Somewhat late with this entry. Time just slips away. I have so much to do.

Wednesday: Fosca play the Brixton Windmill. An uncertain, compromised occasion, but I feel it goes well from the band point of view, and am happy with it.

Getting all four members in one room has become remarkably difficult. I honestly don’t know how other part-time bands manage to play at all. When there’s no financial incentive to play, one has to accentuate that it’ll be Fun. But playing weekday evenings is no Fun when fragile band members have had a long day at Work. And weekends tend to be reserved for their own individual Fun with lovers and friends. Or they have to do other bits of Work at the weekends too.

So getting hold of one member is hard enough, let alone all of them at the same time. If I start to moan at band members for not being available, they quite understandably get upset with me. And then it all becomes markedly less Fun than before.

Each time I’ve received an invitation to play a Fosca gig in the UK, either I wasn’t keen myself, or unavailable (even I make plans), or I was ready and willing but one of the other members wasn’t available. In the end, I thought the only way to play at all was to say yes first, then find who can play the gig second. Even if it meant just me and a guitar and laptop.

So for this Wednesday night in Brixton, Fosca are myself, Tom and Rachel but no Kate.

From the comments I get afterwards, some of the long-term fans would rather we didn’t play at all than play without Kate. But fans are rarely happy whatever the Artist does. It’s important to listen to criticism, but different people like different things for different reasons. And when you redo everything to fit their suggestions, they can change their mind. You have to do what pleases yourself, first and foremost. The band cliche about ‘if anyone else likes it, it’s a bonus’ should never be the case. You must still write to be read, perform to be watched. But when it comes to pleasing people too, trying to guess what they’ll like, all bets are off. I tried that before, with the initial Fosca incarnation, all proper rock guitar stuff. Some people still think I’m a fool to have stopped that, as it looked dangerously like becoming successful. But it wasn’t me.

Since the first indiepop Fosca gig with Rachel in 1998, I’ve not done anything that wasn’t 100% me, that I wasn’t happy with.

The David Lean 1945 film Brief Encounter is re-released in London cinemas this week. Incredibly, Time Out magazine has given it a damning review. According to them, these days it’s dated, hysterical, cold, unconvincing and irrelevant. They want to see Celia Johnson thrusting about on top of Trevor Howard, or nothing. Brief Encounter gets two out of five stars, the same as the Transformers movie. Die Hard 4 gets three stars.

Not that I’m comparing Fosca to Brief Encounter, but you get my point.

Back to the gig. Though it’s never about the money, we do lose out each time we play live, and that has to come from somewhere. Fosca do earn a little money, but it all goes on rehearsal fees, taxis to move equipment about, mixing costs, and so on. To make a living from music, it’s easier to be anything but a musician. Performers, artists and writers are often the last people to be paid. I don’t begrudge the sound engineer and bar staff for being paid out of the takings before the band get their share, but it can be terribly dispiriting to come off stage having given one’s all, having Worked like never before, and realising one has effectively paid to play, and thus paid to Work.

Many of our fans can’t make it to the Windmill this week anyway, even when it’s been booked for weeks. The Victoria Line tube is closed for engineering works by the time one goes on stage at 10.30pm. And it’s a School Night. And it’s Brixton. And, and, and…

Still, we do our utmost to make the best of the scenario. For tonight, Tom painstakingly learns to play all of Kate’s synth bits on guitar while working in his usual guitar bits at the same time. So we have a far rockier, more guitar-heavy sound than usual, which is controversial with some, but not me.

When the first Fosca album came out, I received an angry letter from a German gentleman. ‘WHERE ARE ALL THE GUITARS?’.

So maybe he’ll like the new album. And all the synth fans won’t. Maybe it’ll be too ‘rock’ for the indie-poppers, and too indiepop for the proper indie guitar types. Maybe they should all get Die Hard 4 on DVD.

Fosca never did quite fit. Which was always the whole point.

Anyway, I like the album, and so does the rest of the band. The melodies are catchy, the words are uncommon. One line from ‘Kim’ is:

‘If alcoholic sex doesn’t count, I’m a virgin’, spoke the hack accidentally out loud.

Frankly, that single line is better than most other groups’ entire lyrical output. But I would say that. And so I do say that.

