Jen Denitto reminds me of an amusing Andy Roberts-connected memory that we share, this time from the late 90s.

After spending a pleasant afternoon at a Spitalfields small press comics event Ms D, Mr R, Mr Darren Hayman (of the band Hefner) and I repaired to a local hostelry. It was a Sunday evening, and we had found ourselves wandering around in that weekend no-man’s-land part of London where the City merges with the East End. The only bar we could find open on these deserted streets was a rather bare and uncarpeted little room, brightly lit with bare wooden walls, taped music playing in the background but not too loud. There may well have been sawdust on the floor. A dozen or so drinkers were scattered around barstools and tables. It seemed homely enough, and we really had failed to find anywhere else, so we picked a table, got in a few drinks, and sat down to continue our conversations.

One of us remarked how odd it was there were no other female customers. Or even other groups or couples. Just ordinary-looking lone men, mainly in their forties or older, having a quiet drink. We were also aware that some members of this sullen clientele were openly staring at our little party. I’m quite used to that, of course, and dismissed the attention accordingly. It must be just me they’re staring at, I presumed.

After a short while, we were comforted to see a woman enter the room. Thirty-something, a bit washed-out-looking, fairly ordinary. Someone’s wife, I thought. She went to the bar, got a drink and chatted to the bar staff.

Then she stepped onto a little dais in one corner of the room and proceeded to take off her clothes in time with the music.

Our little group’s chat about sensitive indie guitar bands, Riot Grrrl scenes and compatible comic strips had been rather compromised by a strip of a entirely different kind. Martyrs to our embarrassed smirks, we drank up rather quickly and left.

At least now we knew why the pub solely contained staring lone men being a little bit too quiet.

A gentleman I’ve known, liked, admired and approved of was killed by a motorcycle this week.

I knew him as Mr Andy Roberts of Oxford and London, of the band Linus, and of many artistic scenes spanning music and print, genres and countries, appreciation and creation. A beautiful, kind and talented man is now senselessly, needlessly, pointlessly dead. Many people I know are upset, and I’m rather upset too. In the sphere of public media, I think it’s better to breed support than breed grief, and I want to do whatever I can to help those closer to him. Not least writing this diary, which is the one thing many say I am good at or good for.

Me: ‘I’m terrified of saying anything Inappropriate.’
The Reader: ‘Why break the habit of a lifetime?’

Cliches are so very hard to avoid when writing about somebody who has just died. Andy Roberts was an anti-cliché. And then of course, I find myself writing ‘in so many ways.’

There goes any attempt to be entirely sombre. Someone told me the other day that my public diary was ‘so delightfully funny’, which was all very flattering. But then she quoted an entry I had thought entirely sober and sedate, bordering on despair. I pictured her reading my future suicide note in fits of helpless laughter.

Regular readers will know that when I walk innocently around London, it’s quite usual for strangers to openly point and laugh at me. More now than ever before. On an Old Street tube platform last Friday night, three tall black gentlemen in Hawaiin shirts and shorts stopped their conversation as I passed, paused, then broke into fits of mirth. One of them shook his head and said, ‘Only in London. Only in London.’

What’s important to me is that the speaker was smiling as he said this, and it was a smile without cruelty or malice. Although it is never my intention to be a walking, waking source of public hilarity, I am pleased that I can spread a little accidental happiness as I go by. The same applies to my diary. If I were told today that I was actually the tragicomic figment of a bored German science-fiction fan’s unbalanced imagination, my life would finally make sense.

It’s probably better for me to stay accidentally rather than deliberately funny, too. There’s been many occasions where I’ve made what I thought was a highly amusing joke, only for people to not laugh, or worse, take it the wrong way, even finding the joke offensive. We do, after all, live in a culture of supreme carefulness, huddled around words like crystal. Words like ‘inappropriate’ and ‘offensive’ now bandied about with the kind of frequency the word ‘rations’ must have had in the 1940s. ‘Inappropriate’ is off the ration book.

