A bright and warm day in Highgate, just as there’s been for the last few days. Low-cut tops on women, shorts and short sleeves on men. Not me. I take my jacket off from time to time, but that’s about it. I can’t remember the last time my legs saw sunlight. It’s been so long that the shock might kill them. Or kill someone passing by – pale doesn’t come close.
Pink blossom from the tree next door drifts past the window in little bursts; noiseless, hypnotic. Twice it’s snowed this year in London, and twice I was out of town: Suffolk and Tangier. But I’ll settle for little rains of pink blossom.
Discussing with Rowan Pelling what I’m doing for the Cambridge WordFest event on the 28th. Although it’s a book festival, she’s trying to bump up the entertainment side of things. So instead of reading my bit from the Decadent Handbook about holidaying with Mr MacG, I might now do Quentin Crisp’s Greatest Hits, which I did at the Bistrotheque last year. It’s essentially Dickon does Steven Wright does Quentin: one-liners in a row, quote after quote. I take care to make it a specially-assembled and personal selection of QC’s wit and wisdom, to stop it becoming an indulgence. I once saw a cabaret act at the Edinburgh Fringe where a man recited the Woody Allen stand-up routine about the moose. That was his entire act. I suppose it was a kind of cover version.
Or I could write and perform a kind of Dickon’s Rules For Living monologue based on this diary. Or I could do an acoustic set of Fosca songs, the wordier ones. Which are more like strings of tragicomic quips and musings posing as songs. We shall see. But whatever I do, I shall work at it. So it works.
I once saw Billy Childish perform a solo set at the ICA, reciting poems, stories and singing a cappella. The crowd in the bar downstairs was so loud that he gave up on the spoken word and resorted to the songs. Songs cut through chatter. Particularly if you scream them, as he did.
There’s the chance the people who run the Latitude Festival might book me for something or other, which I’m really hoping will happen. Partly because I’m from Suffolk, partly because I can stay with my parents in their cottage by the Southwold lighthouse. But mostly because it’s such a magical little festival. Last year I wandered around there as a punter, and people came up to me to ask me when I was on. They didn’t know about me, they just thought I looked like a performer. So I really should be more of a performer. I love making up stories, fictional conversations and general musings; it’s just a case of working out if they work best in a song, or in text to read out.
A message:
I’m looking forward to reading the short story you just wrote. Will it only be available as part of the CD, or will it be published somewhere else?
It’ll just be on the CD by This Year’s Model for the time being. I plan to include it within a book of stories, lyrics and essays at some point between now and the grave, but that won’t be for some time. When the CD is available to buy, I’ll put the details here.
Last night: watch ‘New York Doll’, the documentary about Arthur Kane of the New York Dolls. Beautifully made, and features contributions from Morrissey and the great Nina Antonia. The reunion scenes are much like the underrated Bill Nighy film Still Crazy. Mr Kane is revealed to be a gentle Mormon librarian in a shirt and tie, who just happened to be a seminal rock star, if a financially unsuccessful one. Content with his religion, though still harbouring deep resentment at never having made it all those years ago, while watching countless bands – those who are clearly influenced by the Dolls – do so much better.
I look at posters of young bands on London billboards and my abiding thought is, how long will they last? Which jobs will the band members do when the inevitable split happens? And will these jobs be really them, or just an excuse, a nervously smiling alibi till the grave? The tragedy is built-in. Here are some young men. This is now, and this will be gone.
Then again, it only applies to those to whom it applies. If you’d told me in 1990 that The Charlatans would still be happily recording and touring in 2007, while The Stone Roses, Ride and Happy Mondays would be long departed, I’d never have believed it. I wonder who the equivalent of The Charlatans will be in 2024?
