Tuesday August 3rd 1999
Turned a corner in Archway today and someone looked right at me and said, “Oh no – another Dickon Edwards clone.”
Red and yellow and pink and green, purple and orange and blue… I’ve just had some surgery. Varicose veins. I have the body of an old man. I think Jimmy Saville’s got the one I should have by mistake. There’s been a mix-up.
Before, the registration nurse had asked me “Religion?”. “No thanks.” Perhaps I should have ventured one, and then had a Catholic or Hindu or Moonie out-of-body experience when I was put to sleep like an old tired and useless pet. Instead, the experience (my first time Under The Knife) was rather akin to that scene in The Matrix. They fixed a catheter on my left hand, pressed a switch, and something shot into me, quickly working its way up my arm. No going back now. Like Keanu’s liquid mirror engulfing him in order to deliver him to another world, when the anaesthetic reached my neck I started to choke, convinced I could taste it. The nurses held me back, and then – nothingness. No Other World after all. Not even dreams.
Sadly, they revived me after the operation. And so now and for the next week I limp around London, left leg swathed in thick layers of bandage (in this heat, too) and look even more strange than usual.
But it does mean I get a week off work, and can catch up on things like diary entries. Yes, I’ve fooled the Real World enough for it to offer me an Ordinary Job until I can get paid for being myself again. I work part-time (and in part make-up) at nearby Kenwood House, a historic Neo-Classical villa halfway between Highgate and Hampstead which doubles up as an art gallery and ornate furniture museum. To some, it’s best known as the permanent home to such world-famous paintings as Vermeer’s The Guitar Player and the greatest Rembrandt self-portrait, where the artist looks like Rumpole of the Bailey. To most, it’s that stately home in Notting Hill where Hugh Grant catches up with Julia Roberts filming some unspecific English period drama. The current temporary exhibition at Kenwood is a history of the artist’s model 1840-1940, featuring examples by all the usual suspects: Etty, Holman Hunt, Rosetti, Millais, Burne-Jones, Gwen and Augustus John, Stanley Spencer, Moore, Hepworth, Lowry, the Bloomsbury lot, and no less than two portraits of that well-known wartime artist’s model, Quentin Crisp…
So far, I have had more than one visitor ask me if I’m one of the exhibits. One gentleman told me I was only the second Dickon he had ever met. “The first is a chap at Watford B&Q. Terribly helpful. There’s nothing he doesn’t know about vinyl floor coverings.”
The gig at Club V went off without too much bloodshed, but I’m still unsure about how Fosca should sound, who should sing, and whether I should even bother with Pop at all. The more I leaf through the music papers, the less and less I feel I have anything remotely in common with that microcosm of confused priorities and bad sideburns. Which of course is the one reason Fosca should exist, as a kindred spirit to those who feel the same way. I flail about, auditioning as a gigs-only guitarist for the band Spearmint, and even writing to Tim Orlando. Though I’d only make music with Tim again if the results were guaranteed hit singles, and were at least as good as Madonna’s “Beautiful Stranger”, Steps’ “Tragedy” or Shanks and Bigfoot’s “Sweet Like Chocolate”. Otherwise what would be the point?
The Fosca show was covered in the free gay weekly paper, Boyz. There was one picture of me onstage above an advert for a bar called Cock and Comfort. Which is entirely appropriate.
Nic Goodchild’s label Something Velvet is gearing up to release the Nervous, London EP. Release date to be confirmed, but that’s no euphemism: it is coming out. It’s just that both Nic and I have been pre-occupied with our respective leg surgery: her right, my left. And now I’m still um-ing and er-ing over the sleeve artwork. But once I’ve sorted that out, it all gets sent off and turned into shiny new CDs, coins with which to buy Fosca a few gigs around the time of the release, too.
It’s a schizophrenic EP, with “File Under Forsaken” all lo-fi and ten minutes long and cavernous Galaxie 500 aural wasteland with my own lisping, whining vocals on top; balanced by “He’s No Help” and “The Followers”, which are cleaner, shorter, poppier, and feature Val Jones’ wry-and-dry folky tones. Some people can’t “get” this range of diversity, which is a shame, as I’ll have to take Fosca in one direction or the other in order to not confuse people. Despite the fact I write songs by and for the confused. I think it’s a maudlin masterpiece. Until the next one.
Advance mail order and any other enquiries can be made by e-mailing Something Velvet Records here. I was round Nic’s place yesterday, checking the artwork, and giggling smugly at my own lyrics. This is a common occurrence. I’m often to be found smirking on buses, entertained by my own inner relentless word-play and the eternal invention of epigrams taking place in my head. My mind is the world’s most pretentious Walkman.
At a bus stop on Camden Road, a middle-aged American visitor turns to me and says “you remind me of Kim Novak in Bell, Book and Candle.” That’s his opening line.
I have only three observations to make concerning the new Star Wars film. My excuse is that they seem to have been overlooked elsewhere. Which is something you couldn’t say about the film itself..
One of the Naboo fighter pilots is played by Celia Imrie, best known for her work in many a Victoria Wood sketch.
One of the Jedi Council is called Yarael Poof.
The Battle Droids bear a striking resemblance to Jacob Epstein’s 1914 bronze sculpture Torso In Metal from ‘The Rock Drill’.
Well, it makes a change from saying “it’s not as good as the first three”, doesn’t it?