My own sick and twisted taste in humour means that my primary reaction to all the Live 8 philanthropy was to consider having a wristband made with the slogan ‘Make Coldplay History.’ Once again, I apologise to Coldplay and their mothers. Though I do wonder if the mothers of the non-Chris Martin members could recognise their sons, were they not standing next to the singer at the time. (And again, I apologise.)

Mr Roberts had a distinctive and beautiful face, and only ever liked music that was interesting. He could never have been in Coldplay. No greater tribute. (That’s the last time, I promise. Sorry.)

So, stifling another cliche, if the sad clown hat fits – and for me, who I am kidding – wear it. I’d much rather be the ringmaster, a stately trapeze artist, a sexy acrobat, or at the very least Third Zebra, but so be it. I know I am disfigured with a certain innate clumsiness of both body and mind. I can only hope that this clumsiness more often pleases than upsets.

I say something solemn, turn to leave, then fall over. That’s fine. I just want people to smile when I fall over.

***************

And when it comes to my abiding memories, Mr Roberts really did have a great smile. A gentle, kind, wry, welcoming, intelligent smile. I could never imagine him with a smirk or a sneer or a malign rictus. In fact, the latter sounds far more like the name of a band he would have raved about, than an expression his countenance would entertain. I can imagine him buying the first Malign Rictus EP when it came out in 1992. On, oh I don’t know, Dworkin Records 10″ dogtooth vinyl or something like that.

I couldn’t possibly presume to have been anything more than an occasional and peripheral part of his life, but I have to confess feeling a certain admiration – or do I really mean envy? – for what I did know of him. Like me, he dipped his feet into many pools of experience: band culture, book culture, feminism scenes, radical theory scenes, DIY music scenes, fanzine scenes, comic scenes, and the UK small press comic scene that my father Bib is a fan of. Mr R managed to befriend my father and myself separately, before rapturously realizing the connection. This happened on an occasion when Edwards Senior and Junior were both in attendance at some DIY small press do. ‘Guess who Dickon’s Dad is!’ he told others excitedly. Or to some it might have been ‘Guess who Bib’s son is!”

Added to that were his equally inspiring commitments to adult education, proper jobs, and proper relationships. But unlike the dabbling dilettante, fence-sitting likes of myself, Mr R ensured he got his feet wet. When it came to the things and people he found involving, he got involved. And, incredible to me, he managed to have the energy and know-how to keep all such sides of his life in balance, alternative and mainstream; sensible adult worker, inquiring student gabbling to me at gigs about philosophy, and playful cat-like fanboy. For me, he was The Talented Mr Roberts: not just a talented guitarist and artist, but talented in knowing how to get and keep friends, how to be kind without keeping score, and how to live. I certainly envied him that.

I also admired his sincere and lasting dedication to feminist band culture and alternative queer culture, particularly for a straight male. According to one such lady’s lady, Mr Roberts seemed to know more lesbians than the average actual lesbian. He would often use words like ‘cool’ and refer to some spoken word performance artist by saying ‘she rocks’. Whereas these are phrases I would have to employ a stunt double to use myself, Mr R. could pull them off without sounding a snob, an American wannabe, or an ingratiating twit. I felt that the music and fanzine scenes he frequented could sometimes breed a degree of snobbery and wariness of outsiders. For me, Mr Roberts would often be the one person in a room of intimidating ‘scenesters’ that I felt I could approach and chat to safely, without feeling I’d get told off for NOT using the word ‘cool’. He was never, dare I say it, ‘up himself’. And that’s coming from me.

One last abiding memory. I was never the recipient of one of his famous compilation tapes, but I did once pop into Camden Waterstones, where he worked, to buy the latest Alan Bennett spoken word CD. Mr Roberts insisted on giving me a sly staff discount, even though I hadn’t come to any of his gigs for ages, or even seen him much full stop. I was taken aback by this, and I remain grateful. The CD was ‘Alan and Thora’, a compilation of Thora Hird’s Bennett monologues about dying. Paradigms of English tragicomedy. Which is where we came in.

