To describe a specific sensation or object for which there’s no actual word, there’s the temptation to invent one. Douglas Adams’s 80s parlour-game-cum-dictionary, ‘The Meaning Of Liff’, solved this dilemma using existing place names. For instance:

IPSWICH (n.)
The sound at the other end of the telephone which tells you that the automatic exchange is working very hard but is intending not actually to connect you this time, merely to let you know how difficult it is.

I once gave a talk where I wondered out aloud what the hairdo equivalent for ‘namesake’ was, given I’m often compared to others purely on the basis on my hair (Andy Warhol, Boris Johnson, etc). I was duly grateful when Ms Kate St Clair shouted out ‘manesake!’.

Today I found myself experiencing a state of:

TATECARDLESSNESS (n.)
The particular mix of consumer frustration and disappointment when realising an art gallery’s shop doesn’t stock your favourite painting as a postcard.

At the Tate Britain shop today, quite a few people are audibly tatecardless, whining to the assistant with what must be a Frequently Asked Question – why isn’t there a postcard for the main painting of the current exhibition? The show is ‘Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination’, and revolves around Mr Fuseli’s famous 1781 work The Nightmare, depicting a sleeping woman in an ambiguous pose: part sexual abandonment, part rape victim, part murder victim. Her back is arched over the edge of the bed, long tresses to the floor. And some kind of unhuman creature is squatting over her helpless form, with nameless intent. It’s an image that was shocking at the time, becoming a popular print, inspiring the Gothic Romantic genre (hence the exhibition) and parodied even then by Mr Gillray and the other cartoonists of the age. They would substitute the usual ugly politician for the monster, and the girl would become ‘Foreign Policy’ or something like that.

Mr Freud had a copy of The Nightmare on his study wall, and no one was in the least bit surprised. As the exhibition illustrates with a cinema booth, the first great horror movies such as Mr Whale’s Frankenstein and Nosferatu (the first Dracula) paid direct homage to Mr Fuseli’s painting. If it’s got a young women in bed at the mercy of a monster, it’s this painting’s fault.

At the Tate shop, there’s postcards of many other works in the show, but not of the main draw. Often this is down to reproduction rights, remote ownership of the painting, and other such copyright complications. I ask, and it transpires on this occasion the postcard is normally available: but they’ve underestimated the demand and sold out. On top of which, I also can’t purchase an similarly inexpensive souvenir of my favourite Blake in the show: Satan in his Original Glory: ‘Thou wast Perfect till Iniquity was Found in Thee’. I am doubly tatecardless.

I know that these days you can usually find the image online, and assuming you have enough colour ink, print out your own cards (for non-profit, private use, naturally), but it’s not the same thing. When I see a painting I like in a gallery that sells postcards, I want to buy a postcard of it. For me, there’s no greater satisfaction to a day out than perusing a well-stocked Gift Shop. And no greater frustration than finding the shop doesn’t stock the one item you actually want.

The Natural History Museum doesn’t do dinosaur Sellotape, either.

Sat night: to the Spitz for a memorial evening for Andy Roberts. A spot-on event, well-planned and organised, with live bands and talks, poetry, DJs, comics and art. It has his name throughout all of it, like so much seaside rock. He died last year in the process of putting together a similar mini-festival, so it’s entirely fitting.

I’m so glad I didn’t write the word ‘appropriate’ just then. There should be a ban on that much-abused word and its shameful sister, ‘inappropriate’ in the UK press and official press statements. At least for a while, in a kind of vocabulary detox. Other words are available, though sometimes you’d never think it.

I’m embarrassingly late, partly due to taking too long to decide which silk neckscarf to wear, and partly the fault of listening too intently to the new Scarlet’s Well album on my Muvo Slim, resulting in my forgetting when to change tube trains, and then wandering around Tower Hill for no reason on earth.

