Am finally tackling the mountain of books at home, which must have numbered the best part of a thousand before I began a daily culling system a few days ago. Not only do they spill onto all available surfaces, they have begun to form random piles on the floor. There’s simply no space in either of the two bookshelves, themselves creeping into the phase where books appear horizontally on top of the packed rows, or worse still in double-parked piles on the deeper shelves, pointlessly obscuring the books behind. It’s the handbag theory of space management: unless you keep an eye on what’s happening, the space will automatically fill itself up.

So every day I’ve been pulling out books, and using the shelf height to measure a potential reject pile (just under a foot). I also make a note in a computer file (via the VoodooPad Lite program) of what I’m throwing out, in a kind of deal with my secret hoarding demon. Making a list of what I’m ejecting somehow makes it easier. I list, therefore it isn’t.

I now realise that a surprisingly large proportion of the books are from friends, relations, past lovers. Some are presents, some are indefinite loans. It’s hard to tell when there’s no name written on the flyleaf; neither my name denoting a gift, nor a name of the friend, marking their property. In some cases, I have lost contact with the donor in question. In others, it’s so long ago that I’ve forgotten who it was who lent it to me in the first place. I find it’s generally easier on the nerves to just give books away rather than lend them.

Then there’s the dedication page anxiety. I love to find second hand books where there’s a handwritten message on the flyleaf, hinting at another world. Even if it’s just ‘To Sally from Victor, 17th August 1958’. Yet I feel curiously cagey about letting one dedicated to me go into second-hand circulation. Some dedications are too personal, even heartbreaking, and I tear a few out. It’s only a pre-title page, so the book is still perfectly useful to someone else. Still, by donating a book that was once a token of affection for me and me alone,  I can feel like I’m committing a kind of betrayal. It’s nearly akin to the worrying over just when to throw away birthday and Christmas cards.

But if I’ve read a book and have no wish to finger its pages again, and I need the space it occupies, then surely it has to go. I know I’m fussing over nothing, but I almost mutter a prayer of forgiveness as I hand the carrier bags over.

***
David Barnett suggests that, if I do tear out any inlay pages with dedications on, I should keep them all and use them to create some kind of art piece.

He says this on Sunday (yesterday), in St John’s Tavern, Archway. Anna S and Alex P are here too. I’m on the mineral water.

In the early 90s, St John’s Tavern was a fairly ordinary pub which put on indie bands in its Wild-West-themed saloon room. The tiny stage was in one corner fitted with vaudeville drapes and a hooded canopy. I think there may even have been cow horns mounted on the top. I played there in an early version of Orlando, twice, in 1993. A long-haired character called Slim ran the place, and after we played there, he kept phoning me up in Bristol to invite us back. I can’t believe London was ever short on indie bands looking for a gig, so he must have really liked us.

Now it’s been completely refurbished and turned into a more ostentatiously middle-class bar. Jazz on the CD player. Little wooden tables. Pews. Sunday supplements. Couples in their thirties and forties with bottles of wine. Waitresses. When I arrive, I walk into the saloon bar, now a dining area, looking for Anna S. Everyone at the tables stops talking and stares at me. It’s like a middle-class version of that scene in An American Werewolf In London.

I sit on a pew, and make a mental note to avoid doing so the next time. Because a man at the next table is also on the same pew, so I’m at the mercy of vibrations from his little absent-minded kicks and fidgeting, in that way only men can do. I consider having a pew-shaking contest with him, but decide against it.

I leaf through one of the Sunday supplements. An article on networking websites once again, examining which kind of people use Facebook and which use MySpace. It’s against the law to have a newspaper supplement without at least one Facebook article at the moment.

***
How to spot bohemians from a distance, part 79.

Gazing out across Alexandra Park on a hot and crowded afternoon, Rhoda’s birthday picnic is conspicuous for being the only one with:

(a) no baby buggies, and
(b) no men with their tops off.

Am officially on the wagon. No idea how long I’ll last. I’m mainly keen to find out what it’s like being entirely sober for weeks on end. It’ll certainly be a new experience.

As I’m mainly a social drinker, staying teetotal at home is no bind whatsoever. It’s avoiding alcohol in bars and at social gatherings that’s the challenge, particularly when I’m feeling a bit anxious and exposed and need a drink for my nerves. So this might help to either banish the anxiety altogether, or convert it to a kind of energised confidence. We shall see.

