Emails:

From: Ellen and Emelie
Town / Country: Stockholm
Message:

Dear Dickon,

The youth of today are kept away from experiencing real music (such as Fosca) because of age limits to concerts. There are a few of us that got a taste of your music at Stockholms Poetry Festival and are hungry for more. So, pretty please play a concert in Sweden without an age limit? We promise to make you a gigantic sign with your face surrounded in beams of glitter and scream the lyrics to every song. Because we love you and your music and reallyreallyreally want to see you live (lots of more fangirlish comments). Much respect, admiration and unhealthy amounts of love, Emelie and Ellen xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I can’t really do much about the age limits, I’m afraid. But feel free to write to your favourite teen-friendly venues and festivals, and suggest they book Fosca. Playing the Benno festival in 2001 was my happiest gig to date.

HI! I just saw that you’re gonna perform in my hometown Karlstad. Is it possible to meet you and buy your records directly from you, before or after the concert? I really loved your performance at the Rip It Up festival. It seems like this stuff is based on true emotions, without any “wanna be a cool pop star” attitude. I actually got inspired to use new ideas in my pop project. Cheers and hugs to all of Fosca, Patrik

We’ll definitely be bringing some CDs. To be told you’ve inspired others in their own music is always nice. Thank you. I’m looking forward to Karlstad too.

I think I USED to want to be a cool pop star. Those dreams have either faded with time, or have been knocked out of me by life’s pokes and prods. Maybe it’s just as well. I’m finally starting to dream again, albeit of other things.

Also in the Inbox: a student in Utretcht asking to interview me for a thesis on dandyism (sure), plus Gina R from the early 80s teen band Marine Girls, wanting to know if our paths had crossed sometime in the past. She’d seen me on the Web and saw we had mutual friends.

The Marine Girls was the first band of Tracey Thorn, the singer with Everything But The Girl. She and Gina formed it while still at school. They made a couple of records in the early 80s, ‘Beach Party’ and ‘Lazy Ways’, which garnered a following in the world of John Peel and the music press. For a group of teenage girls singing about love, beaches and days out, they sounded unusually sombre, arty, and jazzy, much like Tracey Thorn’s records to come, but less polished, less tutored (and thus more charming), less commercial, and with that unique girls-together edge. Kurt Cobain was a fan, and the US band Unrest recorded a version of ‘Love To Know’ in the 90s.

So although I confirmed that, no, on this occasion I’m pretty certain we haven’t met,
it’s an utter pleasure to get an email from someone whose music you’ve enjoyed for years.

Yet how strange to think I am corresponding with a teenage girl who happens to be in her forties. Turns out she was at Latitude last year, looking after teenage girls of her own, and like my parents she’s rented a place in Southwold every summer for years. So maybe she just saw me walking around in Suffolk one day.

‘Where might I know you from?’

If you think about it, a full answer would be listing every possible interaction you’ve had with the world since birth. Where to start? Where to stop? I really need to look inside that other person’s mind, find my image, and see what it’s filed under, what the taglines are.

I might be known from the bands I’ve been in, or the clubs and events I’ve DJ-d or been a regular at. Or maybe I served them when I worked in a shop? I’ve done a lot of that. In fact, I definitely served her bandmate Ms Thorn in Hampstead Our Price, 1995. Next time I saw Ms T, a few months later, I was hanging out at the aftershow of EBTG’s Shepherds Bush Empire gig, in my new capacity as a glittering music biz party boy. That backstage bar became a bit of a second home for a while.

There’s a theatre anecdote – collected, naturally, by Ned Sherrin – where some old and celebrated actor (possibly Gielgud) is introduced to a younger player at a party.

Old Actor: An actor, eh? Yes, I have seen you before. Were you at Stratford? The Royal Shakespeare Company?

Younger actor: No, I’ve never been in the RSC.

OA: The Royal Court? I’ve definitely seen you –

YA: No, I’ve never played there.

OA: Something by Chekhov in the West End?

YA: (shamefacedly) No…. I’m afraid haven’t acted in a while. The only job I’ve had for the last year is working behind the deli counter at Harrods.

OA: (triumphantly) THAT’S where I saw you! You were MARVELLOUS!

Have to admit it, I am feeling a bit lost in life. I think I need a certain amount of moving on, if not quite Getting On.

It’s been 14 years now in this room. A perfectly lovely bedsitting room, in a very lovely part of North London. And at least I don’t have to play the whole communal living game, arguing murderously over whose hummus is whose. But after 14 years in the same place, and at the same hand-to-lipbalmed-mouth level, I finally want to try living somewhere with my own bathroom. Call me greedy. So I guess this means Work.

But what do I want to be if I grow up? Whenever I look at the Recruiting section of newspapers, I feel utterly in the wrong universe.

There’s a pull-out supplement in this week’s New Statesman, comprising a round table discussion about the commissioning of public services. For me it may as well be written in Klingon. ‘Cross-sector commissioning for effective service delivery’. ‘Our experience includes the implementation of procurement and contracting models.’ ‘Consulting > Solutions > Outsourcing.’

A sample sentence:

‘If you deliver healthcare to somebody…’

Yep, got that.

‘…and they see it as something over which they have no control or have no engagement with…’

Yes, still understanding that. Just about.

‘…there will be a disconnect between the two ends.’

Pardon? This isn’t even a written piece: it’s a transcription of a discussion. That there are so many people in Real Life who regularly speak like this makes me feel like I really am from a different planet.

But I realise it’s me that’s the weird one. I feel a disconnect between my two ends. My reality consultancy has been well and truly outsourced. I need a procurement of ‘solutions’ in my own life. Barman! Can I procure a double Solutions and tonic?

So I guess it’s pointless applying for conventional jobs. At 36, with zero money and next to zero normal career experience, I’ve not so much hit Rock Bottom as hit Rock Sideways. I’ve joked haughtily before that my CV has one sentence on it: ‘Don’t you know who I am?’

But when it comes to things like ‘experience’, what can you say about the experience of being interviewed as a Blogging Dandy by newspapers in Holland and Sweden? Of being known as Shane MacGowan’s New Romantic Butler (not entirely true, but there’s no Black Sobranie smoke without fire)?

I could try pitching a Dickon-style column to selected publications. But if they want an Everyman-ish take on life, they’ve had it with me. I can’t do the Everyman. Those columnists who play to the gallery: how all men are like this, all women are like that, and how politician X or party Y is being typically foolish / wise (delete as applicable); that really isn’t me.

And those columnists who write in a permanent Everyman shrug, what’s all that about, eh?

It’s true I’ve slightly but irrevocably slipped out of the Real World. I suppose this is both my failing and my strength, and is presumably why several thousand people I don’t know are reading this diary.

So I remain optimistic for what happens next. Even the out-of-place can find their place.