As the SW album features Mr R’s long-term friend and bandmate Jennifer Denitto, I hope I am forgiven. The Scarlet’s Well album is quite, quite splendid: fabulous melodies, witty and beautiful words, stop-start pop songs, elegant ballads, brooding shanties, and Bid recording new songs with a full band for the first time since the last Monochrome Set album in 1995. Because the band members are from varying younger generations, diverse backgrounds and musical sensibilities (whatever I mean by that), the sound is never ‘rockist’ or ‘muso’. I can hear Martin White and Bid’s shared love of Viv Stanshall bringing them together: Mr White writes half the music on the album. My own lyrics for ‘Narcissus In The Maze’ are in there, married to a White tune and a superb Bid vocal. I’m very, very, very happy about that. I received the album on Valentine’s Day. It was my only item of post (and whose fault is that?), but the CD was more than enough to make my heart flutter for a long time indeed.

I get to the Spitz and pass Ms Anna S on her way out to a gig by her boyfriend’s band The Boyfriends. Later on, I hear Mr S.P. Morrissey – himself a Monochrome Set fan circa 1980 – was in attendance. At the Spitz, I enjoy the various acts I do catch: Charlotte Cooper, Spy 51, Zombina, Ricky Spontane, The Raincoats.

Mr R’s cartoons, comics and sketchbooks are projected on the stage backdrop throughout the evening, and threaten to upstage the live acts. Favourite Andy Roberts cartoons: – a giant grinning hedgehog walks across a road, flattening a car. ‘Shave The Whale’- caption for said bearded mammal. ‘Magritte Thatcher’ – the former Prime Minister’s face obscured by a large apple.

What I didn’t know till tonight, thanks to Ms Cooper’s excellent anecdotal performance, is that he actually wrote a relationship advice column for a lesbian website, from his point of view as a token straight man. Called ‘Words From A Geezer’ or something like that.

I say hello to Ms Jenni S, Ms Tammy D, Ms Jennifer D, Mr Simon S, Ms Nine, Ms Charley S & Ms Kirsten, Ms Sarah G, Ms Caroline & Ms Lesley, Ms Amy P, Mr Roberts’s brother and parents, and the usual quota of people whose names I may not necessarily recall, but whom I’m on waving-across-the-room terms with. Like a kind of lo-fi Queen Mother. As my tube gets stuck at Euston, Ms Shanthi passes along the platform, and bangs on my carriage window to say hello.

The other day, two people told me – separately – that they’d only now realised how long they’ve known me, at least in terms of an association without ever quite losing contact. One was Lea from the band Spy 51, who I first met in my queercore music dabblings circa 1993, the other Tony O’Neill, formerly a Kenickie keyboard player in 1996, now a published author in NYC. His debut novel, ‘Digging The Vein’, is on my To Read pile. I suppose a grumpier response is to say ‘Thanks for reminding me how old I am!’ But no, I’m grateful. All I ever wanted to be was a fixed point in other people’s changing worlds. A harmless, if fragile, landmark.

I’d have liked to known the floppy-haired, skinny and schoolboyish Spitz barman better. He has the kind of young Julian Cope-like beauty (via the books of Mr Dennis Cooper) that it actually hurts to perceive. Ordering alcohol was quite a different experience for me. I could only afford one drink, but ended up buying three.

During the inter-band DJ music, I can’t help but sing along to the Jonathan Richman late 70s classic, ‘The Morning Of Our Lives’. Always thought how that song in anyone else’s hands could be construed as deeply twee, even patronising, as the eternal boy-man Mr Richman tries to cheer up his sad girlfriend in the lyrics. Particularly where he consults his band during the song:

JR: Dear, I asked Leroy and Asa and D. Sharpe, and they said,
Band (for it is they): Yeah, yeah, yeah…
JR: Don’t you love her too?
Band: Yes, we do!
JR: Then tell her she’s okay.
Band: You’re okay, you’re okay…
JR: Tell her she’s all right.
Band: You’re all right, you’re all right…
JR: You’re okay, dear. There’s nothing to feel inferior about. You can do it. (etc)

If the likes of James Blunt sang this sort of thing, it would be hard to regard as anything short of trite, even embarrassing. But Jonathan Richman is so utterly free from irony or cynicism, so sincere in his childlike-ness (the tune even resembles the theme from Sesame Street) that the song not only works but is really very moving indeed. And for me its spirit perfectly recalls that most uncommon and impressive of Mr Roberts’s character traits – his unconditional encouragement for the potential of others.

