Shang-A-Lang

Went to see Justice last night with the young ‘uns from work and their various siblings, mates and flatmates. Everybody in our group barring me around 24 years of age so I was totally hoping I wouldn’t turn out to be the oldest raver there. Was glad, then, when I saw my old friend from Virgin, Neil, now silver-haired and older than me if memory serves by exactly a month.

Somerset House gig, meaning outdoors and because beforehand heavy grey skies threatened a deluge we went via American Apparel to get Andrew something waterproof to wear. He bought a burgundy bomber, like the red one the Wifes had for V last year. Inside, we bumped into Simon Strange and Daniel and there ensued a giddy couple of minutes climaxing in us all showing each other our underpants. I had the store’s lemon Y-fronts on and Daniel was wearing the same in raspberry. It’s an AA world, kiddos.

Kept catching myself staring like a simpleton at gorgeous people all night. Not in a perving-over-youngsters way, you understand, more a feeling like I was scouting for a modelling agency, Storm or Models 1. The chap who sold Andrew his jacket was so otherworldly, pale and thin and chiselled (like Ziggy Stardust landed that moment from Mars, I shit you not) I’d have signed him up to face an international campaign right there and then. I entreat and implore you to go and look at him, even if you have to fly in from abroad – it's the Covent Garden outlet. And the crowd in Somerset House, too, all seemed so ridiculously handsome and gorgeous and trendy. I like so much the looks on the young of now – nice coats, nice colours, mint and scarlet, pinks, white, lots of green. And see! I even took a photograph of the vision in red woollens running the merch stall. I turned to Hannah and remarked, ”My God Sara Stockbridge is selling the T-shirts” - except she'd never heard of her so I set her straight. I explained in a kindly, avuncular way how SS was the acceptable platinum blonde of the eighties – how she summed up for me the good side of a bad decade.



Crowd utterly wankered by the time Late Of The Pier had finished their support (not bad – a bit Bauhaus-y / Japan-y in places) and nobody minded the rain. In fact, I’d go so far as to say the rain helped. It was of the gentle variety and I noticed later it made my scratchy beard go soft thereby lending credibility to that old Jackie beauty tip about washing your hair in rainwater. Luminous white crosses and big fat synth riffs and exciting samples and long breakdowns and amazing lights – they even finished with a cover of Soulwax’s NY Excuse which was a nice touch. Obviously everybody went mad during D.A.N.C.E. and the Simian one.

After, I was happy walking across Waterloo Bridge in the rain to catch my bus, clutching the Loveboxx festival programme somebody had pressed on me at the exit. For this sort of thing it’s very good indeed – exactly (and I mean exactly) like and early edition of i-D from 1984. Same layout, same typeset, even the same paper. See, the eighties are back! And I knew nearly everybody in it - Johnny Woo, Fashion Phil, Emily Dean, the Horse Meat lovelies. Reading their interviews lasted precisely the length of the bus journey and this made me happier still.

Got in and played music threesers with Fints. I’m mad on the Wailers’ Catch A Fire and Burnin’ albums I got from work recently so we had a bit of that (Small Axe is the one) and Kings Of Leon (also mad on Knocked Up off the last album), some E.L.O. (Strange Maaaaaa-gic!), some Abba. Fints has been mentoring Paul Simonon’s son all week for the lad’s work experience. He said he was a good kid, confident but not cocky, whose favourite single is the Maytals’ Pressure Drop. Pretty cool I’d say for a 16 year old but, then, his father is probably the coolest man ever to have walked the earth. Come to think of it I don’t think I could mentor Paul Simonon’s son – just about everything to do with The Clash, and PS in particular, makes me go funny all over.

Justice was the second good Friday night gig in recent weeks - Jock and I went to see My Bloody Valentine at The Roundhouse the other day. On the way in we'd sneered scornfully at the signs recommending we avail ourselves of the free earplugs on offer. This almost backfired on us. While we made it – just - through the gig without them, they were kind of necessary. The band had apparently shipped in an outdoors P.A. system, two or three times the size of The Roundhouse’s own. Eek!

Let me see – ‘loud’ isn’t really the word. At one point during Feed Me With Your Kiss the sound seemed to making the blood in my head actually boil: I was convinced I was having a nosebleed (I wasn’t) and that before the song ended my eyes would pop out of their sockets, my skull would collapse in and that would be the end of me. But I enjoyed the pain nevertheless – like eating a too-hot chilli or worrying at a loose tooth. During the fifteen minutes of pure, relentless feedback that was the encore I decided my frame physically could not take any more so I went and stood on the terrace for a cig, ears ringing like a fire alarm, and watched with amusement the other shattered bail-er out-ers. Invariably they crashed through the exit doors either laughing their heads off or crying real tears. Jock and Primal Scream’s Bobby Gilespie - who stood next to us all night – stayed the entire course, which makes them better men than me and I doff my cap to them both. They're hard, these Glaswegians.

In other news, my boss Michelle got married last week and her aunt is Dana! The Dana! We made friends with her – awfully nice and totally demure - and I’ll probably treasure forever the mental picture I have of Jelly doing the Gay Gordons with her to Chic’s Le Freak.

In other other news the Wifes have had their portraits done by John Bird. We are big fans of his work so we jumped at the opportunity to sit, or rather stand in the Tavern loos while he took photos of us. The reults are totally fantastic but I didn’t email them home properly so I’ll pop them up another time. Anyway, no vanity image in this post should be allowed to detract from the sheer beauty of MERCH GIRL up there ^^^.

Sunday. Snoozed and snacked and snoozed and snacked, lying downstairs on the sofa from Countryfile to dusk and now I'm at a bit of a loose end. It has been grabbed hangover food, unfortunately – a Ginster’s pasty with ketchup, cereal, smoked cheese slices and a bit of leftover quiche. I’ve finished the novel I was reading, read the papers (except for the bits which come with the NOTW which never get taken out of the plastic and the Culture section of the ST which I fall asleep reading in bed on a Sunday night) and I don’t want a bath just yet. Little miracle Fints did the housework while I was out at the Tower Of London yesterday so that doesn’t need doing. Shame is over, Michelle’s wedding is over, The Project is over – for the first time in months there is no reason for me to be upstairs organising music. Fints is watching sport, alternating between Wimbledon and a football match (I thought that was the end of it last Sunday but, then, football never ever finishes, does it?) and it’s too early to put on the new Futurama movie… So here I am, mucking about.

It wasn’t football. It was the tennis still going on. Rowdy-sounding because it’s the final, says Fints.

Aunty Janet. Hang on, I don’t use the ‘Aunty’ bit when I actually address her, or Aunties Alice and Irene, or Uncles, for that matter: my mum always said she thought it was ‘prissy’ - aunty this, uncle that - so we weren’t brought up that way. Anyway, Jan had these free passes from the woman upstairs - The Tower Of London / discount at the restaurant there / Tower Bridge / boat to Greenwich, all in, so it was arranged I’d meet her and her mate Wendy and mum and dad, outside Tower Hill tube yesterday morning. Overcast at first but sunny by the time we’d circumnavigated the entire attraction about three times in order to find the right entrance for these passes.

I can’t have been there since I was ten years old and I’d forgotten it’s not one thing, but a collection of different buildings – towers, arsenals, wall walks, gates, battlements, chapels, grace and favour cottages, an infirmary, all arranged about the execution green in the centre. It's nice - laid-back and village-y. Me and mum were amazed you could smoke in there.

I found it interesting. Standing in the poky, dank Salt Tower, you really did get an impression of how it would have felt to have been locked up there, overlooking the Thames, with just the meanest slits of windows for light and fresh air. Black wood execution block, worn smooth and shiny with use and riven with great gouges was fascinatingly repulsive. Saw the Royal bling, of course, which was all a bit zzzz except for the most OTT ginormous solid gold punchbowl which seemed to me the kind of thing Michael Jackson would own. Not massively interested either in the rows and rows of weaponry – you’ve seen one pike, you’ve seen ‘em all – but I loved the armour, especially the horse armour. Beautiful.

Of course we just had to run into some ‘living theatre’ thing, didn’t we? It’s everywhere these days this stuff, providing employment for actors on their uppers, and ‘bringing history to life’ for the masses. Here was Lady Nithsdale, in all her Jacobean finery, standing between the gift shop and the women’s toilets: “Oh dear me o good people, gather round gather round and listen to my tale, my Lord and husband the Earl Of Nithsdale is to be executed tomorrow morning at dawn and I have only my trusty servant Master Meakins with me, oh what am I to do, I entreat and implore you to help me set him free and make our escape to Rome etc., etc., ”

Going straight into teenager mode, I was thinking as I reluctantly, sheepishly shuffled forward, ”Please mum please mum please mum don’t shout out or join in” but it was too late. Before I knew it there was mum right down the front, shouting out and joining in. Marked at this early stage of the re-enactment as a game one, mum ended up being roped in to the show, helping bring history to life by, on instruction, winking seductively at the gaoler and nipping in and out of the Earl's cell wearing a servant's hooded cloak etc., Meanwhile Janet and Wendy stood at the front, holding her handbag and cheering her on while dad and I stood well back, smiling through gritted teeth.

It was a true story. Lord Nithsdale’s escape really did happen via this disguise method and he and Lady Nithsdale went on to live happily ever after under the protection of the Catholic Church in Rome. However – and I think this is really odd and really a bit off – what the living theatre actors neglected to tell us was that was all a waste of time, because King George had in fact already reprieved the Earl, an act of great mercy and generosity towards an enemy who had, after all, rallied around James Stuart’s (The Old Pretender) claim to his throne. I looked it up when I got home and it is one of the main facts of the story. And yet by completely oversimplifying events, in order presumably to make pantomime good guys out of the Catholic Nithsdales and bad guys out of the Protestant King, history wasn’t brought to life at all, was it? A waste of time, all this winking and gurning and imploring and costume-changing if people don’t go away actually educated. And you’d expect that from Hollywood, not the Tower Of bloomin’ London. A good day out nevertheless.

