Fascinating interview in Metro the other day, with the always engaging comedian-turned-activist Mark Thomas. He’s a Green Party supporter, and like me often gets fools asking ‘Isn’t that a wasted vote, though?’

My response is usually to point out that no votes for the Greens are wasted: they’re all counted and recorded forever, and are USED to help the party know they’re doing the right thing, to indicate that people actually want something to change. An election is officially announced as a Notice Of Poll, because it’s THE poll. So to vote for one of the big parties purely because they’re more likely to win is like voting for your favourite film from a choice of two, where neither is really you. What’s the point of voting for something you don’t entirely like? A vote for Least Worst rather than what you really, actually want. THAT’S a wasted vote. As is not voting at all.

Mr Thomas puts it better:

MT: I’m a Green Party voter.
METRO: Doesn’t that seem like a wasted vote?
MT: Not unless you say what you want, you’re not gonna get it. I’m not gonna play the game of ‘let’s vote for who came second in the throat-cutting competition’.

Short notice, I know, but tonight at the Boogaloo there’s an ‘indie comedy night’, The OK Club. Nothing to do with me, but I feel obliged to publicise it as the venue’s Ambassador, and I’d like to see more live comedy at The Boogaloo. As long as it’s not the usual ‘trouble with airline food / difference between men and women’ drivel.

I’m also plugging this because Josie Long asked me to, and I think she’s fantastic. She was handing out flyers for this at the Latitude Festival.

So the aforementioned excellent comic Ms Long is hosting the night. Robin Ince is also mentioned as appearing, but given he’s also doing his solo Edinburgh show in Luton the same night, it’ll be interesting to see if he manages to do The Boogaloo as well. The Thameslink to Luton is very fast, but even so…

Anyway, I’ll be there.

Here’s the flyer details:
The OK Club: live comedy, music & DJs. Theme: “My Favourite Mix Tape”.
Thursday 27th July. Starts 7pm. £3 entry.
Venue: The Boogaloo, 312 Archway Rd, N6 5AT. Next to Highgate tube.
http://www.myspace.com/lesmarsh

The July Beautiful & Damned, last Thursday, starts slow but ends pretty well, with a decent amount of happy dancing people. The barbecue is cancelled, as the people organising it are convinced it’s going to rain that night. I go along with their fears and say fair enough, as I’m not the one who has to light the thing and serve the food. Of course, it then completely fails to rain. Still, if I’d been proven wrong in the other direction – the barbecue going ahead on my insistence and it raining – it would have looked far worse for me. A case of choosing the lesser of two evil outcomes.

Mr MacGowan & Ms Clarke turn up and dance. I’m wearing a white shirt, braces and one of the bow ties kindly donated by The General. Seems far too hot to wear a jacket, so I’ve gone to town with my hair by way of compensation, heavily slicking it down so it looks drawn onto my head in proper 1920s style. Mr MacGowan points out that HE’S happily wearing a black jacket, black shirt and tie, and is not bothered by the heat. “You’re a dandy lightweight!”

Meanwhile in Cardiff this week, sweltering skin-baring shoppers watch David Tennant running around in a full suit, as filming goes on for the Doctor Who Christmas Special. If both Doctor Who and Shane MacGowan can wear suit jackets in this heat, there’s really no reason I should let the side down. Besides, the Boogaloo is well air-conditioned these days.

Earlier, when I describe the night to Mr MacGowan, he replies, “So it’s a Fag Rock night, then?”

Well, who am I kidding. On one level, I suppose it is. But I like to think it can also be cool, or friendly, or strange, or camp, all depending on what angle you look at a club that plays Doris Day and showtunes next to David Bowie, Sinatra and the Divine Comedy.

This month we try out showing silent movies, projected upon a screen at one end of the room. It’s feared among the staff that people might just sit and watch the films rather than dance or chat to each other, but this proves ungrounded. I think if the film is black and white and comes with its own vintage caption cards (as opposed to subtitles), and is actually designed to be seen with music in the first place, people don’t find it off-putting to their dancing or conversation. The film illustrates the club’s music, rather than the other way around. Tonight we screen ‘Pandora’s Box’ and ‘Piccadilly’.

