Yesterday (Tues 22nd): Took the exam for my degree course, marking the end of my first academic year. Although I’ve no previous exams to compare it with, I feel like I did okay, at least to get a basic pass. I get the results sometime in late July.

Answered questions on Jekyll and Hyde and the Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair graphic short stories in It’s Dark In London, with references to From Hell. Particularly pleased that I had memorized the Bible verse which mentions the founding of the first City of Man (Genesis 4:17). My only worry now is whether I properly justified the use of such tidbits. It’s so tempting to crowbar any memorized quotes  into one’s answer regardless. Ah well, it’s done now.

I’m now experiencing the strange aftermath of blankness that comes with finishing exams, not felt since I did my GCSEs in the 80s. It’s a dazed sense of ‘now what?’, made more dazed by the sunny weather. In fact, the moment I came out of college the weather suddenly changed from cold and damp to too hot and sunny, with no time spent in-between. Very apt for Jekyll and Hyde.

Celebrated in the evening with drinks at the Boogaloo, in the company of Ms Ella L. We talked about another common post-exam emotion: knowing you can get back to reading books for pleasure again. I have a reading list for the second year, but as that’s not until October, the pressure is somewhat off. First up on the pleasure pile is Clayton Littlewood’s new book, Goodbye To Soho.

Coming up for me: DJ-ing at the Last Tuesday Society on Saturday, then a trip to the Bafta Awards on Sunday, then a day out to visit my parents in Suffolk. However, as tempting as it is in London to spend one’s time idling, socialising and consuming the work of others, I do want to work on something of my own.

***

In Marks and Spencer today. The forthcoming Queen’s Jubilee has meant there’s union jack branding everywhere: sandwiches, cakes, drinks. M&S are even selling a ‘Rule Britannia’ door stop.

Final day of revision. Birkbeck Library today is packed with  students, all in the same boat. It’s the height of exam season, and it can be hard to find a seat in the library, even at 8pm in the evening. Torrington Square is full of red-trousered boys (seems to be the fashion) with armfuls of books.

Lots of  ‘Good luck!’

or, later on in the day:  ‘I can’t believe that question…’

And it still is real books they carry about the campus, along with their laptops. The trolleys for books to be re-shelved look like they’ve been there pre-internet, and they’re still under heavy use.  I think one reason is that even though a lot of research can now be done online, there’s still plenty of academic texts that just aren’t available digitally, at least not for free. It can also be healthier to work from a book alongside a laptop, if only to give the eyes a break from the screen. The classes themselves are still paper-heavy, too, with A4 ‘hand-outs’ given out at most lectures and seminars. I’ve seen some students do their lecture notetaking on iPads and netbooks, but the majority scribble away with pen or pencil.

Today might be a watershed for the history of paper books in Britain, in fact, as Waterstones have announced they’ll be selling Kindle e-books in their shops. Quite how this will work will be interesting (special machines in-store?), but it’s an inevitable step, now that e-books have started to take off. To be able to buy Kindle books without having to give money to the tax-avoiding giant that is Amazon can only be an good thing.

Here’s an interesting article by the author Linda Grant, in favour of Kindles as a device, but uneasy about letting Amazon hog the market. She makes the point that books are mainly written on screens now, so why is it so strange to want to read them on screens too?

***

My exam is tomorrow morning at 10am. The last time I took an exam, Margaret Thatcher was in power.

Three days before the exam, and my revision has hit a predictable level of intensity.  I’m now pretty much living inside the exam texts, to the point where I have the books and laptop with me in bed at night, and I just keep working until I literally fall asleep mid-sentence. Come the morning, I wake up, still surrounded by the laptop and the books, so it’s straight back into the revision. It’s an immersion of work. But I actually like this approach, and particularly enjoy the luxury of being able to work in bed. ‘It’s not laziness, it’s being like Proust!’

I’m not writing this in bed, by the way. I’m at my desk, fully dressed & showered & shaven (a detail one feels compelled to add in these days of working-from-home beardiness), plus shirt & tie and suit, because I had to leave the building to buy groceries.

Current grocery of delight: Twinings’ herbal tea selection box: ‘Mixed Berries’. Five different flavours, five tea bags each. My recent stomach pains turned out to be due to a food allergy or intolerance or general unhealthiness. So I’ve been trying to wean myself off dairy and caffeine and gluten and excess calories as much as possible, and these herbal teas  actually provide a level of sweetness and pleasure that makes the abstention worthwhile.

