The aftermath of my pop quiz victory, of course, is that I report to Rough Trade on Brick Lane today to spend my winnings.

It's easy to scoff at the Hoxton/ Shoreditch area of London now - even you did, just then - but amidst all the nasty cliches, we're in danger of forgetting that there was a point in the late nineties when it was a genuinely invigorating place to be. A Sunday in the region back then would have involved strolling down abandoned streets to wander into a derelict warehouse to look at some skint artist's exhibition. It was astonishingly close to being in East Berlin back then, not necessarily being filled with kids with trust funds or even many people, just lots of very broke individuals with a few ideas and a lot of energy to spare.

As we all know, that changed very swiftly, and the influx of young, swaggering folk with wealthy parents took a mere matter of 2-3 years to swamp the place, making it fairly unbearable very quickly, but still reasonable enough to chance your arm visiting if something innovative seemed to be going on.

The above pattern is well-documented for London, and I sometimes wonder when the artists working on the fringes are ever going to get the pay-out they deserve. It does seem that wherever they move, the money follows - if councils are serious about gentrifying certain areas, all they really need to do is pay a bunch of creative dabblers up to their eyeballs in debt to move there, and watch as the rest of the work happens for them. If I were on Waltham Forest council, I'd probably suggest this scheme myself. Fuck the Olympics - since when have athletes caused property prices to rise consistently? Nobody with any money gives a prune, much less a fig, what Sebastian Coe thinks.

What's less well-documented is what happens after the goldrush, and I saw it for myself today. Amidst the curry houses, appalling Peaches Geldof-esque sub-punk clothes in the thrift market, and the very occasional Nathan Barley type were swarms and swarms of tourists, taking photos seemingly of anything that sat still. They seemed very excited to be in this legendary area of London, obviously oblivious to the fact that its time had come and gone - when Paul Weller whined about the demise of Carnaby Street in the late seventies, this must have been the kind of thing he was referring to (which probably makes me as miserable as him). It's not unique to Brick Lane, and in London at the moment you can witness the same phenomenon on Camden High Street as well. Tourists whizz around the city absolutely all year round and not just the summer, constantly cooing at nothing in particular. It's almost as if we've given up as a city during the recession, and have resigned ourselves to being a heritage attraction for awhile.

The weirdest moment today was seeing a mad-eyed, ragged looking old-school tramp begging for money from passers by. There's nothing remotely unusual about this at all, but the poor man had attracted something of a crowd, all stood in a circle staring at him amazedly as if he were a piece of street theatre who might do something interesting any moment.

"Will you stop looking at me as if I'm a bloody flower at Kew Gardens and just give me some money?" he asked loudly.

They carried on staring at him. I don't think the people he'd asked could speak much English, and he did look outlandish enough in the environment he found himself in to seem like a curiosity. "Coo," you could hear them thinking, "I didn't know England made tramps like that anymore".

I dug into my pocket to see if I had any cash there, and found 4p. I'd spent the rest on a box set in Rough Trade. I didn't give the 4p to the tramp, obviously - he was in an undignified enough position as things were. Sorry.

I went down to the Lexington Arms on Monday night to take part in their weekly Rough Trade pop quiz. My friend Kevin had managed to organise a six-person team he thought would be able to claim victory, and so initially we were slightly dismayed to see a couple of members of Art Brut sat in the pub keen to disavow us of our ambitions. In fact, it all went rather Craggy Island/ Rugged Island to start with, although who was Father Ted and who was Father Dick Byrne I'm really none too sure.

It was all depressingly difficult this time around. About fourteen years ago I was on a student pop quiz team who managed to finish second nationally in an NME sponsored contest after winning the regional heats, beating Bob Stanley out of Saint Etienne's celebrity team by three points. Back then, of course, we had the advantage of a star striker, namely a mate who used to be responsible for managing the stock at Oxford Street's HMV - a person who had learnt a lot about music he'd probably rather be able to forget, quite honestly. It was a very narrow defeat as we were mere inches away from taking the national crown, although I seem to remember our consolation prizes were sheer crap - I was given a little Coca Cola radio/ insulated picnic bag combination, which to this day has remained completely unused. I believe it may be in my parent's loft somewhere, and they've been instructed to cling on to it in the vain hope that it will eventually increase in value as a piece of e-bay kitsch.