Didn’t do the boat trip because we hung around too long and I wanted to get home and have a kip before Gay Shame. I walked through the City to London Bridge and found myself at times quite alone down by the River, which was fantastic. I must start river walking again. And Shame’s theme this year was Masculinity and I did have a (stupid, I suppose) idea quite early on for the Wifes to wear armour, figuring you must be able to hire stuff like that that doesn’t weigh a ton. Too impractical, said Jelly, and he was right, so we did it as builders in hard hats with orange tan and fluorescent waistcoats and arsecrack jeans. They’d put us on a scaffolding high up overlooking the dance floor, reached by a rickety ladder, and oh my the view was astonishing from up there. Robin Whitmore had done a terrific job with the venue. Around the dance floor was a collection of rickety, deliberately down-at-heel booths – pit-stops, tattoo parlours, gay zombie sauna parlour, seedy DIY shops etc., - within which the 100 or so performers and artists peddled their masculinity wares. Outside in the lane alongside The Coronet there was even a mini-village of rockin’ fried food stalls and installations. It was like Glastonbury or something. Somebody was doing flesh coloured lollies cast from a massive dildo. The Bears did dance routines to Macho Man and Smack My Bitch Up and Justin sang and it’s been too long since I’ve seen him and Rufus Wainwright was there but I didn’t see him. Simon had done such an amazing job again - so in this respect I really did feel a welling up of Gay-Proud on Gay Pride - and it was packed. It was still packed in fact when we left the crowd to Lush and zoomed home in our Addison Lee at 3-ish because I am phobic these days about being the last to leave anything i go to. I don’t know why but I think about my exit strategy way before, for example, what I'm going to wear.

Hello everybody. Lack of typing over the past few weeks due entirely to an accident I had with some heated rollers before Spain and all my fingers just clean burnt off. I have had to learn to manipulate the keys with my tongue. It's licky!

Damn I’ve just spent the princely sum of 79p on i-Tunes on a rollicking electro track from last year called Blink by John Dahlback, only to discover I already own it. I’m always, always doing this. What’s the one I downloaded three times? Something or other. Anyway, Blink reminds me of the dirty electro in the Bacardi tent at last year’s V, everyone thoroughly squashed in and off their faces, all the boys with red, poppers-‘n’-sunburn faces and the girls with their knockers out. From outside you could see steam billowing into the air! I do hope it’s the same this year because we’ve just been booked again and this time we’ve been given not two but four extra VIP’s in return for agreeing to do our final set as the Wifes i.e. with a bit of slap on. We’re taking my wee niece and her mate and Mez and Toby Fanny Rat - although I would be a bad uncle if I encouraged the young folks into said electro furnace of Sodom and Gomorrah. I’ll dump them on Lou or outside watching something more wholesome like Babyshambles. Mez is a huge fan of beefy Essex boys so maybe she’ll stick on a regulation Stetson and get her tits out. Maybe Toby will. Maybe we all will.

I won the football! I won the bloody fucking football! Football is ace. Football rules. What does Basil say to Polly when he wins that money on the horses? ”For once in my life I’m ahead?” - that’s me. Pulled Spain out of the hat in the work sweep on the day before we flew there – an omen - and Waz (Warren) said ”They’re going to win, Woody”. But I never win anything so couldn't steal myself to believe for even one fleeting second that they actually would. Whilst holidaying over ‘on the continent’ I paid more attention than is usual to this Euro thing. Not hard - in previous years my interest levels would have had to have been measured in minus figures. Jock, on holiday with us, had also picked Spain in his work's sweep - another omen – and I even watched a bit of one match over there, just a few seconds mind, with my lovely Uncle Philip. Couldn’t face any of the final last night, however. Fints had it on of course but it was too exciting for me and I thought I might suffer a seizure of some kind so I sat upstairs with headphones on playing The Osmonds. We opened a bottle of red wine after it ended at 1-0 and watched Glastonbury on the telly. I think it's incredible that I've actually made some money out of, football – one of the things in life that's most irritated, bemused and annoyed me over the years. Can you bet on EastEnders? I hate that too.

There’s no point in me going on for too long about the holiday, really. Nobody’s ever much interested, are they, when you get home and start distributing photos and going on about what you ate and where. But what I will say is that it was perhaps the most perfect ‘abroad’ break I’ve ever had. I was so knackered and sun-deprived before we went – really, really tired - and all I wanted was a bit of good company and to lie down near water (born under the sign of Pisces, I calm down near water) with a book and an i-Pod, feeling the hot sun pressing into my chest. We had unbroken sunshine for nine days straight, watched the lights come on over Africa at night, laughed our heads off at dinner time with Alice, Philip, Jock and Ada and drove to Cadiz again - only this time it didn’t pour down. Cadiz is fast gaining on Edinburgh in the stakes to be my favourite city of all. Alice and Philip are, have always been, such good fun and we saw a lot of them, and their mates Carol and Harvey who I love. Carol is writing a mystery about a protagonist called Kenzie Brown and Harvey was, is, known for having the biggest cock in the world. He didn't show us of course but somebody saw it after a game of squash and we're talking bollard proportions, apparently.

Gah, but remembering is hard for me: I would so like to still be there, on A and P’s sun-blasted terrace listening to Joanna Lumley’s life story on audio book (utterly brilliant - a wise woman) and rubbing lemons just fallen from the tree into my hair to blonde it up (this works, if you don’t mind the odd wasp or pips running down your face). I love Spain. There's a great picture of me in the pool I meant to post but Fints emailed it to me earlier from downstairs and it's still not here. How can this be?

I played Dave’s Lodger quite a bit on holiday. Shameless I know but I was reading Jock’s Bowie In Berlin book I bought him for his birthday haha. Over the years I’ve read quite a bit in various biogs and magazines about that 76-79 period and played the albums more times than I could count but Lodger I’ve listened to the least of all. For some time I was even actually quite down on it, considering it the poor relation to Low and Heroes which it still sort of is. But there’s still much to admire - Fantastic Voyage, for example and Boys Keep Swinging of course and Red Sails which we regularly blare out at Duckie, screeching along to ”The hinterland! The hinterland! We’re gonna sail to the hinterland!”. See, the first two albums in the 'Berlin Trilogy' always seemed more complete to me, like much more than just a bunch of songs slung together, but reading this book I finally got what he was trying to say with Lodger– the whole thing about restless travel in sunny climes, about not wanting to be a seven stone reclusive waif any longer. In my mind I came back from that holiday like LodgerDave: tanned, happy, hair cut and side-parted, a paperback in my pocket - life is the pop of a cherry.

Returned home with reluctance and I finished The Project at last. 4 months it took beginning to end - my life's work. I felt like taking off all my clothes and running out into the street when it was all over. Fints and I were reunited with kitters (Hook OK but bringing in birds, Evie moping badly and has a minor thyroid thing, Roy is too fat - somebody is obviously feeding him) and I saw Black Kids and Ladyhawke live and pissed about with Jelly at the club. I've caught up with Mary Portas on TV, decided I've gone off Britain’s Next Top Model and, like everyone else, worried about the economy and oil. Won the football yesterday and Gay Shame is this weekend, and then sis's 40th where we'll unite with good friends, past and present. Then it's the first work trip to L.A. for my new job in late-July followed by V Festival in August and, further ahead, Christmas in Scotland. For now the good vastly outweighs the bad, even if this isn't Marbella.

Oh man I am enjoying 1997. Probably because I doubt anybody in the history of the entire world had as much fun as I did in the 1990s, not even the Rolling Stones, not even the Emperor Caligula. The second half of the deacde was particularly enjoyable and, in the parlance of the time, I thoroughly larged it and 'ad it and 'ad it large. It wasn’t unknown for me to go to a club like Marvellous on a Sunday night and then go straight to work after a quick shower. Unthinkable now – the very idea is anathema, repulsive, even - but when do you just get too plain old? As it always does, going through all the songs of the year brought the memories flooding back and most of those memories are good. Like the day I got my tattoo at Into You in Farringdon and bumped into Jock on his way out, nursing a great big plaster over where he’d just had his Wigan Casino Heart Of Soul done.

Right up to that point I’d been in two minds and seeing Jock there looking a little green around the gills, I almost decided on going straight back home. Really, I was concerned it would become infected, go gangrenous and I’d end up having to have my arm taken off like an old sailor. But everybody said don’t worry it’s a good place, the best in London etc., - and all the famous people like Paula Yates and Michael Hutchence went there (mind you, look what happened to that pair).

Bittersweet Symphony was playing on the radio as I had an old-fashioned anchor gouged into my bicep, or in my case what has to pass for a bicep. I chose it from one of their big display wallets of traditional designs because I thought / think it had / has a certain gravitas and historical weight. I was never a Celtic band kind of man. Did it hurt? You bet it did - especially the green ink for some reason - but I did not faint, something I still find remarkable because I can’t even look at needles on TV. I recall the smell of antiseptic and the elaborately decorated calves of the Aussie bloke who did me. Surfer dude - bit of a type really in his baggy shorts and heavy metal T-shirt but really nice all the same. "Be gentle with me", I said, and I was not even joking: and he was, very gentle, talking me through the entire process - "I'm just loading up the red ink, he-yah. Just a litle prick. You OK?".

After, I arrived home to find the flat in a terrible mess with the speaker pushed over and a smashed ornament and upset vase and Roy Kitten (tabby) and Shorace Kitten (black) chasing one another up and down the stairs and round and round the furniture. They were a very boisterous pair of boy kittens and most trying but very beautiful as all kittens are. Possibly my favourite things in the world. We hadn’t yet named them at that point – they were known as Itchy and Scratchy for ages. Soon after this, Scratchy/ Shorace was driven up to Edinburgh by Fints and Diane to be Moira’s family’s cat. We figured three cats is OK (we already had bad McGregor and knocked up teenage slut mum Evie) but four would have been a little weird. It broke my heart when they went off but we got to keep Roy who by now had thankfully stopped doing the worrying and odd thing of butting his head against the skirting board over and over. Anyway, just hearing today that one song from the spring of 1997 reminded me of an entire sequence of events all those years ago. Ain’t that the power of music.

Actually Jock would have been a primary influence on the music I heard that year. We were new friends, awww. The stamp of his exquisite taste, unfailing curiosity and penchant for exotica is all over the list, with many of his favourite bands from the time - Arab Strap, the Beta Band, Pavement, Mogwai, and crazy electronic records like Pierre Henry’s Psyche Rock, Laurent Garnier’s Crispy Bacon, and Come To Daddy by Aphex Twin. He probably turned me on to all of them. He certainly did buy me what I still think’s the best single from that year – the Sterolab / Nurse With Wound collaboration Simple Headphone Mind - ten and a half minutes of groovy, spooky strangeness with the power to utterly transport. I love the bit where everything stops and a woman says ”scuttle” and it all gets going again. The 12” came in a vaccum-packed foil bag with a surreal, slighthly disturbing picture of a man doing what? smoking? eating? smoking a cherry? on the cover, which somehow absolutely represents the unsettling sounds within. It’s what all good sleeves do, don’t you think? Like Ziggy Stardust - you can just tell.



if you're feeling sinister

It wasn’t all straight-in-at-186, handmade-sleeve, only-available-from-Rough-Trade though: Daft Punk, Suede, Radiohead, Belle & Sebastian, Massive Attack, Chemical Brothers… and some of the biggest hits were really great - Professional Widow, Song 2, Novocaine For The Soul, Blueboy’s Remember Me and that beautiful freak / weird Dodo of a Number 1, White Town’s Your Woman. Heck, I even have a sneaking affection for Texas’s Say What You Want and Torn by Natalie Imbruglia. All in all, a very grown up year, like 1979. Druggy, too. Most of it sounds either smack-y or coke-y or dope-y or speed-y or E-y. Primal Scream's Kowalski, Star and Burning Wheel sound like the lot put together, washed down with a few tins of White Lightning.

