Of all the dreary polls and games bored people like to post on the Web, my least favourite is probably ‘Celeb Haikus’. It’s a version of those “Spotted!” pages in magazines like Heat, where readers are encouraged to send it sightings of celebrities.

“Dale Winton, in a road”
“Sue Pollard, buying things in a shop”.

That’s not an anecdote or even proper gossip. It’s just filling space and encouraging banality for its own sake, not to mention consolidating the notion of celebrity prostration in a godless void. It’d only be justifiable if this yen for so-called celebrity surveillance was of the neighbourhood watch persuasion:

“Spotted! Michael Parkinson, seen washing human entrails from his hands, laughing.”
“Spotted! Bruce Forsyth, killing a boy.”

Haikus have always annoyed me too; at school I regarded them as the quadratic equations of poetry. Cheap rules, cheap aftertaste. So here’s the Celeb Haiku to end them all, he said with foolish optimism.

“Spotted!” Shaftesbury Ave
Mark Frith, Editor, Heat Mag
Not spotted: his soul

Actually, I should confess I rather like the glossy graphics and fun attitude of Heat Magazine. And the TV section is pretty good. It’s just the encouragement of spying upon celebrities as a kind of national sport that irks me.

I’m hearing conversations in the background I could do something about.

Press Tent Girl: (to colleague at desk) “Do you remember Frank Sidebottom?”

(blank response from colleague)

PTG: (to other PR person) Do YOU remember Frank Sidebottom?

Them: Who?

I can’t keep quiet any longer. I turn around.

DE: (with an attempt at a helpful smile) Yes, I do. He’s still very much going. He played the Kentish Town Bull & Gate recently.

Pause. The girl and her colleagues stare back at me with a look suggesting “Who asked you, blondie? Mind your own business”.

I don’t know. It’s so hard hearing a conversation in the background where someone wonders about X, and you know you can go over to them and help them with the enquiry, resolving their wonderings with an answer. But they don’t want to hear your stranger’s Yes, I Know. They want to hear the No, I Don’t Know from their friends.

It’s the history of warfare in a nutshell.

Oh, crumbs, now I’m hearing:

PR Boy: Who’s Tom Verlaine?
PR Girl: I’m not sure.

I am doing my best to remain silent.

Earlier, a girl who was taking photographs for a magazine asked me who Nicky Wire was. I helpfully enlightened her.

Photo girl: How come you know all this stuff?
DE: (speechless)

There MUST be a way of getting paid for knowing what people with jobs in the music industry don’t know, but frankly should. It’s a clear case of supply and demand. And yet I can’t make the connection.

My feet are killing me. And my shoes are falling apart. Grumble, grumble, grumble.

I should make it clear I’m having a perfectly nice time here, I just need to sit and rest for a while. This Guest Cafe is within the Press Tent’s wonderful WiFi range, so I can just whip out my iBook and post a diary entry from a field in the middle of nowhere. Well, nowhere as far as some modern concerns go. I’m at the Latitude Festival, near the resort town of Southwold in Suffolk. Southwold is slightly – happily – out of time. There’s even a Campaign To Have Broadband In Southwold, as if it were a small developing Third World country. In fact, I can get a better mobile phone signal in Tangier, Africa, than I can in some parts of Suffolk. Suits me fine, of course, as someone who is a little out of time myself.

My parents are staying at the Southwold cottage they usually rent for a week every year, and I’d be visiting them for the weekend regardless. When I heard a new Mean Fiddler festival – featuring more than a few acts I either admire or am acquainted with personally, or both – was not only taking place near Southwold, but during the same weekend of my stay there, it seemed the height of sarcasm NOT to seek out a weekend pass. So here I am.

At first I attempted to procur a pass as part of paying work, reviewing the festival for a magazine or a commercial music website. I tried two magazines and a website. That failed. No one can accuse me of not trying to apply for work at every opportunity. How can I be anything other than a freeloader if I am deliberately denied employment for the only skills I have been told I am any good at, to wit writing and performing and DJ-ing and looking strange? So I switched to Well-Mannered Hustler Mode and secured a VIP guest pass by dint of being vaguely connected to the better connected. It was always thus.

Actually, Plan B have asked me to review the entire festival for free, but they’ve only demanded a 200 words thumbnail live review. 200 words for about 500 bands and acts. More bands than words to review them with. So I should really select certain adjectives to cover a whole group of bands at a time. How’s this:

“EDGY”
“ANGULAR”
“LILTING”
“SOARING”
“DYNAMIC”
“MELODIC”
“DEBUT”
“CATCHY”
“ECLECTIC”
“BEARDED”

There you go. When dancing about architecture, there’s only a limited amount of steps. Pick and mix the above, apply to absolutely any band ever, and you need never read a music magazine again. All part of the service of being a Dickon Edwards reader.

