So I have finally taken the plunge into the confusing world of myspace.com. Thank God I am pretending to be 21 for the next 13 months or I would feel uncomfortable in sallying forth into this domain of youth culture, but a few people keep asking me if I've got a page and it's meant to be a way of generating interest in one's work and I need another computer based activity to help me avoid doing work (soon I will do nothing that does not involve my laptop - I hope to have it integrated into my brain like I am one of the Borg).
Andrew Collings was showing off about how his myspace page (for his radio show really) has got 80 friends on it already and I thought I could do better than that, because as is my understanding it's really just a competition to see who can get the most strangers pretending to be their friends. I looked up rival 6Music DJ Russell Brand's page and he's got over 1000 friends, which I think will put Andrew and my pages into some kind of perspective. Russell Brand is also all over the tabloids for dating Kate Moss and the Sunday Mirror had a girl selling a story about her brief and tawdry relationship with the Dickensian wordsmith. As usual she came out of it looking foolish, but I was more upset that I had made the mistake of coming on the show of clean living animal loving, health food nut Collings (
who spends most of his life worrying about mop heads) rather than ex-heroin addict party animal, model shagging, kiss and tell generating Brand. My old side-kick Trevor Lock is his side-kick now, (though I believe Russell allows him to speak, which may be why loyalties have shifted there) so he gets to go out and eat cocaines with cock hungry groupies (I imagine. I have nothing to back that up with apart from envy), while I just get to review the papers and eat dairy free flapjack and dried apricots with Collings (who spends all the time the records are playing complaining about mops).
Ah well, I am glad. I wouldn't want to eat cocaines anyway. I think me and Collings have to get more rock n roll and then maybe we'd get more coverage and listeners. Maybe it's best we just stay as we are and leave all the tabloid attracting shenanighans to the dandies and small-faced boys who precede us. I quite like dried apricots anyway and you can't go to prison for eating them - unless you eat about a million and then do a smelly fart in front of the Queen (it's a thirteenth century law that has never been repealed).
I like Russell Brand. I think he's funny and has a great command of language and I really enjoyed
a piece he wrote in the Guardian about West Ham the other week. He has the soul of a poet and the lack of self-consciousness that allows him to enjoy his life in a way that I would find difficult. But even though I lambasted Collings on air, I still prefer him and like being on his show and his friend (for half an hour a week, but that's still a lot of friendship over the year). Much as I would love to read a story in the paper about me being a selfish lover who just rolls over and goes to sleep when I have had my fun (which is of course true of me and most other men you're going to meet, so why Brand's alleged lover felt it necessary to point out I am not sure), it's probably better really that that hasn't happened. Collings and me aren't showy, but we get the job done. Apart from last week when I was tired and hungover.
Anyway if you want to be my myspace friend (and remember this won't in anyway make you my actual friend) then my address is
www.myspace.com/richardherring.
I imagine I will be bored of it all in a week or so, so make the most of it now.
And don't forget the justgiving page. That one is more important. Thanks to those of you who have been so generous so far. You are ace!