Whoops, I’ve done it again. I came to talk about The Tenth Victim at the ICA with Tash, Joe and Fanny Rat, and Sparks with Fints and Gareth, and Oxo Tower drinks with everyone and DJ-ing at Jez and Pan’s night at the Tiki Bar in Kennington, and curry and Duckie with Jelly but I’ve ended up instead in a memory hole, rambling about kittens and Stereolab. Now I’m tired and must to bed. Like I said up there, I’m not the man I used to be.

Fints had to get new Microsoft Office installed on here for his work. Apart from everything looking slightly different (annoying) the new Word has this thing where when you opt to create a new document it gives you a choice of creating a new Blog entry instead of the bog-standard one. Quelle Moderne. I decided to give it a whirl but I should have guessed it would want me to connect to their website and register this journal with them first. They’re always trying to get you to register these people, aren’t they? A real tsk tsk tsk when all I wanted to do was hop on, splurge-write right now and hop off again. But I persevered. When I got to the online registration it didn’t even have Live Journal listed as an option, so I tried closing down the annoying by now several windows and this action crashed the browser! What a waste of time: I shall be sticking to the normal documents and just pasting 'em in in future I’m afraid, Microsoft. *waves angry fist*.

A white-hot, fast week has whizzed past. *Suddenly distracted* Ooh I like this one – it’s Teenage Sensation by Credit To The Nation. Haha and I remember Fints hates it and an argument we had about the song when it was out, um, can it really be fourteen years ago? It was in our living room sitting on the old, horrible, nylon, peach carpet which we did not choose but which came with the flat. Probably we’d had too much red wine - this one went on forever, like most of our "discussions" about music. Fortunately we are in accord on the subject about 70% of the time, a case in point occurring just last night at the Sparks gig when during Beat The Clock Russell sang those lines: ”I’ve met everyone but Liz… Now I’ve even met old Liz”* and we both turned to one another and laughed our goddam heads off.

Oh but Sparks were terrific. I wouldn’t have expected anything less from those two (live, they’ve never disappointed yet) playing my favourite album of theirs in its entirety. The definition of a no-brainer. What I wasn’t prepared for was that Ron would take to the stage with his hair restored to its 1979 new wave-disco glory. That is, lop-sided and falling down over his right eye in gloss-black, kinky, Hot-Gossip-naughty-bits ringlets. Now that's class. It was his Top Of The Pops 1979 look top to toe, in fact, for he also sported the crisp, collarless white shirt tucked into high-waisted black baggies (Bowie trousers, we used to call ‘em - see any NME small ads page 1978 - 1982). Old mens' shiny shoes were the full stop.

My, that album stands up well today. My Other Voice (especially My Other Voice), The Number One Song In Heaven, Tryouts For The Human Race et al have a kind of warmth (the real analogue drums is the trick) that shames so much ‘80s synthcrap from a decade later. And I like quite a lot of ‘80s synthcrap. But maybe it’s not surprising Sparks don’t date like other acts. When you operate in a universe entirely of your own making like they do, how can you date and how can you fail? It’s like with The Cramps - normal rules just don’t apply. And the fact that Number One In Heaven also has the fingerprints of the master Moroder all over it only adds to its lustre, makes it even more immortal, like a diamond. Factor in 1-2-3-4-bingo! pints of Carling Extra Cold (oddly I have developed a taste for this) and the company of your bezzers Jock and Ada and, brifely Andrew H and well, the pair of us left that stinky and soulless shopping mall in Islington walking in the air like Aled Jones and his bloomin' Snowman. Whomp That Sucker is on Wednesday – one of their least well known and one of Fints’s favourites. Should be good and Gareth’s going. Mother, may I have a Pizza Express first?

I took my Auntie Janet to see that Supremes exhibition for her birthday on Saturday morning. It was good to go round again, sober and not clutching a champagne flute this time. She was most taken with a lot of the race history stuff I sort of skipped before (a bit shameful, perhaps, but you couldn’t really get close enough to read it) and her favourite of the outfits was not the green and yellow shiny plastic discs mini dress but a kicky 1969 canary yellow blouse and orange sequinned flares ensemble - ”Oh gawd I would have definitely worn that”, she said - and she would have. I clearly remember my Auntie Janet’s outfits – mind-blowing things, you should see the photographs - and one in particular springs to mind now. It was a short-sleeved army shirt with khaki shorts tucked into kind of army knickerbockers (as if such a thing could exist) worn with knee-high blue and white striped socks and massive platforms. She was taking me out somewhere round Walworth and a man, someone she knew from the pub probably, stopped his car and shouted from the window - “Oi, Jan! You just signed up?” Oh, f*** off!”, she shouted back. Wolf whistles all afternoon and probably more swearing but that was just normal going about in the street with Janet in the early-1970s.

But no wolf whistles this afternoon: it was refained. We had a lunch of soup and cake in the V&A café and with about an hour left to kill she suggested going to see the moving dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum. Not moving, not animatronic, what is that word? I can never remember it. It was getting quite busy in there by the time we entered (and so hot – sort it out, museum peeps) but it was exciting standing under the big light box that said T.Rex in red and white. Exciting in that it would have been just amazing if we’d turned the corner and there was scream scream scream a Marc Bolan robot doing Children Of The Recolution or Raw Ramp. Somebody should do a museum like that, now we’ve got the technology. Anyhow, no Marc and Mickey Finn but the creature was certainly big and pretty lifelike and when I reached the bit where I was face to face with its opening and closing impressive jaws I was a little surprised to catch myself hurrying along to get out of its way. One thing: how do they know dinosaurs were always brown? Surely if you’re as a big as a Tyrannosaurus lizard camouflage isn’t going to make much difference one way or another. How do they know they weren’t psychedelically coloured a la The Supremes?

Wanted to get Jock a Love Child top for his birthday from the V&A. Diana Ross wears one on the cover of the LP of the same name and I know he loves the song. But the girl in the Motown mini-shop adjacent to the exhibition held it up and it was a) a pretty flimsy-looking T-shirt version and b) clearly designed for a woman's shape and a tiny woman at that. So instead I got him a brilliant World War II poster design T depicting a big black Bakelite light switch that reads, ”Switch It Off” in that font they always used. And also I gave the Bowie In Berlin book which I so want to read myself but - what is it Basil says in Fawlty Towers? - "that particular avenue of pleasure has been closed to me". Things like that will just have to wait until after The Project.




what jock didn't get for his birthday

* Never met Old Liz either meself but I did meet Petula Clark the other day. She was washing up mugs when i was taken into the studio to say hello. Really wonderful woman. I asked her about Dusty Springfield and she went, "...Poor Dusty" and looked genuinely sad. I haven't got time to go into anymore now.

Is this new colour naff, everyone? I can't decide. The template's called Love Letter and that's what attracted me to it. It might be a bit too lemon-y, though. And it reminds me vaguely of something I don't like - possibly a confectionery. Also, perhaps a bit too 1985-Wedding-Invite. I can't stand the 1980s.

It’s been a long week, don’t you think? Oh such a very very long week. God knows why. The moon or something like that. Monday seems as long ago as Abba at Eurovision, or Southampton winning the FA Cup in 1976. The occasion of the latter was a Saturday afternoon I remember well, although I’ve never been much of a follower of football, eventually going off it completely when it became obvious I was getting a bit too old to collect the stickers. Of those I most certainly was a fan.

If I remember right the winning goal came at the last minute, and was scored by a player with bad teeth (black teeth? no teeth?). True to form my mum, who loves all the big sporting things like the Grand National and Wimbledon finals, was really ‘avin’ it, waving the iron above her head, tears pricking her eyes – “Come on Southampton! Come on you bastards!” Lou and me would have been lounging on one uncomfortable green-cord-and-black-ash Habitat settee each, watching mum and rolling our eyes at one another. Almost certainly we would have been eating ginger nuts. Boring football, massively entertaining mum. And then all hell broke loose in the ironing corner. ”YES! YES! YEEEES!” - they'd scored and the whistle blew and the dog ran away and hid from more tears, more shouting and swearing. And all this because mum always, always went for “the underdog”. If there’s one overriding thing about our upbringing, one single value we’ve taken from dear mama, it’s to support the underdog even if it's futile.

The long week. Thursday and Friday felt like wading through soup, like that Simpsons thing where Bart looks up at the clock in class and the hands actually start to go backwards. And I like work! I had every intention of coming straight home and getting on with The Project but perhaps because it had felt all week like Friday night would never come, for once I really needed a drink and initiated a spontaneous after work trip to the The Hand & Flower. It’s a nothingy, not-all-that place really, but we rounded up an almost full house of twenty or so and very jolly it all was, too. The wife of one of my colleagues, who makes us cake and sends it into the office with endearing notes and who is definitely a bit of a sort, tagged along, although this time bearing not a lemon drizzle or a choc-orange but photographs of her recent hysterectomy.

”Brace yourselves”, the girls all said – Kitty, Karen, Michelle – and the pictures were duly produced from the handbag while I held onto Karen for fear of fainting. And there it was on some white hospital surface - womb, gnarled ovaries, nobbly cysts, the lot. Extraordinary. Tell you one thing: it bore only a passing resemblance to the textbooks, poor woman.

But it wasn’t all wombs and cysts. Kitty’s from Belfast. Why are they so funny, the Northern Irish? She’s totally pretty and sweet and demure but this is all deception, for she will sneak up behind you when you’re hard at it and whisper, ”I.Will.Fuck.You.Up” or something similarly sinister. At home, where she lives with my lovely Lex (although not in the lesbian sense) she keeps a John Bull printing set and at work on the shelf above her desk a tiny, perfect penis and balls in Blu Tack set in a pretty cameo box on a bed of tissue. Somebody made it for her but we all cherish it. It isn’t remotely gross or anything – just really, really sweet.

