club)

Before boarding the superfast (and super comfortable) Shinkansen bullet train to Nagoya, I buy a toy version of the train from a platform kiosk, to give to Matt of Shinkansen Records of Lambeth. And clearly it works, because Fosca are now going to release something on the label, hopefully a single and mini-album.

We play the Bull and Gate with a drum machine and Sheila B on cello for the first time. And myself as a proper lead vocalist for the first time, as on one song I don’t play guitar and have just the microphone to hold onto for dear life. I am paler than ever. But it feels right. We’re also looking for a fourth permanent member to join myself, Rachel and Sheila, perhaps on guitar, bass or keyboard programming. Write here if you know of someone suitable.

I spent the last weekend in Chipping Norton, partaking in the vivid, dayglo video for Spearmint’s next single, “We’re Going Out”. Naturally, I hogged the make up chair, despite my role being limited to Strange Postman in Scene 42. We all had to attend special choreography lessons. Samanthi, who stars in the video as Woman Going Out, was especially good, and got to wear all the best frocks. I haven’t seen the results yet, but I have a feeling it will look like the video to Aqua’s “Barbie Girl”. Having been re-written by a deranged Mike Leigh fan on too much coffee.

Nothing surprises me anymore.

Reports of the Paddington rail disaster include surreal accounts of rescue workers deafened by a cacophony of abandoned mobile phones ringing like mad: the inappropriate racket of novelty arpeggio trills and vain personalized “amusing” melody chimes among the carnage and flames giving the tragedy a gut-wrenchingly modern pathos. A sick new homage to The Unknown Commuter: They Couldn’t Get A Good Signal. The real tragedy is, of course, Jilly Cooper escaping unscathed.

Nothing surprises me anymore.

On the platform at Highgate Tube station, the woman standing in front of me tries to throw herself into the path of the incoming train.

The guard who gently leads her away by the arm does so with such nonchalance and sighs of resignation that everyone else on the platform assumes she must be a regular at this sort of thing. Then goes back to talking about how great it is that both escalators are working again.

Nothing surprises me anymore.

Waiting for the train on the way home, a lone man with a Bad Beard and Worse Trainers strolls along the platform singing operatic arias at the top of his lungs. A perfect, trained baritone of a voice.

Nothing surprises me anymore.

On Sunday I am so far the only member of the Spearmint touring party to “get off” with someone during the tour. She is a member of the Coventry and Kenilworth Womens Rugby Club, and a confirmed homosexualist. She tries for a conversion with me, and attempts to use tongues, but I am having none of it, and so neither is she. I think she was the prop forward. And I was her hooker. A David-Sylvian-a-Gram. What is it about lesbians and the lead singer of a cult New Romantic pop group from the early 80s? Answers on the back of a postcard: “Greetings From Radclyffe Hall.”

Nothing surprises me anymore.

The following Thursday I am chatted up by Nigel Planer. I’m too old to be this cute. It’s at the launch for “Oral”, an anthology of poetry and pop lyrics. Amongst all the air-kissing, he introduces me to various performance poets. I never thought I’d hear Neil from The Young Ones say the words “and this is Dickon Edwards”. I enjoy readings by Francesca Beard, Billy Childish, Andrew Copeland and Lucy English, and am scared by a severely inebriated Jock Scot. But then, I am scared by most things. I like the poetry performance scene: it’s quieter than rock concerts, there’s no drum kit sound checks and the performers are more honest. And poets are even bigger tarts than rock bands. Flirts, tarts and decent poetry; what else is there?

When you’re Dickon Edwards, old friends act like strangers (and I don’t blame them). And strangers act like old friends, if my email Inbox is anything to go by. One of the reasons I maintain the look I have is so my friends can spot me in a crowd, and my enemies can see me coming. And if my friends spot me first, which is likely, they can then decide whether they’re in the mood to talk to me or not, and dodge or greet me as appropriate. I never approach them. In case they’ve had a really bad day, and the last thing they want now is the likes of me coming up and talking to them. Like the Tennessee Williams play, I not only depend on the kindness of strangers, I’m also always prepared for the unkindness of friends. Unkindness from enemies is far, far preferable, even comparatively homely and welcome when it happens, because enemies, unlike friends, have at least the decency to be consistent in their judgement. My heart leapt with gratitude recently when my name made it into Melody Maker’s gossip column, thanks to my appearance as a new member of Spearmint, and I was referred to as “narcissistic”, “Warhol-wannabe”, “affected, “has-been”, and “doubly annoying prat”. I had a spring in my step all the way back from the newsagents.

