I’ve submitted an album review for Plan B magazine: “Has A Good Home” by Final Fantasy. It’s the solo project of Owen Pallett, violinist for umpteen Toronto bands. They said “no word limit: it’s for the web”. Regular readers will know this is something you should never ask of me. I do have a tendency to go into Alistair Cooke mode and ramble on about some broader subject that occurs to me halfway through. All very nice if you like seeing my brain flail and flounce skittishly before your eyes, but not so readable if you actually want to hear whether the album’s any good.

So I gave them a more concise piece, and present the offcuts below. The Gregory’s Girl quote is as remembered, so it’s probably not verbatim.

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Perhaps there’s something about the way a violin seems above the grubby indie band world. One can play it standing up, dancing about. Unless you’re Mr Chuck Berry, dancing with a guitar can look very embarrassing indeed. But it’s hard to look a fool with a fiddle. Is the violin the haughtiest, purest, most edifying of instruments? Would Mr Pallett’s life and work be quite the same if he were playing a trombone? Did he choose the violin because it suited his character, or was his character shaped over time by being a violinist?

An instant survey suggests itself. If you have ever played a musical instrument, Dear Reader, what was the reason for picking up that specific item? Did your parents have a thing for the oboe? Why did the tilted circles and spider-like poles of the drum kit speak closest to your heart? Was the bassoon the only one left on the list, and you were late getting to class that day? Just what is it about violinists that have all the fun, that get to play the catchy bits? I’m reminded of an observation on this theme in “Hymn” by Alan Bennett:

“An orchestra has a class system all its own, of which the strings are the aristocracy, the intellectuals the woodwind, and the proletariat the brass. The players take on the characteristics of their instruments, brass jolly and fat, clarinets and bassoons soulful and reedy, most of the raffish romantic players in the violins and cellos. Of course, it’s not hard for the strings, who so often have the melody, to seem transported and full of feeling. They have none of the handicaps of the brass, and had they to stop every so often to empty the spit out of the violins, it would be a different story.”

Lately I saw the unquestionably raffish and romantic Mr Pallett on the dreaded Jools Holland programme, sawing frantically away as part of The Arcade Fire. Wonderful stuff, but the perfection of the set-up did remind me of that less perfect, more decorative cliché which TV often indulges – The Rock Band Recruits A String Section. I’m thinking of the Manics playing A Design For Life on Top Of The Pops, dressing down with their own clothes but dressing the song up with a string section. Cue instant hit. Likewise The Verve with their Bittersweet Symphony, Oasis with their Wonderwall cello, and pretty much every Britpop band with a decent budget. Menswear’s fourth or fifth single down the line? Time to call in the violins. Even the original version of the most recorded Beatles song, Yesterday, is dominated by a string section. Guitars be damned, most real people prefer strings, really.

Even the most token and lazily-arranged of string sections will bring a tried and trusted illusion of ingratiating sweetness against an uninspired XFM-targeted guitar sound. Even the most rotten and tuneless rock song becomes a listenable and approachable Radio 2-baiting number that your mother would allow into the house. Poor old string sections- what must they think, phoned up only when some hyped indie rock band needs a lazy, desperate stab at a chart hit? No wonder Mr P refers to his lot as a musical rent boy. A gaming boy on the game.

Another quote suggests itself, this time from the film Gregory’s Girl:

“Is he still a virgin?”
“Wouldn’t have thought so. He’s been in the school orchestra for over a year now.”

So, if we’re all agreed that string arrangements in rock are usually a Good Thing, why not sack the dreary old guitar band and let the string section write the songs?

This may be one reason why the Final Fantasy album is a record so instantly classic-sounding, yet still tangential and clandestine.

I’m tending to leave announcements of my events to the Fosca or DE mailing lists, so if you’re interested in not missing out, Dear Reader, do go and sign up at www.fosca.com or www.dickon-edwards.co.uk.

Next Friday and every week after that (until further notice) I’ve got the following intriguing little residency.

LONDON – Every Friday night from July 15th.

More info at:
http://ebeau.co.uk/hp.htm

It’s all the work of Mr Xavior. He plans panel games and debates, and chat-show bits. A bit like on the radio or TV, but in a Bethnal Green bar. I’m doing it partly to shake myself into a creative and performance routine, and mostly because it sounds like fun.

