Diary at the Centre of the Earth Vol. 1 (1997-2007)
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.
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
Dickon Edwards
Dr Dickon Edwards holds a PhD in English and Humanities (Birkbeck University of London, 2022), and has kept a online diary since 1997. In May 2017, it was recognised as the UK’s longest running web diary by the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College London, as part of their exhibition Dear Diary. The diary has appeared on TV (BBC1’s arts programme, Imagine) and in various periodicals across the world, from the UK’s Select (RIP) to Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter. In 2014 he was featured in the Guardian as one of Travis Elborough’s Top 10 Literary Diarists.
Author portrait © Piers Allardyce