'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

Does that massive new tower at Elephant & Castle have a name yet? I got my first proper look at it vaguely finished over the weekend and assumed it must be the Cheese Grater what with the wind turbine holes and slope making the top of it look exactly like a cheese grater, but no, apparently that's the one at Leadenhall. It certainly deserves a name, I rather like it.

I love music, but I've never felt I had much to contribute by making it. I'm very happy to write effusive posts on here about bands, or appear in their videos (another of which has just gone up), but they told me at school that I wasn't musical and I know this story is meant to be about horrid teachers failing to spot one's astonishing potential but no, in my case they had a point. Since coming to London, I have been in one band (for a given value of the word) for one night - The17, with Bill Drummond. I thought I'd best leave it there, because how do you top being one degree from the KLF?
By being on the next Indelicates album, apparently. augstone passed on an invite so I headed up to Walthamstow with him, his fellow Soft Close-Up David (who was also in the same The17 performance as me, as it happens), keith_totp and thedavidx, to all of whom a recording studio is pretty much a second home. I just tried my best not to a) break anything or b) lose my cool, even when I realised that Denim had recorded there. And Baxendale! And The Long Blondes! And that we were singing along as a sort of backing choir for Philip bloody Jeays (not physically present)! It's not as if I'm going to be individually audible or anything, but nonetheless, I'm on the next Indelicates album. Bloody Hell.

Otherwise, it's been a relatively quiet week and weekend - albeit also very pleasant, with Friday in the Ewok village and Sunday's barbeque managing a decent amount of cooking before the downpour, plus Prom Night on Saturday, the first time I've had a solid reason to wear a bow tie out after watching Matt Smith rock one in Doctor Who (and remember how ahead of time we thought "Geronimo!" was going to be his catchphrase and that it would soon get irritating? By my reckoning he's now said "Bow ties are cool" just as often as "Geronimo!"). Good little episode on Saturday - yes, it essentially stitched together three Buffy episodes ('Normal Again' for the basic premise, 'The Gift''s "What makes you think the other world is any better?" "It has to be" and the demonic ringmaster performance from 'Once More With Feeling'), then borrowed evil geriatrics from Hot Fuzz with a zombie film twist, but the seams didn't show, and even if they never used the name, the villain was the ruddy Valeyard! And still, those wonderful central performances - for the second week in a row my favourite bit in among so very many choices was a little, gestural thing, when the Doctor thinks the baby is due and adopts that panicked wicket-keeper stance. And because the BBC is utterly marvellous, it also gave us a penultimate Ashes to Ashes which has left me with no clue how they're going to resolve this, but a burning need to find out. I think I'm going to be a bit late to Nuisance tomorrow night.

Am just returned from my stint as a member of Bill Drummond's The17. Given the whole point of the exercise is to stand apart from recorded music, it would seem unfair to record it here, but to all of you - and especially those who already expressed an interest but whom I couldn't handle herding - I strongly recommed you get in touch and get involved.

Luxembourg did their usual thing of playing their best when the odds were against them, but their set aside, Friday night was not great. So I very much needed the steampunk extravaganza* of Saturday's White Mischief. Such costumes! Moustaches Dali would envy, the goggles of gentlemen engineers, brass-bound jetpacks, silverware become radar dishes, armoured waistcoats. The fairer sex seemed mainly to go for variations on the theme of corsetry, which was as historically justified as it was welcome. Oh, and there was one cove dressed as a giant panda, who provided a handy locational reference if one was trying to find anyone in the British Sea Power crowd. And this was quite the best I've seen BSP, surfing the edge of chaos, dropkicking owls and scaling the balcony, and somehow projecting such concentrated sonic power that the next day, I felt like I must have spent at least some of the evening getting kicked in the midsection. Kunta Kinte also clicked for me, far more so than at the previous White Mischief (and on the whole, the Scala was definitely a much happier venue for the night than Conway Hall**). But to speak only of the headliners would be to misrepresent the wonder of the night - because it was a night, an event, not just a concert with trappings and frills. One could wander happily past dancers and skin-harpists and time-travelling pirates, or stop and stare. It felt, as too few nights feel, like the sort of club one sees in films, the party at the mad nobleman's palace.

There were a lot of poppies about last week; more than the last couple of years, I'm sure. Perhaps it was that ad campaign that did it (although personally I found the poppy ghosts bloody terrifying), but society at large seems to have remembereed that acknowledging a debt of honour to the dead and wounded is not the same thing as expressing an opinion on any particular war. I've even seen them worn unselfconsciously at gigs and clubs, which for the few years previous had seemed very much a Statement. And today, promptly, they're all gone - not dragging on shabbily and gauchely as they sometimes do. Perhaps it helped that the 11th fell on the Sunday this year?
(Odd though it may seem, I think the best piece I've seen on Remembrance Sunday this year was a retrospective on Amiga classic Cannon Fodder. Oh, and while we're on remembrance - I've never read more than the odd article or quote of Norman Mailer, and was always rather put off by his Dave Sim-approved comments on women writers. But this wonderfully honest and non-hagiographic appreciation by Christopher Hitchens makes me reconsider my failure to investigate further, cliche though it is to get into the work of the newly dead)

My contribution to Blog A Penguin Classic, a review of their edition of Henry V, is now online at their site; my initial grand plans were undermined when I spotted the character limit, but that may have been for the best.

Who drinks so much they don't realise they need to pee? And if they do, how come they don't just wet themselves? That always seems to work for the street drinker community. Granted, I am aware of one previous case of someone bursting their bladder rather than letting it out, but that was one of my less illustrious ancestors, who couldn't bear the idea of going for a wee on a train. So yes, OK, the unyielding will of the overly decorous leading to a burst bladder, fair enough. But the debaucheries of Binge Drink Britain (TM)? I find that improbable.

*What music does a steampunk night play? Well, I dressed myself up to the second Dresden Dolls album, and two of the DJs aired tracks from it, so that would be the short answer.
**Which has given me the seeds of a theory on the incompatibility of humanism and burlesque.