Waa’gwan, maa bredren? Ooo da bombaclaad? Aieee! Fuck off, alright? Or should that be ‘fuck off, innit?’ I mean, Christ, aren’t you as sick of the fucking East London scene as I am? I can cope with some of them. The rich boho types who take a load of drugs and wear crazy sunglasses and cook up some ket with you in a frying pan at seven in the morning so you can kill your acid comedown. Those types are so crazy that they’re actually alright. No, it’s the fucking try-hard, die-hard, wannabe Nathan Barley types that really get to me. And little by little, like the grey squirrel, this verminous pestilence is pushing our rarer boho friends into extinction.

I must declare a vested interest here. I, too, had a trust fund. I use had in the past tense because, dear reader, frankly, I pissed it all away in a little over two years on cocaine, highly experimental hallucinogenic drugs and a coterie of shiny things to stare at when I was mashed off my gourd on ecstasy pipes. And I had a lot of fun. That was it. The only thing I was trying hard to do was to pass out at the end of every night and I like to think that there at least, I succeeded spectacularly. So for this reason I’ve held off venting my spleen on the east london scene because despite having a pretty cool rhyme when you say it out loud, taking the piss out of East London types is easier than snatching kiddies from a playground in Soham.

We’ve all seen Nathan Barley by now. But on the remote chance that you haven’t – perhaps you’ve been living in a cave, been on Mars, or just been fucking your sister on Pitcairn Island for the last three years – here’s a quick summary. Nathan Barley is a well off, middle-class Media-Shoreditch Twat type of unbelievable idiocy. His favourite catchphrase is an overly enthusiastic ‘peace and fucking… believe!’ despite the only thing we believe is that everything he does is shit. He’s so desperate to follow any trend he finds that in one episode he actually sticks paint lids in his hair, yet somehow he gets away with appearing cool at the end of each episode.

Nathan Barley is a TV show that appeals only to well off, middle-class, media-Shoreditch Twat types because the whole show is an in joke that’ll only make sense if you’ve been strutting your skinny black jeans on Brick Lane for the last few years and count The Old Blue Last and the Macbeth as your regular haunts. Go on, own up to it. It’s okay. You see, it’s not the East London scene that pisses me off – well, maybe it does a little (I mean, just how many ‘ironic’ sleazy electroclash nights can there be before we reach saturation point?). No, it’s the way that everybody is now so evidently self-conscious that they’re a bunch of retarded shitpricks and worthless wankers but carry on doing it regardless.

I mean, take something I saw last weekend. A middle-class whiteboy in regulation dreads and wraparound sunglasses was freestyling along to some of the most terrible electro-beats I’ve ever heard. In fact, the only thing worse than the music was the relentless sound of his fake mishmash of Cockney / Rasta accent, neither of which belonged to him, the shit. Yet the crowd were baying along, applauding this worthless turd as if he’d just won the Nobel Peace Prize. They knew he was shit. But they loved it all the same. Suffice it to say that I topdecked the gents’ toilet and then left. But where to go? Every bar I went into was displaying similar amusements.

I was not amused. People have embraced the Nathan Barley mentality as if it’s a good thing. Not so long ago at the now defunct Anti-Social night at Bar Music Hall there was a man who actually went dressed in a beekeper’s suit, a la Barley. And okay, that’s fun. I got a laugh out of it. It’s very referential, tres po-mo, n’est ce pas? I really don’t have a problem with irony, with referentialism, with having a joke. What gets me down is the way that I still can’t go even an hour, let alone a day, without some worthless cocksucker pitching me their screenplay or telling me about some film or album they’re working on. The worst of it comes when they try to impress me by talking about some band they’re working with, or some famous artist / writer / socialite they’re drinking buddies with, as if this in some way makes them a worthwhile person. Why do we always have to be defined by what we do, or worse, who we know?

Listen up, idiots: I couldn’t give two tugs on a dead dog’s cock to know what you’re doing. And you could have been shooting up last night with Russell Brand and Peter Cunting Doherty (for it is his middle name) last night for all I care. I’m just not interested. When I go out to a pub, I just want to have a drink with my friends and talk about normal stuff, like who’s got the biggest norks in Hollyoaks at the moment, or how the footy or the snooker is going. Normal stuff. Bloke stuff. In pubs. Without rappers.

What gets me down is the way we all know what’s going on and do it anyway. We carry on pitching our ideas for tv shows, novels, short stories, magazine features, anything, blindly braying and talking over other people’s more sincere conversations, so desperate for attention that we’ve forgotten if we all talk at once, nothing gets heard. We’ve all become so desperately phony that if Holden Caulfield were alive and kicking he’d take a fucking Heckler and Koch CAWS to every last trendy wine bar in Shoreditch and blow out what little brains these people actually have.

Okay. I’m aware that I’m not saying anything new here. In fact the ground beneath my feet is so worn now, I’m sure I’m standing on thin ice, if that’s not a mixed metaphor. But I’m going to say it anyway. Come on! Can’t we all take a night off occasionally? We work – we network – in the places that most people use to get away from work: the pub. What I’d like to see is just one bar that has a no-bullshit-allowed policy, where if you’re overhead talking business, pitching your screenplay or giving out your worthless web address, you’re forcibly ejected, head first, and barred for life. Or worse.

I want a pub I can go into and not feel like I’m sinking under a colosssal tidal wave of semen as the East End’s creative types circle-jerk each other off about their latest projects. If Nathan Barley taught us anything, it’s that we’re all idiots – but moreover, that it’s a label we’ve accepted and carried on anyway, regardless. I want to know why. Why choose this?

So yeah. Peace and fucking… idiots. Believe that, you worthless, boring, miserable cunts.