Above: my crew pass from the Liam Clancy concert, which was the reason for the trip.
Below: boarding passes. Note scribbled-on upgrade, ensuring I’m seated next to Mr MacG. Which was the whole reason for my being there.

I didn’t take any photos on this trip. Took the camera, charged it with batteries, cleared space on the inner hard drive (digital cameras lack romance: I really want to say ‘loaded it with film’), but once I got there I just didn’t feel like snapping away. Hence the scans. I wonder now if this is through some kind of guilt, that I was really there to do a job – escorting Mr MacG to NYC and acting as his assistant – rather than be a tourist. Or whether it was to do with the fact that everywhere Shane went, strangers came up and asked to have their photo taken with him, and my ‘other people are your stunt doubles’ mode took over.

Ah well. You know what I look like. You know what he looks like. There’s photos of us together in the Tangier entries (Feb 2007, Dec 2005). What more do you want? You want photos of the new thing. Oh, how Western of you! You know what a guide in Tangier said to me? He wondered why Westerners can’t believe anything till they take a photograph of it. When they get to a wonderful sight, their reaction is not to just see it and enjoy the moment for itself, but to put a camera between themselves and the sight, to compromise the moment, to only believe it by recording it. And now they go to concerts with phone cameras to film it, even though they have paid to watch the concert in person. They are not watching the show, they are watching television.

And somewhere in there is the connection between developed nations with imperial pasts, and the undeveloped nations at their mercy. Never mind the law: possession is nine tenths of Western history. The possession of those who write it down or – better still – take cameras. The Western connection between seeing something nice, and wanting to own it. I think of those huge rooms at the V&A full of Victorian plaster casts of statues, towering columns and even doorways, from visits to foreign lands. ‘What a lovely statue you have here. Excuse me while I take a plaster cast… ‘

British history is meant to start when Julius Caesar wrote down his invasion plans. That always seemed rather unfair to me. But then, that’s the reason why I started this diary myself – to try and get one over on my own life, and on the passing of time. Write about it, tell the tale. That’ll teach it.

I also resent the power of photos over words, that were I to say ‘I saw Amy Winehouse today strangling a squirrel’, it wouldn’t have a fraction of the same power as my taking a photo of the incident and posting it here – it would probably even end up in a newspaper whether I gave permission or not, given the current media obsession with every tiny aspect of Ms W’s life. Who the hell do photos think they are?

All of which is probably more to do with my being a rubbish and forgetful photographer than anything else. Look, I just forgot to take photos, okay? I’ll make sure I’ll get some next time, assuming there is a next time. You never know with Mr MacGowan.

One thing I have learned from this is how to get to New York or anywhere else you want to go, with no money whatsoever.

1) Always keep your passport up to date and somewhere easy to find.
2) Be contactable.
3) Wait. Maybe years. But you’ll get there.

It worked for me in Japan in 1999 (playing guitar with Spearmint). Then Tangier in 2005, and now NYC.

** *

This Tristram Shandy-style digression isn’t entirely straying from the point. One of my most abiding sensations once the initial excitement of arriving in NYC had worn off was the sense of sheer pressure. That you’re supposed to see the sights, and you’re supposed to take photos. To not ‘waste’ the experience. To do the things you’re meant to do.

Which really means, to do the things other people expect you to do.

So no, I didn’t go to the top of the Empire State Building. And no, I didn’t visit the Statue of Liberty. I didn’t want to. Not at the time. You have to also remember I wasn’t expecting to be in New York at all, finding out on Thursday night just after midnight, and catching the Heathrow Express at 9am on the Friday morning. People who properly ‘do’ New York tend to plan it months in advance.

On the Sunday morning, I stayed in my hotel room and realised what I most wanted to do right then and there was watch the latest episode of Doctor Who. On my laptop, in my hotel room. So I did. Yet saying so seems a kind of obscenity, and one feels the need to go into a torrent (internet joke) of excuses. I didn’t watch anything else on TV while I was there. There was nothing on, anyway – just lots of endless news programmes about Mr Obama and Mr McCain  and some not terribly funny sitcom called How I Met Your Mother, starring the boy from Doogie Howser MD and Willow from Buffy. You’d have thought that turning on a TV in New York would mean instant access to the Simpsons or Curb Your Enthusiasm or The Wire, but they didn’t ever seem to be on.