“We’re young NOW. Right now’s when we can enjoy it.
Now’s the time for us to have faith in what we can do….
And our time is now, we can do anything you really believe in.
Our time is now, here in the morning of our lives.”

Boiling alive in my own frustration. Riddled with uncertainty. Saturated with penury, debt, self-directed anger, resentment, bitterness, cynicism, and coruscating envy of those with success and money.

Quite happy with my hair.

I’m brutally clearing out clutter, mainly books. Going by the vague rule that if one doesn’t touch a book in the last year, one will never touch it. Not really.

And I’ve realised that there’s an awful lot of books cluttering up my shelves which were lent to me by others. People lend me books all the time, even when I don’t ask them to. It’s actually going to take a huge amount of time and energy to return them all. I feel like the Gallery on ‘Vision On’ or ‘Take Hart’. “We’re sorry we can’t return your paintings…”

But I’ve lent books out myself, and really don’t care if I don’t get them back. If I miss a book, I have the fun of hunting down a fresh copy. If the book was irreplaceable, I really shouldn’t have lent it out. It’s a kind of statute of limitations. After a year, you should really decide whether you actually want it back or not. I would go further: always assume when lending a book to anyone that you won’t get it back. If that’s a problem, don’t lend it in the first place. Better to give than to lend, if only to keep the amount of stress in the world down. At least with libraries there’s the professional approach. With friends, the lending process can become fraught with guilt and fear of offending.

So, Dear Reader, if you have lent a book to someone over a year ago, I ask you now to consider if you really would like to see it again. If the answer is a resounding yes, get in touch with that person now rather than leave it any later.

Particularly if that person is me. Because I’m throwing things out…

An idle evening in with the TV. Start watching one of those Channel 4 ‘100 Greatest’ clipfest things, this time on Sexiest Movie Moments. I’m watching alone, of course. Have to turn off after a while, as the constant cutting from famous smouldering sex scenes to the talking heads of balding, slovenly t-shirted critics like Heat Magazine’s Boyd Hilton is rather jarring. Now, I mean this with the fullest respect to Mr H, who I don’t doubt represents the pinnacle of erotic pleasure to someone in his life, and suspect he’ll have a less depressing Valentine’s Day than me (it wouldn’t be difficult). It’s just grotesquely unfair to all parties to juxtapose his appearance with Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair.

These list programmes are enjoyably enough TV comfort food, but I always wish there were more clips and anecdotes from those genuinely involved with the featured items, and fewer rather obvious observations from whichever media tarts are available on the day.

Of the former, I’m intrigued by photographer Terry O’Neill’s tale of a magazine shoot featuring Raquel Welch in her One Million Years BC fur bikini. Except she was a few years older and strapped to a wooden cross. The implication being she felt crucified by that particular look, and feared she’d never really transcend it. As it transpired, Mr O’Neill never submitted the photo to the magazine: instead, it emerged in one of his books. He’d gotten cold feet about offending religious sensibilities. Plus ca change…

Watch The It Crowd, Graham Linehan’s much-hyped new sitcom. I find myself in that strange position of trying hard to enjoy something despite the bullying hype. There’s giant posters for this programme all over London. Completely unnecessary: no TV programme needs to be advertised on station hoardings, full stop. I also find myself struggling to ignore the studio audience laughter, which if it isn’t canned, is nonetheless intrusive and out of proportion. No laughs at all for the genuinely witty bits, gales of Bo Selecta-like hysteria when a character is on the toilet saying the phrase ‘Number Twos’.

