11
Keep Fit
Will Ricker had a knack with restaurants. He knew where to put them and what fashionable people would want to eat next. He’s nothing like the gentlemen behind the Ivy and Le Caprice who always suggest a saintly otherworldliness, as if they’ve astrally projected down from heaven to keep an eye on how things are going here on earth. Those fellows glide around the tables of their establishments, slightly beyond and above the hubblebubble of lunch and dinner. Will, though, was one of the boys, and gave the impression more of being en route to or from an unmade bed; but every time he opened a new restaurant it filled up with the famous and the fabulous. People tend to get much more excited about seeing Johnny Depp than they do about food, even dessert. The kind of women who get excited about sticky toffee pudding go completely la-la when confronted with a munching movie star. It’s a different order of excitement. Will had some kind of celebrity-invoking juju powers and everybody wanted to be his friend.
‘Alex, buddy.’ He said, he’s Australian, as you can see. ‘Alex, I was watchin’ one of your Blur videos yistidy. Mate, it’s a cryin’ shame. You’ve gotta lose some weight, mate. I’m sindin’ my man round.’
Resistance was futile. A spritely Australian appeared on the doorstep the very next day and brought in dumb-bells, boxing gloves, a bicycle, chest expanders and other instruments of torture. Then he told me to put my running shoes on. I didn’t have any running shoes. I had quite an anti-exercise outlook. I believed that people in bands should concentrate on other, less realistic things, like being decadent and fantastic. But here he was, and it was true that I was starting to look rather frog-like, bulging at the eyes and the neck and the belly. Girls didn’t seem to mind, so I’d been ignoring it. I’d rather been hoping things would sort themselves out, which was the strategy I applied to most crises.
Fortunately, the press office darlings of Adidas, Puma, Gola, Lacoste, Converse, Reebok and Nike had been bombarding me with trainers and I grabbed a pair from a big stack of unopened boxes, put my cigarette out and took a deep breath. By the time we’d run as far as Trafalgar Square, I was taking much deeper ones. I was in a different world of pain from my accustomed hungover malaise. Chest on fire; heart beating like a machine gun; legs, arms, back aching and needling me with intense agonies. I stumped around the pond in St James’s Park and traipsed back up St Martin’s Lane groaning and bellowing so loudly that heads turned. Jason, my tormentor, didn’t break into a sweat. I was wearing a heart rate monitor. He said he’d never seen it go that high, which seemed to please him immensely. Then he said, cheerfully, ‘Roight, boxin’ toime.’ The gloves that he gave me had seen plenty of active service and gave forth an unforgettable series of stinks as they warmed up. Having destroyed my legs, he set to work on my arms, teasing me exquisitely with phantom punches if I let my guard drop. After a couple of minutes I decided to try and kill him, but I couldn’t get near him. He finished me off with some sit-ups and said he’d see me next week. Next week sounded awfully soon. I asked him if it was really necessary to go through all that every week and he said that, to start with, daily would be the best way to make a difference.
I phoned Will and told him he was a bastard, took a cool shower and sipped some orange juice. Then, quite slowly, I started to feel excellent. My hangover had evaporated. I felt energetic and nimble. I felt weightless, fearless and calm. I was in a genuine altered state, but it was the exact opposite of drinking, which feels great while you’re doing it and horrendous afterwards. I felt so good that I went to the café and had a fry-up.
Jason’s visits became regular. His clientele were the chieftains and queen bees of the city jungle. He knew more famous people than me and he had them all grunting and groaning. Most of them had swimming pools as well, poor souls. He came to me early in the morning, at six-thirty, having already given a fashion magazine editor the works. She followed her fitness training with an hour of yoga, five days a week. I couldn’t tell if that was right or wrong. Directly after me he went to Chelsea and bossed Bryan Adams up and down his swimming pool for a bit, before going to fight with Will Ricker. Will was getting quite fanatical about boxing. I was starting to enjoy the excursions around the park in the peace of the early morning sun. Gradually, we extended the run around Buckingham Palace and Green Park. There were times when I hadn’t slept, but I knew my hangover wouldn’t be as bad if I ran around the parks. That still wasn’t sufficient motivation to get me out of bed, but Jason saw to that. Pretty soon, I started to run on my own as well.
I’d spent about a million pounds on champagne and cocaine. It sounds ridiculous but, looking back, I don’t regret it. It was definitely the right thing to do. It was completely decadent, but I was a rock star, after all, a proper one, with a public duty to perform. The smorgasbord of life’s exquisite delights was my raison d’être. I wanted to live life in the moment as fully as possible, and stocks and shares weren’t the ticket. I don’t think I could have enjoyed the full twelve courses of the menu gastronomique with any less of a capital investment. Oddly, if I’d been more conservative, and spent the odd hundred grand, which was probably about par for a successful musician, the rest probably would have just disappeared, but my excesses were so well documented, and ‘key to the image value of the Blur brand’, that the cash I spent formed a kind of advertising campaign and I’m pretty sure I recouped the whole lot, one way or another. Certainly, the accountants managed to claim back the VAT on most of the champagne. If you spend enough money on something, it starts coming back eventually.
