Something of a classified advert. Fosca seek a London-based Tour Manager for their proposed gig in Madrid this September. And possibly other gigs too.

One thing I’ve learned from the Swedish tour - and ten years of foreign gigs - is that there are bands who can do the whole DIY, self-management thing when playing abroad. And there are bands that can’t, or at least would really rather they didn’t. We’re in the latter category.

Though we’ve never quite dipped into the realm of proper touring horror stories - thank goodness - Fosca have still had a certain amount of ill fortune when playing live. We’ve had illness, loss of property, tears, incapacitating tiredness, or all of the above. I’m starting to worry about what will happen in Madrid. A goring from a bull? A civil war? Melting clocks?

So I’m thinking we should really hire a third party Tour Manager for this jaunt, preferably one with a dab of sound engineering experience. Someone to take care of the nuts and bolts, and to stop the nuts from bolting.

They’d need to round up Fosca members who wander astray, help carry the heavy cases when one of us feels they are about to actually pass out, liase with the promoter and ensure that the venue can accommodate our set-up in advance (as opposed to finding out at the soundcheck that there’s not enough channels… sigh), and generally take the organisational pressure off us.

Even though it’s for one gig and less than 48 hours out of our lives, I think it would make all the difference.

The successful applicant would be paid. Really. Enquiries to the usual email address (or use the Contact Page). Please pass this on to anyone you think could help. Thank you.

I’m Dj-ing this Saturday at the club How Does It Feel To Be Loved, which specialises in mixing 60s soul & pop with 80s indie. After all the showtunes and easy listening with which my DJ persona is usually associated, it’s nice to be able to air the likes of ‘Crush The Flowers’ by The Wake or ‘You Wind Me  Up’ by Bad Dream Fancy Dress and not feel like I’m in the wrong room.

Actually, were Cherry Red / El Records to put out 1989’s ‘You Wind Me Up’ as a single now, one wonders if it would be accused of ripping off Lily Allen. Judge for yourself, Dear Reader:

http://dickonedwards.co.uk/you-wind-me-up.mp3

Were I better connected with the current pop world, I’d be nagging Ms Allen to cover it. Or better still, Ms Nash. Or Mr Ronson. Or Misses Girls Aloud. Or any new pop group with a chart-potential marketing budget and youth on their side, but no decent songs.

‘Isn’t that a shameless Lily Allen rip-off?’ the people would cry.

‘Oho!’ you’d say. ‘It’s actually a cover of an obscure 80s indie track. The band was called Bad Dream Fancy Dress, and the song was written by Keith West, of ‘Grocer Jack (Excerpt from A Teenage Opera)’ 60s hit fame. You’d know all this if you read Mr Edwards’s diary.’

‘Oh, him. Why doesn’t he just get a job?’

I digress. Here’s the details of my DJ slot:

Date: Saturday March 15th
Venue: The Phoenix, 37 Cavendish Square, London W1G 0PP, three minutes walk from Oxford Circus tube station.
Time: 9pm-3am, with my set 10.30pm-midnight.
Entry: £4 members, £6 non members. Membership is available free from www.howdoesitfeel.co.uk

***
An email arrives from Zagreb, asking if I could be interviewed (re Fosca) for the Croatian magazine Terapija. Though I’ve never been to Croatia physically, it’s nice to know I’ve been there musically.

So what am I doing at the moment?

First thing to announce is the release of the Fosca live album, available via pre-order only, for a limited period.

The new Fosca album proper, The Painted Side Of The Rocket, will be released by But Is It Art? Records of Sweden. It’ll be a CD with lyrics and liner notes and so on, plus a digital release on iTunes. Release date and further info to come. Hopefully, Fosca will play a few gigs when it comes out.

I’m appearing in Stockholm tomorrow, Friday 19th October, as a guest vocalist of the band Friday Bridge. I’m also DJ-ing at the venue before the band go on, and will be doing a few interviews. Then back to London the next evening and straight from Heathrow to my friends Lea & Gemma’s wedding party before going home.

My other major booking is DJ-ing at White Mischief on Nov 10th. This is a big event at the Scala in King’s Cross, and features the band British Sea Power amid all manner of steampunk-inspired goings-on. For a limited time, you can buy tickets with 25% off at TicketWeb, if you enter the promotion code FRIENDS upon checkout.

On the writing front, I’m still reviewing a few albums and films for the magazine Plan B.

Other than that, I’m busy with the aforementioned sleeve artwork, lyrics and liner notes, sorting out new photos for publicity and generally tidying up the remaining mountains of clutter in my room, before pressing on with new work.

A reminder of this Fosca gig next week:

Spiral Scratch Presents
Fosca + The Besties + A Smile & A Ribbon + The Parallelograms
Wednesday 1 August 2007
The Windmill, 22 Blenheim Gardens, Brixton, London SW2 5BZ. 020 8671 0700.

