Still throwing out most of my old audio cassettes. Many are the demos of friends and correspondents over the years, but I assume they keep their own copies and so don’t think twice about disposing of them.

On the train the other day, David Barnett asks me if I’ve jettisoned his own ancient demo, which he gave me a decade ago when we were musing about making music together. I tell him no, it’s gone the way of all the others. And after ten years, surely a kind of statute of limitations comes into place?

But of course, he then says it was the last copy in the world. I am absolutely mortified, even though any brutal reduction of possessions comes with a price. What was it the USA leaders say about casualties? ‘Stuff happens.’

If it’s any consolation, I add feebly, begging his forgiveness, I’ve also thrown out rare tapes by people who’ve gone on to proper success and Mercury Music Prize nominations. He thinks I’m mad not to put Isobel Campbell’s tape on Ebay, with its demos of her songs for Belle & Sebastian and her first solo album. But even though I’ve not been in contact with Ms C for (again) a decade, it would still feel tacky, even a betrayal, to put such tapes into others’ hands. Money or no. I still have the letter she wrote to me at the time. When I get onto clearing out old letters, it’ll be a different matter entirely.

It’s odd. For someone who loves museums and libraries, I hate the thought of becoming an archivist myself; whether of my own work or others. I like collections, but would hate to be considered a collector. I like being a guest at parties, but rarely the host.

But all this is secondary to the main reason for clearing such dusty items out: I simply don’t have the room to be a collector of anything more than what I need to use right now.

Many of my own demos are the musical equivalent of baby photos: cute to others for five seconds, embarrassing to me for longer.

Baby photos are overrated. I don’t see the point of baby photos in documentaries or in the photo section of biographies. A cheap curiosity. What did the subject look like when they were a baby? Well, guess what! They looked like a baby. They had no choice in the matter.

Life is more interesting when there’s bits missing.

***

Have seen the latest Quentin Tarantino film, Death Proof. Makes one scream at the screen, ‘Hurry up and cut to the chase. Literally.’

Plot: a group of jolly ladies chatter for too long, then are terrorised by an unkind gentleman who uses his stunt car as a murder weapon. Then it happens all over again in a different part of America, with a twist. Then lots of film buffs stroke their beards and point out all the clever references to cult trashy films which only they have seen.

The movie is meant to be viewed in a three-hour double bill, one massive homage to the late night b-movies of yore, called Grindhouse. The other film is Planet Terror by Mr Sin City, about a bottom-kicking pretty woman with one leg, who takes on legions of enemies out to get her. Cue Heather Mills jokes.

Grindhouse also includes a few fake trailers for ‘Coming Attractions’ by other directors, for similarly garish films that don’t exist. There’s one by Edgar Wright, a horror nasty called Don’t. It’s extremely funny and beautifully realised.

Despite the cooler-than-thou appeal, the full Grindhouse package was something of a flop on its US release. So much so that the UK distributors have opted to release the two main movies separately. Britain gets the Tarantino in a few week’s time, followed by the one-legged lady thing a month later. I presume the spoof trailers will be on the inevitable DVD, the afterlife format where all wrongs are righted.

Death Proof, then. It’s very nearly a great film. But the extended dialogue scenes really bore the 70s hot pants off me. They’re meant to build up a sense of tension, but they just drag on and on.

All the girls have 70s flick hairdos and vintage diner clothes, listen to groovy music from the 60s and 70s, show off their long legs and perfect feet to the camera, but have iPods and text messaging, and talk about the use of CGI in movies. All very well, but when the killing comes into it, you no longer care about such creatures of pure fantasy. If anything, I find myself rooting for Kurt Russell’s Morrissey-faced killer to hurry up and dispatch these chattering damsels of dream.

Misogyny on the director’s part? No, more Pygmalionism. I do think he wants women to be more like the ones in his head. Which is either shaking their legs and feet and bottoms, or kicking the bottoms of men, or have them twittering on about the trivia of 60s bands, cult movies, cars, magazines. It’s a world he wishes existed, so he makes it exist. Which is something I completely agree with, after all.

And it’s not unflattering to the women. Who doesn’t want to be sexy and hip and bottom-kicking? I know I do.

Sadly, the lengthy dialogue scenes between the girls are not a patch on the conversations in Reservoir Dogs. Or Amanda Plummer’s ‘Honey Bunny’ character in Pulp Fiction. And that’s my main problem with Death Proof: he doesn’t let the girls be funny. Or indeed, funny and tired and capricious and careful and worried and wise, like the girls I know. His girls are too busy being sexy, hip and tough, and ONLY those things.