The first Fosca EP, “Nervous, London”, is at last all pressed up with somewhere to go. You can find out how to order it here. It’s CD-only and even has a bar-code on it. None of your seven inch vinyl in clear plastic bags for me, thank you very much. I troll over to Nic Goodchild’s place to relieve her of a few boxes of the record. Piles and piles of little CD-sized Dickons. I’m taking some along to all the Spearmintconcerts to sell to anyone who approaches me in person. Such concerts currently are the following:

13.10.99: Amsterdam VPRO live radio session with audience.
14.10.99: Amsterdam Paradiso Club
16.10.99: London Kings Cross Scala (Scalarama all day festival)
23.10.99: Brighton Lift Club
28.10.99: Flight to Japan: various promotional things over the next week like HMV instore performances
01.11.99: Tokyo Quattro Club
02.11.99: Osaka Quattro Club
03.11.99: Nagoya Quattro Club
04.11.99: Flight back to UK
12.11.99: Middlesborough Arena
13.11.99: Glasgow King Tuts Wah Wah Hut

Then, on Monday 15th November, FOSCA play a rare gig at the Bull and Gate, Kentish Town. I think we clash with Morrissey at the Forum next door. Watch this space.

The tour with Spearmint has had all kinds of Spinal Tap-like set backs: fire alarms in Birmingham meaning we only played three songs before having to pack up, unfinished redecorating at the Coventry venue meaning we turned up like idiots for the soundcheck only to find it cancelled… crushingly inappropriate RAWK support acts like the student band in Portsmouth who did a bad grunge version of “Chocolate Salty Balls” from South Park… The strange ideas some promoters have about the definition of “vegetarian riders” (Thanks, I ate last week…). But there have been wonderful moments too, like the entire set at Dingwalls (that rare thing: a receptive London audience), the Bedford and Manchester shows, the whole band singing Happy Birthday down the phone to keyboardist Simon’s partner’s son… people coming to the Spearmint shows because of me playing in the band… people coming to the Spearmint shows because they like Spearmint, then pleasantly discovering I was there too… the Melody Maker review of the Dingwalls show, giving me a nice name-check… staying with my friends Jason and Sam in Bristol, staying up all night with them and listening to obscure OMD B-sides… wandering round the roughest precincts in Hastings on a Saturday night with a telescopic cigarette holder a la Audrey in “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” … tour bus music including The Fall’s “Shiftwork”, Bowie’s “Hunky Dory” (a big sing along album for Spearmint), The Style Council, lots of 70s disco and 80s pop… the person whose only words to me were “Don’t you dare put anything about me on your bloody website”… Nemo supporting us in Bedford, the only appropriate support band we had… teaching certain members of Spearmint how to correctly use words like “aphorism”… umpteen strangers using the Sylvian comparison as a conversation opener… me invading the girls toilets in many venues to apply even more make up because that’s the only place to find a mirror, putting a nice drug-free twist on the cliched reason people usually go into the opposite sex’s toilets for, ie “powdering their nose”… signing Spearmint records despite not playing on them… signing Spearmint set-lists (which makes more sense)… having my photo taken for a French magazine… and, always best of all, strangers coming up to me after a show and saying they enjoyed it, never mind how token and perfunctory… I will never live within my income of praise… I BELIEVE the darling-you-were-wonderful-isms…! I’m that shallow and insecure.

The woman at Muswell Hill Bookshop hands me my copy of Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower and asks me if I’m Swedish. “No, why?” “You sound Swedish, that’s all.”

I promptly rush off and purchase some great Swedish pop music: Stina Nordenstam’s “And She Closed Her Eyes” album. And some great new London pop music: “Preview”, the excellent debut mini-album by Astronaut. Alex, the singer, like all the slyly sexiest people, lives here in Highgate. He helped to fix my eight-track once.

It’s the New Camden. You Get a Good Mix In Highgate, North Six.

