Tuesday March 30th

The new Index Page Picture Stars this time are my better-looking younger brother, Tom, and self, last Christmas in Bildeston. I think I look like Steve Buscemi. No one else agrees. Tom plays guitar on a new disco version of “We Are All Friends Here.”

We mixed half the album at Crosstown, a studio in Fulham where Mark did his apprenticeship. We used a digital editing suite normally suited for making unofficial Doctor Who radio dramas rather than pop music, and it all sounds very Anti-Rock. Oh well. Tapes of the results are sent off to various souls in the hope something happens, and I am rescued from passive DIY hell. I’ve run out of money to finish the mixes at Crosstown, so we back up the remaining songs onto digital computer files, in the hope that Jyoti Mishra can decode them at his place in Norwich and we can mix them with him. I’m keeping my hopes at ground level, though. If we just have to re-record the whole lot at somewhere where there’s someone who (1) knows how to make the equipment work 100%, and (2) has recorded bands on it before, I won’t be at all surprised.

“File Under Forsaken” stands out, nine and a half minutes but feeling like four. Fee’s wordless falsettos towards the end really make it, taking it to spiritual highs and, well, it now sounds like nothing else on earth. Perhaps a bit Mercury Rev without the drugs. “Live Deliberately” is similarly fantastically strange. The in-house engineer, Danny C, says my Juno 6 solo is so beautiful he is nearly moved to tears. Nearly.

I am finally happy with my lead vocals. Danny and Tommy Burton suggest double-tracking and a little echo, and it works. Fosca has finally found it feet. It’s not rock, it’s not pop, it’s not folk (despite lashings of acoustic guitars and Val & Fee’s singing styles), it’s something else, something… strange. But it’s still pop.

So I’m sending out tapes to people who run record labels, and who can hopefully pay for more studio time. I thought about getting a Job, but the past has taught me that I simply can’t hold down work: I’m either always late, or don’t turn up at all, or sit there all day and do no work. Understandably, I’ve been sacked from every job I’ve had, sooner or later.

I’ve realised two things from the recordings:

1) I am finally confident enough to be the lead singer. The trick is to double track my vocals, add a little echo, and I sound… right. At last. To be honest, I’ve decided that having the various female singers doing lead vocals isn’t the best thing for my personal, Dickony style lyrics after all, but I had to try to see if that was true first. Female backing vocals are fine, though. The mixes we’ve made with girl lead vocals ARE great, though, and I shall put them aside for now, anyway. When I played Matt Haynes (of Shinkansen Records) the mixed songs so far, he said he wasn’t “convinced” by the girl lead vocals. He’s biased, but even so. It’s just a confidence/shyness thing on my part. And I should stop thinking that, just because I’m a big Carpenters/Stereolab/female-singers in general fan, to emulate that is right for my own songs. It isn’t. Um, I think…curse this fickleness and insecurity!

2) I so want to Be In A Band as opposed to Fosca being just Mr Dickon plus Friends And Strangers Helping Out. It’s lonely! I want to rehearse regularly, and record as a band, so everyone knows what they’re playing, chips in with ideas, and feels generally good about being in Fosca proper, and happy being committed to and taking joint responsibility for Fosca. I just manage the organisational things by myself… I need a manager. Or band members that can do the management things. Or a wealthy lover.

So I’m also sending out tapes to various musical souls (some of whom have played on the recordings, and some who haven’t) in the hope they’ll want to join Fosca proper. Rachel Stevenson’s on board (on keyboards), so I now just need a permanent bass player and drummer. And perhaps one other soul on another instrument and backing vocals… but not a singer who does nothing else. I keep thinking of the girl in Deacon Blue. As ever, though, my hopes are at ground level.

Howard and I go to see the film “Gods and Monsters”, and Brendan Fraser in it keeps reminding me of that homoerotic DH Lawrence phrase: “his arm completely filled his shirt”. Mr Fraser’s muscles enter the frame some minutes before the rest of him does. He has the face of the young Elvis and the body of Henry Rollins. You don’t really notice if he can act or not.

Mark P is video-recording the events on the news, day by day. His tapes are labelled, “NATO vs Serbia… Day 1, Day 2, etc”. He is convinced it’s going to escalate into World War III. I thought NATO had been done away with at the end of the Cold War, but no. People seem to be nostalgic for the “good old days”. Nostalgic for war. The UN should be handling Serbia, not NATO. Everyone knows this, but they can’t wait to send in NATO troops… to a country where the last time the whole of Europe got involved in a crisis together there was… 1914. And then look what happened.