It’s no good thinking female characters are well-written just because they’re tough, fight with weapons, and talk about cars and obscure movies. Maybe that’s enough for Mr T’s fans, but it leaves me missing Mr Pink arguing about the ethics of tipping, and Honey Bunny switching from timid girl to foul-mouthed gangster and back again, to comic effect.

Still, when the action sequences finally come along, they’re worth the wait. And Zoe Bell, a strapping New Zealand stunt lady, is something of a star. She was the action double for Miss Thurman in Kill Bill, and here is promoted to proper actor. Hearing her Kiwi accent pricking the bubble of Tarantino’s world of Americana is like hearing Tim Roth’s ordinary English one in Pulp Fiction: it shakes the aesthetic up. Just a shame she doesn’t appear till about an hour in.

Tarantino’s choice of soundtrack, however, is as impeccable as ever. For a director, he’s a brilliant DJ. In Death Proof, the main musical showpiece – ie, the bit where Mr Tarantino is purely making a film to illustrate his favourite music – is a superbly groovy version of ‘Baby It’s You’, not by The Shirelles or The Beatles, but by a late 60s band called Smith.

Slightly less of a revelation is the appearance of ‘Chick Habit’ by April March on the closing credits. One could argue this is QT personified: a 1990s cover of a 60s Serge Gainsbourg song. It sounds forty years old, but its hip lyrics meld slang across the decades.

Thing is, it’s already been used on the credits to another film a few years ago. But I’m A Cheerleader got there first, a funny indie romp about gay and lesbian teenagers sent to a hetero-converting summer camp, starring RuPaul. Which, as you can probably guess, is more my cup of alcohol-free absinthe.

There’s a little photo of me in today’s Independent newspaper, as part of Rhodri Marsden’s article on DIY pop. Page 2 of the Extra supplement. I’m caught in mid lip-synch on his video shoot, and it looks like I’m pulling a rather silly, Wildean expression. Bought my copy today from Bildeston Post Office.

Can’t quite believe that, according to his article, Rhodri’s video has been watched 250,000 times, yet the thing it’s meant to be promoting, the actual single, has sold barely 60.

I guess it still has to be radio and TV play, gigging, fanbase interaction and media hype that makes the real difference between watching a pop video and buying a pop song.

Making your own music with a computer is easy, we’re constantly told. Getting people to listen to it, and pay to listen to it in its week of release, is somewhat less easy. There has to be an angle, a world, a tribe to belong to. An aesthetic. A consensus. An appearance on a trusted radio playlist. Filters and signposts, yes. But it has to be the right filters, and the right signposts.

Have sent the new Fosca album out to various labels. Or rather, emailed them and pointed them to the MySpace page so they can hear four of the tracks now, with the offer of sending the full CD if their breath is bated. Seems the modern and eco-friendly thing to do.

Matinee have said sorry, too many acts already. Elefant have said the same, but they’d like to hear the whole CD anyway. Swedish label But Is It Art are tentatively interested; they’re Fosca fans, though new to the label game. No reply yet from Siesta, Rough Trade or Domino. That’s all the labels I can think of. Or rather, all the ones whose records I buy which are aware of me or Fosca, and are still active.

***

‘I don’t do drugs, I am drugs’ said Salvador Dali once, and my newly teetotal incarnation knows exactly what he means.

Since eschewing alcohol, I’ve found my imagination going into newly strange and dreamy extremes. It’s as if my body is missing the state of drunkenness so badly, it’s providing its own version. I’ve found myself craving oneiric music and art. Or at least, the sort that connects. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless album, the Cocteau Twins’ woozier output, the soundtrack to Mysterious Skin, Death In Vegas’s ‘Girls’, William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, Glass’s ‘Floe’, Ligeti’s ‘Atmospheres’, the Huelgas-Ensemble’s polyphonic choral album, 40 Voices. The dreamier fare played on Radio 3’s experimental music shows like Late Junction, or Julian Anderson’s Book Of Hours from last night’s Proms. The latter was described by the programme notes as ‘bursting into a dawn chorus of high heterophonic skirlings’. No need to get personal.

There’s rumours today that My Bloody Valentine are reforming. I saw bassist Deb Googe at a birthday party in Tufnell Park the other month: presumably she knows. Actually, maybe not. I’ve just found an interview when she says she spent her first two years with MBV unsure if she was in the band or not. And did they actually split up, or go on ‘hiatus’? Hard to tell. Their status was always as woozy as their sound.

I can vividly recall their outrageously loud gig in London ULU, 1990. Catching the last train back to this bedroom in Suffolk, and waking the next day with my ears still ringing.

‘You Made Me Realise’ was the encore at Bristol University a year later, on what I think was their last UK tour. Never been keen on that particular track myself. Too rock. I prefer the woozy soundscape stuff.