Watch a documentary about the rise of Ms Abi Titmuss, a youngish blonde cypher of a woman whose face and body regularly dominate the UK tabloid press and men’s magazine covers at time of writing. The curious thing is, she admits to being a fraud as a celebrity and a fraud as a model. Her position, such as it is, is because she has realised how to make an enormous amount of money very quickly, doing fairly easy things and have a rather nice time doing it. It’s an opportunity that she’d glimpsed as the girlfriend of a famous man, then pursued with the dedication and relentless tenacity of a zealot. The tabloid spotlight first hit her as The Girlfriend of Mr X, while she was still working as a nurse in a London hospital, earning much less money for much less fun. The day she decided to get a PR person of her own, quit her job and ‘do’ fame, she felt she’d ‘paid her dues’ to the world, and wanted something more.

I can’t possibly blame her for that. But I’m just not convinced the hospital’s loss is really the media’s gain, and I don’t think she is either.

There are accidental celebrities, those who do something successfully enough that their name is known to millions of strangers, but who accept the fame as a necessary side-effect. Then there are deliberate celebrities, who actively enjoy and encourage the trappings of fame, but also like there to be something to point to by way of explanation for the attention-seeking. A song, a book, a film, a TV series. Something to qualify them. These two types have existed since the invention of showbusiness. It’s only recently that I believe a third category has come into being, of which Ms Titmuss is very much a member: disposable celebrities.

It’s an oxymoronic tag. If you can earn money from being a famous Name alone, that surely suggests you can’t be undone. But with Ms Titmuss, she admits she is not unique, that it will be over sooner rather than later. Blonde women willing to be photographed are not in short supply, and she has not made herself into anything more than a blonde woman with a name. Fame itself doesn’t really suit her. In one interview, she tries to say what she does for a living. She can barely describe herself as a model, though that’s what she technically is, because she says she doesn’t feel like a model. So you’d think she’d have something interesting to say about the nature of modern celebrity, about mass sexuality, about why she does it – money aside. But no. Money aside, there really seems to be no other interest in fame for her. It’s just a job she can do which is better paid than nursing. I’m fascinated and appalled at the same time.

If a celebrity gets on a train full of great thinkers and scientists, and the train crashes, the newspapers will report their name first. That’s what fame means. At the time of the tsunami disaster, one newspaper devoted its front page to an unsmiling photo of the great director and actor Richard Attenborough, because he’d lost his granddaughter in the tragedy. Other bereaved grandfathers were not given a look-in. Even when the great anti-showbiz DJ John Peel died, there were photographers at the funeral service poised to snap celebrities in attendance. The implication being, if a celebrity is involved with an event, the event is somehow elevated – even death or disaster. It can only be a matter of time before there is a publication devoted to funerals attended by celebrities: inevitably called Goodbye! Magazine.

During the BBC TV coverage of the Live 8 concert, a blonde woman called Ferne Cotton was employed to ask inane questions of celebrities in the backstage area, helpfully mentioning the word ‘amazing’ in every other sentence. The cameras cut away from a glimpse of exiled Zimbabwean singer Thomas Mapfumo at the Eden Project concert, in order for Ms Cotton to speak to Neil Morrissey.

Spend the late afternoon of the London bomb attacks in the Archway Tavern, with London friends old and new. Including David Barnett, now of the band The Boyfriends, who was one of the first Londoners I befriended when I moved here in 1994.

It’s the pub featured on the sleeve of “Muswell Hillbillies” (left) by that sine qua non of London bands, The Kinks. Today there’s a few less flat caps and few more Archway waifs with fantastic hair, but it’s otherwise unchanged. The album photo was taken in 1971, the year of my birth. My parents may have chosen to bring up children in Suffolk, but they met as students in the capital, living in Blackheath while Dad worked at an art bookshop in the Charing Cross Road. Consequently I’ve always thought I had London in my DNA. London brought them together, so London made me.

Ms Seaneen is at the pub, and hands me a CD of Bonzo Dog and Viv Stanshall songs. More Only In London types.

Today, as late yesterday, there’s a rather moving spirit in the air, celebrating the better qualities of the city and its people. Anger is the first emotion – anger at terrorists targeting public transport, where politicians never, ever go (unless there’s an accident to be photographed at). The people who suffer are those who can’t afford to get taxis or be driven about with security guards.