Still, I was at a watershed. There is a natural elegance in youthful excess, which gradually turns uglier as one gets older. Uglier and uglier and uglier. Did I want to be chasing women when I was sixty-five, or, worse still, drunk, legless and lonely like Jeffrey Bernard?
No.
The Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom.
Instrument Rating
Nothing terribly bad happened when I wasn’t drinking, but the worry was that nothing terribly fantastic happened either. I’d always adhered to Storm Thorgerson’s advice to take a rest from drinking for one day every week. It wasn’t ever easy, but it served me well. Sometimes I’d take a week off, and I’d even gone sober for a whole month here and there. By now, hangovers were unsupportable five-day epics with special effects and I thought I might try to abstain for a whole year. It was quite a big step to take. Being elegantly wasted was kind of my job, and my social life, too, revolved around hedonistic abandon. When I’d stopped drinking in the past, it had been a matter of just hanging on until the time was up, but to spend a whole year in temperance meant that my life would have to change.
For any drinker the entire pattern of existence changes when alcohol is off the menu. New routines emerge, things get done and good things do inevitably develop, although at a slower pace than the whizz, bang, wallop, wa-hey, whoops-a-daisy of the boozy escapade. Eventually, I started to feel I might be star-ring in a different kind of film altogether.
Pro Flight Aviation, the flying school at Bournemouth airport, was one of only three in the country that offered airborne training for the instrument rating. I’d already completed a correspondence course that involved many weeks of fiddling around with a slide rule and memorising acronyms, followed by a week of intensive residential study and three days of exams at Gatwick airport. An instrument rating is the ultimate pilot’s licence. An instrument-rated pilot is licensed to fly not just in cloud, but also in controlled airspace, with the airliners.
Airliners never fly direct to their destination. Air traffic would be unmanageable if that were the case. To keep things organised, there is a global network of airways, which are like motorways. The jets join the airways system after the takeoff procedure, and leave the network only to descend at the destination aerodrome. This means that all the world’s serious air traffic is funnelled very close together. The separation margin between me on the way home in my Bonanza and you eating nuts on a 747 coming in the opposite direction at a relative speed greater than a Kalashnikov bullet might be as little as five hundred feet. That’s just a bit longer than a football pitch. It’s not much when you consider a 747 is just a bit wider than a football pitch and we might both be in cloud. This is why the instrument rating is so difficult. The CAA, the governing body, make it difficult on purpose. Fifty feet is the tolerated margin of error. No autopilot, no GPS, and screens over the windows so you can’t see out.
The flying school was in a different time zone from everywhere else in Bournemouth. I called them and a voice told me to report for training at ‘zair-o nine-ah hundred ars Zulu’. I knew what Zulu meant; it’s Greenwich Mean Time, but I can never remember if it’s an hour ahead or an hour behind the normal kind of time. Sometimes it’s the same, particularly in France. I asked, ‘Eight a.m?’ The voice said, ‘Affirmative. Eight local currency’, but from his tone I gathered the local currency wasn’t accepted.
Zulu time is the only one that counts for pilots. Instrument clocks in aeroplanes are all set to Zulu. A pilot departing Kuala Lumpur has to say what time it will be in Greenwich when he wants to take off, rather than what time it will be in Kuala Lumpur.
To climb into one of the flying school aircraft was to step out of local time and out of recognisable space into a new scheme of references. The outside world was obscured by screens and represented solely by six wobbling needles. To start with it was terrifying, but after a few weeks I could take off without looking out of the window, fly to Southampton, make an approach, get within fifty feet of the runway, have an engine failure, execute a missed approach on the remaining engine, fly back to Bournemouth, wait in the hold, descend and cross the runway threshold without taking my eyes off those six needles.
It was the most difficult thing I’d ever done. Every waking moment I was consumed by it. I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. There wasn’t room. Towards the end of the training, taking a day off would be enough to take the edge off my flying skills and set me back two or three days. Not everyone was up to it. The pressure reduced grown men to tears daily, as their dreams of becoming commercial pilots proved to be beyond them. There was a handsome RAF Tornado pilot, on leave from active duty in a war zone; he briefly became my hero, but he just couldn’t get the hang of flying holds. He’d definitely get there, though. There was a cheeky kid who’d been left some money by his granny. He was never going to make it. A flying instructor who had more knowledge than most of us to start with, and been a little bit of a know-all, steadily and surely became overwhelmed and ran out of money. He’d taken out a bank loan to finance his training and over the weeks he changed beyond recognition. It broke him completely. I was changing, too. I wasn’t thinking about drinking or shagging or anything except instruments.
