Saturday December 19th 1998
Fosca are playing Club V’s New Year’s Eve party, Upstairs at the Garage (I’m a creature of habit), playing with Linus and “The Lesbian and Gay Community”, a band who apparently use instruments made up of bits of guitars I smashed in the former noisy Fosca. I wondered what happened to those guitars.
I’m mainly doing this for myself. I hate trying to Enjoy Myself for it’s own sake. So for once, I can think about rehearsing and singing rather than the dreaded Stroke of midnight, where everyone Strokes each other with all the sincerity of a politician kissing babies. And I sit hugless in some corner. Not this time. It’s the roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd. New member this time is Ms Farzana Fiaz, who also plays in a band called Anglocanadien. She’s recently cut her hair short, something people seem to be doing a lot since joining Fosca: Rachel and Cressida both now looking not unlike Twenties flappers. Farzana tells me of the time she sported an actual quiff at school, being a big Morrissey fan. She hums me an old Morrissey tune that’s bugging her that day, over the phone to me, and I name it, “Break Up The Family” off the album “Viva Hate”. She nags me about getting my act together, and I have to listen because she also takes classes in boxing.
I go dancing at Uncle Bob’s Wedding Reception Xmas Bash, where we play Pass The Parcel and, like Nero, bop the night away while war is raging in the wings, innocent Iraqis maimed and dying in this season of peace on earth and goodwill to all men, their crime being born into the wrong place at the wrong time. Taylor remarks that if Iraq gassed us all right now, in the throes of juvenile party games, it’d be a interesting and apt way to go.
Shouting on the bingo-caller’s mic is Billy Reeves, who formerly wrote wonderfully urbane and wry lyrics in the band theaudience, and is now doing similar Svengali-like pop activities with the likes of Martine McCutcheon off Eastenders (who, pre-fame, used to be in a pop group called Milan…. I bought their single, “Lead Me On”… it wasn’t bad, either) and Fosca’s own Cressida Johnson. It’s difficult to imagine the writer of such excellent lines as “the car was never tested/and neither were you” is the same rowdy DJ shouting “NO, that’s the BOYS’ present, give it to the GIRLS, now quick, the music’s stopped, unwrap it, …. hurry UP!”. The boys’ prize turned out to be a toy Uzi.
I go to see Charley play with Gay Dad at the swanky bar of the New London Theatre off Drury Lane. It is a building I was last in at the age of 13, to see “Cats”. Well, Mr Lloyd-Webber’s silly show is still going strong there, and as I walk to the venue, I have to sidestep clusters of German tourists marching the other direction, singing “Oh well, I never, did you ever see a cat so clever”
Got abused by a stranger with a ponytail and bad breath.
Him: “Weren’t you in that shit band on Warners? What were you called again?”
Me: “R.E.M.”
He knew Orlando’s label, but not the name… that’ll give you an idea of what sort of people were at the gig. Charley is a star as ever. Quite cat-like, in fact.
I enjoy The Pastels at the Garage immensely, and Marine Research days later at the Dublin Castle, mainly because both bands are enjoying themselves so much, and it’s hard not to be uplifted by unfettered onstage exuberance. Stephen Pastel even puts his guitar down and dances for “Speeding Motorcycle”. Amelia gives me a homemade Christmas card after her band, Marine Research, play. I’ve already made her one. It’s a photo of me. On the Wilde memorial. Hosanna In Excelsis!
Monday December 7th 1998
“I don’t recognize you. I’ve changed a lot.”
My hair is now white (with a touch of peroxide-created blue rinse effect) with gold roots. I am striving to get the roots the same colour as the rest, but they’re strangely resilient this time. The blue rinse will come in handy for my next career as stunt double to Thora Hird.
The peroxide has also thinned my naturally thick (bordering on the curly) hair into a newly floppy fringe of white and gold.
“Bosie has insisted on dropping here for sandwiches. He is quite like a narcissus — so white and gold.”
After saying goodbye to my father at Liverpool Street Station, I wander around to the Freedom Cafe in a time-killing fashion, and pass something I’ve never noticed before, a memorial to Oscar Wilde. Tucked behind St Martin’s-In-The-Fields, in a pedestrianised little avenue used as a rat run by the rush hour West End workers on foot, is a bench-cum-mock-sarcophagus adorned with a bronze bust scuplture of Mr Wilde smoking a cigarette, as if he was coming out of his coffin to chat to the person who decided to rest their feet there. At it’s base is the famous hope-inspiring quote “we are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking up at the stars”. It’s just by a real gutter. And in the heart of Theatreland too, where hundreds literally spend the night in the gutter (and tonight it’s -6 degrees Centrigade), one aspect of Wilde’s London that is as depressingly (and needlessly) prevalent today. What with that and the non-PC cigarette, the sculpture reminds one as much of Wilde’s modern status as an icon of anger and defiance as much as one of wit and literary merit.
