Bookings…
Tomorrow night I’ll be DJ-ing at Beautiful & Damned, at the Boogaloo in Highgate. Also on the bill are Martin White and Vicky Butterfly: pretty top-notch, proper talented fare.
Friday March 13th. Fosca play Stockholm. Debaser Slussen. More dates in that part of the world might pop up either side of the 13th. Last Fosca gigs ever ever ever. Honest. Really! It’ll be the Travel Fosca line-up of myself, Rachel and Charley. Pleased to be able to properly say goodbye to the Swedish Fosca fans. 85% of my last PRS cheque was from Swedish radio play.
May 16th – DJing at a private party with Ms Red.
June 20th – DJ-ing at How Does It Feel To Be Loved.
That’s pretty much the entire commitments list to date. Well, there’s the small matter of The Night Shift Job, which ties up every late night of mine for every other week, but I can get time off if necessary. Thing is, like most employers they only give out a limited amount of Holiday Cards to play – 14 a year. Given I get every other seven days off anyway, that’s pretty reasonable of them. But it does help me sort the ‘wouldn’t mind, oh all right’ events from those I actually really want to do.
You’d have thought I was hardly Mr Full Diary from the above. Yet I’ve just been offered a DJ gig at the ICA, which I’ve love to do, only to realise it clashes with the Stockholm gig, so I can’t. Heigh ho.
Here’s a clip of Travel Fosca playing Stockholm last year. I’m told it’s only been uploaded recently:
(I just love the ‘is.gd’ URL Shortener – even shorter than Tiny URL)
***
Barack Obama’s inauguration dominates today’s papers to such an extent that other news doesn’t stand a chance. I feared that today would be perfect for sly government PRs who are keen on ‘burying bad news’, as that Whitehall spin-doctor lady coined it so notoriously on Sept 11th.
The bad news back then was to do with councillors’ expenses. This time, one story that looked like slipping through the net was a similar attempt by MPs to exempt themselves from disclosing their fiscal outgoings. In today’s news (somewhere under all the Obama stuff), they’ve had to back down. This time round people aren’t so easy to hoodwink, and the Internet helps to spread the word and get people on board. A campaign by MySociety on Facebook ralled 6,000 supporters against the expenses plot. And now they’ve won. It’s so cheering. The dominance of the Net these days makes Getting Away With Things so much harder. The same zeal to uncover plot points in Battlestar Galactica can be channelled into monitoring those who write the story of the real world.
My workload at the Coalface of News last night was a fraction of its usual volume. Partly because most of the Obama coverage isn’t UK related, but also because there was little else in the press. The newspapers today choose to devote their already thinning pages (the recession’s fault) on saying exactly the same thing again and again: Obama’s Inauguration: a Historic Moment. Turn the page: interviews with people in the street. ‘ Do you think it’s a historic moment?’ ‘Yes.’ Repeat. Turn to umpteen columnists. ‘Why Today Is A Historic Moment, and Why I Was Right About Obama Before You Were.’
Can we news-miners take it easy and leave on time with everything finished? Yes, We Can.
Thanks, Mr O. All the best with the new job. Try not to kill anyone.
Tags: beautiful and damned, DJ-ing, Fosca, Obama, Sweden