When I first played the You Made Me Realise EP, I was amazed they’d given the melodically weakest track pride of place. ‘Drive It All Over Me’, ‘Slow’, ‘Cigarette In Your Bed’, and ‘Thorn’ are superior. The best MBV pickings to my mind comprises those four songs, all of Loveless, half of Isn’t Anything, ‘Swallow’, ‘Off Your Face’, and ‘Sugar’, a track from a flexidisc given away with The Catalogue magazine. I remember buying the magazine in Ipswich, cutting out the flexidisc (it was square), playing it and wondering if was warped or not. And thinking: how can you tell?

***

Also for the first time since my teen years, and staying on a dreamy tip (or indeed, trip), I’ve gotten back into the works of Salvador Dali.

I went through the teenage phase of first loving his weirdness per se, then smugly dismissing him as the favourite artist of, well, teenagers who have yet to really find out about modern art. For me, Dali was something you grew out of.

For years I felt that his work was over-polished, garish and tacky, lending itself too easily to Athena posters and postcards on sixth former’s bedroom walls. He was – by his own intentions – a Surrealist for the masses, a forelock-tugging (well, moustache-tugging) Hollywood showman, and thus inferior to the likes of Bacon, Man Ray, Miro, Rothko, Mondrian and so on. Wackiness and tackiness with no heart, no soul.

I think that’s still true of one or two works on display at the Tate Modern’s current show, Dali and Film, like his non-surreal portrait of movie mogul Jack Warner with his pet dog. It’s so garishly literal, loud and glossy, it might as well be one of those paintings they found on the wall of Saddam Hussein’s palace. But then, subtlety and real-life portraiture were hardly Dali’s defining strengths.

Otherwise, though, I’ve revised my opinion on him entirely. Looking for emotional depth is rather missing the point: if imagination and ideas delight the heart, the connection is made.

Most of the show is a gorgeous, sexy, scary, funny and stylish dream. There’s working drawings and paintings, including some for unfilmed projects for the Marx Brothers, alongside a range of paintings with filmic elements. Some rooms are mini-cinemas showing the films he was involved with, on a loop. There’s his iconic work with Bunuel that has you laughing out loud one minute, then squirming uneasily the next (Un Chien Andalou and L’Age D’Or), alongside his dream sequence for Hitchcock’s Spellbound.

But the runaway highlight has to be Dali’s collaboration with Disney, an animated musical short called Destino. This delight of delights was shelved in the 40s but dusted off and completed in 2003, via the thankfully discreet use of computers. Turns out the film’s original director is still working for Disney – at the age of 95.

In Destino, a beautiful dark-eyed ballerina – realised in a style that’s exactly half-Disney, half-Dali – falls through a Dali landscape in search of her lover (I think): while dodging eyeballs, ants, constantly morphing statues, and those very Dali-esque impossible structures in the middle of a sunny desert. It’s as good as the best bits of Fantasia, or the ‘Pink Elephants On Parade’ sequence in Dumbo. And the Disney touch, coupled with the music, provides the emotion. To my mind, it’s the best thing ever to bear Dali’s name.

At the Tate, the 7-minute cartoon is delighting kids and pensioners alike, all raving about it as they come out of the screening room. Had Disney released their proposed DVD in time, it would make an absolute fortune in the gift shop. Instead, there’s a dozen shakey versions on YouTube, surreptitiously recorded by camera-phone. Supply and demand in action.

The YouTube clips are better than nothing, but you really have to see Destino in person. If you can go, go now. It finishes soon.

In Bildeston, visiting Dad while Mum is away in Spain (Valencia). There’s still no mobile phone signal here, and once again I think of the calls I’ve happily made to London while walking around in Morocco, or on the ferry crossing the Mediterranean. Once you’re a few miles out of Ipswich or Stowmarket, you’re on your own. But there’s email and the Web, and that’s more than enough.

Dad’s in good health. One unexpected silver lining of his stroke last year is that his lifelong migraines have vanished completely.

I find the change of setting conducive to reorganizing a routine, and am getting up to write at 6am each morning. I love the sense of pen hitting paper while the world is flickering into life, before my brain has a chance to realise what’s happening. Leave it to my brain to instigate the day, and its first thoughts tend to be of procrastination, tiredness, self-pity and resentment, setting me up for a day of ‘if only’ and ‘what’s the use’. In my case, the mere act of getting up early is a kind of Prozac. Oh, look, brain: 500 words before 7am. Didn’t see that coming, did you.