Another reason is to help improve my diet. Too often have I gone home drunk – or even slightly merry after one drink – and indulged in junk food from a late-night shop. The advice is that you’re not really mean to eat after 8pm at all, let alone stuff yourself with rubbish. If I cut out the drink, hopefully this won’t happen so often.

It’s going to be interesting, being boring. Or rather, being boring in one way in order to be less boring in another.

And just as well I put my foot down about it, because on Saturday I squeeze in three separate social gatherings in the space of a few hours. So I get to deny alcohol three times before the cock crows.

I spend the morning finishing a movie review column for Plan B (covering the September releases Death Proof, Evening, Two In Paris and Tough Enough). Then I gather the latest in a series of bags stuffed with books and take it to a charity shop, of which more in the next entry.

Then to Alexandra Park, for Rhoda B’s 40th birthday picnic, where I hit the apple juice. A good turn-out for her, including Charley Stone, Kirsten, Anna Spivack, Alex Sarll, Ed W, and a lady called Sarah who’s also off the alcohol, so I ask her about that. She’s known for devising fiendishly hard Treasure Hunt games, and Charley suggests I should collaborate with her on some TV pitch. Some kind of quirky cult-ish game programme, like The Adventure Game on BBC TV in the early 80s. The one with dragon-like aliens and ‘The Vortex’ at the end, which is the bit everyone remembers.

I leave Rhoda’s bash at about 4pm, walk up to Muswell Hill where Miss Red waves at me from a passing car, and then take a bus to a party in Highgate, something of a sadder occasion. After years of living in London, Gail O’Hara has been told by the Home Office that she’s not earned enough money to renew her work permit, and back to NYC she must go. So this is her Deportation Party, and she’s selling off various possessions before making the big move. I walk away with a biography of the US poet Frank O’Hara (no relation), and a collection of Adrian Tomine postcards. Gail edited the quality indie fanzine Chickfactor, and the indie stars I say hello to at her party include Harvey Williams, Pam Berry, and Tim Baxendale. I plump for fizzy elderflower water.

Then I negotiate the Tube (with the extra difficulties of the weekend) to Cadogan Hall in Sloane Square in the evening, where Tim Chipping treats me to a Sondheim revue, Good Thing Going, by way of celebrating his birthday on Tuesday. I buy him a whiskey & coke and get a mineral water for myself.

The concert stars Maria Friedman and Daniel Evans, plus the Arts Ed Chorale and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Superb performances, particularly from the Arts Ed students and Daniel Evans, who has such incredible energy that one imagines him punching a hole in a wall whenever he gets off stage. Fantastic stuff, particularly ‘Sunday’ and ‘Move On’ from Sunday In The Park With George, ‘Barcelona’ from Company, and Mary Carewe delivering ‘The Miller’s Son’ from A Little Night Music.

In the theatre foyer, Matt Lucas comes over to say hello. ‘It’s an Orlando reunion!’ he remarks. I’m surprised and pleased that he still knows who I am: last time we chatted he was signing autographs as George Dawes from Shooting Stars.

He’s pulled off that tricky manoeuvre: re-writing what you’re Best Known For in the minds of strangers, and on your own terms. I forget to tell him that I saw the Little Britain stage show last year, as part of the National Youth Theatre Ball. And very wonderful it was too.

Later on, Tim and I repair to the West End, where he shows me Gordon’s Wine Bar, a remarkably preserved Victorian establishment off Charing Cross, with faded newspaper cuttings on the wall, dust-covered books and ancient bottles on the shelves and so forth. But of course, thanks to me, we can’t stop to share a bottle.

Some stranger in the bar takes the mickey out of my appearance as we pass through (‘Hey look, it’s Lord Fossington-Smythe The Third! Oh, he’s going. Cheerio, pip pip!’). It’s karmic: I’m at the mercy of seeing others thinking they’re funny, when they’re just being drunk.

Walking up St Martin’s Lane, we find ourselves surrounded by Orlando fans. Sadly for us, it’s the other Orlando. Mr Bloom is currently in a London play, and it must have just finished because as we walk past the theatre in question, dozens of people are outside waiting to mob him (at least, that’s what we guess is happening). They spill onto the road in such number that the traffic is forced into a makeshift single lane. As we squeeze past to continue on our way, I muse on this rare near-meeting of the two Orlandos in the same space: the failed band and the successful actor.