If it helps, O cruel sightseeing-inclined reader, I WAS watching Doctor Who while eating breakfast. And it WAS at the Waldorf=Astoria hotel (note the double hyphen in the hotel name, often mistaken for an equals sign. Why do they have it? Because it looks nice.) And I DID have a Waldorf Salad, in the Waldorf. All while watching Doctor Who. That’s a stylish way of doing it, isn’t it?

Ironically, the episode in question – one of the most talked about TV episodes of anything this year, with a cliff-hanger that made the news – had Martha Jones phoning Capt Jack in Cardiff and saying she was in New York, confirming that the same apocalyptic goings-on in the UK were also going on there. ‘New York? All right for some,’ he replied wryly. Except of course, it wasn’t really New York. It would have been somewhere in South Wales, where they film the series, plus a bit of computer trickery. I, however, WAS really in New York. Watching people on TV pretending to be there. When I could have been going out and exploring the city. All right for some.

But that aside, I DID go out and explore and see things, or rather do things. Of course I did. I’m not a natural sight-seer, that’s all. I’m more of a thought-thinker, or a thing-doer. So I went out. And I did some things.

(TO! BE! CONTINUED!)

The Dandyism website has put the L’Uomo Vogue article online, with a translation:

http://www.dandyism.net/?p=970

Says the site:

Dickon Edwards, who doesn’t typically pontificate on dandyism itself but who is a fine example of a dandy rocker, was also included.

Not a typical pontificator perhaps, but I know my Brummell from my Baudelaire, and my Beaton from my Barbey d’Aurevilly. He said, in danger of seeking a thick ear. And I am acquainted with Lord Whimsy, if not the others in the piece. Not sure if I’ve ever properly ‘rocked’ either. That’s always been my problem. Not a  proper musician, not a proper dandy. Not a proper writer, either. I must be a proper something. Don’t answer that.

From the L’Uomo Vogue article itself, a rather flattering opening line:

The leading online rock-star dandy is not David Bowie or Bryan Ferry, but Dickon Edwards (dickonedwards.co.uk). The 36-year-old Englishman, who has sang in several bands, has earned admiration in Dandyland for his spare build, slim suits, and blond hair that is as authentic as his first name. Adding to his dandy credentials are his contributions to ‘The Decadent Handbook’ and an afterword to a new edition of Jerome K. Jerome’s classic, ‘Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow.’ Like the dandies of old, Edwards avoids responsibility, preferring to supplement his uncertain musical income by going on welfare rather than taking a job.

Interesting that they assume ‘Dickon’ is as artificial as my hair colour. They’re not the first. It’s like saying someone born Robert but better known as Bobby is assuming a fake name. Dickon is just a more obscure derivative, that’s all. The Richard is also there for the times I can’t be bothered to have the ‘Ooh, interesting name’ conversation.

I did try reverting properly to Richard a few years ago purely to make life easier, in the same way I’ve experimented with not being blond. But in both cases, it just wasn’t me.

And though I’m Richard on my passport, the medical services know me as Dickon, because they need to know the name most likely to bring someone out of unconsciousness. Dickon is my ‘coma name’. Though I realise if I ramble on any more in this hair-splitting mode, I’ll send the reader into one.

As to the bit in the article about my avoiding responsibility: well, it’s more that responsibility avoids me. I do keeping trying to find paid work, work which I think I can do fairly well, where I don’t feel a fraud. Most recently, I emailed all the newspaper blogs with offers of reporting on the Latitude Festival for them, seeing as I’m going to be there anyway, camping for the first time since I was a teenager, and in a white suit too. I thought that would be a vaguely interesting and entertaining perspective: certainly less dull than your average festival report. ‘The Festival Flaneur’, it could have been called. But no one at the broadsheets was interested. Ah well.

Besides, responsibility is all relative. I speak as someone who’s just had to escort Shane MacGowan onto a couple of planes.

Back in Highgate. Utterly tired and shattered and jet-lagged and aching.
I have tales to tell, Shane-shaped and Dickon-shaped. Will write more as soon as my brain starts working again. And when my eyelids stop drooping.

