10

Flying!

Up, Up and Away

On drums, David Alexander De Horne Rowntree had quietly become a high achiever. He seemed to have time for all kinds of things. He was learning karate, building computers, improving his bridge play, publishing scientific papers and learning how to fly. I only knew these things because I read them in the newspapers. Apart from spaceships, we didn’t have much to say to each other, even though we went all over the place together.

It’s the best thing about being in a band, travelling. Travelling is about the best thing there is, at all. I can’t think of anything more worthwhile, more enlightening or more full of promise. There is so much to discover, so many encounters to be had, so many sunsets to see, so many ways of cooking eggs.

Travelling is also incredibly tedious. There was so much travelling. It was like spending half my time in the presence of a crucifying bore who didn’t give me space to think and wouldn’t release me. Every time I got on an aeroplane, there he was. A big invisible companion. Graham was the only person who could make him go away. We were, all four of us, tormented by our travel bores. I loved going on tour more than anything, but we spent so much time in airports, on motorways, on aeroplanes, in cars, trains, boats and buses. Life was one long steeplechase and there was no easy way round it.

At the start of the 13 album campaign we had to go to Manchester to play some songs for a popular radio show on the BBC. It’s about as good as it gets. BBC radio is the best in the world. It’s the best-run business, has the biggest audiences, the best microphones, and has no advertising agenda or ulterior motives for existing other than to serve the people three-and-a-half-minute slices of heaven all day. I suppose it was all marvellous, but it was starting to feel like I’d done this kind of thing already and that, pleasant as it would be to play some new songs to millions of people, why did it have to be in Manchester and why was Manchester so far away? Couldn’t they just play the record? The record always sounds better on the radio anyway. The thought of sitting on the M1 and the M6 for the best part of the day was looming large on my mind like a bad weather forecast at sea. I called Dave.

‘Dave! It’s Alex.’

‘Hello, Alex.’

‘Why have they moved this Radio One business to Manchester? It’s supposed to be in London.’

‘They’re promoting the regions. It’s part of the director general’s new agenda.’ Dave always knew things like that.

‘Oh, I see. Look, have you really got an aeroplane, Dave?’

‘Yes, actually, I’ve got two.’

‘Great. Excellent. Can we fly to Manchester, then?’

‘Yeah, definitely.’

Good old Dave. I remembered how much I’d always liked him.

I hadn’t been to Dave’s house before. We rarely even visited each other’s hotel rooms. He likes to have his own space. He was living in the woods in Hampstead with his wife and a large number of cats and he drove us up to Elstree aerodrome in his little sports car. The airfield was an exciting kind of place. There was a tiny runway, a large number of small aircraft parked on the grass, and a café. I had a fry-up while he checked the aeroplane over with a man called Tony. The café was busy. There were little groups of people huddled together conspiratorially; they all seemed to have a lot to say to each other.

Dave and Tony returned and said they were ready. I asked how long it was going to take. Tony said, ‘We’re taking the Ruschmeyer. It’s brand new and it’s quick. Shouldn’t be more than forty minutes.’

It was autumn and night had fallen completely since we’d arrived at Elstree. The darkness was complementary to the sense of adventure and I was quite excited as we boarded. The aeroplane was the same size inside as a very small car. I sat in the back with Diana. Diana was the band’s current keyboard player. She was a scholar of Debussy and she floated around in the stratosphere of a parallel classical universe. Somehow, she had never heard of Blur when she joined the band, just after ‘Country House’ came out. She was from a deposed Russian royal family background and she also had a lot of cats. Actually, come to think of it, she only had two cats, but it always seemed like there were a lot more. One of them was called Schnibbles, sometimes, I believe.

Dave pushed a button and the engine burst into life. It made the whole aircraft shake and throb. Diana grabbed my hand and held it very tight as we wobbled towards the runway. I grabbed her other hand. I couldn’t hear a thing. Tony passed some headsets to us and indicated where to plug them in. That calmed things down a bit. I could hear Dave talking in a strange language, the only words of which I understood were ‘Clear Take Off’. He turned and offered us both cigarettes and pulled on to the runway. He pushed the big lever forward. The engine screamed. Diana’s eyes were very large in the light of the burning match as I lit her cigarette. ‘Let’s rock, motherfuckers!’ said Dave and took his feet off the brakes.

We were thrown back into our seats. The runway lights rushed by and the rattling aeroplane swept right into the sky. There was nothing to compare to it. The ground, the world and all of its trivial concerns fell away beneath us in strange accelerations and suddenly all was calm and we were apparently still again. Towns floated by beneath us like magical sets of fairy lights, Watford, Milton Keynes, Birmingham. Birmingham already! It all looked so benign and magical. I was enchanted, rapt with a new perspective of a wonderful world.