I like to think I pay my way by looking vaguely interesting, by not letting the side down. Brightening up the place a little. So I’ve got freshly bleached hair, and a freshly dry-cleaned white suit. At a boiling hot rock festival. This is the price I must pay, in lieu of the £105 ticket. Shame that my loafers have decided to give up the ghost, as I’ve had to do an awfully large amount of walking since I’ve been here. But even the most dilapidated loafers look better than brand new puffy trainers. At least on me they do.

Sleeping in a proper room – and one right opposite Southwold Lighthouse – as opposed to a tent really swung it for me. This morning I was awoken by raucous gulls. I think they’re on at the Uncut Stage at 14.30.

I do like tents, it’s just campsites that irk me. At 10.30am today I returned to the site and walked past a long, long queue of people waiting for a shower, even in the Guest Camping area. That’s the side I’m not keen on. Not when I’m wearing a nice suit, anyway.

My last festival as a punter was Reading 1997, when I pretty much said goodbye to the experience. After this, I promised myself, no more festivals unless I’m working, performing or am otherwise involved in a non-spectator capacity. It was the time of Many Endings. Orlando had failed to sell records and be famous, I was leaving the band, so I was spending my dwindling share of the record company money on a vaguely luxurious life, almost by way of compensation. Like a trip to Disneyland for a terminally ill child. Taxis, hotel rooms, binges. The benefits with none of the work. So I blagged a Reading pass, and booked a hotel room within walking distance on the site. Bliss. I shared this wealth, though: making it known that I had a room and the drinks were on me. Erol Alkan, now a top London DJ, slept on my floor. A thin, pretty girl who said she was a presenter on the Nickelodeon Channel shared my double bed, entirely chastely and non-nude. (And as I add that last detail I really wish I hadn’t.)

As Mr Alkan snored, Ms Children’s TV Presenter and I watched the late night movie, sitting up in bed, like a slumber party. With consummate irony, I recall the film was Alan Parker’s ‘Fame’.

So today, as per the whole weekend, I’m wandering around this leafy field-based Suffolk rock festival in a white suit and make-up, lurking backstage at the Literary Tent to chat to acquaintances who are actually booked to perform. The tent is shared by ‘Vox N Roll’, the book reading evening hosted by my friends at The Boogaloo pub, and ‘The Book Club’, the jazz-like comedy variety revue featuring my friend Mr Martin White.

So it’s a fair mistake to make when the most common question I hear from approaching strangers at Latitude is ‘when are you on?’. Even programme sellers have raced over to me ask this question. What can I say? I SHOULD be performing, damn it. Why aren’t I? I’m available and willing and I make the effort in looking interesting. Whether with Fosca or solo, whether doing music or text. Fosca can be invited to play Swedish festivals in lovely lakeside forests – the sort of event that Latitude is clearly influenced by – but none in my own country.

The cynical answer is “Because you’re a rubbish performer, Dickon. And your work is rubbish too. Even the Friday At Noon Acts on the White Lightning Cider Stage are a million times better than you. They have ungroomed beards and trainers and are trying to sound like a watered-down Snow Patrol, who in turn are a watered-down Keane, who in turn are a watered-down Coldplay, who in turn are a watered-down Radiohead, who in turn are a watered-down Pink Floyd. But that’s still better than your brand of ‘well-dressed wordy misfit’ songs and stories. Dilution of fake emotion, darling, is the new rock and roll!”

Maybe it’s because although I’m lucky as a ligger, I’ve never been lucky as a performer. Never have been. Why weren’t Orlando performing at any of those 1996-7 UK rock festivals, despite being on the mighty Warner Brothers? Not even at noon on the Friday on the smallest stage? John Peel played Fosca a number of times, which is more than some acts on the John Peel Stage at Glastonbury can claim. Hah, listen to this faux-haughty bitterness raging!

I can only assume the three or four shadowy people who pull the strings in the UK festival booking world just didn’t like Orlando, as I guess they don’t like me and Fosca. Well, let’s say up until now. Fair enough. But I live in hope things will change. Perhaps it takes a new Fosca album released on just the right kind of label with just the right kind of PR people and management, at just the right kind of time. With just the right kind of soundbitey pitch. ‘Cult Blond Fop-Rock Songwriter Dickon Edwards promotes his new album on Fashionably Acceptable Records’. People need The Angle. The Twist. The Pitch. The Story. Also, many of the music biz and press people in 1997 who clearly didn’t want Orlando anywhere near their nice festival stages have been replaced by much jollier younger models in 2006, who find it easier to defer to my wiser, aloof older man allure, ho ho. My age alone in such an acne-saturated environment suggests I’m ‘someone’. I’m not ENTIRELY joking.