It’s Mum’s MBE ceremony tomorrow, at Buckingham Palace. Not a bad excuse to give when telling people in NYC why I can’t stick around too long. ‘Oh you know how it is…’

So I’m in the car – well, a people-carrier – being driven with Mr SMG from JFK to NYC proper. It’s about 9pm, and as the Empire State, the Chrysler and the rest of that most heart-stopping of skylines looms into view, I think of all the songs…

I start singing, half under my breath, half indulged by Shane, and Moira our host and Sydney our driver.

Singing.

‘We’ll take Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island too…. Um, dum dum dum-dum do…’

Pause. Think. Another song.

‘They sentenced to me twenty years of boredom… For trying to change the system from within…. First we take Manhattan – then we take Berlin!’

(Still haven’t been to Berlin yet.)

‘Hey Manhattan, doobie-doo…’ (Prefab Sprout).

But most of all, the one song that dominates my over-excited, no-longer-a-USA-virgin brain, is the very, VERY silly ‘America’ song from A Bit Of Fry And Laurie. Maybe because I know all of the words. All three of them.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=z4tDP-yMwXI

Thursday, early afternoon: I’m spending a few hours trying to update the three-year-old DE website gallery with the fruits of more recent shoots by Phoebe Allen (2008) and Gillian Kirby (2007). For each photo I have to make a thumbnail for the menu, which links to a medium-sized version for the website, which in turn links to the full high-res version for magazines to use. Very much a teeth-pulling learning process for me, and terms like ‘PHP’ still make me boggle blankly with technophobic incomprehension (if indeed it’s possible to boggle blankly).

As soon as I upload the first high-res photo into WordPress’s new Media Thingy, the site throws a fit and goes down. It’s back up within minutes, but in those minutes Lawrence G phones to invite me out. So I take the Universe’s hint, admit defeat, and escape into town. The photos will just have to wait.

I spend an entirely pleasant Thursday afternoon with the lovely Mr G and his equally lovely Russian fiancee Mr Fyodor, taking the river boat to the Tate Britain, where we gawp at the gigantic Burne-Jones ‘Death Of Arthur’, newly on loan. Mr G and Mr F got engaged via that Jules Verne-esque installation which lived on the South Bank recently: a huge and pretty two-way mute videophone connecting London and New York. Lawrence used cue cards.

In the evening, I DJ at Club D’Amour, in a venue called Volupte, off Chancery Lane. I follow on from Tricity Vogue and her band – and her opera glove action – who do a jazz-swing set featuring versions of ‘Trust In Me’ (from The Jungle Book), ‘Sweet Dreams’ (as in the Eurythmics song) and ‘Club Tropicana’ (as in Wham).

As I walk back to the tube – joined briefly by Lawrence, Fyodor and their young friends – when my mobile rings. Would I like to accompany Mr MacGowan to New York, and could I do so in the morning…?

Now it’s Friday evening. I’m typing this in my room at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, NYC.

The Chrysler Building is outside my window. So, New York is real after all.

Back by Weds.

Paola in Milan tells me I’m mentioned and pictured in the July/August issue of L’Uomo Vogue, being the Italian menswear version of Vogue. The article in question is about dandyism, and they asked me to send press photos a month or so ago. I’d better find a London stockist.

***

Last weekend the new tent arrived. Jen C allowed me to put it up in her Highgate back garden, by way of a trial run. Thank goodness she did: she and her boyfriend Chris understood the thing’s demon geometry far better than I could. I know more or less how it fits together now. Once you get the inner compartment connected to the outer flysheet, and the knee bone connected to the ankle bone, the instructions say it’s okay to leave them like this, forever conjoined in tent-based bliss. To take the tent down, you just extract the poles and pegs and roll this dual skin up, and off you saunter. Come festival day – when I’ll be camping by myself – the poles go back in and the whole thing supposedly springs into shape easily. Well, we shall see. There may be wailing ahead.