Claire
I got my stripes and returned to London in April, on the day that spring arrived. It was a Thursday. I went to the Groucho to meet Bernard Sumner from New Order and, to quote Bernard, it was as if the whole city was feeling ‘a sudden sense of liberty’. The calm sunny evening had drawn people into it and as I strolled from Covent Garden into Soho, crowds were lingering outside pubs, suddenly able to dream and do nothing in particular again. When I arrived at the Groucho, the whole world was there. In the upstairs bar, Moby was playing ‘London Calling’ on the piano, Joe Strummer was singing and Wayne Sleep, the ballet dancer, was turning pirouettes on the bar. Keith was in full swing as impromptu ringmaster, leading the jolly gathering to join in with the ‘and I . . . live by the river-uuh’ bits.
It wasn’t torturous being sober in the Groucho. I’d been absolutely rigorous about not drinking for one day every week, so it wasn’t like it was the first time. I still liked it there, with the right company.
I was introduced to the bass player from Coldplay, who was at the bar. He was a very serious young man. He was observing the chaos with some hauteur. He explained carefully that his band’s reinvigorated North American promotional strategies would boost sales in key secondary markets, coast to coast, album on album. Fair to say it did.
I went and sat with Bernard. He said he didn’t care how long I stopped drinking for; there was still no way he was ever going to get into an aeroplane with me driving. We were talking about boats when Dan Macmillan arrived. He said he was going to Cabaret and asked if I wanted to come with him. A girl had been winking at me and, if I’d have had a few drinks, I would probably have stayed in the Groucho and surrendered. I didn’t and the random caprice of Dan’s soaring wanderlust led me unwittingly to an almighty turning point.
It took ages to get to Cabaret, even though it was only round the corner. Dan wanted to fight the parked cars. Then we had some trouble getting past the doormen. As we dawdled on the threshold, two girls pushed past us. One was laughing and beautiful, and the other one I vaguely recognised. The lady in charge arrived and started kissing Dan. All his friends were there and we danced. The beautiful laughing girl was dancing, too. I didn’t get her name until we were in the taxi.
It was Claire, she told me on the Edgware Road. We were nearly at her house when she asked if I had a girlfriend. I said of course I had a girlfriend. I had loads of girlfriends. Girlfriends everywhere. I was a fucking rock star, for Christ’s sake. She made the taxi stop and told me to get out. We were in Kilburn and it was barren of taxis, so I said I’d drop her off and take the one that we were in back to my house. And then we were kissing again.
She had very long legs and a business card, which said that she was an executive producer. I didn’t know what that was, or who she was. I just had lots of scratches down my back and a big smile on my face.
Think Tank
We’d started recording a new Blur record before I went to Bournemouth. Graham hadn’t turned up. Maybe we should have waited, but we started it without him, hoping he’d come back. We’d all developed as musicians and songwriters. Since we’d last made a record, Damon’s Gorillaz album had outsold any of Blur’s albums and ‘Vindaloo’ had outsold any of Blur’s singles. Still, it’s a delicate equilibrium that makes a band really thrive and it wasn’t clear how it would work without Graham.
A good simple melody is an unfathomable work of genius, and an acute sense of melody was Damon’s gift. Melodies are probably the trickiest thing of all. Having said that, Graham is definitely the best guitar player in the world. It’s absolutely true. Graham can also write good melodies, but I think his greatest capacity is for harmony. His mind thrives in the expressiveness of harmonic forms. He added sixths, he diminished sevenths and he adjusted fifths with a natural flair, adding exquisite depth and colour to Damon’s effortless top lines.
Damon was keen to work at his studio in Ladbroke Grove. I was a bit dubious. When you get down to the nitty-gritty chemistry that drives great bands, it’s really just a power struggle. I thought working in Damon’s studio might be giving him too much ground. It was soon obvious that it was the best place to work, though. Damon was always going to be in charge, but it wasn’t really my job to agree with him about anything. I think we all always thought we knew best.
The studio was very near to Claire’s house, and agreeing to work there turned out to be another monumental decision I had no idea I was making. I saw her again at a party that Dan Macmillan threw to launch his lifestyle emporium. Sometimes, when I’m in a contemplative mood, I still ponder over how we might never have met. For years we’d been missing each other. She knew people that I knew and we went to the same places. I would have been as likely to meet Claire in New York as London. The affair got serious when she fell off her horse and mangled her arm. She had a month off work then, and as her house was next to the studio I’d pop in and see her in the mornings. Soon I was going round after the studio as well.
I loved Justine. We’d shared so much, but it was all over by then. We clung on to each other, trying to make it work. She was uniquely beautiful and still more important to me than anything else that had happened in my life. I wanted her to be happy, but I was making her sad. We’d become flatmates, best friends rather than husband and wife. She was practically the only woman I knew who I wasn’t having sex with. I told her I was going and she cried and I cried and we held each other for the last time. I hope I never have to do anything that difficult again. It’s the benchmark that I measure all other pain against.