Also present: David Barnett & his mother, Anna S, Suzi L, Robin & Ellen, Emma Jackson, Anneliese, Ms Red’s Mr Ollie, Ms Hazel, Ms Mary. I meet a couple from Canada who are absolutely thrilled with the night.

El Records have accidentally sent me two review copies of their new Doris Day compilation, ‘Darling’, so it seems fitting to offer my spare CD as an extra prize for the best-dressed people there, in addition to the usual cocktails. The Canadian young lady is well turned-out in 20s garb, and I’m feeling ambassadorial, so the CD goes to her. I point out to her that El Records is a gem among UK indie labels. These days it puts out classy compilations and rare albums of classic artists, such as the Elizabeth Taylor In London album. None of your tacky TV-advertised compilations cashing in on a dusty old song used in some yoghurt commercial. El Records CDs are made to be seen with in public.

The cover photo of ‘Darling’ is typically unusual in the El Records way: an early shot of Doris looking unrecognisably young and girlishly sexy, as opposed to the more common later photos where she’s faux-virginal and camp. It’s Doris Day before she became ‘Doris Day’.

Mr O’Boyle suggests I play ‘Fiesta’ by the Pogues, and it works surprisingly well. I also spin both versions of ‘Beyond The Sea’, ie M. Trenet’s ‘La Mer’ as well as Mr Darin’s hit. During ‘One’ from ‘A Chorus Line’, Ms Red – who is an experienced musical actress as well as my fellow DJ – performs a proper leg-kicking dance with her boyfriend Mr Ollie. People applaud.

Noel Coward’s ‘The Party’s Over’ makes a pretty good closer, but I’m asked for a DJ encore. Cue yet more selections from ‘Bugsy Malone’, ending with Doris Day’s ‘Secret Love’. Emma J tells me she knows all the words to ‘Deadwood Stage’ from ‘Calamity Jane’, and promptly recites them to me on the spot. The whole song.

I’m disappointed that there’s many men in attendance who haven’t bothered to dress up at ALL tonight, but Ms Lou tells me the bar takings are the highest for a B&D night so far, and I like to keep the venue happy. It’s a dress recommendation, not a dress code enforced on the door. I don’t want to turn casually-dressed people away if they’re not giving the dressed-up dandies any trouble.

Still, I do wish I could convince more men to make the effort in their attire. I never have any trouble getting women to dress up. I suppose I could literally shout at the offending gentlemen like Matthew G does at ‘Kash Point’ (“How DARE you come to MY club in JEANS and a T-SHIRT! How DARE you!”). But no, that be rather out of character.

I do tell them off when they ask for requests, though. Albeit with a harmless smirk.

“Got any Etta James?”
“I’ll tell you when your clothes are worthy of an answer.”

Next month’s Beautiful & Damned is on Thursday August 17th. For the silent movies, I’ll screen ‘Metropolis’ and something with Ms Garbo, I think.

Idle TV advert spotting.

MFI Sale – music by Suede. ‘She’s In Fashion’, ho ho.

Hotpoint washing machines – music by Stina Nordenstam. Well, it’s actually Vangelis featuring Ms Nordenstam. I suppose even eccentric, reclusive, ethereal Swedish singers have to use washing machines.

Transport For London: Oyster Card. A fast-paced diary entry of a young man’s adventures, with equally speeded-up narration. I’m convinced this is a direct steal from the recent movie ‘The Rules Of Attraction’, where one typically self-centred character recounts his European holiday adventures in a similar montage manner. The movie’s sequence is truly a feat of jaw-dropping editing: months of work compacted into minutes.

“Killed By A Bouncy Castle” screams the front pages of a few newspapers today.

I’m not sure which I’m more appalled by: the horrific, Ian McEwan-like event itself; or the fact that it’s considered to be more newsworthy than the Israeli-Lebanon crisis. Though I can see the tabloid editors’ point: the mass killing of innocents in the Middle East is a more depressingly common story than the surreal terror of this unlikely new accident.

Or that the artist Maurice Agis’s signature ‘Dreamspace’ installation, developed over a lifetime through various incarnations, has not only received its zenith of publicity as a result of this tragedy – but to add insult to actual injury, they’re calling it a bouncy castle. That most tacky of summer attractions.

