I’ve just prepared a press release for the Fosca album. Thought I might as well post it here. I’ve had to think about all the things that might vaguely pique the curiosity of journalists.

Reading the press quotes again, ancient though they are, cheered me up today.

***

FOSCA

The Painted Side Of The Rocket

Fosca is the eccentric UK pop band fronted by Highgate-based dandy and wordsmith Dickon Edwards. Since forming in 1998, they’ve released four singles and three albums, toured several times across Europe, received radio play by John Peel, and found their lyrics quoted in a Swedish novel (Martina Lowden’s Allt).

After leaving the slightly acclaimed group Orlando, Mr Edwards started Fosca with a revolving line-up of London musicians, recruited partly down to their musical prowess, but mostly on what he thought of their dress sense at the time (Mr Edwards still has a strict ‘no trainers’ rule, believing running shoes are for running in, not for playing guitar in). However, some members have managed to stick around for the duration, notably Rachel Stevenson (keyboards / vocals).

From 2000 – 2002, Fosca were signed to Shinkansen Records, recording two albums with Saint Etienne producer Ian Catt. The results won fans all over the world, with NYC label Secret Crush Records taking their name from the Fosca single Secret Crush On Third Trombone. Two unofficial videos were made by separate groups of fans – both from Sweden – for Secret Crush and for the obscure b-side Confused And Proud. Given its curious popularity beyond its status, this latter song has now been reworked and re-recorded for the third album.

For the last five years, Mr Edwards has concentrated on non-Fosca activities, such as appearing on BBC1’s Imagine in his dubious capacity as a pioneer blogger; writing music and film reviews for Plan B Magazine, DJ-ing for dress-up club nights like The Beautiful & Damned (including four nights at the 2007 Latitude Festival); collaborating with the Monochrome Set’s Bid for his group Scarlet’s Well, writing a new Afterword for Jerome K Jerome’s The Idle Thoughts Of An Idle Fellow (Snowbooks) and contributing an article about a trip to Tangier with Shane MacGowan, for The Decadent Handbook (Dedalus Books), where he was described by the Daily Telegraph as possessing a certain ‘wonky charm’.

After much idling, bouts of ill health and general misfortune, the third Fosca album was finally completed in a Hackney basement in summer 2007, with Tom Edwards (guitar / programming) and Kate Dornan (keyboards, recorder, vocals). As Shinkansen had wound down, Sweden’s But Is It Art Records stepped in to release the album. And no, Fosca still have no idea why their most devoted fans tend to be Swedish.

DISCOGRAPHY:

Nervous London: CD EP, Something Velvet Records, 1999

The Agony Without The Ecstasy: CD EP, Shinkansen, 2000

On Earth To Make The Numbers Up: CD album, Shinkansen, 2000

Supine On The Astroturf: CD EP, Shinkansen 2001

Secret Crush On Third Trombone: CD EP, Shinkansen, 2002

Diary Of An Antibody: CD album, Shinkansen 2002

Confused & Live – Fosca In Concert: live CDR, But Is It Art 2007

The Painted Side Of The Rocket: CD album, But Is It Art 2008

***
SELECTED MEDIA KINDNESS FOR FOSCA

‘Diary Of An Antibody is Dickon Edwards’s second revenge attack on humanity. His couplets are relentlessly sharp…

– Simon Price, Independent On Sunday

‘Accomplished and muscular whimsy… An attractive noise… 80’s bombast saved and beyond by sharp lyrics and impeccable timing… Secret Crush On Third Trombone is one of those “must have” records.’

– from “Unpeeled”, the paper-only fanzine for the John Peel show.

‘Some of the time, Fosca remind me of the Pet Shop Boys, except you most certainly can’t dance to Dickon’s anguish, and occasionally they sound like the Divine Comedy, only with far more excellence. ‘

– Everett True, New York Press

‘Secret Crush On Third Trombone is the perfect pop song… A gleaming chorus and lyrics about schoolchild angst that glides along wonderfully. It’s sunny, fun, and brilliantly put together. ‘

– UK club Strange Fruit’s newsletter, “Fruitbowl”, issue 35.