I feel like that 17th century Italian prophet, who, convinced that the world was going to end, went up to pregnant women on the street and insulted them for adding to the potential deathcount. All that time, that money, that pain, nine months, and what for? But I’ve mellowed my opinions slightly. Never mind reproduction is pollution. Now, reproduction is anachronism.

Warhol: “I can’t believe people are still pregnant these days.”

But the pain of parents chastising their screaming kids in the street (I always associate parents with scolding), and everyone else’s pain and worries will end: NATO will see to that. And it won’t be our fault.

I think a lot of my problem with people having children stems from my innate solipsism: I keep thinking that “there’s a child that will see a world I won’t”, and am offended. This is, of course, stupid. I’m sure there’s old women about now who will outlive me.

Saturday March 6th

A shock of blonde hair, heavy black panda-eye make up, the Queen of the Mods, a thin but emotive and immeasurably English singing voice, an ambivalent cagey sexuality, a string of the hippest musical collaborative partners, song after song extolling the world of secret loves and frustrated longing…

But enough about me. Dusty Springfield died this week. For all our sins. In tribute, I consort alone with tears and a bottle of red wine and put on “Dusty In Memphis” at immense volume at 3am. My neighbours wouldn’t dare complain.

I seem to spend my life being indebted to immensely kind people called Tim. Tim Mauve answers his Finchley door in an immaculate tweed suit and lends me his reel to reel 8 track. Tim Burton from the pro-pop band Baxendale (named after cartoonist Leo, not actress Helen) and who also plays in the band Astronaut (and who also just happens to live three doors down from me) lends me his VS880. I lend the latter my copy of the Future Bible Heroes album (the US version on Rykodisc rather than the UK Setanta release, naturally), and he seems to be pleased. It’s right up his avenue: you have to complete word puzzles in order to work out the lyric sheet. His 8-track isn’t fully operational, though. Some faders are broken because he spilt treacle on them. A true sweet-toothed Pop Kid. His colourful house is festooned with pictures of Spice Girls, Kylie, All Saints, and he bought the Britney Spears single rather than the new Blur one. I joke that as soon as I leave, he tears them all down, revealing Ocean Colour Scene and Bob Marley posters. But no, Tim is… for real. Treacle included, sadly.

We talk about the sincerity of kitsch and camp, the fact that there are those who seem to have to choose between the likes of Belle and Sebastian and Mogwai and Steps and Aqua. You can swing both ways. It’s more fun. It’s all melodies and tunes, it’s all pop music. Life’s too short for irony. And ironing, too.

Actually, I don’t like Mogwai. No lyrics. Even Steps have lyrics. And they make the effort to dress up a bit. Or perhaps I’m being unfair. Perhaps Mogwai and Arab Strap normally walk around with neat flattering haircuts, well-toned and moisturised skin and nice clothes, only slapping on the big ugly sideburns and getting the stylist to give them a Slovenly Scottish Gritty Indie Guitar look, come the photo sessions?

Mark’s friend Abba, an American boy with a huge… Shirley Bassey collection, comes to stay, and keeps calling me Ridiculous Edwards. I tell him I don’t like football. “But do you like feet? Do you like balls?”

We visit Tommy and Taylor and play them a few of the new Fosca songs. “Galaxie 500 with Morrissey-ish lyrics?” In my defense, I proclaim that Galaxie 500 are my Beatles. Tommy mutters contemptously, “well, the Beatles are my Beatles…” We listen to the first Wings album and drink far too much black coffee. Mark thinks that Taylor looks like Damon Albarn’s sulkier brother.

Sunday February 28th

Not a great day. The digital 8-track on which we’re recording the album, a Roland VS840, decides to suddenly wipe a whole song completely. Everything is lost: it was a seven minute Hal Hartley-ish epic called “Storytelling Johnny” that was nearing completion. I don’t mind so much about my own vocal, guitar, bass guitar and keyboard parts, but there +
was also Laurence’s keyboard part, Cressida’s flute part, Fiona’s violins, Sheila’s cellos, Marnie’s drums, Tom’s guitar…

Suffice it to say I felt a deep, yawning pit of doom in my stomach. A familiar one.