Thousands of people who have visited Mr Agis’s installations over the decades – which were all based on the same sort of ‘colour maze’ theme – know that Dreamspace is not only far from being a simple ‘bouncy castle’, but is part of a famous, enduring and popular series of artworks.

I recall his previous, more simple installations, called “Colourspace”. One of them turned up at the Puffin Show at the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington, in 1981. I visited it a few times later, never tiring of wandering around the peaceful, ambient landspace of this unique multicoloured labyrinth. Colourspace was a regular feature of London summers, pitched at festivals or in the grounds of museums.

In the early 90s, the band Pulp filmed their ‘Lipgloss’ video inside one of the Colourspaces. It’s on You Tube, naturally. When I first saw the video, I recognised Mr Agis’s work then, as I do now, despite the ‘bouncy castle’ tag.

The BBC news site has ominous amateur camera footage of the accident – the enormous maze inverting into the sky, folding, toppling. Dreamspace: The Pop Art Hindenburg.

Of all the dreary polls and games bored people like to post on the Web, my least favourite is probably ‘Celeb Haikus’. It’s a version of those “Spotted!” pages in magazines like Heat, where readers are encouraged to send it sightings of celebrities.

“Dale Winton, in a road”
“Sue Pollard, buying things in a shop”.

That’s not an anecdote or even proper gossip. It’s just filling space and encouraging banality for its own sake, not to mention consolidating the notion of celebrity prostration in a godless void. It’d only be justifiable if this yen for so-called celebrity surveillance was of the neighbourhood watch persuasion:

“Spotted! Michael Parkinson, seen washing human entrails from his hands, laughing.”
“Spotted! Bruce Forsyth, killing a boy.”

Haikus have always annoyed me too; at school I regarded them as the quadratic equations of poetry. Cheap rules, cheap aftertaste. So here’s the Celeb Haiku to end them all, he said with foolish optimism.

“Spotted!” Shaftesbury Ave
Mark Frith, Editor, Heat Mag
Not spotted: his soul

Actually, I should confess I rather like the glossy graphics and fun attitude of Heat Magazine. And the TV section is pretty good. It’s just the encouragement of spying upon celebrities as a kind of national sport that irks me.

I’m hearing conversations in the background I could do something about.

Press Tent Girl: (to colleague at desk) “Do you remember Frank Sidebottom?”

(blank response from colleague)

PTG: (to other PR person) Do YOU remember Frank Sidebottom?

Them: Who?

I can’t keep quiet any longer. I turn around.

DE: (with an attempt at a helpful smile) Yes, I do. He’s still very much going. He played the Kentish Town Bull & Gate recently.

Pause. The girl and her colleagues stare back at me with a look suggesting “Who asked you, blondie? Mind your own business”.

I don’t know. It’s so hard hearing a conversation in the background where someone wonders about X, and you know you can go over to them and help them with the enquiry, resolving their wonderings with an answer. But they don’t want to hear your stranger’s Yes, I Know. They want to hear the No, I Don’t Know from their friends.

It’s the history of warfare in a nutshell.

Oh, crumbs, now I’m hearing:

PR Boy: Who’s Tom Verlaine?
PR Girl: I’m not sure.

I am doing my best to remain silent.

Earlier, a girl who was taking photographs for a magazine asked me who Nicky Wire was. I helpfully enlightened her.

Photo girl: How come you know all this stuff?
DE: (speechless)

There MUST be a way of getting paid for knowing what people with jobs in the music industry don’t know, but frankly should. It’s a clear case of supply and demand. And yet I can’t make the connection.

My feet are killing me. And my shoes are falling apart. Grumble, grumble, grumble.

I should make it clear I’m having a perfectly nice time here, I just need to sit and rest for a while. This Guest Cafe is within the Press Tent’s wonderful WiFi range, so I can just whip out my iBook and post a diary entry from a field in the middle of nowhere. Well, nowhere as far as some modern concerns go. I’m at the Latitude Festival, near the resort town of Southwold in Suffolk. Southwold is slightly – happily – out of time. There’s even a Campaign To Have Broadband In Southwold, as if it were a small developing Third World country. In fact, I can get a better mobile phone signal in Tangier, Africa, than I can in some parts of Suffolk. Suits me fine, of course, as someone who is a little out of time myself.

