Just occurred to me that I may not have mentioned I’m DJ-ing at The Beautiful & Damned tonight.

Well, I am. Boogaloo, 312 Archway Road, near Highgate tube. Live acts and Dj-ing from 8.30pm till after midnight. £3 entry. Come along. Dress up. Drink. Dance.

It’s a bit like the club in ‘Slaves Of Freedom’ from Rutland Weekend Television. With slightly more people.

I’ll be airing Brigitte Bardot’s ‘Everybody Loves My Baby’ along with the usual showtuney dizziness.

‘Anger is the most corrosive of the emotions in its ability to increase heart strain. Avoid contact with irritating people; instead, write them a letter, then tear it up before sending it.’ – Dr Graham Jackson, cardiologist, 1998. As quoted in Matthew Engel’s ‘Extracts from the Red Notebooks.’

Sound advice, but it does need updating. I’d add: ‘And don’t put your words in an email or online…’ All that’s then achieved is adding to the amount of petty irritation in the world. I’ve been all too guilty of it myself.

So I’ve imposed a new rule on my day – 1 hour online maximum – usually the first hour after waking up. That’s plenty to clear emails, answer the ones that need answering, skim-read the online words of selected others, then switch off and do the things I actually want to do.

In my case, my internet connection is dependent on a USB stick, as the built-in wireless on my main laptop is broken. I could get the machine fixed, but I rather like being able to say (aloud) ‘Enough! Basta! Get OFF the internet!’, rip the USB wireless stick out of its socket and hurl it into a far corner. There – internet off. The computer becomes a typewriter, and not an entertainment centre. A tool of creation and contribution, rather than a thief of whole days in the cause of passive spectating and giving permanent life to petty vexations. How dismal to think you might be outlived by some casual moan you made on a message board, one bored and unguarded hour in 2002, and that it might haunt you to the grave and beyond. ‘Trivia longa, vita brevis’.

***

Monday last week – to Cad & The Dandy in Hanover Square, Mayfair, to be measured for a new suit. I also order a new waistcoat and white shirt – both tailored. A specially made shirt does seem an indulgence beyond indulgences, but it was always on my list of ‘One Day…’ things.

I love the thought of Dickon-shaped bits of material. And how wonderful to be able to choose things like types of lapel, numbers of jacket vents, ‘kissing buttons’, colour of the lining, colour of the piping of the lining – the bit that goes around the lining edge, number of buttons and pockets, types of buttons and pockets, angles of pockets, and more. And then do the same again for the waistcoat. It’ll be ready in a few weeks’ time. Can’t wait.

Sunday last – to The Shady Dolls Cabaret at a venue called The Last Days Of Decadence, on Shoreditch High Street. Beautiful Beardsley-esque stained glass windows, plush sofas inside, performance area in the basement. The Shady Dolls themselves are a couple of young ladies performing little comedy skits and musical turns – one of whom is Vicki Churchill’s sister Laura. There’s a few other acts including a burlesque dancer, plus a particularly good male duo called Moonfish Rhumba.

The venue is absolutely packed, and though the show is a seated affair, many have to spend the evening standing at the back, or sitting on the floor in the front. Cabaret – even ragged-edged, Fringe Revue-type cabaret like this – seems very much a popular draw at the moment.

Again, I do think this current scene would been unthinkable in the 90s. Back then, young people who were keen to get on a stage and artistically express themselves – and feel part of the world too – pretty much had to form a Britpop band or else. They had to fit in with or react against Blur, or Oasis, or Pulp. There was a ‘loungecore’ scene, granted, but it was very much on the margins. Today, role models are just as likely to be The Mighty Boosh (surreal, idiosyncratic comedy), or Flight of The Conchords (ditties, character interaction), or Dita Von Teese (burlesque dancing) as the latest guitar band.

I meet Jo Roberts – there with Charley S – in her offstage persona. Am more used to seeing her onstage persona fronting the Rude Mechanicals, in a beehive blonde wig and whiteface make-up, all deadpan glowering. Meeting her brunette, charming and friendly ‘normal’ self is a little thrilling – like meeting Lady Jekyll after witnessing Ms Hyde.  I’m always in awe of performers and actors who go in for transformation. I find it hard work enough just being myself.

Yet again I leave the diary unchanged for days on end, then come back with an entry that’s far too long. Apologies.