And so I go on. Even though I never ‘go on’.

I was going to write about the bands and acts I’ve seen so far. But I appear to have filled this page quite easily talking about myself.

Hmm.

I’m off to photograph coloured sheep.

Am at the Latitude Festival testing out the Press Tent’s WiFi.

THE BEAUTIFUL & DAMNED – SUMMER BARBECUE PARTY
Date: Thursday 20th July.
Times: BARBECUE from 7pm, Club 9pm to midnight.
Venue: The Boogaloo, 312 Archway Road, London N6 5AT, UK. 020 8340 2928.
Tube: Highgate (Northern Line). Buses: 43, 134, 263.
Price: Free entry, but please dress up.

“Unmissable!” – Time Out, who also featured B&D in their ‘Top 10 Critics’ Choices’.
“A divine London night out” – The Penny magazine.

The well-dressed club night returns, its motto being ‘Never Knowingly Underdressed’. This time, the club starts a little earlier, at 7pm, with a barbecue in the garden outside. Then it’s business as usual inside from 9pm.

The Beautiful And Damned is a timezone-jumping decadent disco curated (as opposed to ‘DJ’d’) by Mr Dickon Edwards and Miss Red. Patrons are encouraged to dress up in their own take on period glamour, ideally with a nod to the styles of the 1920s & 1930s, though anything more stylish than the ubiquitous Old Street fashions is welcome. Cigarillos, braces, tweeds, beads, silk scarves, summer dresses, unforgiving teddy bears, Pimms & high hats. Free cocktails for the best dressed.

Drink, dance, and ponder the nights tenderness to an eclectic but discerning mix of Sinatra (Frank & Nancy), Strauss waltzes, soundtracks, musicals, El Records, Peggy Lee, Doris Day, Gilbert & Sullivan, Ella Fitzgerald, Dory Previn, Bugsy Malone, Cabaret, Chicago, deviant disco, shadowy soul, parvenu pop, insouciant indie, and easy listening for difficult children.

Photo taken by Mr O’Boyle’s phone. Time: 4.30am this morning. Place: a black cab, en route from the ‘Pirates Of the Caribbean 2’ premiere party, heading across town to the Boogaloo.

A sequel night. Mr MacGowan is back, so it’s Return Of The Odd Couple time. Within seconds of meeting him at the Dorchester’s bar, he suggests another trip to Tangier. It’s ridiculously hot in London at the moment, so North Africa is hardly going to be a cooling break. But he argues that Tangier is used to high temperatures, and is built for them, unlike London. Moreover, it’s on the coast, so you get the Mediterranean breeze. Well, we’ll see.

And tonight we’re off to the premiere of ‘Pirates Of The Caribbean 2’, at the Leicester Square Odeon. There’s five tickets for us, and we’re four: Mr O’Boyle, Ms Clarke, Mr MacGowan, and myself. So we give the spare ticket to our taxi driver, who parks the car and joins us inside. He is absolutely delighted.

I naturally enjoy walking the big red carpet at Leicester Square, and wonder what the autograph hunters and paparazzi think as they see me. I could have sworn I heard someone shouting out:

“Hey! Dickon From Orlando!”

But it’s now occurred to me that they may have really shouted:

“Hey Dickhead! We want Orlando!”

The sequel reunites Mr Depp, Mr Bloom and Ms Knightley from the first film, joined by Mr Nighy as a Lovecraftian villain whose face is a mass of writhing octopus-like tentacles. There’s one scene where he fiendishly plays a church organ in true Hammer Horror style. Except the organ is on a watery ghost ship, and he plays it with his facial appendages. Presumably it’s CGI, but even on a screen as big as the Odeon’s, it’s hard to tell which bits are make-up and prosthetics, and which are applied by someone clever on a computer. Even so, the creature’s eyes – which are all that’s left of the actor’s face – are unmistakably Mr Nighy’s.

Though I love a good children’s blockbuster (I went to see ‘Narnia’ twice), I wasn’t a big fan of ‘Pirates 1′. The funny bits didn’t really work, and although the special effects were impressive, I felt everything else seemed far from special. The fantasy swashbuckling sequences were oddly corporate and soulless, and smacked of going through the motions. I was all too aware that this was not much more than its nominal description: a Disney film adaptation of a Disneyland funfair ride. Though Mr Rush was a fun villain, it was mostly Mr Depp’s otherworldy charisma that justified the movie’s existence. Now, one must never confuse an unremarkable film with a great Johnny Depp performance with an actually great film. But thousands disagreed with me, children, adults and Oscar judges alike, so here we are at the sequel.