There was an office debate going around this week about whether to show said ornament to the new intern on their first day and the upshot of it all was that Kitty did decide to proffer the sacred thing in its little box. ”Welcome to our department, would you like to see this?”, she said, or something like it (I was not present) and she slowly lifted the lid. But the reaction was not good, and they just sort of went ”Ugh”, turned their back and carried on surfing the internet. A big-time backfire. This had obviously eaten away at Kitty all week and last night, after she’d had a few, she began to speak rather darkly of this individual: ”They can have another chance but three strikes and they’re OUT – not even joking” - although of course she was joking (I think).

Maybe the week felt long and hard because the weather turned mid-way through and made it seem like two weeks. Or perhaps it was the big night out on Monday – another work gang. It was the official opening night of the Supremes exhibition at the V&A, sponsored by our catalogue department (we look after Motown). Peach of an evening as we strolled round the back of the Albert Hall (London felt suddenly fun again) and down Kensington Gore to the museum, blossom blowing everywhere. There were loads of us, each sinking at least one bottle of champagne which, rarely, did not run out all night.

OK folks, on a scale of one to ten how gay is this? Eleven out of ten? You see it’s an exhibition of the Supremes’ costumes from the 1960s and 1970s, faaaaaaabulous swirly creations behind glass in psychedelic, furs, silks, nylons and velvets. And plastic – my favourite of all being a 1966 mini-dress made entirely of green and yellow plastic discs stitched over a sort of string-vest frame. Amazing. Nothing you see now ever looks that futuristic.

No Diana, naturally, or poor dead Flo, obviously, but Mary Wilson was there and she got up and spoke and sang a medley of hits which was a good choice, plus a song from the Dreamgirls soundtrack which wasn’t And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going and was not such a good choice. She came across as radiant, absolutely full of life, no longer bitter about it all. She certainly looked remarkable for her age – about 35, you’d probably guess if you didn’t know better – although I imagine she’s had some work done and there were whispers that her luxurious hair was in fact a wig.

She certainly looked younger than a clearly ravenous Vanessa Feltz who barged my friend Andrew out of the way to get to the canapés (which unlike the champagne were a rare sighting throughout) and much better than Bill Wyman and Jimmy Page, both of whom I spied waiting patiently in the queue to meet La Wilson after she’d come off stage and spent a little time refurbishing herself. I bumped into lovely Mark Paytress who wrote the definitive biographies of both Marc Bolan and Sid Vicious and did the excellent Banshees in their own words thing which I’ve read about a million times. Oh and Jonny Blue Eyes from the Glam Rock Night was there, although this time he kept his balls in his kaftan. That mad girl Jo, who used to come to our Northern Soul night, was DJ-ing in the museum foyer. She did it proper ‘60s style, too, getting on the mic after every song and talking, giving it all the Emperor Rosko patter: ”I’ve been asked all night for some Marvin Gaye so heeeeere’s ‘This Love Starved Heart Of Mine’”. I miss all that, really.

Lots of other stuff going on. The Project rolls on of course (1990) and I’m in talks about not one but two, on the face of it better, jobs. I should get to hear what the respective packages are like next week and one of them is almost certainly the perfect job for me. I am pretty excited about it all (and grateful and flattered) but – and there’s always a but – how could I leave my friends behind? How could I leave our shared tiny penis in a box and Electro Friday afternoons? We’ll see.

The downsides of The Project. It’s taken me over, turned me into a social recluse, emptied my bank account via the i-Tunes store, made me smoke too much and wake up each day at dawn, sometimes even before dawn. BANG! - just like that – and I’m bolt upright and in a state of terror, almost, mind racing along the lines of, ”Oh my God I forgot to put Amanda Lear’s ‘Follow Me’ on 1978” or “Where is our Dalek I Love You record? I HAVE NOT SEEN THE DALEK I LOVE YOU RECORD FOR YEARS AND YEARS THE PROJECT IS RUINED”. The poor kitters, winding in and out of my legs, have to jolly well wait for their filthy fishy meat until I’ve reassured myself that I did put Amanada Lear on 1978 after all, until I’ve found the Dalek I Love You record, which is where it always was, i.e. under ‘D’. 4516 songs so far and I’m at 1990. 18 years to go! The loony bin beckons.

The upside of The Project. I’m rediscovering lots of songs I haven’t really played for years. Some real humdingers. Dalek I Love You would be one actually. Not Amanda though - I play Follow Me roughly every ten minutes of my life and in this respect I feel I’m like Therese Bazar who, at the height of Dollar fame, divulged in some interview I read somewhere that she carried in her handbag a cassette tape containing only 10CC’s I’m Not In Love repeated over and over again. These days, who knows, she might well have an iPod Mini (a pink one, I expect) filled with the very same song. Actually we played Follow Me last night at the club and Joanie came running over to say it’s his favourite single of all time. He said they all used to call it the aeroplane song because it sounds like a vehicle taking off and he did this sort of action with his hand in time to the rhythm to demonstrate something leaving a runaway. I’d say he certainly has a point. I don’t know where it came from but one night many years ago we were playing the record and Jelly and I fell into changing the lyrics to, ”I’m wearing a dress - and MOVING ON” over and over.” That's really the gist of it anyway and, you might say, of Lady Lear's faaabulous life too. Anyway, that’s how we sing it always now, with just the one line. Doubt we ever knew the real words in the first place.

See - loony, I’ve allowed myself to be sidetracked by Amanda when I really came to say how fresh and lovely Orange Juice’s I Can’t Help Myself sounded the other morning. Those remarkable opening lines just came right back - ”I always thought I could fall from a height, land on my feet/ Now I’m considering throwing in the towel, admitting defeat”. Extraordinary, attention-grabbing start and with the added bonus later in the song of that old, dreamy George McCrae organ sound. Or how life-affirmingly wonderful Raw Silk’s Do It To The Music is after all these years. Or Magazine’s The Light Pours Out Of Me, or The Skids’ Animation or See Those Eyes by Altered Images (much better I think than I Could Be Happy Birthday). My favourite though would have to be The Rezillos’ mental Destination Venus. That one has a great little set of lyrics too. See!

”Further modulation of the frequency rotation
Triggered waveband activation - near elation
Somewhere in the distance I could hear a voice, one instance
Then it faded from existence - no persistence”

Earl Grey was the act last night. Me and Jelly think he’s a genius. He did a very funny what if? Gone With The Wind thing with Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn etc., as the lead instead of Vivien Leigh. Top notch drag and uncanny vocal impersonations. He’s best known for doing his Corrie voices of course, specifically Deirdre in the slammer which is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on stage at The Tavern. But we did not know until last night before opening that he actually worked on the Street as a prompt during its ‘70s heyday. For several years he prompted ‘em all: Elsie Tanner / Pat Phoenix - ”A star, a true star, she came from another world, she was just this… presence”; Rita Fairclough / Barbara Knox - ”Very good but a bit tricky”; Hilda Ogden / Jean Alexander - ”Distant, a little cold, tricky also”; Annie Walker Doris Speed - ”Hilarious, gorgeous, a marvellous lady”. He said Margot Bryant, who played timid little Minnie Caldwell, had a gob on her like a navvy and he once witnessed her pick up the phone and say to the person on the other end of the line, ”Hello CUNT”. Haha.

They all loved him being a poof of course and his best friends in the cast, the ones he actually saw socially, were Bet Lynch / Julie Goodyear and Vera Duckworth / Liz Dawn. Who else! The latter told him one night, ”Well, chuck, I only got married because all the girls down our street were doing it.” So many stories and we sat there like children – Jelly, Nadine, me - with wide eyes and slightly open mouths. I’ll confess to feeling more than a little envious that this man once held what was certainly the best job in the history of jobs. Tony Robinson should do a TV series on them. Surely working on the Street back then was even better than the position of receptionist at the original Factory in New York, even better than being the pilot of Led Zeppelin’s personal jumbo jet. He’s immensely funny, too, this Earl. He’s having, he said, trouble finding a boyfriend. The conversation went something like this.

Earl: ” I think I’m just too camp when I meet people.”
Us: ”Oh no! There’s somebody for everyone” etc.,
Earl: ”No I definitely am. I mean what do you say? "I like dressing up as Julie Garland?" It’d put anyone off."

No word of a lie I am still laughing about that. Perhaps I'll never stop.

Beautiful weather. I’d almost forgotten what summer was like after last year’s wash-out. Fresh and warm with just the right amount of breeze and everything’s right with the world. Summer in the city is Saint Etienne weather and it always makes me want to hear Kiss & Make Up or People Get Real. Or Avenue (giant sigh). Speaking of which Bob Stanley himself rang me at work a couple of weeks ago for a favour. A friend of his was convalescing from an illness and simply desperate to hear Sherbet’s Howzat but all they could find online was some horrible Hi Energy remix from the ‘80s. Funnily enough I was working on 1976 at the time and had already ferreted it out for myself so I met him at Waterloo Station, under the big station clock at 9am precisely, to hand over my copy on this shonky compilation CD I bought many years ago at a scabby boot fair. It was nice to help out a hero but I was also a little ashamed because this particular CD had all these dubious brown stains all over the cover. Typical. I had to say, ”Bob, it plays fine but it looks manky because it came from the car boot.” I wouldn’t want him, or anyone else for that matter, thinking I had lots of disgusting-looking CDs like that at home.

Oh God it’s just awful (even more awful that is) living in this country, what with weird Tories, crowing happily and grinning all over the place ( Why do they look so weird when they smile?) Councils taken across the UK of course, and the big fat boo hoo shame for me this past week has been coming to terms with the fact that the upper class twit of the year is now the mayor of me. I was no fan of Ken Livingstone but a part of me is sorry for him. I kind of miss him already. I'm tempted to write him a letter telling him where he went wrong. Last Saturday morning I burst into hysterical laughter reading about the results in The Times but only because if I hadn’t done so this volcano of disappointment and rage might well have expressed itself as tears. I am pretty much always on the verge.

Ugh they’re back, aren’t they? Tories. The Tories Are Back. It’s still sort of sinking in. I appreciate that technically they’re not in real power yet but why do I feel like it’s the ‘80s all over again? It could be the nasty newspapers having their field day, or a new generation of Sloane Rangers braying their heads off everywhere I go, or Ian Hislop looking happy (see-it’s most sinister when they smile) or the general triumphing of a great section of the population that I just can’t abide. Oh I do know some Tories, a couple of the old school Thatcher-y ones but many more of the new (neo?) kind, and they’re nice people and all that. I believe their views are sincerely held but also that they’re deluded, have short memories and are perhaps a little ungrateful for freedoms and rights they enjoy that a Tory government would never ever have passed as statutes. But there you go - I imagine they think similar things about me, too.