***

One of my favourite and certainly unexpected Christmas presents was an advance DVD of the new Quentin Crisp film, ‘An Englishman In New York’. I’m extremely grateful to the kind person in question, who worked on the production and thought of me. They did try to get me IN the film itself, lurking in the background. This didn’t happen, but as a Crisp fan I’m more than happy with being able to see the finished product so soon. They’ve asked me to hold off from writing about the film until now. It’s just had its official premiere at the Berlinale film festival, and will be on ITV in the Spring.

So: ‘An Englishman In New York’ is both a biopic and a sequel. It follows ‘The Naked Civil Servant’, the 1975 ITV movie that dramatised the incredible life of Quentin Crisp, the Soho dandy, wit, artist’s model and unabashed lifelong ‘visible’ homosexual. It showed him – and the changing face of London -  from the age of 20 in 1928, through to what was then the present day. At the end a 67-year-old Mr Crisp walks through 70s Chelsea and muses on how the fashions of the day have finally caught up with him: men with long hair, beads, flamboyant shirts with big collars, flares and so on. ‘Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day…’

As Crisp noted, the film originally went out at a time when there were only two other TV channels.  BBC2 was usually a repository for the Open University or darts (when it was transmitting at all), while BBC1 – ‘the other side’ – would have been showing the Nine O’Clock News. So one has to remember that pretty much everyone who was spending an evening in with the TV that night in 1975, and who didn’t fancy the news, would have seen ‘The Naked Civil Servant’.

‘If it had been a cinema film,’ reasoned Crisp, ‘the only people who would have gone to see it would have been gay men… Oh, and liberals wishing to be seen going into and coming out of the cinema.’

Given such mainstream attention, ‘The Naked Civil Servant’ changed the life of its subject overnight. Crisp became nationally famous, a regular on TV chat shows. His one man stage show – in which he doled out his advice on life like a Wildean self-help guru – became his day job.

But it also changed the life of the actor who portrayed him, John Hurt. So much so that Crisp would say Hurt was still playing variations on the Crisp role for years afterwards. ‘The Elephant Man was merely me with a bag over my head.’

There’s a great moment in the 1990 documentary Resident Alien, where Hurt catches up with Crisp at his New York bedsit, and asks him about this.

Hurt: You said I was just playing versions of you.
Crisp: You play victims.
Hurt: But I wouldn’t necessarily call you a victim.
Crisp: Oh, but I CLAIM to be a victim…
Hurt: How so?
Crisp: Because I am at the mercy of the world…
Hurt: (laughs) Aren’t we all?

(It’s too easy to just go on quoting QC – so many gems)

Now Mr Hurt has returned to take up the part once more, covering the NYC era of Crisp’s life from the late 70s to his death in 1999. And fittingly it’s another ITV movie.

‘An Englishman In New York’ takes its title from the 80s hit about him, by the artist Crisp referred to as ‘Mr Sting’. And though the lion’s share of the film is indeed set in New York, there’s a few London scenes at the start showing the one most abiding aspect of how overnight fame affected his life in Britain.

We see him answering the phone in his Chelsea bedsit.

Crisp (voice over): My lifelong tormentors now had a name to go on.

Man on phone: Is this Quentin Crisp?
Crisp Yeeeeeeesss…?
Man: You dirty poof. I’m going to smash your f—ing face in.
Crisp: Do you wish to make an appointment?
Man: What?
Crisp: I have some time on Tuesday afternoon if that is convenient for you.

(click!)

In the UK, suggests the film, fame is resented. Celebrities are punchbags, then as now. Certainly, interminable BBC3 programmes like ‘The 100 Most Irritating Celebrities’  – a six hour long show that went out last Christmas – would bear this out.

As soon as Crisp gets to New York, of course, the disco music plays, people smile and compliment him as he goes by, and he’s in a kind of heaven. He is granted Resident Alien status, moves into the Lower East Side, and spends his days Being Quentin Crisp professionally, delivering quips and aphorisms in his local diner, or at parties, or at his stage show.

That’s pretty much the real life tale in a nutshell. It’s a film that starts with a happy ending. There’s no conflict or journey or quest or antagonist, unless you count getting old itself. So rather understandably the script lunges for incidents of dilemma.

