An excerpt from the John Walsh column in the Independent, 16th May 1996

If you want to get ahead, publish a diary. With the book-party season in full swing, that seems to be the lesson for thespian and rockular celebrities around town. There's no reason any more to write a real book; just download those mildly pointless encounters with your agent/ co-star/ American fan/ wife/ amusingly ordinary neighbour, add some easy-to-write notes about what you had for breakfast and Robert's your avuncular relation...

...Barely 24 hours later, I was in media diaryland again, at the Royal College of Art where Brian Eno, the former keyboards maestro with Roxy Music (he did the der-der-dit-der-DONG middle bit in Virginia Plain), legendary record producer and one-man fan club of airport music was launching A Year with Swollen Appendices, his chronicle of 1995, complete with batso speculations ("28th May. Woke at 4.30. Funny thing - in Ireland I rarely get an erection...") and a virtual obsession with large female bottoms. Given Mr Eno's transmedial celebrity, the place was full of writers (Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi) as well as rock journos and installation artistes. It's the kind of place where you suddenly find yourself standing tongue-tied beside Jarvis Cocker, being elbowed out of the way by a Finnish blonde in search of an autograph, then rescued by John Brown, the publisher of Viz. More striking was the way the young and desperately groovy all traded up, creatively speaking, in Eno's presence, as if being a pop star were hardly enough when rubbing shoulders with such a pan-aesthetic genius. Thus it was that your humble scribe found himself conversing about poetry with Robbie Williams, the naughty-boy singer formerly (m'lud) with the Take That dancing ensemble...