Anyway, never mind the Orlandos. Sorry you’re leaving, Gail. Happy birthday, Rhoda. Happy birthday for Tuesday, Tim. A non-alcoholic toast to you all.

Just answered the door to a MORI poll lady. She’s doing a survey of young people in Highgate.

‘You look like a young person,’ she says, getting out her clipboard. ‘How old are you?’

‘Thirty-six next month.’

‘Good lord. Sorry for waking you’.

It’s half-past one in the afternoon. She moves on down the road. Though not, sadly, as Diana Ross did in The Wiz.

Naturally, I can only find it cheering to be genuinely mistaken for a twenty-something. Though I have friends of the same age who are still asked in a pub to prove they’re 18.

There’s plenty of others in this condition of blessed youthfulness, or indeed arrested development. Particularly those I’ve known for over ten years on the London music scene. Some of it is down to dressing like a younger person, with a younger person’s hairdo. If they do have jobs, such jobs often endorse and encourage a clinging to one’s youth: the music business, popular media, fashion, new technology, gadgets.

One place which encourages a more pernicious regression, if not downright schizophrenia, is the interactive side of the Internet. I’ve seen the anonymity of blogs and message boards turning perfectly intelligent and thoughtful graduates into the worst aspect of their childhood selves. Or perhaps they’re created new childhood selves, making up for some past wrongs. Victims of bullying in the real playground becoming virtual bullies online. An explanation, but not an excuse.

Such adults go out of their way to don a virtual mask – and a virtual school uniform if not a nappy – and adopt one or more of the time-honoured playground roles:

1) the spiteful, foul-mouthed bully
2) the whining victim telling tales
3) the self-appointed joker playing to some imagined gallery.

But meet such people in person, away from their devil machines, and they seem entirely reasonable and sane adults, who believe in love and hope and responsibility for one’s actions. And then they go back home, log on, and out comes the problem child all over again.

If I have ever inadvertently joined in with this Net equivalent of Knock Down Ginger myself (being the childhood ‘game’ of knocking on a front door, then running away giggling), then it’s always with my own name attached, striving for accountability. I feel the need to be found standing sheepishly in the doorway afterwards, facing the music. By myself. With a name tag. Any hoped-for giggling rings hollow and nervous and sad. It’s been a waste of time.

The trick is to write as if absolutely everyone in the world was right next to you, in the room, reading over your shoulder. And at the front of the crowd is the person you’re writing about at the time. Then if you are still childishly unkind, at least the schizophrenia aspect can be reigned in.

I’ve only been on ‘Second Life’ once. Within minutes of arriving in this animated virtual playground, one of the other newcomers (male) attacked another (female), knocking her about and calling her names. Just because he could. It was a kind of Second Life Rape.

I think of all that adult ingenuity, creating computers and computer programs, designing new types of silicon chips and so on, only to enable other adults to don child masks and regress in all the cruelest, most depressing, hollow ways. Not to add and improve, but to subtract, dilute, delete and undo. The worst side of the vandalism instinct, gorged with the playground mentality.

Some vandals can indeed be creative, such as Banksy (I do wince at his Grange Hill-like name) the graffiti artist turned darling of the coffee table books. But he works on his own. His defiling of Paris Hilton CDs wasn’t his greatest moment: it was cheap and obvious, and a bit of a childish regression on his own terms. Playing to the most tiresome kind of gallery. But at least he put his name to it. If not his face, of course.

When there’s a gang or a gathering, the bigger the numbers, the more chance of someone defining themselves by playing up to their worst aspect. I’m mindful of the ‘graffiti bomb’ of Camden Town Tube last Christmas Day.

On this, the only day the station could be closed, a group of spray can guerillas broke in and covered the walls with various daubings, in-joke images, ‘tags’ and taunting messages to the police, with whom they were playing a catch-me-if-you-can party game. What’s wrong with Naked Twister, I say, but anyway.

Some of it was rather jolly: a big silver ‘Merry Xmas’ all along one platform wall, beautifully outlined in that chunky letters way (though I’ve never understood why the 2007 graffiti style hasn’t changed from early 80s New York subway art one iota. Apart from Banksy’s style).

Others in the gang were less clever: a poster for a Downs Syndrome charity amended with the words, ‘Kick his face.’ So much for the romantic rebel. Even criminal gangs need their own moderators.