But that passes – perhaps more quickly than in other cities. London doesn’t like to get too sentimental for too long about things – Liverpool rather has the monopoly on that. One silver lining, apart from the cancellation of a ghastly Queen concert, is how people are recognising the capital in 2005 as a paradigm of unfussy optimism. Of annoyed sighs, but of adapting and getting on with making things better. Where that infamous English aloofness and fear of social embarrassment mixes with the capital’s international embrace, forming a unique resolve all its own. The strange convenience of the bus exploding directly outside the British Medical Association – where the nation’s top doctors raced outside to help. World convenience alongside frustrating inconvenience – another very London formula.

I think of the men on the platform at Old Street the other week who giggled at my appearance as I passed, shaking their heads and saying “Only in London. Only in London.” They didn’t mean it nastily, and I didn’t take it nastily. I’m now prouder than ever of that particular cat-call.

I’m in the mood for a Kinks song. A band that can be wry, sarcastic and satirical with one glance, then sincere and poignant (in a perfectly pitched tone similar to Ken Livingstone’s recent speech about the bombings) with another. Very London indeed.

Waterloo Sunset is far too obvious. Instead, here’s a lesser-known early 80s song of theirs, Better Things. Perfect for today. It even made me cry when I played it just now. But without being too silly about it.

Chin chin, you dirty old city.

Be an optimist instead,
And somehow happiness will find you.
Forget what happened yesterday,
I know that better things are on the way.
It’s really good to see you rocking out
And having fun,
Living like you just begun.
Accept your life and what it brings.
I hope tomorrow you’ll find better things.
I know tomorrow you’ll find better things.

I’m entirely safe and unharmed here in Highgate. Sorry to disappoint you, Unkind Reader. Woken up by a phone call from my father checking I was okay.

It’s just as well that I’m in a not-going-out-in-London mood at the moment. After a series of bomb attacks in town, London Transport has been pretty much closed down for the time being (tempting the Dorothy Parker quote about the dead president – ‘How can you tell?’).

The bombs were initially reported as ‘power surges’ on the Tube. Later it transpires this was an accidental interpretation rather than a deliberate euphemism, but at the time I assume the latter, and muse if this is the 2005 terrorist equivalent of the theatre fire signal, ‘Mr Sands is in dressing room 3.’ Anything rather than shouting ‘Fire!’

It seems silly at first, even insulting and deceptive, but when the level of panic alone can make a difference to casualties, one has to admit it makes sense.

The only time I understand you are meant to actually cry ‘Help! Fire!’ is when you’re being raped or mugged. The psychology of alarm.

Two pictures on the news take me aback before I turn off. One is a dark, cave-like photo of people walking along Tube tunnels. The other is of splattered bloodstains halfway up the wall of the BMA building in Tavistock Square. The stains are level with the top deck of the exploded bus.

Bill Gates speaking on eliminating poverty from the world, onstage at the Live 8 event –

“The best thing that humanity has even done… And now, Dido.”

Something cheering. Today’s mp3 offering is ‘Library’, a fantastic song by Cursor Miner, released far too quietly in December 2003.

It’s a bouncy, impossibly catchy and entirely sincere laptop-synthpop song with rough-boy vocals, all about how wonderful public libraries are. Possibly the only track regularly played at Kash Point that could also feature in a children’s educational programme. Dedicated to all the gorgeous librarians among my readership. As Mr Miner says, their kind are indeed ‘often sexy’. Though perhaps not in the case of Mr Philip Larkin.

There’s also a terrific animated video to go with the song, which I thoroughly urge you to watch.

Cursor Miner plays in London tonight, at Club Hemisphere. I shall attend before going onto Mr Price’s Stay Beautiful.

the library the library
it’s a place where books are free
the library the library
it’s a lot better than watching tv

the library the library
it’s a place where books are free
the library the library
librarians are often sexy

A thought-provoking comment from Momus, made while he was railing against the state of 2005 London:

I admire your dandyism, I think you’re basically what people become in Britain when they remain defiantly defensive of basic aesthetic values. But I think the danger is the same as the danger of being a satirist: there’s a possibility that you become nothing more than the mirror image of the things you hate and revile, a walking challenge to the challenge. And there are so many other things you could be, in so many other cities. You might even find that there are places where people think, dress and feel as you do, and that it’s nice to be part of a community rather than some sort of stubborn sacrificial lamb out on an increasingly fragile limb.

