I keep looking in the mirror to see if I can catch my face.


Not out of excessive vanity, but just to see if I can remember what I am. Because I think I forgot, somewhere between here and there.

We can’t run away from it – modern life is saturated with iconography. Everything you do is naught but a rehashed, remixed version of what the Buzzcocks did in the 70s or what the weans in Skins wore last week. It’s the drip-down theory in its most terrifying incarnation; nothing can be original because the people at the top did it before, and they copied the guys who went before them anyway.

Everyone knows it. The phenomenon of the ‘Alexa’ and the ‘Agyness’ with gender counterpart of their boyfriends; interchangeable. Would you like to be Scott Walker today, or would you prefer living off 2001's back-catalogue?

Gigs today are a riot of Fred Perry. May the Chelsea boot factory never close down, nor the vale of comparison ever run dry.

Girls in scuffed shoes and huge-mungous hairdos – sweating to death in the maudlin fur they bought vintage and were insistent on wearing tonight. They will take it off for no one. No-one. Cloakrooms are not their business. They will show everyone they are bohemian, if it kills them. The smell of hound is your problem, lads. Deal. Wi. That.


Sadly, for ladies of a certain postcode, the wearing of fur can galvanise the impression that one is perhaps an Easterhouse hooker and not quite the reincarnation of the darling 60s.

One such character, a self-appointed doyenne in nobody's circle, wears her grandfather's shoes with her grandmother's jacket. To university.


Doing too much at once there? Entirely out of the question? No, but she’s playing it racy – mixing up her Agyness with her Edie.

For some reason, Edie Sedgwick – who came across real nice in Factory Girl and has a mean way with an eyelash that I frequently try to emulate – is everyone’s bestest heroine. But there’s nothing empowering about being an anorexic (speaks experience) and there’s certainly nothing liberating about letting men walk all over you. She was a light who was trodden on until she went out. 


So why do we choose who we want to be so unwisely? Often they're not so talented, or so interesting. More often than not, it's some tosser from London who was born rich and doesn't give a fuck about you, so why the hell should you care about them?


It’s because identity is now a commodity; today I’ll buy my personality and tomorrow I can throw it away. Images scream to you from TopShop windows and the NME (if you even buy that these days), telling you how you should be and what you should be wearing and which star-crossed images you should be dragging out from their photo-stories. Every year there is a new zeitgeist, which becomes more and more familiar to the one before. Fair enough, you can do what you want in terms of combining them but it’s pretty much fair to say we live in a culture of quotation.

We have so many storylines to contest with that we are now never sure if we are behaving in the way which befits the situation – or just copying what we’ve seen on telly.  When we tell someone we love them, sometimes we're copying the way someone else put it in a song. It’s such an effort to be original, to be yourself and you get slated for it anyway.  The scars of peer pressure are hard to outgrow.  Why not just join the crowd of cult-worshippers?

People will see your shoes and prescribe a personality type. Half of this is because we live in front of the television and our idea of other people's lives, and half because when we are out we are taking pictures of taking pictures. To prove that we have something. We know what people are like - we've seen all the types already. We've decided what we 'are' already.

Thanks very much.

The real issue probably isn't quite our 'failures' perceived or imagined, it's just speaking volumes about our attitude to cultural recycling. Under my bed and slung on the floor, I've more lace-up heeled brogues than I care to disclose, literally millions of 60s shifts for my lack of curve and a boxful of silk scraps bought from charity shops because I think that doing this makes me in some way more authentic along with high-street Chanel and t-shirts I've procured with special means. Lots of books I don't read as much as I did before this age.

I don't think anyone even has the ability to be superior - not for special inventiveness. Medals are only handed to those who manage to negotiate the cliches without treading on the landmines. I know I should calm the heid and rest for it, but it's maddening. We're always going to be compared to something else. I don't want to be part of something so mediocre.


“Anything beyond original thought is beyond you.”

A goth outside the ABC said that to me once. He was dressed like one of the Horrors. What the hell did he know?



Faris Rotter saw John Cooper saw Bob Dylz.