I think on and I worry about the clock going backwards. If this is the new 1980s does it mean I’ll have to start working at WH Smith on a Saturday again? And drinking barley wine and lime? Shit. And eek! How many Royal Weddings must we suffer? Will The Housemartins reform? That would be too much to bear, wouldn't it? Ohmygod ohmygod ohmyGOD it has just dawned - will Spitting Image come back and throw unfunny rubber satire at me on Sundays nights? Worst. Decade. Ever.

As for Johnson and Cameron etc., –I have processed all the “blah blah they’re all the same anyway” but… they’re not really, are they? (Section 28?). While I could list 1,000 or more things wrong with this incarnation of Labour and with Gordon Brown (whom Fints inexplicably to me actually despises) my bottom line, my un-crossable electric fence of belief is… I just don’t want to be governed by upper-class people who went to Eton and feel they have a right to rule. The old boys had their turn at running things, and I really hoped we’d moved on and that someone else could have a go for a couple of centuries. Really, I don’t even think there should be public schools - I know, I know Len Spart or Ken Spart or whatever his name was. Call it class envy or even class hatred (call it what you bloody well like, I don’t care) but at soon as I hear a certain type of accent I just shut down, stop listening and stop cooperating. I don’t know where I get it from - mum and dad are certainly nothing like that. It's entirely possible I listened to The Eton Rifles too much at school. But that really would my personal politics in a nutjob and I'm hard-wired this way, like a robot beep beep. So endov - don't write in!

Hey I’m, like, making myself totally late for a disco date here. Meant to be in hair and make-up in, like, no minutes. But I’ve reached a sort of watershed with The Project which means more journal time again and I can muck about a bit tomorrow so I’ll come back then and do the nice, un-ranty stuff.

Hey! What are you doing this glorious Bank Holiday May Day thingy? I’m shut up in the office room at home but the windows are wide open (it’s like the Summer of ’76 here) and right now I’m groovin’ along to Sharon Redd’s masterpiece Can You Handle It (1981/ Volume 3/ March/ Epic/ #31). Or rather I was because dear oh dear here comes Kool & the Gang’s divorce-themed weepie Jones Vs. Jones (1981/ Volume 3/ March De-Lite/ #11). Do you think James "J T", Robert Bell and co., sorry, Gang, got the idea from the film Kramer Vs/ Kramer? I do. And I am unanimous in that, Captain Peacock.

I’ve been out and about, though. Whirlwind, whistle-stop trip to Brighton last night for my old school friend Becky’s 40th birthday bash. In a pub up near the station so I didn’t see much of the fair city – no sea, no pier, no Julie B, just the pub, the station, the late night fag shop and Becky’s miniscule doll’s house of a house secreted down a tiny lane. I got there later than planned (9-ish bloody Bank-Holiday-third-world-train-service) and was desperate for a pee having decided to knock back two and a half cans of lager on the train down. Really, there were so many groups of pissed “youths” on the trains and all over London Bridge and East Croydon making a bloody row that I reasoned to myself if you can’t beat ‘em you might as well join ‘em. Anyway, this pee: the Gents was at the top of the pub some distance from the function room which was in the basement and through the beer garden. Even so, above the noise of the cisterns and my own delicate tinkling all I could hear up there was the sound of my sister talking and laughing her head off. Holding court. She most certainly has a voice that could be said to “carry”.

Many dear friends from Brighton (headlines: Chris is about to take his Law Finals, Sally has left the Labour Party, Avy fell off the settee and boo-hoo’d) and from our teenage years in Woking. Ah, but inevitably the latter camp fell to reminiscing about the days when we were free, the time of hitching to parties, doing your hair for hours, mucking about and getting into scrapes. Do you know that B-52’s song, The Deadbeat Club? We were very much like that. After all these years, Dale and I couldn’t actually believe Mark Wealthy let us drive his vintage, newly-restored 1920’s Austin 7 round Brookwood Cemetery at dusk for a “driving lesson”, while we were all on barley wine and magic mushrooms.

1985. It felt like we were absolutely tearing through the woody undergrowth of the cemetery but we somehow ended up back on the main road and the vehicle, which couldn’t really go any speed at all, was instantly hit from the rear. We all shot forward. Fortunately it was an Egyptian bloke with no insurance so he sped off fairly soon after he’d clocked we were certainly more in the wrong than he was. We all piled back in. I remember intently studying some wilting bluebells I’d picked which looked very, ahem, psychedelic. We moved off and more or less immediately crashed it again, this time into a tree at the side of the road, all laughing hysterically. To this day I’ve never told my mum and dad.

And the time Sheena pushed Dale into an open manhole after a Marc Almond concert in Brixton and he disappeared up to his head and cracked all his ribs. And when the very same Sheena, 16 years old, got drunk in the park and went with Terence Morris to the squaddies tattoo parlour in Aldershot and got a tattoo which she regretted even as the man was doing it. She's getting it laser-removed at the moemnt and was last night sporting a plaster over the damaged bit of her arm. Haha. We were wicked children. Woking might not have been much of a place but I was blessed to grow up around that lot. When I was seventeen, thirty of us went to stay in Becky’s Uncle’s modest two-up two-down holiday home in Bideford, Devon. She told him it would be her and a couple of friends. For that one week all you could smell for miles around was hairspray and burning hair on heated crimpers.

Ooh and there’s a ghost story, too. When Sue and my sister parked up before the party in Brighton yesterday afternoon, she wound down the window and the car was filled instantly with the most revolting stench. Lou said, ”Oh my God, it smells like Pepys’s London!” and Sue said, ”Ugh that’s the smell of Death!” and my niece Remi and her mate Craig, sitting in the back, were actually retching. But when they opened the car door the smell was nowhere, gone, and they couldn’t work out at where on earth it had come from. When they told me this later on I joked, ”It was probably a poltergeist came in through the window”. But when we returned to the car this morning it was apparent in the light of the day that they'd parked right next to a graveyard! Whoooooooh.

Einstein A Go Go (1981/ Volume 3/ March/ RCA/ #5) now and it’s irritating me. It has not aged well but I remember loving it at the time stupid spoddy teenager.

Had an amazing sausage and mash dinner round Jock’s on Friday evening. Just the four of us and some red wine. I can still taste the sausages now which Jock, being Jock, had spent a fortune on – Old Spot pigs or something (Gold Spot? Cold Spot?) Totally yumbolina anyway.

You know I can’t for the life of me get hold of the bloody Smurf Song anywhere. I make it my business to keep a copy of all these rotten novelty records and it was my intention to hide this track away as a sort of joke at the end of the set for 1978. I mean, it’s hideous and annoying and Lou won’t really care one way or t'other but it was undeniably one of the sounds of that year. I turned the house upside down trying to find it. Nothing. Probably used my old copy for target practice or turned into an ahtray or soemthing. And there's nothing on i-Tunes either. How can something which sold a gazillion copies at the time just disappear like that? I gave up in the end after wasting hours. Pah. So let the legend on my gravestone read - ”Defeated By A Smurf".

Gosh has it really been that long? Been sort of completely busy all the time and was half hoping my journal might learn to write itself, like that thing people always say about chimpanzees coming up with the works of Shakespeare if they're left to it for long enough. To be honest, I don’t really fully understand it when people do say that but you hear it a lot so its deep profundity must be lost on me. I pretend to get it though: I nod and go “Haha!” or (depending on who it is and whether I want to impress them) sometimes even throw back my head and go “HAHA!” like the village idiot. I don’t put my finger on my nose and point back at them though. I hate that.

There are a wedding and a funeral and a birthday to talk about, which you have to admit is pretty tidy. All human life is here. And a Duckie photo session which we’ll do first because photo sessions are the most boring thing in the world. Brick Lane, couple of Mondays ago. Monday night! I could have wept, getting all done up in slap and putting on slightly stale-smelling boxing gloves just as the finale of America’s Next Top Model was about to begin. After the hurried schlep East from where I work (West, inconveniently) I tried hard to be positive and “in the mood” but the truth is I just never am in the mood for photo sessions. At my arrival I even declared, diva-like, that while I would wear the gloves I would not under any circumstances be cajoled into boxing against Jelly.

But inevitably. The photographer - who was completely lovely by the way and sort of famous and acclaimed with books out – soon tired of us just standing about and suggested movement and action which really meant we start fighting each other. My heart sank, even if it was always going to happen. And I had to say my rehearsed ”Thank you but no, we’re not performers and I don’t particularly hold with the sport of boxing and it has been a very long day…” Rotten old killjoy I’m turning into but I like to think Quentin would have agreed with me - ”Boxing isn’t your styyyyyyyyyle”. One good thing: you could see the shots come through, live, onto the screen of a Mac laptop and, side on, I looked slim.

Coincidentally, it was another photographer, my friend Brian, who got married to Jen a month or so ago. Ran away to Scotland and did it and this was his London friends bash in The Bull pub up at Highgate. It takes a lot to get me off the sofa on a Sunday but I’d have gone just about anywhere for dear old Bri who is not only a genius snapper (he took that picture of me I used to have up on here) but also one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. Among other things it was Brian who came up with the concept of a reality TV show called Child Vs Swan - real children fighting real swans on primetime. Haha.

Someone at the wedding pointed out that Rod Stewart had been born in the block of flats directly opposite so everybody, me included, kept on rushing forward to look at them, as if Rod himself would pop out onto the balcony and start waving. Great people, and we all got gently sloshed in the chilly sunny afternoon. I drank Guinness, as did Fints but soon switched to sundry other beers when somebody suggested a pint of the black stuff contains as many calories as a roast dinner. This isn't true, surely? Moggy, who looked hot, always looks hot, gave me a great book (she's always giving me great books, too). This was the autobiography of Cherie Currie from The Runaways and this copy was obvioulsy stolen at some point from a library in Canada. Devoured it: they were all Bowie mad, that lot. They played Bring Me Sunshine and Honky Tonk Women and we even flicked through some of Jody’s Your Cat magazines going “Aaaw”.

The funeral, well, it’s old-sad news now about Tallulah. Thanks for the messages from everyone but he wasn’t a massively close friend – just a bit of a hero and a lovely funny man. I never blogged it at the time, because the police hadn’t yet contacted all of his nearest and dearest, but it was a shocking morning. On the way to work Ritchie had texted Jelly who’d texted me and – standing dripping in the rain outside South Ken tube station - I rang Ritchie back for confirmation. He said he’d heard late the previous evening because he just so happened to be standing next to Paul Burston in The Tavern when a text came through to him.

