Apologies for this diary entry taking so long. Belated Merry Christmas. Tidings of comfort blankets and joy. Here is a bumper entry to warm you up.
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And so the year of the Monolith came, nudging the human race onto the next evolutionary step, onto higher planes of intelligence and civilised thinking.
And so, Melody Maker had to go.
1985: I am Second Trombone in Great Cornard Upper School Orchestra, Sudbury, Suffolk. I have a secret crush on First Trombone. He is older, taller, darker, richer, a popular boy with popular hair and all his own teeth. He swims like a fish. He reads trendy magazines I’ve never heard of. The one nestling under his sacred stackable orchestra chair this afternoon is big and inky, has a ‘Spitting Image’ puppet of Bob Geldof on the cover and is called Melody Maker. The boy ignores me and talks to his gaggle of female admirers. I am spotty, boring and alone. No one likes me.
1989: I start buying Melody Maker every week. I have left home, left school, and have started to wear long black overcoats. That’ll teach ’em. Unfortunately I do not care for The Mission, the main group associated with MM at this time, but that hasn’t stopped me pointing to various pictures of pop stars within its pages and thinking “that’s me, that is”. I’m hoping to attract cool young things in Ipswich. I throw my one and only house party, and invite everyone in my trendy drama class at Suffolk College. No one comes. No one likes me.
1993: I start writing letters to Melody Maker, usually pretending I’m a fat black goth girl from Bury St Edmunds. I chastise them for lusting after token girls in bands like the female keyboard player from World Of Twist. They print pictures of her alone rather than the rest of the group, for purely dirty-old-man reasons. I have my favourite writers: Simon Price and Taylor Parkes. I write them countless letters about this band I’m starting, Orlando. I never send a single one of them. I am living alone in a bedsit above a joiner’s shop in Bristol. I am hit on the head by a flying Marathon bar at a Voodoo Queens gig. I begin wearing make up, originally to cover up occasional bouts of acne, but I get hooked. I dance regularly at all the Bristol indie discos, in the hope someone will notice my nifty foxtrot to “Falling” by Chapterhouse. No one does. No one likes me.
1995: Orlando get their first mention in Melody Maker. It is a half-page live review by Simon Price, with a big picture of Tim to boot (and many readers do just that). I start pointing to various pictures of Orlando printed subsequently, and think “that’s me, that is.” I begin to go to countless aftershow parties and play gigs around the country. I am signed to a big major record label and release records. I have Gucci loafers and Hamnett suits and appear on televison. I meet and befriend Taylor Parkes. No one likes me.
1999: Price and Parkes no longer write for Melody Maker. It has a relaunch, becomes small and tacky, and starts regularly printing pictures of token girl in band Charlotte Thing from Ash, rather than the rest of the group, for purely dirty-old-man reasons. In its “look back at the Nineties” feature, the magazine officially wishes me dead. I start a new group, Fosca, and release my first records as a lead vocalist. I can’t even get them reviewed. No one likes me.
2001: The last ever issue of Melody Maker has a two-page spread on how fanciable Muriel Thing, the token girl in JJ72 is, with helpful comments from the editor of Loaded. The last ever cover star is Fred Durst from Limp Bizkit. This is the way Melody Maker ends, not with a bang but a wanker. Taylor Parkes currently uses my tumble dryer and owes me money. I am a purely dirty old man. No one likes me.
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Select Magazine ask me to become a regular columnist for them, along the lines of Dickon’s Zany Sideways Look At Life.
Being a columnist is actually something I’ve always thought I’d drift into naturally. I’d assumed that if you stood too long in one place at a London showbiz party and mouthed off your ill-informed generalisations, you were given your own weekend broadsheet column by default. Columnism is a very widespread concern at the moment. Even Q Magazine have employed Alex James from Blur to be their mock Jeffrey Bernard. Everyone who’s anyone either has their own column or TV cookery programme, or both. And seeing as I never cook, the column has to be it. Well, I suppose I could present a show about how to spend all day in cafes where the seats are bolted down, on one cup of tea.
In fact, Select want me to replace Him Out Of Mogwai. The one who unfortunately resembles the type of plump little boy popular in borstal sodomy sessions.
I send off my first column. Select Magazine reacts like Quentin Crisp did when I was going to meet him… by promptly taking the easy way out and dying.
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Eminem’s book is called “Angry Blonde”. Blonde, with an “e”, usually refers to a female with blonde hair. Yellow-haired men are blonds. Perhaps he’s just a big girl after all.
It does seems very fashionable at the moment for literary people to talk, quite seriously, about what a wonderful lyricist he is. Typical excerpt of his work (from “Amityville” off his latest album):
“My words are like a dagger with a jagged edge / That’ll stab you in the head / whether you’re a fag or lez / Or the homosex, hermaph or a trans-a-vest / Pants or dress – hate fags? The answer’s “yes” / Homophobic? Nah, you’re just heterophobic / Starin at my jeans, watchin my genitals bulgin (Ooh!) / That’s my motherfuckin balls, you’d better let go of em / They belong in my scrotum, you’ll never get hold of em”
The Spectator magazine compares him to Gerard Manley Hopkins.