We landed behind a 737. I didn’t want to go anywhere by car any more. The next day I bought Dave’s spare aeroplane.

Oxford Union

I had just set my hair on fire, somehow, at the Q Awards. Then I had my photo taken with New Order. Then the phone rang and it was someone asking me if I would address the Oxford Union the next day. I said definitely. I was still a bit miffed about not getting into Oxford. I knew they would need me one day, and that day was tomorrow. Keith was at the Q Awards, too. He was at everything. I asked him what the Oxford University Union was. He explained in so many words that it was a debating chamber where the future leaders of the country sharpen their claws by arguing the toss about any old bollocks. Then his phone rang, just like that, and it was someone asking him if he wanted to address the Oxford Union the next day. He said he’d do it, for five hundred quid, cash, and some cake.

The party moved to the Groucho and Magnea was there. She’d moved to London, she said. I went home with her and woke up in the wrong bed at midday. I called Justine and said I’d be home in a minute, but she’d had it. Then I remembered I had to go to Oxford and called her back but she didn’t answer. The thought of going to Oxford tomorrow had been quite a nice thought yesterday. The idea of going to Oxford today, in the clothes I’d slept in, was nowhere near as appealing.

I called Keith. I don’t think he’d been to bed, which made me feel better. He said we had to pick up Mariella Frostrup on our way to Oxford as she was opposing the motion. I liked Mariella. To describe her as a writer and broadcaster, which is what she is known for, would be selling her short. She is a linchpin of London high society. She knew absolutely everybody, from company directors and executives to broadsheet, tabloid and magazine editors, film stars, rock stars, photographers, writers, artists, moguls and billionaires and they all seemed to have a special affection for her. I certainly did. She seemed to be able to call anyone, anytime.

She had about a hundred pages of notes and her speech all prepared. It had even been neatly typed out by her PA. I had a PA by this time, but she couldn’t read my writing.

Keith and I were both the worse for wear and we didn’t know what we were supposed to be talking about; Mariella was looking fabulous and she’d done her homework. The title of the motion was ‘This house believes that music is the highest form of art’. I didn’t need notes to talk about that. I believe it and breathe it.

We dined with the president of the Union in an oak-panelled dining room. The cream of the student body of all the combined colleges of the university was assembled in that room. You could have blasted the whole thing to another planet and there would have been enough knowledge to start a new civilisation from scratch, with no outside assistance.

It was very formal, with prayers, a loyal toast and port that passed to the left. Fair to say, there was definitely a better chance of forming a decent band at Goldsmiths than there, but it was fantastic. We’d lived on pasta sandwiches at Goldsmiths and we rarely bothered with glasses, let alone decanters or grace.

The debating chamber looked just like the House of Commons does on the television. It was a hallowed hall and many great minds had spoken their sensible thoughts there. I had the benefit of speaking last. So far, Keith had stripped to get everyone on our side. Mariella had countered with a suggestion that it was nonsense to compare art forms; a saucy writer of bestselling romantic fiction had told her to get stuffed; a boring DJ type said that music only existed to make money. Then I had the floor. The chairman whispered that he would wave at me once I’d been talking for fifteen minutes and that suddenly seemed like a very long time.

It was silent. All eyes were on me. I hadn’t done my homework, again, a familiar stumbling block with this institution.

I do believe music is the highest form of art. It’s the ultimate condition and the highest form of anything. Music is an absolutely fundamental quality of the universe. Films are not fundamental entities, nor are paintings, or sculptures. They represent things and have functions. Music actually is something. Music is omniscient, a quality that echoes across space and time: from the concord and balance of galactic superclusters down to the vibrating ten dimensional filaments of superstring theory. The entire cosmos is a musical situation and all artistic and scientific endeavours tend towards music. All life aspires to the state of music. Music is a mystery, pure abstraction, calling from deep to deep. Voices raised in song are louder when you’re in love, when you’re happy, when you’re sad. Music can make hearts beat faster and cause tears to flow. Melody is a universal language. Harmony is the resting place of consciousness. Rhythm hammers the mind into the right shape. Rock stars are the only real deities. We are the music makers. We are the dreamers of dreams.

I said. We lost, but only just. There were drinks and commiserations. The president of the Union joined Fat Les and it was time to go back to London.

Le Touquet

It wasn’t obvious whether the Colony Room was one step further towards the gutter or the stars. I was being pulled in two directions. The straight and narrow and the highway to hell were both calling. The spaceship was being built in Milton Keynes and we’d made our best record yet, but I was drinking a lot. I’d take a few weeks off to sort myself out, and then I’d be back with renewed vigour, nailing my pants to the wall of the Groucho between a Damien Hirst and a Peter Blake and climbing into the Colony through the window.