Doors 8pm. Fosca onstage 10.20pm.

Tickets £4 advance, on sale now. Go to:  www.wegottickets.com/event/19272

It’s Fosca’s first London gig for over a year, and our first headliner in our own home city (well, for me and Rachel) for much longer. Please buy a ticket and come. We don’t play live very often. And I’m not sure when we’ll play another one, to be honest. There’s too much heavy lifting.

Last night - mixed the Fosca song ‘Don’t Be A DJ’. It’s not strictly anti-DJ-ing, more about people who fall into non-creative jobs around the creative works of others, where they can keep their head down, immune from any criticism. Fear of tall poppy syndrome. PRs who should be stars, working for dull stars who should be PRs (or anything else). Music journalists who are more attractive and have more to say then the dull bands they have to write about. How even the finest piece of music criticism only benefits the subject not the writer. A beautiful essay on Scott Walker only benefits Scott Walker. Whereas if Scott Walker recorded a beautiful song about the journalist… it would STILL only benefit Scott Walker. Thus with DJs. The need to rely on the works of others adds a level of compromise that irks me.

And this is one reason why I’ve turned down any hints of a career in either field myself. I feel the need to get on with writing an original song, story, or even just something in this diary. I’d feel a fraud if I did DJ-ing or reviewing seriously. It’d feel like an alibi. An excuse for not doing what I’m meant to be doing.

Had a discussion about this with producer Alex M, and we agreed that even the lowliest creative act, the record no one buys, the song no one hears, is still more noble than the finest book on pop music. Because creating is always greater than spectating. Then we thought about oh, Coldplay or someone we don’t care for. Are we really saying that Coldplay have more worth than great critics like Paul Morley or Simon Reynolds?

We solved this one by deciding that what Coldplay did wasn’t at all creative… Ah, a cheap jibe I know. I’m sure they feel the sting in their glittering mansions. Sorry, Coldplay.

It’s not like the art of literary biography, writers on writers: if a book on the Sex Pistols survived their music, it’d be worthless. The best thing a book on pop can do is make you go and listen to the records. They can never really stand alone, by their own nature. Writing about music will always be popular, because of the need to make sense of the abstract. But it still needs to come from, and go back to, the music. I leaf through a magazine and read some great pieces on bands I’ve never heard, and it’s all pointless unless I can get hold of the music too. It can’t stand alone in its own right. Just as DJ-ing can’t happen without records, but you can make records without being a DJ.

Dear Lord, let me not die a Fan.

Still, the occasional and unusual bout of DJ-ing here and there is fine, I decide. So I have turned down all offers of summer DJ work except one - the Latitude Festival in Suffolk.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to be booked or not, but today I find out for sure. Yes, it’s on. I’m booked. With Miss Red too, as The Beautiful & Damned. DJ-ing every evening in the Cabaret Arena, while silent movies and strange tableaux abound. And I will be shunning loitering within tent in favour of staying with my parents, in the cottage they rent every year by the Southwold lighthouse. Once again Latitude coincides neatly with their week’s holiday nearby. I like festivals which seem to be arranged entirely around my mother’s holiday plans.

I’ll bring a change of suit this time: last year, I had some unkind comments from passers-by when I walked around Southwold after three days, still in the same white ensemble. It wasn’t very white by that point.

Let’s see who else is there. CSS, Bat For Lashes, Arcade Fire, Jarvis Cocker, Patrick Wolf, Camera Obscura, Charlotte Hatherley, I’m From Barcelona, Final Fantasy, Stewart Lee, Bill Bailey, Dylan Moran, Josie Long, Mark Steel, Jeremy Hardy, Marcus Brigstocke, Roger McGough, The Puppini Sisters, Robin Ince and his Book Club (which I hope includes Martin White), Simon Munnery, Esther Freud. But I should also do the festival serendipity bit: wander into a tent and see if something I’ve not heard of delights the heart.

In my bone fide creative life, Fosca have been asked to play London on Weds August 1st. The Windmill in Brixton. Headlining, for the first time in… well, it must be years. So we said yes. Please come. Bring everyone else. Because, oh, because we’re worth it.

Some of Fosca are single. Well, all right, just me.

When choosing which bands to go and see, at any time, you should be told which band members are in relationships and which one’s aren’t. It should be in the listings. Never mind “Rock” and “Jazz” and “Blues”. There should only be two categories:

“Bands With Single Members Who Are Looking, Actually.

“Everyone Else.”

Lynsey De Paul’s white marabou shrug. Me. The same paragraph.

Happiness.

(more on the provenance of this clipping tomorrow)

P.S. The next Beautiful & Damned is May 24th.