Compared to the relative ease of that particular battle, parts of Monday night felt like a nasty little slog. Now I no longer get free singles and albums in the post, I can't remember who various pop stars are. What has Lil' Chris ever done? Something I've heard before, I'm sure, but I've never bothered to commit it to memory, and I doubt I'd recognise him if he was trying to buy crisps in Boots at the same time I was there (Chipmunk was buying crisps in Boots a few months back, in fact, and the cashier was stunned that I failed to recognise who I was stood behind in the queue). How many top ten hits have Travis had? The only obvious answer is the cheap jibe "too many", surely? Then when you actually find out, your only response is the flabbergasted "What? That many?" The main question I'm useful for is the fact that Gerry Rafferty used to be in sixties folksters The Humblebums with Billy Connelly, but the quizmaster decides that's too hard and narrows things down to the extent that everyone in the entire room must surely have got the answer right. (This 'narrowing down' incidentally involves asking everyone in the room which Scottish comedian was in the band with him, and doing an impersonation of Billy Connelly to boot).

Despite being an old nag ready to be shot, I'm relieved to say that our team did win the contest, beating Eddie Argos' axis of evil by one point. This despite the fact that when they marked our answer sheet, they deducted ten points from the total for no apparent reason, and had to be corrected. They said it was a genuine error. I'll believe them this once. We all win Rough Trade record store vouchers, which are infinitely better than a crappy Coca Cola radio, and Argos' cohorts seem happier with the second prize of free booze and crisps. It's a merry compromise, as by the end of the evening I was too pissed to drink anymore anyway, and unlike such indie layabouts, I had a job to go to Tuesday morning. Sometimes results emerge which are really the best endings for all concerned.

-------------------

Tall Lighthouse are presently running a stylistically varied night at the Poetry Cafe with 'scene stalwart' John Citizen hosting. Other 'scene stalwart' (and Forward Prize nominee) Tim Wells was also present on Thursday evening, along with the comparatively fresh-faced Kirsten Irving (who was also on the same pop quiz team as me on Monday night - so there is a link here). At present, it seems to be striking the right balance between intriguing new talent and acclaimed existing talent, which is genuinely welcome for the London poetry circuit, which at the moment does seem to be operating in two different leagues - either you're a STAR, in which case you'll be placed alongside the other STARS on one of the heavily promoted bills in Hoxton and get gigs at Latitude and Glastonbury later in the year, or you're a nobody and are therefore left to fend for yourself anonymously in the pub backrooms where the promoters won't bother to turn up to watch you anymore.

If the present standard continues at Tall Lighthouse, I'll definitely regularly attend. I've been watching the progress of a lot of the big-name poets for absolutely years now, so if nothing else, I need to see new talent just to add a bit of spice and variety to the proceedings. I know that people have to cater for the casual Time Out-reading punter and not take too many risks with their bookings, but at least one risk per bill shouldn't kill an evening's reputation.

If you're a promoter and you're reading this and thinking "But I don't do that, and I can prove it!" then you probably don't, by the way, and I probably already know. Please don't comment and add your CV. That would be defensive and boring. Save all that administrative guff for the Arts Council.

I was saddened to learn about the passing of publisher and poet John Rety, who apparently died suddenly at home on Wednesday evening.

I won't pretend to you that he was ever really a proper friend of mine. When we saw each other out and about from time to time, we would usually exchange pleasantries or nods across the room, and I don't think I'm being unfair when I say that was probably the extent of our personal relationship. What John did, however, was run Hearing Eye Press and the Torriano Meeting House, two things I know had an influence on my life and a great many other people.

I know that there have been financial issues with Hearing Eye in recent years, and keeping it going proved a struggle at times, but John kept it up right until the end, and in the process published a lot of poets for the first time, poets who were frequently too esoteric, earthy or awkward to be touched by a lot of other houses. In doing so, he launched a lot of careers and provided a much needed injection of publicity to up-and-coming artists. He took two of my poems in the London anthology "In The Company of Poets", and I remember it as being the first time my material was made available in commercial bookstores. His policy of not deleting or discontinuing the books on his catalogue with any great regularity also meant that most poets never totally disappeared from view once they'd caught his attention, either.

I have two memories of John Rety which to me sum the man's personality up. The first was witnessing him watching one of John Hegley's sets at Torriano. He was almost in tears of laughter, to the extent that his thanks for Hegley at the end of the set were almost incomprehensible, chuckling away as he was like a rather hairy, overgrown child in a sandpit, bouncing a ping-pong ball as he did so, a prop Hegley had left lying around the place.

The other occurred a few days after the Iraq war was first announced, when he berated the open mic-ers at his evening for not producing any worthwhile or appropriate material. The subtext of his criticism seemed to be that we had all been too self-indulgent and solopsistic under the circumstances. I still don't agree with his criticism entirely - as writers rather than journalists, we were probably still mulling over the shock of the news and absorbing it rather than penning brilliant poems on the topic instantaneously. Nonetheless, I admired the fact that he vocalised his views openly, and wore his heart on his sleeve politically without caring if it made others feel uncomfortable. Politically he was an anarchist rather than a socialist like myself, but the poetry circuit tends to be filled with fence-sitters and airy fans of the "live and let live" doctrine, so his passion - whether I concurred with his points or not - was often enlivening.

