To Kilburn to see David Barnett’s band The New Royal Family. He’s fantastically confident, entertaining and generally impressive as a frontman, and they make a splendid sound as a group. Vainly, I can’t help imagining him singing my lyrics. But then, I think the same while watching most bands I’m fond of these days. The frustrated lyricist’s lot.

I feel it’s still quite unusual for male singers (at least in bands) to agree to sing another person’s words. Which is a shame, as a kind of healthy competition tends to come forth: the singer doing their best to show off as a performer, putting their own spin on the words; the lyricist trying hard to impress the singer, frustrated with their own vocal shortcomings. A standard kept up on both sides. Showing off to each other, before showing off to a crowd.

I’m snuffling somewhat due to a cold that tediously seems to come and go. I inwardly grumble and whine on the journey, feeling that Highgate to Kilburn is the most difficult journey in the world. It isn’t actually: I just have to plan it better.

Last time I went to Kilburn was to the Luminaire, and I hung about too late, resulting in waiting for a night bus connection at Brent Cross at some ungodly hour.

Public transport has really been getting to me lately. Either I’m dwelling on the shortcomings of the tubes and buses, or I’m actually cursed. At the weekend, those on the Northern Line know all about these things called Rail Replacement Buses. The idea is, because of engineering works, Transport For London commandeers a fleet of lovely old Routemaster buses to cover the route that the tube trains would be taking. All very well, except these temporary drivers seem to be from a dimension much like this one, but not entirely. Out of the four or five Rail Replacement buses I’ve taken in the last month or so, two have led to an unexpectedly long excursion along rail routes which only exist in parallel worlds.

On one of these acidic trips, the driver decided to suddenly veer off into a maze of residential streets off Kentish Town Road before reaching a dead end. Then we all heard him phone his fearless leaders, and sheepishly retrace his trail to rejoin the main road at the point he left off. This was after about twenty minutes. No one on board said or did anything, of course. Too English.

On the other, a full double-decker of people expecting to travel from Archway down to Camden suddenly found themselves travelling down the Holloway Road, and then up Seven Sisters all the way to Finsbury Park. Which is, it’s fair to say, a somewhat loose interpretation of the Northern Line. To cap it all, the driver didn’t even use the bus lane. We were stuck in traffic AND on the way to the wrong destination. Some people did finally get up and say something to the driver, once we were on the Seven Sisters Road. Thus can be measured the limit of English Reserve – half the length of the Holloway Road.

“Don’t tell me how to do my job!” came the driver’s snarled response. One of those men who, given the choice between plunging off a cliff and admitting to having made a mistake, would take the pebble-dashed coffin look every time.

Thankfully, he relented to opening the doors to those who wished to take their chances elsewhere. Which was everyone on board. Muttering darkly, yet still not quite talking to each other, we walked the remaining yards to Finsbury Park tube.

It’s a minor waking nightmare. A vehicle full of people, all of whom know where they’re going, except one: the driver. And he thinks everyone else is wrong.

So now at weekends I avoid all Rail Replacement Buses. Instead, I take the normal 134 which covers the same tube route. It stops more often, but at least my pulse isn’t given any nasty surprises.

With Ms Charley to the press screening of It’s a Boy Girl Thing, a high school body-swapping comedy. The plot: a boy and girl who don’t get on magically switch bodies due to some ancient relic or other. Cue the usual comedic consequences, followed by lessons about what matters in life, and then the inevitable romantic happy ending. Hardly an original tale. Still, I decide to troll along as interpretations of gender-swapping and metamorphosis are favourite themes of mine, no matter how mass-marketed. It also helps that the boy is Mr Kevin Zegers, last seen as the son in Transamerica. Like Cary Elwes, Jared Leto and River Phoenix before him, he’s one of those preternaturally beautiful young actors that one wants to keep tabs on before the rude interception of career vicissitudes, or the ever-popular drug-inspired early grave, or simply the cruel volleys of age.

His mother is played by the frankly unlikely Ms Sharon Osbourne, of Ozzy and Asda fame. Her acting talents as evinced here will not, I suspect, give Ms Streep any sleepless nights.

