Recently: to the top of 30 St Mary Axe, the London tower block better known as The Gherkin. As featured in the new Woody Allen film Match Point, the recent Doctor Who Christmas special (where its windows were blown out by aliens), and voted the Most Admired New Building in the World by a major firm of architects.

I am delighted to discover that the floor at the very top of the building is a VIP bar of sorts. The building comprises private offices, mostly for the Swiss Re company. The bar is staff and friends only. So to gain access to the top of this skyline landmark, you need to either work for Swiss Re, or know someone who does. So, via the kindness of my mother’s hairdresser’s daughter’s fiancee, my father and I paid a visit.

Best of all – there’s a dress code. ‘Strictly no jeans or trainers’. I’m in heaven, in every sense.

Acutally, I wonder if the real Heaven has a dress code. St Peter at the gates – “You’re not getting in looking like that. This is the Afterlife! You could have made an effort…”

The Bar itself:

Looking across to the NatWest Tower, or Tower 42 as it’s now known,and to Tower Bridge:

DE looking down on the world as usual:

To the 12 Bar Club for a wonderful concert: John Howard and Pete Aves playing a joint gig. Mr Howard is promoting his new album As I Was Saying, which I reviewed in Plan B declaring it my favourite album of 2005. I didn’t realise it wasn’t released until early 2006, but I suppose that makes me like all those proper UK film critics who nominated Brokeback Mountain in their end-of-year best-of lists, even though the movie was only released to real people last week. Those best-of-year polls are highly suspect, anyway. Non-blockbuster movies often do the festival rounds a full year before proper release, in order to garner the best possible ‘opening weekend’, poster quotes and national distribution.

My favourites of 2005, by the way, are:

FILMS:
1. Mysterious Skin
2. Tarnation
3. Palindromes

ALBUMS:
1. John Howard – As I Was Saying
2. Final Fantasy – Has A Good Home
3. Robin Guthrie and Harold Budd – Mysterious Skin: Original Soundtrack
4. Gentleman Reg – Darby & Joan

BOOKS:
1. Alan Bennett – Writing Home
2. Guillaume Lecasble – Lobster
3. Nina Antonia – Prettiest Star

I genuinely can’t think of anything else I really, really enjoyed as opposed to quite liked. That’s a pretty poor showing. Clearly I need to read, watch and listen to more new releases. Thing is, it’s just been obscure Victorian novels and Nico solo albums round these parts lately. Oh, and the new Best Of El Records compilation. ‘I Bloodbrother Be’ is still one of the most remarkable songs ever recorded. Having that next to classics by the Monochrome Set, Would-Be-Goods and Vic Godard’s sublime Nice On The Ice makes this CD essential to any discerning soul:

Back to John Howard. ‘As I Was Saying’ is his first new album in thirty years. In the productivity stakes, this makes Ms Kate Bush look like Terry Pratchett. Not entirely Mr Howard’s fault: he recorded albums, but either the labels involved declined to put them out or some other obstacles reared their unkind heads, and he understandably turned his energies to other pursuits. Mr Howard’s last proper solo release was his 1975 debut, Kid In A Big World, a treasure of early Elton John and Bowiesque cinematic melodies with arguably the greatest album sleeve ever forged:

Although commercially unsuccessful, the album became cited as a Lost Classic by those who write books about such things, and its CD release on RPM a couple of years ago generated new interest, not least aided by reviews in magazines like Uncut (proving their worth for once – there IS life beyond writing about Mr Springsteen every single month). So Mr Howard finally returned to the studio knowing that there were people out there who cared after all. The sleeve of As I Was Saying is particularly poignant: the fiftysomething Howard clutching a vinyl copy of Kid In A Big World:

At the 12 Bar, he performs most of the new LP beautifully, along with debut single Goodbye Suzie from the first album, and ends the night on a fantastic rendering of Mr Bowie’s Bewley Brothers – arguably superior to the original. It’s clear that this one Bowie song in particular has informed much of Mr Howard’s style, mixed in with vaudeville, Sondheim and Randy Newman. I can’t recommend the new album highly enough.

For this gig, he’s backed by fellow Cherry Red singer-songwriter Pete Aves, and they perform two sets comprising songs by both artists. Mr A’s pregnant-with-twins partner Sarah accompanies the two gentlemen on bass, guitar and keyboards, somehow managing to fit all these instruments plus amps plus her enhanced physical form into a corner of the 12 Bar’s famously tiny stage.

Mr Aves: You realise we’ve given a pregnant woman the most work to do onstage?
Mr Howard: It’s because we’re misogynist bastards, darling…

The last small gig I attended (aside from my own) was Sing-Sing at the Water Rats, where singer Lisa was equally encumbered with child. As these things usually come in threes, I suppose this means there’ll be a pregnant person onstage at my next scheduled gig. Which is Martin White at Short Fuse. Now, I know Mr White is multi-talented and artistically prolific, but I sincerely hope he draws the line at physically giving birth.

