Snippets from recent press stories about the Pogues, making me feel like a ghost within the gossip.

Contact Music / Ireland Online, 8th Dec:
The Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan infuriated band members by taking an impromptu holiday to Morocco when he should have been rehearsing with them. MacGowan suddenly reappeared in London, just in time to record a new version of the Christmas track Fairytale Of New York with singer Katie Melua for UK chatshow Tonight With Jonathan Ross.

A source says: “Shane is a free spirit. He thought he’d rather be exploring Africa than rehearsing.
***

From The Independent (UK), 16 December 2005, Pogues accordionist James Fearnley’s diary:
[At their first December rehearsal] We don’t expect to be seeing Shane MacGowan. He’s in Morocco, or on his way back from Morocco. It’s a mystery how he gets there without help, since [his manager] had not accompanied him, so we’re told. It’s a further mystery how he gets back.
***

Barry Egan in the Sunday Independent (Ireland). Sun, Dec 18, 2005:
No one had appeared to know where Shane was. There were reports he was in Morocco. Or Spain. So this was like a tip-off from the CIA about the whereabouts of Bin Laden.
***
But what could I expect them to write? ‘Fairytale Of Tangier: Who Is Mystery Blond In Shane’s Life?’ Still, it’s all good press for the Pogues concerts, and indeed the re-release of ‘Fairytale Of New York’ this week, which I urge all my readers to buy. A couple of very good reasons: it’s a benefit single for both the Justice For Kirsty MacColl campaign and the homeless charity, Crisis At Christmas.

Also, the likes of the ‘X Factor’ drivel really must be stopped from grasping the Xmas Number One. Apparently the TV talent show puppetmasters have even selected someone called ‘Shayne’ to front their latest aural atrocity. A typo to the throne.

It’s also Mr MacGowan’s birthday on December 25th. A Number One single would be a pretty good present, particularly as ‘Fairytale’ was denied the top spot on its original release in 1987.

***

Tangier, Morocco, early December, early morning. I coerce Mr MacGowan into joining me for breakfast, if only to sample the hotel breakfast room’s incredibly ornate lampshades and decor.

He grabs one of the ubiquitous bottles of mineral water, Sidi Ali, and suggests a quick photo opportunity.

“Here, take a photo of me with this. They could use it as an advert, heh heh.”

The bottle itself contained gin and tonic.

Mr MacGowan taking lunch on the terrace of the Hotel Continental.

DE on the same. Photo taken by Mr MacG.

Photos from DE and S MacG’s week in Tangier, early December 2005. I’ll upload one or two a day.

Here, Mr O’Boyle, landlord of The Boogaloo and general saint to fragile outsiders, joins myself and Mr MacG on the terrace of the Hotel Continental. He stayed for the weekend.

Here’s Mr MacGowan in his hotel room, re-reading Finnegan’s Wake. Deliciously, he was allocated Room 101 at the excellent ghost-ridden Hotel Continental in the Medina. Note that his bedfellow is not a person, but a pile of books. I get annoyed when some people compare Mr MacG to Ozzy Osbourne or the late George Best, as if all legendary over-indulgers are alike. I doubt those other two notably dissipated names are as literary-inclined as Mr MacG, whose collected lyrics were published by Faber & Faber. His travel bag included works by Joyce, Plato, Burroughs, Kerouac, Dorothy Parker, and the entire James Ellroy LA Confidential trilogy. There is decadence, and then there is Decadence.

One of Tangier’s late literary hooligans (either Mr Bowles or someone who knew Mr Bowles) described a local woman as walking ‘like a rope unwinding’. And this is how my mind feels today.