***

Current petty language bugbear: the usage of  the qualifying adverb ‘famously’.

As in, say: ‘Proust famously wrote in bed.’

The implication is that the writer assumes the reader knows this particular fact. If the reader doesn’t know that Proust wrote in bed, the use of ‘famously’ is at best, debatable, and worse, redundant.

And if the reader does  know this fact, the statement feels cheap and shallow, even desperate. The writer is saying ‘Not only do I know this fact, but it’s important to add that I know that it’s well-known.’

Why is it important? And how do you define ‘well-known’ anyway? Who is this General Knowledge, and what time is the mutiny?

(And I think of the time when I was in a room with Pete Doherty and Peter Blake, and I overheard a young man from Mr Doherty’s party asking Peter Blake who he was, and I thought of my parents, who may not know who Pete Doherty is, but who definitely know who Peter Blake is, and I think about how this matters, and to whom it matters)

(And I think about the people who sign into comments boxes on the Internet, purely to add ‘who cares?’ And I think about the solipsism of the Internet, and how that’s affected discourse)

(And I think of the common Twitter phrase ‘Is it me, or…’ And what that means)

In fact, I think it all comes down to wanting to connect, and the fear of feeling alone. Well, cheer up! Someone is reading your sentence, in a world of texual saturation! You have already made a connection! So you can drop the ‘famously’ – it makes you look needy.

Fame connects. But it doesn’t connect uniformly. So ‘famously’ in this sense tries to assume what cannot be assumed. At worse, ‘famously’ panders.

Where ‘famously’ can be used is in the other sense, as in ‘excellently’. As in ‘getting on famously’.

But I’m worried that the other usage is becoming more, well, famous.

Into my last week of revision. One of the many rewarding things about studying English literature at Birkbeck is that the lecturers have often written introductions to the books. Today I was going over my lecture notes on Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde – the lecturer being Roger Luckhurst – and re-read the Oxford Classics edition of the text, which has an introduction and annotations by him too.

Today: I look at the London Library’s 1886 edition of Jekyll & Hyde, available for members to borrow. The book was first published in January of that year, but the library’s copy is not a first edition. Or even a second. Jekyll & Hyde was such a bestseller – such an instant myth – that the book hit its sixth edition within a few months. How strange to think its original appeal was as a crime mystery as much as a gothic horror: the revelation that Dr Jekyll IS Mr Hyde is the twist ending. Now, of course, the twist is more famous than the original story. But the Stevenson text always feels fresh,  however much one re-reads it. There’s the business with the two doors, the flat in Soho, and the innuendo over what exactly it is that Hyde gets up to (as played on by Wilde in Dorian Gray). But what impresses most of all is the sheer innovation of the text, blending genres, creating levels of disorientation, anticipating Modernism and psychoanalysis, inspiring The Hulk; all this, and Stevenson carries it off in a mere sixty pages.

***

The other day: I bump into Darren Beach on the tube, who tells me about his new concept music blog One Below Ten. The idea is that every entry is about a pop single that made it to Number Eleven in the British charts; so close yet so far to becoming a proper Top Ten hit (which really matters to those to whom it matters). The first subject is ‘Michael Caine’ by Madness, which I’m rather fond of. Still odd to think that the very mannered and gentle lead vocals are not by Suggs but by Chas Smash, the same man who shouted ‘Hey you – don’t watch that, watch this!’ on ‘One Step Beyond’, in rather a different style. But then, as Mr Beach says, Madness were a different band in 1984:

http://onebelowten.wordpress.com/

***

My friend, the charming glam rock god David Ryder-Prangley, has just moved in next door. By coincidence, I’d been listening to a track by KISS, of whom I’m not a massive fan, but I know that Mr DRP is very much an admirer. It’s because I’m preparing a DJ set for an event to celebrate Sebastian Horsley, and the song – ‘C’mon And Love Me (Alive! version)’ is in the late Mr H’s list of his favourites. Like a lot of those sort of bands, I may not be keen on the music, but I fully approve of the glamour.

Day spent revising graphic novels and psychogeography for the exam. I’ve also been reading about ‘Hauntology’, a Derrida term reclaimed by Mark Fisher to use instead of psychogeography, for instance when describing Laura Oldfield Ford’s book, Savage Messiah.  He uses it along with Simon Reynolds  to denote a theorised ‘end of history’ trend in music as well as writing: ‘mourning for lost utopias’.