‘Wordy and sickly, neurotic pop music’

– Richard Smith, Gay Times (UK)

‘Secret Crush on Third Trombone’ .. the best single of the summer… Simply a marvellous throwaway three minutes of sheer unrepentant Pop, all magnificent chorus hooks and jibes at the shaky nature of growing up and old and away from your youth.’

– Tangents Webzine

‘Calculated to reignite those “New Smiths” tags … The crucial difference is the juxtaposition of bouncy killer keyboards and arch observational narrative… Fosca do disposable pop with a twist… that it isn’t disposable.’

– In Love With These Times webzine

‘Incessant and striped-candy sweet. Imagine Belle and Sebastian had grown up listening only to the insane, gaudy Euro-Pop they have on Eurotrash and you’ll have some idea. Fosca play outsider anthems for those in need of wit and sparkle.’

– Drowned In Sound website

‘This band are winning the crown of “coolest new-wave-ish band in London” award as we speak.’

– Dagger fanzine, Santa Rosa, California

‘On Earth To Make The Numbers Up… is singly the best record to come out of the UK in 2000.”

– Indiespinzone.com (Sweden)

I’m pleased to announce that the new Fosca album The Painted Side Of The Rocket is now available to order at the But Is It Art website:

http://butisitart.org/order/

100 copies are accompanied with a limited edition book of lyrics and other writings, The Portable Dickon Edwards.  The book is not available separately.

The album will also be available on iTunes some time in March.

We apologise for the delay in proper diary entries. This is due to Mr Edwards feeling a bit more poorly and low than usual, and having to fend off inner cries of ‘Oh Heavens, what’s the point of it all, I should have joined the Marines.’

Whilst we are waiting for Mr Edwards’s brain to start working again, our crew will be passing among you shortly to serve complimentary asterixes.

***

In the meantime, here’s some music.

I’ve been enjoying the TV programme Ashes To Ashes lately. A glamourous if haughty person who lives in a bizarre 80s world that could all be part of their damaged imagination…

but enough about me.

Here’s some 80s pop videos I’ve been using to crack the ice of my moping mindset. They’re always playing inside my head, but for those of you yet to get telepathy in your area (I hear it lost out in the format wars to Blu-Ray), click on the stills to drink from the addictive if calorie-free charms of Ms YouTube:

The Waitresses: I Know What Boys Like (1982)

If the formula to a good pop song is to make it sound like a child’s nursery rhyme – or a child’s playground jeer -  this is a pretty perfect exponent. Note the now utterly anachronistic use of smoking in an MTV video, and the sax player’s red tie with black shirt. Yes, Shampoo covered this song in the 90s. And yes, the Waitresses also did ‘Christmas Wrapping’.

Here’s the reverse of the red & black look, as modelled by a Style Council backing singer turned solo:

Tracie: The House That Jack Built (1983)

Doesn’t she look wonderful? Tracie Young walks onstage to the kind of raucous wolf whistles one might associate with a burlesque turn, yet she remains fully buttoned up in black suit with long sleeves & trousers, padded shoulders, shiny tie, and red pocket square hanky. It’s like a New Romantic Burka. One day, someone will start a religion where everyone dresses this way forever. It may have to be me.

Berntholer: The Choice (1981)

Rather more obscure, this is a charming example of what else was going on at the more alternative end of the early 80s pool. I was reviewing a compilation of Belgian ‘Cold Wave’ bands last year (released on LTM Records), and fell belatedly in love with this gaggle of art-pop types, channelling the Factory Records scene in their own odd and lovely way. A bit like the Liquid Sky soundtrack, and a bit early Altered Images too, what with all the child-like posing and smirking. Note the singer’s gloves: is it cold, or is it the 80s? I ask myself that question daily.