Mark Partridge and I are frightened to do anything else with the machine in case it does the same with the other nine songs. So today I’m writing frantically to everyone I know with an 8-track, digital or otherwise, hoping they might be kind enough to lend us their machine with which to “back-up” the other songs, hoping also they might even be kind enough to lend their machines to actually finish the album on too. And angrily taking the VS840 back to the shop where I bought it. Maybe it’s faulty, maybe it’s a design fault.

I suppose in retrospect I should have investigated investing in some kind of external back-up system when I bought the wretched thing. But I never was very good with knowing which computers and recording equipment to buy. And I certainly can’t afford to buy anything extra now.

This DIY recording principle isn’t so great sometimes.

Fiona also recorded some choirboy-type vocals on a song that DIDN’T get wiped. “I had to unclasp my bra to reach the really high notes”. I think Pavarotti uses the same technique.

I can’t afford to keep a mobile phone anymore. Which isn’t such a bad thing. Mark tells me that London is the worldwide capital of mobile usage: go to New York or any other major city and the trilling epidemic of elaborate electronic yelps from record bags is noticably less abundant. People elsewhere tend to prefer to be contactable when they want to be. Answering services are more than enough.

What do I think about “Queer As Folk”, the “shocking” new gay drama on Channel Four? Well, it had the Daily Mail in fits of umbrage and censorious apoplexy, so it must be a Good Thing, by definition.

Some gay men don’t like the fact that the show portrays them in a bad light (one character is predatory, selfish and irresponsible, one is underage and lets himself be exploited by the former, and one is, well, a Doctor Who fan…). But this IS what many gay men are like in the real world, rather than the saints, martyrs and token ciphers that exist everywhere else on TV and in films. It is possible to be gay and be a less than wonderful person. I was going to put in a reference to Peter Mandelson here. Oh, I have.

And I did like the line from the mother of the selfish man’s newborn baby: “so… we both had a child tonight…”

Sunday February 21st

The Fosca album, now called “On Earth To Make The Numbers Up”, is coming together slowly and strangely in a borrowed art storage room in Hammersmith. Made entirely by people who are, how shall we say, not the world’s biggest fans of football.

The sessions drag on, and we miss all the things we were hoping to do like catch Hefner playing at Borders Bookshop, or going to see Mouthfull at Club V. But we do manage to take in “Room 2”, the dirt-cheap indie night at Heaven every Monday, and I bump into virtually every person I’d expect to be there: Howard, D, Laurence, Andy from Mouthfull. D tells me he is getting married, Green Card convenience style. I accuse him of trying to copy the plotlines of “Gimme Gimme Gimme”.

I get approached on the dancefloor. “My friend really fancies you. He’s the one at the bar. With the glasses.”

Epicene Epics.

Because many of the songs go on for about 8 minutes, due to me having far too much to say, so many words and verses. I’m torn between my two Rules For Albums:

1) Albums must have Ten Songs. That’s not too many or too few. I hate records that outstay their welcome.
2) Albums must last just under 45 minutes, so you can tape them on one side of a C90 for your walkman or your friends.

But the way things are going, it’ll either have to be a ten song album that lasts too long or a 9 song album that doesn’t.

Some writers from Select Magazine have emailed me, wanting to put Fosca in their new bands section, “Ignition”. And we haven’t even put anything out yet. But if it was Mojo or Q, I would have been worried. Those are magazines for people who buy records in order to have a Good Music Collection. Pop music should be listened to, not collected.

Some of the staff from the Riverside Arts Centre and Studios pop in. “Do you like David Syvian?” one asks, referring to my bleached side-parted haircut. I get this a lot from strangers approaching me.

If they are over 40, they say I look like Andy Warhol.
If they are between the ages of 25 and 40 and know nothing about music, they say I look like Gary Numan.
If they are between the ages of 25 and 40 and know TOO MUCH about music, they say I look like David Sylvian.
If they are under 25, they laugh and shout at me “Oi, Blond Bastard”.

I also get the occasional Sick Boy off “Trainspotting” or Bob Downe comparison. Or Dracula played by Michael Crawford.

One evening I was on the Tube, caked in make up and in a suit, and a gang of big drunken boys jeered amongst themselves. After a while they started pointing to the part of me that actually inspired their mirth. To my white socks.