I was told yesterday that as a 79 year old man he'd had a very full and brilliant life. I could only agree, but I was shocked to learn that he was 79 - I'd always assumed he was in his early sixties. In terms of personality, he seemed much younger than many poets even of my age. He'll be missed by a lot of us, and a lot of us owed him a great deal. Right now, I'm sure I can't be the only person who feels guilty about not visiting the Torriano Meeting House in a long time.

It all begins on New Year's Day - to my immense surprise, some things do besides hangovers. Sore in the head from the excesses of the night before, I'm wandering down Walthamstow High Street and become conscious of a nagging pain at the top of my thigh, right in a place where it would be unseemly to rub in public. Putting it down to the fact that I almost certainly slept awkwardly after a drunken night's sleep, I ignored it.

Five days later, the pain was still there, only this time worse.

( Men's problems beneath the cut for the slightly sensitive souls among you )

Right... I've decided that I really ought to start this blog up again. Most of my reasons for abandoning it nearly two years ago now still stand, but it's become incredibly apparent that one thing I feared turned out not to be true. Originally, I supposed that keeping a blog interfered with my writing, and that spewing all my ideas out here was a waste when I could be spending more time crafting my own material.

It turns out that this is probably crap. On the contrary, keeping a blog - or indeed any kind of running project - going actually seems to exercise the cliched "creative muscle". Instead of resulting in an increase in my output, I've reduced the amount of work I do as well as failed to keep a running account of personal nonsense on here. It's clear that I benefitted more from keeping this than I realised at the time.

Whilst I doubt I'll update LJ anything like as frequently as before, I'll still try to use this as a scrapbook and dumping ground for waffle. I don't expect many people to continue reading it since most readers have long since drifted off to pastures new, but never mind.

It might be a bumpy ride to start with, but for anyone who is still interested, here I am.

As I'm sure you've probably all gathered by now, there is no real reason for me to continue using this Livejournal. However, my account will remain active and I will still be reading other people's, so please do keep me on your friends list if you want me to still be involved in your blog or community.

As for my own writing, there are two options open to you:

1. http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog&friendID=173012326

This is the blog that exists on my MySpace profile, focussing mostly on poetry and writing - a lot of the content on here has been mirrored over there for the last few months, and you can expect it to continue in the same vain. Nobody will be missing out on my "fantastic" observations on these artistic areas as a result, and I may find time to do the odd personal entry as well if I'm tempted. I'm planning a jaunt to Beirut in September, and if that goes ahead I'm sure I will find plenty to say about it. Don't be too optimistic that I'l waffle on day-to-day life on there much, though.

If you don't have me on your friends list and want to add me, don't be afraid to ask. A lot of you have banned audio profiles from being added without your initial approaches, so I haven't been able to stick you on my list myself.

2. http://www.left-and-to-the-back.blogspot.com

The new place for MP3 and YouTube uploads, you fools! Please do come and visit - it was even updated today especially. I must admit I'm quite excited about the possibilities of this idea at the moment, even if most of my lj friends list doesn't seem to be. Their loss.

I feel I should also make it clear that there are no sinister reasons behind discontinuing this lj, unless boredom counts as being something sinister. I'm not trying to avoid anyone or even make any sort of political statement about lj's new owners, I just feel that four years of me wittering on about my day to day life in public is enough for one lifetime, and possibly even more than is healthy for one person. It feels as if my energies should now be directed in a more productive direction, and that's exactly what I plan to do. No more naval gazing for me. Well, not much, anyway.

If anyone wants to talk to me about what's going on in my life in the future, you know my email address. And if you don't, or need reminding, please feel free to leave a comment below. I'll see you around. And who knows, I might even reactivate this blog at some point in the future if I go travelling again or have something useful to say, but don't put any money on it.

It's the moment you've all been waiting for... My long-promised MP3/ YouTube blog focussing on forgotten curios and obscurities is now online. It will focus on both the sublime and ridiculous moments in pop music, so you can expect to read about dire flop novelty singles of yore (I have some treats lined up, I assure you, including a country rock single about Spanish holidays) as much as you can lost gems which were wrongfully ignored.