Mr MacGowan has not left his hotel room for two days. I insisted he let me in today, to check on his well-being. It’s difficult to tell. What’s healthy for him would be considered life-threatening for others. But he says he’s okay, really. And I feel relieved when Mr O’Boyle, the Boogaloo landlord and friend of Mr MacG for some years arrives to stay with us for these last few days. I go back to my biography about the Bowles’s scene by Michelle Green, “The Dream at the End of the World: Paul Bowles and the Literary Renegades in Tangier”. The page I’m on mentions Mr Kerouc not leaving HIS Tangier hotel room for days, trying to sleep with the noises of Mr Burroughs’s pederasty going in the next room. Later, I read this passage aloud to Mr MacG and he replies:

“I’ve heard worse things coming from a room next door, kkkksssssshhhhh….!”

I’ve come here with the Rough Guide To Morocco (bought, 2005 edition) plus the Lonely Planet guide for Morocco, Highgate Library’s copy. This latter turns out to be the 2001 edition and is therefore frequently out of date. I have now learned that you should always buy the latest edition of these things, even if they are a bit pricy.

But even the 2005 Rough Guide has errors. Of the two internet cafes it lists, one (Euronet) appears to now be a record shop, while the other (Cafe Adam) is tiny and dingy, the staff speak even less French than me, and I couldn’t get any of the machines to work. Instead, I heartily recommend the place I’m in now: Afrique Net, 4 Rue Imam Assili. Lovely well-lit LCD monitors, drinks and ashtrays and Mozilla Firefox ready to go.

Both guidebooks have different versions of street maps for parts of Tangier. Shops in Tangier do not sell street maps themselves, only road maps for travelling across Morocco. I got laughed in a Ville Nouvelle newsagent the other day for daring to suggest it might be an idea for a local firm to publish a proper multi-lingual detailed street guide to the city. If I were to move here, I’d definitely research and print up one myself: surely it would sell to tourists and travellers, even if the locals scoff at such an idea. To want to not get lost seems to be missing the point of Tangier. You come here to lose yourself.

Besides, there’s some debate as to what many streets are actually called – different versions in French and Arabic abound, and on top of that I’ve seen the names spelt entirely differently on official signs.

The Rough Guide is definitely the superior of the two guidebooks, at least for Morocco. Comparatively groovy, forward-thinking and non-judgmental, it even contains a Bowles short story at the back.

The Lonely Planet, on the other hand, can’t resist terse little judgements here and there, often bordering on the xenophobic. The writers come across like liberal backpackers fresh out of university who are secretly future Daily Mail editors. On the subject of Burroughs, Orton et al coming here to have sex with underrage boys in rooms off the Petit Socco, the Lonely Planet has this to say:

“There’s nothing quaint or romantic about paedophilia.”

Well, thanks for that searingly useful and enlightening tidbit, O Lonely Planet writers. Was that REALLY necessary to add? Here comes a moral bandwagon, you’d better jump aboard.

Mr MacGowan turns to the photos of the book’s researchers.

“No wonder. Just LOOK at these idiots. No wonder they’re lonely, kkkksssshhhh.”

The Moroccan hotel manager looks concerned.

‘Votre ami: il est malade? Vous voulez un docteur?’

‘Non, merci. Il est bien. Vraiment. Il est souvent comme ca. C’est de rien. Alors, c’est de rien pour lui.’

**********

An internet cafe, Blvd Pasteur, Tangier, December 2005.

This is going to take some getting used to, the fake-blond man thinks. And some time to type.

The fake-blond man, feeling like the world’s most naive Englishman, which he very possibly is, struggles slowly with the unfamiliar computer keyboard. Where’s the button for the full-stop? Oh, up there, press and hold SHIFT plus the semi-colon key. Must be less used here. The temptation to just type away as one would on a – he stops himself saying ‘normal’ – British keyboard is overwhelming. He types his own name without looking at his fingers:

Dickon Edaqrds;

In Tangiers, most people speak Moroccan Arabic, then maybe French or Spanish in that order. Putting it very nicely indeed, his French isn’t too good, and his Spanish and Arabic is non-existent. His travelling companion and employer has been here before and can speak a bit of Spanish, though on some days he barely speaks at all. Today the friend is confined to his hotel room, sleeping, reading, smoking and drinking. Mostly sleeping and drinking. The unitiated are often distressed, even upset to see him like this, but the fake-blond man is used to it. The Irishman may no longer be a heroin addict, but he’s still a gin and tonic and cigarettes junkie. To stop those, he says, would kill him.