My parents are staying at the Southwold cottage they usually rent for a week every year, and I’d be visiting them for the weekend regardless. When I heard a new Mean Fiddler festival – featuring more than a few acts I either admire or am acquainted with personally, or both – was not only taking place near Southwold, but during the same weekend of my stay there, it seemed the height of sarcasm NOT to seek out a weekend pass. So here I am.

At first I attempted to procur a pass as part of paying work, reviewing the festival for a magazine or a commercial music website. I tried two magazines and a website. That failed. No one can accuse me of not trying to apply for work at every opportunity. How can I be anything other than a freeloader if I am deliberately denied employment for the only skills I have been told I am any good at, to wit writing and performing and DJ-ing and looking strange? So I switched to Well-Mannered Hustler Mode and secured a VIP guest pass by dint of being vaguely connected to the better connected. It was always thus.

Actually, Plan B have asked me to review the entire festival for free, but they’ve only demanded a 200 words thumbnail live review. 200 words for about 500 bands and acts. More bands than words to review them with. So I should really select certain adjectives to cover a whole group of bands at a time. How’s this:

“EDGY”
“ANGULAR”
“LILTING”
“SOARING”
“DYNAMIC”
“MELODIC”
“DEBUT”
“CATCHY”
“ECLECTIC”
“BEARDED”

There you go. When dancing about architecture, there’s only a limited amount of steps. Pick and mix the above, apply to absolutely any band ever, and you need never read a music magazine again. All part of the service of being a Dickon Edwards reader.

I like to think I pay my way by looking vaguely interesting, by not letting the side down. Brightening up the place a little. So I’ve got freshly bleached hair, and a freshly dry-cleaned white suit. At a boiling hot rock festival. This is the price I must pay, in lieu of the £105 ticket. Shame that my loafers have decided to give up the ghost, as I’ve had to do an awfully large amount of walking since I’ve been here. But even the most dilapidated loafers look better than brand new puffy trainers. At least on me they do.

Sleeping in a proper room – and one right opposite Southwold Lighthouse – as opposed to a tent really swung it for me. This morning I was awoken by raucous gulls. I think they’re on at the Uncut Stage at 14.30.

I do like tents, it’s just campsites that irk me. At 10.30am today I returned to the site and walked past a long, long queue of people waiting for a shower, even in the Guest Camping area. That’s the side I’m not keen on. Not when I’m wearing a nice suit, anyway.

My last festival as a punter was Reading 1997, when I pretty much said goodbye to the experience. After this, I promised myself, no more festivals unless I’m working, performing or am otherwise involved in a non-spectator capacity. It was the time of Many Endings. Orlando had failed to sell records and be famous, I was leaving the band, so I was spending my dwindling share of the record company money on a vaguely luxurious life, almost by way of compensation. Like a trip to Disneyland for a terminally ill child. Taxis, hotel rooms, binges. The benefits with none of the work. So I blagged a Reading pass, and booked a hotel room within walking distance on the site. Bliss. I shared this wealth, though: making it known that I had a room and the drinks were on me. Erol Alkan, now a top London DJ, slept on my floor. A thin, pretty girl who said she was a presenter on the Nickelodeon Channel shared my double bed, entirely chastely and non-nude. (And as I add that last detail I really wish I hadn’t.)

As Mr Alkan snored, Ms Children’s TV Presenter and I watched the late night movie, sitting up in bed, like a slumber party. With consummate irony, I recall the film was Alan Parker’s ‘Fame’.

So today, as per the whole weekend, I’m wandering around this leafy field-based Suffolk rock festival in a white suit and make-up, lurking backstage at the Literary Tent to chat to acquaintances who are actually booked to perform. The tent is shared by ‘Vox N Roll’, the book reading evening hosted by my friends at The Boogaloo pub, and ‘The Book Club’, the jazz-like comedy variety revue featuring my friend Mr Martin White.