While the producer Mr Bruckenheimer is hardly a flamboyant, artistic visionary along the lines of Mr Jackson, Mr Gilliam or Mr Burton, he knows what strangers all over the world will queue up to see. Or even, as in the case of this massive, traffic-halting premiere, what will make strangers queue up to see other strangers going into the cinema to see. He is a master of popcorn.

So I’m happy to report the sequel is a great improvement on its predecessor. The funny bits are actually funny, the fantasy set-pieces are more original and inventive. Mr Nighy’s fishy crew are incredible to look at: mutant faces which draw on starfish and hammerhead sharks, even a crewman whose head disappears into a shell like a hermit crab. There’s also a terrific swordfight on the top of a giant wooden wheel rolling through a tropical forest, which I’m fairly sure hasn’t been done before. Jack Davenport’s character has actually become a character, as opposed to the cardboard cut-out he was in the first film. Mr Depp is as watchable as ever. Although the Bruckheimer sheen still prevents it from being in the same stylish postcode as those wonderful Gothic Rococo movies Mr Depp makes with Mr Burton, it is definitely a lot of fun. The certificate says: “12A – Moderate Horror.”

Speaking of which, Mr MacGowan was his usual self. On the verge of being Difficult (or even Trouble) one moment, a knowledgeable and funny storyteller – and at some gatherings the only person in the room who’ll talk to me – the next.

At the premiere, an actor from “Lost’ asks to be photographed next to him. Although I’ve never seen the series, I’m aware of this gentlemen, who is unusually large for a modern US TV star. Long haired and plump, he looks more like your average comic shop worker than a glossy actor – and thus rather stands out from the rest of the more blandly pretty cast.

Which is to his credit, because I’d never recognise any of the others if they were there at the premiere. They’re entirely ‘lost’ on me, ho ho. Beauty is as much about registering in the memory as it is about surface aesthetics. This is why the large chap has more in common with Mr Depp than his Lost colleagues. And it’s also why Johnny Vegas is more beautiful than Sienna Miller. She’s one of those pretty actresses that the popular press like to spy on. I must have seen umpteen photos of her, yet I still would never recognise her in person. I think she’s blonde. I think.

After a meal at the Dorchester, we repair to Old Billingsgate Market for the premiere party. Lots of piratey props, palm trees, muslin tablecloths, rum cocktails, waiters in pirate costume. We spot Mr Depp, but don’t get the chance to speak to him. We hear later that he was looking for us – well, looking for Mr MacGowan. They’ve been friends since the release of Edward Scissorhands. Mr Depp has played guitar on Mr MacGowan’s solo records, and Mr MacGowan has appeared with him in The Libertine (though cut out in the edit).

In the party’s VIP area, I spot Mr Nighy, and Mr Davenport with a full beard, and a woman from the TV series Green Wing. Not Tamsin Thing, one of the other ones. No, not her either. Or her. The other one. Otherwise, we’re surrounded by people who are either celebrities I’m not aware of, or more likely non-famous people who go to premieres. These sort of massive screenings are mostly attended by competition winners, corporate hospitality types, friends and family of the hundreds involved with the movie, and industry workers. I suppose I’m here as a friend of a friend of Johnny Depp.

I do spot Mr Philip Sallon, who is never knowingly underdressed. He’s in full Georgian frills and lace jacket, which he’d be wearing anyway, pirate theme or no pirate theme. Mr MacGowan chats to him about the Blitz Kids days. It’s fair to say the Pogues singer was never a New Romantic, but he was definitely a well-known face about town in the Punk and Post-Punk days, and claims to have at least dipped his toe in every defining London club and gig scene from those days, regardless of the music. Including the Steve Strange crowd. As he tells me tonight, he even attended some of the early Acid House rave parties. “I just like to go wherever people are enjoying themselves.”

After the premiere party dismantles around Mr MacGowan, who has typically refused to leave until his chair is literally packed away in front of him, he eschews his hotel room for the sofas at the Boogaloo. There, the two of us are left drinking and falling asleep, as Donovan plays on the jukebox and the sun comes up on another unnecessarily hot day.

After a short snooze, I wake up, remember my real bed is yards away and leave him sleeping there. I let myself out of the pub – a privilege I never take for granted – and stagger home.

Lea in Big Brother:

“These aren’t my friends. They’re just people I know.”

A quote of the year, not least because of MySpace Nation.

