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

So it looks like entries every other month is now standard. I still have notes in amongst the films and bands about kicking the leaves around, and here we are almost at that point again (though for now it's still altogether too hot for my liking, with the prospect of donning the big coat nowhere near appealing). And I wish I had been better about writing stuff up, because there are names in those notes of bands I know I liked, but about whom I remember nothing - like Tomorrow We Sail. I'm sure they have a page somewhere which would remind me, but that's not the same as a record of how the show felt. At least with Pete Astor I had the sense to offer myself some reminder - "more like Nick Drake than most Nick Drake wannabes; timeless but raw". It's not much, but it's a snapshot, which is the most any diary can be. Him I saw supporting John Moore at a rather undersubscribed evening; subsequently, Moore's novel would be the first project I've tried crowdfunding which did not meet its target, is not (at least in that manner) coming to pass. If a cult act are too popular, get T-shirts in Top Shop, their cultishness comes to seem rather a joke; if they can't even draw a decent crowd to the Lexington, not even with balloon tricks and an impromptu Black Box Recorder reunion, that may be going too far the other way.
(The journey home that evening was one of the times I've had strangers get a bit overfamiliar on account of the beard. I wouldn't mind so much if they weren't always straight men with lesser beards wanting some kind of symbolic contact)
Who else? Sarah Cracknell's new band. Martin Carr's new songs. Martin Newell. You'll notice a theme here; new but not new. Every so often I read a piece about some hot new act who aren't an act I already liked reconfigured, and unlike its kin it doesn't instantly bore me, and I give whoever it is a listen. And at best I think...yeah, that's OK. Last night it was Julia Holter. Magical stuff, I'd been told. But what I heard was perfectly pleasant background music.

That all sounds terribly jaded, doesn't it? But even beyond all those old favourites that still do it for me music-wise, London retains its infinite supply of everything else. A little depleted by the bastards and the oligarchs, perhaps, but not half so much as the dismal opinion pieces might suggest. You can still hear Arthur Machen's 'N' being read in Abney Park, happen upon accidentally private rooms in pubs that haven't been gentrified and gastroed to death, attend celebrations of life's odd contents which have speeches about anything from lifts (Boring) to exorcisms (Nine Worlds). The galleries have Gothic gems and surprise chunks of Grayson Perry. I think the decider for me, at the point where too much stuff was closing down and too many people calling it quits, was rediscovering Bingo Master's Breakout, London's premiere bingo, poetry and karaoke night, where every month a band plays a karaoke set of themselves, and the poets have to sing and the singers have to read poems, and the landlord has a real thing for Half Man Half Biscuit, and someone wins a Werner Herzog film. It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way.

Got another reminder last week of how much I dislike big gigs these days, whoever's playing. Maybe if I go to another I should get a seat? Not because I'm getting older, but because the rest of the crowd are - at Magazine I think the only punters I saw younger than me had been brought by their dad who, like most of the audience, looked like he'd been into Magazine first time around. And really, trying to be part of the energy down on the floor doesn't work so well when it's just a load of old blokes (plus a very occasional woman) standing around. And did venues all look the same like this before a few years back? I remember the Shepherd's Bush Empire and the Kentish Town Forum having their own personalities, but now I can barely remember which one I'm in (and that's not down to intoxication, not at their drinks prices). Magazine themselves were...as you'd expect. They played a little more of the new stuff than I'd hoped, and 'Because You're Frightened' was a surprising omission. The banter was a little embarrassing. Devoto describing them as "Magazine version 6.0 service pack 1 - thank you for upgrading" just emphasised the sense that, whereas on record their music still evokes a sense of vast, alien horizons and urban nightmarescapes, live it's always going to be forcibly grounded by the fact you're watching a bunch of old guys (plus a couple of ringers).
Far more satisfactory - and far stranger - was Luke Haines at the Old Queen's Head. I don't even especially like his wrestling album - its reference points are a little before my time - but seeing it done in that living-room-like space, with Kendo Nagasaki sat at the side of the stage watching TV, and a psychedelic rabbit stew recipe for an encore...well, that's not a gig where you end up wishing you'd stuck to the recordings on your headphones, is it? Or the weekend before, where I'd seen Thee Faction punching out songs about GDH Cole in a community centre where one of the crowd was dancing with a small dog. These are shows to cherish, not just part of The Live Music Industry.

