Thursday August 24th 2000

I’ve come to a decision: Radiohead are a national embarrassment and must be shot at once. Or at least deported. To Middlesborough.

Don’t get me wrong (said in my best Alison-Steadman-in-Abigail’s-Party voice). I actually quite like a couple of their songs. But as an ideology, they are singlehandedly ruining British music and British youth, by inspiring impressionable sixth-formers all over the country to equate faux-angst overcooked wailing, bad lyrics, entirely devoid of wit or humour (even Cohen has wryness, even their beloved U2 and REM don’t take themselves too seriously), and plumping for general self-deluding po-facedness with some ill-conceived idea of actual worth. Radiohead gave us Muse and JJ72. Thanks. Radiohead would explode if placed near a Motown record. Diana Ross’s “Touch Me In The Morning” contains more angst then they’ll ever contrive to disport.

Even their name is taken from a late Talking Heads song. A really naff one. Early Talking Heads would be fine… So why, then, are they allowed to live, worse, actively encouraged, unanimously, by the biz? Simply because they are at the heart of far too many people’s livelihoods: too many people in the Serious Rock Industry have vested interests in the perpetuation of both the band and all they stand for, every dour, dreary trapping. Result being: that dreaded phrase “Much Awaited New Album” everywhere I read, every week for the past year.

Not much awaited by me, dears. You’ll be the first ones up against the wall when the pop revolution comes. Small black schoolgirls on Tottenham buses are laughing at you.

Until that day of reckoning, Radiohead are continually held up as a precedent, nay, an acceptable, even preferable role model for glamour-free white boys with their irony-free Marshall amps and eyes set on the corporate Alt-Rock stadium career trajectory. I’m too fazed to even yawn.

Dear Susannah Yorke, if you genuinely hate your situation so much whilst being so concerned about cruelty to others in the world, please do us all a Benefit and stop making music. Signed, the entire population of Tibet.

Thursday August 3rd 2000

This week’s Most Hated Thing: men who spit loudly and manfully in public urinals. Why do they do it? Repressed foreplay for cottaging?

There are rumours circulating about certain band rules we have in Fosca. Yes, the one about the ban on trainers, long hair and facial hair is true. Every rehearsal, any band member caught “slumming it” has to run four laps of the car park chanting “Cleanse! Tone! Moisturise!” before we can begin. It keeps the grooming standards up for me and my doughty pop sentinels of love.

My dancefloor moves are entirely inspired by a lifetime of buying underwear in charity shops.

I’m reliably informed that Daphne & Celeste, the Proper Chart Pop Stars That Ageing Indie Boys Can Also Enjoy, have bought the Orlando album. I’m not sure to be more impressed by the fact they wanted to own a copy, or by the fact they found a shop selling it. Apparently they refer to me as “Dickly.” Which makes me sound like a cartoon dog with its own strip in the Daily Mail. Named and shamed!

I’ve had an interesting evening at the Borderline venue in London, where I had hoped to catch an excellent set from the Trembling Blue Stars, but instead found myself loitering at the back of the venue chatting to one David Gedge by the t-shirt stall. For some reason I got into a heated argument with him about which Altered Images songs The Wedding Present had covered. I was sure that, in addition to “Happy Birthday”, they had also recorded a version of “See Those Eyes”, while he insisted the track I was thinking of was in fact “Think That It Might”. “I should know, I was there”, he said with threateningly conclusive zeal.

Thankfully, I managed to swiftly change the subject by relating a recent comment my next-door-but-four-neighbour had made on listening to Fosca. They had maintained that my vocals strongly resembled, to their ears at least, “a gay David Gedge”.

“I don’t know about that”, the Gedgester retorted. “I mean, if “This Boy Can Wait” isn’t laced with latent homoeroticism, what is? Now push off, you’re casting a louche shadow on my Cinzano.”

And, do you know, he was right.