Despite a few scenes of nudity which must pitch this toward the older side of the teen market, there’s the disappointing eschewing of any true sexual exploration: the boy-as-girl very nearly has sex with a man, but doesn’t go through with it. The leads fall in love while thus displaced, but don’t act upon such urges until things are back to normal. As Charley points out, it’d be more interesting if they slept together or even just kissed while in each others’ bodies, but this is, we must presume, Going Too Far.

So we get the fossilised set pieces as tried and tested by every US teen flick since the 80s, not least the climactic all-or-nothing football match. And yet Mr Zegers and Ms Samaire Armstrong – who has fun swaggering and swearing – are such a watchable and convincing couple, the film is just about redeemed. Interestingly, Mr Z is more convincing as a girl in a boy’s body than he is as a macho sports jock. Far too moisturised for ball games.

Ms S suggests I sign up for NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month event that runs in November. Although it has the slight whiff of US Self-Help-ness about it, I think it can only be a good thing. So I’ll give it a go.

Saturday night. Just in from The Boogaloo, which tonight is hosting an jolly party for The Sounds. I am told The Sounds are a Swedish band who have just played 4 nights at Brixton Academy, supporting a group called Panic At The Disco. I wouldn’t know a Sound or a Panic At The Disco if he or she bit me on the bottom. If this were to actually happen, I’d be less concerned with identifying their position as a modern pop group in the general scheme of things, and far more concerned with the act of being bitten on the bottom by a person with whom I had not formally been introduced.

Anyway, people seem to be enjoying themselves, dancing and smiling and so forth. I do the necessary etiquette for feeling not quite in the mood for a party: make eye contact and smile with everyone I know, then politely sneak out. So I leave the pub at about 1.45am, and sit here across the road, my ears ringing, to write up my diary.

Last Thursday. Beautiful & Damned is laid-back but fun. Present are Robin, Ellen, Tammy, Eddie, Lawrence, along with my neighbours Ms Layla, Ms Liz and Mr Cicero. It’s nice to show one’s next door neighbours what your life is like, not confining it to the usual small talk when passing in the street. Some fantastically dressed people there, including a handsome gentleman called David who is not only impeccably attired, but is something of an impressive dancer, probably with a few proper lessons under his belt. Moreover, he shares the wealth, happily partnering up with boys and girls alike, teaching them a few vintage moves on the spot.

My fellow DJ Ms Red follows a fantastic set by over-indulging at the bar to the point where she hurts herself while dancing. “I’ve forgotten I can’t do The Splits” she says, limping. Later, when she develops a bout of hiccups, I am witness to a cure that genuinely works. You pull back your ears and drink a glass of water very quickly. Although in this case, her ears are pulled back for her by a third party. Actually, the glass of water is also administered by a third party. Her hiccups vanish at once.

Silent movies screened tonight are Flesh And The Devil and Piccadilly. Music played includes The Puppini Sisters’ Wuthering Heights, which seems to go down terribly well, along with Right Now by Mel Torme, a suggestion from my mother. I am also complimented for airing The Monochrome Set’s The Ruling Class. Peggy Lee’s My Man is less obvious than Fever and solicits less dancing, but sounds no less stunning in a club environment. Lawrence – dressed as a deposed Russian prince – gets me to play Ivor Novello’s Keep The Home Fires Burning.

Other current favourites:

I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair – from the movie South Pacific
Oh Lori – Alessi Brothers
Five Foot Two, Eyes Of Blue – Art Landry (1920s recording)
Don’t Forget To Mess Around – Louis Armstrong And His Hot Five
Ole Buttermilk Sky – Hoagy Carmichael
Hey There – Peggy Lee (from her album of Broadway tunes in a Latin style)
I Could Have Danced All Night – ditto
Savoy Stomp – Judy Garland
Sweet Georgia Brown – Ella Fitzgerald & Count Basie
You’re The Top – Anita O’Day & Billy May
Mister Sandman – The Chordettes
Two Little Girls From Little Rock – Marilyn Monroe & Jane Russell
Next (Jacques Brel) – Scott Walker, though I alternate it with the even more histrionic version from the 60s cast album of “Jacques Brel Is Alive And Well…”.

‘Next’ is one of my favourite lyrics of all time. I wonder what it must have been like for Scott Walker’s teeny bopper fans to hear him sing, only a couple of years after his big pop hits with the Walker Brothers, about his ‘first case of gonorrhea’.

