I was sitting in the pub thinking about things I should have thought about ages ago - demographics, target audience. But also I want to introduce a femme fatale into this story I'm writing on this website I do for these songs I've recorded. But it's not easy. Post Maddie. Post Spice. Post Carrie. A woman whose dangerous sexuality lures men away from the duller comforts of the atomic family agenda? Whose ambition, self-interest and drive are a surprise to the protagonist-reader-spectator? How do you make her stand out, how do you make her special?

"It's all relative - the geezer has to be a bit repressed." I know that. "Linda Wotsit in Last Seduction," someone claims. Why? I ask. "She threw blokes through car windscreens." Pro-action over seduction, violence and lack of empathy. You can't say it's not fatale.

The ladies are intrigued. "So what's the boys' conclusion then? What makes a femme fatale these days?" I don't know but all this is useful.

Demographics. Men's magazines are in a quandry, someone has read. The Lad's had it. Too TFI, Liam and Gascoigne. And nothing much has come along to replace him that your unfettered street-gent sees as any fun at all. The Lad echoed Girl Power in some ways, the latter giving girls permission to make up and party with new school feminist backing to do the things they wanted to do anyway. New Lad was about stoopidly digging the stoopid things lads dig - no chink in it's armour could be found - it was pure chink and proud of it and free from any high hat politics and the permission-seeking this entails. Both pop-social demographs couldn't fail, and couldn't fail to sell.

With all of this in mind, I got up bright and breezy to set about my research. After consulting The Ministry Of Flowcharts website and having spent several hours sweating out in the reading room of the British Library I managed to pin down an array of upcoming man/family demographs. All of whom could be potential fans and all requiring their own magazine reflecting their life aspirations. One might be your secretary. Or a dancer in a go-go club.

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The Tanner

The Tanner waits alone in the Old Kent Road Gin Palace, a fur coat pulled tightly about him. His face is Clinique exfoliated, scruffed and M-lotioned. After several bitters he'll start cursing the ghost of some uppity legal advisor who made him feel worth something for a while, then turned around and traded him in for the nearest tuppence ha'penny strutting Latino with a nut-tight gut and no English. As he swallows back the last of his bitter he burps free a curse upon the predatory whims of all things Woman. He doesn't really mean it. A tear breaks out. He'd love to be loved and wishes the world was more like the past, when things were good and people were nice. A shark-woman swims through the bar when she spots his distress. Soon she's ploughing down on him across his mattress, a smirk on her face, a Sex And The City pan shot sweeping through her self-interested head. The Tanner lets his eye navigate the ceiling and caresses the hair from her eyes once she reaches a juddering finish, wondering if this might be one that lasts. Stay? Please. - he hints as she rises from the bed. She checks him up and down as she zips her jeans to leave. Tanners aren't her type. I mean, what would people say?

The Winkworths

Just back from the Beach where their loungers collapsed while they were watching 'Trisha' dubbed into German. As they vocalised their opinions on the topics covered, lesser educated and disenfranchised locals danced past to ask if they wanted another Cava spritzer and they picked their heads off the sand and gurgled "Why not eh? We've worked hard enough. Time we lived a little." Later, they freshened up and sauntered into town to sideways glance at the pleasing swerve of tourist flesh from the shade of a cafe table umbrella. Distractedly, they penned postcards to the tenants of their four mid-nineties bought-to-rent flats back in London. Dear Schmucks. Keep it coming. F.U., the Winkworths. They ended the evening staring across tapas in an ultra exclusive outdoor restaurant. The other customers looked like Chilean businessmen communicating very little to curiously mute escorts. But they were cool with that. Very Eighties, very decadence.

Wee Fraser Winkworth

Wee Fraser Winkworth is the fresh-faced cousin noir of the New Lad. An easy-to-ignore child now entering his late teens and raging hard against everything low-of-brow. He stays in his bedroom reading Kant, listening to The Dog And Pony Show and writing a thesis on the effects of fringe pornography on stupid countries. Snookered by spiralling house prices, he cannot afford to move out of his parents home and is quite content to wait for forty years until they die so he can parade masturbating about the living room. Asked when he is going to cut the cord and land on his own two feet, he waves out the window at the impossible cost of living and demands whether his parents would prefer to stand by watching him cornholed at fist-point in the broken lifts of a Thamesmead horse block. His parents blame the fact that he was conceived listening to Pearly Dewdrops Drop by the Cocteau Twins.

The Dalai Benjys Corporate Modeller

The Dalai Benjys Corporate Modeller can't see why lifespace has to be divided into hyper-constraining structuralist monads like 'work' 'home' 'family' 'reward' 'external' 'upper' 'leftie' 'them' 'us' 'carrot' 'West Ham' 'salt' 'pepper' 'me' and 'other people'. He once read an interesting report that pointed out how companies increased productivity by empathising and empowering their staff with random acts of senseless humanism to counter modern snap-together transcience. In California, such companies start the morning by touching and caressing one another's behinds, stating earnestly how much they love, understand and ultimately respect all our shared fears, hopes and aspirations. He expounds his theories excitedly each time his boss slumps down into the basement to collect another tray of Crabstick and Cucumber subs.

Urban Not-Spooks

Their friends having settled down or been priced out of the city, Urban Not-Spooks find themselves casual, contemporary, effervescent when called for, charming, pan-class and cultured but one hundred percent alone. They buy family birthday cards in Paperchase, write them in Ixxys Bagels, take in a foreign movie at the ICA, check if Selectadisc has 'Plastic Fang' by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - then go clubbing solo. They stand against the walls and listen worriedly to sob stories from staring Danish men called Carlsten who have nowhere to sleep that night. They sometimes worry that they will end up becoming Urban Spooks, and often start websites instead. While they could consider returning to be dapper tropical fish in their smalltown small ponds, the total freedom and anonymity they now have sometimes gives them a tingle of illicit excitement. They wake late next afternoon to find that Carlsten has run off with their UK first edition of 'In Cold Blood' and the passbook to a Woolwich current account which closed over two years ago. They sit in the local cafe, write 'You have so much to offer the right person' in the ketchup on their plate, stare through the window as skipping children make their way home from school through the still-frosty air.

Robinson Theakston

After a second messy divorce which cost him his children, a three bed semi in Epsom and half his sanity, Robinson Theakston told his friends that he was now irrepairably damaged inside the stasis of his own centrifugal frightmare and phantasm-engorging head. Following a failed attempt to cycle overland to South Africa he returned to the UK to cultivate a leading-edge comb-over and squat outside Caledonian Road peep shows in an ill-fitting pink and caramel flying blouson as an Urban Spook (see Urban Not-Spooks), then became his local Conservative Party candidate. He now gets a sadistic kick out the fact that across the surface of his life he is an aspiring pillar of regional politics, though he returns home to spend his evenings editing together homemade DVDs of a Korean exchange student being asked to kiss into a microphone through an echo chamber. He dreams of the day he will be caught. He will walk slowly through his front door and into the spring dawn, across his garden path and onto the front seat of a cold police van feeling somewhat relieved, more than anything.

---oOo---

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