I wear white socks for personally dubious reasons: schoolboy fetish, roughboy fetish. “The White Sock Brigade” was what we called the equivalent of rednecks when growing up in Ipswich and Colchester: they were always the regulation issue for those ready to beat you up in the precinct of an evening. So it’s a little “reclamation of territory” on my part as well (or so I thought), like some gay men shaving their heads and looking as hard as possible. But now it’s just me being a little perverted.

When I was getting the keys for the studio yesterday, a gaggle of teenage girls saw me, pointed and laughed loudly. I had to hide in the cafe section until they had gone. I still wonder if they think I look famous or just silly. I look more famous than I really am.

Some of Fosca have terrific facial mannerisms when they record. Rachel dances and bobs about at her keyboard, mouthing the words. Marnie tilts her Canadian head and gazes at the ceiling in calculated concentration. I jump about and the click-track packs its bags.

Another visitor remarks on the work in progress, “hmm, very Belle and Sebastian.” I foresee both good and bad things from this unhelpful comparison. Belle and Sebastian are quickly becoming a lazy byword simile for anything indie-ish by anyone who doesn’t know that much about indie music. I envy such people. What am I saying, I envy most people.

Then Charley starts singing a U2 song along to “File Under Forsaken”, just to tease me. She is pale and poorly, and we have her coughs on the record for posterity. Before she went for the cropped look, her hair used to be a Pre-Raphaelite cascade of tousled curls, and references to Shelleyesque “consumption” and TB are bandied about. These pale English romantic types, they never really went away. Like lions after slumber in unvanquishable number…

We listen to Frazier Chorus’ first album, the anti-rock classic “Sue”, for distraction, inspiration and keyboard sounds. One band that should have stayed on 4AD rather than taken the major label shilling and blanded out. I note for the first time that it was recorded at the same place as the Orlando album, which I also think sounds too clean and… produced. But don’t start me on that one!

Indie bands that sign to a major don’t always lose it, mind. I think the first Polydor album (“You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever”) by Orange Juice is infinitely preferable to their earlier Postcard Records offerings, whose scratchy naive charm is, well, just that and no more.

Production-wise, I prefer to think more Joe Meek rather than “lo-fi”. I can just imagine me going the same way as him too, dying in a bizarre shooting incident involving one’s landlady.

We are later told that the paintings that are stored in our new temporary “home” are those that didn’t make the final selection for the Riverside’s current exhibition next door. I imagine what euphemisms were used in the heartbreaking dismissal: “They’re very good, but not quite what we’re looking for… and lack of wall space sadly prevents us from…” On one day, a quiet man in black with a beard (presumably an artist) comes in, collects his rejected masterpieces, perhaps his life’s work, and forlornly shuffles them out to his car.

Tuesday February 16th

Such a strange day. In the morning, Mark Partridge and I trek up to Wood Green to help take Justin Paton’s drum kit down to Hammersmith. On the Tube. All three of us are penniless, and of the two people we know in London who both own cars and would be free to help, one has no license, and the other no tax disc.

The dilemma of transporting instruments and equipment about is a recurring scenario in London bands’ lives. Or at least mine. Most people I know in London simply don’t own cars, even if they can drive. Some used to, but on moving to the big city the first thing to get sold is the vehicle. The high cost of living is bad enough without all the extra overheads a car incurs. And the fact that you can’t have a drink in town. And the fact that other people tend to treat you like a chauffeur.

This is put into stark contrast later in the day when Charley turns up at the studio, regaling us with tales of touring with Gay Dad and the attendant trappings of proper pop band life, where stage crews handle all the mucky, menial, tedious bits of being in a group, and all you have to do is wait for the taxi to take you from hotel to soundcheck to bus.

Some lucky bands in this position don’t even attend their own soundchecks. Now that’s a smooth running machine. Lo-fi, schmo-fi!

Though I’ve always had my suspicions about bigtime bands that do benefit concerts for causes of equality and The Little Man Against The System: “We’re playing this benefit for the workers, they’re just like us… Roadie! My guitar!”

Charley will, though, be bringing her stardust guitar on the Tube to the Fosca sessions tomorrow… and Jyoti Mishra (White Town)’s recruitment into the Fosca Collective makes me feel, ooh, nearly good about being alive. Nearly.

On the news, Kurdish people around Europe protest outside Greek embassies over the arrest of Abdullah Ocalan. Some (heart-wrenchingly) set themselves on fire. After the news there’s an advert for Heat magazine featuring…. people on fire. And then a report on the Brit Awards, featuring a Manics video where they appear to be… on fire. All in the same chunk of TV.

