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.

Friday 9th June 2000

Summer, my least favourite time of year.

I visit the Fig-1 gallery, to see its latest installation… Will Self. The frog-headed novelist is roped off like any other exhibit, and is seated at a desk with a laptop computer and an endless supply of cigarettes. As he types and creates a new story, a large screen on the adjoining wall displays his efforts. He wears wraparound shades, so one cannot stare him out, and attempts to speak to him are strictly forbidden. I sit and watch for a while, hoping he’ll “fictionalise” me as he has done most of the gallery’s visitors. After a while, he types, “…and I hate that phoney Warhol hunched on a bench.”

Hatred, it’s that lovable emotion we all share! Blind misanthropy, it’s the great leveller! Pick one of the new 21st Century stereotypes, sorry, tribes, and vent away! And in this sticky, thin-aired city, where the pollen count rises and the tolerance level plummets accordingly.

Pick one of my own bugbears on this stifling day:

1) People with henna tattoos. On their way to “Glarstonbree”, then a fortnight in Goa. The ones who have children purely so they can take them to festivals and get their faces painted.

2) People who ride their bikes on the pavement. At top speed. Yes, I know it’s dangerous and so inconvenient to cycle in the road in London, but I choose to walk on the pavement because I was just hoping not to get run down.

3) Skateboarders. Especially ageing skateboarders. With the worst clothes, the worst haircuts and the worst music. Call that a noble, athletic sport? Give me bare-knuckle boxing in a Somerset barn any day.

4) Street artists in Leicester Square. Ah, yes, just the thing I need: a badly-drawn sketch of Bob Marley. How did I get by before?

5) People with mobile phones that play a tune. And then let it ring out for a good minute or two before answering it. In the cinema.

6) Jester hats. England team football shirts. Ill-advised shorts. Bared pink English Bad Flesh. Never mind your mad dogs, Mr Coward…

7) The film people who won’t return our record label’s umpteen calls and faxes so we can clear a short sample of dialogue from “Liquid Sky” for Fosca’s little album. For those interested, it was going to be from the scene where Margaret is talking to her old college tutor on her roof, shortly before he has his cold and loveless way with her… “I’m nobody’s victim… It’s only fair I warn them this pussy has teeth.” (Hats off to Bloomsbury Publishing and the author JT Leroy, though, for kindly letting us use a quote from his novel, “Sarah”, on the sleeve).

So I take comfort in the only way I know how. By surfing to Ask Jesus, typing in a website of choice, say “http://www.nme.com” or “http://news.bbc.co.uk”, and reading the results…

Tuesday Ist May 2000

“Hats are always funny”, said Tim Baxendale to me yesterday. “If you put a hat on the monster from Alien it’s immediately funny.”

Yes, it’s the Dickon guide to the vibrant, colourful, glamorous, futuristic, state-of-the-art UK Alternative Music Scene. Cut out and keep. Notebooks out, plagiarists!

Stereophonics:
Three bowls of porridge looking for a spoon.

Muse:
I’d like their records to be played at my funeral. And not before.

Idlewild:
I can have no room in my life for a band whose vocabulary does not incluced the word ‘moisturiser’. Eric Idle is wilder.

Gomez:
A band that would be greatly improved by death.

Primal Scream:
Free Satpal Ram! Jail Bobby Gillespie!

Embrace:
Useful… for putting up shelves.

I’m sorry, I’m in that kind of mood. Things like the “All Tomorrow’s Parties” festival line-up depress me immensely. A festival named after a song from the Warhol Factory days. But no Superstars, Pop Artists, transvestites, deviants and iconic Germanic blondes to be found here. Just badly-dressed indie-schmindie Real Ale fans playing. White boy indie post-rock. And again and again and again. Bad Beards and worse clothes. Sports clothes. Badly-cut sideburns. Ruddy skin. Stubble. Did Karen Carpenter die for nothing? Don’t they remember The Associates? Ivor Cutler? Orange Juice? It is possible to come from Glasgow and not be quite so very dour.