There will also be an irregular feature on there which will involve me pulling out a charity shop or second hand shop find for everyone's delight - I would reveal my plans for the future now, but I wouldn't want to spoil the surprise or show my hand at this early stage. For openers, though, please find Bernard Manning and Ronnie Barker's failed 1970s bids to enter the Top 40, and I reckon I can easily top even that in the near future.

http://left-and-to-the-back.blogspot.com/

If you presently link to this blog from a website of your own, I would be quite grateful if you could update to the one shown above. Obviously, I'll understand if you don't want to or are not as keen on the content of the new blog as you were on this one, but it would certainly help me to get over the usual problems with generating traffic in the tricky first few months.

(*And yep, I know that two of the existing entries on there are rewritten versions of old ones on this livejournal. I don't intend to make a habit of recycling old material, but it seemed like a good way of sticking a reasonable amount of content up as quickly and as painlessly as possible so visitors could have something more than one entry to look at).

If you speak to certain people at the wheel of the great poetry juggernaut, you will often be told that poetry has "gone back into the mainstream" again, that it's now fashionable, credible, and that since Scroobius Pip climbed into the Top 40 everybody knows what to expect from the spoken word scene. Sometimes I pick up the Metro and the London Paper and read these articles and almost will myself to believe them. I'd have to try very hard, though - they're complete and total bollocks, obviously.

I don't blame anybody for trying to get the public's confidence, and it probably does much more for the cause than my brand of self-deprecating honesty, but let Uncle Dave put you right here. Poetry has been in much ruder health at other points in history. This isn't like 1968 all over again, and it isn't selling out the Royal Albert Hall. In fact, it's frequently barely selling out scruffy pub backrooms even when there are big names on the bill. That the mainstream media even want to touch the artform at the moment is a giant leap forwards in itself from the dark old days of 2005 when poetry sales hit their lowest trough since records began, but we've still got a long, long way to go before people get the recognition they deserve.

Nights like Jorge at the George Tavern in Stepney do highlight the public's general attitude towards spoken word artists as soon as the form is taken out of its safe little ghetto. Where poets and bands share the same bill, it's a war the prose warriors will never, ever win. Make no mistake, it's a tough gig, and I don't know anybody on the circuit who would ever claim otherwise apart from perhaps the most famous performers. As I take to the mic, I notice that I am greeted with a number of angry scowls in the front row before I've even opened my mouth. "Poet = wanker" their expressions seem to say. The majority of the audience talk straight through me to start with, rendering the first few minutes barely audible to most of the room.

During the third poem, however, something strange happens. The whole room shuts up, and is watching and listening to me. It's not a slight silence, either, as a few people trudge towards the bar and ask for drinks. It's total silence (with applause at the end, thankfully). This continues for long enough that I can get some snappy, simple material out which I think won't anger too many people with self-indulgence, and stays with me to the very end of the set. It still feels as if it's been a battle, but it's an absolute blessed relief that I've managed to come out on top. It's an unusual set in that I air a lot of material which I would ordinarily leave out of gigs, but I make a mental note to remember exactly what I did and how I did it for future occasions like this one. In a moment that makes me cringe immediately afterwards as soon as I sit back down, I tell the audience that they've been lovely. This is a blatant lie, obviously - they were stubborn arseholes for a worrying amount of time. I find myself meaning it as I say it, though. It's the same syndrome as when you decide you like the school psychopath for a few minutes, because they've made up their minds that they find you rather endearing and they're not going to torture you with a car battery after all. I think sometimes as human beings we tend to mix up feelings of relief with something else entirely.

I completely admire the concept of the Jorge night and think what they're doing for poetry (and indeed the gig circuit in London) is wonderful, though. Far from constantly going for obvious "big names" or people who are barely even connected to the poetry world to promote the form, they're genuinely taking risks and booking new artists as well. It often works, and many poets find themselves in similar positions to me to start with, only to win over the audience against all the odds. The bands are also frequently brilliant. On the bill on Thursday we also saw the enjoyable piano driven tunesmithery of Steve Bland, who actually managed to be anthemic with very little musical support, the distortion heavy pop angst of Thee Assasins, and finally an anarchic twelve piece band called Apples for Everyone who seemed like an exciting collision between Celtic folk, psychedelic pop, anti-folk, The Guillemots and your large drunken uncle after ten Guinnesses. What astonishes me about the present music scene is that lurking in the cracks and crevices are some bands who frankly wouldn't have been out of place on John Peel's Dandelion label circa 1972. They don't seem to get much press exposure, but they're there nonetheless, and sometimes you can turn up to events like these and feel as if the carnival has come to town. The lead singer ruins things slightly by making a few comments about performance poets which sound rather sarcastic and scathing - perhaps I misread his intentions, but nonetheless it would be a bit rich if he were indeed extracting the urine. For large scale hippy collectives to suggest that poets are a bit pretentious and ridiculous would be hypocrisy of the highest order, after all. As Dan sneered to the judge in Withnail and I: "Do you think you look normal, your honour?"