I moved into Claridge’s. Claridge’s is regal. When Buckingham Palace is full, the Queen sends her spare guests to stay there. It’s the Brook Street annexe of the royal household and it’s quite simply the best hotel in the world. I’d been making a careful, close and continuous study of luxury. It was a kind of hobby. For Mr Claridge it was evidently more of a mission. I can’t think of anything about the whole of Claridge’s that could be any better. It takes thirty seconds to run a bath and an hour to have breakfast. Everything about the place, from its Mayfair location to its pastry chefs, is the stuff of special occasions. I’m pretty sure that if, as an experiment, somebody was made to stay there and given nothing in particular to do, pretty soon they’d have made a huge success of themselves. The whole place is brimming with infectious achievement and to wake up there is to wake up invincible.
I swooned for Claire. I hung on her half-finished sentences, reading meanings into pauses and glances, searching for signs that she was feeling what I was feeling. I mooned around while she was at work. It was bugging the hell out of Damon and Dave. Damien became quite distant, too. A few months earlier my distraught mother had said that if I didn’t stop drinking, pretty soon I’d have no friends at all. It was well meant, but in fact the opposite thing happened. I had far fewer friends now that I’d been sober for six months.
You can know a lot of people, be very popular, enjoy yourself with a host of chums and buddies, but you can’t ever have a lot of really close friends. Intimacy doesn’t spread thinly. My closest friends were fine about me being sober, but the ones who love you the most and know you the best are the ones who find it hardest to cope with you falling in love.
Morocco
It’s probably possible to make good records without ever leaving a recording studio. Some bands do it like that. They lock themselves away from the world to craft their gypsy trick masterpieces. We flourished only with stimulation. The stimulants changed as we grew up and changed as people. Drink had been reliable to start with. Drugs are always good for one album, but no more than one. Love is always there to fall back on, love lost or love won. We thought we might feel more alive if we took ourselves out of our usual situation and went somewhere we’d never been before. That’s why we went to North Africa to finish Think Tank. The plan was to rent a riad, a Moroccan house, near Marrakesh, build a makeshift studio and see what happened.
Three lorries full of gear trundled across Europe towards the Strait of Gibraltar. One of the lorries just had leads in it: bantam leads, jack leads, balanced XLR leads, MIDI leads, looms, speaker cables, computer cables, optical connectors, power lines, strings, wires and rope, that kind of thing.
While we were in Africa, Dave and I were planning to fly down to Timbuktu. When you tell people that you’re a pilot, they usually want to know where’s the furthest you’ve been. Timbuktu, we both agreed, was the best possible answer to that question and a good enough reason to go there. Even taking the Bonanza to North Africa was quite a serious undertaking. We’d bought a lot of charts, a desert survival kit and a life raft. If the plane had any technical problems, we’d probably be best fixing it ourselves, so we also took spare tyres, engine parts and a tool kit. We had the aeroplane serviced before we left and when we arrived at the airfield it was sitting on the tarmac next to the Queen’s helicopter. There had been big problems with Dave’s Cessna. We’d been merrily flying around in a machine that had such bad corrosion that the wings could have fallen off at any time. That’s got to be one of worst things that can happen to an aeroplane. When we found out, we decided that in future we’d have the best engineers we could find to keep an eye on things under the cowlings. It was reassuring to see the royal chopper as we set out on our maiden inter-continental voyage.
We wanted to have lunch and refuel at La Rochelle. We didn’t really need to land and pick up more avgas until we reached the southern coast of France, but were in agreement that the baguettes fromages at that airport were the best cheese sandwiches we’d ever tasted, and it was worth a detour. Those sandwiches are a sensational case study in beautiful simplicity. Just French bread and Camembert, no butter, no nothing. We almost always had cheese sandwiches for lunch when we were working, and the La Rochelle special was the benchmark standard that all were compared to. The Primrose Hill delicatessen offered notably good high-end, custom-built ciabattas, but the proprietor inclined towards the over-elaborate. It’s the way things are going. In order to compete with each other to give people what they want, the sandwich makers of the world feel they have to create more and more fanciful-sounding fillings, trying to cram three courses of contemporary fusion cuisine between ever-increasing varieties of bread. The marketing gurus would tell us we’re not just buying lunch any more, but that we’re making a statement about who we are. If you can swallow that, you can probably swallow one of their cold cling-filmed sandwiches.
I became suspicious of marketing when I was working on a feature film score. The film was all finished and there was a screening at a shopping centre in Essex - composing film scores is plainly not as glamorous as being a rock star. The film was being shown to a special audience, who’d been recruited from outside McDonald’s, from park benches and street corners. It was being targeted at a young audience and the financiers had tried to assemble a representative crowd. In return for seeing the film for nothing the group had to answer some questions about it afterwards. They were all having a lovely day, but the director, the man who’d spent the last six months ordering Ray Winstone around, was terrified.
Every time the audience laughed, a lot of clipboards rustled. If they chattered or showed signs of confusion, there was more rustling. At the end a nice jolly man stood at the front and went through gruelling lists of questions about how everyone had enjoyed all aspects of the film; the characters in turn, the music, the plot, the sub-plots, the whole picture. By this time, the director and the producers were on the edge of their seats with their feet in their mouths. A particularly smart-arsed twelve-year-old boy didn’t like the way the story ended. He was encouraged to say why. An involuntary moan escaped from somewhere deep inside the director as the child rallied his allies and led a revolt against the film’s denouement. Would it be better if the film ended, completely differently, maybe like this, with the old lady dying, said the nice jolly man.