Article by Andrew Gallix on hauntology

***

Candid photo of me taken by Travis Elborough at the Aubin Cinema the other day. I’m in the middle of talking to Alex Mayor about, oh I don’t know, ‘failing upwards’ or some such Whit Stillman quote. We were about to watch Damsels In Distress, the new Stillman film.

I like the photo, even though it’s my Not So Good Side. I never did learn to fully love the constellation of little moles on my right cheek. Always thought they look vaguely like a join-the-dots puzzle of Bonnie Langford. I even went to see an NHS plastic surgeon about them, once, when I was about 20. He pretty much laughed me out of the room, saying they weren’t worth worrying about.

And yet… One thinks of standards of acceptable facial imperfections. In fact, it reminds me that Analeigh Tipton, one of the main actresses in Damsels In Distress, has a faint  scar around one side of her mouth.

What’s unusual is that not only has her scar not been covered up with make-up (as I tend to with my moles when properly being photographed), but the director, Whit Stillman, often seems to focus on it, lovingly, as if making a point. It’s like a sweeter version of that much maligned cinematic theory, the Male Gaze. Ms Tipton is already extremely beautiful, and the scar stops her being boringly beautiful.

A little bit of Googling reveals that she started a career in modelling, but was soon dropped by her agency. Because of the scar. ‘So many people in the fashion industry were like, ‘We’re so sorry that happened to your face.’ 

One thinks of Cindy Crawford making a trademark out of her mole. Why is a scar worse?

Still, up yours, fashion.

A very flattering email. A gentleman tells me he’s had quotes from my lyrics done as tattoos on his hands and arms. Four Dickon quotes, alongside ones by T.S. Eliot, Baudelaire, William Burroughs, and Richey Manic:

Left hand: ‘My crime is being myself’
Right hand: ‘My punishment is staying myself’
Left arm: ‘I don’t want forever, I just want a little now’
Right side of chest: ‘Steep yourself in yourself’.

***

Managed to get the gender essay in on time, though I don’t think it’ll get as high a mark as the previous one. I still have a tendency to forget I’m meant to be playing at being a literary critic and analyst rather than a researcher. I think I sample too many text books, not knowing where to stop, though thankfully I know when – not missed a single deadline yet. Thing is, I feel I’m not yet qualified to be able to take up my own position on such a massive subject, whereas for the subject of the last essay – the film Finisterre – I knew could identify a few things that the academics had overlooked. Still, I think I’m getting better at the harder subjects.

That’s the last essay for this academic year. Have now moved onto the revision for my first exam, held on May 22nd.

***

One tidbit of trivia about gendering literature: ‘chick lit’ was originally coined as a reaction to ‘lad lit’ in the early 1990s, as in Nick Hornby’s early novels. Unlike ‘chick lit’, ‘lad lit’ didn’t succeed in attracting the audience it was targeted at. Despite all the themes of eternal boyishness, of football and record shops, Hornby’s novels were mostly bought by women.

Though I rarely regard myself as stereotypical male in many respects – whether as an asset or a weakness – I have to admit I do the male thing of not reading enough novels – and not finishing enough novels. When men read printed matter for leisure at all, they are thought to read more newspapers and non-fiction.

Well, the mayoral election certainly put me off newspapers for a while. I picked up an Evening Standard on the day of the count. It was full of the most absurd bias towards Boris Johnson, and negativity towards Ken Livingstone. It even seriously discussed whether Johnson could be the next Prime Minister.

When I came out of the polling booth last Thursday, I spotted the actor John Simm in the cafe outside. He played the villainous Master in Doctor Who, and in one episode manages to be elected Prime Minister of Britain by using a satellite network to telepathically brainwash voters.

Over a million Londoners voted for a man who has difficulty combing his hair. As they say on the internet at the moment, ‘just saying…’

Wednesday: Last research day spent in libraries, for the essay on gendering literature. I seem to have developed an unusually sensible inner voice for the essay process. It tells me exactly when it’s time to stop researching and start knocking the first draft into shape, while still allowing for time to do further drafts and polishing. The most important thing about this voice is that I appear to be listening to it.

Also today: I meet Charley Stone for lunch in the café in Russell Square. The café is old fashioned and non-franchise, something which is getting increasingly rare in central London. There are rumours the Olympics are going to shut down whole squares like this, making them into temporary media bases for the duration.