Granted, he was speaking from the point of view of a Grumpy Old Ex-Pat passing through the capital, seeking evidence to fit his argument. But it has made me think. I’ve lived in this one room in North London since February 1994. It was Bristol before that, Suffolk before that. I always loved the idea of living in London when I was growing up, and regard it as a kind of ambition realised in itself. But have I now been here too long? Are all my current problems just symptoms that the moss is beginning to choke? How can I know if somewhere else is better for me right now, unless I up sticks and see for myself?

I always admired Mr Quentin Crisp’s ability to live in a Chelsea bedsit for most of his life, but then he was really waiting until he could afford to move to New York. I am not and will never be Mr Crisp. Thank goodness – I’d have to say nice things about Mrs Thatcher and unkind things about music, and I’d have to happily speak on the phone instead of using email. I detest speaking on the phone; particularly in these mobile-dominated days where most callers have to shout against traffic noise, and then the signal breaks up. Added to which most calls to my landline number are by automated recordings of Americans trying to sell me something. Thank you, Alexander Graham Bell.

Which is where you find me tonight, Dear Reader. Considering my life, feeling too tired too often, feeling every one of my 33 years and more, feeling that I will never be anything more than too many people’s Less Close Friend (another possible song title…), that people drift in and out of my life with their Dickon Edwards phases. I have one of those too – it’s just lifelong.

And still no closer to finding and retaining An Appropriate Source Of Regular Income. I need something to get me out of this turgid, soporific, failing state where every waking hour is spent just wanting to go back to bed. Lately, I’ve found myself ashamedly spending energy trying to get out of clubs, gigs and gatherings I’ve been invited to, plumping for an Unquiet Night In. I realise it’s rather hard to elicit sympathy for that, Dear Reader.

‘Poor Mr Edwards. He gets invited to too many London parties. It must be awful for him.’

I could say I enjoy being alone, but that’s clearly not true either.

But what is it I need? A Sex Life? A Proper Relationship? Or could it be A Move? Certain cities suggest themselves: Edinburgh, Oxford, Brighton, Toronto, NYC, perhaps even Gothenburg or Stockholm. I’ve still not even been to NYC or Toronto.

Right now, I do feel weighed down by the might of my life’s To Do list. Where to start? And I feel weighed down by this room’s decade of accumulated possessions. Evidence of time passed rather than a life lived.

My mother told me the other day, ‘If there’s something troubling you, you either do something about it, or you stop worrying about it and accept it.’

So, I must do something. But oh – the effort!

To darkest East London for Andy Roberts’s funeral on a day of sunshine, lightning and eventually Biblical rain. Someone I used to see around is no longer around. Underlying sense of horror in the air, which I’m not prepared for. I’ve been to funerals before, but those were for my grandparents, both elderly. Death is not the great leveller if someone has died far too young, in a road accident. There is normal grief, and there is shock-grief.

It’s hard to say things like ‘superb turn-out’, and ‘fantastic service’ without sounding like you’re actually envying the deceased, or judging a life by counting heads at a funeral, but those two things are certainly true, and it’s proof that Mr R was certainly famous for more than 15 people. Touching, beautiful and poetic tributes, and an Order of Service that comes with a pull-out comics supplement – comics by Mr R, of course. A terrific touch.

I repair to a pub in Limehouse for the wake, drink too much and say too much. At once point I start a sentence with the Freudian slip ‘My boyfriend’s girlfriend…’. (meaning to say ‘my brother’s girlfriend’) Possibly a title for a song. Music played at the wake includes the Hidden Cameras excellent b-side ‘Heavy Flow Of Evil’.

Walking my way up from East Ham tube, I turn a corner too sharply and collide with a large Asian gentleman whose swagger involves swinging his arms. The result is his hand connects directly with my crotch as I pass. He apologises at once, and of course so do I. As I think John Cleese put it, England is where you say sorry to the person treading on your foot.

At the funeral, I relate this incident to Tim Chipping. He imagines the man being far more horrified than I, rushing home to scrub his fingers at once. To some minds I must resemble the sort of person who would rather enjoy such a collision, or even arrange it deliberately. All I can say is it’s the closest thing I’ve had to a sex life for some time.

A Poem for Glastonbury by Dickon Edwards

Pictures of teenagers wallowing in E.coli
Make me feel so terribly lone-li