‘Dass miles maw betta,’ said the boy, and his friends agreed. Then a little girl piped up, said that she liked the old lady and she was pleased it had all worked for her in the end. The director and producer were exchanging open-mouthed glances. The finale of the film that they had spent the last three years of their lives living and breathing - its whole meaning and purpose, all their expertise - was in the hands of two gobby twelve-year-olds. It went back and forth for some while and in the end the old lady was granted a stay of execution by the jury. If the focus group doesn’t like the ending, the studio will reshoot it. No question at all. There’s too much money at stake. It was harrowing. The ending survived intact. It put me right off films, though.
Focus groups, wielding the almighty authority of the witless pleb, rule the world, but there in La Rochelle, like a beacon in the void, was a grumpy old lady with the best cheese sandwiches in the world.
It was a clear day in early October and we tootled on, flying south with the birds and the butterflies, zooming low over the rising backbone of continental Europe and landing in the dark at Avignon. That was when I really realised I’d left Claire behind. I called her and she was out with a group of film directors. Film directors think they’re cooler than rock stars, but I knew the truth about them, and their run-ins with twelve-year-olds in Essex precincts. I wondered if she did, too. We were going to Morocco for six weeks and it suddenly felt like a long time.
Down the rocky coast of Spain, the sea far below: mountains large and close in the right-hand windows. We passed over miles and miles of polytunnels, endless ugly greenhouses in appalling contrast to the green fields of home. When Africa came it was like a surprise snog from a superstar. It loomed unexpectedly green and soft beyond the harsh desert of southern Spain, dissolving into distant mist. We stopped for fuel at Tangier and followed the gently meandering beach towards the distant and fabled city of Marrakesh. It was an untouched, subtle and wonderful wilderness. There was nothing except nature and nothing was ever so beautiful.
‘Vous avez fait un infraction, monsieur. Il faut payer,’ said the man in uniform. He was saying we had committed an aviation crime and that we were in big trouble and we would have to give him some money. It was dusky, we’d made Marrakesh and we were unloading the aeroplane and stretching our legs. ‘Tell him to piss off,’ said Dave. Dave knows his rights.
‘I’m terribly sorry, I don’t speak Moroccan,’ I said, and smiled and nodded. The man flapped his arms around and kept on about ‘infractions’. He followed us to the tower where we paid the landing fee, but he’d scuttled off wagging his finger by the time we’d got to the terminal. Corruption was rife. A lot of the equipment was bound over in customs, said Damon, who’d come to pick us up from the airport in an ancient, knackered, tiny Peugeot. It wouldn’t have passed an MOT in Europe, but here it was a status symbol.
The traffic was very scary. There were pedestrians, fully loaded donkeys, bicycles carrying passengers, whole families wobbling along on phut-phuts, cars with no lights, impatient taxis, crank buses and very big lorries all competing for not very much road. It was a swarming, smoky, brightly lit circus. Unusual smells and strange musics assaulted us as we crawled around the colossal biblical scene in the main square. There was a man with a snake; a man selling teeth: individual human teeth; two men were bare-knuckle fighting and a crowd was watching; there were people eating goats’ heads with spoons; there were bonfires, and everybody was very smartly dressed.
The riad, ten miles outside the city, sat among olive groves roamed at night by packs of wild dogs. There were strange creatures everywhere. Jason, the sound engineer, was the finder and keeper of a particularly menacing translucent insect as big as a hen’s egg that curled its tail and spat goo when he poked it, which he did for the benefit of all new arrivals.
It was a vast, sprawling kasbah and everything about it had either just been patched up or was just about to break. The gear was set up in a derelict annexe; a young man lived there with no running water or worldly goods apart from the clothes he stood up in. He was always smartly dressed and eager to help.
There was a place where mobiles worked, high on one of the roofs, and a freezing swimming pool. The mosaic-tiled interior had once been magnificent and the bedrooms formed an open courtyard around a fountain. I took over the west wing, sprinkling rose petals and lavender from the market everywhere and lighting it with candles. There was a flat roof, which looked beyond the orchards towards an uncultivated lunar landscape with splashes of green oases and the Atlas Mountains towering in the distance.
Everyone developed body-rocking diarrhoea immediately. There was no escape. Dave’s bicycle was kept in the control room and at any time without warning one of the party might suddenly take flight towards the nearest loo in the house a couple of hundred yards away. We shaved our heads and plugged in our guitars. The illnesses ebbed and flowed, the food was awful, the place was practically a ruin, but the music sounded better than anything we’d ever done. I was the happiest man in the world. Claire was coming.
Into the Light
I picked her up from the airport in the Peugeot and took her straight for hammam. Hammam is the most intense spa-type experience in the world. It eclipses the shiatsu beatings of the Japanese, sees off the Icelandic birch-whipping ceremonies, casts Swedish super-muscle mashings into the shade and even outshines the Russian baths on Avenue A in New York City - and they’re something special.