A car alarm chirps in Southwood Avenue. On for two seconds, off for two seconds, on for two seconds, and so on. Intermittent electric birdsong. It’s the middle of the afternoon, the car owner presumably at work. It drives me mad. I leave the house and go shopping.

Two hours later, it’s still chirping away.

Quite why car alarms that don’t shut off automatically after a minute are allowed to exist, I wish I knew.

It chirps on. I feel under seige.

Reading the news about our Opus Dei Education Minister and the storm over allowing sex offenders to teach, I am far more shocked to find a photo of Ms Kelly where she rather resembles me:

Apologies for the diary’s RSS feed going haywire in the last 12 hours. I’ve been renaming the URLS of individual diary entries with something called ‘Permalinks’, for the sake of Google. Clearly that’s the cause of the RSS efflux. It shouldn’t happen again.

Finally emerge from an extended spiral of bed-centred fluey gloom, convince friends and family that I’m more or less okay, and face the world once more. Onwards and upwards.

Today – polish off a live review of the womanly dream-pop duo Sing-Sing for Plan B Magazine. I muse on how guitarist & songwriter Emma Anderson looks exactly the same as she did when I saw her play Norwich Arts Club in 1990, then in her former band Lush. Sing-Sing are far more musically multi-dimensional and far less at the mercy of Faustian music scenes than Lush were, though I fear the latter matters more in the UK success scheme of things, as ever, but I’m happy to be proved wrong. The new album, ‘Sing-Sing & I’ is classy and contagious, the CD featuring a curious animated video about a transvestite courting a male mannequin.

To the Horse Hospital for the latest Dedalus Books event. It’s a showing of a new 25 minute black& white silent film, “Prayer-Cushions Of The Flesh: An Irrational Erotic Fantasy”, starring dapper pencil-moustached London club host David Piper and chanteuse Anne Pigalle. Adapted from a Dedalus novel by Robert Irwin, all manner of surreal and naughty things go on in a harem, including puppet giraffes, zips on mouths, stop-frame animation, fetish wear, tattooed nudity and more, though it’s more funny and sinister than actually explicit. Good value for the duration. Kenneth Anger would approve. The showing goes down well, and DVD copies are snapped up.

The event is also to launch Phil Baker’s ‘Dedalus Book Of Absinthe – Premium Edition’, and appropriately enough there’s free green stuff on hand. A chapter toward the back of the book carefully grades all the various available brands of absinthe, and gives the highest mark jointly to Mari Mayans (Spanish) and La Feé Parisian (French). The latter is served at this event.

I hadn’t realised that the whole business of setting a spoonful of sugar soaked in absinthe alight (without setting the whole glass alight) is specifically for a 1920s Prague recipe, known as ‘Bohemian Absinth’ (note Czech spelling, with ‘Bohemia’ referring to the actual place). The more traditional nineteenth-century Parisian drink is rather more sedately prepared with a slotted spoon, a sugar lump, and chilled water. I’m pleased about this; knowing my inner slapstick child, I’ve always steered clear of any drink that involves playing with matches. So Parisian Absinthe it is.

This photo was taken in Mr MacGowan’s Kensington Hotel, by Mr O’Boyle and his mobile phone. This would be during the early hours of Dec 23rd, following the Pogues’ last of three Christmas concerts in London. After the Brixton Academy staff had had enough of us, we retired to the hotel to continue the aftershow jollities. I can’t quite remember what’s going on in this photo, but I think I was having fun.

A clear, crisp, bright lunchtime. I indulge in my usual Christmas Day routine: feeding the ducks in Waterlow Park. Playing Santa to the coots.

I’ve rented out ‘Grand Hotel’ on DVD. A new catchphrase of mine is “Sorry, I can’t come to your gig / club / party / dinner. I’m having an attack of the Garbos”. They understand.

All by myself today. And I wouldn’t want it any other way.

In an obligingly seasonal gesture, a small robin approached as I was feeding the ducks:

Close up:

Other photos taken today: the London skyline as seen from Highgate. It’s a Bright Christmas, though a little chilly:

A young man playing football in Waterlow Park:

The Christmas Day noonday sun:

Highgate Village High Street:

In the window of the local bookshop there’s a display of Schott’s 2006 Almanac, labelled “Local Author. Signed Copies”. So, there’s one more piece of trivia to add to the umpteen lists and facts contained within: Mr Schott lives in Highgate. You don’t have to be a bestselling trivia goose to live in Highgate Village, but it helps.