Andy Roberts – the missing link between my father, Bikini Kill, and Thora Hird.

Splendid boy, all of him. I’ll never forget him.

Having acquired broadband, I’ve started to enjoy mp3 blogs. Everyone’s a DJ nowadays. With mp3 blogs, one gets to asks oneself, ‘if I could play the world one track right now, what would it be?’ Or at least, that’s what they should be asking themselves.

Treasures I’ve enjoyed lately include a live recording of The Arcade Fire performing the Talking Heads song Naive Melody (This Must Be The Place). With guest vocals from none other than its author, David Byrne. Then there’s Final Fantasy’s dreamy cover of the Joanna Newsom song Peach Plum Pear.

I’m tempted to join in a little myself. So today my finger points to the NYC group My Favorite. I first encountered them on the bill at the 2001 Benno festival, which also marked Fosca’s Swedish debut. The event was held in a forest clearing, next to a vast and silent moonlit lake. Instead of dressing rooms, we had our own chalets. The wine flowed, the crowds danced and sang along. Like Fosca, My Favorite seemed to be a band that Swedish music fans had particularly taken to their hearts entirely of their own accord.

My Favorite have a winning line in well-crafted, heartfelt and catchy indiepop. One song they played at Benno was so memorable to me that I could still remember it four years later. Michael from the band emailed me last week to say they’re playing the UK, so I finally asked him to identify that song he’d invaded my mind with so successfully.

It’s called Homeless Club Kids (link expires in 7 days), and is the song I’ve chosen to broadcast to you, Dear Reader. Please enjoy.

As should be the case with all mp3 downloading, if you enjoy the music, do buy the proper CDs. This track is taken from the double CD compilation The Happiest Days Of Our Lives (on Double Agent Records), which includes remixes by the likes of Future Bible Heroes, ie The Magnetic Fields in synthpop mode.

There’s more audio and video at the band’s website. I particularly like the small dog in the rather adorable video for the song ‘The Happiest Days Of My Life’.

My Favorite play a rare concert in London this Friday 17th June, at Club Hemisphere @ Underbelly, 11 Hoxton Square, N1. Support from Plans and Apologies and Strange Idols.

I’ll be there.

Shocked to hear about Andy Roberts’s accident via Jenni Scott.

Fosca are looking for a stand-up violin or viola player to join the band. Pass it on.

I’m tempted to ask Dickon of the Tindersticks. Partly because they appear to be resting at the moment, but mainly because I like the idea of speaking to someone else called Dickon.

Rather impressively, Plan B magazine is now on sale at my local newsagent of choice – Northwood News in Northwood Road N6. Filed next to The Wire, but I’ve never been attracted to that more long-running publication. It takes lesser-known music very seriously indeed, which is fine, but without any sense of joy or playfulness, which for me is less fine. The writers of The Wire like to celebrate music, but without evincing any signs of actually enjoying it. So much for Delighting The Heart.

As for Word magazine, well, it follows up an issue with a Bruce Springsteen cover with one, er, featuring ‘On Tour With Bruce Springsteen’. Any colour as long as it’s Bruce. I suppose someone important must have told them they had to pretend to be Mojo, or die. Such a shame.

‘And what do you bring to the party?’
‘A sense of trying to be someone else.’

Photo of self sent today from Richard Smith of Gay Times. Taken by Piers Allardyce, a charming man who once photographed Orlando at Club Skinny in Camden, circa 1995. Ten years later, he’s still snapping away and I’m still posing away in London clubs. In this case, Kash Point at Moonlighting, Soho, May 2005. Though in 1995, he couldn’t show me the results instantly via the back of his camera.

The lighting makes it look like I’m wearing nail varnish. I’m not. That would be overdoing it, even for me. Apart from anything else, the fumes give me a headache.

After having an email address for ten years, I finally get Broadband. The child in a sweetshop element has yet to die down.