Besides, as the Toothless Junkie told his Toothsome Secretary the previous day, ‘I didn’t come here to wake up.’ And he giggles his rattlesnake giggle: ‘KKkksshhhhhhhh.’

The friend, who has treated the Englishman to an impromptu week’s paid holiday here, is a famous Irish rock star. Or at least, famous to those who have heard of him. In Tangier, only what really matters really matters. People here earn a tiny fraction of the average Englishman’s wage, even a tiny fraction of the non-average Englishman’s wage, like the fake-blond man. He may be a housed beggar in his home country, but here he has the spending power of a minor aristrocrat. Which is what he always thought he was anyway. He feels wealthy, vulnerable and lost, but doesn’t mind too much. This is Tangier, city of dreams according to all of those dead literary hooligans connected with the city, whom he feels connected to himself: Paul and Jane Bowles, William S Burroughs, Jack Kerouc, Truman Capote and all their decadent pals.

What must the locals think of this pair? The nervous fake-blond younger Englishman in the white suit is older than he looks, but mainly because he hasn’t really begun to live. The older man with black hair in the big black coat gets annoyed when hearing himself referred to as English or American (‘I’m Irish! Irish!’); he looks and acts like he’s lived several dozens of lives. English and Irish; White Suit and Black Coat; Yin and Yang; Innocence and Experience.

Tangier is another planet, even more so than Tokyo. Which is perhaps why so many Western science fiction movies and TV, from Star Trek to Star Wars to Serenity, imagine that most settlements on other planets look like Tangier. People in scarfs, cowls and hoods mingling with the modern, ululating howls from exotic temples, streets which are really one-person corridors in buildings, desert and ocean vistas around the corner, drugs and street hustlers, the bizarre and the bizaars; indecipherable but beautiful alphabets, indecipherable but beautiful everything.

The Englishman sniffs away at the beginning of a cold, and stops typing in order to find a piece of tissue with which to blow his nose. Is there ‘une Kleenex’ pres d’ici? The place does have a toilet, but no toilet paper. He asks for some, and they smile and laugh as if this is an entirely unreasonable demand to make. You buy your own, you bring your own. He does have a pocket handkerchief, but it is only for show. Serves him right, really.

The Englishman decides to check his email. To be continued. He will be back in London on Tuesday. He has to rehearse with his band, just as his employer has to rehearse with his. Both men are known, if known musically at all, for their lyrics. One is playing at the Camden Purple Turtle, the other is headlining Brixton Academy.

Till then, he feels a little like the butler at the end of Citizen Kane.

A Fosca rehearsal for the band’s first UK gig in 2 years goes well, with my brother Tom finally playing in a band with me after all these years. Our parents are happy about this, needless to say, and I hope the fans are too. He’s one of the best musicians I’ve worked with, regardless. New song practiced: “In-Joke For One”.

***

I now have a part-time job of sorts, in my capacity as Shane MacGowan and Victoria Clarke’s sporadic Gentleman Secretary and Impersonal Personal Assistant. Victoria is planning a new TV and book project where the pair chat to various famous names about the pursuit of happiness. They’ve employed me to send out her proposal-cum-invitation to all the illustrious names on their list, and Shane has bought me my own little phone and fax machine. Within minutes of setting it up, I receive two calls from an Indian call centre trying to sell me deals on One-Tel mobiles.

Although I bridle when referred to as the Pogues singer’s ‘New Romantic Butler’, despite looking exactly like one, yesterday he did ask me to fetch his socks from the third drawer.

Last night – to see Bob Dylan at the Brixton Academy with Mr MacGowan, Ms Clarke, and Ms Clarke’s charming sister Jo. Somehow, we arrive a bit late and apparently annoy family members of Bryan Ferry by unknowingly sitting in their seats while they’re in the bar or something. I consider making some remark about Otis Ferry invading the House of Commons, and that what goes around comes around, but think better of it. In case they set the hounds on us.

