Unpurged memories of Sweden. A lady collars me as I’m walking around the festival.

Lady: Oh, Fosca! ‘Storytelling Johnny’ is such a brilliant song!

Me (graciously): Thank you.

Lady: Though of course, you are not as great as Baxendale.

Me: Thank you again.

***

Monday last, 6pm to late: finally finish mixing the rest of the new Fosca album with Alexander M, who indeed is in the Highgate-based indiepop band Baxendale, or was. It’s not clear if they’re still going or not, even to himself when I ask him what their status is. But one hopes that Swedish lady and other such fans of both groups might be slightly impressed by the collaboration.

So we now have a completed album. Ten songs, forty minutes long, album title The Painted Side Of The Rocket. This is a reference to brother Tom and mine’s childhood games of the imagination, where we’d sit one side of a shaped and painted sheet of hardboard (a present from Dad), and pretend we were in a space rocket. Though the painted side was on the outside, unseen by ourselves, visible to those looking on only, we knew it was there and carried on as if we could see the outside as well as the inside. And obviously most of the time there would be no one else there look on. But it didn’t matter. We were in the space rocket, having adventures.

So it’s a comment on perspective of creativity, where the thing you make is never going to be the same as the version perceived by an onlooker, a listener, a reader. Records, films and books are different to those who’ve made them and those who buy them. And of course, it also manages to comment on how it doesn’t matter if no one else is there to look on. Creativity is a personal act offered to the world in the hope others will make their own personal connection. It’s an act of faith.

And then there’s the level of childhood nostalgia: this album is the first creative thing Tom and I have made together since we were children. As Tom Lehrer said rather unkindly, pop is music by and for children. Being in a band, making records, is something usually associated with young people. To do it in your thirties, particularly when you’re not full-time and successfully established on some minimum level, has a regressive, self-deluding side of it which doesn’t happen for those who make films or write novels.

You’re allowed to make your debut film in your forties (eg Red Road), or publish your debut novel in your fifties (eg A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian). But with bands, age really matters. Would Lily Allen be allowed to put out her first album at the age of fifty? The whole youth side of bands is something that fascinates me. New gods selling the influences of the old. Old chord progressions on young vocal chords.

So like most Fosca lyrics themselves, there’s an attempt to say at least three things in the title alone. And it doesn’t matter if no one else ‘gets it’. And indeed if no one else gets it, as in buys the album. The rocket trip has still been made. Creative acts still exist even if no one else looks on. I’m not holding my breath for a five-page interview spread in the broadsheet supplements. Though obviously, it would be nice. Frankly, I’ve got far more interesting and unusual things to say and even take a better photo than your average hyped band of the moment. But you expect me to say that, don’t you, Dear Reader? It only matters to those to whom it matters.

The next step is to find a record label to release it. One that believes in paying its bands (Shinkansen seemed quite unusual in this respect, given what I’ve heard elsewhere). It’s cost us the best part of £500 to finish, mostly going on Alexander M’s time, skill, and rental of a proper studio. So that has to be recovered for a start. I fear the DIY indie world rather expects you to have incurred a total recording budget of zero, as opposed to the thousands spent by bands on proper labels where day jobs are allowed to be left. As ever, I’m neither one thing nor the other.