Still, the sight of one character reading a Dan Clowes comic book (I recognise it as ‘Twentieth Century Eightball‘, surely making me more geeky than any character in the show) is reason enough to have me rooting for The It Crowd. They just need to stop hawking it like mad to train commuters, and let it quietly develop a following of its own accord.

Emerge from a post-January hangover of incapable gloom and general slump in productivity. Doesn’t help that the free NHS therapy has ended and I’m on my own, so to speak. Still, I have done the bit about staring at a blank page or screen until my head starts to bleed and cranked out pieces of writing here and there. Two thousand words for Neil Scott about the JT Leroy affair. I know there’s hundreds of similar articles about right now, but I bet mine is the first to compare Laura Albert’s impressively successful hoax with Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain and Catherine Tate’s ‘How very dare you!’ TV sketch character. Women portraying gay men, you see.

The current issue of Plan B has a few pieces by me, including one linking Alan Bennett’s latest audiobook with the current TATU album, indiepop band Pipas’s impressive 10-songs-in-20-minutes album ‘A Cat Escaped’, and Nico’s ‘Chelsea Girl’.

Last night – to Tom’s to continue work on the Fosca album. We’ve cracked open the big box of chorus pedals in an attempt to go a bit dreamy. I never understood why bands like My Bloody Valentine eschewed decent lyrics (if audible lyrics at all) in favour of startling snowstorm guitar sounds. As ever I want both.

A recent Friday: to Kirsten and Charley’s flat in Crouch End for a very modern pastime – a Big Brother Eviction Night Party. Essentially a shameless excuse for consuming drinks and snacks around the TV with friends. This year’s Celeb BB has definitely been the most gripping, and the result arguably says a fair amount about UK cultural life and concerns in 2006. Chantelle, the token non-celebrity, wins and thereby becomes a celebrity herself, albeit of the more precarious and disposable variety. A thousand newspaper columns and student theses about What Celebrity Means are born. Russell Brand tells Jade Goody ‘Meet your replacement!’, and he’s not joking. Chantelle must represent the average BB viewer / Heat reader. They like her, because she doesn’t threaten them. She reminds the BB voters of themselves, or someone they know.

Ms Charley describes her own current look as ‘Liza Minnelli Joins The Strokes’.

Ms Kirsten teaches young children for a living, and at Christmas is the recipient of umpteen boxes of chocolates from kids’ families. Even in late January, there’s still a few unscoffed boxes knocking about in their flat, and I’m only too pleased to help relieve them of this enviable burden.

On their kitchen wall are a couple of adorable letters and written exercises from pupils. I’m particularly fond of one noting changes made in the city since the Great Fire Of London.

“When London is rebuilt must have…
New houses built whith briks
No more people running whith bucit.
New fire engines when there is a fire.
hose for when there is a fire we can put it out.
No more tach roof houses.
No more teris houses.
No more dressing gown
and no more men werring tights.”

An evening of Soho-ness, playing the layabout pauper wined and dined by the successful and kind. Call round artist Sebastian Horsley’s place, with his cabinet of human skulls, photos of his own crucifixion, and clippings from the times he’s been on the front of the News Of The World. He’s a fellow Quentin Crisp fan, charming and friendly, which is the way it should be for someone who gets complaints when he’s appeared in the national media. Offend the masses, befriend the individuals. The opposite to left-wing newspaper editors, who like humanity but dislike people.

He takes me off to tea at Maison Bertaux, next to the Coach and Horses, which is filled with Japanese girls for some reason. Then onto the members-only Colony Rooms, finally completing the quartet of legendary Soho Boho drinking holes I’ve read about for so long. Groucho Club, French House, Coach and Horses – I’ve visited them all several times by now. But not the Colony till today. Up the famous green stairs to the tiny bar room. Homely and cosy. No Muriel Belcher anymore (as played by Tilda Swinton in the Francis Bacon biopic Love Is The Devil), but she’s alive in umpteen clippings on the wall.

‘See if you spot my own two artworks,’ says Mr H.

