Friday 16th May 2003 - 11.40pm

1) One Thursday evening, you will arrive home to find upon the kitchen table a blue envelope bearing your name. Opening the envelope reveals a pair of train tickets and a mysterious photocopied note, all odd lettering and cut-up words and “Please do not attempt to trace the source of this letter! Spoilers and bastards are at large…”. These people, you will think to yourself, have my address..

And, still unsure as to whether the tickets come from friends or disgruntled creditors, you will allow yourself a smile, because, either way, they care enough..

On a Saturday afternoon at 2.30pm, I scour Euston station for a clue, having promised my family that I would try to call should anyone attempt to smuggle me across the Swiss border. And so it happens that I stumble upon two seated figures, one in a highwayman’s mask, the other in a Red-Indian head-dress.

Kate and Greg, respectively.

Really, I couldn’t wish to be abducted by two greater people.

And so begins another lost weekend in the capital. I shan’t transcribe the details: my words are made for describing libraries, not pleasures. The time passes, as is always the case with London, in a blur of laughter and forgetting, reunions and reminiscences, jukeboxes and sunsets. There’s something about the city, I can’t explain it in any other way than this:

Swapping trains and switching lines on my way back to the overground station on the final day, I can’t help but fall insincerely in love with every other girl I share a carriage with.

With regard to my hosts, my paper diary contains the words: “bless them.. bless them both.” I see no reason to moderate this.

2)

It begins, each of the four band members intone “this is my heart..”; later, you join them. But there’s more - yes, I remember..

At its best, it’s pop music that knows sadness in a way that nothing else does, the pop music you always dreamed of. So synthetic, so lightweight, so sorry that it should come to this, long afternoons spent programming drum tracks in the living room.

You will say that the Stars I’m thinking of are different from the Stars you hear on record. I won’t take issue, it’s ok. Some groups are so evocative that the music becomes little more than a prompt, a step in the only direction you would want to go. A mediator, I suppose, between yourself, shimmying in the kitchen, the bedroom, the street, and an ideal that you grasp only in dreams, or in one song, just a few minutes.

I’m quoting from the single. I think of it as my very own ‘Some Of These Days’. It doesn’t feature on the album.

3) Ultra-pop is where it’s at. Ultra-pop is Stars if they turned the treble further up and any aberration of guitars off . Please note down the collective noun for future use. Ultra-pop demands: if it moves, synthesise it.

Which brings me to two recent shocks. The first is quite how easy Ultra-pop is to produce; the second, how few people exploit this. Ultra-pop simply requires a digital composer along the lines of Buzz, which is basic shareware, a microphone and a tape recorder. Perhaps a keyboard if you’re feeling indulgent. But that really is it. Ultra-pop is cheaper and easier to create than punk music has ever been, whilst also being neither gritty nor authentic, and thus clearly preferable.

To give an example of the potential, and also of my own well documented weakness for abstract ideas, I shall mention the forthcoming Patrick Wolf album. A title: ‘Lycanthropy’. A few words of description: “21st century folktronica dandy”, “rhythms emanating from a glowing white laptop”. And I’m imagining Bright Eyes backed by glitch-techno, Jandek with electronic jabs to drive him further, further still, out of context. And it’s all I want. And it’s impossible to sleep until I’ve experienced it.

And so I make it myself.

Isn’t it the simplest thing in the world?

**

4) One phrase:

There are few journals that I read, and even fewer that I would make the effort to recommend. This one makes me curse the sobriety of my words.

This is a compliment.