Come to Highgate, I’ll give you a quick guided pop tour. Here’s the house shared by Tim Baxendale and Alex Astronaut. Here’s where Keith Moon threw a champagne bottle through a dividing wall and framed it for a photo. Here’s where The Pink Floyd originally rehearsed in their 60s psychedelic light-show days. Here’s where Jo Whiley nearly got me run over. Here’s where Tjinder Cornershop held the toilet door open for me. Here’s where I saw the singer from Heavy Stereo (now in Oasis?) buying his cigarettes. Here’s where the guitarist from Salad waits for a bus. Here’s where Tona De Brett gives her singing lessons to pop stars. Here’s where Brett Anderson wrote “Dog Man Star”. Here’s where Kula Shaker first chanted their mantras together. Here’s where Bernard Butler has his breakfast. Here’s where Victoria Wood gets her library books. Here’s where Helen from Fluffy picked up her dry cleaning. Here’s where the singer from Acacia waved at me. Here’s the bookshop where Terry Gilliam is advertised as a local author. Here’s where the Persecution Complex had their infamous open-house parties, attended by the entire Romo gathering, plus Saint Etienne, the singer from Octopus, Kenickie, that lot in Rachel Stamp, various Longpigs and These Animal Men and countless other bands of varying repute; here’s where the guitarist from Massive Ego and Minty rents his videos, here’s the notice board where two fanzine writers put up a note saying they came all the way here to stalk me, without success… And here’s Highgate Cemetery, favoured by all Gothic-tinged band photo-shoots… Karl who?

I used to hate people saying I looked so “80s”. Now, years on from that Romo palaver, like any good existentialist, I’ve swam with the tide but faster, preferring The Associates to The Beatles, Altered Images to Bob Dylan, ABC to The Beach Boys, and, yes, Japan to The Who. To some people, this sort of music is “kitsch”, wedding reception fodder. To me, it’s a tonic in these dark days.

That said, I am now carrying a small card reading “Yes, I KNOW I look like (tick one of the following) David Sylvian on the cover of “Gentlemen Take Polaroids” / Andy Warhol / Nick Rhodes / Sick Boy in Trainspotting / Lurch in The Addams Family / Kim Novak In “Bell Book and Candle” / David Bowie (?) / Gary Numan (?) / Simon Le Bon (??) / A refugee from “Velvet Goldmine” / The bad guy in “Desperately Seeking Susan” (!) / Dracula (?!?) / Nicky Wire (eyes only) / …Thank you anyway.”

No, really.

Tuesday September 14th 1999

Received this today. Mr Numan need not fret: as far as I’m concerned, friends are electric.

>You’ll be pleased to know that they’re talking about you more than Mark E Smith on ‘Fall-Net’.

>> Anyone remember this twat? His diary is reassuringly unaltered, and he still deserves as horrific a death as is imaginable.

> >http://freespace.virgin.net/dickon.edwards/

>> Stuart

>

>>Actually I think D’s diary is quite interesting. Has anyone here ever heard his music?

>>PJ

Check the record, check the record, check the guy’s track record. It’s out on October 25th, according to Saint Nic at Something Velvet Records. Hopefully Fosca will play a date or two around the time. That’s when I’m not playing guitar for my new employers. I had heard there were a couple of vacancies in Oasis, but somehow I don’t think I’d fit in. My favourite Sondheim musical is Assassins, while Liam Gallagher’s is A Little Night Music. We would never get along.

So I’ve plumped for playing Auxiliary Guitar in Spearmint, the Smiths you can do Northern Soul dancing to. They are kindly employing me to enhance their live performance in my own strange way, at all of their concerts from now till Christmas at least, taking in much of the UK, plus Paris, Amsterdam, and a week of dates in Japan. Full details can be found on the Spearmint website. It’s all terribly exciting, and it helps that I do actually like the band, having spent many an evening at Soho’s Blow Up club strutting my stuff to “Sweeping the Nation”, arguably one of the greatest singles of the Nineties.

I’m particularly looking forward to the dates in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya, because ever since I started to frequent the less discerning pockets of the London music industry scene, people have taken one look at me and said “Oh… you MUST go to Japan. They’d love you there.” It’s as if I’d be offered my own Manga animated series (SAILOR DICKON!) within seconds off stepping off the plane. Well, now I shall find out. I shall be taking copies of the Fosca EP with me on tour and see what happens. I hope to be drinking sake while reading the short stories of Saki. And being sarky.

But for now, the Spearmint schedule kicks off this week with shows at Dingwalls in Camden, the Louisiana in Bristol and Aldershot West End Centre. Oh, the reckless glamour of it all! Roadie! My mascara!

Tuesday August 3rd 1999

Turned a corner in Archway today and someone looked right at me and said, “Oh no – another Dickon Edwards clone.”