Charley and I chat about My Bloody Valentine, whose remastered Creation back catalogue seems to be finally coming out next week, four years late. She mentions an interview with Kevin Shields where he talks about the remastering in highly technical terms, at least for the average musician. But of course Mr Shields is no average musician:

http://www.pitchfork.com/features/interviews/8809-kevin-shields/

Evening: To the Aubin Cinema in Shoreditch – Zone 1’s smallest single-screen cinema for new releases. Very comfortable it is, too: they give you foot stalls in the front row, so you can pretty much lie down. Also present: Alex Mayor, Travis E, Emily B, John Noi.

We see Damsels In Distress, the new Whit Stillman film. I’m such a huge fan of his debut, Metropolitan, and loved The Last Days Of Disco, the last film he managed to make, which was about fifteen years ago. Damsels isn’t up there with those two, I feel, but it’s as good as Barcelona, his mid-90s film. Same uniquely old-fashioned and deliberately stagey dialogue, same bookish quips about broken hearts, but not quite enough character depth and narrative flow compared to Metropolitan and Disco. Still, I laughed a lot, which is usually a good sign for a comedy. And as films about US college students speaking in stylised retorts go, I far prefer Damsels over The Social Network. Damsels has its faults, but more than makes up for them with sheer charm. Plus there’s a glimpse of a class on Ronald Firbank, always a good thing in my book.

Mayoral election tomorrow. It is upsetting to think that thousands of Londoners might vote for a right wing Mayor once again, mistaking a buffoonishly inept but entertaining dinner party guest for a capable governor of the most complicated metropolis on earth. Still, one must remain optimistic. It’s not as if Boris Johnson will vanish from public life if he loses – he’ll be back guest presenting Have I Got News For You within days. Which is really why the celebrity-obsessed voted for him last time, after all. And where he should have stayed.

I currently have a weekly session with a study skills tutor, who checks up on my work habits; though in the nicest possible way. Her room is deep within the Orwellian confines of Senate House, with its pleasing sense of ghosts and past lives led.

We meet every Monday. Today I tell her about my current stresses and worries about not getting enough done (a final essay due in next week, plus an exam on May 22nd to revise for). She dares me to take a complete holiday from social media – a ban – until the next session. It might make me more productive. It might even make me more happy – my feelings about being on social media are still so mixed. Either way, it’s worth a try. As next Monday is a bank holiday, this effectively means staying off Twitter and Facebook for two weeks. So I’m starting today.

I’m tempted to add radio and non-essential Internet access too, just to see what it would be like to spend a fortnight fully immersed in books and offline writing.

***

Thursday last: a day out to Ipswich to meet with Dad. Many parts of the town of my birth are now conspicuously rundown, possibly even abandoned. The silvery Odeon cinema has been empty for the best part of a decade, while Upper Orwell Street is full of boarded up shop fronts, windows with eviction notices and broken pavements fenced off by steel barriers, forcing the pedestrian to dodge the cars in order to walk down the street. One empty shop’s upper storey has broken windows with pigeons flying in and out. What shops there are seem to be either franchise charity shops, or ‘cash convertors’, ie what used to be called pawn shops. The following weekend the Sunday Times runs its ‘Rich List’ feature.

***

Recent outings: a farewell bash in a King’s Cross bar for Emma Jackson and Adey Lobb, who are moving to Glasgow. Something of an end to an era, as I remember Emma’s first place in London, circa 1996. It was when she was in Kenickie, and she shared it with the other band members, Monkees-style.

Also there: Marie & Pete of Kenickie, Erol Alkan, Bob Stanley. Simon Price DJs, and even plays a Romo tune (Plastic Fantastic) just like he did when I met him, and met Kenickie. It feels long ago – it was long ago. A lifetime piling up, as the Talking Heads song goes.

Like a fool, yesterday I let temptation get the better of me. I went on one of those ‘Who Unfollowed Me On Twitter’ sites. Such a Pandora’s box. I suppose the emotion behind doing so comes from the game-like nature of Twitter, which insists on associating one’s name with a total number of ‘followers’. As if to say, ‘this is your score in life’. So when you see the number going down, and you know there’s a site which tells you just who has had enough of you, Dame Insecurity takes over. And there they are. Sometimes it’s just strangers trying you out, and realising you’re not for them. But sometimes it’s people you were following back, people you thought were kindred spirits. Friends in real life, sometimes. One shouldn’t take it personally, but of course, one does.