There’s the accusations of him being a kind of gay Uncle Tom figure, accused of ‘playing to the straights’ by Angry Gay Man 1 in one of his audiences. There’s his comment that ‘AIDS is merely a fad’ leading to him being cornered by Angry Gay Man 2 in an alley. The film uses these episodes to get under the Crisp skin, with a Boswell-style character at his side, Mr Steele, forever in a state of frustration. He knows there’s a Public Crisp, all sweeping statements and droll misanthropy – a kind of Grumpy Old Queen – as well as a Private Crisp, who is compassionate, kind and generous, who sends off cheques to AIDS charities.

And somewhere in the middle the story takes a complete detour to focus on the struggling artist Patrick Angus, who Crisp does his best to help. Again, the film thinks it needs to lunge for a message, ie ‘He Was Different In Private’. It’s pertinent that the script is by the writer of ‘The Curse Of Steptoe And Son’.

But sometimes you don’t watch a biopic to see years of untidy facts corralled into suspiciously convenient arcs of conflict and pathos. Dramas needn’t always be dramatic. If there’s no plot, you shouldn’t force one.  It’s perfectly okay to just want to spend time with the characters. Movies (and novels) can be like dinner parties. And that’s fine. That’s more than enough.

You come for  – and get – John Hurt returning to play Quentin Crisp, saying all the funny and wise and witty things Crisp said. You also get Miranda out of Sex and the City, visibly enjoying herself as the performance artist Penny Arcade.

You also get a wonderful recreation of a scene in the 1992 film Orlando, with Hurt playing Crisp playing Queen Elizabeth 1st (and a non-speaking actress playing Tilda Swinton playing Orlando as a young man – wish that had been me…).

And you get this marvellous line as a 90-year-old Crisp sits in his filthy NYC room (which you can almost smell):

‘He who famously said ‘after the first four years the dust doesn’t get any worse’… He was wrong! The dust took its AWFUL revenge…’

Highgate this morning. Chaos on the roads, happiness for schoolchildren everywhere:

Here’s the latest on the Fosca Swedish dates. Note change to the Stockholm venue.

Friday March 13th, evening: Stockholm – Svenska Musikklubben.

Sat March 14th, noon ish: Stockholm – instore or café gig at lunchtime to please those under the nightclub age limit. This is yet to be booked, so if anyone knows of a suitable Stockholm shop or cafe, do contact But Is It Art Records at info@butisitart.org

Sat March 14th, evening: Norrköping: Klubb Republik.

Twitter, the ‘microblogging’ site where entries are limited to a mere 140 characters, seems to be this year’s Facebook. At least in terms of giving newspaper columnists something to write about which doesn’t need that much research. I got an account in – gosh – July 2007, made a few ‘Tweets’ (grimace) on signing up, heard the sound of tumbleweed, then gave it up. It seemed pretty pointless unless it caught on in a big way.

I felt similarly in 1998 when I found out my new mobile phone could send something called ‘text messages’: I didn’t see the point unless it became a commonplace thing to do. It would have been like buying one of the first telephones, or opening the first Tube station – you need a decent amount of other people on the receiving end first.

Being one of the first UK bloggers / online diarists was different, though. I didn’t have to be part of a ‘blogosphere’ or blogging Friends community, because they didn’t exist. If anything, I started the diary to escape the world of groups and chatter, not link up with it. Starting an internet diary in 1997 had more of an existential appeal to me – I blogged, therefore I was.

Twitter, on the other hand, is very much an audience affair – you don’t have readers, you have ‘followers’. Thanks to a few high profile Twitter members of late – Stephen Fry (since Oct 2008 – unusually late for him), Jonathan Ross (December, while twiddling his thumbs away from the BBC) and a survivor of the Hudson River Plane Crash a few weeks ago, plus an upgrade which made photos and phones more Twitter-compatible (much like the coming of predictive messaging for texts, or Blogger and LJ for online diaries), a pretty decent amount of people are now all a-Twitter.

By its own restricted design, it encourages chatty, ephemeral banalities, and makes me sound as if I’m caught not quite with my pants down but certainly with hair uncombed… for better or worse. But it’s a handy stop gap between proper diary posts:

http://twitter.com/dickon_edwards

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:

http://is.gd/gJ3m

(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.

Sunday – lunch in Clapham at Heather M’s place, Claudia A accompanying me. Then straight to Angel to see ‘The Reader’ at the Vue cinema, with Shanthi S.