Shane: Dickon, do you want to get the drinks in? Hang on… Bryan!

Bryan Ferry: …. (visibly peeved with us and trying to watch the concert)

Shane: Oh… Bryan Ferry doesn’t want a drink.

End up being moved from a seat next to either Neil Tennant or a Ferry relative who looks like Neil Tennant, to a seat next to the singer from the Stereophonics. Fairly safe to say we’re not mutual fans of each other’s music, but he seems a nice boy and is rather handsome in the flesh. Unless it was just someone who looked like the singer from the Stereophonics. I could go on like this. I myself am just someone who looks like Dickon Edwards. And writes and speaks like him. I keep thinking of that Alan Bennett quote from the documentary where he’s sitting for a portrait.

“When people say, ‘just be yourself’. What they really mean is: imitate yourself.”

I suppose Mr Stereophonics and I at least agree on Mr Dylan, who obligingly does rather good versions of Like A Rolling Stone and All Along The Watchtower, dressed in a fantastic red and black suit and hat. I spy the Oscar for his song in The Wonder Boys propped up on an amp nearby.

*****
Previously – to the Boogaloo for a magazine launch party. Except there’s a bit of a problem: no magazine. Due to some publishing mishap, State Of Play, a new music publication impressively featuring the Fire Engines on the cover, has no physical state to play with. But the party goes ahead anyway. This is very London – a launch party without the launch.

Someone writes to say they spotted me in a video for the band Readers Wifes (sic), looking very ‘Quentin Warhol’.

This would be the consequence of an afternoon spent in a South London bar earlier this year. I was part of an audience watching the group mime their song over and over again. No payment for this appearance: I think I attended the shoot partly because I heard there’d be free drink (which turned out to be just one free drink), and partly because I approve of the band. Tie-wearing male DJs in heavy make-up and tranny wigs who play the likes of Paul McCartney’s Coming Up at their club, Duckie. One of their songs has lyrics specially written by Julie Burchill.

I’ve not seen the video myself, but sometimes that’s the way things should be. A memory springs to mind of a BBC make-up girl I met a few years ago. Discussing my looks, I told her one reason I must never get fat is so I’m never confused with Boris Johnson.

‘Who’s that?’
‘You know, the buffoonish white-haired Tory politician, often on Have I Got News For You.’
‘Oh, I never watch TV.’
‘Really?’
‘No. I’m too busy making it.’

On the bus from Muswell Hill to Highgate, a large black woman with gappy, protruding teeth gets on, talking constantly, though it quickly becomes evident she’s by herself and is not talking to anyone in particular. Her utterances are a series of repeated phrases spat at each and every passenger in rotation, her head like an automatic lawn sprinkler.

‘You – you are all responsible. How dare you put children in care! You are all doing it. You killed my baby. You! You put children in care! Killed my baby. You all do it.’

Then she pauses, smiles sweetly at a man sitting near me, flutters her eyelids and asks him if he likes her necklace. He mumbles something minimal and kind. A moment later, she’s back with the shouted accusations, with no exceptions. The man is just one of Them once more.

I sit there impassively, trying hard to ignore the hard to ignore. But even this non-expression screams a certain passion. It’s the very English desire of just wanting to reach one’s destination without incident.

Back from Radlett with Tom E, mixing the first few songs for the new Fosca album. One lesson learned: it’s all very well putting down 47 separate instruments on a song (I’ve Agreed To Something I Shouldn’t Have), but mixing the thing takes about 47 times longer. By the time you’ve finalised the correct treatment of Hank Marviny Guitar #3, you’ve forgotten all about Kevin Shieldsy Guitar or Jimi Hendrixy Guitar or Juno 6 Synth Pretending To Be A Glockenspiel #9.

The simplest song of the batch, Kim, contains more or less the same amount of instruments as the version we’ve been playing live, albeit with Tom playing my guitar parts due to my – as Mr Bowie says on the back cover of Hunky Dory – inability. Kim was the fastest to mix and, strangely, sounds the most impressive. It must be that we’ve given the song room to breathe.