Rising at 11am, as I’ve done too much of late, may be fine for some who work at home, but for me it feels like I’m missing out. Not necessarily missing the best part of the day, as the cliche goes, but missing the most hopeful. Get past noon without anything done, and I feel the day has already been a failure.

To this end, I would like to thank the large moth which woke me up this morning, making a truly disproportionate racket as if fluttered angrily between the window and the roller blind. Thank you, Moth.

***

Yesterday morning. 10.50am. Catch the Tube down to Liverpool St, worrying that I’ve left it too late and will miss the 11.30am train to Stowmarket. David B and Rhoda get on the same tube carriage at Archway and keep me company. David reassures me that I’ll still make it okay, as long as I make the Moorgate Manoeuvre.

This is one of those tips that separates Londoners from the tourists. If your Tube journey involves a single-stop trip at one end, it can work out quicker to make the connection on foot. This is certainly true between Covent Garden and Leicester Square stations, where the getting to and from the platforms (via lift or escalator), added to the waiting for a train plus the train journey itself, takes several times the duration of walking the same distance along Long Acre.

Likewise changing at Moorgate for Liverpool Street. Quicker to walk the last stage, as long as you know where you’re going. From Moorgate, you walk along Eldon Street or Finsbury Circus, look out for the 2001-like monolith, then descend the steps straight into the main part of Liverpool Street station. Easy. I make it to the train with no rushing.

But the reassurance from David and Rhoda on the way makes all the difference. ‘You’ll do it’, say your friends. And so you do. It’s my own brain – or rather, the part that shouts the loudest – that says ‘You won’t make it. You can’t write. You can’t catch trains. You can’t get out of bed. You’re useless.’

It can be a real struggle to ignore this inner critic at times, or worse, actively seek out condemnation from real critics to support it; I’ve banned myself from Googling my own name ever again and heading down that particular self-serving spiral.

Never underrate kind friends. And moths.

An email:

You bloody well better have bought Scott Pilgrim as well as the excellent Phonogram. As Phonogram is a celebration of music geekery, Scott Pilgrim is a celebration of ALL geekery. Plus a romantic comedy and martial arts/punk rock adventure. P.S. Your diary is wonderfully written.

Thank you!

Phonogram author Keiron Gillen also writes, somewhat modestly:

You should have bought Scott Pilgrim. It would be the only sensible thing to do.

Oh all right, then. I’ll buy it after my birthday.

I share my birthday with the playwright Caryl Churchill, the TV presenter Fearne Cotton and the outbreak of World War 2. We always have a joint party. ‘Hullo Fearne. Hullo Caryl. Hullo, Outbreak of World War 2.’

***
I’ve also been alerted to Gosh Comics’s email newsletter service, where they keep you in touch with what’s new in stock from the comfort of your Inbox. So that’s handy.

***

Today – one of those days where things go a bit wrong. I get up too late, I miss a film screening (the new Cronenberg), it’s battering down with rain, I can’t think straight when reading and writing.

In the Assassin’s Cloak anthology of diaries, there’s this from August 23rd, 1956, by author Dawn Powell:

A motto: do it tomorrow; you’ve made enough mistakes today.

Which sums up my Aug 23rd in 2007.

However, I do manage to meet Shane MacG and Victoria Mary Clarke for late morning coffee in Highgate, then bump into Dale Cornish on Tottenham Court Road. Dale’s a lovely young man from the Kash Point scene, and was formerly in the band No Bra. Current band: Barraclough (I think that’s what he said it was called). We kiss hello. He has grown something of a beard since we last met, but it’s soft and downy rather than thick and bristly. A good kissing beard. He is off on holiday to Croatia, now something of a chic destination. The fashionable choice used to be Iceland, then Cuba, then Goa. Now it’s Slovenia, the freshly-detached Montenegro, and sunny Croatia.

***

Read about an alleged graffito in the toilets of the Old Bailey:

I’m about to be tried by twelve people too stupid to get out of doing jury service.

Following on from my last entry about the comic book Phonogram, I’m now informed that Warren Ellis is indeed a comic creator, but that his stuff probably isn’t to my taste. On top of which, there is a different Warren Ellis who is in bands I’ve heard of: The Dirty Three and Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds.

When I saw the kind description of Orlando in the book’s Glossary, I think I said ‘Gosh!’ out aloud. If you’re going to say ‘Gosh!’ out aloud in any shop in London, it might as well be in Gosh Comics.

***
That pop video I mentioned, by Rhodri Marsden / The Schema is now online here

I’m impressive it was finished so quickly; there must have been hours of editing involved. I’m in it very briefly, twice. As ever, I’m the one who looks like a New Romantic Mormon.

Am slightly concerned that the director Alex di Campi may have been wearing her beret purely because she was acting on camera as The Director, and wouldn’t do so for her other shoots. I hope not, though.