Aztec Camera: Oblivious (1983)

Roddy Frame + 80s hair and make-up = Alan Cumming now. And an Ivor Cutler introduction too. What’s going on with all the Tarot cards? Am I mad, in a coma, or reading Dickon Edwards’s diary? Note the jeans. Hey, Aztec Camera: good of you to ‘turn up’.

The new CD:

The new book:

Good for Zadie Smith. She once used her Waterstones ‘An Author Recommends’ spot to highlight the works of Joe Stacco and David B with the tag ‘Graphic novels take so much time and work to make. The least we can do is read them’. Can’t really argue with that.

The Book Of Other People, which she’s edited, is a recent anthology of specially commissioned short stories from various bookish notables: Mr Eggars, Ms July, Ms Kennedy, Mr Toibin, Mr Litt, Mr Safran Foer. But she’s also included comic strip tales from Mr Ware and Mr Clowes, and a Posy Simmonds-illustrated piece by Mr Hornby.

I suspect many readers of White Teeth and more than a few literary critics who rate Ms Smith would never touch a comic book with a Booker-nominated bargepole. So I like to think her unabashed nod to comics helps to shake them up just that little bit. Perhaps it even confuses them. ‘A Whitbread Prize winner who likes comics? Does. Not. Compute.’

The only problem is, new anthologies of prose short stories also suffer from a similarly baffling across-the-board dismissal by the mainstream book buyers. It’s so strange how British readers in particular like their printed fiction to be in novel form only. Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader is either a long short story or a novella, depending on your taste in word counts, but what’s more important according to the publishing market is that it’s been packaged like a short novel. Include it in a collection, and it just wouldn’t sell so well. UK readers have this ‘thing’ about fiction anthologies, just as they do graphic novels.

I once heard a radio interview with Stephen King, where the next guest was the Booker winner DBC Pierre. They turned out to be fans of each other’s work, and it was lovely to hear these two authors from different corners of the bookshop meet and exchange compliments Romeo & Juliet-like, while those on both sides gnashed their teeth.

I understand WHY there are genres, why graphic novels aren’t filed alongside the prose fiction, why Terry Pratchett is filed away from Martin Amis. What aggrieves me is the assumption that readers are meant to stick to one thing or the other. A varied diet is healthier – literary novels can get into unimaginative and predictable ruts too. When they talk about ‘the death of the novel’, they really mean the dearth of the reader’s scope. One should go for the best of all possible worlds, as Mr Voltaire said. And indeed, Penguin have put out an edition of Candide with comic strips by Chris Ware on the cover.

It’s not the publishers or writers, it’s the UK reading market that’s the problem. Funny how bookworms can sometimes be more narrow-minded than TV or movie addicts. There can be prejudice among those who claim to eschew prejudice.

The very British hypocritical connection between liberal snobbery and fake open-mindedness never fails to astonish me. The more people boast about how free from intolerance they are, the more you realise how much they’ve deliberately shut out from their lives.

The whole point of being a writer is opening up minds and showing people new worlds, rather than keeping them in their comfort zones. Enlightenment as entertainment, and vice versa.

And so to Mike Russell on Persepolis. Mr Russell is a film journalist who transforms his interviews into comic strips. Not content with being an interviewer per se, he also manages to render the strip’s artistic style to fit the subject.

Here he is talking to director Richard Linklater about A Scanner Darkly, using that film’s unique Rotoscoping look (tracing over live action with a pen) to depict the interview in comic form.

For an interview with Jerry Seinfeld for Bee Movie, he gives the strip the same form of anecdotal, meandering, observational comedy feel typical of Seinfeld’s own trademark routines. I particularly love the detail of the officious PR lady with a clipboard, gently nudging him away from the ‘talent’, as if the journalist were nothing more than an autograph hunter.