Much lower down the bill on the night was an individual called Harry Herry who I embarrassingly spoke about on mic as being "Hairy Mary" (although I still maintain that he has been billed as that at the Klinker at some point). He's another character who has to be seen to be believed - a man from Rotterdam dressed as a Dutch sailor who sings solo songs about perplexing topics such as cleaning out toilets whilst gurning, bobbing up and down, and playing his keyboard like a demented, hyperactive goon. He's been around on the circuit for many years now, and is always worth a look.

Another top night, then, and further evidence that The George Tavern may not be the neatest or smartest gig venue in London, but it's certainly one of the most daring and deserves to continue.

A long, long time ago - or a year and a half ago to be precise - you may remember that I mentioned that the Chris Morris website Cookd and Bombd were compiling their Top 1000 Singles of all time. The way this worked was quite simple. Each forum member was to nominate several singles of their choosing with an MP3 and a review, and the final list was to be in no fixed order, just being a cluster of singles everybody felt strongly enough to nominate. The final results are enormously varied and curious. Click on "read more" to see.

( Read more... )

Obviously I can't say I agree with every single choice, but it's fascinating to see precisely what everybody chipped in with. If you want to argue with the results, it's probably best to join the forum at http://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk and go to the Oscillations section rather than bicker with me about it.

I'm now sitting back and seeing whether mentioning 1,000 different singles in a row like that and also the magic word "MP3" will cause the webstats for this blog to suddenly skyrocket... sorry to disappoint any random strangers who have popped by expecting more.

Anyway, on another topic entirely, I'm doing a gig at the George Tavern near Shadwell tube tonight, so please drop by if you can. The audiences for these occasions tend to be notoriously tough, so we'll see how it goes...

Touch Me I'm Sick is a regular London poetry night which has been running for nearly two years now. That seems like a rather pathetic tally in the grand scheme of things - "But the Eiffel Tower has been around for longer!" I can hear you cry - but on the ever-changing poetry circuit that's actually quite significant. It does seem sometimes as if most nights collapse not long after their first birthdays, the hosts gradually growing tired of the work involved for minimum thanks or financial returns. Two years is normally a decent benchmark, and a sign that the evening will be around for awhile to come yet.

Changes do seem to be afoot with the occasion, however. Last night they managed to get a sixties garage and psychedelic DJ to play music in the run up to the night and also during the breaks, which obviously meets with my full approval. TMIS has had odd evenings in the past where enthusiasm and audience response has seemed somewhat low, and such high tempo, full-on, joyous clanging and rattling seems ideal to get people in the mood. It may be a sheer coincidence, but on this occasion I notice that the audience seem much more cheerful and enthusiastic.

There again, it's always worth cheering up when Richard Tyrone Jones has a full-length set. Richard has been on the circuit for long enough now that he's beginning to seem like a stalwart himself, and far from churning out the same material over and over, he often achieves the impressive feat of regularly keeping his set fresh amidst all the pressure of the continual live work. I must admit I prefer his shorter, snappier material, but the longer prose pieces he did last night managed the tricky balancing act between being crude, intelligent and surreal. "The Day the World's Arsehole Disappeared", for example, does exactly what it says on the tin topic-wise, but allows itself to speculate and meander around the subject in a fashion which is immediately fascinating. He has the imagination to actually think through all the absurd scenarios and possible statements which could be made out of the basest of beginnings, and to do so whilst hardly bothering to mention toilet matters, and for that should be applauded. There's no question that his raucous and full-on style may not be to everybody's taste, but it's certainly worth investigating.

This was arguably the best TMIS I've been to since the night began, and I can only hope that it manages to continue on this form for much longer.

(And yes, I will still carry on updating this LJ until I've got the other blog fully in place).

I've been talking about doing this for ages, and I think the time is nigh... well, a couple of weeks away, anyway (let me get Easter and a few other extra-curricular responsibilities out of the way first).

In a nutshell, I think time is long overdue to put an end to this Livejournal. I do aim to continue blogging, but for various reasons too dull to go into here would like to keep the poetry blog active online over at the Myspace site, and start up a specialist music blog running elsewhere. I could of course just as easily do the latter here on LJ, but there are a wide variety of reasons why I might find that uncomfortable, and for quite another thing, I really don't think that LJ is quite the blogging site that it once was when I joined in 2004. It's not even owned or marketed by the same people. Time was you had all sorts of brilliant, tremendously active writers on this site and a lot of interaction, whereas there are days at the moment where it just feels like operating within a void (and not just on this blog either - my whole friends list suffers from similar underactivity).

