Biba Kopf? Who’s she?

Regrets, I’ve had plenty, and I don’t mind mentioning them. At inordinate length, to anyone who’s buying.

According to a profoundly unscientific straw poll on Twitter and Facebook, these are just some of the pseudonyms I could have chosen if I’d really wanted to be a highly successful music journalist: Dirk Nastie; Glen Thrips; Rick Ord; (Tim?) Phutmon; Ace Ventura; Jeff Senstarship; Tim Shaar Footy; Tim Shaar True; Tommi Fanto; Tom Fantomi; Tad Foot-Tapper; Mitch Carper. Thanks to all who contributed to the experience. At last, I know where I went wrong in my life.

Actually the real reason I never became a successful music journalist was that I was always trying to write stuff like this, but never quite pulling it off:

Everywhere you look, there seem to be increasing signs that we are living inside a novel that JG Ballard started to write at the exact moment he died, a novel that takes the form of a reverberating hallucination that just keeps giving. Perhaps the novel/hallucination ends when Ballard himself is the most followed character on Facebook, his brain radiating astounding time-bending realities at the centre of the new post-internet universe where the numerous and multiplying levels of our existence interact. For reasons that help the writing of this column, the soundtrack to this novel/hallucination would be best supplied by Prince, himself currently mucking around with reality and his possible mysterious connection to it in ways that mix up the Ballardian with splashes of obsessive Gaga narcissism, madcap McLuhan theorising, larky Russell Brand lunacy and teasing Dylan masking.