Sunday January 31st

I hereby conclude: I am a member of the TENTH sex.

1. Manly Men
2. Womanly Women
3. Boyish Boys
4. Girlish Girls
5. Boyish Girls
6. Girlish Boys
7. Male To Female Transsexuals
8. Female To Male Transsexuals
9. The Intersexed
10. Arch Misanthropic Pansexual Alien Compassionate Curmudgeons (With Bad Teeth).

I only have friends in gender groups 2 to 10. I don’t know any Manly Men. Shouting from moving cars. Jangling keys. Swaggering. Big puffy sleeping-bag-like coats. The ones who murmer “seems like a nice boy” when I’m buying a bag of chips. And I’m not even wearing any make up. I may as well be a different species to them.

Archway, 3am. A man dashes across the darkened street to me, only to stop himself: “Sorry. I thought you was my wife.”

I’m only male because it’s the default gender. The vanilla pronoun. Worldwide. 51% of the globe is female, but they still have their own Minorities Section in bookshops.

Jo Brand on the differences between male and female stand-up comedians: “If men have a bad gig, they blame the audience. If women have a bad gig, they blame themselves.”

Tomorrow Fosca moves into The Riverside Studios, Hammersmith. Or at least, an old studio annex. Three weeks to do the bulk of the album. Budget: less than nothing. Or rather, Budget: Love. New recruit Val Jones has already delighted us with her Natalie-Merchant-from-Hull vocal style on “He’s No Help”, which I wrote on the bus back from Oxford the previous day. Appropriately, the song contains a Philip Larkin quote.

Must try hard not to be too influenced by Orange Juice’s album, “You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever”.. Archness and whimsy are all very well, but I also like lyrics you can cut and paste onto your own life. Useful lyrics. Sympathetic vicar lyrics. Lyrics that are your only true friends. “Everything’s awful, but this song is on my side”. Songs for the waif-like and the wraith-like. For the well read and ill fed.

Terribly excited about the record. Geoff Travis said I was writing a new chapter of the book Morrissey started. Presumably one where the pages are stuck together. And all for the wrong reasons.

Monday January 4th 1999

In the end, I made such a mess of rounding up Fosca types for the one night in the year that most people have already made plans for, that Fosca played as a brand new three piece: myself, plus Farzana and Marnie, the rhythm section in Anglocanadien. They were very good about it.

Afterwards, someone said we were like early Talking Heads. This pleased me no end, of course. The first couple of Talking Heads albums are incredibly good. Beautiful yelps, scratchy undistorted, anti-rock guitars. Songs about buildings and food. And haircuts. And, and, and…

The set was beset by technical problems, like Farzana walking off halfway through “On Earth To Make The Numbers Up”. I thought it was because she had had enough of me jumping about onstage, or thought the band was so awful she had to leave it then and there, or that she was sick. She later said it was because her bass guitar strap broke. I didn’t mind too much, though: we only had one more song to do and that needed no bass anyway. “File Under Forsaken” worked quite well, though. I got to do my Dean Wareham act. Laurence really liked this one, which was good because it’s very Galaxie 500, and he hates Galaxie 500. So it can’t have been too Galaxie 500 when we did it.

A small girl with dark floppy hair and a foreign accent must have liked it, because she asked me afterwards where she could get our records from. I said there weren’t any yet, but she didn’t believe me. “Well, where WILL they be available?”. It was a good sign though: a stranger stopping you to ask about your records.

Cliff Jones, a tall boy with floppy blond hair who sings with Gay Dad was really nice to me. He recommended I should read a Cyril Connolly book, and that the songs needed to be worked on. I agreed.

It worked out quite well in the end, because I didn’t have to buy any drinks all night. After the rider was polished off, people kept buying me drinks. Charley’s friend bought me one because she thought I looked sad. This is what happens when your default expression is one of utter misery most of the time. She talked about how she wanted to leave her breasts at home, taking them off as if they were attached with Velcro. “They’re a pain when playing squash. And when you’re running for the bus”.

The club was full of beautiful people with great haircuts. A medium-height boy with a #1 crop and a red t-shirt said I was reminded him of Marilyn. “Monroe?” “No. Boy George’s friend. Without the smack, though.”

