The Fosca album has just been released in the UK, distributed by Forte. I’m going to pop out and see if I can spot it in London record shops.

If anyone sees a review in the UK press, please do let me know. I’m not holding my breath, but it would be nice.

***
Have had a few job suggestions put to me. One is being a medical guinea-pig. I realise how this is known to be well-paid but it’s out of the question for a terminal hypochondriac such as myself. However much I’d be assured the tests were mild and safe, the relief afforded by the money would be several times offset by all the additional anxiety over imagined side-effects for days, if not years after the testing. My apologies to medical science. After I’m dead, though, they can help themselves. Assuming they’d want to. And here I think of that Graham Chapman song: ‘I’ve left my body to science / But I’m afraid they’ve turned it down.’

Someone else suggested I do a bit of voluntary work, as it always looks good on a CV. Well I already do, in a sense. Plan B Magazine have asked me to review five CD albums this week, and they can’t afford to pay occasional contributors like myself. I suppose I should really use my cache of clippings to try and secure paid reviewing work. It’s just the hustling side of things that balks me. Naively, I sit here hoping someone will just offer me work – not just opening the proverbial door but grabbing me and pulling me through it too. I watch others getting on in the world, knocking on doors or, if necessary, taking an axe to them. And of course, some just go into the door-making business. And the axe business. And the over-stretched metaphor business.

***
Feeling a little sad for the deaths of old men from Radio 4 or the pages of Punch who cheered up my youth: Ned Sherrin, Miles Kington and now Humphrey Lyttleton. The latter two made the connection between jazz music and joyously silly comedy (‘Let’s Parler Franglais’ still a hilarious series of books, I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue managing to be the funniest show on the BBC right up to the end – or the end of Humph’s watch, at least), while Mr Sherrin’s just had a double CDs of his live show released, all anecdotes and quotes from a life in the theatre. I take a fogeyish pleasure in telling people the only CD I’ve bought so far this year is An Evening With Ned Sherrin rather than The Kills or The Killers or The Kooktons or the Ting Tings or the Dirty Pretty Tings or Get Ting Wear Ting Fly or the Yeah Yeahs Yeahs or Does It Ting You, Yeah?

Yes I know it fits my out-of-time image, but it also means I don’t feel qualified to write about new bands. I think proper music critics do have to know what’s going on in the new band scene per se, and I really don’t. From the age of 16 till 30 I read the music press religiously and knew at least something about every artist in the charts or in the NME or on the festival posters. But I now read reviews that compare a band I’ve never heard of with five others I’ve also never heard of. I read the line-up of a festival and shrug at about 90% of the names. I also feel the same way about books – the sense of a limited time on earth, that reading one means another goes unread, or an album goes unheard, or a movie unseen. The sheer volume of choice versus time running out.

So I lay awake at night, thinking of these things. Isn’t about time I properly got into folk music? Classical? Free Jazz? Or that kind of jazz you can actually stay in the same room as? In terms of enlightenment and pleasure, should I finally get around to reading Proust or investigate the full back catalogue of AC/DC? We just don’t know.

The CDs I tend to be given to review are often reissues from a time outworn, and this suits me fine. Today it’s the 50s recordings of Linda Hopkins, a blues singer who’s still performing and recording in her 80s. So my review will muse on things like age and how you can be 84 in blues, yet feel too old at 36 for indie music; and how recordings are a form of time travel, how the album is on the same label as Shampoo and Peter And The Test-Tube Babies (ie Cherry Red). All rather than pretend I’m an authority on blues.

I’m also writing about a new CD of some early 40s radio plays by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre, including his dramatisation – live with adverts – of Saki’s ‘Sredni Vashtar’, one of my favourite stories full stop. Music by Bernard Herrmann, too. It’s on El Records (obviously) – and is called ‘Orson Welles – Your Obedient Servant’. As you might imagine, this sort of album is really what ‘rocks my world’ in 2008. If I can’t be paid for reviewing, the next best thing is to be paid in the things I would be spending the money on if I were. The Welles CD is one of them.

Having said that, I feel okay about covering the Dresden Dolls, as I get the impression they’re in a genre of their own rather than part of any current trend. And they have that cross-over element with musicals and cabaret, with and without a big ‘C’.

And I do like the occasional new pop song, if it manages to find its way to me. Here’s ‘Little Bit’ by Stockholm’s Lykke Li, brought to my ears by a diary reader, with much thanks. I have no idea what you’re meant to think about this track in the UK, or even if she’s known in the UK at all, but I absolutely adore it and that’s all that matters:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=mUC0ezAlHwE

Now I bet someone’s going to email in and tell me it’s been Number One for eighteen weeks.