Learning how to fly was exactly what I needed. Playing the bass isn’t a position of high responsibility. Lives are not at risk when you plug in a Fender Precision. There are no huge mistakes to be made, or tragic consequences of irresponsible basslines. It suited me. I’m light-hearted, I was young and I didn’t want to be weighed down by anything remotely realistic.

I needed a challenge. A pilot is taking his own life, and the lives of his passengers, into his hands. It’s the same when you’re driving a car, I suppose. There is no one thing about flying an aeroplane that is any more difficult than reversing a car round a corner. Flying is a lot of simple things happening at the same time, often quite fast. It’s like reversing round an uphill corner while talking on the telephone, reading a map and looking at the rev counter. At two hundred miles an hour. It’s crucial never to run out of petrol either. There’s the radio, the navigation systems, the weather, the handling of the aircraft, the emergency procedures to master. I loved every minute of it.

To begin with, I wanted to fly because I thought it was a good way to get around, but I soon realised that it was flying I loved.

Tony, who had flown with us to Manchester, was my teacher. He was fanatical about flying. He considered time spent on the ground as time wasted. He had the keys to nearly every aeroplane at Elstree and in his day job he was a British Airways pilot. We’d go to Leicester for lunch and practise taking off and landing. Then we’d fly to Wales for tea. They had really good cake in Cardiff. Then we’d come back to London, low level over the Cotswolds, practising engine failures, stalls and steep turns. Nothing looks ugly from the sky, but the Cotswolds surprised me. I’d never been there, but that part of the country looked the most beautiful from above. The grass was the greenest. The gently rolling landscape with its neat farms, honey-coloured villages and grand piles nestling secretly in their formal gardens was as beautiful and otherworldly as an underwater tableau.

Once I had my licence I went to France most weekends. The ‘glamour run’, from Elstree to Le Touquet, took about forty minutes in my new aeroplane, a Beechcraft Bonanza. It was like a flying Bentley with big ashtrays for fat cigars. It was the same kind of aeroplane that Buddy Holly had died in. I never told anyone that until we got home safely, though.

Le Touquet is a seaside resort about ten minutes’ flying time west of Calais. After takeoff at Elstree it was usually possible to get clearance from air traffic control to fly over London beneath the airliners. I’d fly low down the Lee Valley to Canary Wharf, with Tower Bridge and the West End to the right and Greenwich on the nose. London is miraculous and passengers were always still reeling from it all as we turned right at the Thames Barrier to cross the Kent marshes for Dover. As the white cliffs slid behind, France looked like you could reach out and touch it. The Dover Strait is surprisingly narrow. Coasting in at France, Le Touquet, Paris Plage, is the second town on the right. In days gone by it was the exclusive playground of the rich and famous. More recently they huddle together at the southern end of France on its grisly private beaches and within its gated communities. It’s all the same people you see in New York and London down there. Northern France, and particularly Le Touquet, are a well-kept secret. The expansive beaches are deserted and the whole place has a natural glamour. The French are a sophisticated race. Whereas Bournemouth tends to die at the end of summer, Le Touquet becomes cosier and more romantic.

It’s just a ten-minute walk through the pine forests from the airport into town, or you can rent bicycles. There are chocolate shops, a casino and silly things to rent and do. There are restaurants galore and hotels from the grand to the grounded. After a while, I began to like the cheap hotels. They had the most character. Luxury looks the same in Le Touquet as it does in Leeds. You lose all sense of luxury if you never step outside of it. We all need a bit of rough with our smooth.

Airborne Cruising

Flying turned everything around. Where I had dreaded the daily schlep to the next place, now it was the thing that I looked forward to the most. Dave had graduated to a multi-engine, six-seater Cessna. It was a real heap, but it got us around. We took a pilot with us on tour. His name was Bob. He prepared the aeroplane, fuelled it, filed flight plans, checked the weather and paid the landing fees so that Dave and I just had to jump in and take off. Bob was a test pilot for Lockheed Martin. Previously he had made many millions from running a successful aerobatic display team, but he had spent all his money on jet fighters and helicopters. They are the aviation equivalent of crack cocaine and heroin. He told me never to get into jets. He was on top of it now, he said; he still had one jet trainer but he only used it at weekends. Then he said I had to try it. It did Mach 0.8, was fully aerobatic, and he’d just bought new ejector seats for it.

Damon said there was no way he was ever going to get into an aeroplane with me, or Dave, let alone both of us. Then we were in Germany on a Monday. We left the stage and I told the tour manager to call a taxi. Damon asked where I was going and I said I was going home and toodle-oo. There was no scheduled flight until the morning and by the time we’d done the encore Damon had completely changed his mind about which people he got into aeroplanes with. He was quite nervous and drank a lot of vodka on the way to the airport. It was a large international airport, all the runway and taxi lights were on, but there was very little traffic as it was so late at night. The terminal buildings were empty. We had the place to ourselves. It was ethereal. There was a café for the freight pilots and we ate chips and mayonnaise with a cosmopolitan assembly of flight crews while Bob activated the flight plan and made a final check of the weather.