Red and yellow and pink and green, purple and orange and blue… I’ve just had some surgery. Varicose veins. I have the body of an old man. I think Jimmy Saville’s got the one I should have by mistake. There’s been a mix-up.

Before, the registration nurse had asked me “Religion?”. “No thanks.” Perhaps I should have ventured one, and then had a Catholic or Hindu or Moonie out-of-body experience when I was put to sleep like an old tired and useless pet. Instead, the experience (my first time Under The Knife) was rather akin to that scene in The Matrix. They fixed a catheter on my left hand, pressed a switch, and something shot into me, quickly working its way up my arm. No going back now. Like Keanu’s liquid mirror engulfing him in order to deliver him to another world, when the anaesthetic reached my neck I started to choke, convinced I could taste it. The nurses held me back, and then – nothingness. No Other World after all. Not even dreams.

Sadly, they revived me after the operation. And so now and for the next week I limp around London, left leg swathed in thick layers of bandage (in this heat, too) and look even more strange than usual.

But it does mean I get a week off work, and can catch up on things like diary entries. Yes, I’ve fooled the Real World enough for it to offer me an Ordinary Job until I can get paid for being myself again. I work part-time (and in part make-up) at nearby Kenwood House, a historic Neo-Classical villa halfway between Highgate and Hampstead which doubles up as an art gallery and ornate furniture museum. To some, it’s best known as the permanent home to such world-famous paintings as Vermeer’s The Guitar Player and the greatest Rembrandt self-portrait, where the artist looks like Rumpole of the Bailey. To most, it’s that stately home in Notting Hill where Hugh Grant catches up with Julia Roberts filming some unspecific English period drama. The current temporary exhibition at Kenwood is a history of the artist’s model 1840-1940, featuring examples by all the usual suspects: Etty, Holman Hunt, Rosetti, Millais, Burne-Jones, Gwen and Augustus John, Stanley Spencer, Moore, Hepworth, Lowry, the Bloomsbury lot, and no less than two portraits of that well-known wartime artist’s model, Quentin Crisp…

So far, I have had more than one visitor ask me if I’m one of the exhibits. One gentleman told me I was only the second Dickon he had ever met. “The first is a chap at Watford B&Q. Terribly helpful. There’s nothing he doesn’t know about vinyl floor coverings.”

The gig at Club V went off without too much bloodshed, but I’m still unsure about how Fosca should sound, who should sing, and whether I should even bother with Pop at all. The more I leaf through the music papers, the less and less I feel I have anything remotely in common with that microcosm of confused priorities and bad sideburns. Which of course is the one reason Fosca should exist, as a kindred spirit to those who feel the same way. I flail about, auditioning as a gigs-only guitarist for the band Spearmint, and even writing to Tim Orlando. Though I’d only make music with Tim again if the results were guaranteed hit singles, and were at least as good as Madonna’s “Beautiful Stranger”, Steps’ “Tragedy” or Shanks and Bigfoot’s “Sweet Like Chocolate”. Otherwise what would be the point?

The Fosca show was covered in the free gay weekly paper, Boyz. There was one picture of me onstage above an advert for a bar called Cock and Comfort. Which is entirely appropriate.

Nic Goodchild’s label Something Velvet is gearing up to release the Nervous, London EP. Release date to be confirmed, but that’s no euphemism: it is coming out. It’s just that both Nic and I have been pre-occupied with our respective leg surgery: her right, my left. And now I’m still um-ing and er-ing over the sleeve artwork. But once I’ve sorted that out, it all gets sent off and turned into shiny new CDs, coins with which to buy Fosca a few gigs around the time of the release, too.

It’s a schizophrenic EP, with “File Under Forsaken” all lo-fi and ten minutes long and cavernous Galaxie 500 aural wasteland with my own lisping, whining vocals on top; balanced by “He’s No Help” and “The Followers”, which are cleaner, shorter, poppier, and feature Val Jones’ wry-and-dry folky tones. Some people can’t “get” this range of diversity, which is a shame, as I’ll have to take Fosca in one direction or the other in order to not confuse people. Despite the fact I write songs by and for the confused. I think it’s a maudlin masterpiece. Until the next one.

Advance mail order and any other enquiries can be made by e-mailing Something Velvet Records here. I was round Nic’s place yesterday, checking the artwork, and giggling smugly at my own lyrics. This is a common occurrence. I’m often to be found smirking on buses, entertained by my own inner relentless word-play and the eternal invention of epigrams taking place in my head. My mind is the world’s most pretentious Walkman.

