Many blogs have open comment boxes. I don’t. Not for me. I prefer to have an email form on the website for anyone who really does want to get a message to me. A little like ‘Letters To The Editor’. It’s only a few clicks of the mouse away from the diary, by which time a reader would have worked out if they really do want to go ahead with their correspondence or are just bored and hey, it wasn’t really important anyway.

I would say about 80% of blog comments are entirely trivial and unnecessary. And that’s putting it nicely. It can be summed up in an equation. Internet + blog comment button + boredom = unnecessary comments, unflattering to reader, author and the human race. Many of such comments are by people who went to university, too. It does them no favours. It’s no good having a First in English from Oxford if the moment you go online, you turn into a dizzy 8-year-old girl.

If Virginia Woolf were about now, would she be posting photos of her pets and expecting the world to give a hoot? Oh wait, she published ‘Flush’, an entire book about a dog. Okay, bad example.

I went onto Myspace last night to find about a hundred messages waiting for me. Most of which were strangers plugging their bands or clubs. The others were, well, hardly the stuff of literary biography. No serious enquiries or proposals. The MySpace website itself was taking so long to respond that I just gave up. Life really is too short to spend hours at a computer pressing ‘delete’ and waiting for the page to refresh.

Too many areas of the Web have made it far too easy to generate pointless messages, and far too difficult to delete them. A decade’s blogging experience has taught me that asking people to write to you directly rather than post a public comment filters out all kinds of knee-jerk trifles, heckling for its own sake, and childish pettiness. There’s a place for that, sure. But I can only read so much of it per day. Once again, there just has to be a balance between Heat Magazine and the Times Literary Supplement.

There’s a feed of this diary on LiveJournal, and occasionally I take a peek to find a comment or two. I wish such commentators would email me directly instead, or I could miss something well-considered like this:

… but Dickon, DJing is creative, it has to be… There are people who’ve set up club nights which have had a far greater impact on people’s lives than most bands… Most good DJs also are musicians, they can match rhythmically, they know how to build a set, they are aware of the context of the music they are playing. See Erol Alkan or Larry Levan. And I’m not ashamed to say my residency has paid me a four figure sum over the past year, because I’m good at what I do, be it ‘just’ DJing… I could have just written, ‘it was good enough for John Peel’ here… But I do agree that ultimately first hand creation is the ultimate aspiration, because it takes more effort, not just some effort. Which is why I am going back to it.

You’re right, it is perfectly possible to be a creative DJ. Erol Alkan certainly is one, with far more ideas and creative worth than many derivative bands, who I don’t regard as creative in the slightest; more like joining in. I do like the odd Daft Punk, Death In Vegas, Basement Jaxx and Chemical Brothers record. They’ve all blurred the original artist / DJ distinction somewhat, and are very much in the ‘creative’ box.

Fatboy Slim is also a master of his art, though when I see footage of him performing to a massive festival crowd and doing his “arms in the air! make some noise!” gestures, part of me does think, “I miss the Housemartins.”

Regarding John Peel, I’d say he was more a broadcaster than an ordinary DJ, with his unique voice punctuating and branding his shows, which is far more creative than just playing records back to back. His voice was as important as his taste.

Still, that’s very true about DJs, club scenes and journalists influencing new bands. Though I would say they’re more catalysts and departure points, not destinations in their own right.

My point – and the Fosca song – is really addressed to artists that give up their songs entirely to become the more lazy, non-creative kind of DJs, slipping into a DJ career because it’s an easier ride and a regular wage. Less risk. More keeping your head down. Safer and more financially secure than marching up to the microphone and expressing oneself via an original lyric. But if you prefer it anyway, then fine. Personally I’d feel a bit itchy myself if I did it as my main activity. It wouldn’t feel entirely right.

God knows I’ve met many PRs, managers, TV producers and promoters who are far more original thinkers, smarter wordsmiths and indeed better dressers than the so-called talent they work for. They should be the ones on stage and on camera, not their clients. Essentially, I feel that if you do have a creative itch, it should always be scratched.

I appreciate the financial side of a proper DJ career is tempting, and it wasn’t easy to turn down offers of paid club work this month. But I’d made a promise to my heart that it was Latitude only for the time being, so I can think more about finally finishing the Fosca album. And because I don’t want to become a regular working DJ – it’s not really me. Just now and again is fine.

Which is a shame on a strict survival level, as I could really use the money. Still it’s better to be poor and happy than paid but itchy. And am I happy? Don’t answer that.

Anyway, at past gigs, I’ve introduced ‘Don’t Be A DJ’ (written years before I did any regular DJ-ing) with a kind of disclaimer:

“This next song… I don’t necessarily agree with in its entirety.”

It gets a laugh.