The weather outlook was quite bad with thunderstorms over Belgium, said Bob. Hopefully we would be able to avoid them or it would be very bumpy. Then he and Dave got into a conversation about de-icing equipment that I couldn’t follow. Dave was some way ahead of me as a pilot. He had an instrument rating, the very top flying qualification. In theory it meant that he had the skills to land at Heathrow, in a thick foggy thunderstorm in the middle of the night while simultaneously handling an engine failure. It was no use telling Damon that. He was looking worried and he’d opened another bottle of vodka at the mention of thunderstorms.

The airport was massive and we spent a good ten minutes navigating the brightly lit taxiways. The moon was up in a cloudless sky and we were cleared to enter controlled airspace at our cruising altitude, as we’d hoped. There was a good tailwind. Then the moon disappeared and it started to get bumpy. Bob was asking air traffic for ‘radar vectors’ around the bad weather. Dave was writing things down. Damon was drinking vodka. I lit a cigarette. Bob screamed, ‘PUT IT OUT! If we get a lightning strike and you’re smoking, we’re toast.’ Poor Damon. The aircraft, which must have weighed five tonnes, was getting tossed around like a feather. I’d never known turbulence like that. I had to tighten my seat belt to stop my head banging the ceiling as hailstones crashed around us. The darkness was complete apart from the warm and comforting glow of the instrument panel. My head was thrown back and I could hardly support it, then I would feel weightless. It was a runaway rollercoaster. The Cessna 310 was being put through its paces. Bob was enjoying himself at last. Our manager had insisted that at no time should the four of us ever fly together in a light aircraft, as it would invalidate our insurance. There were risks, but in less than three minutes we popped out of the storm cell into clear skies as if nothing had happened.

Then Damon needed to go to the toilet. We had a hot-water bottle for that, but it had never been put to the test. The flying magazines all recommended hot-water bottles as being the best receptacles. They don’t work. They’re too floppy, that was clear very quickly, and it was a while before Damon flew with us again.

The Fat Les brigade were all too happy to jump into an aeroplane when we were given some tickets for England vs. Germany in the European Championships. I hired an enormous Piper Navajo from a geezer at Elstree. It was a real old banger, a musty twelve-seater with a loo. The match was in Belgium, but the weather was clement. Michael Barrymore was in the band by that time. I’m not sure exactly what he did in the band, but he was good to have around. He was extravagant, funny, highly intelligent and incredibly famous. I was used to walking around with Damon and seeing heads spin and jaws drop. I got a bit of it myself, but Barrymore was in a different league. Absolutely everybody recognised him and loved him too, from kids in pushchairs to grannies on Zimmer frames. Whenever he came to my house, by the time he left, which sometimes was days later, there was always a crowd of paparazzi outside. I was a bit nervous about taking a high-profile homo into the lions’ den of an England/Germany clash. He was wearing a baseball cap, in an attempt at anonymity, but he just looked like Michael Barrymore in a baseball cap. The Navajo has turbocharged engines and goes like stink, but somehow the passengers all managed to get completely shit-faced in the back of the aircraft in the twenty-five minutes it took to get to Charleroi. They sang all the way.

The city was a war zone. You could taste the testosterone on the breeze. There were no women or children in the town, or any Belgians. The shops were shut and marauding gangs roamed the streets looking for trouble. It wasn’t Jerusalem. It was horrible. I haven’t been to a football match since. Fortunately, Barrymore was a big hit with the apes, whose mums were all fans, without exception. We saw the tender side of many a football toughie as they politely asked Michael for autographs for their old dears. Inside the stadium it was chaos. The seats were jammed close together like a fairground ride, and all right on top of each other so that if anyone in the top row fell over, everyone would go down like dominoes. There were mountain rescue teams in place in case that happened. People were vomiting, screaming and throwing things. The man I was squashed next to had got so drunk that he’d messed his trousers. He really hummed. He hugged me when England scored and after that I hoped they wouldn’t score again. I just wanted to get back into the aeroplane.

Mick Jagger was at the airport, getting into his Learjet. I heard someone say, ‘Hey, Michael!’ and Mick turned around. Somebody was running towards Michael Barrymore waving a pen and paper.