It doesn’t help that some days I turn up to the studio telling Tom “make it sound like Phil Spector”, while on other days I say, “make it sound like Nico’s solo albums.”

Nico produced by Spector? Hmm. I suppose that’s more or less the Spector-produced Leonard Cohen album, Death Of A Ladies’ Man. Which Mr S and Mr C all but disowned.

I, however, rather like it.

The first diary entry in the new format. I am indebted to Neil Scott of Noble Savage Web Design, for creating a brand new DE website incorporating the diary safely within its own virtual bosom. There’s still some minor tinkering to do on the archived diary entries, which stretch back to 1997, but otherwise the new website goes ‘live’ today.

Welcome, then, to the New Martian Chronicles. Do take a look around.

If you know about RSS feeds, use the little orange Atom and XML boxes to the right to be alerted to future diary entries.

If you’re a LiveJournal user, you can add the new diary to your Friends page with this link.

At Mr Scott’s suggestion, there’s some discreet Google adverts lurking at the bottom of individual diary entry pages. This is in the vague hope of paying off the site costs. I rather like the look of them, actually. The adverts are automatically selected to fit with the content of each diary entry. So when I moan on about my dentist experiences, this results in a small text ad for a tooth whitening service. Far from compromising the style of the diary, I equate these with the adverts found at the back of old 1940s Penguin paperbacks for Craven A cigarettes. ‘The Doctor’s Choice’.

So, after three years, I bid the LiveJournal ‘blogging’ community goodbye as an active member, though I’ll keep my account there to read the diaries of others. It is an excellent system, arguably bringing the likeminded but otherwise isolated together better than any other set-up involving computers and phone lines. But I have to conclude it’s not really the place for my diary anymore. As soon as I feel I’ve become part of a club, I feel I’m at its mercy. I can be pigeonholed, written off, explained away. That won’t do. A certain distancing is a healthier option.

I hasten to add I feel this only applies to myself. I remain a voracious reader of other people’s published diaries, whether they’re by Virginia Woolf (A Moment’s Liberty: The Shorter Diary. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell. Pimlico Books, 1997) or a teenage girl from darkest Middle America waxing lyrical about her love life to Internet Friends (which often means complete strangers) while hiding behind a photo of a kitten.

But once I’d turned off the public comments function on my own diary a few months ago, I felt I was missing the point of the whole LJ structure. With LiveJournal, a diary entry is encouraged to become the opening of a debate, a chat, an exchanging of information, or a coconut shy. All very well, but I started the diary in 1997 to give recent thoughts and events a permanence. Marking Time before Time marks me. With a public comments box, the permanence is gone, and the entry will never be finished. There, I want to say as I put down my pen, that’s an end to it. If further thoughts spring forth and demand to be chronicled in the same place, I feel happier they should be my own, chronicled as and when I see fit. Perhaps in later entries, perhaps not at all.

I’m reminded of what Katherine Mansfield wrote in her own diary about living alone in London in 1917, “If I find a hair upon my bread and honey – at any rate it is my own.”

If I wasn’t going to use the comments function, I concluded, I might as well not be on LJ at all. Once Mr Scott assured me a stand-alone diary was as easy to update as a community blog, the move was inevitable.

Apart from anything else, my mother reads the diary now. And my aunt. So I feel, as Mr Nelson felt 200 years ago this week, that this increasingly diverse nation of readers expects me to do my duty. To present them with a fresh diary that doesn’t favour users of particular system above non-users. A diary tailored for readers who may not want to go anywhere else on the Web. That’s the difference between a blog and an online diary. Blogs point outwards, encouraging the reader to look elsewhere, look away. Diaries point only within. Blogs are surface signposts; diaries are deeper destinations. To this extent, I’ve banned myself from putting links in future diary entries.

My mother must be protected from people at a loose end babbling on about the new Doctor Who to anyone who will listen. She gets enough of that at home with my father.