On this occasion, I discovered I’d been not just unfollowed but ‘blocked’. Blocking is a Twitter button usually reserved – as far as I understand it – for those who have been actively spamming or abusing or otherwise pestering someone – it completely cuts off further contact either way. The person who’d blocked me was a music journalist I rather liked, whom I’d chatted to a few times in the Twittery way, enthusing about shared interests. I’d never had any kind of arguments with him, or bombarded him with unasked-for Tweets, and I hadn’t even Tweeted “at” him directly for a week or so. So now I’d instantly became steeped in Kakfa-esque paranoia – what had I said? It’s the not knowing that irks the most.

In order to stop myself going completely insane with worry, I did the other Pandora’s box thing (in for a Pandora’s penny, in for a pound) – I logged out of my own Twitter account in order to look at his public timeline. And there it was, a Tweet referring to blocking someone who had annoyed him because…  they had Tweeted about their essay marks. I instantly knew, with a horrible sinking feeling, that he must have meant me.

What can I say? I’d managed to get some very good marks and was really happy about doing so, and I shared this fact on Twitter. Not directly to Mr Blocker (that’s the bit I don’t get), but generally, openly. Why? Because I like it when other people do the same – I like hearing of their successes, book deals, appearances on TV & radio, babies, marriages, running marathons, all of it. I like people to be happy! And I suppose I naively thought people on Twitter thought the same.

Clearly not…

I guess one person’s idea of spontaneously expressing happiness is another’s person idea of a nauseating, undignified and smug boast.

But then again, perhaps my blocker didn’t realise how much it meant to me. Or perhaps he saw my Tweets while having a particularly bad day. Or perhaps he doesn’t realise that blocking is not the same as unfollowing. The element of not knowing goes further still, and it goes both ways. Oh well.

I don’t bear him the slightest ill-will, mind, because it was really my fault for going on that website in the first place. In fact, I’d like to apologise for annoying him, only I can’t, because he’s blocked me.

At least I’ve learned a couple of lessons, though. One is to never go on those ‘who unfollowed me’ sites ever again – it only ends in tears. Another is that I should restrain from Tweeting things about my college life – if it drove him to blocking me, it must have annoyed a few others too.

Besides, I have this diary for such things.

So, readers who find accounts of college work annoying or just boring might want to look away. For the next three and a bit years. Sorry.

***

This time last year I was approaching forty, and was wondering what the hell I should do with myself. My attempts at a sustainable career as a musician & songwriter, or a freelance writer, or a DJ, or a club promoter, or working in offices and shops and museums, had all fizzled out. Either I wasn’t good enough at them, or I just didn’t have the enthusiasm to keep at them for very long, or I just wanted to try something else. I was beginning to question if I was actually good at anything at all, to be honest.

Then a kind friend – Emily B – pointed out a journalism course for postgraduates, not realising I didn’t even have an A level to my name. I told her I wasn’t qualified, but thanks, and… wait a minute, that reminds me! A mothballed ambition at the back of my mind came alive, and I realised I really, really, really wanted to do a degree. I’d dropped out of A-levels after an unhappy episode at school, meaning I couldn’t do a degree at the time most people do them. Since then, it was always something I knew I wanted to do. I just had forgotten about it. Until now.

Such a wonderful feeling, to actually know what you want to do.

(oh, and there was that business about the fees going up if I left it any longer)

I’m not doing much else in my life at the moment – the degree is pretty much what I’m living for. Since starting the course last October my essay marks have been, in order, 69, 69, 70, 71, and 75. I’m putting the work in, and it’s paying off – I’m improving as an academic. For an English Literature degree, a First is 70 or above. I don’t find the work easy in the slightest – it’s hard and riddled with frustration, not least because I have dyspraxia (essentially meaning I’m slower and more scatterbrained than the average student), and it’s been over 20 years since I was last in formal education.  So, yes, I’m quite happy about my marks. If that’s all right with the rest of the world.

***

As it is, I worry of the common British Twitter emotion of Default Scorn. It’s actually more exhausting than cathartic, to have to join in with collective knee-jerk umbrage about some article in the Daily Mail (don’t link to it then!), or fixating on this columnist or that columnist or whatever it is today.

(stomach still aching, getting very boring now)

***

P.S. A few people have now told me they do like hearing of how I’m doing at college. And yes, I know this is a very petty story, and I’m being a bit thin-skinned and over-sensitive on this. It’s just being honest. Which is what got me blocked in the first place. But this is my first awareness of being blocked on Twitter, and my first and last comment on the unhappy, if ultimately ephemeral experience. I just needed to, well, unblock my thoughts on it.