More Beautiful Women

Robert, the magnet guy, the artist I’d met in New York, came to stay at Mercer Street. One of his flying lawnmowers was on show at a new high-tech gallery in the East End. An American art dealer had converted an old warehouse into a church of contemporary art. This dealer was new in town. He explained to me that he liked the East End because it was still ‘kinda edgy’. It certainly was. On the morning after the gala opening three men walked into the gallery, locked him in the cellar and stole all the equipment: the computers, monitors, projectors and lights. They didn’t bother with any of the art and some of the artists were offended by the snub.

It was great having Robert around. He knew how everything worked. He enjoyed dismantling mechanical household appliances and putting them back together again so that they worked perfectly. He had already tuned up the dishwasher, given the washing machines a service, and when I got back from the studio he was stripping down the boiler. He felt it was a bit noisy, and that its performance could be improved.

I thought it would be good for business to take him to the Serpentine Gallery summer party and he squeezed into one of my suits. The Serpentine is in the middle of Hyde Park. Every summer a leading art figure is commissioned to create an experimental piece of architecture in the park next to the gallery and the good and the great all come and drink champagne within it. At the end of August a wealthy patron of the arts buys the ‘Summer Pavilion’ and puts it in one of his gardens, next to his tree collection, where it increases in value for ever more.

It was a sit down dickie-bow dinner. I was trying to listen to the football on a transistor radio. England went out and we hadn’t sold anywhere near enough copies of ‘Jerusalem’ to pay for all those violins. Then there was an auction. Charles Saatchi, the Saviour of British Art, bought a Mini covered in spots by Damien, similar to the taxi Keith had left in Rotterdam, but not as good. He paid half a million pounds for it. It was not my night, I figured. Then a man at the next table said, ‘Hey, this girl wants to meet you!’

I couldn’t recall ever seeing anyone so beautiful. I couldn’t recall anything for the moment. She was long, willowy and delicate and she held her infinite gaze on me with perfect poise and immaculate balance. It was like being killed. I was consumed in her gaze. I noticed then that I was laughing and I asked her if she wanted to come to Rotterdam, but we went dancing instead. Robert was having a good evening, he had sold a flying lawnmower to a lonely countess and although he’d split his trousers he was in the mood and, suddenly, strange things were happening again. We were escorted by discreetly armed SAS men to a cavalcade of Daimlers. The men kept looking around and talking into their sleeves. I got into the first one with Robert and the girl. The Duchess of York and Prince Andrew - or maybe it was Edward, whichever one she had been married to - got into the one behind. The remaining cars were for security. The procession glided into Berkeley Square and we hit the dance floor at a club called Annabel’s. I remember doing the Macarena with the duchess and ordering a magnum of Cristal, and I remember leaving with Robert. Then we walked back to the Colony where we belonged.

She called me, that girl, but I didn’t know what to do. I was already infatuated and I knew if I started seeing her I’d be in love, just like that. I was already in love, with Justine, and having sex with people was one thing, but falling in love was much more complicated.

I was with Colin Pillinger at the Groucho and we’d drunk too much absinthe. I was running to the toilet to be sick, but I didn’t make it and I lost my lunch on the floor of the upstairs bar. I felt much better and insisted on clearing it up myself. I was still mopping when Courtney Love arrived. She liked my shirt and she lifted my mop and gave me her phone number. I thought about it and I liked it and I called her. I wondered what booze to take to her house. I settled on a magnum of rosé champagne. Rosé champagne is never, ever wrong. You could take it to your granny’s. You could take it to Buckingham Palace. It was fine for Courtney too.

She was wearing a dressing gown when I arrived. We drank the champagne quite quickly, from the bottle, mainly. She’s had so many songs written about her, probably more than any other living person, and now I know why. She is a beguiling woman. I really liked her, we were having a great time, but I had to go to New York. Damien had another show, and, being banned from the Mercer, had taken the top floor of the SoHo Grand for his stay. It had a large roof terrace.

Things were really spiralling out of control. As the sun came up Keith, Damien and I burnt the backs of our wrists with hot lumps of charcoal from the barbecue on the roof. The circular scar was the sign of The Embers, a select brotherhood about which I can say no more here, as it is highly secret. Damien’s girlfriend Maia wasn’t allowed to join The Embers, but she wanted to join in so she burnt the back of her heel. Our friend Charles, the chef, was eligible for Embership but he didn’t want to go through the ritual. Later he got drunk and used a cigarette.

The burn gave me gyp the whole weekend. By the time the show opened, I’d been up for three days and I had pus dripping down my left hand. The gallery was rammed with gruesome New York high society at a high frenzy. It was like Harrods on the first day of the sales. They pushed and shoved and were every bit as grotesque as the people at the football match in Belgium. There was a girl called Fanny. She’d written a novel. We left right away. We went back to my room at the Mercer and danced to the Bee Gees. So many of the great episodes of my life have been interspersed with the music of the Gibb brothers. We went out for breakfast and I put her on a train to Brooklyn. I had a bad case of the horrors and went back to my room to die. To my surprise Keith was sitting on the bed tucking into a room-service breakfast. He was wearing a pink suit. I wanted to know how he’d got into the room and he said he’d told reception that he was my boyfriend. He had some vodka with him and that took the edge off everything. Keith did too. He never felt any shame. He was never horrified about anything he’d done. He had absolute faith in his every action. His company was just what my screaming superego needed. We walked round to the SoHo Grand in the sunshine, comparing burns.