So it’s a fair mistake to make when the most common question I hear from approaching strangers at Latitude is ‘when are you on?’. Even programme sellers have raced over to me ask this question. What can I say? I SHOULD be performing, damn it. Why aren’t I? I’m available and willing and I make the effort in looking interesting. Whether with Fosca or solo, whether doing music or text. Fosca can be invited to play Swedish festivals in lovely lakeside forests – the sort of event that Latitude is clearly influenced by – but none in my own country.

The cynical answer is “Because you’re a rubbish performer, Dickon. And your work is rubbish too. Even the Friday At Noon Acts on the White Lightning Cider Stage are a million times better than you. They have ungroomed beards and trainers and are trying to sound like a watered-down Snow Patrol, who in turn are a watered-down Keane, who in turn are a watered-down Coldplay, who in turn are a watered-down Radiohead, who in turn are a watered-down Pink Floyd. But that’s still better than your brand of ‘well-dressed wordy misfit’ songs and stories. Dilution of fake emotion, darling, is the new rock and roll!”

Maybe it’s because although I’m lucky as a ligger, I’ve never been lucky as a performer. Never have been. Why weren’t Orlando performing at any of those 1996-7 UK rock festivals, despite being on the mighty Warner Brothers? Not even at noon on the Friday on the smallest stage? John Peel played Fosca a number of times, which is more than some acts on the John Peel Stage at Glastonbury can claim. Hah, listen to this faux-haughty bitterness raging!

I can only assume the three or four shadowy people who pull the strings in the UK festival booking world just didn’t like Orlando, as I guess they don’t like me and Fosca. Well, let’s say up until now. Fair enough. But I live in hope things will change. Perhaps it takes a new Fosca album released on just the right kind of label with just the right kind of PR people and management, at just the right kind of time. With just the right kind of soundbitey pitch. ‘Cult Blond Fop-Rock Songwriter Dickon Edwards promotes his new album on Fashionably Acceptable Records’. People need The Angle. The Twist. The Pitch. The Story. Also, many of the music biz and press people in 1997 who clearly didn’t want Orlando anywhere near their nice festival stages have been replaced by much jollier younger models in 2006, who find it easier to defer to my wiser, aloof older man allure, ho ho. My age alone in such an acne-saturated environment suggests I’m ‘someone’. I’m not ENTIRELY joking.

And so I go on. Even though I never ‘go on’.

I was going to write about the bands and acts I’ve seen so far. But I appear to have filled this page quite easily talking about myself.

Hmm.

I’m off to photograph coloured sheep.

Am at the Latitude Festival testing out the Press Tent’s WiFi.

THE BEAUTIFUL & DAMNED – SUMMER BARBECUE PARTY
Date: Thursday 20th July.
Times: BARBECUE from 7pm, Club 9pm to midnight.
Venue: The Boogaloo, 312 Archway Road, London N6 5AT, UK. 020 8340 2928.
Tube: Highgate (Northern Line). Buses: 43, 134, 263.
Price: Free entry, but please dress up.

“Unmissable!” – Time Out, who also featured B&D in their ‘Top 10 Critics’ Choices’.
“A divine London night out” – The Penny magazine.

The well-dressed club night returns, its motto being ‘Never Knowingly Underdressed’. This time, the club starts a little earlier, at 7pm, with a barbecue in the garden outside. Then it’s business as usual inside from 9pm.

The Beautiful And Damned is a timezone-jumping decadent disco curated (as opposed to ‘DJ’d’) by Mr Dickon Edwards and Miss Red. Patrons are encouraged to dress up in their own take on period glamour, ideally with a nod to the styles of the 1920s & 1930s, though anything more stylish than the ubiquitous Old Street fashions is welcome. Cigarillos, braces, tweeds, beads, silk scarves, summer dresses, unforgiving teddy bears, Pimms & high hats. Free cocktails for the best dressed.

Drink, dance, and ponder the nights tenderness to an eclectic but discerning mix of Sinatra (Frank & Nancy), Strauss waltzes, soundtracks, musicals, El Records, Peggy Lee, Doris Day, Gilbert & Sullivan, Ella Fitzgerald, Dory Previn, Bugsy Malone, Cabaret, Chicago, deviant disco, shadowy soul, parvenu pop, insouciant indie, and easy listening for difficult children.