If I’d been in that gang, I would have scrawled, ‘Damn it. I’ve missed Doctor Who. AND these fumes are giving me a terrible headache. Frankly, I’m beginning to question if this has been the best use of my time.’

London is still muggy and warm in just the wrong way.

Last night: start to make my way to a press screening of a new western starring Russell Crowe (3:10 To Yuma), but then feel rather ill and have to turn back home. I’m not sure how much of this is down to the heat, and how much down to my lack of interest in both westerns and Russell Crowe.

On the bus back, I bump into Aurora, a nice French lady from Archway. Well, she says she’s French, but her accent is closer to that of Kristin Scott Thomas in Four Weddings And A Funeral; a friendly brand of aristocratic English. What does give her Frenchness away is the occasionally uncommon turn of phrase. Or her subject matter – a sudden Sartre-like observation about Life, right out of the blue at the No 43 bus stop.

Similarly, I think of my experiences with Swedish friends who speak perfect English with no trace of an accent. One forgets their nationality entirely, until the use of swearing comes into it. Or alcohol. Talking to someone who’s drunk in a second language can be a very odd conversation indeed. A kind of accidental aggression, full of rudeness that isn’t rudeness, faux pas that are not faux pas. Or whatever the Swedish is for faux pas.

Of course, the real faux pas is being a near-monoglottal Englishman (my French and German are shamefully rusty). At the Fosca gig last Weds, Rachel Stevenson muses that we should just move to Sweden and have done with it, given the Fosca fan base over there is several times the size of our UK one. She’s joking, but if I were to move there, I’d have to learn an acceptable amount of Swedish. Otherwise it’s just so rude. Deliberately rude.

***
Two evenings out in a row are spent in the company of Charley Stone. On the Thursday she invites me along to the National Portrait Gallery for a free tour called ‘The Queer Gaze’. Essentially, it’s two tour guides’ selection of works in the permanent exhibition which have a gay interest slant. Or, as they put it, just people in paintings that they fancy.

The guides are Shaun Levin, a writer from South Africa, and the artist Sadie Lee. Though I know her also as a DJ at a rather good club night in Stoke Newington called Lower The Tone. She has wonderful hair: a kind of Suzi Quatro feather cut. And her lecture style is refreshingly informal and honest.

‘I like her,’ whispers an elderly lady behind me to her friend. ‘She’s funny.’

What’s important is that she gets the degree of humour just right for an art lecture: witty and engaging rather than flip or facetious.

The tour includes an outrageously effeminate portrait of George Villiers, Duke Of Buckingham, much-favoured courtier and rumoured lover of James I. It was said he had the nicest legs in the land, and the painting enhances them to the point of caricature.

I’m mindful of those manipulated photos of women on current magazine covers and film posters, their legs and other attributes artificially exaggerated by a computer. Men’s legs get less of a look-in.

Sunday: hot and sunny in all the unpleasant ways. Men and women exposing flesh that really should be put away. I am in full black suit, surrounded by men in t-shirts and shorts. I know, I should have worn the white linen ensemble.

To the Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes to see a few bands with friends in: New Royal Family, Low Edges, Luxembourg. I forget it’s a Sunday, when one must always allow extra time for more infrequent tubes and buses, and closures for engineering works. Highgate tube is closed, so I have to take a bus. Arrive not only too late to see the NRF, but to be told that I look unusually colourful. A touch of sunburn from the unexpected bus journey, where no seat isn’t steeped in sunlight. Thus my mood is already ruined for the evening.

The Low Edges and Luxembourg are entertaining enough, and I’m sure I would enjoy them if I was in more of a mood to enjoy anything at all. It’s an 80s themed event, and each band is charged with playing an 80s cover version. The Low Edges do Huey Lewis’s ‘Power Of Love’. Luxembourg do ‘Manic Monday.’

I have mixed feelings about this sort of thing. There’s dangers of cheap, jokey irony that I can take or leave, but that’s more to do with the organisers, who I don’t know, than the bands, who I do (or at least, some of their members). The organisers keep having party games in between the live acts, mucking about with samples of A-Ha’s ‘Take On Me’.

It’s like hearing young people you don’t know quoting ‘Withnail at I’ lines at each other. Funny for some, less so for others.