The roof terrace was a battle scene. The best suite at New York’s second-best hotel was littered with the unconscious, the unsavoury and the undressed. I felt much better, drank some vodka and took all my clothes off.

That was when Damien threw the watermelon. It was the size of a beach ball. He picked it up and hurled it backwards over his head with both hands. It sailed clean over the parapet. I do wonder why he did it. He never got drunk enough to lose his charm. He must have known what he was doing. The street fifty storeys below was a busy one. A direct hit by an apple from that height would have been touch and go. A watermelon travelling at terminal velocity would have taken out a car. Way down below, there was watermelon everywhere. No one had taken a direct hit, but only by chance, and a fair number of people had been completely slimed. The police arrived quickly. There were a lot of them. They arrested everybody, especially the naked ones. I said I had to go inside to get my clothes. The door of the suite was open and I darted through it, unnoticed, scrambling into my trousers and leaping into the lift half dressed when it arrived. I only just escaped from New York that time. My arm was swelling up. Justine took me to the doctor, who wanted to know how it had happened. The doctor asked a lot of questions, to see if I was mad, but I managed to convince her that I was just stupid. Courtney had somehow found and called the home number while I was away. Justine was really good at handling those calls. Stella McCartney called a couple of times, just on friendly business. There was nothing going on there, but Jus was fed up with the girls she didn’t know calling the house and she made them all suffer.

‘Hello, can I speak to Alex?’

‘Who’s calling?’

‘Stella.’

‘Who?’

‘It’s Stella McCartney.’

‘Could you spell that please?’

‘M-C-C-A-R-T-N-E-Y.’

‘Yeah, I’m sorry, er, Sheila, but he’s watching telly. I’ll tell him you called.’

Grand Prix

The temperature was still rising. The tempo was increasing. It was the final spin cycle and things were getting still more far-fetched. I returned from Greenland after crossing the Atlantic four times in seven days, once on Concorde. I can’t remember a thing about Concorde apart from the noise. I was invited to the Grand Prix in Monte Carlo, to write a story for Harper’s Bazaar. I couldn’t see a downside. They’d put me in the blah-blah five star this, give me dinner at the blah-blah Michelin star that, and I’d have a driver and a pit pass and everyone would be there and it was all going to be super-duper. Damien said that he was going and that I should come and stay with Anne and Mungo at their places. They had an apartment overlooking the grid and a villa in the hills.

Anne is an art dealer from an old Monaco dynasty and Mungo is an expert Perudo player. I guess he must have made a stack of money somehow or other. I kept meaning to ask him what he did, but there was always something else going on. They led a life of exquisite tastefulness and elegance. I liked them both a lot.

‘They were going to put you in a hotel, darling, how horrible! What? A driver from Jaguar? Sweetheart, you can’t drive anywhere in town without Monaco plates this weekend. Take my car. Le quoi? Mais c’est terrible! You can’t possibly eat there. Everybody will be at Rocamadour tonight. You must come. Will you? Mungo, get this boy a drink!’

Largely thanks to Anne and Mungo, it was a weekend of great delights. How dull the weekend would have been without them, it’s hard to say. I would probably have thought I was having a good time. It’s funny how ‘very good indeed’ is no substitute for ‘the best’, once you know that ‘best’ exists. This was well illustrated in the harbour. Jemma, who was on/off dating one of the drivers, had told us to meet her on the big boat. Which big boat? we wondered; they were all big. It was a monstrous parade of obscene ostentation. It was tacky. The further we walked along the pontoon, the larger the boats became. Soon we were looking at ships. Then we saw the big boat. It was definitely the right one. On one end there was a helicopter pad with a shiny Augusta 109 sitting on it. The Augusta 109 is the fastest, fanciest, most expensive helicopter on the market. At the other end, an ocean-going yacht was suspended above the deck, in case anyone fancied a sail. It was dwarfed by the magnitude of the mother ship. The whole caboodle gleamed with mint newness and bespoke magnificence. The boats on either side were the second and third nicest things I’d ever seen in my life, both floating fortresses of far-fetched fabulousness. But they were deserted. Absolutely nobody was in the slightest bit interested in second and third. The whole world was aboard Le Grand Bleu. And that’s the way it is in Monaco. The big guy gets everything. I’m not sure if the owner was even there, but everybody else was.

