Friday night was an odd affair. One of the problems with doing flyering for a bunch of bands and artists on the fringes of even the alternative scene is that it's hard to know where to target your promotional efforts. A bog-standard cop-out is to stand outside gigs by The Fall and hope that Mark E Smith's fans still listen to Radio One in the evenings, and have caught the bands you're on about - a long shot much of the time, I reckon. Another option is to see if any of the bands you're promoting previously supported other bands who are playing this week and flyer there. Or, in the case of Saturday night, I went with the tenuous link option and handed out leaflets at the Buff Medways gig. After all, Graham Coxon loves Billy Childish, and Stephen out of Stuffy and the Fuses drums for Graham Coxon. And Billy Childish writes and reads poetry, and we're also promoting poetry. Also, many of the people at these events are open to leftfield ideas... therefore, it's not such a ridiculous jump into the unknown.

It was also a fantastic excuse for me to catch the Buffs again, who to my mind are one of the best live garage bands in the UK. Indeed, I made new friends in the venue of Spanish and Italian origin. I spy a Spanish man in a Buff Medways styled soldier's jacket with brass buttons in a state of jittery anticipation, and begin talking to him.
"I cannot believe it!" he says. "They are playing in a pub! Why are they not playing to thousands? In Spain, we love this music!"
I can't properly explain to him that in Britain, the last wave of fascination with sixties styled music ended with Britpop, nearly ten years ago now. These days, everyone's gone back to their Wire and Gang of Four CDs (though this isn't necessarily a bad thing either).

There's also a rather truculent man with large sideburns and an attitude to match who is bullying members of the audience to dance. I befriend him slightly, but his rather aggressive, shouty, physically over-familiar manner begins to rub me up the wrong way after awhile and I start to give him a wider berth. His girlfriend, a wee redhead of a somewhat tolerant disposition, is sighing and shrugging her shoulders in a defeated, deflated manner.

The Buffs play astoundingly well again, the beats hammering into my ribcage as I stand right by the bass drum. It's a hugely enjoyable evening with some fantastic music - zero points for originality, but full marks for delivery. It's beyond me why people would bother to pay full-price stadium tickets for "The Who" (such as they are at present) when The Buff Medways play North London pubs for six quid.

I stand outside handing out flyers after the event, and I'm greeted with the usual trickle of truculent, dismissive, moody types who seem to have a natural aversion to free information on pieces of paper, interested types (who I always thank perhaps a bit too enthusiastically) and the odd drunk bastard. In this case, the drunk bastard is the manic, aggressive acquaintance from inside the venue, who unbeknownst to me is in the middle of a row with his girlfriend.

"Right, just fuck off, mate!" he warns me. "Just FUCK OFF, OK?"
"Fine," say I, and stroll away. But his girlfriend is having none of it.
"Don't be so RUDE!" she roars. "This is why I want nothing TO DO WITH YOU! You're so fucking OBNOXIOUS!"
He moves towards me to shake my hand in apology, but it's too little too late. His girlfriend runs towards the tube, and he runs after her in an attempt to reconcile the situation. I've a feeling he didn't get far. So... that's one relationship ruined by the innocent art of flyering, though in the case of big-sideburns man, I strongly suspect it would have happened sooner or later anyway.

Saturday night was spent much more in the traditional manner that would be expected - a fireworks night in Victoria Park, Mile End. I attended with vilebody and her friends, as I had been assured that a replica model of the Houses of Parliament would be ignited, and indeed I wasn't disappointed in that score. What I wasn't expecting, however, was the pseudo-hip-hop build up to it all, with rather questionable rapping about Guy Fawkes being a "dood" and an "MC". It bothers me the way East London councils assume that the only way to get anyone's attention on any issue is to use Urban music or imagery, often in a very hackneyed (no pun intended) way. All around our way, they put posters up of people in hoodies and dead weights of jewellery, with big slogans such as "SORT IT OUT! Look BOTH ways before you cross the road, otherwise you'll NEVER get to release an award winning Urban album in a few years time!". I then look around me, and see a bunch of rather confused looking Muslims and Polish people who probably couldn't give a toss about this kind of thing. Then there's the appropriateness of it all, and the grey-haired hair-brained way they approach these things. Saying Guy Fawkes was a "dood" and an "MC" is not only factually incorrect (gramaphone players weren't invented until the 20th Century, and MCing itself I don't believe came around until the late seventies) it's also rather dated (who in the 21st Century do you hear using the phrase "dood", apart from people attempting to imitate Bill and Ted?).

Quibbles aside, however, the burning of the Houses of Parliament really was quite a sight to behold. The rather dapper looking Guy Fawkes figure sat atop the inferno, actually looking rather like Billy Childish's stuckist poet chum SP Howarth. The fireworks were cacophonous and colourful, and the whole event obviously gave a whole bunch of left wing Londoners (and myself, I have to admit) a demonstration of childish wish-fulfilment. We don't really wish to burn the Houses of Parliament, obviously, but we sometimes have odd dreams about it. The mull cider we had back at vilebody's house was also very pleasant indeed.

A nice weekend, then. Now, while my head's still on business, you ARE all going to attend Spinster at the ULU on the 20th November aren't you?

It's been an irresponsibly good weekend this time around - and I say "irresponsible" because I know damn well that, in reality, I should have been largely at home saving money and scouring the Guardian's Saturday supplement for jobs. Stuff that, I say, because two treats were in the offing.