The sleeve notes to ‘Scott 2’, the 1968 album ‘Next’ is on, are by ‘his friend Jonathan King’. Mr Walker’s 2006 album, “The Drift’, is shockingly experimental and avant garde, but I can’t help thinking he should have asked Jonathan King to do the sleeve notes once again. That’d be truly ‘dark’, and ‘challenging’.

As a DJ, I find it’s better to generally play to women than to men or to some idea of what pleases both. Women are more likely to get up and dance of their own accord. Men are less likely to dance, and are also far less likely to dress up. The question of putting someone on the door to impose a dress code is dismissed when I realise there’s a fair amount of male club regulars who love the music, but prefer not to make an effort with their clothes. I will never understand why boys like jeans quite so very much. Other trousers are available.

Message from Mr J:

“I just saw Salman Rushdie dancing in Clerkenwell – to I Will Survive.”

The next Beautiful & Damned is on Thursday November 23rd.

To the Phoenix Cinema in Finchley for a screening of The History Boys, preceded by a Q&A with Alan Bennett himself. A comical moment kicks off the proceedings when the National Treasure is welcomed to the stage. He has to walk down the auditorium aisle from the back of the cinema, but his way is obstructed by a handful of latecomers still getting to their seats, along with a smattering of people suddenly getting up to go to the refreshments kiosk or the toilets. He stands halfway along the aisle, waiting for these people to pass, with an embarrassed smirk as the applause continues for just that little bit too long. Given he’s a writer who specialises in the very English fear of social embarrassment, it almost seems scripted.

And then, as with so many London Q&As in cinemas I’ve attended, the microphone doesn’t work. The event is a benefit for the venue, a beautiful Edwardian cinema struggling to retain its independence. I can only hope they spend some of the revenue on better microphones.

From yesterday.
A giveaway sign that Dad doesn’t live in London: as we walk around town close to 4pm, he looks on the umpteen aggressive vendors of free newspapers as a curious novelty and a generous service; not the plague of superfluous irritation they’ve become for commuters.

Pop into the huge Waterstones on Piccadilly. Am pleased to discover that on one counter by the tills are no less than two books with contributions from myself. The Jerome K Jerome ‘Idle Thoughts’ is there (now at half price), next to ‘The Decadent Handbook’, which is newly out. I mention this to the till staff, and they just stare at me warily.

Spend most of the day with Dad, whose forthcoming 70th birthday bash I’m DJ-ing at. His list of requests includes Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, all of which is expected. Less likely, at least to me, is a track by the Scissor Sisters. I first heard about them from Erol, the DJ at Club Trash, who gave me a CD promo just before they had a hit with their Bee Gees-esque version of Pink Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb’. I recall thinking they were yet another NYC club act, perfectly enjoyable but unlikely to appeal to real people, certainly not to those over 35. How wrong I was.

We attend the Mel Calman exhibition at the Cartoon Museum in Little Russell St. Calman was essentially a gag merchant who used a rudimentary, yet recognisably unique style of line figures, usually for single panels in daily newspapers. I note some of those on display:

Woman, to Man Reading Newspaper: “Look at me when you’re pretending to listen to me.”

Man to Woman: “I’ve got no subconscious resentment against you. It’s all conscious.”

Therapist to Santa Claus (on couch): “Why do you have this desire to GIVE all the time?”

I stop and buy the new Moleskine City Guide notebook for London, with cute leaves of removable tracing paper for plotting routes on street maps. I probably don’t really need it, given I already use the basic notebook along with their party-friendly skinny Moleskine Cahiers. But I’m an incurable notebook junkie.

Then to a Mervyn Peake show at a small working gallery called Chris Beetles Ltd, off Piccadilly. Peake’s illustrations for Bleak House are incredible: bringing the more outrageously Gothic side of Dickens to the fore. Interesting that many people still think of Mr Peake purely as the Gormenghast author, not the acclaimed artist and illustrator he started out as.