Social standing in the world of high glamour is precarious. The previous time I’d been in the South of France was with the band for the Cannes Film Festival. We’d flown into Nice by private jet and transferred to the festival by helicopter. We were staying at a hotel with massed crowds outside. My room was the only one with a roof terrace. It overlooked the cordoned-off red carpet that led to the hotel entrance. We’d come in through the back doors, but there was a constant flow of celebrity traffic along the carpet, taking bows and signing autographs. I suppose film stars only encounter multitudes at premieres and they wanted to make the most of it. It is a unique and addictive feeling to be confronted with a crowd that loves you and is willing you to surprise or enthral it. Bands encounter thronged humanity every day. It’s normal. Surprisingly the bigger the horde, the easier it is to take command. It’s a thousand times easier to whip a swarm into a whirl than it is to get one person agitated. Crowd behaviour is surprisingly easy to control, as long as you have the right kind of spanner; the police use horses; we used guitars; the film stars had to do it all with their teeth, flashing their flimsy smiles.

The stage was on the beach, and the only way to get to it without going through the crowds was by speedboat. We played a couple of songs and we were done. The record company had hired the speedboat for the whole day, so that was at my disposal. Things were looking good. Roof terrace, private jet, speedboat, new friends – I was on the Soho House boat, with Ewan MacGregor, when the tour manager called and said it was time to go home. I told him I’d decided to spend the rest of my life here. He said that was all fine, and he’d leave an open return ticket at the hotel.

Then Mariella was there and she asked me how the hell I was going to get to the Hôtel du Cap by speedboat. I did not know this hotel. She said we had to go there right now, because it was where ‘it’ was. There is a lot of dashing around trying to find ‘it’ at Cannes. ‘It’ never stops moving. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘I’ve got a moped.’

It was indeed all happening at the Hôtel du Cap. Security was draconian. From nowhere, Mariella produced sheaves of paperwork, badges and accreditation, and we were in. It seemed to be more of a magazine than a hotel. There was a different story going on in every room. Apart from the bar, which was buzzing nicely, it was peaceful. The management had gone to great lengths to preserve the refined calm of the establishment. In town it was a bunfight; up in the hills it was all about candles and whispers. It was a wonderful atmosphere. I struck up an instant intimacy with a billionaire who invited me to come and stay on his boat in the south seas.

We were drinking Bellinis - champagne and peach juice. Pretty soon everyone was. At the exact point when things could never get any better, I left, taking two beautiful women with me.

It was late and all was calm on the Promenade des Anglais. We sat on the terrace looking out to sea and singing.

Then two men were pulling me out of bed by my feet. I was naked. God, I felt awful. What was happening? I kicked but they kept pulling and they were shouting now.

‘Messieurs, s’il vous plaît!?’

‘Room is finish!’ said one.

‘Fine. I’ll take it for another night.’

‘Is finish!’

‘Moi, je n’ai pas fini. Moi! Je payerai.’

‘Is all full.’

‘You’re telling me it’s awful, it’s a disgrace, mate.’

‘Non, monsieur. All. Full. Full.’

That was it: boom to bust in twenty-four hours. Dragged out into the corridor by my feet. One of them went back to get my stuff while the other one stared at me. The girls had gone. The speedboat was making someone else’s day today. I was wrecked, knackered and homeless. There wasn’t a vacant room within a hundred miles. How are the mighty fallen. I didn’t call anybody. I went back to live in England immediately. Nobody loves you when you’re down and out, baby.

In Monaco this time, things were on more of an even keel as I was with friends. There was something vaguely familiar about those cars flashing round and round in circles at high speed and volume. When they’d finished they threw champagne everywhere. As soon as the race was over, the sky filled with helicopters. It was gridlock up there.

We all walked to the beach. Anne said the gaffer, Prince Albert, was going to be there. I asked Mungo what I should be doing if I had a royal encounter. Mungo knew all about etiquette. He had shown me four different ways to tie a tie the previous evening. Then he had explained who made the best ties in the world and why they were great and where to get them. Then he’d kicked my ass at Perudo again. I felt like a small but favoured boy. With regards to any Albert activity, he said that it was an informal occasion so it would be quite relaxed, but it would be good manners to stand if we were introduced, not to shake his hand until offered, to let him lead the conversation and to refer to him as ‘sir’. It all sounded sensible.