Best of all is his conversation with Marjane Satrapi, creator of Persepolis, the comic book about a life of growing up in Iran, which is now an animated movie. Getting Ms Satrapi’s own drawing style right for his interview is impressive enough (her black and white, faux-naif manner may seem simple, but it is disarmingly difficult to mimic accurately), but I’m most impressed by Mr Russell’s noting of her chain-smoking, and the boiling down of a long interview into a series of aphorisms and insights:

‘The real war is not between the West and the East. The real war is between intelligent and stupid people.’

‘Culture and instruction are really weapons of mass construction.’

‘I was brought up on the idea that American people were the most evil in the world.’

‘The second I have a friend in one country, that country cannot be my enemy’

And a credo after my own heart:

‘If we don’t consider people as individuals, we go to hell.’

Emails:

From: Ellen and Emelie
Town / Country: Stockholm
Message:

Dear Dickon,

The youth of today are kept away from experiencing real music (such as Fosca) because of age limits to concerts. There are a few of us that got a taste of your music at Stockholms Poetry Festival and are hungry for more. So, pretty please play a concert in Sweden without an age limit? We promise to make you a gigantic sign with your face surrounded in beams of glitter and scream the lyrics to every song. Because we love you and your music and reallyreallyreally want to see you live (lots of more fangirlish comments). Much respect, admiration and unhealthy amounts of love, Emelie and Ellen xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I can’t really do much about the age limits, I’m afraid. But feel free to write to your favourite teen-friendly venues and festivals, and suggest they book Fosca. Playing the Benno festival in 2001 was my happiest gig to date.

HI! I just saw that you’re gonna perform in my hometown Karlstad. Is it possible to meet you and buy your records directly from you, before or after the concert? I really loved your performance at the Rip It Up festival. It seems like this stuff is based on true emotions, without any “wanna be a cool pop star” attitude. I actually got inspired to use new ideas in my pop project. Cheers and hugs to all of Fosca, Patrik

We’ll definitely be bringing some CDs. To be told you’ve inspired others in their own music is always nice. Thank you. I’m looking forward to Karlstad too.

I think I USED to want to be a cool pop star. Those dreams have either faded with time, or have been knocked out of me by life’s pokes and prods. Maybe it’s just as well. I’m finally starting to dream again, albeit of other things.

Also in the Inbox: a student in Utretcht asking to interview me for a thesis on dandyism (sure), plus Gina R from the early 80s teen band Marine Girls, wanting to know if our paths had crossed sometime in the past. She’d seen me on the Web and saw we had mutual friends.

The Marine Girls was the first band of Tracey Thorn, the singer with Everything But The Girl. She and Gina formed it while still at school. They made a couple of records in the early 80s, ‘Beach Party’ and ‘Lazy Ways’, which garnered a following in the world of John Peel and the music press. For a group of teenage girls singing about love, beaches and days out, they sounded unusually sombre, arty, and jazzy, much like Tracey Thorn’s records to come, but less polished, less tutored (and thus more charming), less commercial, and with that unique girls-together edge. Kurt Cobain was a fan, and the US band Unrest recorded a version of ‘Love To Know’ in the 90s.

So although I confirmed that, no, on this occasion I’m pretty certain we haven’t met,
it’s an utter pleasure to get an email from someone whose music you’ve enjoyed for years.

Yet how strange to think I am corresponding with a teenage girl who happens to be in her forties. Turns out she was at Latitude last year, looking after teenage girls of her own, and like my parents she’s rented a place in Southwold every summer for years. So maybe she just saw me walking around in Suffolk one day.

‘Where might I know you from?’

If you think about it, a full answer would be listing every possible interaction you’ve had with the world since birth. Where to start? Where to stop? I really need to look inside that other person’s mind, find my image, and see what it’s filed under, what the taglines are.

I might be known from the bands I’ve been in, or the clubs and events I’ve DJ-d or been a regular at. Or maybe I served them when I worked in a shop? I’ve done a lot of that. In fact, I definitely served her bandmate Ms Thorn in Hampstead Our Price, 1995. Next time I saw Ms T, a few months later, I was hanging out at the aftershow of EBTG’s Shepherds Bush Empire gig, in my new capacity as a glittering music biz party boy. That backstage bar became a bit of a second home for a while.