From time to time I pop into the veteran independent bookshop Gay’s The Word in Marchmont Street, which has a unique and often exclusive selection of new and used books on gay topics. My rare copy of Mr Hoare’s Stephen Tennant biography was found there. There’s also a good stock of homo-themed graphic novels and comic books.

It’s been going since 1979, right through the Thatcher years and Clause 28, and is now struggling to hold its own against the escalating rents of 2007 London. With the demise of Compendium Books in Camden and Sister Moon of Charing Cross, I think many people of my age and older are surprised to learn that it’s still going. Well, just about still going. This story in the Times is fascinating.

Plenty of authors voice their concern at its possible closure, and the shop is offering a chance for supporters to ‘Sponsor a Shelf’ at £100 a go. I’d cough up myself if I could afford it.

Incredibly, though, Jeanette Winterson thinks the shop has had its day:

“Bookshops have made real progress by including specifically lesbian and gay books on their shelves, both generally and in special sections. The very fact that it is thinking of closing may mean that its work is done.”

But there’s more to GTW than providing a real-world, specialist shopping experience. I’m shocked at the use of the word ‘only’ in this part of the same news story:

Today, the only homophobia the shop suffers is “a brick through the window once a year and twice a week people spit on the windows,”.

Work not quite done there, I feel.

There’s going to be a photographer at Beautiful + Damned tonight, taking pictures for official B&D flyers, a dedicated MySpace page and the like. Please come; and if you’re coming, please dress up. 8pm start, Metropolis on the screen, a bit of live performance, anything goes. And indeed, ‘Anything Goes’ from The Boys In The Band.

Tonight, I intend to play Paul Williams’s ‘The Rainbow Connection’ from The Muppet Movie, and either ‘Let’s Go Fly A Kite’ or ‘Feed The Birds’, or both, from Mary Poppins. I’ve also discovered a rather good version of ‘Cabaret’ by Louis Armstrong, which Russell “Not With A T’ Davies alerted me to on his excellent Radio 2 programme.

Trivia learned from the same radio show: Mr Sinatra’s song ‘New York New York’ - the one with the opening line “Start spreadin’ the news” - owes its creation to Robert De Niro, the star of the 70s Scorsese film for which it was written. The songwriters Kander and Ebb (of Cabaret and Chicago fame) originally wrote a completely different theme song, but Mr De Niro dismissed it as ‘too weak’. So they went away and produced the all too familiar one we know today, particularly popular after a few drinks.

Just a note to say that this month’s Beautiful & Damned is now starting at the earlier time of 8pm. This is to cater for patrons who have to leave before the night really gets going, due to it being a School Night in Slightly-Out-Of-The-Way-Shire.

So, 8pm till late, then, Thursday 22nd.

And there’s the high possibility of some live performance this time, too.

Full club info at the DE News page.

I had to make it back from Tangier for Saturday evening as I had a DJ booking at a private party for a friend of a friend. They paid well, though Shane offered me the same money to stay with him and miss it. I couldn’t possibly renege on a gig booking, and Victoria Clarke turning up at the Minzah on Thursday made it easier to say goodbye and make my way home solo on Sat morning, leaving him in more tried and tested company. He grumbled but let me go. I think they’re still there now.

It did mean me getting my first ever plane by myself, and spending a dreary five hours in the dull departure area at Casablanca airport. Would love to have walked around Casablanca for a bit, but the way my passport was stamped meant I couldn’t even visit the outer section of the airport, the one with proper shops rather than duty frees.

Found myself waived through the customs at Heathrow like royalty, even though I was a slightly alternative-looking man coming back from a druggy country. I swanned past while sniffer dogs were set to work on the suitcases of families with small children. Perhaps I just have Harmless written all over my face. Still, I was hardly complaining, as I made it back to Highgate with barely 30 mins before the DJ gig.

Two more DJ dates this week. One is tonight, a late booking at ‘Loss: An Evening Of Exquisite Misery’. I am told I have to play the most miserable songs I know. Given the date, Nico’s My Funny Valentine is a must. The Carpenters, Smiths, Shangri-Las and Mr Cohen willl also be on the menu. I’ll put down the list here afterwards.

Then on Saturday I’m the guest DJ at 60s girl group / 80s indiepop club How Does It Feel To Be Loved, the first time time back since I started Beautiful & Damned. It’ll be hard to not punctuate the Smiths and Supremes with the likes of Ms Garland and selections from Bugsy Malone. I may not entirely succeed. We shall see.

How Does It Feel To Be Loved?
Saturday February 17th
The Phoenix, 37 Cavendish Square, London W1G 0PP,
three minutes walk from Oxford Circus tube station,
9pm-3am, £4 members, £6 non members.
Membership is free from http://www.howdoesitfeel.co.uk