I spy the photo of his ‘crucified’ hand. The other is a Bacon-esque dark painting. We stop for a drink and raise a toast to carrying the torch. Chat to his friend Carla, who’s off to see Richard Ashcroft play in Camden tonight. Throughout his career with and without The Verve, Mr Ashcroft has been given so many second chances by the UK music industry – far more than other artists of varying form. O ‘Lucky Man’ indeed. Down one glass of red wine. All the Colony Room glasses have stencilled slogans provided by an artist whose name escapes me: ‘Thief’ , ‘C**ty’ (the Muriel Belcher catchphrase), ‘Robocock’.

On my glass it says, ‘Wanker’.

Spot a row of DVD sleeves wall-mounted above the doorway of the club as we leave. I wonder why they’re there. One of them is the cover of ‘Mysterious Skin’, far and away my favourite film of the last few years. I touch it on my way out. For luck, for respect, for thanks.

Onto the Marlborough Gallery for the private view of the new Maggi Hambling exhibition: portraits and sea paintings. Mr Horsley is one of the worm-faced subjects on display here, and his portrait is sold for what he says is several hundred times more expensive than the real Sebastian Horsley, a former escort. Guzzle a glass of champagne.

Thence to the Sartoria restaurant for dinner. I wasn’t invited, but Ms Hambling thinks I’m beautiful enough to be squeezed in. Among our party is George Melly, who gives us a speech and a rude song. Ms Hambling is a fantastic host, pure Bohemian Soho, full of naughty gossip about famous names, and tales of Hadleigh, Suffolk, where she comes from, close to where I myself grew up. In fact, my father once taught art to her father, at a local evening class.

Chat to Ms Jane Joseph, who was at art school in the 60s with Ms Hambling, Ms Mary Miller, and Ms Libby Hall. The latter’s card describes her as a collector of dog photographs pre-1940. Eat a three course dinner, including duck and sea bream. Down many glasses of red wine. Am greeted by Rhodri M’s girlfriend Jenny, at a wine-tasting in the same restaurant. Kiss Ms Hambling and Mr Melly goodnight. I forgot to mention to Ms H that I once posed on her Oscar Wilde bench sculpture for a photo.

I feel very obliged to the lot of them, and must pay them back somehow. Like Mr Ashcroft, I feel a lucky man given umpteen second chances.

How Language Works, Part 379: Political Sex ‘Scandals’ in the 21st Century.

In today’s news, married Lib-Dem MP Mark Outen stands down from the party leadership contest and front bench after the News Of The World reveals a rent boy affair. He describes the 6 month tryst as ‘an error of judgement’. His words, his life and career, but not his phrase.

What an incredible modern phrase that is, up there in the Official Statement-Speak chart with the more cowardly ‘inappropriate’. I’ve seen the latter used to describe everything from a leaked email comment to the ejection of an old man from a Labour conference, to the shooting of an innocent man at a tube station. Except with the poor Brazilian gentleman, that really was an error of judgement; he was judged guilty – Dredd-like – by the police and shot dead on the spot. He was innocent. They made an error of judgement, and then an rather more irreversible error of punishment.

Yet it’s the shooting that gets officially filed as ‘inappropriate’. An ‘error of judgement’, on the other hand, is now used when officials get caught doing something they shouldn’t. Painting over The Deliberate with a thin veneer of The Accidental.

Civilians commit ‘crimes’. Politicians, civil servants and police make ‘errors’.

‘Officer, my bag’s been stolen!’
‘I’ll stop you there. You mean, your bag has been the victim of an error of judgement.’

It’s as if Mr Outen accidentally went online to the escort website, ‘accidentally’ visited the trick’s place, accidentally paid him, then accidentally kept repeating it all for months on end.

My own sordid confession is that today I bought the News Of The World in order to read the piece. I feel very disgusted with myself for doing so. To excuse myself, I have to draw upon that third euphemism for getting caught. It was in the spirit of ‘research’.