There’s a theatre anecdote – collected, naturally, by Ned Sherrin – where some old and celebrated actor (possibly Gielgud) is introduced to a younger player at a party.

Old Actor: An actor, eh? Yes, I have seen you before. Were you at Stratford? The Royal Shakespeare Company?

Younger actor: No, I’ve never been in the RSC.

OA: The Royal Court? I’ve definitely seen you –

YA: No, I’ve never played there.

OA: Something by Chekhov in the West End?

YA: (shamefacedly) No…. I’m afraid haven’t acted in a while. The only job I’ve had for the last year is working behind the deli counter at Harrods.

OA: (triumphantly) THAT’S where I saw you! You were MARVELLOUS!

Have to admit it, I am feeling a bit lost in life. I think I need a certain amount of moving on, if not quite Getting On.

It’s been 14 years now in this room. A perfectly lovely bedsitting room, in a very lovely part of North London. And at least I don’t have to play the whole communal living game, arguing murderously over whose hummus is whose. But after 14 years in the same place, and at the same hand-to-lipbalmed-mouth level, I finally want to try living somewhere with my own bathroom. Call me greedy. So I guess this means Work.

But what do I want to be if I grow up? Whenever I look at the Recruiting section of newspapers, I feel utterly in the wrong universe.

There’s a pull-out supplement in this week’s New Statesman, comprising a round table discussion about the commissioning of public services. For me it may as well be written in Klingon. ‘Cross-sector commissioning for effective service delivery’. ‘Our experience includes the implementation of procurement and contracting models.’ ‘Consulting > Solutions > Outsourcing.’

A sample sentence:

‘If you deliver healthcare to somebody…’

Yep, got that.

‘…and they see it as something over which they have no control or have no engagement with…’

Yes, still understanding that. Just about.

‘…there will be a disconnect between the two ends.’

Pardon? This isn’t even a written piece: it’s a transcription of a discussion. That there are so many people in Real Life who regularly speak like this makes me feel like I really am from a different planet.

But I realise it’s me that’s the weird one. I feel a disconnect between my two ends. My reality consultancy has been well and truly outsourced. I need a procurement of ‘solutions’ in my own life. Barman! Can I procure a double Solutions and tonic?

So I guess it’s pointless applying for conventional jobs. At 36, with zero money and next to zero normal career experience, I’ve not so much hit Rock Bottom as hit Rock Sideways. I’ve joked haughtily before that my CV has one sentence on it: ‘Don’t you know who I am?’

But when it comes to things like ‘experience’, what can you say about the experience of being interviewed as a Blogging Dandy by newspapers in Holland and Sweden? Of being known as Shane MacGowan’s New Romantic Butler (not entirely true, but there’s no Black Sobranie smoke without fire)?

I could try pitching a Dickon-style column to selected publications. But if they want an Everyman-ish take on life, they’ve had it with me. I can’t do the Everyman. Those columnists who play to the gallery: how all men are like this, all women are like that, and how politician X or party Y is being typically foolish / wise (delete as applicable); that really isn’t me.

And those columnists who write in a permanent Everyman shrug, what’s all that about, eh?

It’s true I’ve slightly but irrevocably slipped out of the Real World. I suppose this is both my failing and my strength, and is presumably why several thousand people I don’t know are reading this diary.

So I remain optimistic for what happens next. Even the out-of-place can find their place.

What with the death of Heath Ledger followed by the passing of Jeremy Beadle, I’m sure hilarious wags around the country will say something like ‘from one evil Joker to another’.

But I wonder how many will say that Jeremy Beadle introduced them to Virginia Woolf?

Before he appeared on shows like Game For A Laugh and Beadle’s About, before he became ‘Jeremy Beadle’, I was rather a fan of his. Because in the early 80s he presented children’s teatime programmes like Eureka, April Fool and The Deceivers. These were quirky little BBC non-fiction entertainments, with a touch of the educational, showing how the safety pin was invented, or relating the history of imposters and hoaxers through the ages.

