Monday April 26th 1999

Going nowhere fast, deep in debt and despair, but still I struggle on. I refuse to commit suicide until I have at least one album out. Simon Price thinks I should place one of those begging adverts in the back of Private Eye.”The world owes me a living. Send money now”.

I’ve amusingly attempted to find some way of earning money, applying for writing, internet and jobs where I can just sit at a computer all day and not have to talk to anyone too much. But my joie-de-vivre is such at a low ebb, I radiate such lack of enthusiasm when talking to prospective employers on the phone or in interview rooms, and I don’t expect to be taken up at all. But Fosca can’t go anywhere without money, so I sit here wondering what will happen next, waiting for the next happy accident that will take me to further adventures. I have this overwhelming sense of being properly famous at some point in my life, I just don’t know in what way. Something involving a jail sentence, probably.

Envying Charley’s current employment, I’ve also written to two bands I like that are looking for live guitarists, Spy 51 and Spearmint. I’ve always wondered what it would be like taking a back seat in someone else’s band, where the only thing you have to worry about is your own guitar part. I tried this once before in The Childrens Hour, but that didn’t last long, as I’m not the easiest of people to get on with. I can’t do the “bonding” bit: I tend to retreat to a corner with a good book, and am always the Odd One Out in the band. This was the situation in Orlando, even. And that was seen to be “my” band. It wasn’t, of course. Fosca is my proper, first attempt to do my own band where I’m not someone else’s employee. And I seem to be incapable of getting it together. My oxymoronical quandary: I am a loner who can’t do anything by himself.

I used to think an oxymoron was an idiot in acne cream.

Still, I send tapes of the finished recordings so far to various would-be band members and labels, and there are hopes in the form of a one-song “single” on Shout It Out Loud, an internet-only MP3 label, a song on a compilation CD by Club V, one on a split EP by Ritual Records, and a proper EP on the new label started by Nic Goodchild. She is funding it with the compensation money she received after being run over and hospitalized by a drunk driver. This is a very Fosca thing. I suggested she named the label after the car that hit her.

I also send tapes to the people I like and that I think might appreciate them: Too Pure, Geoff Travis, Shinkansen, Piao!, Blow Up, Stephen Pastel, Cliff Gay Dad (at Charley’s suggestion), Darren Hefner, and Suzanne Rhatigan. None of them have yet gotten in touch. Well, Matt from Shinkansen ums and ers, but he does that in normal conversation anyway, so I can never tell. It doesn’t help that I hate phoning people. My passivity positively stifles.

I get a call from Backyard, who promote gigs around town. They want to put on Fosca at the Lil’ Backyard Club off Great Portland Street. “How many people do you think you can pull?”. “I never pull anyone, except social tourists. And sexual tourists. And tourists.” I tell them Fosca won’t play any gigs until we have a record definitely coming out, to justify doing so. And we have less of a revolving-door line up.

At the Velocette gig I attend with Rachel Stevenson, a group of visitors from Hong Kong recognise me from my former life in Orlando and insist on having my picture taken with them. This is so strange, and only adds fuel to my theory that I’m more of a walking tourist attraction than a capable human being. Orlando were spectacularly unsuccessful, yet this sort of thing happens.

Afterwards, we go to Suffragette City, Debbie Smith’s club night at the Candy Bar. It is my first ever visit to a women-only bar, and I bore most of the regulars with this information. Bizarrely, I’m most taken with how much I notice how small women are. It’s… a bar full of small people. I’m not the only male there (men are allowed as guests), but I am the only one in make up and free of facial hair (including sideburns). There are quite a few “baby dykes”, a Nineties breed of young, friendly, boyishly fresh-faced fun-loving Sapphists who don’t hate men. It’s a new stereotype, perhaps, but a far more welcome one to the humourless, hatchet-faced misandrist clichés of the 80s, and that surely can only be a Good Thing. If only male-only gay bars were more forward-thinking. I think about Fosca playing a gig there, reminded of Huggy Bear (who featured two boys) playing women-only gigs in their heyday. It’s certainly a more novel way of kicking against the pricks.

I’m approached by a girl called Layla (her parents were big Clapton fans). It transpires she is a friend of Tim from Baxendale. I tell her of my search for appropriate bandmates and she tells me the girl she is chatting up is a musician. Vulture-like, I pounce on her potential date, a French girl called Carolyn, and I exchange phone numbers and addresses with her before Layla does. Typical, I go to a lesbian bar and within minutes I’ve swapped numbers with a girl there.

I got to Trash, Erol’s club that has moved around the corner to The Annex in Dean Street. It’s a lot bigger than Plastic People, and there’s a section with sofas where you can actually hold a conversation. I bump into Emma (now in the band Rosita), Adrian, David Barnett (who has split up with his ginger-haired girlfriend to go out with a… ginger-haired girl), John the tube driver, Erol’s cousin whose name I always forget, Skinny David Who Works In TV, a girl that recognises me from Orlando, oh, and more. The old crowd. They never call me or invite me out to anything, but they are always friendly when I do see them about. I spend most of the night watching other people, as ever. One couple are wrapped in each other’s embraces particularly tightly. The girl has exactly the same short haircut, t-shirt and jeans that the boy has. His-and-hers haircuts. Opposites don’t always attract. Especially not for narcissists. “Single female seeks mirror image.” Still in a similar pet Fosca subjects vein, there’s also an obviously anorexic girl there who wears a slinky dress so everyone can see her worryingly skeletal frame. Like a road accident, people are simultaneously entranced, annoyed and horrified by her. Much like these diaries.

I attend Club V’s fourth birthday party. Once again, I am chatted up by a tourist of some ilk. But at least he buys me a drink. Like all the best haircuts, he is short, and to the point.

On the night bus home, I bump into Alex, also from Baxendale. I hadn’t recognised him from their excellent concert I witnessed recently, because he wasn’t wearing his stage expression: a sulky Ron Mael frown. Some people have stage costumes. Alex has a stage frown. Offstage, he is all smiles and happy-go-lucky charm. Rather like Russell Senior from Pulp, in fact.

After attending Val Jones’ champagne-saturated birthday bash in Covent Garden (cries of “oy! Spandau Ballet!” from the men outside Stringfellows), I go to a party at Darian’s place off Portland Place. Someone tells me I look like David Bowie. I really must trowl on the foundation more thickly if my skin resembles a 52-year-old’s.