The numerous BBC Radio Listen Again streams are a particular favourite. No excuse to miss anything half-decent on the radio now. There’s the mp3 podcasts of the intellectual discussion show In Our Time, currently holding its Who Is The Best Philospher poll, or Mark Kermode’s deliciously ranting film reviews on Five Live. For the film Palindromes, he manages to not only slag off the director Mr Solondz, but poor old Mr Brecht too. “Brechtian distance? I don’t need to be reminded I’m watching a film or play. I know I’m in the theatre, because I entered a building with the word ‘THEATRE’ on the outside!”

This week, David Mitchell, of the shows Peepshow and Mitchell & Webb, shines on Armando Ianucci’s satirical show Charm Offensive. Proof that, in the hands of experts (ie not 99% of people who write on the Internet), sarcasm can actually be the highest form of wit. He has this to say on the subject of Bob Geldof and the forthcoming Live 8 concert:

“I think he’s saying the real power doesn’t lie in the established forms of government. It lies in a man who by swearing can make credulous people assemble.”

Fosca at Cafe Kosmos, Gothenburg, June 4th 2005.
L – R: Kate Dornan, D.E., Rachel Stevenson.

Back from Sweden in one piece. We are looked after by Erika, Victor and the band Compute in Gothenburg; Said, Mikael and Dan in Malmo. Fantastic response from audience at Gothenburg – where they know all the Fosca lyrics far better than I do. The experience of watching an audience singing along to one’s own lyrics is one that makes everything worthwhile.

On the way home, I manage to set off the Gothenburg airport metal detector. The culprits are the metal clips on my braces. As in the types that hold one’s trousers up. For some reason the machine’s Stansted counterpart isn’t affected. Either the Swedish security devices are more powerful, or the Stansted device is deliberately calibrated to allow for old-fashioned trouser accessories.

Have to write up my notes as a tour diary for Plan B magazine, but readers may be interested to read the blog reports of my bandmates Ms Dornan and Ms Stevenson. Ms Dornan has an additional moose teaser here.

Big piece on The Boogaloo by James Brown in this week’s Time Out magazine. It concludes thus:

Holding court in the corner is inevitably [Shane] MacGowan, these days a Dickensian character who has a live-in butler who serves him sausages. ‘The butler’s a former New Romantic called Mr Dickon Edwards,” says [manager] O’Boyle. “He used to be in that band Orlando. I’ve made him the Ambassador of the Boogaloo. Only Shane could come to the pub with a butler.’

I’m rather pleased about that. Since then Mr O’Boyle has asked me to host bingo nights at the pub. I do hope these happen.

One of those emails that makes it all worthwhile:

Thanks for starting up Fosca again. Wish I could fly a quarter of the way
around the world to see you. But know that at least someone will be buying
whatever you guys manage to put out.

Currently struggling with programs to generate synthy basslines and beats, starting with the appallingly named Fruity Loops v5. Like website design, it’s about time I put in the hours and really taught myself how to do it.

Found myself saying this at a party the other day:

“I’m against the Conservative Party politically, but I’m for them sexually.”

Morning – find it harder than ever to get up out of bed and journey to the therapist. Aches and pains. My jaw has started to click when I eat, though there’s no pain. Never did this before. Started a month or two ago, when I began to sleep with these tooth-whitening gel-filled moulds in place, as per dentist’s instructions. Both dentist and GP say the clicking is nothing. Health consists of having the same diseases as one’s neighbours.

Sunny day. In a front yard of one of the houses on Highgate Avenue, two men are breaking rocks with enormous mallets. Work personified. And yet I consider getting out of bed one morning a week to attend a Belsize Park therapy session akin to a task of Mr Hercules. I could be breaking rocks in the hot sun, just like in Mr Strummer’s jolly song, I Fought The Law. And yes, before you write in, I do know that’s a cover version.

On the tube to the session, Claudia A gets on at Archway. I explain where I’m off to. She says “If everyone who found it difficult to get up and go somewhere every Monday morning needed therapy…”.

Therapist reminds me to get a job. Even the most menial employment would, he thinks, get me on the road to doing the work I really want to do. Work begets work. I’ve had all the time in the world these last few years, and what have I to show for them? Can’t argue with that, really. It’s advice I’ve heard elsewhere, too.