Mr Beadle would do the main narration and explanations to camera, then there’d be an acting out of the story in elaborate sketch form, via period costume and appropriately decked-out studio sets. I remember the actors included Madeline Smith, the doll-like Hammer Horror beauty, and Sylvester McCoy, the future Doctor Who. No studio audience, no on location hidden cameras.

So Jeremy Beadle was once the early 80s equivalent of Stephen Fry on QI, or Robert Newman on his recent programme The History Of The World Backwards. Or Ben Schott of Schott’s Miscellany. He represented the quirkier side of learning.

Though the genre of trivia is thought to be self-serving and unedifying in itself (often equated with the pub bore or list-compiling geek) it’s not always pointed out how it can sometimes be a shoe-in for autodidacts, piquing curiosity and encouraging further reading. Which I’m a firm believer in – the ‘rubbing off’ principle of learning. Demonstrating the history of the safety-pin might spark a lifetime’s interest in that particular process of science, or that particular historical period.

The one sketch I most remember was Mr Beadle’s retelling of the story of the HMS Dreadnought hoax in 1910. He mentioned one of the participants was the young Virginia Woolf. I would have been about eleven at the time, and had never heard of the novelist until now. I came away from Mr B’s history of hoaxes wanting to consult my parents’ bookshelves. By the time I was thirteen, I had read Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Orlando. All thanks to Jeremy Beadle.

I also remember the first edition of Game For A Laugh, and how my childhood heart sank to see this hero of quirky children’s TV turn into a tacky presenter of hidden camera pranks on the adult public. I could see how retelling the HMS Dreadnought hoax could lead to similar elaborate set-ups of his own, but fooling the Armed Forces in 1910 is a world away from convincing some hapless present-day wife that there were aliens in her garden, all to get The Look On Her Face on camera. I knew it was a step down, replacing the quiet joy of historical trivia with cruelty and belittlement. People with proper jobs could now be made to look like idiots for the sake of TV entertainment, with Mr Beadle at the helm. And the concept of televised petty schadenfreude wasn’t even original – Candid Camera had been doing it for years in the US.

From Beadle’s About to Dead Ringers to ‘happy slapping’, bringing cameras into the equation turns the playful side of pranks into the realms of cheap sniggering, bullying and depressing voyeurism. The 1910 newspaper photos of the Dreadnought incident, with Ms Woolf in blackface and drag, may have been the direct precedent of Beadle’s About, but the lack of TV gave it a certain style.

Horace de Vere Cole was indeed the Beadle of his day, but without the element of playing to a mass audience in their sitting rooms, history has filed him as a lovable eccentric. Once TV was invented, the prank had fallen from grace, and Jeremy Beadle became famous for being hated.

It’s true Cole was hated too, but the stakes for elaborate pranks were somewhat higher. After the Dreadnought affair was revealed, the Navy had Mr Cole ceremonially caned. Those were the days.

Shopping for basic toiletries – deodorants, shower gel, razors – I tend avoid anything labelled ‘For Men’. I’ve never felt manly in my life. At least, not manly in the Gillette sense.

I could never grow a beard. I wouldn’t know where to start.

[Have made myself laugh out aloud at that line. How shaming.]

To be found in possession of any canister decked out in those appointed colours of maleness (dark blue, silver, black) would make me feel at best disastrously miscast, at worse a fraud. I am not at home to Mr Lynx.

So I have to look for their more androgynously labelled counterparts. And if those aren’t immediately available, I buy the ladies’ products. Not really a big deal, as I’ve been purchasing hair bleach kits with photos of women on the front for nearly twenty years. The only true Women Only contents are the little polythene gloves. My hands are regrettably male in size, if not in hirsuteness. I resort to marigold rubber gloves instead.

Even the Body Shop has let me down. Their range of gentlemen’s products used to be called Mostly Men. I liked that. I feel not entirely a man. Just mostly. But now that range has been renamed to, you guessed it, For Men.