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Tim shows me Digital TV. He is the only person I know to have it, and lets me watch David Walliams & Matt Lucas’s “Rock Profiles”, a series of extremely silly parody interviews of pop stars that was broadcast on UK Play. Their take on Blur is a riot, with Walliams as an outrageously gay Alex James. They perform a version of “Song 2” where, at the famous chorus, he flips his wrist, rolls his eyes, and, coos “woo-hoo!” in full Larry Grayson mode. I’ll never be able to hear that song in the same way ever again.
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Sophie Dahl, previously famous for being the only model in Christiandiordom that wasn’t stick-thin, is now famous for playing with herself, wearing nothing but high heels and a necklace (and having lost lots of weight), in a billboard advert for a perfume with a Frenchman’s name. It is the most complained-about UK poster advert in years, outraging radical feminists and Tory Wives alike, and embarrassing parents who have to explain her “act” to their children. One piece of graffiti, scrawled across a hoarding carrying the advert, reads: “PORN = ABUSE”.
To me, she resembles that dancing woman in the credit sequence to her late grandfather’s 80s TV series “Tales of the Unexpected”.
When Roald Dahl depicted her as the little girl in his children’s book “The BFG”, I wonder if he ever imagined she would grow up to distract the nation’s lorry drivers in such a manner? Bet that was “unexpected”.
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I’d been previously aware of a gay Doctor Who fanclub called The Sisterhood of Karn, but I’m now told that there’s a London-based society of lesbian Star Trek fans called Deep Space Dykes. Their slogan is, naturally, “boldly going where no man has gone before.”
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People who make records on an independent, professional or semi-professional level have to fill out PPL forms. These are for officially declaring who plays what instrument on whichever recording. Every instrument has to be included, even if it’s things like handclaps and fingerclicks. The PPL print a 48 page booklet listing all the various “contributor category codes” that one has to allocate to the various performers on a track. The following are genuine codes from the booklet:
FEE – feedback
FST – foot stamping
FTA – foot tapping
AMN – animal sounds
BRM – broom
BLR – bullroarer
QFG – quintfagott
As far as I am reasonably conscious, I have yet to suck on a quintfagott. Or indeed, roar up a bull. But I’m thinking of starting up a quintfagott-and-broom experimental jazz duo, solely to liven up the PPL admin clerks’ day a little.
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Sad about Kirsty MacColl’s death: her last album, the Cuban-inspired one, is really witty and tongue-in-cheek. I bought it at one of those “V Shops” that used to be Our Price. It’s hard to find the back catalogue CDs once you’ve gotten past the mobile phones, DVDs and Playstation Twos. Poor old pop music.
After MacColl’s album and radio series on Cuba, plus the “Bueno Vista Social Club” craze among the middle class Islington dinner-party set, Cuba has become gruesomely fashionable. So much so, that it warrants a mention on the last Half Man Half Biscuit album:
I still don’t wanna go to Cuba
Cause Cuba’s the new destination
Cuba’s the new Iceland
And it’ll be full of Italian Cockney Rejects
But the Manics heed not the words of Nigel Blackwell, and, seemingly keen to please the Chattering Classes against the Masses, are launching their latest album on Castro’s rock. “Boyo Vista Social Club” hasn’t appeared as a music paper headline yet, but it’s only a matter of time.
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I was recently asked to comment on the well-publicised romance between the 18-year-old Billie Piper and 34-year-old Chris Evans. I actually find the age gap (as opposed to the far more significant wage gap in Ms Piper and Mr Evan’s case) difficult to condemn as unhealthy, seeing as I number among my own friends one or two girls who only socialise with much older men, as well as several examples of men pushing or past thirty, who only deal with girls substantially their junior. Unkind friends have described that both types do in fact have one thing in common… they’re both self-deluding fools, and therefore deserve each other.
For my part, I was going to speak in defence of such couplings. I was going to quote The Virgin Suicides (“clearly, doctor, you’ve never been a teenage girl”), state how, in general, teenage boys are far less attractive (in so many ways) to girls of the same age than older men, and wax lyrical about a teenage girl’s sense of wonder and playful exuberance lacking in counterparts of said men’s own generation…. but then I realised I sounded like Peter Stringfellow.
I am, I hasten to add, currently single myself. “Blond suit-wearing performance artist, 29, with comedy teeth and curmudgeonly bent seeks similar of same or near age. Gender not essential, but helpful.”
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I meet a Rock Party Girl who tells me she once went up to Fred Durst and deliberately mistook him for Fred Dineage. The perplexed bearded rock star had to respond to questions about what it was like to present “How?”.
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Walking along Holloway road in the dead of night, my appearance solicits this response from a stranger:
“I’M SORRY MATE, BUT YOU LOOK LIKE MAX HEADROOM.”
I haven’t heard that one before, actually. Yet another one for the list.
This is the one excuse for wanting to be famous. So that one is allowed to look like oneself. For once.
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