I’m spending Easter writing essays for college and hoping a rather painful stomach ache goes away. Think it’s a return of the dreaded IBS, made worse by stress over the essays. Am hitting the peppermint capsules and hoping for the best.

Recent outings…

Saturday 31 March was another stint of DJ-ing for the Last Tuesday Society, at the Adam Street club off the Strand. After I’d finished I stuck around and caught a performance by an excellent African band, Kasai Masai. Their giddy, hypnotic music  fitted the atmosphere perfectly.

Sunday: tea in Highgate with Ella Lucas, then we both wandered into town, taking in the National Portrait Gallery and South Bank. I’d been reading Virginia Woolf – Icon by Brenda Silver (1999), which claimed Ms Woolf’s photo (this one) was the best selling postcard in the NPG shop. I ask the NPG staff whose postcard sells the most today. They’re not sure, but reckon it to be between Kate Moss, Prince William & Prince Harry, the Queen by Warhol, Lily Cole, and Darcey Bussell. Ms Woolf’s face still does well though – a Woolf-branded notebook has sold out.

Monday last was the launch of Richard King’s book about the story of British indie labels, How Soon Is Now. I was kindly invited by Richard himself, and I asked my old bandmate Simon Kehoe along (from the first Orlando line-up), seeing as he’d just moved to London and was looking for things to go to. Turns out Simon had been invited too –  he and Richard were once in the Bristol band Teenagers In Trouble during the 90s. Simon also brought another bandmate along, Kevin from The Foaming Beauties, whom I met for the first time. So at some point Simon managed to assemble representatives of all his past bands in the same room – and got a photo of all of us too.

Simon, Kevin and myself started the evening in Soho with drinks at the French House and dinner at the Stockpot (a deliberate attempt to have an Old Soho evening), before going on to the launch event at the Social in Fitzrovia. The launch included Bob Stanley DJ-ing, a chat about the nature of indie music between Messrs King and Stanley with Owen Hatherley, and a short but utterly fantastic acoustic set by Edwyn Collins, backed by James Walbourne and Andy Hackett. They performed dazzling versions of ‘Falling And Laughing’, ‘Rip It Up’, ‘A Girl Like You’ and ‘Blueboy’.

Chatted to Grace Maxwell (Edwyn Collins’s partner, whom I’ve met before when my brother Tom was playing for Edwyn) and Jeanette Lee (from Rough Trade, who signed Orlando to Warners, and was once in PiL). Bought a copy of the book from a lady who later turned out to be Louise Brealey, the actress who plays Molly From The Morgue on Sherlock. Just as well I didn’t realise this at the time, as I’d downed rather a lot of wine by this point and had reached that stage of solipsistic drunkenness which is just about acceptable for friends, but deeply tiresome for strangers. I realise now I must have annoyed Lee Brackstone from Faber Books too, which I’m rather shamefaced about (sorry, Mr B). Still, it was a rare event; a class reunion of a kind, and a celebration of past lives and passions.

Tom is currently playing guitar for Adam Ant in Australia (photo of him onstage in Perth here). So proud of him.

***

Some new works by other people worthy of greater exposure:

New albums:

CN Lester – Ashes (available here).
Stunning debut collection of haunting, late-night torch songs. I first saw the androgynous CN play at a Transgender Day Of Remembrance service, and am so pleased they’ve released  an album. Here’s to many more.

The Monochrome Set – Platinum Coils. (available here)
An unexpected, wonderful surprise; a brand new CD by the MS, their first since the mid 90s. Arch, crooning, twangy guitar pop, sounding just as fresh as their late 70s and early 80s records.

New books:

Richard King – How Soon is Now? The Madmen and Mavericks Who Made Independent Music 1975-2005. (Richard has a blog here)
As bought at the above launch. Satisfyingly doorstop-sized, engrossing account of the history of labels like Mute, Factory, Creation and Rough Trade. Focuses on tales of music and money (the lack of it, the making of it, the wasting of it) and the way indie labels and artists took on the mainstream, not always certain of what they were doing. The notorious appearance of the KLF at the Brit Awards being a case in point.

Jen Campbell – Weird Things Customers Say In Bookshops (Jen’s blog is here). Jen C works at Ripping Yarns, the used and antiquarian bookshop down the road from me in Highgate. The book collects some of the strange requests and utterations that she’s heard, illustrated with line drawings which are also rather weird, in a sweet sort of way.