Thursday February 17th 2000

I spend Valentine’s Day 2000 in a cramped van full of tired Spearmint types, traipsing across Europe. It’s not terribly romantic or glamourous, the touring life at the lowest, and necessarily most economical level. No one gets to see any of the three Scandinavian countries the band is touring in apart from the view from the tourbus window. All spare time is taken up driving from venue to venue: the concerts are spaced far apart and there is no day off.

My one abiding memory of travelling to, from, and within Scandinavia: there is a branch of McDonald’s everywhere you look.

One girl comments, after the sold-out show in Stockholm, “It’s such a shame you were all so tired… I mean, people PAID…” Despite her words, she is smiling in a friendly, sincerely approachable fashion.

The Swedish, on evidence of a week spent in their country, tend to say what they think with a lack of tact that never fails to startle. Having gone to the trouble of learning technical fluency in English, it appears that incorporating the language’s normally attendant and essential attributes such as tact, diplomacy, euphemism, politeness and manners of any sort is overdoing it.

Perhaps this would go some way to explain that, of all the people who have attempted to chat me up, most of them have been Swedish girls. In Camden, usually.

In Stockholm, I meet up with Rory, Linda, Simon and Mel, people I’ve known from London gigs and house parties who by coincidence are visiting the Swedish capital on the very day I play a concert there. I am …. very tired. They invite me out to a club elsewhere, but there’s no time. We have to do an overnight drive to Malmo for the next day. Still, I’ve brought my Abba video with me to watch on the bus. And there’s a nice picture of me with Spearmint on the cover of a Swedish newspaper’s weekend supplement. With my newly-shorn haircut. The blond has gone for now, in order to let my hair breathe a little after two years of solid punishment. It is the first time my hair has been like this since the photo shoot for the Orlando album sleeve. I look … normal. Which is, of course, extremely misleading. So the make-up goes on even thicker than before.

I am approached only once on this little tour: by a boy in Malmo who is a fan of the 1995 Shelley single. He has not heard of Orlando. I get back to find Tim Chipping has emailed me the URL of a particularly articulate review of the same record, on a webzine. It all augurs strangely for Fosca’s imminent appearance on the record label that descended from Shelley’s label, Sarah: Shinkansen.

We are currently preparing to record the debut album “On Earth To Make The Numbers Up”, with Ian Catt, producer of Trembling Blue Stars and St Etienne. Alex Sharkey, once of the Sarah band Brighter, is also involved. And Fosca play their next concert supporting Trembling Blue Stars on Thursday, March 23rd, 8pm, at The Spitz Club, Old Spitalfields Market, 109 Commercial Street, London E1 (Aldgate East or Liverpool Street tube).

Discussions on the new Fosca songs. Question: is it possible to make a modern dance pop song with (deliberately, naturally) soulless male vocals and not make it resemble New Order? “This above all, to thine ownself be true…”

People keep inviting me out, but I keep not going. I had to spend the Christmas and New Year period in Bildeston, with my parents, away from it all.

My New Year’s Resolution: Read fewer Greta Garbo biographies.

Go to see “Dogma” at the new Ipswich multiplex, by the big McDonalds. Disappointed. Would have made a better comic book than a film.

The fuss over the Government’s plans to repeal Section 28 depresses me immensely, particularly the fact that the House of Lords have just bounced the bill back at them. And websites like this one.

Apart from the fact that the Section is nothing short of legalised bigotry, anyone who has ever been a schoolchild knows full well how cruel kids can be to each other, and how much the word “gay” is used as a term of abuse, of humiliation and of intimidation. Anyone who, like me, finds themself today surrounded by schoolkids simply by accidentally catching a bus in North London between 4 and 5pm, knows that despite that post-AIDS and post-Thatcher, things have changed very little in the trials of the playground:

“Urgh – you don’t like football… you must be gay.”

and, of course, the classic:

“Urgh – you hang around with girls… you must be gay.”

Schools, private and public, are by nature homophobic: it’s the default sentiment whenever you shove a group of disparate kids who just happen to live in the same area together. The scrapping of Section 28 is not nearly enough: it should be replaced by active education in sexuality and toleration from the off.

Thank god we only have to survive school at the beginning of our lives, because there’s no way we’d survive it any later.