Seen on the screen: the new Tintin film. Which, in 3D at least, is staggering. Most of the 3D films I've seen, it's been a gimmick which made for one or two impressive moments. Coraline was the only one to use it thoroughly, and well. But Tintin simply uses it better. It helps that the motion-capture world has a real physicality - one which reminded me somehow of Frank Quitely's art, cartoony yet still solid; only Bianca Castafiore teeters into the uncanny valley. Whether it will grip on the small screen, or flat, I couldn't say, but on the big screen it seemed a far worthier adaptation that many commentators are giving it credit for. I suspect they're just even older than me, and as such were rendered even more queasy by the rollercoaster ride of it.

Underneath one of Islington's libraries is a museum, where there's currently a Joe Orton exhibition called Malicious Damage. Containing, principally, the Islington books which Orton and his lover were gaoled for defacting. 1962 to 2011 could almost seem like a record time from outrage to assimilation if I didn't remember the Times giving away a Pistols CD, but even leaving that aside...they deserved to go to prison for this crap. The detournements of books' covers and blurbs, even taking into account that they predate Photoshop, are clunky and unfunny. Orton and Halliwell claimed to have been treated harshly "because we were queers" - but if this was a gay rights thing, how come they vandalised a book by Auden and Isherwood? If it was a protest against "endless shelves of rubbish", then how come the most common author by a long way is Shakespeare? And most of the rest is blameless guidebooks and handbooks. Set against all this, the exhibition also holds their diary of a trip to more liberated climes, and their sexual adventures there - and it is dreadful, dreary stuff, successful neither as literature nor filth. They were, in summary, louts, not revolutionaries. So if nothing else, with this exhibition Islington libraries get the last laugh.

*Primrose Hill on Bonfire Night. Going out among the people made for a change, if nothing else, but not one I am in a hurry to repeat.

If you haven't been keeping up with Luke Haines' recent ventures, he's just released 50 albums. Which so far as anyone can work out are 50 versions of the same album, Outsider Music each recorded live in one take, and each costing £75. I don't have it, no. There's various Bill Drummond-style rhetoric about this restoring the sanctity of the physical album &c, but given the old bastard has always made an art out of wilful perversity, I suspect a large part of it is making a few grand quickly while seeing what the fans will put up with. In much the same spirit, last night he played the new material live at the Hoxton Pony, a venue whose name is in a sense honest, but perhaps a little too disguised by the Cockney rhyming slang. The intro tape doesn't seem to be able to stay at the same sound level for a whole song, and two of those songs are by the Doors. And the support is a berk who is apparently from a band called Silvery, and who seems to have been booked just so Haines can remind himself how much he hates Britpop because his stuff sounds like something which steve586 would refuse to play at Nuisance. Haines himself is sounding a little odd on account of some missing teeth, and horribly plosive because he's doing stuff with the mic which even I know how not to do. It is, in short, not the ideal setting. On top of which, as Haines says while introducing the song about a friend who met Alan Vega of Suicide, "the new songs were rather like the old songs". One song, more recent even than the Outsider Music stuff, is introduced as part of a forthcoming concept album about seventies wrestling, and concerns the domestic arrangements of Kendo Nagasaki. From anyone else, you'd know that intro was a joke. But from Haines? (Suggested heckle: "Play the one about the seventies!")
Haines is in that spot a lot of artists get to where they've found their territory and, if they do get any new fans, it'll be through a critical rehabilitation rather than a sudden shift in the material. This is not necessarily a bad thing; I was listening to the new Twilight Singers album on the way to the gig, and there's not a surprise on it, but that doesn't stop it from being the third best album of the year so far (not the faint praise it may seem in mid-January, the H Bird and British Sea Power records are excellent). But if these songs really don't get any wider release...well, most of them I won't honestly feel as gaps in my life, the exception being the brilliant 'Enoch Powell'.
And then we get the old songs, and a reminder of why we put up with all this because yes, the man has written several dozen absolute and eternal classics, and here's a selection. Most terrifying is to hear 'Future Generations' in the company of a fan born in the nineties*, proof that Haines was, as usual, right when he first sang "the next generation will get it from the start".

I hadn't even been planning to go to that show until mid-afternoon; I had other plans, and I'd assumed it was sold out. And by that point I'd already reached my standing goal of doing at least two things per day beyond pootling around on the net or reading a comic or two or other minor stuff; I'd filled in my tax return, and I'd finally watched Videodrome (which is basically just 'Blink - The Queasily Sexy Years', isn't it?). This in spite of having developed a problematic addiction to "I am the man who arranges the blocks" after having heard it at Bright Club the night before, with which I had thought I should re-familiarise myself given I'm performing at the next Wilmington one on February 15th.

