Within hours of posting that entry about the NME, <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=dickon_edwards&itemid=17220&thread=84804#t84804">I got a comment from "an insider"</a>.
Something I've learned from this, and from that gentleman from Q Magazine responding to my Moz tickets piece is this: clearly it's easier to get a reaction from the UK music press by writing a vaguely infamous online diary than it is to make an album and send it to them for reviewing.
I used to think that, if you've got something to say to the world, putting it in song was the best way of reaching the world. Pop music is populist, after all. Now I'm not so sure. One can toil over the creation of a song, its arrangement, its performance, the recording, the mixing, the mastering, and the artwork, only to find that you can't get the thing reviewed in most of the mainstream UK press, even if you ask them very nicely and promise to take back what you said about their mother. Your album is released with virtually no reviews, and the resulting implication that you are less important, less interesting, less <i>worthwhile</i> than Tarquin Scrump from Coldplay hits home. And it hits hard.
But write an online diary, and despite the fact that your diary is one of millions as opposed to one album against mere dozens of new releases that month, people WILL find it. They will come to you. And they <i>react</i>. And the turnover of reaction is faster, often within minutes. They come offering unconditional love, or demands of your immediate suicide, but they DO come. So we now know that when Mr Forster wrote "only connect", he was predicting the coming of Freeserve Anytime.
I only became an online diarist by accident. I started the diary in 1997, years before 'weblogs', 'blogs' and Livejournals became a way of life for so many. I did so in an attempt to Mark Time Before Time Marked Me. Then Select Magazine made the diary Website Of The Month, and continued to quote from it in later issues. They eventually offered me a proper monthly column in the magazine, though the publication folded before my debut effort was published (I still got paid, however).
I'll be the first to admit that my strengths, if I have any, lie in writing words and looking distinctive rather than musical talent. In the band Orlando I took my cue from my namesake out of the Manics (I was born Richard Edwards), happy to write the lyrics and look beautiful while badly strumming an inaudible guitar and leaving the actual musicianship to others. I'm sure many wish I'd followed Richey Manic's example to its logical conclusion, and vanished off the face of the earth.
In Fosca, I'm doing the bulk of the musical work and singing as well. Or rather, as well as I can with my silly rasping voice. It is a sad day for a young man when he realises he will never be Diana Ross. And there's also the problem that the music isn't to everyone's taste.
But in this diary I am truly myself, unfettered, liberated and instantly available to the world. The smell of the greasepaint, the roar of the virtual crowd. So if I must be known as a diarist who makes music rather than a musican that writes a diary, let it be so.