Jarvis Cocker has been doing the 80s hit ‘Eye Of The Tiger’ at his gigs. Some think this is brilliant, some thing it’s hilarious, others think it’s bizarre. I’m not sure what I think.

I chat to a few friends, but ultimately feel terribly lonely and out of place with it all. I end up sitting by myself in a corner reading my pocket copy of Rilke’s ‘Letters To A Young Poet’, for goodness’ sake. Well, it’s as good a guide to solitude as any. Though Mr Rilke could do with a few jokes. Get over yourself Rilke, I say.

It’s hard, because I want to support those I know in bands. But I enjoy gigs per se less and less at the moment. Private views, films, book launches, plays, yes. Club nights and gigs less so. Particularly if I have to get there by myself.

I think it’s to do with not enjoying the shared experience element. I currently look for exclusive, personal connections in art between the perceiver (reader / listener / viewer) and the artist. The one-on-one experience, like reading. The group experience less so.

At gigs I feel I have to play the part of The Audience Member. I can’t enjoy the band as much as I’d like, because I’m thinking about how best to get home, who to talk to, what I can afford at the bar, and whether to approach that attractive person in the crowd that almost certainly doesn’t feel the same way about me. It’s meant to be Fun, but increasingly I come away at best self-conscious and out of place, at worst depressed and lonely.

It would make all the difference if I’d come with a friend, and left with a friend. Right now, I crave either solitude or one-on-one company like never before. One among the many – even a crowd of friends – is something I’m feeling oddly at sea with, despite my aloof reputation. Which is fine, but I have to stop spending time doing anything I’m not 100% enjoying, and hope my friends will understand. If anything, being so aloof I’m not actually there helps cultivate the image, the myth.

Which is a real shame, as so many of my friends are all in bands or putting on club nights or holding birthday gatherings. I’m spending so much time saying sorry.

That said, there are still a few bands I’d like to see live right now, even if it means going alone. Xiu Xiu. The North Sea Radio Orchestra. And I’m always up for a spot of theatre and musical theatre, which I’ve not done enough of in recent memory. Looking forward to a Sondheim revue this weekend, plus my first trip to the Globe next month, for Love’s Labours Lost.

Walking home past the temple-like St Pancras Church, which is lit up at night, I see the usual homeless man playing his unfortunate part to type – puffy jacket, sunken expression, baseball cap, filthy blankets – bedding down under the vast columns. But further along, also under the columns, there’s another sleeping bag. A pristine white one. And in it are a couple: a thin woman wrapping elegant arms around a man. It’s the clean white sleeping bag – possibly a duvet – and elegance of the woman’s bare arm that convince me they must have a home to go to.

Hard to tell with the man. He has the same sort of scruffy half-beard favoured by fashionable and monied gentlemen who work in television, as well as actual tramps. Women are far more helpful. Few women of Primrose Hill would like to be described as dressing like a homeless person. Whereas much of the male staff at Channel 4 would be over the moon.

Maybe the woman just fancies tramps. There’s someone for everyone.

It’s about 30 degrees C at 11pm, so a bout of al fresco lovemaking is a perfectly good explanation. I feel the need to take a closer look, so unusual is this sight. And yet, though this is a public space on a vast and busy street, it feels like invading their privacy. I walk on quickly, embarrassed. And of course, feeling very much alone.

Somewhat late with this entry. Time just slips away. I have so much to do.

Wednesday: Fosca play the Brixton Windmill. An uncertain, compromised occasion, but I feel it goes well from the band point of view, and am happy with it.

Getting all four members in one room has become remarkably difficult. I honestly don’t know how other part-time bands manage to play at all. When there’s no financial incentive to play, one has to accentuate that it’ll be Fun. But playing weekday evenings is no Fun when fragile band members have had a long day at Work. And weekends tend to be reserved for their own individual Fun with lovers and friends. Or they have to do other bits of Work at the weekends too.

So getting hold of one member is hard enough, let alone all of them at the same time. If I start to moan at band members for not being available, they quite understandably get upset with me. And then it all becomes markedly less Fun than before.

Each time I’ve received an invitation to play a Fosca gig in the UK, either I wasn’t keen myself, or unavailable (even I make plans), or I was ready and willing but one of the other members wasn’t available. In the end, I thought the only way to play at all was to say yes first, then find who can play the gig second. Even if it meant just me and a guitar and laptop.

So for this Wednesday night in Brixton, Fosca are myself, Tom and Rachel but no Kate.