Such a sense of deja vu with the Oaten story. There’s even a MP character in the third series of Little Britain, forever apologising in unconvincing descriptions to the press about his ‘accidental’ cottaging exploits, wife and family at his side. O, for one politician to break the cycle for once. I wish Mr Oaten could have made his statement along the lines of:

‘Yes, so I spent six months having threesomes with young men dressed in football strips. So what? You’ve got to have a hobby.’

He’d get my vote if he did.

Mr Clinton proved that a private life should really be nothing to do with being fit to govern. If anything, people liked him more for being alive from the waist down.

In fact, even though this story leads the BBC News, it only makes Page Eight of the actual NOTW. Page One features the England football team manager’s corruption allegations. Oh, and a free DVD of ‘Highlander’.

So even the News Of The World readers don’t really care that much about the lives of politicians. At least, not as much as football and free DVDs.

In Britain, the idea that politicians must be dull, frigid husks in order to govern persists. To run the lives of the nation, your own life has to be lifeless. Charles Kennedy’s drinking made him interesting for the first time in his life, yet he had to go.

Seeing George Galloway mewing like a cat (in a rather kinky, sex worker client way) on Big Brother could possibly change things. Mr Galloway, I strongly suspect, won’t describe his BB antics as an ‘error of judgement’, even though his Commons colleagues want him to. On the contrary, I think he’ll cite them as evidence of being alive and trying to enjoy himself.

Mr Oaten, however, is happy to be eclipsed by this story, as just another ‘3 IN A BED SHAME’ scandal, another Little Britain stereotype. I have more sympathy for him than for the rent boy, who clearly sold his story, or for the dreaded News Of The World itself, which exists purely to damage lives and uphold this out-of-date, prurient-yet-prudish, curtain-twitching side of the country’s political and sexual psyche. More interested in DVDs and Football Men than politicians, then chastising an MP for liking Football Men A Little Too Much.

The newspaper is as much a hypocrite as the MP. From the article:

‘The naked MP then got the rent boys to humiliate him with a bizarre sex act too revolting to describe.’

As I read this sentence, I’m instantly separated from the target audience of the newspaper, as is anyone with an IQ over 10.

The News of the World is only the news of A world, not THE world.

The language they use, and the language Mr O uses in return, are the real things to be shameful about.

Thoughts after seeing Match Point, the new Woody Allen movie.

Clunky dialogue, wooden acting, touristy London references. I wince at the Banksy graffiti, now as much a coffee table London cliche as Big Ben. Indeed, there’s ads on the tube for coffee table books in the January sales, and Banksy’s book is included. Very Basquiat, I suppose: the rebel beloved by the establishment. Jeffrey Archer having the UK’s biggest Warhol collection.

As seen in Enduring Love previously, the Tate Modern is the new double-decker bus. Puts me off going to that place ever again, really.

Scarlett J manages to be an asexual fat-lipped brat, a shame given her character is meant to be fantastically irresistible. Jonathan Rhys-M is too Malcom McDowell / Tom Ripley-esque and effete (at least here) to be a convincing heterosexual- he has more onscreen sexual chemistry in his scenes with Matthew Goode, the family’s son. I was watching a different movie in my head.

Various names from the Brit comedy and acting worlds are wheeled on and off. Mark Gatiss is a ping-pong player with no lines (!), while Steve Pemberton is a bland police officer with about three lines. Paul Kaye is a cliched cockney estate agent. When you’ve got versatile comedy actors at your disposal, what on EARTH is the point in wasting them? Ye gods. I’d kill for the chance to write scenes for them myself.

The movie picks up when murderous intentions are introduced, but this should have been foreshadowed from the off. It’s a thriller that only realises it’s a thriller in the last 30 minutes, as if out of desperation. ‘This drama really isn’t going anywhere… Oh, let’s make it a thriller instead.’

It staggers me how a whole movie can be allowed to be this bad, given the huge amounts of money, time and personnel involved. Someone should have gone up to Woody Allen and said, very gently and very nicely, ‘This isn’t working. You’re surrounded by fantastically talented people who know what a great script is. Ask them to re-write it with you. Ask anyone to re-write it with you.’