I was intrigued to hear about the new biodegradable tent pegs available at this year’s Glastonbury, and went to Millets in Kensington High St to buy some for myself. It does seem like one of those ridiculously obvious ideas. If metal tent pegs are left in the ground, particularly with their heads snapped off to a vicious spike, they’re a clear hazard to hoof, foot and soil. The biodegradable pegs, made from potato starch, are not only lighter to carry and flexible enough to avoid spearing a passing cow, but if left in the ground they eventually break down entirely. As would I.

So I tested the green pegs (coloured green, to ram the point home in both senses) in Jen’s garden. Their jagged shape does make them much better at anchoring than their metal counterparts, but it takes far more force to shove them into the ground and pull them out afterwards. And if you’re not careful, the top of the pegs can snap off in the process. I had to leave one such decapitated specimen in Jen’s garden. ‘It’s okay, it’s flexible and biodegradable,’ I blushed feebly, attempting to pull the thing out.

I tried a few metal pegs alongside the green ones, and they were much easier to use, with less grunting and no snapping, and could be pulled out with no fuss. But then again, there were no other tents around, the soil was soft, and I could easily see all the pegs I’d put in. Solution? I’m taking two packs of the green ones, with a few metal ones on standby.

A quick plug. Ms Tricity Vogue has booked me as a DJ for her Holborn club this Thursday:

The Tricity Vogue Slinktet present
Club d’Amour
Thursday 26 June, 7pm – 3am
At Volupte, 7-9 Norwich St, Holborn, London EC4A 1EJ
Tickets: £8. Email: reservations@volupte-lounge.com or call 020 7831 1622

“Music, cabaret and romantic misadventure, featuring the cheeky jazz stylings of the Tricity Vogue Slinktet. With special guests laconic piano man Pete Saunders and spine-tingling singer Simone Laraway. All topped off with fine tunes to jive, lindyhop or make your own shapes on the dancefloor to, courtesy of DJ Dickon Edwards. Buy-one-get-one-free cocktails from 5-8pm. Restaurant open 7pm – 10pm. You don’t have to book for dinner: just turn up.”

www.volupte-lounge.com
http://www.myspace.com/vogueloveclub

As well as lending the Gemeentemuseum one of my outfits for their ‘Ideal Man’ exhibition, I’m mentioned in the official invite to the opening night:

“…Modern dandy and British fashion icon Dickon Edwards will also be present.”

So there you go. British fashion icon.

Well, I suppose I did have the Agyness Deyn hairdo before she did. If you squint. And stand a long distance away. It’s said in the papers this week that women across the UK are asking hairdressers to give them ‘The Agy’: a short, spiky peroxide cut.

I’m sure it’s been pointed out before, but Ms Deyn’s look does seem very Face Magazine circa 1985. I would say it’s even a bit Romo, except that the New Romantics were disdainful, haughty, and aristocratic. Agyness Deyn’s image – or at least the image her magazine covers like to play up – is more playful, friendly, childlike, with a touch of Japanese comics at their fizziest. Manga Romo, if you will. I approve.

I read elsewhere that the Ideal Man show will also include two suits formerly owned by President Mitterrand. Me and Mitterrand – museum suit brothers.

***

Friday: Photo shoot at my place, this time for photographer Jamie McLoed. He’s putting together an exhibition of, well, exhibitionists and dandies for the Green Carnation bar. Sebastian Horsley recommended me to him, and so today I spend an hour or so posing in my room with a cigarette – his suggestion.

Afterwards: to the Curzon Mayfair with VM Clarke for ‘The Edge Of Love’, the John Maybury movie about Dylan Thomas. Or rather, the ladies in Dylan Thomas’s life. Lots of smoking and posing in that, too.

***

Before that, dinner with VMC at a restaurant in Shepherd Market. Victor Lewis-Smith is at the next table, cartoonish black dreadlocks still in place. VMC tells me about the celebrity karaoke party she attended the previous night, as the guest of Nick Cave. Apparently Will Self can deliver an impressive rendition of ‘Hey Joe’.

That Dutch newspaper article on my dandyism has led to new adventures. The Hague’s Gemeentemuseum has asked if I could lend them one of my suits. It’s to go put on public display as part of an exhibition on male fashion and style, ‘The Ideal Man’, running from late July to October.

http://www.gemeentemuseum.nl/index.php?id=035553&langId=en

I’ll be delivering the suit in person two days before the show opens, staying in town for the opening on July 26th. The museum are covering my travel and hotel costs, so I’m treating it as a small holiday.