Once it becomes clear that the film is entirely made up of English actors playing German characters, who speak to each other in English – but with a German accent, I just can’t  get on with it.

With me, it’s purely the choice of accent that grates, rather than the usage of English. Had Kate Winslet and co spoke in BBC RP – that so-called ‘non-accent English’ – which is really Southern English-posh (but not too posh), I’d have no problem. RP is the convention I’m used to: RP is The British Drama Accent. If you choose convention, you have to follow through with it. But English with a German accent – to represent Germans speaking to other Germans – seems an attempt to have one’s strudel and eat it.

On top of which, the lines they speak sound like German In Translation – stilted, stagey, and too ominously aware of the gravity of the subject matter. It’s a tale connected to the Holocaust, so one hardly expects a bundle of laughs. But just a tiny twist more realism is needed – a little roughening up, a little less polish.

I think of ‘Conspiracy’, the TV movie where Kenneth Branagh and others play various top Nazis at a secret conference, deciding upon the Final Solution. They use BBC RP with a touch of the vernacular and everyday. They chat, in other words. As they would have.

At one point a character says, ‘Do the Jews believe in hell?’ and Branagh replies, ‘They do now. We provide it.’ He tosses this chilling line out casually, lightly, with the fake-matey smirk of an unloved office manager. And it works brilliantly. People who made history didn’t declaim in a ‘Making History’ tone, not when they were just speaking to each other behind closed doors.

Bruno Ganz pops up in ‘The Reader’ too, recalling ‘Downfall’, the German film where he played Hitler. Again, another WW2 film where people in conversation actually converse rather than declaim.

The other convention that irks me is the question of characters aging. When we first see her in the 1950s, Ms Winslet – playing a thirtysomething – frolics with a teenage boy. Then it moves to the 60s, where he’s in his twenties, and she’s in her forties. Cue slight aging make-up for Kate, and college clothes for the young man. Come the 1970s and 1980s, she gets the full old lady make-up, while the young man… turns into Ralph Fiennes.

Again, it’s the inconsistency of dramatic convention that risks dividing the audience into those who don’t see these things as distractions, and those who can’t think of anything else.

Why didn’t they age the young male actor as well? Or replace Ms W with an older actress?

I’ve seen ‘Iris’. I know that if you leave Kate Winslet alone long enough, she turns into Judi Dench.

John Mortimer has died. What a life – defending the Sex Pistols’ ‘Never Mind…’ sleeve and Oz magazine’s ‘gay Jesus’ case with one hand, while writing all those Rumpole stories and plays and screenplays with the other. Someone who never fell into the easy trap of becoming a grumpy old man, his 2003 memoir, ‘Where’s There’s A Will’, about how to write and indeed how to live,  is a real inspiration.  He wrote it as a kind of last message to the world, but still managed to squeeze in five further novels between ‘Will’ and the grave. Another message, then: keep doing it till you really do drop dead.

I’m sure among the obituaries and tributes there will be those lovers of a good myth-buster (like myself) who will point out that Mr M never actually wrote the screenplay to the 80s TV version of ‘Brideshead Revisited’. It was the director and producer, Derek Grainger, who penned the adaptation, pretty much leaving the Waugh novel intact – which is why it took so many hour-long episodes. Mortimer was contracted to submit a script, so although it wasn’t used they had to keep his name on the credits.

I’m currently reading Russell T Davies’s excellent ‘The Writer’s Tale’, his epistolary account  about writing for and executively producing the present Doctor Who. As with ‘Brideshead’, he also mentions the occasional discrepancy between the names on the writing credits and those who actually supply the words. One Who story in particular, ‘Human Nature / The Family Of Blood’, is credited to Paul Cornell, adapted from his novel, though Davies says:

‘I had a whole Sunday of people saying ‘What a brilliant script. Paul is a genius.’ Which he is. But I’m thinking, if only you knew how much of that I wrote! …People know that I polish stuff, but they think that polishing means adding a gag or an epigram, not writing half the script.’

The obsession with the writer as sole auteur works fine with books, but falls apart when it comes to most TV programmes and films. The nature of the medium encourages creation by committee – Doctor Who itself was created by a BBC focus group in the early 60s, rather than by a single writer. There’s a fascinating in-house report from the period, stating why the Corporation should make science fiction drama at all- and what the point of science fiction IS. The works of Ray Bradbury are cited, demonstrating the importance of blending engaging, inspiring sci-fi ideas with sympathetic human characters.