Firstly, on Friday night the Buff Medways played at the Boston Arms in Tufnell Park. Believe it or not, this is the first time I've seen the band live, and a lot of my reticence to bother in the past has been fuelled by their rather patchy albums. I've also never been able to make my mind up whether or not Billy Childish is a petty punk puritan, strangled creatively by his own rigid manifestos, or a genuinely interesting and diverting sort of fellow. Such worries get cast to one side when you see the band play, though. The thing is, the Buffs operate in a very narrow strand of rock music. For them, nothing has really happened since 1966, and the pinnacle of rock evolution was The Who and The Creation. Everything is stripped down to the basics, with perhaps the most daring piece of engineering work being some distortion on the vocal mic. Ultimately though, they do it wonderfully well, and with an energy that is truly infectuous. Dressed up to the nines in British Colonial Army uniforms, they pound and bash their way through a series of no frills punkoid R&B tracks, most of them from the album "Steady the Buffs". The drummer in particular is mesmerising, and when they cover The Who's "Ivor" it actually sounds far better than any of the versions I've heard the Who do. There's a great fat rush of urgency to it all, and above all else a carefree abandon which so many bands lack now. Most acts are too studied and cool to ever truly let themselves shine live in this way.

The support act for the evening was some Belgian garage act whose name escapes me, and whom actually aren't worth remembering but for one small detail which is relevant to my point above. They had a female singing drummer who seemed pleased as punch to be there up on stage and genuinely in love with the material, grinning from ear to ear at points. Her male companions, on the other hand, were stiff as boards and rather desperately self-conscious. Kevin Reinhardt has mentioned to me a number of times that female members of bands seem to be instrinsically much more interesting than their male counterparts these days, and I'm beginning to come around to his point of view. Whereas most male-fronted bands now look as if they may have stepped out of a Sunday Supplement catalogue, women in bands are becoming increasingly eccentric, increasingly energetic and genuinely going along with the thrill of it all on stage. You can see it in a number of acts that have been at Blang as well, not least Misty's Big Adventure and Sofizel. I realise there's a hint of sexism implied in my statement here, as if I'm trying to say that in the past female musicians have often been uninteresting, and that's not intentional. What I think has happened, in reality, is that a lot of men have lost the instinct for spontaniety on stage, and are far too afraid they'll look ridiculous for whatever NME hack has happened to turn up to review their show. I can't imagine someone as bizarre as Julian Cope getting press these days (one can imagine the headlines - "Fuck off Crusty!" they would no doubt wittily say), and given that most musicians are (unfortunately) incredibly careerist in their outlooks, I guess there's become a hint of "studied cool" about men on stage in the last four or five years. I saw Interpol live a couple of years ago, and whilst I was fascinated by their wax dummy features, it ultimately made for a rather soulless gig experience. A lot of women, on the other hand, are keen to define themselves as something more than pretty faces or "token female members", and it shows through in the performances.

Anyway, wild enthusiasm was also evident (after a few drinks) at the Smiths and Morrissey club night "The Quarry" at the Barbican on Saturday night. Whilst the evening wasn't overly packed, and there were surprisingly enough only a few quiffs n specs combinations evident in the assembled throng, it was still a surprisingly enjoyable night. I drank far too much to make any coherent sense towards the end of the evening and suffered horribly throughout Sunday, but it did make me appreciate that Mozzer actually has a wealth of really good material. Enough for an entire club evening which never once repeats itself, in fact. It also goes without saying that Amanda and our friend Robert Yates were thrilled by it all, but even as a demi-fan or casual listener I could enjoy myself, especially as I didn't have to worry about whether the DJ was going to ruin the evening by putting on The Darkness at some point.

Back in the real responsible world, though, I'm having the usual problems with parasitical employment agencies again. I was phoned on Friday afternoon and offered a job for the next fortnight. I agreed, but warned them that I was attending a job interview on Friday morning, so would have to have half of that day off. They immediately turned icy on me.

"I see," muttered the woman on the phone, sounding for all the world like a spurned lover. "And are you taking 'this job'?" (the words are carefully searched for and annunciated).
"Well, it's at my old firm," I reply, "who have already made me redundant once. And I'd need to have some sort of assurances this time that it won't happen again, and I'd also need to see who I'm working with".
"I see," she replied, like a stuck record.
"And, you know, nobody's offered me the job yet. And because they've made me redundant, they have to offer me interviews for anything I apply for. If the role you're offering is only for two weeks, I really don't think there's anything for you to worry about."
"Oh," she said. "Well, I'll ring you back if I'm interested in giving you this role".

She wasn't, evidently, and for the sake of two weeks work it barely seemed worth an argument or an explanation in the first place. I can see I'm going to have to invent a lot of family funerals over the next few weeks if I want to hold down any sort of temporary work whilst actively looking for something a bit more secure. Though why I should actually HAVE to do this I've no idea - I think the arrogance irritates me more than anything else. After all, if someone is keen to just give you tiny scraps of work now and then (which they often make false promises about), why do they so often expect this ridiculous loyalty? It weren't like that in the old days of temping, you know, when you could be in a band, go on tour, do summer work, etc... These days you have to sign away your entire life for eight pounds an hour, or they're not content.