We were sprayed all over with scalding water, as we lay naked, prone and side-by-side on the hot stone floor of a tiled room full of steam. It wasn’t a steam room, though. Steam rooms are chilly by comparison. This was more like the inside of a pressure cooker. Girls dressed in light towelling shorts and bikini tops got busy with loofahs and scrubbed us pink. Then there was a bone-creaking kneading involving knee-in-the-back half-nelsons and leg-bending body presses. We floated all the way home to Riad Nadjma.
I didn’t lose the floating sensation. I was feeling the sway of the secret and limitless feminine. When you start feeling like that, it’s time to say, ‘I love you’, so I took Claire into the desert.
There are different kinds of desert. Some are rocky; some are made out of gravel, like massive untidy car parks. You have to get your wildernesses in perspective. They’re no good those ones, they’re a waste of gravity. All rocky planets have them. We were heading for the dunes. Ahmed, the local fixer, sorted us out with a 4×4 and driver, we loaded up with water and set off for the Sahara.
Through the snow-capped Atlas Mountains with their precipices and nestling fortresses, we trundled, on and on through night and day, through new geography. We saw goats up trees, the ruins of crumbling palaces, the magic trails of rivers and the mud houses that populated them. When we stopped, people invited us to stay with them, people with no shoes, people with no teeth. It was a benign kingdom. I never felt any apprehension of violence or danger.
And the dunes rose in the distance, cartoon-like, surreal, fantastic.
A 4×4 is no good in the sandbanks. The only thing that will do for the dunes is a camel. There was a Berber, immaculately turned out in an electric-blue kaftan, who had some camels and agreed to be our guide. He was highly intelligent, a comedian with a quiet smile and an acute sense of comic timing. Things are never like you expect. Deserts, I’d imagined, were populated by more serious types full of wistful melancholy. He packed up the camels with blankets and provisions, nimbly lashing a cooking pot here, a lantern there, having a conversation with himself that consisted only of the words, ‘Comme ça’. He was able to express a wide range of emotions, and extract a good deal of comedy from those two words. He flipped ropes into elaborate knots, muttering ‘Comme ça, comme ça, comme ça’, every time the ends crossed, with a final definitive ‘Comme ça’ as he yanked them tight. As he moved around to the other side, I could hear him quietly musically murmuring ‘ça-ça-ça’, and the final triumphant ‘ça’. Then the ‘ça’s became interspersed with the odd ‘Ah!?’ followed by a pause, when things went awry. It was a brilliant routine. He knew he was making me laugh. ‘Camel are smelly,’ he said and smiled.
We rode into the sands, perched high on camel humps. There were no discernible landmarks, just undulating dunes that rose to great heights like a calcified stormy sea. The most complete silence fell. There was no birdsong or rustle of leaves. The sand soaked up the sounds of our voices as if to suggest not to compete with the hush. The abstract peaks and troughs rose and fell with cartoon-like simplicity and everything suggested infinity: the endless blue sky, the evenness and constancy of the sand, the celestial silence. And Claire.
We’d been trekking for many hours, but our guide didn’t have a map or a compass. There are no maps of these shifting seas.
‘How do you know where we are?’ I asked him.
‘I came here yesterday,’ he said.
Then an unusual thing happened. The sky went grey and then black and it started to rain; heavy rain in heavy drops. It hadn’t rained for five years. The camels bellowed as it lashed down. Maybe it was all as new to them as it was to me.
After an hour it stopped and, an hour after that, it might never have happened. There was no trace of moisture or a cloud.
The oasis, too, when we arrived at dusk, was still dry on the surface. The only clue to its existence was a cluster of Bedouin tents. There was a tent for Claire and me, and nothing was ever cosier. It was dressed with soft rugs and blankets. Candles flickered and incense burned. Mohammed, our guide, set about making dinner. He unwrapped packets of provisions, unscrewed flasks and made gunpowder tea. ‘Berber whisky!’ he said. It’s powerful stuff, loaded with caffeine, sugar and scented herbs. Somewhere someone was banging a drum and having a wail.
Moroccan food is not my absolute favourite. I was finding the endless casseroles a bit wearisome, but the simple stew that Mohammed prepared was the perfect accompaniment to the Saharan night, and I think the best meal I’ve ever had. We were naked in the desert. It’s another world and our senses were roving in the alien surroundings and our minds wandering into new speculations. We were snapped right back inside ourselves by the nourishing, warm, essential familiarity of food.
I’ve not had that feeling in the Ivy, not even when Posh and Becks walked in.
The desert is the best place to put telescopes. The air is dry and the darkness is absolute. The dazzling stars, a hundred thousand million billion of them, sparkled through the roof of the tent as we lay in each other’s arms. I said, ‘Will you marry me?’ and she said, ‘OK.’
