Last Friday: perform with Fosca at the Purple Turtle in Mornington Crescent, with Tim Ten Yen and Exile Inside, as part of The Fanclub Christmas Party. A Parisian fan, Ms Sheridan Quaint, gives me a bunch of lilies two days before the gig. They look very nice in my room, but I feel their usage could be maximised. So at the gig, I tape the flowers to the top of the microphone stand, and as if that weren’t enough, I festoon the rest of the stand with tinsel. I’ve done this before at solo gigs, but this is a first use of lilies for Fosca. I rather think I should do this at all future concerts, as my concert signature. It’s certainly far preferable to sing into a flower than an unadorned dirty old SM58 saturated in the oral bacteria of every previous band to play the venue.

The sound is excellent (hats off to Mr Mark, the venue engineer), the gig goes okay, and Tom in particular is happy with it. He gets through his first gig as a Fosca member without making a single mistake, while the performances of the more seasoned members such as myself are a little rusty around the edges. Still, we did pretty well for our first UK gig in two years. We just need to play more often.

I certainly feel more comfortable playing as a four-piece than as a trio, as we tried in Sweden. I have a thing about symmetry and even numbers. I also insist on playing an even number of songs in the set list. This is of course, fuel for those of my friends who are convinced I have a mild form of autism. One man’s autism is another man’s boyish eccentricity, I retort. It’s The Curious Incident Of the Fop In The Night-Time.

At the gig, even though I have my lyrics on a music stand to aid my awful memory, I can never quite read and sing and play guitar all at the same time, and I still manage to fluff the occasional line. It would actually be far easier to, dare I say it, learn my own words to a comfortably safe degree of recall. Like most bands do. Too much idling on my part, I fear. It must stop. Next gig, no music stand.

But I get kind feedback from the crowd, and from messages received days after the show. Ms Hazel, Ms Groom and Mr Gullo attend from the Bohemian Cabaret side of my life, and Mr G throws a white glove to me while I perform. Mr O’Boyle and Ms Scanlon from the Boogaloo side of my life also turn up without my knowledge – I didn’t think they’d be interested and am quite touched by this. Given the concert happens on the most popular night in December for Christmas parties, I’m touched that anyone I know has come along at all.

We perform a version of The Pogues’ Rainy Night In Soho, by way of a Christmas cover version. It’s not actually a Christmas song, but I associate December in London with freezing rain as much as snow, plus the arrangement of the original version is as sumptuous and colourful as Fairytale Of New York to my ears. Additionally, the author, Mr MacGowan, was born on December 25th. So you could argue all his songs are Christmas songs in a way. Actually, he shares his birthday with Quentin Crisp too.

For the gig, we tried rehearsing a version of Mr Cole’s Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire, but it didn’t really work. Whereas Rainy Night is pretty hard to mess up… though Mr Nick Cave’s version slightly annoys me. In his recording, I’m really not keen on the way he changes the scansion of the opening line:

“I’ve been loving you… a Long! (enormous pause) Time!”

When it should be sung quickly as if the two words were one, ie:

I’ve been loving you… a longtime…

I don’t know why that tiny detail annoys me so much, but it does. And who am I to talk anyway, as at the Fosca concert I slightly change the words, though I don’t actually realise it at the time. Instead of:

Covered in a cloak of silence

I change it to:

“Covered in a cloak of shadows.”

Ms Scanlon asks me about this afterwards, but I can’t answer. I thought I sang ‘silence’, but it came out as ‘shadows’. Perhaps it’s best not to dwell upon how my mind works.

Another reason for playing the song is as a way to say thank you to Mr MacG for his recent kindness toward me. But most of all, it’s because I just really, really like the song.

The audience contains the usual loud fellow shouting out things between songs. After we play the Pogues number, he barks “Who wrote that, then?”

Me: If you don’t know, why don’t you find out for yourself?

Drunk shouting man: Well, I’m asking you, now!

Me: Oh, someone else will tell you. Ignorance is nothing to shout about.

I was quite proud of this last anti-heckler remark, thought up on the spot. Though I did fear he might beat me up later. At another point, I reply to him (albeit I’m paraphrasing and embellishing):

“Just because you’re shouting out things from an audience, it doesn’t mean you’re more important than those who aren’t. Besides, I’m far more interested in quiet people. They’re the ones I write songs about. Here’s another one…”

(photos by Sheridan Quaint)