Not a mistake then. All I could think about was whether Our Jimmy Brown knew yet – Tallulah was Jimmy’s oldest London friend and neighbour and annual holiday companion to Los Angeles – but I knew in my heart of hearts that he didn’t know or else he would have phoned me. So I went and stood in the stairwell at work and summoned up the courage from somewhere – a horrible thing to have to do – and we were both in shock, I suppose, because I kept saying ”I’m really sorry I had to tell you” and he kept saying, “I’m really glad I found out from you” over and over again. Sounded like a right pair of nutters I expect.

But life’s not a race, is it, and Tallulah packed a lot into his 59 years as evinced by the cracking turn out to the wake in Soho. All these faces from the city’s clubland past standing about in the street smoking and chatting and laughing - really, really laughing. Even Molly Parkin was there and nobody had a clue Tallulah knew her. Anyway, Tallulah’s ashes are being scattered over the golden sands of California by Our Jimmy on Monday. He’s over there now. Must be a bit odd for him without his pal.

Jeepers, look at the time! That’s lunch break over. Wanted to say I haven’t given up on this. It’s just been a busy time primarily because of this project I’m doing for music for my sister’s 40th. That’s really been eating all the spare time at home recently but I feel I’m finally getting there. Half way through the '70s now and the ‘60s and the ‘80s are all done and most of the '90s. But roll on Spain in June. I need a holiday.

Mary Cigs! Do you have an email? I can send you the 70s lists because they're too big for here. 1974 was 12 Volumes! Mwah!

My ankle went totally John Merrick The Elephant Man on me towards the end of last week. Not sure whether it was a sprain or bite or what but it was absolutely ginormus. I certainly couldn’t walk on the damn thing. Hope it’s not arthritis, inherited from Mum – completely happy to inherit anything from dear old Mum except for bosoms and that. Somebody at work suggested gout (gout!) but when we all crowded round Wikipedia I was relieved to discover that gouty inflammations are too painful even to wear socks or touch and it wasn’t like that. Anyway I hobbled about on Friday and almost boo-hoo’d getting back from work, half from pain and half from sheer frustration at the speeds everybody else was managing, as I hopped and hobbled my way along and up the platforms and stairs of the interchange at Piccadilly Circus. Cast a black cloud over the entire weekend but when I woke up on Monday it was fine, just in time for work again. Typical.

Oh hahaha. Grandad by Clive Dunn has just come on. 1971. These CDs of singles by year that I’m doing for my sister. I finished the 1980s finally a couple of weeks ago – good riddance, you bastard ‘80s – and went back to 1970 (5 discs). I am of course much happier there, in the decade of strikes and slackness and Man About The House. And breathtaking pop-musical diversity and innovation. Tamla and Stax and Trojan and early glam, prog, the singer-songwriters, the purest bubblegum, the novelty hits (Ernie!)… I like practically everything from 1971 (6 discs), although not really Grandad if truth be told. So sickly. I’m not sure Lou will thank me for it but it’s stuck right on the end of Disc 2 and therefore easily skip-able. And it was Number 1 and we did jointly own it and even buy it for our own granddad at the time and he’s dead now, so…

Actually, the tracks I selected for the set are so diverse that each disc has been a bit of a bugger to sequence. In particular getting Disc 1 into shape was agony. I ended up with this but if you think you can do better and want a shot feel free to leave it in the comments. I might even change mine - hate the way Elton crashes into Bob / Lee Perry’s Mr Brown. Knock yourself out.

01. We’ve Only Just Begun – The Carpenters
02. Wild World - Cat Stevens
03. My Sweet Lord – George Harrison
04. The Man Who Sold The World - David Bowie
05. I Feel The Earth Move – Carole King
06. It’s A Shame – The Detroit Spinners
07. Stoned Love – The Supremes
08. You’re Ready Now – Frankie Valli
09. The Pushbike Song – The Mixtures
10. What Have They Done To My Song, Ma? – Melanie
11. Me & Bobby McGee- Janis Joplin
12. Love Her Madly – The Doors
13. No Matter What – Badfinger
14. Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys – The Equals
15. Mr. Brown – Bob Marley
16. Your Song – Elton John
17. Another Day – Paul McCartney
18. I Think I Love You – The Partridge Family
19. Rupert – Jackie Lee
20. Resurrection Shuffle – Ashton, Gardiner & Dyke
21. Baby Jump – Mungo Jerry
22. Strange Kind Of Woman – Deep Purple


The covers are always the same. Four sleeves like this




It’s a solitary task, all this cutting and pasting and fact-checking and running up and down the stairs with armfuls of stuff, so I tend to do it in the early mornings before work and, at the weekend, before Fints rises. This morning (it’s Saturday) at around 6am I was just hitting my stride when I got an attack of the boo-hoos when Cat Stevens’s version of Morning Has Broken started up, just as it was turning light outside. I wouldn't describe myself as a religious person but it gets me every time, that beautiful, beautiful hymn. "Morning has broken like the first morning, blackbird has spoken like the first bird” – it’s true, isn’t it? Cat's voice, old Rick Wakeman's rollicking piano... I really cannot tell whether it makes me feel incredibly euphoric or utterly melancholic. It’s both at the same time, really. Anyway, the song ended and I could hear birds singing in the garden and I choose to believe they were yer actual blackbirds. Who knows, maybe I will end up a Jesus Freak and - "call me morbid, call me pale” if you like but - I’m so having MHB at my funeral. Hopefully that won’t be any time soon but you never know.

Pattie Boyd’s Wonderful Tonight autobiography is surprisingly good, or it is if you’re me and you can read about golden age rock stars and their faaaaaaaabulous entourages of displaced Eastenders and aristocrats, models, musicians, artists and groupies till the cows come home. I like to think it would have suited me, that kind of life. Guitars; English stately homes paid for with cash; Biba and Tramp's; Jamaica, the Bahamas and Barbados; chanting with the Krishna’s; buying up the same Armani suit in every colour; staying up all night. Terminally boring when the shower of mediocrities who pass for rock stars these days get up to similar, but the Beatles, the Stones, Cream and that lot were the first at it back then and it feels so much more innocent. I love it. Didn’t realise how much of an utter caner Eric Clapton was. It’s astonishing he’s still alive while the other famous husband, George Harrison, died so young.

Ooh sleaze. Rupaul’s Starrbooty film at the NFT on Wednesday night was the funniest, peppiest, sleaziest film I think I’ve ever seen, and that includes Pink Flamingos. Played relentlessly for laughs and with a cast comprised entirely of drag queens and porn stars I’d say it has the capability to offend just about everybody alive in the world today. Kicky. You see quite a lot of tits (big, fake, bouncy) and cocks (big, erect, bouncy) and there are echoes of Cleopatra Jones, Dallas and Dynasty, Charlie’s Angels… all the things drag queens love. Oh, and my viddies, he was there, in person, topping and tailing the film with an introductory speech and Q&A session. Huge blonde afro, totally svelte, bright white teeth, the longest legs… Flawless. He really does laugh all the time, too, and that’s kind of infectious. Alongside Dolly Parton and Michael Palin I suspect he is the good-est famous in the world today.

Music Week Awards on Thursday. Drinking on a school night really doesn’t agree with me and neither do late nights but I really enjoyed this for some reason. Usual cheering and boo-ing. Universal won a lot and I saw Jimmy and Eamonn and a fair few of my old Account Managers from the previous job. But the best thing, the absolute best thing, was I was standing outside on Park Lane waiting for my car home when I saw Peter Saville, who’d earlier accepted a posthumous award on behalf of Tony Wilson, walking in my direction, smoking a cigarette and looking exactly like you wish Bryan Ferry still looked but doesn’t. I don’t need to go on again about what Joy Division / Factory / The Hacienda have meant to me over the years but this fella was central to the whole story (and the hand behind some of my all-time favourite sleeve designs) and I just had to say something. So I gushed along the lines of "Peter, you absolutely made my night. I had no idea you were on” and, genuinely surprised, he smiled and said, ”Really?” and we exchanged a couple of words before he wafted off towards Mayfair in his long black coat. My car came and I jumped in still massively excited and, even though it was awfully late, rang Jelly and Fints and told them all about it.

Everyone rightly goes on about Blue Monday and the Hac posters and Unknown Pleasures but I also love the designs he did for Suede in the late-90s. If the job of a sleeve is to capture the essence of the music within, it doesn’t get much closer than this.

Ta-Dah! I said sometime back in February that 2008 has turned out to be the best start to a year in music for me since God knows when. And there's been no let up since then either. Here's my twenty from the best, though it could have been a top forty or even a fifty. From what I know's already on the horizon the best could even be yet to come - My Toys Like Me, Santogold, Sebastian Tellier, Annie, Madonna, Shortwave Set, Little Dragon etc., are all on the horizon ... maybe Radiohead will finally get round to releasing House Of Cards, too. And look! Three songs vying for my Number 1 affections.



=01. Time To Pretend – MGMT
Ooh, The Big Music’s back! I’m hearing Rise, The Whole Of The Moon, Pasionate Friend, The Cutter, Dazzle, Inbetween Days, Road To Nowhere… ambitious, beautifully produced indie pop with a lot of ambition but not an ounce of waste (or Oasis). ”We'll choke on our vomit and that will be the end / We were fated to pretend”. Epic, funny, sad and true - carry the news.




=01. Blind – Hercules & Love Affair
Oh, come on. This one is just obvious.




=01. A&E – Goldfrapp
A suicide attempt never sounded so glam. It’s one of those last-ditch, grab-for-attention ones, isn’t it? - ”I was trying to phone you when I'm crawling out the door”. The devil is in the details: bright blue light, a pastel ward, some pills, a backless dress... Oh, Alison, could you be the most underrated lyricist we’ve got?




04. Ready For The Floor – Hot Chips
We’d had it knocking about in the DJ wallet for a few weeks but Ready For The Floor really caught fire for me during the night in New York. Now it just feels like it’s always been there, filling the floor faster than The Friday Night Project’s Coat Of Cash. The ”Number Number Number Number One One One One” bit is still terrifically exciting, even if you have to forcibly restrict yourself from wondering whether they might turn out to be the Landscape of now. They would do an awfully good Einstein A Go Go, I think.