Additionally, I don't feel especially comfortable scribbling away about everyday matters on here*. There have been a few instances in the last year or so where I've almost said the wrong thing and come a cropper, and so I've been a bit more ruthless at editing those sorts of entries than I used to be. The problem is, it's now reached a point where I feel as if I'm skirting around the interesting details so much that the whole thing is almost entirely missing the point, and actually isn't much fun for me on a personal level. I'm not one of life's natural gossips, and whilst a blog might have made sense when I was living in Australia when I had a lot to observe and could very quickly run away (or at least get a flight home) in the event of upsetting the natives, it's a bit harder to be so truthful in London where people do seem to take offence very easily. It doesn't matter that this blog is actually hardly read by anybody - it only needs to be read by the wrong person at the wrong time for me to find my nasal passages precariously close to the proverbial ton of shit. And we all know what that smells like, eh readers?

The big question is, where should the new blog go? Blogger and Blogspot seem to be the most popular two choices, and there's a lot of content on both that's worthy of a good read, but what essentially is the difference? What tools do they offer? Is there anything that's a pain in the arse about them? And what are their communities like (Blogspot seems the most active to my eyes, but is it easy to "link into" other people's journals as you can on lj?)

Anyhow, I await everyone's advice. If I don't get any, I'll probably pester rhodri. And rest assured I've been out buying odds and sods from records stores and doing some vinyl rips of stuff that will end up on the new music blog, and it will be a damn sight (or perhaps a damn site, ho ho) better than this scrapbook-styled effort in terms of content.

(*Yes, I've heard of locked entries. No, I don't like them much).

I returned to the 13th Floor Club on Saturday night, which is almost always a joy. It might be because it's a niche night, playing only sixties mod, garage and psychedelia, but it appears on the surface to be one of those rare evenings which manages to attract a constant, hardcore audience without once being heavily invaded by scenesters or people determined to force their vain identity on the place. Facebook photo snappers are present there, but for most people the evening seems to be an excuse to have a good time rather than to be seen to be seen in the right clothes.

I find that most of the best club nights in London peak early in their lives - you have to be aware of them just after the first couple of nights when they're beginning to attract a crowd, but before the point where the more obnoxious media whores get wind of them and colonise them. Believe it or not, I know club promoters who (privately) think exactly the same thing, and get painfully nostalgic for the days When They Wasn't Famous. Or didn't have their brilliant idea ruined, at least - fame is probably overstating the case more than a little bit.

Highlights of the evening included:

* Guest DJ David Quantick getting deperate for the toilets and leaving his DJ booth to rush through to the front of the cubicle queues with a nervous and embarrassed wave of thanks. I wouldn't like to speculate about what his problem was, but I hope he's OK now.

* Icelandic mod band Thor's Hammer actually getting a spin on the decks this time around - not with "My Life" but another more obscure EP track "Big Beat Country Dance". Always welcome.

* Can's "Mother Sky". This was spun the last time I visited the club in January and felt like cheating then, being neither psychedelia or garage in the strictest sense of the word, but being blasted through a proper PA system the track always sounds wonderful. Home listening never quite seems to capture the pulsing, repetitive urgency of it, but there are precious few places you can visit where it will work its way on to a DJ's playlist.

Obscure track of the evening on this occasion was Alan Avon and Toyshop's "A Night To Remember". I'm not a fan of it, actually, and nobody danced to it, but I'm always entertained by the curveballs some DJs like to throw into their sets.

Beyond the fact that the evening was much more crowded this time than last, little seemed to have changed beyond the presence of rather more mods on this occasion. This can be bad news in that mods do tend to have a nasty habit of judging a person by their evening wear, but almost all seemed to enter into the spirit of the occasion and were perfectly friendly. I'm also starting to see people I recognise from previous visits in the club now, which is rare for me. Perhaps it's because the 13th Floor Club officially has the friendliest toilet queue in London - although you tend to be stood in it forever, waiting for one of two cubicles to become available, so I suppose chat is preferable to awkward silences.

I only hope this night can continue without being hijacked by a self-conscious set or ruined at any point soon. It does what it does extremely well, and I don't think it needs any additional help.

It's an ongoing inconvenience in my life that a lot of people I like in both the world of poetry and music seem to get gigs in venues I care rather less for. It's an ongoing disparity. I've waffled on about the Old Crown pub's status on the poetry circuit for so long that I'm beginning to bore even myself, but I've perhaps talked less about how little I like the "legendary" 100 Club on Oxford Street, which is right at the other end of the spectrum, in the red zone labelled "scuffed up beyond belief". Even as a teenager I disliked the place. Yes, people will tell you, but it's so delightfully authentic and tumbledown. It looks as if it hasn't been decorated since 1973. "Precisely", I'll reply.