One of these days I shall get around to starting my own toiletries company, making a range of affordable emollients and underarm razors, for the slightly less manly gentleman. Suggested names for this brand: Dorian. Sebastian. Not Gatsby, though. Japan already has that. Take a look at this marvellous TV ad for Gatsby Hair Bleach. Will there ever be a British equivalent?

Though I have been regularly described as camp and flamboyant, I would say it’s only in comparison with the man in the street. Assuming the man in the street is Dennis Waterman circa 1978.

For a while, however, my own literal man in the street was indeed less manly. A young drag queen lived a few doors down from me and I knew him from the shinier, polysexual dress-up clubs like Kash Point.

One day, he phoned me up asking me to come over and change his light bulb. Not a euphemism – he knew how to negotiate the darkened streets of Highgate in high heels and a mini-skirt, but not how to change a standard light bulb. So he called me over, and I taught him the difference between a Bayonet Cap and an Edison Screw. (And then I told him about types of light bulb, yes, yes, all right.)

This was the manliest time I’ve felt in my life. I can also wire a three pin plug. But don’t tell anyone.

Last week I was contacted by a journalist. She was writing a piece on ‘the lives and loves of transmen’, ie female to male transsexuals, and wanted to interview me on the subject.

I presumed this was because I’ve written about the trans experience in Fosca songs, and have fallen in love with, befriended or dated a few persons who’ve happened to be trans. Though I would never go into personal details (I don’t kiss and tell, I’m too fond of kissing), I’m happy to help raise awareness about transgender jargon, etiquette, bust a few prejudices and generally do my bit for the differently-bodied cause.

The journalist wanted a few photos of me for the piece, which I duly sent. Then she wanted to hear some Fosca, and I sorted that out too.

And then her next email said, ‘Can I just clarify you’re trans?’

Ah.

I told her no, I wasn’t, not me personally. I’m merely a less manly biological male. But thank you for the compliment.

And that was the end of that. In that solipsistic way some journalists can get, she didn’t reply, not even to say sorry for the misunderstanding.

I suppose what I’m saying is, I wish she’d been more of a gentleman.

Friday evening: I’m at a jolly club called Don’t Stop Moving, above Canal 125, a bar on the Caledonian Road. Charley Stone is DJ-ing, and has asked me along.

The club is decorated with sweets and pop biographies lying on windowsills (one on Steps with a typically cagey interview with ‘H’, then closeted), and there’s pages from Smash Hits magazine on the walls. Interestingly, the issues tend to be from the early 90s, presumably reflecting the generation of the club’s organisers. Younger than me, but old enough to remember Cathy Dennis in her pop star phase. ‘Cathy’s Guide To Norwich!’ Pre-Alan Partridge, too.

It’s a kind of Smash Hits interregnum period: after the 80s, the magazine’s real heyday, but just before Take That hit their imperial stream of hits. From about 1993-1995, Smash Hits was effectively a Take That fan mag, with both group and magazine enjoying a symbiotic relationship, keeping the other one successful. After Robbie Williams’s departure, and a logical but curiously unsuccessful flirtation with the Britpop era (I was told that the worst selling issue was the one with the Bluetones on the cover), Smash Hits eventually turned into just another one of those teen mags, always packaged in a plastic bag with some free gift. It’s never a good sign when the words are not enough.

So the pages adorning this Kings Cross wall, being slightly off-vintage, hold a certain poignancy. They are from my post-teen period; a time where although I still loved pop music, it was no longer being made for me. Here’s a 90s interview with The Primitives, going for a comeback years after ‘Crash’ (quick glance at Wikipedia: this was for their single ‘You Are The Way’ – in at No 58, 1991).

Here’s Rob ‘Mary Whitehouse Experience’ Newman reviewing the singles. He favours St Etienne’s ‘Avenue’. Here’s Betty Boo with her second album. The Farm answering questions from the Biscuit Tin. Shampoo doing the same.

