Description
Songwriter, dyspraxic dandy-about-town, DJ, late-flowering academic, and accidental pioneering blogger, Dickon Edwards bears witness to history, squeamishly uncertain about becoming part of it himself.
Dickon Edwards has one of the longest-running Internet diaries in the world. Starting in 1997, it predates the word “weblog” much less the word “blog.”
“Blogs point outwards,” writes Dr Edwards, “encouraging the reader to look elsewhere, look away. Diaries point only within. Blogs are surface signposts; diaries are deeper destinations.”
Between 1997 and 2007, Dickon leads his band Fosca to new heights, plays with Scarlett’s Well, walks a lobster, represents the Green Party for his beloved London district of Highgate, appears on the BBC’s Imagine, serves as a literary and film critic for fledgling magazine Plan B, comes to terms with his newfound status as a midly prominent diarist, and serves as Shane McGowan’s “New Romantic butler” in Tangier.
A young genius loci of the queer and indiepop scenes of turn-of-the-millennium London, the diary takes us to clubs like Kash Point, Trash, and Edwards’s own The Beautiful and Damned, through sites of historic Soho with his friends Rowan Pelling and Sebastian Horsley.
With amusing cameos from Paul Weller, Mark Gatiss, Billy Bragg, Momus, Pete Docherty and Ali Smith, Diary at the Centre of the Earth is a party for the ages.
This is the first time the diary has been edited, in full, for print. In the well-manicured hands of Robert Wringham with specially-commissioned cover art by Lawrence Gullo and a new introduction by Travis Elborough, the book will be an object of beauty in its own right. It is designed to be both a handbag-friendly fashion accessory to be seen with in public, and a comforting talisman to grab during a sudden eviction.
“Invaluable … Historians seeking some understanding of what on earth went on in London in the late 1990s and beyond, just as they might turn to Pepys for the 1660s, have no better resource.”
Travis Elborough
Order now to receive a download link by email as soon as the e-book becomes available in October 2025.