Home and Dry
Dave had to return to England a couple of days early. I flew home from Marrakesh with my dad. He loved the aeroplane. We flew back up the African coast with the transponder unplugged. The transponder is the piece of equipment that sends regular messages to air traffic control telling them your altitude. Unless you’re taking off or landing, the altitude should never be less than five hundred feet. It’s all clearly explained in Rule V in the CAP 53 of the ANO, as any pilot will tell you. I estimate our height above sea level along the North African coast was an average of about thirty feet. It’s pretty dangerous, but on the outbound journey I hadn’t seen so much as a house or a person for a couple of hundred miles and if there was ever a time to mess with Rule V, this was it. We rocketed along the deserted beaches at head height, the cliffs above us on our right, flamingos scattering in our path. We made steep banking turns around headlands, sometimes pulling more than twice our body weights, sometimes floating out of our seats as we zoomed and dived towards home in our incredible flying machine.
Winter was drawing in at home. In Marrakesh we’d recorded an orchestra and a couple of new songs and a lot of vocals, but the record wasn’t finished or mixed. The lorries took all the gear direct to another barn in Devon, where we added the finishing touches. I dashed between Devon, London and the Cotswolds in a rental car. Claire and I were renting a cottage on an estate in Gloucestershire. There was a river running through the garden, and chickens and peacocks pecked around. The Cotswolds was every bit as pretty as it promised from the air. The vast walled domains, the fossilised remains of astronomical wealth and power still dominate the rural landscape. The industrial revolution passed the area by almost completely.
Claire was worried about me starting my new drinking campaign in January. She’d only known me sober. I assured her that I was very good at it.
It was February and a nice man called Bill was saying, ‘And tell me what you remember about the party.’
‘Well, I remember swapping shirts with the principal dancer of the Royal Ballet Company.’
‘OK. Good. What next?’
‘I think I snogged the dog.’
‘Right. OK. Then what happened?’
‘Well, I had a row with Claire and went home. I locked her out, and when she was banging on the door, I pissed on her head from the fourth-storey window.’
‘Why did you do that?’
‘Well, that’s what she wants to know.’
‘Anything else happen?’
‘No, not that night, anyway.’
Bill was kind and he listened and he helped me and I stopped drinking altogether after that and tried yoga.
The thing that irritated me most about yoga was how expensive it was. It was sixty quid for an hour. Will Ricker was only paying thirty quid an hour to punch the crap out of Ozzie Jason. The advanced flying instructors were on much less than that. Apart from yoga, for between twenty and thirty quid you can get someone to come to your house and teach you just about anything you can think of. I’d tried an hour of ‘Japanese for Beginner’. That was twenty quid well spent. A Japanese lady came to the house, made some green tea and taught me how to say, ‘Hello, I like cheese, cheers.’ That got me by in Japan for years.
Learning is a bargain, but I’d always shied away from music lessons. I seemed to know how to speak fluent bass guitar; it was second nature, but I had absolutely no idea what it was I was doing.
I wanted to know more, but I was apprehensive about my bubble bursting. I’d had a bad spell cast on me by The Times Guide to Better Writing. At the time, I was writing a weekly column for Time Out, about staying in. I’d done one about my enthusiasm for jigsaw puzzles, one about bubble baths, that kind of thing. It was going well. That was when I read the book about how to write stuff even better. The features editor was waiting for a treatise on the baked potato, but once I’d crossed out all the bits that the man in the book wouldn’t have liked, there was nothing left. I couldn’t write anything for weeks. The book was very strict and authoritative and it completely undermined my confidence.
Confidence is the most important attribute for any kind of creative activity, a dumb self-assurance that you know better than anybody. This is something that can’t really be taught, but if you can think you’re brilliant and you can turn up on time, you can do whatever you want.
Self-confidence is easily shattered and I was worried that analysis of my musical style would have bad consequences. Blur were playing in Bournemouth and I offered to go back to school and talk to the boys about rock and roll. I’m really glad I did. It seemed a wonderful place. I sat in on a third-year music lesson and tried to explain myself. Then they asked questions.
‘How does the bass affect the harmony of a piece of music?’ asked the teacher. I thought that was a very good question. I looked up to see who would answer, but everyone was looking at me. I wanted, more than anything, to say, ‘Don’t know, Sir’, but it clearly wasn’t appropriate. I said the thing about the bass, really, was that it never sounds wrong. If the bass isn’t right, everything else sounds wrong, but the bass always sounds right, even if you make a mistake. That was why bass players always looked the coolest.
I had some piano lessons after that episode. The bass guides the harmony. That’s what it does. It guides the harmony and supports the upper voices. It was good to know, in writing.
In Devon, horse-riding lessons were only twelve pounds and they threw in a horse as well. The Cotswolds is very horsey. Claire had been having lessons and riding quite a lot. While Damon, Dave and I were finishing the album in Devon I got up early in the mornings and drove to the local stables to try and get the hang of it. After galloping along streams in Iceland in the middle of the night, I didn’t really have any apprehension about trotting round a riding school with a hard hat on. By the end of the first week I was jumping over fences and that, I felt, was that. I could ride a horse. I really wanted to go riding with Claire. It’s definitely more dangerous than flying, and the thrill is intense. It’s an earthy, overtly sexual business, especially for women, as they thrust their pelvises around and get sweaty and start panting. The danger is a part of it, too, for sure. You can never be sure what a horse is going to do.