A tall girl with a shaven head played with my hair when I was dancing. A thin black boy with a #2 crop called me his baby. An immensely tall girl called Jackie who said she was 40 and worked for the Financial Times said I reminded her of Andy Warhol. Or was it David Sylvian? Jenni Scott, who is a small girl with pixie hair that writes articles about Jinty Comic and runs “small press” conventions was there. I’ve only ever met her at New Year’s Eve parties. She’s like my own personal Father Time, but with face glitter and a navel piercing rather than a scythe and a big hourglass. She gave me little white pieces of paper with her face and email address stamped on using a specially-made self-inking rubber stamper. They were like acid tabs for narcissists.

I had been invited to other parties that night: Amelia’s, Emma and Marie’s, and the Uncle Bob’s one. But it would have meant trying to get across London on New Year’s Eve with my guitar and big bag of pedals. It was okay, I was more than happy to stay at Club V all night, with all these pretty people and great haircuts, and getting paid to be there in the first place. They played Urusei Yatsura’s “Tiger”. And they didn’t play Prince’s “1999”.

It was a Good Haircut Night.

Saw the new Star Trek film. Dull as ditchwater, but it had the line “It’s been 300 years since I’ve seen a bald man,” spoken with lusty relish. Saw “The Acid House”. Got annoyed that I couldn’t understand one in every three words of the dialogue, so heavy are the Edinburgh accents. And I’m British. It says a lot about my cultural conditioning that I can understand films and TV programmes with heavy American and Australian accents far more. If they try and make it a hit in America, like the previous Irvine Welsh film, “Trainspotting”, I’ll be interested to see if they use subtitles, like they do for Oasis interviews on MTV. It didn’t have Ewan McGregor in it though, which made a change for a recent British film. There’s actually a book out about the last few years of the UK film industry, and it had so much Ewan McGregor in it that in the end they had to sell it as a Ewan McGregor biography instead.

Saturday December 19th 1998

Fosca are playing Club V’s New Year’s Eve party, Upstairs at the Garage (I’m a creature of habit), playing with Linus and “The Lesbian and Gay Community”, a band who apparently use instruments made up of bits of guitars I smashed in the former noisy Fosca. I wondered what happened to those guitars.

I’m mainly doing this for myself. I hate trying to Enjoy Myself for it’s own sake. So for once, I can think about rehearsing and singing rather than the dreaded Stroke of midnight, where everyone Strokes each other with all the sincerity of a politician kissing babies. And I sit hugless in some corner. Not this time. It’s the roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd. New member this time is Ms Farzana Fiaz, who also plays in a band called Anglocanadien. She’s recently cut her hair short, something people seem to be doing a lot since joining Fosca: Rachel and Cressida both now looking not unlike Twenties flappers. Farzana tells me of the time she sported an actual quiff at school, being a big Morrissey fan. She hums me an old Morrissey tune that’s bugging her that day, over the phone to me, and I name it, “Break Up The Family” off the album “Viva Hate”. She nags me about getting my act together, and I have to listen because she also takes classes in boxing.

I go dancing at Uncle Bob’s Wedding Reception Xmas Bash, where we play Pass The Parcel and, like Nero, bop the night away while war is raging in the wings, innocent Iraqis maimed and dying in this season of peace on earth and goodwill to all men, their crime being born into the wrong place at the wrong time. Taylor remarks that if Iraq gassed us all right now, in the throes of juvenile party games, it’d be a interesting and apt way to go.

Shouting on the bingo-caller’s mic is Billy Reeves, who formerly wrote wonderfully urbane and wry lyrics in the band theaudience, and is now doing similar Svengali-like pop activities with the likes of Martine McCutcheon off Eastenders (who, pre-fame, used to be in a pop group called Milan…. I bought their single, “Lead Me On”… it wasn’t bad, either) and Fosca’s own Cressida Johnson. It’s difficult to imagine the writer of such excellent lines as “the car was never tested/and neither were you” is the same rowdy DJ shouting “NO, that’s the BOYS’ present, give it to the GIRLS, now quick, the music’s stopped, unwrap it, …. hurry UP!”. The boys’ prize turned out to be a toy Uzi.

I go to see Charley play with Gay Dad at the swanky bar of the New London Theatre off Drury Lane. It is a building I was last in at the age of 13, to see “Cats”. Well, Mr Lloyd-Webber’s silly show is still going strong there, and as I walk to the venue, I have to sidestep clusters of German tourists marching the other direction, singing “Oh well, I never, did you ever see a cat so clever”

Got abused by a stranger with a ponytail and bad breath.