At a bus stop on Camden Road, a middle-aged American visitor turns to me and says “you remind me of Kim Novak in Bell, Book and Candle.” That’s his opening line.

I have only three observations to make concerning the new Star Wars film. My excuse is that they seem to have been overlooked elsewhere. Which is something you couldn’t say about the film itself..

One of the Naboo fighter pilots is played by Celia Imrie, best known for her work in many a Victoria Wood sketch.

One of the Jedi Council is called Yarael Poof.

The Battle Droids bear a striking resemblance to Jacob Epstein’s 1914 bronze sculpture Torso In Metal from ‘The Rock Drill’.

Well, it makes a change from saying “it’s not as good as the first three”, doesn’t it?

Just to remind those coming, Fosca play live in London next Saturday 12th June, along with Linus and Billy Childish associate Sexton Ming, Upstairs At The Garage, Highbury Corner, N5. Doors open 8pm, and we’re on first, 9pm or thereabouts.

The Club VCD compilation, featuring Fosca and about 700 other Club V-friendly bands, will be on sale at the show. It’s also available for £4 (plus p&p) via mail-order, details of how to do so can be found here.

Do come and say hello to us.

Saturday May 29th 1999

I float on an unforeseen gust of tourists into Tower Records, Piccadilly Circus, and flick through Simon Price’s new Manics book. Annoyingly, I only get a tiny quote rather than the seventeen chapters I’d previously envisaged. And the new Catherine Cookson doesn’t mention me at all. A stiff letter to the editors of Women’s Weekly is in order.

How can Nicky Wire reconcile his love of existential literature with his current predilection for domesticity and Dyson hoovers?

Doesn’t he know that Nietzsche abhors a vacuum?

Last Wednesday, and Fosca record the song “On Earth To Make The Numbers Up” at Tommy Barton’s place in Archway. He calls his Joe Meek kitchen set-up The White Ark, as a jokey take on Lee Perry’s Black Ark Studios. Awfully, this now sounds like one of those London right-wing groups you read about in the news, and I’ll have to change the sleeve credit or risk people Getting The Wrong Idea I Shouldn’t Wonder.

We swathe the song in Abba-esque synths and it sounds strange, but new. And definitely Pop Music. Albeit another seven minute epic. Blame my current love of those narrative-poem-like Leonard Cohen songs with 800 verses (from “Death of A Ladies’ Man” onwards, not the earlier stuff). Work has to stop at 7pm because everyone files out to the pub to watch some football match or other. I try following the Cricket World Cup, but the only aspect that appeals to me is the fact that the teams get to wear what looks like garishly-coloured pyjamas.

I mourn the passing of another Fosca icon I’m annoyed to have never met, Dirk Bogarde. The BBC puts on a few of his old films, Death In Venice predictably, and Doctor In Distress somewhat less predictably. No sign of The Blue Lamp, The Night Porter, Victim or The Servant. Doctor In Distress is downright weird. Bogarde made it in 1963, after the arty, black and white, ground-breaking likes of The Servant and Victim had saved him from the charming-if-lightweight early-Carry On-ish kitsch comedy hell of the “Doctor…” series. Bogarde had the career Kenneth Williams really wanted but never got, moving from cheap popular colour comedies to serious dramatic celluloid milestones, but still went back to do one more Doctor film. Perhaps he just did Doctor In Distress for the money, as he seems to be acting on auto-pilot. The whole point of the Simon Sparrow character in the first film, 1954’s “Doctor In The House”, was his young medical student naivety. By “… In Distress”, Simon Sparrow is tired, greying, past 40, and is merely a friend and colleague to the Falstaff-like surgeon Sir Lancelot, rather than an upstart foil. The film is an intriguing curio, but for all the wrong reasons.

Farzana says Charley might be up for playing guitar at the next Fosca gig, the tireless thing. She and Gay Dad are all over the media at the moment. In NME, editor Steve Sutherland rants viciously against their hype, while putting the band on the front cover. Cliff Jones comes in for abuse for liking the Britney Spears single. Games are being played. I don’t understand any of it. Does any of it matter? And to whom?

I’m getting very good at replying to e-mails at the moment. There was a time when I never got around to answering any at all. Now every electronic missive I receive personally, and that seems to want a reply, is replied to within a week or so. Junk mail and unsolicited mail which is sent to me in a list of other recipients, seemingly just as an address that someone knows, is rapidly deleted. Top of my bugbear list are those so-called “virus alert” mails. You know the sort of thing. “Fwd: Do not open any mails with the subject line “Badgers Know No Fear”. Please copy and forward this mail to everyone you don’t like very much”.