Never been to the Hague before. Lots of museums, including one devoted to MC Escher, that DJ of mathematical art (“MC Escher in the house! Make some infinite noise!”).

I do hope his museum has lots of impossible staircases spiralling upon themselves. I want to stand on them and shout Peter Davison’s cliffhanger line from the Doctor Who tale, ‘Castrovalva’. The Doctor and his companions (there’s about 79 of them at this point) become trapped in a real-life version of an Escher town, with all exits leading right back to the entrances. He explains what’s happened to his companions, as the episode ends:

“Recursive Occlusion! Someone’s manipulating Castrovalva! WE’RE CAUGHT IN A SPACE-TIME TRAP!”

On the Castrovalva DVD, there’s an out-take of the director forcing Mr Davison to ham up this line until it rises to a sufficently hysterical pitch. But it’s not hammy acting, he insists in the commentary (with an endearing degree of self-mockery), it’s TV cliffhanger acting. The two are often confused.

The Gemeentemuseum has asked me to make my own travel arrangements. So I’ve been doing a bit of travel research and have plumped for the Harwich ferry, with trains either side. Partly because one’s meant to be more ‘carbon efficient’ and cut back on flying where possible; partly because I’ve flown abroad about eight times in the last two and a half years and want to try the path less travelled. I’ve done Eurostar before, but never the North Sea ferry.

But mostly because I want my own cabin. I want a floating Room Of One’s Own. With its own toilet, shower and bed. A private space to escape to while travelling. Even the smallest possible single room is an oasis to the soul. Whether it’s Easyjet or Eurostar, if you’re travelling alone and can only occupy rows of open seating, you’re at the mercy of other travellers, which might mean loud businessmen on their mobile phones, squealing other people’s children running about, or beered-up football supporters.

Set down like this, such concerns sound downright misanthropic. But I’ve had a run of bad luck with train and plane trips in recent memory, in terms of Sartre-esque ordeals, suffering the noise – or even cannibis smoke – of my less considerate fellow passengers. I can’t be the man who complains or politely asks others to restrain themselves, as I am not part of normal society in the first place. Quiet eccentrics must not tell off noisy straights. That’s the whole eccentric deal.

When away from home, I crave rooms with lockable doors, however small (in the case of Latitude, a tent with a zip). On a ferry you get somewhere to escape, somewhere to sleep without being on display, and somewhere to shower en route. But you also get somewhere to go for a walk, somewhere to take in fresh air, and somewhere to drink and eat and mix with other travellers if you ARE feeling sociable. You get the choice of both worlds.

The only two downsides of ferry travel are the extra hours added to the trip, and the chances of a rough crossing. In the first case, my life isn’t the busiest in the world, so the time away is no problem. And besides, the extra hours are comfortable and private extra hours.

In the event of a rough crossing, I’d just down a few vodkas at the bar and go to bed. I toss in my sleep anyway, and a lone male is in no position to refuse a bit of extra tossing.

Far better to suffer the Cruel Sea than suffer the cruel loudness of other passengers. Frankly, it’s the lesser of two tossers.

Have confirmed that I’ll be DJ-ing once more at this year’s Latitude Festival. The festival runs from the 17th to 20th July, and I’ll be spinning the usual showtunes and vintage pop in the Cabaret Arena, though the slots are briefer than last year. Once again, it’ll be me and Miss Red, appearing as The Beautiful & Damned DJs.

This time, however, I’m going to do the festival thing properly and bring a tent. Ms S thinks this is hilarious. I’ve just bought a cheap little number that came recommended by a Daily Telegraph article on ‘glamping’. This is an alleged new trend: glamourous camping for monied types. Prada groundsheets, Gucci guy ropes, that kind of thing. Well, my take on ‘glamping’ is more low budget, but at least I’ll be pitched in a glamourous space – backstage with all the other Cabaret Arena types.

