Sunday June 16th 2002

In today’s Observer, Barbara Ellen, the Julie Burchill you can eat between meals, criticises the male dominance of Meltdown, the annual unabashed middle-class, middle-aged, but definitely not middlebrow music festival held on the South Bank. This is the big London arts centre where everything is taken very seriously indeed. The people there even know how to mike up live bands properly. Despite my aversion to the general air of snobbiness, of an elitism that is genuinely connected to the real elite, the people who actually do run things (it includes the Royal Festival Hall, after all), I do prefer it to the more smelly venues in town, and would be quite happy if Fosca could play there forever.

Meltdown is ‘curated’ by a different person each year, usually a well-known figure of a certain age and the right kind of reputation: Scott Walker, John Peel, Nick Cave, Elvis Costello, Robert Wyatt, and now David Bowie. Mr Bowie has a new album out, the critical consensus calling it euphemistically “his best for years”. Which is what they’ve said about every single album of his since “Tin Machine 2”.

Once appointed, the curator then gets to choose the bill of the festival. And then a man in charge reminds them that their best mate’s favourite Nigerian gargling jazz quartet are all very well, but they need to sell some tickets here. The curator then suggests Level 42, featuring Mark King’s effortless mastery of the slap bass. The man in charge shakes his head sadly and draws out a list of a few choice crowd-pulling, but broadsheet-compatible names from the world of Fashionable Rock. “Whatever”, shrugs the curator, and mutters sadly into his cocoa about how things were better in the old days when you could leave your paedophile unlocked and still get change from a pound. Later, he does an interview about how he was always a big fan of The Radioheads ever since their first album, “Dummy” was played to him by his granddaughter Plectrum Adenoid.

Barbara Ellen complains that, in ten years of Meltdown, only one curator has been female: Laurie Anderson, “who nobody remembers or cares about”. She doesn’t mention that earlier curators Magnus Lindberg, Louis Andriesson and George Benjamin aren’t exactly household names either. And I care about Laurie Anderson. And I think Lou Reed does too. So that’s at least two.

She goes on to bemoan the male dominance of the Matedown bills over the years, and equates this with misogyny. Misogyny is one of those strong words frequently misused and freely bandied about a little too quickly by columnists who hope that by doing so, they’ll be immune to such accusations themselves. Foreign regimes punishing adulterous women with public stonings might be more deservedly described as misogynist. Booking Supergrass and Coldplay over Pam Ayres or Maureen Lipman is just careless.

Ms Ellen finally extends her complaint to the implicit sexism of the music business, which is fair enough, except that she claims female artists get overlooked in awards and critics’ polls. This is quite untrue. Every time Polly Harvey gets out of bed she wins some tacky gong somewhere. And Kate Bush recently received a Q Magazine award for not even doing that.

So, there’s really nothing to complain about after all. Ms Bush gets an award without having to make a record for years, Ms Ellen gets her column done without having to check her facts, and I get something to write about in my diary without doing anything involving heavy lifting.

Wednesday June 12th 2002

So sorry for the delay in new entries. With me, the more I leave things, the harder I find it to approach them again.

But there’s more to my reluctance to update than good old lethargy.

When I first started this diary in 1997, when the Internet was in black and white, when you could leave your wife unlocked and still get change from a fiver, online diaries were a comparative novelty. I was even something of a Minor Internet Celebrity by default. But now these things called “web logs” or “blogs” (I do hate that word) are everywhere, and everyone is crying out like at the end of Death Of A Salesman: “ATTENTION MUST BE PAID.”

Before the Internet, people knew full well they were simply one of billions. They just didn’t let it bother them too much. Now, they go to their computers, log on, gaze out at a sea of a billion faces and find out to their horror that the world doesn’t revolve around themselves after all. And it terrifies them.

If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound? And what websites was it looking at? And what kind of day did it have at work? And what did all the trees in all the other forests say about it?

Now everyone is talking and commenting till they are blue in the wrist, armchair experts and desktop columnists to a man. They natter on their mobiles, on their text-messaging and on their blogs, which as far as I can tell are just ergonomic diaries with adverts. I keep thinking about taking the plunge and converting this one to a blog by way of swimming with the tide but faster, but the third-party host feel of them puts me off. And the feeling of subscribing to a sponsored web community, signing up to an “account” (I am allergic to accounting of any sort), where you are invited to link with other “bloggers” and cross-pollinate comments, giving each other virtual high-fives and hollow hugs, REALLY puts me off. I’ll keep things as they are for the time being. I need to keep some way of feeling vaguely disconnected, being as I am from another world.

But I do like this recent development, and spend many enjoyable hours a week reading the web journals of strangers and acquaintances. I’m not telling you which ones, though.

Last night, as part of my continuing lifelong defiance of the laws of nature, I got something for nothing. I attended one of the much-gushed-about, quickly-sold-out concerts by Mr Brian Wilson, the one who once led the group The Beach Boys. This was despite not buying a ticket when they went on sale, because I’m not a big enough fan of The Beach Boys to warrant spending £40 (that I can’t really afford) on a concert ticket. It is a lot of money for a gig, even (as some people said it was) the greatest gig ever. I balk at paying anything over a fiver for anything.

Sold out concerts in London are not necessarily packed out. One reason is that industry guest lists at London gigs are typically huge, and many designated places are left unclaimed, based as they are on the off chance someone terribly important might feel the inclination to attend, along the lines of “Madonna Plus One”. And even the lesser media people are famously fickle anyway, asking for a guest list place, then feeling a bit fragile on the night and plumping for a date with the telly.

Another reason is that large amounts of tickets to any event with a vague air of popularity become quickly snapped up by hairy-palmed touts of no mother born, in the hope of reselling them for a tidy profit on the streets outside. In this case often £200 each. They do not always succeed. Whether put off by the rain or the touts’ badly judged prices, I heard from reports of previous nights that a fair few tickets remained unused. “Free” is my favourite price for a Brian Wilson gig, so I made my way to the venue with no ticket and, aided by a kind friend who DID have a ticket, sat in an empty seat once the concert had started. The ushers seemed quite happy about this and didn’t bother to check, as long as I didn’t smoke or take a glass bottle in with me.

All those beautiful songs, pretty much ALL of them too, plus the whole of the “Pet Sounds” album performed in full, sounding just like the record, except being recreated live by the main creator himself plus a faultless backing band. Suffice it to say, the show was the best £40 I’ve never spent.