05. Courtship Dating – Crystal Castles
Only just made it into Q1 – it’s actually out on Monday. Hmmm. Maybe it should be a place higher than Hot Chip. It sounds like… um… it sounds like, er…. Well, it sounds like little, screaming, half-bat bitmap people (maybe three-quarters-bat) falling off a cliff with some radioactively malfunctioning synthesizers. That is honestly what it sounds like but there’s a great tune in there somewhere too, albeit one that's suffocating slowly in a bag. I wouldn’t play it walking down a dark alley if I were you.




06. American Boy – Estelle
The girl from next door and Little Miss Nineteen-Eighty (the year that God made me) must be 28 now. Old and gnarly enough, then, to be hanging out with Jay-Z and Kanye and coming up with sauce like, ”Don’t like his baggy jeans but I might like what’s underneath.” Must we throw this filth at our kids? Apparently yes – it’s "all over radio" and Number 1 in the Hit Parade as I type.




07. Slow Kids (S.P.A. Mix) – Cheeky Cheeky & The Nosebleeeds
And this is Number 1 in the Hip Parade. All the versions are worth anybody’s bob but for me it’s this mix, so lo-fi it could have been mastered from a Boots Ferro C60 cassette, circa 1976. Imagine Jilted John / Graham Fellows singing The Silicone Teens: ”I am a girl with no lips but I can keep a hula going around my hips / We work in the same place looking after Slow Kids but we never ever take it too faaaar”. He’s not a girl at all, y' know. Mad! *Rik from The Young Ones face*




08. Machine Gun – Portishead
Nope, I never expected much either. People rarely do come back after this amount of time with much worth cherishing but I think this is every bit as good as Sour Times or Mysterons. Without the big clunking drums and gun / dive bomber stimulations it could be a desolate old English folk song from the olden days - I'd like to hear Maddy Prior or someone give it a go. Hope they do an a-capella so we can all play mash-ups.




09. Great DJ – The Ting Tings
A-boing boing boing boing, A-boing boing boooooing! Springier and zingier than Samantha Fox and Linda Lusardi playing bikini beach ball on a bouncy castle. On pogo-sticks. This Q’s other dead cert aerobics floorfiller –up, down, Top Rank Tings (yes, sorry about that). Long may they reign.




10. Beeper – The Count And Sinden
Is it Get me on my beeper, Hit me on my beeper or Hear me on my beeper? Been driving me mad since January. A daft load of old rubbish and therefore positively, definitely, indupitably me, me , meeeeeeeee.

They also served

11. Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
12. Work - Kelly Rowland
13. Run – Gnarls Barkley
14. How To Reduce The Chances Of Being A Terror Victim – XX Teens
15. Morning After Midnight – Adam Green
16. Can’t Speak French – Girls Aloud
17. Needy Girl – Chromeo
18. Letting Go – Team Waterpolo
19. Superstar – Lupe Fiasco
20. Black And Gold - Sam Sparrow

Not even remotely interested in The Foals or Vampire Weekend.

A-BEEP BEEP BEEP!!! I’ve started so I’ll finish…

So we came in from the club on Saturday night in a really good Easter-lazy mood and the boiler wasn’t effing firing or something. No heating, no hot water. Seven months old! We’ve subsequently gleaned that it was probably a temporary dip in water pressure, which would have righted itself eventually and if I’d known this I really wouldn’t, I promise, have fiddled with the knobs and screws and dials at 3am but I did of course because I can’t ever let alone in these situations. This meddling of mine led to a flaming row with Fints, who stomped off to bed, and it may also have prompted said boiler to suddenly begin expunging itself of all the water in its pipes or wherever the hell the water comes from. Standing there exhausted at 4 in the morning holding a chuffing blue plastic bucket catching filthy drips – not one of my best looks. The evil man who put it in is due tomorrow but I don’t trust that these people will ever turn up and make good. Old person’s oil-filled radiator out again for the cold snap - “Hello, old friend!”

Bad Friday drinks in Soho. Our annual quackfest of - what did Mez call it? - drinking and shouting. Just about sums it up. Fourth great year! There’s usually a perfunctory lunch of some description, moving crab cakes or a steak around a plate or some such, and lots of wine and then a bit of a pub crawl round the West End. On previous occasions people have, variously; laid down in the road, removed their trousers in Greek Street and danced on those clattery, unstable chairs in Bradley’s to Uptown Top Ranking. One year we hijacked a Chinese couple who spoke almost no English and press ganged them into taking hundreds of group shots of us on my camera, right under the shadow of Centre Point. When I got them home all but one were blurry and useless.

The (small but definitely in there somewhere) God-fearing part of me does, I’ll admit, invariably feel a twinge of guilt about invoking the Feast Of Bacchus on the day of the Crucifixion but, being the time of miracles, these feelings are usually assuaged after onetwothree red wines. But this year I really wasn’t in the mood for debauchery and I missed lunch completely having had a pretty late one the night before, as we shall see. Great to see everybody – is Good Friday the day of the year when people feel at their most Devil-may-care? - but by the time I arrived at the restaurant most of my friends were three, four, and in some cases, five sheets to the wind so I sipped water and, later in the pub, the boringest lowest alcohol lager on offer. Thankfully, Mez out on the town herself the night before was in a similarly fragile condition so I felt safest with her, and I talked to Grace and Toby quite a bit – they’re usually pretty sensible. Reliably avuncular Martin mapped out for me exactly where in Soho you could get a cheap pint, Lou told us about a Czech woman in her 90s who has thrown open her house in north London to complete strangers for tea and cake every single Thursday night since the War, and game old Jody left veering left and right on her heels to go and DJ at the Notting Hill Arts Club for five hours. Oh and Our Jimmy Brown came along after work – he really is turning into a silver-long-haired Californian - it suits him. Got some lovely presents and cards but limped home sober, wishing that that damned full moon wasn’t looking at me. Bought Private Eye, had a super dinner with Fints and crashed out on the settee at 9.30.

Had applied no brakes whatsoever the night before, however – ‘Easter Eve’ as Jelly calls it and officially my birthday party for those nearest and dearest. Round Jock and Ada’s with Jelly and Ritchie Spit-Spot and Fints. It had been my idea to spend it pretty soberly, watching Alan Parker’s Fame with the guys and eating hot dogs and popcorn, all of which we did. It just wasn’t really in the plan to sit there gassing and playing music quite so late but at some point after the popcorn was finished some Bacardi was retrieved from the kitchen and… oh you know. In truth, Fame was nowhere as good as I’d remembered, which was as some kind of gritty slice of late-‘70s New York City, sleazy and bankrupt. It sort of was like this, but so much more schmaltzy and soapy than the film I'd been playing in my head since 1981 and it seemed to end very abruptly after what felt like an hour and a half of auditions, auditions, auditions. The songs were still good, though - ”Hot lunch!” Fact Fans: the first track I ever downloaded from the iTunes store was the film’s version of Weather Report’s I Sing The Body Electric - even if I’m always saying it was Steely Dan’s original, when of course it sounds nothing like something Becker and Fagen would ever write.

Great presents from the guys. Ada’s taking us to see a show next Tuesday, Ritchie brought me a set of new Simon Carter midnight blue fibre optic cuff-links (amazing) he designed, Jels got us the complete every-single-episode box of Man About The House and Jock did me a Throbbing Gristle / Genesis P. Orridge-themed package involving that book I should have bought in New York but didn’t, a CD and this brilliant T-Shirt with a big fetish platform shoe on it with the ominous legend - ”She. Is. Coming.”.

”Here they come with their make-up on
as lovely as the clouds, come and see them,
Boys and girls and their mums and their words
and their romances and jobs and their sons,
Barking mad kids, lonely dads
who drug it up to give it some meaning,
From the raves to the council estates
they're reminding us there's things to be done.

But you and me, all we want to be is lazy,
you and me, so lazy...

Here they come gone 7am
getting satellite and Sky getting cable,
Bills and Bens and their mums and their friends
who just really, really want to be loved,
Uncle Teds and their legendary vests
helping out around the disabled,
From the flats and the maisonettes
they're reminding us there's things to be done.”


Ah, good old Suede - that’s my Easter song. Their prettiest melody and, in my book, Brett’s best ever lyric. ”Uncle Teds and their legendary vests, helping out around the disabled” - right there and nailed, a multitude of English weekends, simple and small. It’s my Easter song because it’s the time of year I feel most like that - and the 'you and me' who want to be so "laaaaaayzy" is me and Fints. There’s just this ocean of gratis time – you get a day off, then a weekend, then another day off - so like millions of others at this time of year,I potter and pub and gorge myself on sleep and TV. Never go to Ikea, though: haven’t been in one of those for a decade or more. On TV right now it’s Wainwright’s Walks - I could watch that till the cows come home – and Fints is in the kitchen making falafel. He’s a genius – it’s exactly what I fancy. Lazy.

Let’s do it backwards, Time’s Arrow style. Woke up this morning with the comfortingly familiar Easter sensation of ”Yippee! Yet another day off!” and just fannied about on iTunes until Fints got up, Captain Hook as ever padding right behind him. That cat won’t leave the bedroom to even eat till he’s up – we totally should have named him Old Shep. Not a trace of a hangover for me either – remarkable considering the lager / rum / lager / champagne / lager infusion I put away with Jelly up at Rebel Rebel’s glam rock party in Islington last night.

Met up at The Retro first, anticipating a quiet bar with maybe a smattering of regulars. Fat chance. The place was full of out-of-towners, blown off The Strand’s weary tourist trail. Not the remotest possibility of even a bar stool, let alone a lonely corner where we could plan our DJ set but Wendy, bless her, not only gave us a couple of Dr. Who Easter eggs, she also opened up the top bar and locked us in there. So we had the place completely to ourselves, including access to the fire escape’s handy smoking facilities. Just a brilliant chat with Jelly, ruminating mostly on the genius of Princess Julia but many other hot topics, too. Three pints in our aerie sanctuary and then down below for last orders where it had by then thinned out a little and where Amy’s sister Sarah, in town from New Jersey for a week, had indeed bagged a table and some bar Nacho’s with melted cheese which she was sharing with her adorable pen friend Mikey from Manchester. I can’t eat them though – the smell really turns my stomach. Ooh, and we saw Liverpool Eyeliner Stuart sitting with that genius pop blogger Phil a.k.a Worrapalava (http://worrapolava.blogspot.com/) - had no idea they knew each other. On the way out Jelly described Sarah as ‘kicky’ – a word he got from a David Sedaris book. I thought that was just genius. There’s nothing like a good new word and I intend to use it now at every opportunity.