The thing is, the actual idea of having a music festival in a holiday camp is terrific. The problem is, the camp element seems to stop right there. It’s the Lack Of Variety Club. This year the acts and films were chosen by Mogwai. Who, let’s face it, are not the world’s greatest Abba fans. They balk at the mere mention of sequins. Mogwai and their dour little friends Must Be Stopped. With Knives. Next year it’s the turn of… Tortoise. The future’s so dreary I’ve got to wear mascara.

It’s all very well me sitting here and moaning about it. But I’m also doing my bit in the Pop Wars. Putting my neck gladly (and gaudily) on the line myself. And so… here’s some new records of my own, by way of an alternative to the Alternative.

The new Fosca single. “The Agony Without The Ecstasy”. All 2 minutes 50 seconds of burbling synths, MIDI magic and sparkling auto-harps. AND you can dance to it. Out on CD only (no 7″ elitism here) on Shinkansen next month. Release date JUNE 26th. Backed with “Confused And Proud” and “Weightless”. More aphorisms to scrawl on your satchel while gazing vainly across the room at the one who won’t gaze at you. The album, “On Earth To Make The Numbers Up”, follows in August. Unlike Orlando, the new Fosca releases should be available in France, Spain and America as well as the UK. And we’re working on Sweden and Japan. Next stop, Madison Square Gardens…. in Hemel Hempstead.

I had one of those internet questionnaires recently.

WHAT’S ON YOUR MOUSE MAT?: It’s got a plain red cotton layer covered in shameful grime, so it currently resembles a late Francis Bacon.

FAVOURITE BOARD GAME: “Drabble” It’s like Scrabble, but the loser has to impersonate Margaret Drabble for a day.

WHAT IS THE FIRST THING YOU THINK WHEN YOU WAKE IN THE MORNING: Oh no, not again.

FUTURE DAUGHTER’S NAME: Dickonia.

FUTURE SON’S NAME: Dickon Garden City

IF YOU COULD HAVE ANY JOB YOU WANTED, WHAT WOULD IT BE?: I’d quite like to join Asian Dub Foundation. Seriously! But do you think they’d have me? Last week, and this is true as well as handy for the purposes of a bad pun, I was snogged by a very cute Asian boy, smudging my make-up. I was then wearing, wait for it… Asian Rubbed Foundation.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE SNAPPLE?: Are you an American? You must be very proud.

FAVOURITE MOVIE(S)?: This week it’s Liquid Sky. All-time it’s The Naked Civil Servant.

WHAT IS THE WORST THING YOU HAVE EVER SEEN?: “The Horse Whisperer”. I had to gnaw my own elbows off to survive.

WHAT ONE THING IRRITATES YOU THE MOST IN PEOPLE: Not obeying my every command.

WHERE DO YOU WANT TO BE RIGHT NOW?: New York.

WHAT IS YOUR MOST MEMORABLE MOMENT? : To date, winning my Marksman badge at Colchester Barracks for the local Scouts. Deadeye Dickon, they called me. I’m actually quite handy with a .77 army rifle. You wouldn’t think it to look at me, would you? I’m a dab hand at using the crosshairs to kill people whose hair makes me cross.

Apparently these diary entries are printed out by one reader and read in the girls’ toilets at her school.

Monday 24th April 2000

Yes, the album is mixed and finished. Yes, it’s the record I’ve always dreamed of making. Yes, in Alex Sharkey I’ve found the best collaborator since Tim. Yes, there were times in the studio when Ian and Alex stood back to back, both playing vintage synths simultaneously. Yes, the record label like it. Yes, it’s coming out soon. Yes, there will be a single before then, in late June.

Amd yes, we are playing gigs again. Saturday May 27th. Club V, Upstairs At The Garage, 20-22 Highbury Corner, London N5.

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.