Actually, my descriptions of the 100 Club could go further than that. Not only does it look as if it hasn't been decorated since 1973, it also looks as if it hasn't quite been tidied up or repaired after a wild working man's club party where the orange plastic chairs and wobbly formica top tables took some slight damage. It's not the end of the world, obviously - I don't necessarily expect plushness from gig venues, but if they're going for the whole "earthy" vibe, I would at least like them to perhaps try to go beyond the community hall look. A good band can transcend a trashy environment, but why give them the challenge in the first place? The 12 Bar on Denmark Street has exactly the right idea about how to look authentic and old-school without looking as if the painters and decorators last visit pre-dated the pub rock movement.

The evening manages to get off to a bad start as one of the doormen/ bouncers takes exception to me entering the venue a whole two minutes before they're ready, sending me outside again to wait behind the door like a naughty boy. I don't want to quibble, but it's not so much the problem as the way he addresses it - with aggressive and sarcastic tones. When I was a teenager I looked forward to the day where I wouldn't be shepherded around by bouncers in a condescending way anymore. That day never came. My older self feels impotent about this outcome. I could raise a complaint about shoddy customer service values, but I think it would fall on deaf ears. There's not really anything you can say to these people. "Excuse me, my good man, but I think you might find that your shabby little gig venue might stand rather more of a chance in the harsh London climate if you utilised some manners around your customers" probably wouldn't wash. I'm half tempted to try it, just to see if it stuns him into silence, then think better of it when I realise it would be likely to get a more forthright response.

Still, it's always a happy night when Misty's Big Adventure do a gig in London, irrespective of the location or the gatekeepers. Last night they were minus their giant blue dancing "creature" Erotic Volvo, the many-handed, wild-eyed gibbering thing who regularly dives into the audience to dance with random strangers. He was voted "worst band mascot" by staff at the NME recently, which is a bit unfair - his absence makes one thing very apparent, which is that he was indeed responsible for a certain volume of the atmosphere the band created. Without Erotic Volvo, the audience seem to take longer to be persuaded to dance, and even the band themselves seem a bit more subdued than usual. You expect that kind of result from a lead guitarist who has been replaced by a session musician, but it's surprising to note that somebody who has previously been dismissed as "Bez-like" makes such a big difference. I hope his absence is only temporary.

A slightly below par Misty's Big Adventure gig still kicks the performances of almost all other bands into touch, of course, and this one is aided by their inclusion of a "Greatest Hits" set, playing each and every one of their singles back to back. It's a reminder of how long their career has plodded on for. When I first saw them at the 12 Bar back in 2002, I was convinced that they were destined for greater things and within a couple of years would be playing the Astoria as a headline act. That they're still only playing the 100 Club is something I will always find baffling. When "Fashion Parade" kicks in, it sounds every inch like a lost hit single - in fact, perhaps if they'd chosen a topic for the lyrics which revolved around something other than criticising the more fashionable bands around them, it would have stood a chance. A great big brassy pop tune criticising the playlist favourites of XFM was never, ever going to break through in the way it deserved, although perhaps we can listen to it in years to come and laugh amongst ourselves when the careers of the Kaiser Chiefs are up.

I'm stunned by the band as always, although I've given up on the idea that they're ever going to have anything other than a marginal cult following. As long as they can afford to look after themselves, I'll be happy - perhaps there's something to be said for setting up direct debit schemes for any bands we feel might become airbrushed out of existence in the present conservative music scene. I'd happily drop them a couple of hundred pounds a year just to keep going forward. In this Internet driven age, would it be too much to ask for a website where we could drop funds in the direction of bands in return for the odd T-shirt, exclusive album, the guarantees of gigs in usually ignored far flung towns and perhaps a special mug? Have I invented the future here, or just thought of a concept which belongs way back in the past (the fan club)? You tell me.

The NME is not dead, contrary to continual Internet rumours, but by gum it certainly is looking a bit peaky:

http://entertainment.time.../music/article3497298.ece

As much as reading the NME was an obsession for me at one point in my life (although I preferred Melody Maker, I would actually buy both weekly) I can't see that there's very much to mourn here. The paper has moved so far from its original purposes and incarnation that it's hard to trace any easy way back. It was also difficult to see it at the time, but the rot really did set in around Britpop - that was the exact point where an obsession with image and sales developed over and above the outsiders they used to champion. Journalists began to talking to bands about "disappointing sales" continually at that point, and by the time The Spice Girls were on the front page, it was all over bar the shouting. The emphasis had shifted irreversibly.