Given the extras in it are all wearing their own clothes, I’m wondering if the video could be used as a snapshot of internet-using, Independent-reading types in August 2007. Or at least, the sort of people who live in London and follow Rhodri’s blog. How many years need to pass before the video becomes a sartorial period piece? None of the men have Pete Doherty hats, and none of the women have orange skin, but one never knows what the trends of the future will be:

‘What WERE they wearing in those days? Yuck, women who haven’t shaved their heads! And men who haven’t been neutered!’

***
In the British Library. After a while, the occasional coughs and sneezes bouncing around the huge, two-storey Reading Room become a kind of birdsong.

‘Achoo!’ cheeps a lesser-spotted PHD to my left.

‘Blurgh-hew!’ trills another, from the storey below.

These two sounds are so perfectly timed, they sound like a deliberate call and response. They could be coded signals from spies, assassins, or lovers.

‘Achoo!’ (Translation: ‘Fancy it? Disabled loo, third floor?’)

‘Blurgh-hew!’ (‘Oh all right. Don’t forget the appliance this time.’)

***
It’s now been a couple of weeks on the wagon. But it’s also been months since I last bought cigarettes, meat or fish. And I’ve now cut out starchy foods, takeways, sugar in tea and coffee, and sweets. Instead, I’ve become addicted to things like tidying up and throwing out piles of dusty possessions. With the books, it was one shelf-height’s worth a day, then two, then three. Then on Sunday I took four such piles down to Oxfam. The first goal has been reached, and I’m down to properly-shelved books only, for the first time in years. Which is still too many. But at least I can actually see every one of them. I must have jettisoned over 400 books over the last ten days.

Before I stopped drinking, I found it hard to throw away even Christmas cards. Now, I can’t stop. I’m hooked.

Next step: Cassette Apocalypse.

I haven’t played an audio cassette for years. I don’t think I’ll ever play one again. They’re just taking up space. And they have to go.

Many are compilations made for me over the years by friends – some go back to 1988. There’s dozens and dozens and dozens of them. I feel the tapes are private, yet I can’t hang on to them forever. Like the books, I have to be brutal.

So I bless each one, give thanks for those times, and say goodbye.

Some cassettes are past demos. VERY rough demos. The very first Orlando rehearsal, 1992, my Bristol bedsit. Just me and Simon Kehoe. That sounds like it’s of massive personal importance, but it’s just guitar instrumentals, attempts to cover other songs, excruciating derivative dabblings. Orlando live at St John’s Tavern, Archway, 1993. Who recorded that? Doesn’t matter. It’s hardly the Beatles in Hamburg. Terrible, poorly-recorded, unlistenable tosh… and the Orlando stuff’s not perfect, either. Ho ho.

I will keep some stuff, but what? How much can one be one’s own museum curator? Lines must be drawn, rules must be made. Limits must be stuck to. There’s just so much of it. And I actually can’t bear to sit down and listen to every minute of every tape – it would take forever. I want to throw the lot out and move on. It’s weighing me down.

Keeping such ultra-rough demo cassettes would be like an architect keeping the scaffolding of his dream home, after it was built. Or a novelist keeping his first, awful draft. I’m such an all-or-nothing person, so it’s hard to choose what has to go.

Actually, the Passive Soul album, with its montage of school reports and childhood photos on the CD booklet, handily contains all the nostalgia I need for one lifetime. The rest… well, that’s what myths and mysteries are for.

I suppose I have to go through all the old letters at some point.

Thirty-sixth birthday soon. Old skin must be shed.

It’s an unusually cold and blustery night for August. The windows are rattling.

The other day, I’m in Gosh Comics in Bloomsbury, opposite the British Museum. I’m here to buy a specific comic, Peter Bagge’s Hate Annual, which is a mistake. Comic shops are places of luck and serendipity. If you’re after a particular comic, you have to second-guess when it’s going to arrive from the US, then ensure you visit the shop soon enough after, before the stock sells out. If it’s been out for a while, forget it. You have to be a real follower of that whole world, or risk losing out. Searching eBay or resorting to costly mail order from US publishers are the only remaining options. It’s all or nothing with comics.

Graphic novels and volumes collecting whole series, however, are a different matter entirely. They’re proper books with spines. They stay on the shelves for more than a few weeks. They can be found in libraries. And they appeal more to – well, I hesitate to say ‘real people’. But certainly to those who, while not feeling able to call themselves comic fans, do want to enjoy the ones they might enjoy.