From the comments I get afterwards, some of the long-term fans would rather we didn’t play at all than play without Kate. But fans are rarely happy whatever the Artist does. It’s important to listen to criticism, but different people like different things for different reasons. And when you redo everything to fit their suggestions, they can change their mind. You have to do what pleases yourself, first and foremost. The band cliche about ‘if anyone else likes it, it’s a bonus’ should never be the case. You must still write to be read, perform to be watched. But when it comes to pleasing people too, trying to guess what they’ll like, all bets are off. I tried that before, with the initial Fosca incarnation, all proper rock guitar stuff. Some people still think I’m a fool to have stopped that, as it looked dangerously like becoming successful. But it wasn’t me.

Since the first indiepop Fosca gig with Rachel in 1998, I’ve not done anything that wasn’t 100% me, that I wasn’t happy with.

The David Lean 1945 film Brief Encounter is re-released in London cinemas this week. Incredibly, Time Out magazine has given it a damning review. According to them, these days it’s dated, hysterical, cold, unconvincing and irrelevant. They want to see Celia Johnson thrusting about on top of Trevor Howard, or nothing. Brief Encounter gets two out of five stars, the same as the Transformers movie. Die Hard 4 gets three stars.

Not that I’m comparing Fosca to Brief Encounter, but you get my point.

Back to the gig. Though it’s never about the money, we do lose out each time we play live, and that has to come from somewhere. Fosca do earn a little money, but it all goes on rehearsal fees, taxis to move equipment about, mixing costs, and so on. To make a living from music, it’s easier to be anything but a musician. Performers, artists and writers are often the last people to be paid. I don’t begrudge the sound engineer and bar staff for being paid out of the takings before the band get their share, but it can be terribly dispiriting to come off stage having given one’s all, having Worked like never before, and realising one has effectively paid to play, and thus paid to Work.

Many of our fans can’t make it to the Windmill this week anyway, even when it’s been booked for weeks. The Victoria Line tube is closed for engineering works by the time one goes on stage at 10.30pm. And it’s a School Night. And it’s Brixton. And, and, and…

Still, we do our utmost to make the best of the scenario. For tonight, Tom painstakingly learns to play all of Kate’s synth bits on guitar while working in his usual guitar bits at the same time. So we have a far rockier, more guitar-heavy sound than usual, which is controversial with some, but not me.

When the first Fosca album came out, I received an angry letter from a German gentleman. ‘WHERE ARE ALL THE GUITARS?’.

So maybe he’ll like the new album. And all the synth fans won’t. Maybe it’ll be too ‘rock’ for the indie-poppers, and too indiepop for the proper indie guitar types. Maybe they should all get Die Hard 4 on DVD.

Fosca never did quite fit. Which was always the whole point.

Anyway, I like the album, and so does the rest of the band. The melodies are catchy, the words are uncommon. One line from ‘Kim’ is:

‘If alcoholic sex doesn’t count, I’m a virgin’, spoke the hack accidentally out loud.

Frankly, that single line is better than most other groups’ entire lyrical output. But I would say that. And so I do say that.

For this gig, I finally bring my own pristine SM58 microphone (a venue’s own microphones are invariably dented and steeped in the gingivitis of a thousand Pete Doherty clones), and let all the other bands use it. The handsome and exuberant American boy who fronts the Besties covers it with his oral fluids, so I have to give it a bit of a wipe. And then I keep the tissue for later ‘research’. I’m joking.

All the other bands are terribly good, and very classic indiepop. So much so that the Parallelograms play a song that sounds remarkably like Talulah Gosh’s ‘The Girl With The Strawberry Hair’, which I bought when it came out, from Andy’s Records in Ipswich in 1879 or whenever it was. Then I realise The Parallelograms are actually covering the song in question, the C86 arrangements replicated painstakingly, like a Cutie Cutty Sark.

At the Windmill tonight there’s a merchandise stall selling badges and 7″ indie singles. I feel like nothing has changed since my days of regularly going to Sarah Records gigs, 1990-1993. A mixed feeling indeed. Sometimes one wants a world to vanish, in order to moan about it nostalgically. If the world keeps going, with younger faces at the helm, one is denied a certain tidying up, at the risk of saying ‘closure’.