For this gig, I finally bring my own pristine SM58 microphone (a venue’s own microphones are invariably dented and steeped in the gingivitis of a thousand Pete Doherty clones), and let all the other bands use it. The handsome and exuberant American boy who fronts the Besties covers it with his oral fluids, so I have to give it a bit of a wipe. And then I keep the tissue for later ‘research’. I’m joking.

All the other bands are terribly good, and very classic indiepop. So much so that the Parallelograms play a song that sounds remarkably like Talulah Gosh’s ‘The Girl With The Strawberry Hair’, which I bought when it came out, from Andy’s Records in Ipswich in 1879 or whenever it was. Then I realise The Parallelograms are actually covering the song in question, the C86 arrangements replicated painstakingly, like a Cutie Cutty Sark.

At the Windmill tonight there’s a merchandise stall selling badges and 7″ indie singles. I feel like nothing has changed since my days of regularly going to Sarah Records gigs, 1990-1993. A mixed feeling indeed. Sometimes one wants a world to vanish, in order to moan about it nostalgically. If the world keeps going, with younger faces at the helm, one is denied a certain tidying up, at the risk of saying ‘closure’.

Still, one hears 60s garage rock all the time, same old guitars and drums, same old set up. Nothing really dies. The new music is the old music with younger faces, that’s all. The decision to move on is therefore down to an individual’s inner changes, nothing external. So I have to move on. And Fosca needs to end.

How much of this 2007 indiepop scene is the fault of Belle & Sebastian – the Pastels fans who played the Hollywood Bowl – is debatable. Maybe it would have happened anyway.

The other band on the bill, Sweden’s A Smile And A Ribbon, are possibly the most immaculately stylish indiepop group I’ve ever seen. Very clean and doll-like in their polkadot retro appearance, just as they are in their music. Some songs are actually rather doo-wop and rock and roll in the 50s sense, but with minimum noise. One of them chides me later for not playing any of the older Fosca ‘hits’. I promise her we’ll play Stockholm soon.

Throughout the gig I’m doped up on painkillers for the arthritis (it’s coming and going), and thus think it best to not have more than one drink, downed a full three hours before showtime. So I perform while sober, but numb. An odd sensation indeed. My first ever gigs demanded a certain Dutch Courage, usually a full bottle of red wine. The result was being barely able to perform at all.

For Orlando, we had a strict ‘no alcohol before a show’ rule, a la Dexys. Then for most Fosca gigs I’ve tended to have a couple of drinks to get me loosened up on stage. Not tonight. And yet I don’t feel any more nervous. So I’m now thinking of trying a period of full sobriety for a few months, to see what happens. I’ll start it… at some point.

I ended up calling this week’s gig Fosca’s First Farewell Show, a la Barbra Streisand. The third album will be the last, but it’s not out yet, so we need to play a few more for when it does see the light of day. I’m sending a CDR to a label today.

But this depends on so much else that’s out of my control: the album coming out at all, the other members (Kate included) being available and willing, the right time and place.

From this week’s gig, I have learned that the next Fosca show must:

– feature all four of us.
– take place on a Friday or Saturday evening, with our set over by 9pm, for those who use the phrase ‘school night’, or have trains to catch. Or to anticipate problems with the Tubes.
– be in a London Zone 1 venue, for those who balk at going anywhere less central.
– feature a healthy amount of the older, synth-heavy songs, for those who complain we don’t play our ‘hits’.
– be booked at least three months in advance, in the hope of getting it into people’s diaries before they book something else. People are so busy these days. In London, it’s amazing any social gatherings of more than two people take place at all.

Or it won’t happen at all.

Ideally, I’d like to rent a space that doesn’t normally put on bands, like a bookshop or library. I’d hire a PA and sell tickets in advance. So it’d be like a private view or book launch, but with the new album on sale, and a set from Fosca. No support bands, lovely though the Windmill ones are. I want to play only to an audience of Fosca fans. There’s not many, but there’s more than none.

We also need to play Sweden at least one more time – ideally Stockholm and Gothenburg.

And Barcelona would be nice to visit just the once, given we have a slight fanbase there, too.

As we pack our equipment away, the Windmill DJs play Orange Juice’s ‘I Can’t Help Myself’, and Tom and I dance along, happy. It’s a perfect record that not enough people know. Should have been a massive hit. People are so hard to please.

The singer Edwyn Collins has a new solo album out next month. I know I moan about my problems and frustrations, but his (recovering from two major brain haemorrhages plus a bout of MRSA) rather put things into sharp relief.