I found myself discussing Alan Moore’s Watchmen in a pub the other day, inevitably turning to the subject of what a movie adaptation might be like. Like Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, it’s one of those films that you hear is ‘in the pipeline’ on and off for years, even decades. And it’s always a double emotion if you’re a fan of the book. A Watchmen movie could only be brilliant, and it could only be awful. You want to say no, and yet you want to see what it’d be like. Just because.

There’s the sense that movie adaptations are the ultimate medium, that they’re the best thing to happen to a book or comic or play. This novel is so good, goes the thinking, that it’s even been made into a film. The real mark of success is a film adaptation. Which is of course, not true. It’s an illusion created by mass media. More people are involved, with more money, that’s all.

The sheer inevitability of the Harry Potter movies being made goes hand-in-hand with the equally predictable compromise: they can never be as good as the books, say the hardcore fans. The movies in this case are more like celebrations of the books, which you’re meant to have read, and within hours of the things being on sale too. The solitary experience of reading is transmuted – if not downright transubstantiated – into the group ride of going to the cinema. But with Harry Potter, it’s unlikely that those aware of the films are unaware there’s a series of books that came first.

Whereas From Hell and The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen are known to most as lacklustre movies, rather than the rich and inventive Alan Moore books they adapted. Moore’s fans have to engage with the uninitiated in a stoop of defensiveness, for both the medium itself – comics – and for the middling-to-rotten movies that represent his works. When Lenny Henry appeared on Desert Island Discs and asked to have Watchmen as his sole volume of choice, presenter Sue Lawley refused, saying it wasn’t a proper book. Different mediums connect with some, while pushing others away.

And thence to pop music. Celebrating music tends to be via prose; which is, of course, missing the point. No one quite hears the same record as anyone else. Music should never be made to be written about. John Peel once said that the best compliment you could pay to a book about pop music is that it makes you go back and listen to the music. So music criticism is essential, yet pointless.

There is a point to this rambling, honest.

In Gosh Comics, I am fingering the pages of a new volume called Phonogram: Rue Britannia, by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. ‘One of the few truly essential comics of 2006’ says someone called Warren Ellis, on the back cover. To qualify Mr Ellis’s credentials, his name is followed by what I assume are his Best Known For works: Fell, Transmetropolitan and Planetary. I haven’t heard of any of those. Would I like them? Do tell.

Then underneath is a similar endorsement from Luke Haines. Now, I know who that is: he’s a singer-songwriter. But he gets brackets after his name too: The Auteurs and Black Box Recorder. Definitely names of bands. Not comic books.

Actually, for all I know, Warren Ellis is a singer with the bands Fell, Transmetropolitan and Planetary. It’s that favourite subject of mine again: osmotic notability. Received opinions. How you’re meant to be have heard of X, but not Y. And that you’re meant to think this about X, and that about Y. Guilty Pleasures. So bad it’s good. Famous for fifteen people. What ‘cult’ means. Tallest pigmies, big fish in small ponds. Or is it tallest pigmies in smallest ponds?

I realise that if I dwell on these thoughts any further, I will either go actually mad, or solve the secret of the universe. Neither would do.

Phonogram is a beautifully drawn and intelligently written tale of goddesses and ghosts , time-travelling, memories of lost love, portals into other worlds. But the ‘hook’ of it is how all these elements connect to pop songs, specifically those from the UK music scene circa 1995, taking in Britpop, Blur, the Manics, Oasis, Afghan Whigs, and Kenickie. A lot on Kenickie. There’s also unkind references to Kula Shaker, Shed Seven and Echobelly. And some up-to-date comments on Pete Doherty, Dirty Pretty Things and The Arctic Monkeys. Whoever they all are. I’m joking. Slightly.

Do these band names mean anything to you, Dear Reader? Do you have an instant, unshakable image or opinion in your head when such names are mentioned? Well, that’s part of the point of the story. But Phonogram comes with a very handy Glossary at the back, so all is not lost. You don’t need to know the music to enjoy the story.

It could have been a self-indulgent piece of pop nostalgia, but there’s enough arresting ideas in the words and artwork to more than justify the proceedings. A goddess at Ladyfest curses a man with menstruation – a ‘Curse’ indeed. Aging male music fans are described as not men, but ‘a different colour of boy’. And the torture of sitting through awful support acts has never been more vividly realised.

Says one girl character on Kenickie, ‘When Marie sings ‘Classy’, I’m a statue made of dust and glitter. I feel the future at my fingertips. I can do anything.’

I mention this because it’s Marie’s birthday this week. Happy Birthday, Marie.

So I’m in Gosh Comics, wanting to buy something – one thing. I’m umming and erring between Phonogram, something by Joe Sacco, or Scott Pilgrim Vol 1.