*edit: Actually 1989, I am informed, and unlike Wikipedia I trust people to correct their own biographical data. But I feel the point stands.

Although these days he's more frequently seen in his guise of mediocre political journalist, John Harris doesn't want us forgetting that he started out as a mediocre music journalist. Apparently he edited "the now-defunct Select, a title that floated on the tide of Britpop and sank when it receded". Which is interesting, because I remember Select as being at its best just before Britpop, dealing with the bands who wouldn't quite fit into the grand narrative to come. And what does this rewriting of the past remind us of? That's right - Harris is a retromancer. Bemoaning how obsessed we all are with the past, he then goes on to rehearse the familiar old stories about how Lester Bangs and Nick Kent are the best music journalists ever (for the record - Kent was OK, but Bangs hated Roxy Music and as such, is never going to have anything to tell me. Or consider the Bangs quote Harris uses, of the mawkishness around John Lennon's death, Bangs wondering what "'the real - cynical, sneeringly sarcastic, witheringly witty and iconoclastic - John Lennon" would make of it all. If that's the real Lennon, who was responsible for 'Imagine' and 'All You Need Is Love'? Tosser). Obviously print dates are such that the article couldn't respond to the death of Steven Wells (for me, the saddest of last week's demises, even ahead of Sky Saxon). But consider all the other omissions. An article about the state of music writing which fails even once to mention Paul Morley is de facto worthless right there. But nor does it find space to mention any of the contributors to Melody Maker's nineties golden age. It bigs up a Mott the Hoople autobiography as "the best book written by a British rock musician" - well, I've not read it but if it's as good as Marianne Faithfull's first memoir, I'll be amazed. And recent years saw classics by Alex James and Luke Haines. Do they get a mention? They do not. The frequently-insufferable Pitchfork is cited as a good example of modern music writing; the consistently brilliant Popjustice is as absent as its predecessor, Smash Hits. I'm a fan of music journalism, and I don't recognise the field Harris is talking about.

Friday: Poptimism is less Jacko-heavy than expected, which is good given I only ever liked a handful of his songs. I inadvertently get far drunker than intended. Saturday: friends are drinking in my 'downstairs garden', and it would be rude not to join them en route to getting the paper, right? We end up cackling incoherently about eggs and realise that yes, we are no longer above this, we are drinking in the daytime in Wetherspoon's and we belong there. Although there is a break for Finnish bowling (actually just throwing a stick at some other sticks) and apocalyptic tempest, I proceed to get far too drunk, again. Sunday: Tubewalk day. I plan not to drink, but forget the sheer soul-shredding horror of the Edgware Road, End up drinking, on and off, for something like ten hours.
Today I really am not drinking.
(It's weird, though, almost as soon as you're off the road itself, the area is lovely, all odd little bookshops interspersed with I Saw You Coming-type establishments. Whereas on the road, you get girls proving if ever proof were needed that Rihanna's look only works on Rihanna. Also: the pub in Paddington station? It worries me. They have lightbulbs which are melting the picture frames beneath them, not to mention the clientele)

In other news:
http://www.explosionsandboobs.com

The radio adaptation of Iain M Banks' 'The State of the Art' reminded me how much that bloody story depressed me. Reading the Culture books out of order, because it doesn't really matter, I'd concluded that getting a native writer to introduce the concept of the Culture to a civilisation ahead of formal contact was exactly the sort of thing that wise and wonderful society might attempt. Except then I got to this one, where they find "the place with the genocide", aka Earth, and ultimately decide against contact. And all this set in 1977. I could have lived my whole life in the Culture, you bastards. Anyway. Good adaptation by Paul Cornell, and with the Doctor-who-never-was, Paterson Joseph, as one of the leads. Opposite Nina Sosanya, though race is never specified as an issue; I wonder if that would be as doable on TV? I'd like to think so. All the Who alumni reminded me that before I'd ever read Banks, my first encounter with the Culture was through their Who book analogues, the People. Even then I recognised it as perhaps the first utopia I'd ever seen which really felt like somewhere I'd want to live. Well, that and Miracleman, but if the latter ever does get completed, I now know that Gaiman planned for The Golden Age (where I thought the story ended, with balloons) to be followed by Silver and Dark Ages.