I have a second appointment in the clinic – a 3 monthly assessment with a youngish woman. A few days before, she posts me a lengthy questionnaire for to complete and bring to this meeting, where I offload more of my mind’s baggage. Effectively two therapy sessions in one day. And still I feel I’m barely scratching the surface.

I mention this assessment meeting with Mr S, the regular therapist.

“So, did you fill out the questionnaire?”
“No. I haven’t had the time.”

He laughs. Understandably enough.

What HAVE I been doing? I simply have no proof unless I write it down. Maybe if I write it down, I’ll realise just how much time I waste. Stare back at my wasted day, in the hope the next one will be more productive. It’s one of the main reasons for keeping a diary at all.

Afternoon – shopping in Swiss Cottage and Tottenham Ct Road for replacement musical equipment. Somehow between the last Fosca gig (December 2003) and now, I managed to lose a few essential leads, adaptors and so on. Occupational hazard. In Bristol I once knew a heavy metal-playing Japanese boy whose entire gig-playing accessories – pedals, plectrums, leads, etc – consisted of lost property from other bands’ gigs.

Read the latest issue of Word Magazine on the Tube. Feel a bit embarrassed reading this in public. Silly old Mr Springsteen on the front. I’m not manly enough to be seen in public with this. I’m not one of the editor Mr Ellen’s so-called Fifty Pound Men. These are a new social group he’s identified and rants on about proudly, like Mr Simpson and his Metrosexuals. And I suppose I’ve got my Default Men.

As I understand it, Fifty Pound Men are entirely comfortable Nick Hornby boy-man types, aged 30 – 55 (and ageing), with enough disposable income to spend £50 at a time in HMV or Virgin, on a mixture of DVDs and CD albums, often delving into the shops’ now permanent 3 For 2 sales. It’s the fact they’re coming home with physical goods, rather than downloading the content on the Net. Satisfying the male hunter-gatherer instinct. Where once was bison and antelope, now it’s Coldplay and Aimee Mann. They’re meant to be quietly saving the music industry.

Evening – with Ms Silke and Mr Sam to the Phoenix to see the latest Todd Solondz film, Palindromes. His usual black comedy mix of non-monstrous paedophiles (2 this time), cold sex, suburban garden teeth and anti-Disney children. Utterly original and marvellous, despite what some reviewers think, wrongly. Definitely my favourite of his works so far. I never quite enjoyed Happiness as much as others seemed to. I felt the segments about the paedophile and the obscene phone caller far upstaged the other stories, and warranted whole films in their own right. With Palindromes, Mr S takes just one story and works his episodic sub-plots within. It’s the tragicomic odyssey of a 12 year old girl played by many different actors, all of whom are superb. She gets to be several different teenage girls, one beautiful floppy-haired JT LeRoy type boy (who I naturally feel is not given nearly enough screen time), one enormous black woman, one small under-12 black girl, and the more well-known Ms Jennifer Jason Leigh, who I suppose now counts as a veteran actress. Ms Leigh has arguably been playing sullen teenage girls all her career – even when she was Dorothy Parker.

Thinking about this multi-actor device, I recall that the other hip US indie filmmaker called Todd, ie Mr Haynes of Velvet Goldmine and Far From Heaven fame, was last heard planning a movie about the life of Mr Bob Dylan. The single character of Mr Dylan was to be played by a bevy of different actors of different age, race and gender. I wonder if great Indie Movie Todds think alike?

Ultimately, I feel it’s wonderful that Mr Solondz is even allowed to exist, and have the sense his real masterpiece is yet to come. It’s a shame this month’s movie publicity cake has been swallowed entirely by the new Star Wars, with people acting like the bullied sheep Mr Lucas wants them to be. Just ignore Star Wars, I say, and hopefully it will go away.

Besides, Mr Sam’s seen Episode 3: Revenge Of The Hoodies or whatever it is, and safely tells me it’s rubbish. So that’s that.