Then to a Soho screening of a rather odd US indie comedy about bestiality called Sleeping Dogs Lie, followed by a brisk walk to the Horseshoe pub in Clerkenwell for a gathering of Neil Scott’s friends, including Rhodri, Jen D, and Kate D. Martin White is an energizing, galvanizing presence as ever. As I arrive, I note our host is still yet to attend, and I make some allusion to the film Murder By Death. Turns out that’s what everyone else was saying before I got there myself. Well, it’s nice that we’ve all got an awareness of 70s Neil Simon spoofs in common.

A reminder that this month’s Beautiful & Damned night is next THURSDAY, Oct 19th.

THE BEAUTIFUL & DAMNED – OCTOBER EDITION
Date: Thursday 21st October
Times: 9pm to 12.30am.
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 do please dress up. Cocktails for the best dressed.

Full description on the DE News page.

In the Rare Books reading room of the British Library. I get an immense thrill on receiving my first Rare Book – a gloriously illustrated first edition of Richard Marsh’s The Beetle – in a protective blue cardboard box. The lid is kept shut by thin lengths of string wound round delicate little cardboard cogs. To open any book preserved in such a way has the air of a childhood Christmas. The resulting thrill, I have to admit, is the closest I’ve come to sexual ecstasy for some time.

Directly in my line of sight in the desk opposite is a fifty-ish man with a greying beard, glasses on a string, and a slightly mucky jumper. He is consulting some enormous gilded tome. I can’t help being distracted when at one point he suddenly bangs his fist on the desk and says ‘that’s it!’ – albeit in a whisper.

Recent merchandise acquisitions: a cream-coloured tote bag by The Hidden Cameras, which Anna S thinks is a laundry bag. More bands should market their own laundry bags. Plus a promotional strip of tear-off bookmarks for ‘The History Boys’. Am pleased to find my two favourite Boys, Dominic Cooper’s Dakin and Jamie Parker’s Scripps (who to me resembles a teenage Trevor Howard), are on either side of the same bookmark.

To Anna S’s for a haircut. Am rather gratified to find that the layer of unbleached hair underneath is still pretty healthy, thick and devoid of any signs of thinning or greyness. David B goes off to his night shift job, Anna goes off to the club Stay Beautiful, and I just go home for a quiet evening in. Not so much due to any lack of energy as preferring to get on with a few things at my desk.

I have a new neighbour, a face from the past – Ms Sophie W. She once interviewed me for her fanzine nearly ten years ago. In fact, I came across the fanzine last week while tidying up a pile of clutter. Not only is Orlando in it, but so is David, in his former band Guernica, featuring the now prominent London DJ, Erol Alkan on guitar. There’s also an interview with The Longpigs, dominated by their guitarist, Richard Hawley. These days, Mr H is successful as a solo artist, his appeal somewhat further-reaching than that of The Longpigs. Even real people buy his records. I can’t see how anyone would want to get passionate and hot under the collar about his entirely inoffensive music and minimum-risk appearance, but then I forget that making pleasant music for its own sake is more than enough for most. Not everyone wants to make a statement. He does appear to be re-writing Buddy Holly’s True Love Ways on more than one occasion, but there are worse songs to re-write.

Read an excerpt from AN Wilson’s Betjeman biography, concerning his bisexuality. The great poet once described an attractive female secretary as looking enticingly like ‘a ruined choirboy’. And that famous line in A Subaltern’s Love Song about lusting after a hardy tennis player always struck me as a rather unusual way to describe a girl:

The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy

But then, where some say ‘bisexual’, I say ‘English’.

More mixed thoughts on the Fry documentary. I’m annoyed by the constant cliched use of Philip Glass music, only serving to remind the viewer that this is TV entertainment like anything else. In one of the segments about people who manage to be depressed and NOT famous, there’s a woman who can barely get through the day, who has to constantly guzzle a myriad of different pills even to keep her in this lifeless state. Fair enough, but then the Philip Glass soundtrack swells yet again to accentuate her voice-over, and we’re reminded it’s just another TV programme cut to a tried and tested formula.

That’s entertainment. Lives edited to taste. Yes, I realise that’s what documentaries are. But you’re not meant to be jarringly reminded of the fact. Someone should tell such directors that the works of Philip Glass (or if wet, Coldplay) are not the only fruit. Or even ask their own presenters for a few suggestions, given Mr Fry is a classical music buff.