Mr Allen famously never re-watches his own films after completing them. He really, really should start doing so. How can the director of Match Point be the same man who made Manhattan and Annie Hall?

Okay, so what would I do with the script? Well, I’d enhance the Patricia Highsmith thriller elements, getting them in place from the start. Use the homoerotic chemistry between JRM and Mr Goode – think Hitchcock’s Rope. Put in some lines about how crowded and overrated the Tate bloody Modern is. Put some dark jokes in. Give Ms Johannsen a decent character – girlish, awkward and endearingly sulky rather than sophisticated-young-womanly. She still looks a teenager, for goodness’s sake.

There’s a great film here, but it’s not the one that’s been made.

Match Point is what happens when the entire UK film scene is too polite to tell Woody Allen that he’s wrong. Which says more about the English than anything in the script.

To the ‘Public Disordar’ club night at Camden’s Black Cap, for a Burns Night.

Celebrating Pete Burns of Dead Or Alive, of course. Currently in the Big Brother house; an absolute tonic. Some people have gotten in a huff about his fur coat, and the police were even called in to check the coat wasn’t a former member of an endangered species. Given the alarming reports of stabbings in London, I’d rather the police concentrated on protecting endangered human beings.

Meet up with Marc Massive Ego, whose club it is:

To the Camden Head for Martin White at Short Fuse. MW excellent: his song The Excitement Is Over At Last is a catty Sondheim-esque gem, along the lines of Could I Leave You from Follies.

Chat to Rob S and Lou FK, charming company as ever. Get a little drunk and silly with it, though more harmlessly (I hope) than the tedious heckler who was a pain in Simon Munnery’s set. Enjoy the ultra-skinny host, Nathan P, who’s sorted out his hair and trousers since I last saw him; from scruffy poetry geek to slick and sexy Franz Ferdinand-type. Also on the bill are a brilliant young comedy-magician duo called Barry and Stuart. The tall Welsh one who does most of the talking looks, again, like he’s in some sexy rock band.

I’m noticing this a lot lately. Not that I’m enjoying ogling sexy young men any more than usual (though I have been pretty lonely of late), but that people working in non musical mediums often seem like they’d rather be playing guitar in the Kaiser Chiefs if they had the choice. Possibly a grass-always-greener sensation. Novelists, artists, film directors, actors, all seem to be musicians manque. One artist told me he’d give his paintings up if he could change places with a member of a big rock band.

Book Publisher: You look like you should be in a band. There’s more fun and money being in a band, you know.

DE: (sigh)

People who look and dress like they’re in trendy indie bands, or wish they were in bands:
Cillian Murphy, rising Irish actor
David Tennant as the new Doctor Who
Russell Brand, comedian / TV host
Noel Fielding, comedian (The Mighty Boosh)
David Cameron, new Tory leader – Smiths fan, incredibly.
Tony Blair – failed prog rock musician
Jonathan Caouette, director of Tarnation – would be busking in NYC if he knew how to play (never stopped many)
Scott Heim, author of Mysterious Skin – failed rock drummer.
Daniel Handler – bestselling author of Lemony Snicket books – accordionist
Conan O’Brien, US chat show host – drummer who once lent his kit to Galaxie 500

The list of comedians who appear to want to be in bands is particularly extensive. I’m reminded of Bill Hicks’s pointless musical interludes.

A male thing, perhaps? Then I think of Smack The Pony’s baffling musical sequences.

Film directors, actors and comedians envy musicians.

Musicians envy directors, actors and comedians for appealing to more people across the board, and having a longer-lasting career.

Musicians are at best a soundtrack to something else – a film, a story, a commercial for furniture (Suede’s She’s In Fashion on the recent MFI adverts – the ultimate resting place for bands?)

Storytellers wish they were musicians.

DJs are the saddest people alive.

I need to work out what the hell I’m meant to be doing with my life. I am 34.