Fosca at Cafe Kosmos, Gothenburg, June 4th 2005.
L – R: Kate Dornan, D.E., Rachel Stevenson.

Back from Sweden in one piece. We are looked after by Erika, Victor and the band Compute in Gothenburg; Said, Mikael and Dan in Malmo. Fantastic response from audience at Gothenburg – where they know all the Fosca lyrics far better than I do. The experience of watching an audience singing along to one’s own lyrics is one that makes everything worthwhile.

On the way home, I manage to set off the Gothenburg airport metal detector. The culprits are the metal clips on my braces. As in the types that hold one’s trousers up. For some reason the machine’s Stansted counterpart isn’t affected. Either the Swedish security devices are more powerful, or the Stansted device is deliberately calibrated to allow for old-fashioned trouser accessories.

Have to write up my notes as a tour diary for Plan B magazine, but readers may be interested to read the blog reports of my bandmates Ms Dornan and Ms Stevenson. Ms Dornan has an additional moose teaser here.

Big piece on The Boogaloo by James Brown in this week’s Time Out magazine. It concludes thus:

Holding court in the corner is inevitably [Shane] MacGowan, these days a Dickensian character who has a live-in butler who serves him sausages. ‘The butler’s a former New Romantic called Mr Dickon Edwards,” says [manager] O’Boyle. “He used to be in that band Orlando. I’ve made him the Ambassador of the Boogaloo. Only Shane could come to the pub with a butler.’

I’m rather pleased about that. Since then Mr O’Boyle has asked me to host bingo nights at the pub. I do hope these happen.