By a nice coincidence, I’d just been writing about Smash Hits in the introduction to my own lyrics collection. The magazine was my first exposure to the concept of publishing pop lyrics on their own: it was one of the many Smash Hits trademarks. Except they weren’t lyrics. They were ‘Songwords’.

These would be the words to all the chart hits of the moment, presented in colourful and attractive little boxes alongside the interviews and competitions. Readers were encouraged not just to learn and sing the verses and choruses of Wham, Culture Club and so on, but to actively cut out and affix the lyrics on their bedroom wall or school book, just like the posters. Words could be teenage pin-ups, too.

I was in Smash Hits a couple of times myself, in little photo features on Orlando circa 1996. The band may have failed, but little things on my life’s To Do list still managed to get ticked off. Get my band interviewed in Smash Hits – tick. Get played by John Peel – tick. Though that was the indie Fosca rather than the pop Orlando (did he play Shelley too?). Little flames of achievement, raging against the failures.

In fact, I’d nearly go as far as feeling sorry for the trendy new bands of today. That however successful they may get, they will never know what it’s like to be in Smash Hits, or to be played by John Peel, or both. But of course, such ancient benchmarks must be utterly meaningless to a 19-year-old now.

I wonder what the equivalent ambitions are today? Being played by Alex Zane? Appearing in the Observer Music Monthly? Having your lyrics on one of those non-specific online lyrics directories? Do today’s schoolchildren still adorn their bedrooms with the lyrics to their favourite songs, via print outs from the Net?

It’s very hard not to fall into the Grumpy Old Man cliché of saying it’s not the same. But really, it’s not the same.

At the club, I meet Andy Roberts’s daughter Sophie, first time since his funeral. She’s 19 now. I should have asked her what she made of it all. She’d have been about three when Rob Newman was reviewing the singles. I guess you’d have to call Rob Newman the Russell Brand of 1991.

Of the music played, Deacon Blue’s ‘Real Gone Kid’ is an unexpected pleasure. I very nearly said, a Guilty Pleasure. It’s the one where the singers make train noises.

Then one of the DJs plays Bucks Fizz’s ‘Making Your Mind Up’, which is surely from a time before her time, and I wonder how she became acquainted with it. There’s all kinds of questions I want to ask, but the music is at shouting-in-ear volume, and the fact I now mind about these things, when previously I didn’t, speaks, well, volumes.

Maybe it’s just as well. People are here to dance, not to discuss what it all means in connection with where they are on their own life paths. I think that may be my trouble. That and being so much older than those who now feel old.

An Orlando fan I’ve not seen for years, Ms S, chats to me at length. She tells me how she feels old these days (in her 20s), how she doesn’t go to gigs as much as she used to, except for the bands of her youth, like the Manics and Morrissey. It’s rather odd when people a whole ten years or so younger than you say they’re feeling old. It also reminds me why so many bands are suddenly reforming to play tours, from the Spice Girls to My Bloody Valentine. Never mind music. People want their youth back, or if they’re too young, they want the youth of their elders, the bands they missed out on. They will pay handsomely – plus booking fee – for the privilege. It’s music as Botox.

On the tube home, I pass a young man who points me out to his girlfriend.

‘Rhydian!’ he says. Third time, now. Dear God, please let my life be more than this. And soon. It’s all getting so old.

I want to stop and ask him, why Rhydian? Why not Max Headroom, as I had from a man on the Holloway Road a few years ago? It’s exactly the same hair. It’s them, not me. Except it is me.

The club was great, the music was great, the people were great: Ed, Alex S, Davina, Sarah PV, Charley, Ella G. I think my predicament might be that, contrary to the name of the club night, I have indeed stopped moving. I need to get on with whatever I’m meant to be doing next.

My hair’s catcalls help me keep time. If it’s Rhydian, it must be early 2008. Maybe it’ll be someone else next year.

I’ll be your pop culture mirror. Or rather, my hair will be. It’s about time my hair got its own BBC4 series.