Him: “Weren’t you in that shit band on Warners? What were you called again?”
Me: “R.E.M.”

He knew Orlando’s label, but not the name… that’ll give you an idea of what sort of people were at the gig. Charley is a star as ever. Quite cat-like, in fact.

I enjoy The Pastels at the Garage immensely, and Marine Research days later at the Dublin Castle, mainly because both bands are enjoying themselves so much, and it’s hard not to be uplifted by unfettered onstage exuberance. Stephen Pastel even puts his guitar down and dances for “Speeding Motorcycle”. Amelia gives me a homemade Christmas card after her band, Marine Research, play. I’ve already made her one. It’s a photo of me. On the Wilde memorial. Hosanna In Excelsis!

Monday December 7th 1998

“I don’t recognize you. I’ve changed a lot.”

My hair is now white (with a touch of peroxide-created blue rinse effect) with gold roots. I am striving to get the roots the same colour as the rest, but they’re strangely resilient this time. The blue rinse will come in handy for my next career as stunt double to Thora Hird.

The peroxide has also thinned my naturally thick (bordering on the curly) hair into a newly floppy fringe of white and gold.

“Bosie has insisted on dropping here for sandwiches. He is quite like a narcissus — so white and gold.”

After saying goodbye to my father at Liverpool Street Station, I wander around to the Freedom Cafe in a time-killing fashion, and pass something I’ve never noticed before, a memorial to Oscar Wilde. Tucked behind St Martin’s-In-The-Fields, in a pedestrianised little avenue used as a rat run by the rush hour West End workers on foot, is a bench-cum-mock-sarcophagus adorned with a bronze bust scuplture of Mr Wilde smoking a cigarette, as if he was coming out of his coffin to chat to the person who decided to rest their feet there. At it’s base is the famous hope-inspiring quote “we are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking up at the stars”. It’s just by a real gutter. And in the heart of Theatreland too, where hundreds literally spend the night in the gutter (and tonight it’s -6 degrees Centrigade), one aspect of Wilde’s London that is as depressingly (and needlessly) prevalent today. What with that and the non-PC cigarette, the sculpture reminds one as much of Wilde’s modern status as an icon of anger and defiance as much as one of wit and literary merit.

At home, I watch the news, and it turns out the memorial was unveiled only that day, by Stephen Fry and Lucian Holland, Wilde’s 19-year-old great-grandson who is currently considering changing the family name back to Wilde again, its disgrace having somewhat dispersed after 100 years. Or at least mostly lifted, as the Daily Mail gets all hot under the collar about the ‘controversial’ memorial: “If Wilde had been alive today, he would be on the paedophile register”.

Mark Partridge tells me that the young, floppy-fringed and Bosie-ish Master Holland reminded him of me. I am chuffed.

Laurence says it’d be best to get a visit to the sculpture-bench in as soon as possible. “Before that cigarette is broken off by some drunken stockbroker on a Friday night.” Mark P. has just taken a batch of new photographs of me around Highgate and Muswell Hill, but I would like to get a new shot of me chatting to Mr Wilde on his coffin. Or lying fully down on it, rehearsing for my own demise, perhaps. And then there’s the newly gilded Albert Memorial… In London, everyone is a tourist of some kind. If not geographically, then socially.

The new single by Ash rips off Mike Nesmith’s “Different Drum”. Is it just me who notices this? I am bored stupid by much music around at the moment. Another Wilde quote: “The idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” Can anyone call Ash a dangerous idea? Orlando was definitely a dangerous idea, and I’m working on Fosca’s danger quotient… the make up and disco beats have to stay…

Steps are a tonic, though. Unabashed trashyness, the revenge of Pete Waterman. And Proper Music Fans are sent into paroxysms of indignation by them, which can only be a Good Thing. Steps will never make the cover of Mojo Magazine because to this particular strata of music fans, they clearly are a dangerous idea. Praise Steps! And pity Gomez!

The Air album is apparently this year’s equivalent to Radiohead’s “OK Computer” or Portishead’s “Dummy” or Bjork’s “Debut”: pure coffee table, London bar music. I do like it, but this stigma puts me off. Listening to such albums, I feel like a BBC2 documentary director stroking an imaginary goatee. I don’t feel…. middle class enough to enjoy such music.