At home, I watch the news, and it turns out the memorial was unveiled only that day, by Stephen Fry and Lucian Holland, Wilde’s 19-year-old great-grandson who is currently considering changing the family name back to Wilde again, its disgrace having somewhat dispersed after 100 years. Or at least mostly lifted, as the Daily Mail gets all hot under the collar about the ‘controversial’ memorial: “If Wilde had been alive today, he would be on the paedophile register”.
Mark Partridge tells me that the young, floppy-fringed and Bosie-ish Master Holland reminded him of me. I am chuffed.
Laurence says it’d be best to get a visit to the sculpture-bench in as soon as possible. “Before that cigarette is broken off by some drunken stockbroker on a Friday night.” Mark P. has just taken a batch of new photographs of me around Highgate and Muswell Hill, but I would like to get a new shot of me chatting to Mr Wilde on his coffin. Or lying fully down on it, rehearsing for my own demise, perhaps. And then there’s the newly gilded Albert Memorial… In London, everyone is a tourist of some kind. If not geographically, then socially.
The new single by Ash rips off Mike Nesmith’s “Different Drum”. Is it just me who notices this? I am bored stupid by much music around at the moment. Another Wilde quote: “The idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” Can anyone call Ash a dangerous idea? Orlando was definitely a dangerous idea, and I’m working on Fosca’s danger quotient… the make up and disco beats have to stay…
Steps are a tonic, though. Unabashed trashyness, the revenge of Pete Waterman. And Proper Music Fans are sent into paroxysms of indignation by them, which can only be a Good Thing. Steps will never make the cover of Mojo Magazine because to this particular strata of music fans, they clearly are a dangerous idea. Praise Steps! And pity Gomez!
The Air album is apparently this year’s equivalent to Radiohead’s “OK Computer” or Portishead’s “Dummy” or Bjork’s “Debut”: pure coffee table, London bar music. I do like it, but this stigma puts me off. Listening to such albums, I feel like a BBC2 documentary director stroking an imaginary goatee. I don’t feel…. middle class enough to enjoy such music.
Ashamedly, I am in torment about whether to get Tomb Raider 3 or not, purely because it features scenes on the London Underground. Curse this obsession with the capital and its imagery. Unlike books, films or music, computer games like this have no “cultural enhancement” factor at all. They are absolutely useless for anything else other than getting closer to the end of your life. What would the Queen Mother do?
For the Freedom Cafe event, I have my hair cut and styled (for free) by Soho Base, who decide to cement it into a horn-like quiff, a la “There’s Something About Mary”. But without the substance Ms Cameron Diaz’s character used. I look like a cartoon character. Which is entirely appropriate. Despite this, I am thoroughly upstaged by some of the other models there, who are cuter and wear a lot less clothes than me.
I go dancing at “Shimmy”, the new club run by Emmy-Kate and Marie, both formerly of the band Kenickie. They have clearly got their act together, because present is a photographer and writer from Minx Magazine. This, as far as I am aware, is a publication not unlike Just Seventeen, but with even more sex. I am asked once again if I admire Andy Warhol, and my shoes get photographed more often than the rest of me. It’s the Gucci loafers, you see. They’re starting to get a bit battered, but clearly haven’t lost their quality to impress. They were given to me two years ago by my neighbour, who works at Kenwood House, a stately home in Hampstead. He told me that the pop star Mr Mark Morrison had been filming a video there, and that the crew had left the shoes behind. Genuine Gucci two-tone loafers. My neighbour had no idea of my shoe size, but he clearly is magical is some way, because Cinderella-like, they fitted me perfectly.
For Cressida’s birthday we go to her local pub, the John Baird. It’s named after the inventor of television, Muswell Hill being the nearest shopping area to Alexandra Palace, where the first BBC television transmissions were broadcast.
LANDLORD: Closing time, everyone out.
[the Cressida Johnson party groans. They are the last ones in the pub}
LANDLORD: Come on. Remember ‘Andy Pandy’? Time to go home…!
ME: But didn’t you see that episode of ‘Andy Pandy’ where they had a lock-in?
Everyone else laughed far too hard at this remark, except the landlord. I thought I was going to get barred. I’m running out of places in Muswell Hill I haven’t been barred from yet.
I don’t mind the cold tonight: I’m in bed with “A Shropshire Lad”. Which, the blue plaque has it, was written in a house mere yards from this computer. When do I get my blue plaque? And what will it be for? “Here the bodies of the serial killer Dickon Edwards’ 47 victims were seduced and gruesomely murdered…”
No, of course not. That’d never fit on a blue plaque.