***
Last Wednesday – to Barden’s Boudoir in Stoke Newington Road, to see the bands Deptford Beach Babes, Sexton Ming, Tropics Of Cancer and Rude Mechanicals. All are vastly enjoyable. Lots of bluesy madness, twangy guitars, mad scattershot drumming, brimmed hats, costumes. The Tropics of Cancer feature Ms She, who I remember once kept me company at the club Lady Luck, where she worked behind the bar.

Rude Ms singer Jo Roberts is unforgettable: cartoonish whiteface make-up, dusty grey beehive wig, vintage ballgown and bare feet. She’d be visual attraction enough, but there’s also the violinist – a transvestite in a tight skirt who occasionally plays with the bow between their legs, while the drummer is a deadpan butch android. Like the Deptford BBs, both wear sunglasses, thus straddling the line between deadpan cool and deadpan comedy – and deadpan comedy IS cool, after all.

Sunglasses onstage always work best as part of an overall costume. Dressed-down rock bands who wear shades are so tiresome. ‘Listen to me, don’t look at me’ is an attitude I’ve never understood. Why get on a stage if you don’t want to be looked at?

Barden’s Boudoir is a newish venue, and one of many signs that Stoke Newington is becoming a bigger part of the capital’s cultural life. Only thing is, the venue is too new for my liking. One complains about grotty small venues, then one complains when they’re not grotty enough. As usual, I want things both ways: I want unbattered, working equipment AND thick layers of graffiti. I enjoy my suits not smelling of other people’s stale cigarettes the day after, yet I’m suspicious of sobriety.

Chat to Vicki Churchill, who sings with the Deptford BBs. Years ago, we once signed a couple of dollar bills in a semi-drunken pact, promising to each other to get to New York before we die. Last year I made it there (thanks to Mr MacG), and it turns out that she did too, visiting the city a few months later. Pact completed. Next goal: published books. She’s beaten me to that one, though, having brought out a children’s picture book a few years ago. I think it’s about a vole.

On the overground train from Camden Road to Dalston Kingsland, I bump into Roger from the band Exile Inside. He recognises me from the time Fosca played with E.I. at the Purple Turtle in December – gosh – 2005. Turns out we both listen to BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction, both finding it a suitable substitute for John Peel’s show. In Stoke Newington Road, before we part company, he points out the Turkish restaurant where Gilbert & George usually have their evening meal. They’re not in tonight, but I don’t mind – I was glowered at by Victoria Wood in the High Tea tea rooms earlier.

Regarding the Orlando reissue on iTunes, I now understand it’s only on iTunes UK, rather than iTunes USA or iTunes Elsewhere. So profuse apologies if people in other countries can’t buy it. I’m not sure what’s the best way around that, short of asking a UK friend to download it, burn it onto a CD, then put it in the post.

A collector writes:

I must hopefully enquire whether the iTunes availability of Passive Soul is likely to translate into a physical reissue at any time? This sort of thing has happened with a lot of reissues lately – first download-only, then later on CD. I’d love to hear the unreleased material, but being so terribly sniffy about sound quality I can’t bear listening to MP3s, and anyway I much prefer to have an actual artefact, even if it’s largely a compilation of other artefacts that I already own. I enjoyed your “programme notes” and feel that with the addition of Tim’s comments these would make excellent sleevenotes if and when Orlando return to the shelves.

Well, what I do know is that Tim C says he’s setting up a MySpace archive of Orlando things. And that he’ll be writing his own sleeve notes there. The iTunes reissue is entirely down to him – all I did was say yes.

I think it’s unlikely that Passive Soul would be released again on an actual official CD. Then again, one does see ancient and obscure major label albums turning up on indie reissue and collector labels, such as Cherry Red or LTM.

But it’s one thing for an artist to hawk a brand new release to a label unsolicited, and quite another to hustle a reissue. I’d feel very uneasy about doing so. I couldn’t dare instigate the negotiations – the approaching, the rights, the licensing, the approval, not to mention all the convincing. Still, I would say yes if others made it actually happen, and all I had to do was, well, say yes.

The great thing about those aforementioned indie reissue labels is that they clearly believe in just putting the material out there, in the spirit of pure faith. A balm to both the curious and the collector. Rather than thinking ‘but will anyone buy it whose name I do not know?’