(I’ve just come up with that phrase on the spot, though I don’t doubt minds have been thinking alike across the world. I’d lay money that someone somewhere is writing a book called ‘Myspace Nation’. Purely because it’s so absolutely, searingly inevitable.)

I get a kind of cathartic buzz watching Lea on Big Brother. She’s a paranoid, attention-seeking depressive given to regular fits of tears, whose spending of money trying to feel happier and at home in her skin – her plastic surgery – clearly has failed to deliver even an iota of the hoped-for results. By way of excusing my watching of Big Brother at all, I like to think of Ms Lea as doing the side of me that I’d like to have surgically removed myself. She’s my emotional stunt double.

Something currently driving me mad: knowing how to greet people I know. A handshake, a hug, a kiss on one cheek, a kiss on both cheeks, or a kiss on the lips? Which one for which person at which occasion? No one ever tells you this. It’s an absolute minefield of anxiety. People should wear signs. “We should hug.” “A handshake is fine.” “Not on the mouth!”

I can never work out what people want, and am terrified that I’ll do the wrong thing, and they’ll call the police.

A cartoon seen recently, worthy of pre-war Punch, marked ‘Modern London Life’.

Two drawings, each of two women hugging effusively, saying “How ARE you?”. The caption for one says “Best Friends”. The other says “Vague Aquaintances”.

Both drawings are, of course, absolutely identical.

Said the pond to Narcissus, “It’s just ‘self, self, self’ with some people.”

Talking Heads: “Nothing But Flowers” (1988)

A rare video from Talking Heads’ last album, featuring not only Mr D Byrne and pals on the verge of splitting up, but also Mr J Marr fresh from splitting up The Smiths. And Ms K MacColl fresh from THAT Pogues duet, to boot. An pro-environmental song of sorts, but with a witty twist. It’s a kind of retort to Ms Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”, where the protaganist laments Paradise being paved to ‘put up a parking lot’. Here, Mr Byrne’s character is in some kind of post-apocalypse rural Paradise, but misses the parking lots, shopping malls and billboards that went before.

Musically, it reminds me somewhat of The Smiths’ “Ask”: Mr Marr’s jangly summer guitar, Ms MacColl’s winning pop harmonies.

If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower

Here’s another Talking Heads song, the better-known “Once In A Lifetime”. As covered by Mr K Frog and The Muppets. Oh yes!

Finally, here’s fellow New York witty art-pop purveyor Ms Laurie Anderson, delivering a short spoken word piece about Women And Money. Proving her advice on how best to avoid accusations of pretension while making Art: take the mickey out of yourself. I can’t watch her these days without thinking of the UK comedienne Ms Jo Neary, who I saw in Edinburgh last year. One of her character routines is essentially ‘Laurie Anderson Orders A Bag Of Chips’. It was a pretty funny impersonation, though I did wonder if your average UK comedy audience would recognise a Laurie Anderson spoof. It’s not like she’s Tony Blair. Actually, Ms Anderson’s latest show, Happiness, includes her account of SELLING bags of chips, when she worked at a NYC branch of McDonalds, just out of wondering what it was like. In her (puts on Laurie Anderson voice)… de- tached…. ar-ty ec-cen-tric… vague-ly a-sexual… a-loof but po-litical… way.

You can see why I relate to her.

Today’s News Of The World screams predictably about ‘Sarah’s Law’, and the need to keep convicted paedophiles monitored. They seem to be doing a pretty good job themselves, publishing a photo of two gentlemen apparently filming small children in a park. Later that day, the police report they’ve arrested one of the men, thanks to the paper’s vigilence. The papers sell, the readers are happy, the police are happy. Who needs a new law?

In fact, if Sarah’s Law were to come into being, the tabloid would no longer be obliged to do this sort of monitoring themselves. I can’t believe that’s what they really want, deep down. They clearly love taking pictures of paedophiles, and would hate to have to stop. Monitoring paedophiles is the tabloids’ fetish. They’re paedophile-philes. They get off on taking photos of men getting off on taking photos.

Just underneath this story on the NOTW website is a rather shocking juxtaposition: a little ad for a competition called ‘Baby Idol’. Next to a photo of a smiling naked baby is the following invitation. “Does your baby have the X Factor? Do you think your nipper could be Britain’s cutest? Text or email us your top tot photos and you could win a family holiday for four.”

Something else that springs to mind: the editor of The Sun and lately of the NOTW, Ms R. Wade, is married to the Eastenders actor Mr R. Kemp. With his shaven head and moon-like features, I can’t help thinking Mr Kemp rather resembles a giant baby. I’d better not dwell on this line of thinking any further.

I do hope no one saw me looking at the News Of The World. I was doing it purely for research purposes.