Can’t remember the last time I did go camping, in fact. Possibly the Reading Festival 1990, at the age of 18. The bands playing then included the Pixies, the Wedding Present, Nick Cave, Mega City Four, the Senseless Things, and the aforementioned Inspiral Carpets, who were the biggest act on one of the nights. Many of these groups have since split, then reformed, then split again. Actually, even in 1990 there already was a reformed band playing – The Buzzcocks, with The Smiths’ Mike Joyce on drums. And I think Wire were in their second time around. Not being new is not a new thing.

My abiding memory is finding out the hard way just how pointless it is lurking down the front by the main stage all day, purely to secure the best view of the big acts later on. But I had to try it for myself first.

In order to be close to the Wedding Present (second from last), I installed myself right against the metal crowd barrier, dead centre, rushing to secure this position at about 1pm, as soon as the arena gates opened. I didn’t mind going without food all afternoon, and cups of water were always to hand, obligingly handed out by stewards in the photographer’s pit, that sliver of calm between barrier and stage.

John Peel was DJ-ing in between the acts, which rather helped. I remember him playing the Popguns b-side ‘Because He Wanted To’, fairly early on in the day. Hearing this catchy and fuzzy little indiepop tune, a favourite of mine, was a treat. It felt like private music imposed upon thousands, when only two years earlier Reading was more of a heavy metal festival. This very un-rocking pop song was now ringing out on the gigantic Main Stage speakers, previously accustomed to the likes of Whitesnake, Saxon and Magnum. For a few minutes, the meek could indeed inherit the world, with a help from Mr Peel.

I then stood and watched the coming and going of Ned’s Atomic Dustbin (quite fun), Psychic TV (no tunes), Wire (past their best, looked bored), The Young Gods (baffling, one of those bands other people like), Ride (okay, if looking amusingly out of place in the bright afternoon sunshine), and Billy Bragg (great as ever).

As the hours passed, the crush down the front became more frightening than I’d envisaged. I was even afraid real damage might be done to my ribs. By the time the Buzzcocks came on, the pressure of so many bodies behind me and to either side was impossible to take any longer. I didn’t want to be one of those archetypal forlorn youths down the front that had to be dragged out by security men. As much as I loved the Wedding Present back then, I didn’t think they were worth suffering actual physical agony for (insert your own jokes about their records here, non-fans).

‘This is really no way to see a band,’ I remember thinking. ‘Even though all these other young people down the front think it is. Once again, I know I am not like other young people.’

So halfway through the Buzzcocks I yielded my prized place at the barrier and started to move back to a more bearable area of crowd density. I didn’t stop walking – or rather, squeezing past muttering a million ‘scuse me’s -till I felt I could move my arms freely again. When the Wedding Present finally took to the stage, I was right at the back of the crowd. It’d been a waste of time. Well, no, it’d been a lesson learned.

I still approve of the serendipitous side of music festivals, where you can wander around and discover new favourite bands. With its emphasis on a varied diet of stages, I feel Latitude does this side of things particularly well. It’s the feral crowd side of rock festivals I’m not keen on – the mud, the sweat, the packed-in numbers down the front.

One of the headliners at Latitude this year is Franz Ferdinand, who I last saw upstairs at the Barfly, supporting the Futureheads. Back then, they turned up on my Highgate doorstep and asked to borrow my Juno 6 synthesizer. The Barfly wasn’t thinly attended – these were two bands with ‘industry buzz’ after all – but neither was it packed. These days, Franz Ferdinand are a bigger deal, of course.

So next month they’ll doubtlessly be playing to a crowd of thousands, with 18-year-olds down the front, but I do wonder if these teens will be suffering to quite the same degree I did at their age, or whether the civilised feel of Latitude means it’ll be more like the Tube at rush hour – packed in, but not to the extent of actual pain.

Also, these days the Net and mobile phone culture has meant there’s so much more to do than watching bands, and I’d have thought that would affect the pain level of the moshpit. Or does it connect with a Lord Of The Flies-style, atavistic teen aggression, something I’ve never felt? That fearing for your rib cage is part of the fun, and will always be the case? With all the downloading, all the Internetting, all the iPodding, all the digital surfeit of choice, could it be that this particular trial of life remains utterly unchanged?

Well, I’m not going down the front to find out.