Channel 4 inexplicably scheduled the two things I wanted to watch this week opposite each other - nice work there, chaps. Well, OK, there was that Heston Blumenthal show in which he made absinthe & d1ldo jelly, but for all that I love his mad science, at times I was reminded that I was watching a cookery show, got bored and had to read a book on folklore. Which reminded me about the concept of being 'elf-struck' just as the ads showed that one about stroke symptoms - followed by one for Fairy. Terrifying moment. So anyway, C4 putting perhaps the most heartwarming episode of Skins ever opposite the terrifying Red Riding, a missive from that nasty old England of Black Box Recorder's that I was talking about recently, Life on Mars without the laughs. I had been looking forward to this flush of David Peace adaptations, but while this one (of a book I've not read) convinced me, I no longer have any interest in The Damned United given the producer 'said the film-makers had taken a conscious decision to lighten the book's tone. "We didn't dwell on his alcoholism or his decline. That wasn't the story we wanted to tell. In quite tough times, we wanted to make a film with an upbeat ending - you come out of the cinema thinking it was an enjoyable experience and that Clough was a good guy."'

Drayton Park - a station I've been through plenty of times on the train, but in spite of how near I knew it must be to me, not somewhere I'd ever passed on foot. This week I finally found it, part of a whole area sharing the name, tucked away between Highbury and Holloway with the same sort of tesseract magic as London uses to hide Somers Town away where there really shouldn't be space for a district. I love this city and its labyrinths. Passing through there en route to Shoreditch where 18 Carat Love Affair were playing with fewer bands than expected at the Legion, a venue whose refits have actually worked out pretty well, unusually for the area. Broke off from talking to their singer about Alan Moore to go to the bar, where the barman who served me had SOLVE and COAGULA tattooed down his arms; if the 'elf-struck' coincidence was terrifying, this one reminded me of the happier side of living in a world where magic happens.

More Catholic hilarity as helping a nine year old, raped by her stepfather since age 6, to obtain an abortion is judged excommunicable! No word whether Pope Sidious has personally approved this decision, but I think we can assume so. He's probably offered the stepfather a job too, he seems to have the main skills required for the priesthood.
edit: This Vatican endorsement of the Brazilian church's position just in.

The smoking ban. Catherine Tate as the Doctor's companion next season. The death of Fopp. The weather. And just because that's not enough bad news to be getting on with, the Chavez/Ahmadinejad supervillain team-up rolls on. "Today Hugo Chavez is the most talkative, launching a tirade against the "barbarians" he says have invaded Iraq, and comparing them with the barbarians he says destroyed the ancient civilisations of Latin America." Now, by now I would hope anyone reading this journal appreciates that I am not naturally on the side of aggressive Catholic imperialism, but he is talking about civilisations which practised mass human sacrifice. Civilisations whose own subjectt states allied with the invaders because anything had to be better than being a source of blood and beating hearts for the Aztec death gods - and who, in spite of the ensuing conquistador atrocities, were probably right. But no, as far as the Secret Society of Supervillains, sorry, 'Axis of Unity', is concerned, because those death cults were enemies of the West, they must have been the good guys. Next week: because the Jews opposed the sacrifice of children to Moloch, Ahmadinejad decides that even if it does oppose every tenet of islam, reinstituting the worship of Moloch can't be all bad.

Looking for some small candle to hold against this darkness, I find only unconfirmed possibilities; Boris Johnson is apparently 'not ruling out' standing for Mayor of London against the loathsome liche-lord who, in life, was known as Ken Livingstone. And in the new NME Eddie Argos mentions the formation of The English Travelling Wilburys - a supergroup featuring himself, Luke Haines, David Devant (presumably he means the Vessel)...and Frank Sidebottom. One fears these might both be back-of-beermat plans, destined to leave no more trace than the morning fog - but right now they would appear to be the closest things we've got to hope. Hell, even The Thick Of It seems to have lost its pinpoint accuracy; this week's special may still have had some good swearing, but in its failure to anticipate anything like the shape of the Labour leadership handover, it no longer felt like a smuggled report of the truth behind the scenes, and that was always at least as much of a factor in its appeal.

edit: Reading back through the friendslist, Stockholm Syndrome seems to be breeding excuses for the abomination Tate. As a public service, I offer a reminder of potential companions less inevitably dreadful than a reprise of Donna from The Worst Who Episode Ever:
Dalek Sec (having swapped his smart suit for a hoodie, better to appeal to Ver Kidz)
Russell T Davies' sphincter, expelling its contents onto the camera lens every five minutes
Adric
A Slitheen in a fez