Cut to a New York composer. Filmed at his piano, I shouldn’t wonder:

PHILIP GLASS (for it is he): The depression first hit me when I realised that British TV documentaries kept lazily using my music for everything from climate change to terrorism to heroin addiction. Since then I’ve just not been the same.

OMINOUS REPETITIVE MUSIC UNDERNEATH (by Mr Glass): boodoo boodoo boodoo boodoo…

This tendency is actually two decades old, starting with the 1983 movie Koyaanisqatsi. Timelapse montages of buildings against the sky, the clouds zooming past above, the traffic like fireflies below. All set to Philip Glass’s pounding arpeggios and doom-laden, but rather listenable, mathematical pulses of melody. Since then, this format has been imitated so much in portentous TV ads and documentaries, it’s become a kind of Stairway To Heaven for directors. Just as that Led Zeppelin tune is the one that guitarists can’t help playing in music shops, TV directors can’t stop themselves from saying, “Bung on a bit of Philip Glass, that’ll work well.”

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Still, it drives me to rent out ‘The Hours’ and see it for the first time since its release a couple of years ago. More depression as entertainment, certainly, but more honestly so. And this time, Philip Glass tailors his music to fit. I think this is why I ultimately prefer fiction to documentary. Fiction looks for truth in fabrication, documentary applies fabrication to truth. In Fiction, saying to yourself, “This wouldn’t happen” doesn’t matter too much, not if there’s other elements to stay for. With documentary, the set-up pieces, the contrived tableaux, the shot of the presenter arriving at someone’s house where there happens to be a camera crew already set up; it’s as fictional as fiction. I find fiction more truthful.

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So to ‘United 93’, a much-praised movie dramatisation of the fourth 9/11 flight, the one which crashed into a field. This has been hyped as a sensitive account, dedicated to the memory of those that died, and so on and so forth. Who are they kidding? It’s entertainment like anything else. We see the four terrorists viciously kill the pilots and a few passengers as they take over the plane, additionally slitting the throat of a stewardess because, “We don’t need her any more”. They might as well be in an Indiana Jones film.

This initial burst of cartoonish evil sets us up for a payback like any other thriller movie. You want the ‘Baddies’ to be defeated, but as we already know what has to happen in the end, the makers invent little victories that might have happened… but very probably didn’t. Outrageously, a German passenger (whose widow was one of the relatives not consulted by the director) is depicted pleading for appeasement, trying to stop the others revolting from their seats, and they turn on him as if he were as guilty as the terrorists. Then they viciously, brutally kill the hijackers one by one – just like in the movies – as the plane hurtles to its fate, a sea of hands grabbing for the pilot’s joystick, trying to wrest control seconds before the inevitable.

To describe a 9/11 movie as exciting and entertaining, which is what ‘United 93’ is, seems profoundly distasteful, but that’s the currency it’s trading in. It’s only distasteful in the way ‘Titanic’ is distasteful (by being a bad movie), and ‘The Queen’ isn’t (by being a good movie). Such flicks exist in a different world altogether, where dramatic arcs matter more than accuracy or even likelihood of accuracy. As a tribute to the memory of those that perished, it’s on very insincere grounds indeed. I felt the same when watching “Saving Private Ryan”, in the scenes where surrendering Germans on Omaha Beach are shot dead by Americans. Movies are movies, even the ones that call themselves memorials. They all end with the usual white text on a black background, telling us what happened in the real world afterwards. Just as ‘United 93’ does.

But then again, this is an argument which began with the TV news crews deciding what to show from that day. Was it distasteful to broadcast the footage of the planes hitting the towers over and over again? What about the people jumping from the towers? How much reality do you want? How much can you take? And so on. And this is the line taken by the movie directors. Whether you like it or not, they reason, 9/11 looked like a Hollywood movie. Or three. Or more. So they cover their consciences with the world ‘memorial’, insisting that some of the relatives of the deceased are ‘on their side’ (much like bigots who say ‘some of my best friends are…’) and promises that a percentage of the movie profits will go to, oh, some 9/11-connected charity or other. They may as well be saying “Will that do”?

