Am typing this in a Stockholm hotel room. The tour’s going okay so far.<\/p>\n
Tuesday: two phone interviews from Sweden in the morning. Noon till 6pm sees a long but languid rehearsal session at Camden Zed One Studios, stopping at 2pm for one more Swedish interview.<\/p>\n
Tuesday evening: pack and prepare for the trip. Two stupid mistakes: I forget about the Bank Holidays affecting payment, and so have literally no cash to take with me to a foreign country (thankfully resolved the next day when the delayed payment goes through). The other one is to leave my mobile phone charger in the rehearsal room, necessitating a second trip back to Zed One in the evening. And much grumbling under my breath. Of course, one doesn’t have to be hostage to such devices at all, but given this is a trip where different people need to get hold of me at different times, the phone is a necessity.<\/p>\n
Can’t sleep with pre-tour excitement (or nerves). Watch ‘The Curse Of Steptoe’. It’s another of those new TV biopics of old TV entertainers. The usual line: Genius Is Pain, The Sad Clown, Successful People Are Never Happy. From Kenneth Williams to Fanny Craddock to Peter Sellers to Peter Cook to Frankie Howerd to Harry H Corbett. Very different people, but these recent dramas all tell exactly the same story – it’s a sad life bringing happiness to millions. It’s the Scott of the Antarctic Syndrome, the Feet Of Clay syndrome. Success is a happy ending in itself, so to go anywhere when telling the story, the requisite pain must take centre stage.<\/p>\n
Contrast this with autobiographies by celebrities alive today, which also tend to all tell the same story, albeit with the opposite arc: ‘First I was not famous and successful. Then I was. The End.’<\/p>\n
Still, the main appeal of these dramas is to see actors of the day pulling off impersonations of past legends. Jason Isaacs as Harry H Corbett is just fantastic.<\/p>\n
Wednesday, 7AM: cab with Charley Stone to London City Airport. Cab driver slightly racist, and comments accordingly on crime in Hackney as we drive through. I don’t engage him in conversation, knowing that there’s no way I could do so without coming out badly one way or another. Of course, what I really want to do is point out that a cab driver stereotyping race is in himself a stereotype. That’d shut him up, I think. Except of course, it’s me that shuts up.<\/p>\n
The thing to say about City Airport is that the runways are worryingly close to the Thames. Every take-off seems to pull away from the edge of the water at the very last minute, like the second thoughts of a self-drowner.<\/p>\n
Charley expresses annoyance in the waitress-service cafe, when the fresh pastry she orders arrives in a cellophane wrapper. Albeit with the word ‘fresh’ printed on it.<\/p>\n
The flight is delayed by the best part of an hour, and we arrive in Arlanda circa 1pm. Check in to the hotel, or rather the others check in: I have an interview with a pleasant young man in the hotel lobby right away. Then get to my room – small but lovely – and titivate myself to a degree of telegenic acceptance. Then straight to Landet to perform a two-song acoustic session for a Web TV channel. Landet is a cafe venue with the performance area upstairs. I think we do okay, though one of the songs takes about five takes to reach the end without messing up. I’m just not used to playing acoustic guitars; it’s so much harder on the fingertips than the electric.<\/p>\n
A teeth-pulling soundcheck, then a nice meal in the venue, then back to the hotel for another interview. My fifth in 48 hours. I’m only too happy to do every interview sent my way, knowing how hard the record label works to set them up.<\/p>\n
Back to Landet in the van – the venue is some way from the centre of Stockholm. Say hello to lots of people I’ve seen at Fosca gigs in Sweden over the years: from those at Benno in 2001, to those at the Poetry Festival last November. The venue is packed, with at least 150 paying to see us – the capacity. It’s far better to play a packed small venue than a half-empty large one.<\/p>\n
As for the actual gig, the sound is atrocious and riddled with drop-outs, and we lose the bass on the rhythm backing track for much of the set. It’s Fosca as the White Stripes. But despite this, we do our utmost to give the best performance possible, and by the end I’m losing my voice. Just as well we don’t play sets longer than 40 minutes. Though I also play ‘Rude Esperanto’ as a solo spot before Friday Bridge’s set, sing guest vocals on FB’s ‘Pigeon’, recruit FB back onto the stage to join us for ‘It’s Going To End In Tears’ as a first encore, then gasp out ‘Agony Without The Ecstasy’ for the second.<\/p>\n
The DJ at Landet airs Scarlet’s Well’s ‘Mermaid’ and the Monochrome Set’s ‘I’ll Scry Instead’. Perfect records, both.<\/p>\n
Stockholm weather is freezing, with several inches of virgin snow on the grass outside the venue. So I can’t resist running about just to hear that crunch-crunch-crunch underfoot. Another perfect sound.\u00c2\u00a0 Charley keeps singing a Prince song called ‘Snow In April’ or something along those lines.<\/p>\n
I’m exhausted, but having fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Am typing this in a Stockholm hotel room. The tour’s going okay so far. Tuesday: two phone interviews from Sweden in the morning. Noon till 6pm sees a long but languid rehearsal session at Camden Zed One Studios, stopping at 2pm for one more Swedish interview. Tuesday evening: pack and prepare for the trip. Two […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}