Monte Carlo’s one small beach is reserved for its senior players. It is fastidiously maintained. It’s more of an open-air restaurant where you eat lying down. Anne and Mungo’s pitch, with its loungers and parasols, was permanently reserved and it neighboured the royal enclosure. Sure enough, Good Prince Albert was there and he and Anne were deep in conversation. I was introduced and I stood up and it all went very well. Then Damien’s brother Bradley arrived. Part of Damien’s charm is that he is not from a privileged background. He’s more of a home-grown king, a triumph of merit and charisma, which have their own nobility. I love Damien’s family. Bradley is a Formula One fanatic and he was having the best day of his life. He was very drunk and excited and he was dripping from the sea. ‘Foookinell, did you see them bazongers? Them were beauty.’

‘Ah, Bradley, this is Prince Albert of Monaco.’

‘Fokinell, alright mate. Did you see them tits?’

Prince Albert of Monaco was smiling.

Several Sorties

August was a holiday. I spent the first week in the Colony and then I flew down to Land’s End to see Fanny. She’d come back from New York to stay with her parents. I terrified her poor mother. I drank all the brandy and knocked all the delicate things over. I had trouble on the way back, getting caught out by bad weather. I’d checked the forecast thoroughly, but the forecast got it wrong. I wasn’t qualified to fly in cloud. There was fog behind me and the cloud ahead was lower than the hill-tops. I was in a blind panic and considering putting out a Mayday. I knew very well that the average time an untrained pilot retains control of the aircraft in cloud is less than three minutes before spiralling into the ground. I heard someone say on the radio that he was above the cloud at fifteen hundred feet. There was no way forward or back. The only way was up. I was flying at five hundred feet and at a normal cruise climb I figured I’d be in cloud for two minutes. I just had to keep the nose up and the wings level and watch the airspeed. Sounds easy, but I’ve never been so scared, not even being chased down an icy road by a hundred of Magnea’s boyfriends. Not even close. Time stood still in the greyness. You can’t trust your sense of balance in cloud. Only the instruments can tell you what’s happening. I tried to do everything slowly but my mind was racing, my heart was whirring and sweat was teeming from every pore. Suddenly, as if someone had turned the lights on, there was brilliant sunshine everywhere. It was like being born again. I swore to do an instrument rating. I landed at Bournemouth and stayed with my mum and dad for a couple of days. My dad said he was concerned about how much I was drinking. Still, we went to the pub and the landlord wouldn’t let us pay for anything and kept bringing new whiskies for us to try. He didn’t want us to go home at closing time and kept bringing forth older and grander whiskies. By the time we sailed out at two a.m. my dad was singing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ and agreeing that it wasn’t easy to stay out of trouble.

The weather cleared, eventually, and the hangovers, and I said I’d take my parents to the Isle of Wight for lunch. My mum is quite a nervous flyer and it was the first time I’d been able to persuade her to come on the aeroplane. At the airport, as I went to complete the pre-flight checks on the Bonanza, I noticed the Red Arrows parked in formation on the apron. When I was happy with the aircraft, I signalled to Kelly and Jason in the terminal to make their way over. As they were getting in I noticed the Red Arrows starting to taxi. It was a stirring sight. They all moved as one. I called the tower.

‘Golf Sierra Tango request taxi.’

‘Golf Sierra Tango, roger. Follow the Red Arrows, please.’

Kelly was sitting next to me and her mouth was gaping wide open as they flowed past and we pulled out behind them. She kept looking from me to Jason and back again. She grabbed my hand and it was pretty spectacular as they reached the runway and rocketed off as one. If you ever meet my mother, you will know her because she is the one telling that story. She tells everyone about that.

I went back to Cannes with Mariella. It took four hours in the Bonanza, due south all the way and not a cloud in the sky. We stayed at the Hôtel du Cap. The film festival had popped like a bubble and disappeared. In high season the clientele comprised bored billionaires’ wives, presidents and royalty. It is said to be the finest hotel in the world. They only accept cash as payment, and there are stories of people taking suites for the entire summer and settling up with briefcases full of bundles. You couldn’t make anything more luxurious. It was so luxurious it had a tranquillising effect. Everyone was in bed by ten, exhausted by the utter tedium of complete perfection. We got drunk on Bellinis and went for a swim in the pools at midnight and it felt like we’d done everything there was to do there.

We left in the morning to find Damien in Provence. He was playing volleyball. His host was slaughtering a lamb. We went for dinner in the world’s most expensive restaurant. From the moment the junior waiter unfolded your napkin for you until the nice lady lit your cigar, things could not have been more tippetytop. Leaving the best hotel with my exalted consort, to arrive at the most expensive restaurant in my own aeroplane, to meet the world’s richest living artist. The next day we flew to Mick Jagger’s chateau in the Loire.

It was going to be downhill all the way from here, surely? This was the top of the hill. What else could life hold? It’s funny, but when I look back I think that period of my life was the bottom of a pit, rather than the summit of Mount Fantasticus. I was a morally bankrupt, pissed fatso with a stupid grin and a girlfriend with a murdered heart.