Then I realise Phonogram namechecks Orlando, and favourably. In the Glossary:

ORLANDO
London soul-pop duo whose Wildean alienation classic Passive Soul was held tightly to the chests of those upset by the laddy excesses of late Britpop.

Sold! I’ll take ten!

Watch a documentary about Stephen Fry, who has turned 50. It focuses on his qualities as a jack-of-all-trades, and pretty much declares him master of them all. John Sessions calls his novel The Hippopotamus a modern classic, up there with anything by Amis, Faulks, and so on. JK Rowling calls his autobiography one of the best she’s ever read. Prince Charles also sings his praises, citing Fry as the kind of person there should be more of: clever people who share and encourage rather than belittle or show off.

Phil Jupitus is a fan of his 80s radio sketch show Saturday Night Fry, as am I. Not only was it extremely inspired and witty, but it was an impressively early example of Fry sending up his own public persona:

A: ‘Ere! This tea tastes funny.
B: That’s not tea. That’s a potion which turns you into a parody of Stephen Fry.
A: So it does! Well, isn’t that a turn-up (voice changes into the actual Fry) … for the trousers. En passant, it’s a fascinating but worthless observation that the word ‘trousers’… (etc)

And this was in 1988, before A Bit Of Fry & Laurie and Jeeves & Wooster.

He’s a good example of one of my credos: the art of creating a deliberate persona based loosely on your natural self, then wielding it as both a shield for your anxieties, and a sword for dealing with the world. See also Wilde (obviously), Crisp, Warhol and more recently and most vividly, Russell Brand.

I’ve been listening to episodes of David Baddiel’s Radio 4 debate programme, Heresy. One from last year includes Russell Brand just as his career is properly taking off, and Baddiel comments on his newly-honed public persona:

Russell Brand: …and I think the Queen should sometimes hand out photographs of what she looks like while she’s having it off.
Baddiel: Having it what?
Brand: Having it off, having it away, you know. Monkey business, how’s yer father, that sort of stuff.
Baddiel: “‘aving it ‘orff?” Are you from the 19th Century?
Brand: Yeah! I likes it there, David.
Baddiel: You’re a Cockney bloke from the 19th century…!
Brand: Well, that’s when our nation was epitomised. I don’t think we’ve really progressed since then. So I thought I’d just linger there for a while, if I may. (to audience) I should never have done those ‘Rippins’, though!
Baddiel: But when I first met you, you were NOT stuck halfway up a Victorian chimney.

Re-invention in motion. A year on, and it’s impossible to think of Brand as anything other than this uniquely anachronistic ‘Artful Dodger Of Camden Market’ character. It suits him. But back to Stephen Fry.

As well as projecting a strong public persona, Fry is a commendable polymath, dodging the phrase ‘Best Known For’ as regards any single work.

And it’s the polymath inspiration that I’m musing on as I sit in a deckchair the next day, by the bandstand in Embankment Gardens. I’m surrounded by dozens of others, similarly deckchaired, all reading newspapers and books, but deliberately so. We are extras in a pop video.

The band are The Schema, aka Rhodri Marsden, another polymath. He’s a blogger, a GIF designer (or something to do with computers and image design anyway), a musician with Scritti Politti, a recording artiste in his own right as The Free French, and a freelance journalist. This pop video is part of a feature he’s doing for a newspaper about DIY music-making in 2007. He’s created a whole new band, written and recorded a song, distributed it online, and made a video, all so he can write about it in the press. Or is it the other way around? Is he a journalist who makes music, or a musician who writes for the papers? If the question can be posed at all, it’s usually a good thing.

Likewise the video director, Alex de Campi. She directs films (in a beret, I’m pleased to report) but also writes graphic novels. With no apparent bias to one or the other.

For the shoot, I have brought along a prop magazine: Your Hair Monthly. Which is mostly pictures of hairdos, with alliterative captions. ‘Crazy crops for sizzling summer’. That sort of thing. Bit of a waste of time, though, as I arrive too late for the crowd shots, having been caught up in morning chores. But I do manage to record some lip-synching as part of a rotation of guest singers.

David B and Anna S are there, as is Travis E & Emily, Angelique C (her hair now in Blond Transition), Rhoda B, Sarah PV, Ed J, Melissa, Jo B. Afterwards, many of us repair to a Charing Cross pub and are joined by Ben H and Jen Denitto (back from Scarlet’s Well playing in Denmark).

One of the video actors, Ed, is charming and friendly and comes up to me between takes. He reminds me of the more vocationally-geared thesbians I used to socialise with at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Actors who are just keen to do as much as possible, the more varied the work the better.