Oh them Rebel boys had pulled out all the stops when we arrived at the venue, hidden away in a corner somewhere of that shopping centre in the Angel. Lots of pretty kids, all totally skinny and in their twenties, dripping with glitter and eyeliner, in bum-hugging ‘70s suits and feather boas. What I'm convinced Heaven will be like, if I make it in. Tony looked the spit of Human Menagerie-era Steve Harley and there were Bowie clones and Bolan clones and even a Roy Wood in the form of a wonderful bearded man mountain called Johnny Blue Eyes. We became instant friends – a really interesting person and (as they would have said at the time) a true free spirit. He pirouetted around the stage, half-naked and lip-synching to Cosmic Dancer, channelling the spirit of Hibiscus Cockette. Kicky. Turns out he knows a lot of the same people as me because he sort of fell into styling the Scissor Sisters for their first album. Now he’s doing Beth Ditto whom, he pledged, he would bring down to the club because she would really love it and I think she would too – you get the impression she’s totally knockabout.

Angus and Clive were there, too, bopping about to Slade – it was wonderful to see them. We played Iggy and Lou and The Sweet and Roxy and there were exciting firework pyrotechnics and glitter-filled giant balloons and champagne corks popping – I felt like Les Gray doing Rocket on Supersonic. We had a bit of a boogie after we came off and then, in the cab home, agreed that we were really pleased we’d agreed to do the night. We don’t often (hardly ever these days) say yes to one-offs but glam rock was so obviously the greatest artistic achievement of all time – the pinnacle of western civilization no less – and we love Fletch and Dan and have wanted to do something with them for a while. But there’s a greater principle in that you can stay at home, can’t you, and have a night in and nothing much will happen. Or you can head out and have a shot at the unknown. What is known is you’re much more likely to remember the latter in years to come. Came home happy and impressed upon Fints the urgency of hearing The Human Menagerie, Dandy In The Underworld and the first Roxy LP and so that’s what we did before blissful zzzzzzzzzz.

The weather’s been odd all weekend – sudden showers of rain and hail like bullets, gorgeous sunshine, big flakes of snow this morning - and full moons always make me feel like somebody, everybody, is watching me when it’s only just a big blind eye in the sky. Got caught in one of the hail storms on the way round to Jez’s on Saturday afternoon – ouch! – but we had a good time catching up with Jez with whom we have had no QT since February. Ridiculous. Curry at The Coriander before the club – hot, sour chicken and sweet coconut rice was exactly what the doctor ordered...

Ah, the falafel is here. I’ve still got the birthday to do (thanks for all the LJ birthday messages down there!) and Bad Friday drinks in Soho but, like they used to say in Kenny Everett before the commercials… ”Now it is time for a break… So let’s break!”

Tart tart tart tart. You know when you get that thing where a word keeps following you around? Happened just yesterday, beginning in the late afternoon when I was upstairs in the office checking the 1986 CDs I made for my sister. I realised to my chagrin I’d missed off the Happy Mondays’ first single, Tart Tart! - I take this sort of thing very seriously. Right miffed for a bit until, drawing deeply on a Marlie Light I actually fell into a little reverie right there and then, as it dawned what a great, disappearing little word tart is. I mean in the old-fashioned sense of the word of course, to describe a woman of dubious morals – the type of girl who actually enjoyed a bit of the old how’s your father before it was strictly allowed, or, possibly, an actual prostitute. A low life, a marginal - like the word ’pansy’ when it was a euphemism for the gays. I once had a boss who who called me ”Tart” instead of using my actual name but it was meant affectionately (I think) and anyway that was back in the 1980s. You don’t much hear it now.

Went downstairs and you could have blown me down because there, lying on the floor, open at the problem page, was the News Of The World, headline, ”I Want To Punish My Cheating Husband And Tart”. Result! Then, as we sat down to dinner and a new Midsomer Murders on DVD, the word cropped up at least ten times, aimed in each case at a low-bred, admittedly unlikeable character who’d somehow managed to wangle her way into an upper class family. Throughout, they were paranoid The Tart was trying to get her hands on the family emeralds and naturally she had her brains blown out about half way in, but that’s by the by. The mother (played by Sian Phillips, actually) called her a tart to her face, her sisters referred to her behind her back as The Tart, even Cook and her daughter called her a tart below stairs. Tart tart tart. My Sunday could not have got any tartier if Finton had served us a very tart lemon tart for afters. Cosmic.

Going out a lot last week almost interfered with all the television I like to watch but I made up for it by getting up a half hour early and seeing the shows before work. Finton (new nickname, Finton-On-Sea) looked at me like I was mental when he surfaced for the loo and caught me watching This Week with Andrew Neil and Michael Portillo etc., at 6.45 the other day. But the going out things were all quite good. My friend Polly’s PR-ing the new Joy Division documentary so Jels and me went to a screening of that in Poland Street last Monday. Packed. You’d have thought that coming so soon after the film Control and the book Touching From A Distance I might have felt a bit Joy Div’d out by now but nothing could be further from the truth. This had everyone in it – or everyone who’s still alive anyway – including the three remaining band members (Hooky is extremely funny) and The Other Woman, Annik, and it contains the last ever interviews with Tony Wilson, who comes across as such a hero, getting the band on the telly and putting up with all kinds of abuse and teasing. We sat in the dark, clutching red wine in plastic glasses and, yes, I might have just been a teansy bit tearful at the end. Beautiful sound in the cinema: pumped up really loud over a good system those Martin Hannett productions sounded like glass and diamonds. Gorgeous.

Tuesday night met Jelly and Richie Spit-Spot in the HK Diner in Chinatown. Obviously snow peas were in order, nom nom nom. Round the corner to meet Rob, Paddy, Ralph and Alex in The Yard. Lovely fellas, they really are. Round another Soho corner to Comedy Camp where Barbara Nice was headlining although I’d originally thought Jelly had said ”Do you want to come out and see barber shop?” on the phone and while I thought this was a little odd, imagining some kind of ghastly Four Poofs And A Piano thing, I agreed to go along just to be sociable. Like the time I thought we were going for a Medieval vegetarian dinner in the City with Jock and Ada and told everyone at work about it and when we got there it was Mediterranean - doh! It was all academic in the end up anyway because I left before she came on: work is especially busy during the early part of the week and I just can’t be gallivanting around the West End at midnight on a Tuesday any more. In fact, those wiseguys wound up dancing in the bar to Fame by Irene Cara. Shame I had to leave. I like and know Barbara (we’ve done clubs in Manchester and Birmingham with her before) who is a brilliant stand-up but's probably best known for playing Holy Mary in Phoenix Nights. Apparently she crowd-surfed from the stage to the back and then back to the stage again. "I'm coming through!", Jelly said she said. Haha.

Thursday night was a work social. Our department are up for some award so it was partly a celebration but when we reached the pub that had been hired out in Kensington it was burning to the ground! Firemen leaning out of top windows and smoke everywhere. Exciting. I would have stayed to watch for longer but it was also chucking it down, so we went somewhere else and cleared the pub out of champagne, washed down with chips and spring rolls. They’re a good bunch of people to go out with – they’re taking me out for a birthday slap-up this week and I’ve only been there ten minutes!

Yup. Birthday time again. Forty Two. It doesn’t look so old written in words as with numbers. 42. Don’t feel much different to 32, really. The good thing about being 42 is that for one year I can make good use of that old Julie Walters quote from Victoria Wood On Television, where the two middle-aged boilers go on holiday. VW plays a kind of lonely Judith Chalmers frump with sunburn: JW’s her nympho sidekick. In the sketch she gets drunk really fast in the hotel bar and picks up some vile-looking, equally drunk man. ”Forty two and no bra - not bad, eh?”, she says as she rubs up against him suggestively, ”You don’t want to phone your wife.” So that’ll be me for 2008. You have to grow old disgracefully, as Simon always says.

Great lunch in town on Saturday with friends, all ex-colleagues from Virgin. Funny how none of us is there any more and even funnier when you consider that Virgin itself no longer exists. It was only a year ago we were still all working together. Anyway, Joe Allen’s with Bruno The Little French Bear, Dan, Max and Kathryn. Ate too much meat - must get out of that habit. Encouraging, I thought, how everyone’s gone on to bigger and better things: Bruno’s at The Mail, D’s project managing, K’s spending marketing budgets unimagined at the old place, and Max is at music college in Brighton building her own synthesizers just like Kraftwerk. We drank a fair bit for the daytime – liqueurs, dessert wines the lot and then we ended up at Gordon’s in Charing Cross, the scene of a fair-few skivey Friday afternoons. Had to have a serious sleep before DJ-ing in the evening but life’s for living, isn’t it?

A quick whiz through the Meltis Newberry Fruits of the past fortnight before they go off in the box.

Took my auntie Janet to see Mika two weeks ago (the tickets came from work) because she’s, like, totally bananas on him. A Monday night, so not ideal and usually jealously guarded - embargoed, even - on account of America’s Next Top Model and sundry other post-weekend rehydrations. But the date, having been rescheduled from the one he cancelled before Christmas, meant the choice was between 'like' or 'lump'. Incredibly, I liked my rare Monday out - and very much too. Egg and chips round Jan’s tiny kitchen table in Shepherd’s Bush after work, watching and tsk-ing and craning up at the news on the portable TV on the top of the fridge freezer. Bloody high it is. It was the day the prostitute killer in Ipswich got put away and that hideous Leroy fella, him with the really hangable face, went on trial for all those bus stop murders. I even stayed overnight on the settee after the gig and slept unfeasibly well. Staying with your auntie, who does you egg and chips, and then gets her boyfriend to drive you to work in the morning - not very grown up is it? Just like Ronnie Corbett in Sorry.

But we had a good laugh there at the Hammersmith Whatever-It’s-Called-These-Days and Mika was pop fun personnified, channelling the sprit of Freddie and darting about the stage shrieking and skinny, silly-serious and wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly-sexy. It was pure showbiz and you’d have had to had a heart of stone not to be seduced by the glitter cannons, dancing animals and the nicest-natured gig audience I’ve ever experienced. Lots of teenage girls and chubby gay men just as you'd expect - except at one point, amazingly, a straight man and complete stranger to boot loomed out of the crowd and spontaneously kissed Janet full on the mouth! She was made up about that, even if she tried to pretend otherwise. Happy Ending and that one he does about Big Girl (You Are Beautiful) etc., have been on the iPod ever since - I’d never really noticed them all that much before. Always loved Love Today, however, which reminds me of freewheeling, very early-‘70s bubblegum like Hitchin’ A Ride or Beautiful Sunday