Unlike The Teardrop Explodes, Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Mondays, The Stone Roses (whose debut only sold a few hundred thousand in its first year, and at a slow, constant trickle), even in fact the Pistols and the Clash, Blur and Oasis were big, generation gap jumping, tabloid headline grabbing, sellers. "Morning Glory" sold beyond Simply Red levels, and "Parklife" certainly didn't do that badly either. You could argue that The Sex Pistols defined a generation more and are now seen as a "classic band", but they alienated the straight kids and almost all parents completely at the time. Unless you were a certain age and of a certain disposition, they were an utter turn-off. The NME celebrated things like that (eventually, though they were frequently slow on the uptake) and understood that its audience wanted "rebel oddball outsiders" and intelligent commentary rather than world-beating, Bono-threatening champions, and more tedious stories about cocaine use. Unlike their predecessors, though, and probably against the magazine's original expectations, Oasis and Blur crossed boundaries. The uncles and aunts of the stadium terrace chanters who got off on Oasis would have been completely disturbed and alienated by most of the NME favourites from 67 to 77, and possibly well into the eighties too. David Bowie would have been far too effiminate for them to cope with, Lou Reed too intelligent and perverse, the Prog bands far too awkward. Whilst many of these acts crossed over on a pop level, for most of their careers they were truly niche performers with sales propped up by hardcore fanbases.

The one moment in the sun where the NME was suddenly "big news" (on the UK Nine O Clock News for the Blur v Oasis battle) changed the way both IPC and the editors thought about the magazine. It wasn't about interesting, intelligent bands anymore (or at the very least bands with pretensions towards intelligence). It became about giant backstage parties, and coke sniffed off toilet seats and ROCK AND ROLL!!! As soon as those reports began to shift more units, it caused the paper to really lose its way, slowly but surely.

And lest we forget, before we get too weepy-eyed about the death of Melody Maker, we must remember that it too pulled the trigger on itself. The MM revamp of the late nineties (where it became a tabloid sized colour magazine) really wasn't far off the NME of today. That folded as a result of its attempts to get a cool teen market, and you would have thought the marketing folk at Time Warner would have given that a bit of thought before going sexy sticker and poster crazy with its sister paper. Or perhaps they thought what went wrong last time was just that they ran posters of the wrong people... which at least would explain why Sophie Ellis Bextor hasn't featured so prominently this time (unfortunately for me).

I'm still exhausted from the conference I attended and had no intention of doing a journal update today at all, but then I received the rather sad news that the producer Norman Smith died over the weekend. This probably means very little to most of you, and that's actually a huge shame - besides engineering a large bulk of The Beatles output in the sixties, he also has Pink Floyd's first two albums on his production CV, and equally notably the Pretty Things "SF Sorrow is Born" which is one of the finer albums of the period.

Norman Smith was nicknamed "Normal Smith" by John Lennon, largely due to his rather straight, middle aged attitudes and appearance. In the sixties the Abbey Road studios contingent were still quite conservative, technically minded chaps in white lab coats or smart suits, doing their best to understand and bring out the best from wave upon wave of new musical trends (and to get some idea about the advances in technology and styles, think about how far rock music jumped from the earliest Merseybeat pop bands in 62/63 to the approaching rumbles of hard rock and heavy metal in 69 - such enormous changes would be almost unthinkable in one decade now). Some of the sound boffins coped, others didn't, but all the evidence shows that Norman Smith handled change far better than most, and certainly far better than his appearances would suggest. Pink Floyd were doubtful that Smith "understood" the way they worked during the recording of "Saucerful of Secrets", but the Pretty Things "SF Sorrow" just shows how much he learned and how many of the stylings were quite definably his, and how much he had to offer - so much so that The Pretty Things named him as almost being an honorary member at that point. Also, in total fairness to the man, for all Saucerful's strengths I doubt the Floyd really knew what they wanted in the period immediately following Syd Barrett's expulsion, let alone how to communicate it to a producer.

In a further odd twist, Norman Smith went on to have a couple of hit singles himself in the seventies. He originally wrote "Don't Let It Die" as a songwriter's demo, and found EMI were keen enough to issue his version, which promptly got to number two in the British charts. Hence he's probably one of the very few people who first tasted chart success in his own right by the time he was in his fifties. It's a rather sugary, Saltwatery, Lennon-esque piece of work, but quite likeable, and I include it as a download here just to commemorate him. If you really want to get a measure of his finest achievements, though, I'd recommend rushing out to get copies of "SF Sorrow" or "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" now though, if you haven't already got them.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=JFM71LUT