We discuss this in relation to the differences between a polymath and a dilettante. Dilettantes dabble. They ‘have a go’. Polymaths do their best in all the fields that interest them, and stick with it beyond ‘dabbling’. Or at least, that’s the spirit.

Standing on the bandstand, I gaze out at the trees in Burlington Gardens, and think about the old nature-related metaphors, applicable to polymaths. How trees just grow as tall as they individually can, without thinking it’s a competition, or thinking about comparisons, or worrying about being attacked.

It’s a very hippy-ish and luvvie-ish train of thought, I know. But it’s helpful when one slips into the whole ‘why bother’ mode. And I come away from the video shoot in a perfectly moan-free mood, for once.

Still ejecting piles of books every day. I’ve impatiently upped my daily rate to two or even three piles per day: with an average of 15 books in a pile. The aim is to reduce the number so all books are actually contained in the two bookcases, as opposed to forming tottering piles on the floor or other surfaces. All filed neatly and properly (ie vertically) with space for new ones. Then I’ll finally be able to see exactly what I have. As opposed to what happened yesterday, when I discovered I’d absent-mindedly bought the same book twice on more than one occasion, and the duplication remained undetected for months. It’s all part of my grand scheme to convert what’s essentially a gathering of clutter into a vaguely decent working space.

I’m also using the process as an excuse to walk around town (getting some exercise into the bargain) and find new charity shops to bother. Some shops are clutter-domes themselves, and I feel bad about adding to their burden. Some have filters and rules about what they will and won’t take.

‘No technical manuals,’ says the frosty lady in one Oxfam bookshop. ‘No out-of-date travel guides. AND the books must be in a good, clean condition. We’ll have a look at you’ve got.’

Which to me sounds like my carrier bags will be thoroughly vetted while I have to stand there sheepishly, like I’m at Customs, with the possibility of still having books on my hands when I walk out.

I wouldn’t mind this undignified ritual if I were actually selling the things, eg at Music & Video Exchange. But as I’m donating to charity I think life’s too short, so I give the shop a miss.

The lady at another Oxfam bookshop, on the other hand, has something of a friendlier attitude on the phone.

‘Just bring it all in, we’ll take it! It’s not a problem. It’s good of you to donate.’

Which is exactly what I want to hear, of course.

One of the many inlay dedications, over ten years old:

Hope the New Year sees Orlando become massive. Thanks for all your love and correspondence in the past year, it means a lot. Love & friendship, xxx.

I’m pleased to find I did write back to those that sent me letters in those days. Proper ink on proper paper, proper stamps on proper envelopes. I met the girl in question at a club recently, for the first time in years, and was pleased to see she seems to have her life in order. Certainly more so than me, anyway. Though she wasn’t exactly falling over herself to talk to me, and I have a feeling I represent her embarrassing teenage past to her.

It’s odd to realise you’ve been someone’s Funny Little Phase, From Their Madder Days. But that’s fine. I’m glad to be of use. And I have my funny little phases too.

The books go into the bags, off to a new life.

Today is Mum and Dad’s 42nd wedding anniversary. When dating in the 60s – or rather, courting (I’m all for bringing back that term), they used to meet outside the back entrance of the British Museum, by the stone lions.

And I’m in the British Museum today, in the sci-fi Great Court, having a cup of tea with Shanthi S. She’s been with her own beau for nearly fifteen years herself. It can still be done.

We’ve been to see the Edith Piaf biopic, La Vie En Rose, at Covent Garden Odeon. Excellent stuff. The actress playing her, Marion Cotillard, is the absolute spitting image of Piaf from 20 to 47, all sad eyes, stoop and quivering mouth.

The transformation is remarkable, not just with the age changes, but from Cotillard to Piaf in the first place. Cotillard is an extremely beautiful young woman in the flesh (playing Russell Crowe’s love interest in A Good Year), and certainly looks nothing at all like Edith Piaf. But in the younger age scenes, her face is convincingly sparrow-like (as per Piaf’s nickname) and ordinary-looking. Awards for her acting are indeed justified, but the hair and make-up designers should definitely be acknowledged for playing their part. See also Nicole Kidman in The Hours.

Signs of 2007 London: Shanthi and I arrange to meet via a combination of Facebook and mobile phone texting. On the way there, I overhear someone on Tottenham Court Road also mentioning what has become another kind of F-word. Were a time-traveller to alight now, wondering what year it was, the giveaway pointers would be conversations mentioning Facebook, white iPod headphone leads, and the huge amount of free newspapers littering the tubes and streets.

One cliche with stories about time-travellers is that they always find a discarded newspaper within seconds of arriving, and thus find out the date. For London 2007, finding an unwanted newspaper is now matter-of-fact. You can’t move for them.