Pilots want everyone to be pilots. They love taking people flying who’ve never been before. They universally encourage the novice to join the brotherhood. Horse people in Gloucestershire weren’t like that. It was the opposite kind of thing.
I went to the local stables back at the cottage and said I wanted to go for a hack. I spent weeks going round in circles, arching my back, tucking my heels in, thrusting my pelvis. I would never have known I could jump if I hadn’t gone to Devon first. They said I was brilliant in Devon. In Gloucestershire I never made it out of the yard.
Given a choice of not being particularly great at something, but believing I was a natural, and actually genuinely being good at something and being reserved about it, I would take the conceited option every time. It’s much more fun.
Farmers for Fifteen Minutes
Claire and I were married within a year of meeting each other and we set about looking for a house in the Cotswolds. I wasn’t sure if I wanted a big one or a little one, which really confused the estate agents, who were thrown by the car, too, Claire’s old drug dealer-style BMW. It had been broken into in London, and had a cardboard passenger window as a result. It had also recently caught fire, and smelt a bit on the funny side. It always seemed to be very muddy, inside and out, and most people thought we were time-wasters when we rolled up their carriage drives in that heap. It’s just hard to care very much about cars when you have an aeroplane.
We looked at some tarted-up, overpriced cottages. Then we started looking at houses. It was quite depressing. The figures involved were astronomical. Prices were similar to those in London. The whole world had gone mad. Houses were a million pounds. For a cool million, a price that was fairly ridiculous, all you seemed to get was a fairly nice house with a fairly big garden, nothing fit for a rock star. It didn’t make any sense at all. Surely a million pounds was enough for anything? I can clearly remember wanting to have a hundred pounds when I was young. It seemed like a good amount to be aiming for. I never dreamed I’d have a million pounds, let alone that it wouldn’t be enough.
We went to look at a farm that was for sale for a million and a half. The numbers were scary, but for half as much money again you got about twenty times as much. The rambling farmhouse sat in two hundred acres. It came with half a mile of the river Evenlode and three woods. It had a little lake with an island in the middle. The title included modern barns, decaying outbuildings, stables, an orchard, ancient wells and a walled garden. There were piles of tyres and heaps of manure and all the inevitable junk and jetsam that accumulates in barnyards. There was even a cricket pitch indicated on an old map of the land. It was the complete, unabridged, bundled country-life package.
The owner was the first person we’d met on our quest who clearly didn’t want to sell his house. He loved the place, but he was getting too old to be running a farm. The cellar was full of his cherished tropical fish, cichlids, and he showed us them first. There were a confusing number of rooms - attics and pantries abounded. There was a welcoming comfy generosity about the place. We walked over the land with the man, Mr Taplin. I’d started to like him the moment we arrived. He was particularly pleased about the drains, and we kept stopping to inspect pipes, soakaways and trenches. In London you flush the loo and that’s the business dealt with. Out here it was just the beginning of an epic journey. The foul waste pipe ran under the garden and through the farmyard to a septic tank. The purified effluent from the septic tank discharged into a gully. The gully, sprouting lilies and irises, ran past the Dutch barn and expelled into the primary ditch. The ditch gradually became more of a stream as it converged with the outputs of the rainwater run-off manifold and the field drain matrices. He said he’d show us the field drains if we wanted to inspect them, but that they were quite complex. The main ditch neatly bisected the farm, taking a scenic detour through the lake. On the far side of the lake it resumed its journey, towards the Evenlode and, once in the Evenlode and heading for London, the matter was out of our hands.
Then he showed us where his favourite horse was buried. It was a sunny spring day, and I’d known since before I’d got out of the car that I wanted to live here. It was perfect. Mr Taplin’s car, which we’d parked next to, was of a similar vintage and in similar condition to our own.
Claire wanted to see the woods. So did I. We walked over the heath. A large number of big black birds were circling and whirling over one end. ‘Wow,’ we said, ‘look at all those birds!’
‘Well, I’ve not been at ’em for a couple of years,’ Mr Taplin said. ‘They want taking care of.’
‘What do you feed them on?’
‘Feed ’em? No, take care of ’em. Let ’em ’ave it!’
I’d been a vegetarian for seventeen years. ‘What do you mean, let ’em ’ave it?’
‘Well, I come down with the twelve-bore, and let ’em ’ave it.’
Apart from shooting the birds, he seemed like a really nice man. He smoked Embassy Number Six and painted in watercolours. He was unhurried and peaceful, enjoying the moments as they sailed past.
For many years the property had been a notable shorthorn dairy cattle farm, but mad cow disease and foot and mouth had brought it to its knees. It was a wreck, but we loved it.
The house in Mercer Street had a balcony with some window boxes, but no garden. I sold the house and Dave bought the aeroplane and we bought the farm. It was going to be quite a leap up to two hundred acres.