Ashamedly, I am in torment about whether to get Tomb Raider 3 or not, purely because it features scenes on the London Underground. Curse this obsession with the capital and its imagery. Unlike books, films or music, computer games like this have no “cultural enhancement” factor at all. They are absolutely useless for anything else other than getting closer to the end of your life. What would the Queen Mother do?

For the Freedom Cafe event, I have my hair cut and styled (for free) by Soho Base, who decide to cement it into a horn-like quiff, a la “There’s Something About Mary”. But without the substance Ms Cameron Diaz’s character used. I look like a cartoon character. Which is entirely appropriate. Despite this, I am thoroughly upstaged by some of the other models there, who are cuter and wear a lot less clothes than me.

I go dancing at “Shimmy”, the new club run by Emmy-Kate and Marie, both formerly of the band Kenickie. They have clearly got their act together, because present is a photographer and writer from Minx Magazine. This, as far as I am aware, is a publication not unlike Just Seventeen, but with even more sex. I am asked once again if I admire Andy Warhol, and my shoes get photographed more often than the rest of me. It’s the Gucci loafers, you see. They’re starting to get a bit battered, but clearly haven’t lost their quality to impress. They were given to me two years ago by my neighbour, who works at Kenwood House, a stately home in Hampstead. He told me that the pop star Mr Mark Morrison had been filming a video there, and that the crew had left the shoes behind. Genuine Gucci two-tone loafers. My neighbour had no idea of my shoe size, but he clearly is magical is some way, because Cinderella-like, they fitted me perfectly.

For Cressida’s birthday we go to her local pub, the John Baird. It’s named after the inventor of television, Muswell Hill being the nearest shopping area to Alexandra Palace, where the first BBC television transmissions were broadcast.

LANDLORD: Closing time, everyone out.

[the Cressida Johnson party groans. They are the last ones in the pub}

LANDLORD: Come on. Remember ‘Andy Pandy’? Time to go home…!

ME: But didn’t you see that episode of ‘Andy Pandy’ where they had a lock-in?

Everyone else laughed far too hard at this remark, except the landlord. I thought I was going to get barred. I’m running out of places in Muswell Hill I haven’t been barred from yet.

I don’t mind the cold tonight: I’m in bed with “A Shropshire Lad”. Which, the blue plaque has it, was written in a house mere yards from this computer. When do I get my blue plaque? And what will it be for? “Here the bodies of the serial killer Dickon Edwards’ 47 victims were seduced and gruesomely murdered…”

No, of course not. That’d never fit on a blue plaque.

Laurence visits and plays me his Minidisc recordings of choirboys. He lends me a couple of videos: a bootleg of The Smiths live in 1985 and Quentin Crisp’s first television interview, in 1970, which I promptly dub onto audio cassette for permanence in my home. Both offer me great hope.
Quentin talks of death: “It can’t be long now.” Nearly thirty years later, he’s still waiting. Still in one bedsit, depending on the kindness of strangers. The only difference is the bedsit is in Manhattan, not Chelsea. And he’s become famous. After the 1970 interview, he was asked to write his autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant, which was made into a film, and the world finally recognised him for the star and velvet guru that he was. Is. I still hope to meet him one day, when my fare is paid to New York. I go wherever my fare is paid. Now more than ever!

Sex is the P.E. of adult life. And I’ve got a note from my mother.

Sex is a poor substitute for masturbation. (Internet users will doubtless agree.)

Contrary to popular belief, sex is not the adult compensation for having to pay rent.

Sex is only worth doing for any reason other than self-gratification.
In order to shut someone up.
In order to earn money.
In order to do research.
In order to pass the time.

Also: In order to talk about it to the world afterwards.
The time was when it was something you simply never spoke about. Now it’s everywhere, and people just do it so they have something to talk about to their friends, or to the poor wretch they have found themselves in a Relationship with. It makes sense.

Sex is worth reading about, hearing about, talking about, joking about. I was going to add for watching in films, but I then realised that all my favourite films’ least favourite moments are the sex scenes, if there are any. But sex is never worth doing for its own sake. Once you realise this, life is so much easier.

Celibacy and solitude (as opposed to loneliness) are raison d’etres for anyone interested in getting through this tiresomely unpredicatable stagger to the grave with as little fuss as possible.

Rejoice! For it will end!