My overriding response to which is a resounding “Hmmmmmph…” I realise all writers and film-makers are vultures of a kind, and I’m no different with this diary. I just try to be careful not to be obviously offensive to those who might be watching. And one way is by resorting to fiction over documentary, or fiction that claims to be documentary. Which is where we came in.

Remove the cowardly disclaimers, change the names and the event, and the film is what it is – a good thriller based on a true story, but only based. Gus Van Saint’s ‘Elephant’ is a fine example of how to translate filmic events to film. It’s obviously about Columbine, but doesn’t claim to be. As with much in life, once you start dropping names, you’re cheapening yourself.

If a memorial is about “lest we forget”, here it’s lest we forget America’s lust for vindictive, brutal payback rage, and their lust for understanding the world through simplistic but impressively entertaining movies. As if you could forget. If ‘United 93’ is Hollywood being ‘sensitive’ to recent events, one dreads the opposite.

Watch the Stephen Fry documentary on depression. The clips from him rehearsing to present some glossy awards ceremony are interesting. The director asks, “Happy, Stephen?”. “Happy???” he mutters as the crew moves to the next cue. “Oh, yes, ‘happy’. I remember that…”.

As ever, I find confessions about phases of despair from the massively successful both fascinating and infuriating. It’s hard not to shout “Oh just get over yourself, Mr Millionaire” at the screen, though one useful message persists: that of plunging oneself into work as at least one kind of cure.

I find myself wanting to shout the same sort of things at the passages of unrelenting self pity in some of Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories essays (especially ‘Written On The Body’, his unusually candid account of feeling off sick when Sex was handed out). Particularly as he himself dislikes the idea of The Artist As Tragic Figure.

Is the viewer and reader meant to think “Poor, poor Stephen” and “Poor, poor Alan”?

No, I decide, not really; both Bookish National Teddy Bears are several steps ahead of their audiences’ thought processes, and deal with any accusations of self-obsession in a kind of knowing pre-emptive manner, which of course just endears them further. Ultimately, they’re just being honest about their feelings. Which is very hard to get away with when you’re terminally English, depression or no.

Which is why Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, and self-help books are nearly always from America.

Sunday: to Heathrow on a mission from the Boogaloo circle. Given the generosity they’ve showered upon me in the past, I think I’m going to be asked something akin to being in ‘The Manchurian Candidate’. “We’ve done a lot for you, Mr Edwards. And today’s the day you pay us back. You must now kill the Prime Minister.”

Thankfully I just have to deliver some business documents to Victoria M Clarke as she changes planes en route to Tokyo, where the Pogues are touring. At the airport, she buys me lunch and gives me plenty of encouragement, contacts and tips for getting my so-called writing career going. While checking in, she is told she can bring her lipstick in her hand luggage, but not her liquid make-up. The ludicrous state of air travel in 2006.

Then to Camden where Ms Anna and Ms Suzi L have been drinking the afternoon away, while waiting for me. I can’t help thinking of that Noel Coward play, Fallen Angels. Anna cooks us all dinner, and we discuss what to do with Anna’s rodent infestation: it ignores her vegetarian mousetraps. Plus what to do with the old computer scanner Suzi has kindly given me: it refuses to work with my Mac OS X, and I can’t find a driver for Mac OS 9 which might possibly work instead, if I switch my laptop to something called ‘Classic Mode’. It’s a pain that technology only makes life easier if you keep up with it.

Pop in at the Boogaloo and chat to the Kashpoint kid Eddie, who I’d forgotten comes from Ipswich like me. We chat about what’s changed there (I’m dismayed to hear Martin & Newby, the long-running hardware store with the 70-year-old light-bulb in the toilets – has gone), and he asks me if I know of any jobs going in my London spheres of existence. I guffaw at this somewhat, feeling like the doctor who is more ill than the patient. But then I give him a few suggestions as to places to look. I don’t feel like I’m someone to look up to exactly, but I forget that some younger people view me as having Made It in some ways. If only having Made It to the age of 35, with all the osmotic dribbles of experience that engenders, simply by being alive for longer. Age is an illusion of experience:

Have cleared away the piles of clutter on my floor for the first time in about ten years. My landlady insisted on cleaning my carpet, and for once I decided to view this as an opportunity rather than an intrusion. Quite a transformation. I can actually have people to visit and not apologise for its state. Progress of a kind.