His original compendium, “Schott’s Miscellany” was quite fun when it came out a few years ago, but clearly it made too much money for him to NOT shove out something – ANYTHING – with his name on, every single Christmas since then. Well, at least it’s his own bandwagon he’s jumping on. I wonder how many people received a copy of this today?

A VERY HAPPY CHRISTMAS FROM DICKON EDWARDS

(Photo taken at The Boogaloo, Highgate, December 23rd 2005. Thanks to Liam and Marios)

Last Friday: perform with Fosca at the Purple Turtle in Mornington Crescent, with Tim Ten Yen and Exile Inside, as part of The Fanclub Christmas Party. A Parisian fan, Ms Sheridan Quaint, gives me a bunch of lilies two days before the gig. They look very nice in my room, but I feel their usage could be maximised. So at the gig, I tape the flowers to the top of the microphone stand, and as if that weren’t enough, I festoon the rest of the stand with tinsel. I’ve done this before at solo gigs, but this is a first use of lilies for Fosca. I rather think I should do this at all future concerts, as my concert signature. It’s certainly far preferable to sing into a flower than an unadorned dirty old SM58 saturated in the oral bacteria of every previous band to play the venue.

The sound is excellent (hats off to Mr Mark, the venue engineer), the gig goes okay, and Tom in particular is happy with it. He gets through his first gig as a Fosca member without making a single mistake, while the performances of the more seasoned members such as myself are a little rusty around the edges. Still, we did pretty well for our first UK gig in two years. We just need to play more often.

I certainly feel more comfortable playing as a four-piece than as a trio, as we tried in Sweden. I have a thing about symmetry and even numbers. I also insist on playing an even number of songs in the set list. This is of course, fuel for those of my friends who are convinced I have a mild form of autism. One man’s autism is another man’s boyish eccentricity, I retort. It’s The Curious Incident Of the Fop In The Night-Time.

At the gig, even though I have my lyrics on a music stand to aid my awful memory, I can never quite read and sing and play guitar all at the same time, and I still manage to fluff the occasional line. It would actually be far easier to, dare I say it, learn my own words to a comfortably safe degree of recall. Like most bands do. Too much idling on my part, I fear. It must stop. Next gig, no music stand.

But I get kind feedback from the crowd, and from messages received days after the show. Ms Hazel, Ms Groom and Mr Gullo attend from the Bohemian Cabaret side of my life, and Mr G throws a white glove to me while I perform. Mr O’Boyle and Ms Scanlon from the Boogaloo side of my life also turn up without my knowledge – I didn’t think they’d be interested and am quite touched by this. Given the concert happens on the most popular night in December for Christmas parties, I’m touched that anyone I know has come along at all.

We perform a version of The Pogues’ Rainy Night In Soho, by way of a Christmas cover version. It’s not actually a Christmas song, but I associate December in London with freezing rain as much as snow, plus the arrangement of the original version is as sumptuous and colourful as Fairytale Of New York to my ears. Additionally, the author, Mr MacGowan, was born on December 25th. So you could argue all his songs are Christmas songs in a way. Actually, he shares his birthday with Quentin Crisp too.

For the gig, we tried rehearsing a version of Mr Cole’s Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire, but it didn’t really work. Whereas Rainy Night is pretty hard to mess up… though Mr Nick Cave’s version slightly annoys me. In his recording, I’m really not keen on the way he changes the scansion of the opening line:

“I’ve been loving you… a Long! (enormous pause) Time!”

When it should be sung quickly as if the two words were one, ie:

I’ve been loving you… a longtime…

I don’t know why that tiny detail annoys me so much, but it does. And who am I to talk anyway, as at the Fosca concert I slightly change the words, though I don’t actually realise it at the time. Instead of:

Covered in a cloak of silence

I change it to:

“Covered in a cloak of shadows.”

Ms Scanlon asks me about this afterwards, but I can’t answer. I thought I sang ‘silence’, but it came out as ‘shadows’. Perhaps it’s best not to dwell upon how my mind works.

Another reason for playing the song is as a way to say thank you to Mr MacG for his recent kindness toward me. But most of all, it’s because I just really, really like the song.

The audience contains the usual loud fellow shouting out things between songs. After we play the Pogues number, he barks “Who wrote that, then?”

Me: If you don’t know, why don’t you find out for yourself?

Drunk shouting man: Well, I’m asking you, now!

Me: Oh, someone else will tell you. Ignorance is nothing to shout about.

I was quite proud of this last anti-heckler remark, thought up on the spot. Though I did fear he might beat me up later. At another point, I reply to him (albeit I’m paraphrasing and embellishing):

“Just because you’re shouting out things from an audience, it doesn’t mean you’re more important than those who aren’t. Besides, I’m far more interested in quiet people. They’re the ones I write songs about. Here’s another one…”

(photos by Sheridan Quaint)