Still, one hears 60s garage rock all the time, same old guitars and drums, same old set up. Nothing really dies. The new music is the old music with younger faces, that’s all. The decision to move on is therefore down to an individual’s inner changes, nothing external. So I have to move on. And Fosca needs to end.

How much of this 2007 indiepop scene is the fault of Belle & Sebastian – the Pastels fans who played the Hollywood Bowl – is debatable. Maybe it would have happened anyway.

The other band on the bill, Sweden’s A Smile And A Ribbon, are possibly the most immaculately stylish indiepop group I’ve ever seen. Very clean and doll-like in their polkadot retro appearance, just as they are in their music. Some songs are actually rather doo-wop and rock and roll in the 50s sense, but with minimum noise. One of them chides me later for not playing any of the older Fosca ‘hits’. I promise her we’ll play Stockholm soon.

Throughout the gig I’m doped up on painkillers for the arthritis (it’s coming and going), and thus think it best to not have more than one drink, downed a full three hours before showtime. So I perform while sober, but numb. An odd sensation indeed. My first ever gigs demanded a certain Dutch Courage, usually a full bottle of red wine. The result was being barely able to perform at all.

For Orlando, we had a strict ‘no alcohol before a show’ rule, a la Dexys. Then for most Fosca gigs I’ve tended to have a couple of drinks to get me loosened up on stage. Not tonight. And yet I don’t feel any more nervous. So I’m now thinking of trying a period of full sobriety for a few months, to see what happens. I’ll start it… at some point.

I ended up calling this week’s gig Fosca’s First Farewell Show, a la Barbra Streisand. The third album will be the last, but it’s not out yet, so we need to play a few more for when it does see the light of day. I’m sending a CDR to a label today.

But this depends on so much else that’s out of my control: the album coming out at all, the other members (Kate included) being available and willing, the right time and place.

From this week’s gig, I have learned that the next Fosca show must:

– feature all four of us.
– take place on a Friday or Saturday evening, with our set over by 9pm, for those who use the phrase ‘school night’, or have trains to catch. Or to anticipate problems with the Tubes.
– be in a London Zone 1 venue, for those who balk at going anywhere less central.
– feature a healthy amount of the older, synth-heavy songs, for those who complain we don’t play our ‘hits’.
– be booked at least three months in advance, in the hope of getting it into people’s diaries before they book something else. People are so busy these days. In London, it’s amazing any social gatherings of more than two people take place at all.

Or it won’t happen at all.

Ideally, I’d like to rent a space that doesn’t normally put on bands, like a bookshop or library. I’d hire a PA and sell tickets in advance. So it’d be like a private view or book launch, but with the new album on sale, and a set from Fosca. No support bands, lovely though the Windmill ones are. I want to play only to an audience of Fosca fans. There’s not many, but there’s more than none.

We also need to play Sweden at least one more time – ideally Stockholm and Gothenburg.

And Barcelona would be nice to visit just the once, given we have a slight fanbase there, too.

As we pack our equipment away, the Windmill DJs play Orange Juice’s ‘I Can’t Help Myself’, and Tom and I dance along, happy. It’s a perfect record that not enough people know. Should have been a massive hit. People are so hard to please.

The singer Edwyn Collins has a new solo album out next month. I know I moan about my problems and frustrations, but his (recovering from two major brain haemorrhages plus a bout of MRSA) rather put things into sharp relief.

Sadness: the mysterious foot pain is mysteriously back (am I now officially arthritic?), and it looks like I’m going to have play this Fosca gig while being unable to walk. Rachel is providing me with extra painkillers. It’s going to have to be pricey taxis from Highgate to Brixton and back. But then, I would have insisted on that anyway.

I did say it’s the last Fosca gig. But perhaps that’s unfair, what with the Victoria Line’s shortcomings preventing some fans from coming. Perhaps we should do a reunion when the album’s out. I don’t know. We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it. A booking agent and record label would make all the difference.

Sadness: the foot pain has also triggered the dreaded depression. I yearn to throw myself into activity, but The Foot isn’t making it easy. It’s coming and going, though.

Happiness (slight): just found out that the forthcoming ‘Doctor Who: Key To Time’ DVD box set includes a previously unscreened 1979 broadcast of Tom Baker reading ‘Late Night Tales’, including Saki’s ‘Sredni Vashtar’. Which is pretty much my idea of heaven. Little spectator indulgences like this may not exactly be a rest-cure (to quote another Saki title), but they help.