Next on the hatelist is the likes of “Fwd: Come to my gig/website/bar mitzvah.” The answer being, no, I probably won’t, if the only time you write to me is as one of many people, you impersonal thing, you.

Some people try to send me unsolicited attachments (photos, sound files etc) and emails written in coloured typefaces via HTML. I wish they wouldn’t. Because my steam-powered e-mail program simply can’t open them.

The actor playing William Hague in the new Eurosceptic branch of the Conservative Party’s Political Broadcast is, amusingly, called Tim Chipping. There’s also an actor doing the rounds in Cambridge University indie films called Dickon Edwards. I get the occasional e-mail confusing me with him, “Didn’t you play a policeman in a play I saw recently? I know your sister’s dog’s vet’s osteopath.” I start to wonder what are the chances of there being someone else out there with the same obscure name AND age as me who also works in the Great British Arts. But then, once the probability of a child being named Dickon is spoken for, the chances of him working in the Arts isn’t that unlikely. And “Edwards” isn’t exactly uncommon at all. An obscure first name compensated for by a dirt-cheap surname.

As I constantly bore anyone who listens, I’m not even the first Dickon to be in a signed British indie band… there’s the violin player in the Tindersticks. As everyone knows. But I still get the “uh?” and “pfft!” comments and misspellings when presenting my name to strangers. However, this is all fair and proper, as I have an “uh?” and “pfft!” and misspelt face.

Saturday May 22nd 1999

Morrissey’s 40th birthday today… so I send him a card of me on the Wilde memorial. On the Jo Whiley TV show, a programme that always has me shouting things at the televison (I’m a frustrated chat show guest), one topic of discussion is the Smiths. Billy Bragg bemoans the fact that no one writes lyrics like that anymore, citing the new Suede single as an example of present-day dumbing down in the so-say alternative/indie music world.

I make a note to send him a copy of the debut Fosca EP, “Nervous, London”, on its release. “Nervous, London” because I was thinking of those people who write to Agony Aunts, signing themselves, “Worried, Tunbridge Wells”. It was going to be “Nervous Of London”, but I like the comma too much. Punctuation is the new rock ‘n’ roll. The lead song “as opposed to “A-side”, for this is a CD), is nine and a half minutes long. Extended Players don’t come much more extended. But it’s still a pop song. “File Under Forsaken”. Three verses, chorus, middle eight, intro, outro. Like any other pop song. I am NOT going to turn into Pink Floyd, promise. Although the site of a giant inflatable Dickon floating above Battersea Power Station isn’t entirely a bad idea.

It’s going to be released on Something Velvet Records, Nic Goodchild’s new label. We master it on Tuesday. I never went to any of the mastering sessions for Orlando, so this will be an exciting new experience for me. I will basically ask for it to sound less “lo-fi”, something that has only happened by accident. The accident being me thinking I could engineer. The sleeve will have the lyrics, pictures of me in a nice suit (it did not take long to decide that), and a nice life-affirming quote from Radclyffe Hall. I hope she won’t mind. Her tomb is in Highgate Cemetery, so if she does, she hasn’t far to go to haunt me.

Meantime, one of the songs on the EP, “He’s No Help” will be included on the nearly-released Club V CD compilation, and Fosca play the album’s launch night at the club on Saturday June 12th. The venue is Upstairs At The Garage, opposite Highbury & Islington tube, Highbury Corner, London N5. Further details on how to get hold of the CD, and Club V in general can be found here.

As for the album, well, I ran out of money while recording it myself, and was becoming increasingly frustrated at the limitations of three different digital recording machines I used. All three proved to be faulty and troublesome, and I resolve to record in future with an engineer/co-producer that has done it before. But it’s hard: I have very specific ideas, and they’re not always the obvious, easy ones. On Wednesday we try recording the title track of the album at Tommy Barton’s Joe Meek-style set up at his flat in Archway. Fingers crossed. What I really need is to be signed. Perhaps having a CD EP out will be more impressive than badly-duplicated tapes. What keeps me going is the unassailable fact that I have more talent in my little finger than, say, the Stereophonics (to unfairly pick a name from the dartboard) have in their entire, dreary, formulaic rock, non-specific, nothing-to-say bodies. The joke’s on me, though, as I never use my little finger for anything.