2

Goldsmiths college

Camberwell

Goldsmiths College said they’d have me after all, despite my recent lack of form, and I set off for London a year late to start a French degree. Someone else was getting his stuff out of his parents’ car when I arrived at the student halls of residence with my own parents. I saw him unload a guitar. He was covered in paint, but even if he hadn’t been it would have been obvious that he was an art student: pale and skinny; National Health specs; huge trousers and a stripy, baggy jumper. It’s a moment that I remember very clearly. I liked him from the instant I saw him and I had the certain feeling that one of the main characters in my life had just walked on to the stage. His name was Graham Coxon and he had the room above me, but I didn’t see him again for a few weeks. He had friends who were in their final year, and he spent his time with them.

Camberwell is a far cry from Bournemouth. It’s in the most populous square mile of Europe, in the borough of Southwark, just south of the Thames. Stannard Hall, where we lived, was a rotten eyesore in an otherwise beautiful street that ran around a park with plane trees, tennis courts and a bandstand. It was a leafy enclave in a squalid neighbourhood where civilisation was permanently on the brink of collapse. It really wasn’t safe after dark, or even in the daytime. There were a lot of muggings. In the broad daylight of a Saturday afternoon, a couple of weeks after we all arrived, a gang plundered the hall. There was a high fence around the building and grilles on the windows, but they smashed the doors down and grabbed everyone’s stereos and cameras.

We were encouraged not to look too much like students, especially in October, when the marauding gangs were on the lookout for bewildered-looking, easy targets. A stick-thin, big-brained, benevolent psychology don lived there in the hall with Laura, his Alsatian. He gave us all hope. He drove a VW camper van and he seemed to enjoy sleeping out on the front line. You went to see him when you got mugged or menaced and he made you tea. I never needed to go and see him. When I got to know Graham he told me that there was dog poo in the lounge when he went in sometimes.

Paul Hodgson was the first person I really connected with at college. He was always getting mugged. He still is. I ran into him in the street a few months ago and he had a black eye from a thief. He was set upon by rogues even before he started at Goldsmiths, on his way to the interview. He’s quite a dandy dresser. Maybe that’s what it is. Paul talked a lot about Shelley and Byron. He was doing Fine Art and he made me laugh. The people who did art at my school weren’t that clever, or funny. The clever people did physics and chemistry. Paul was very perceptive and inquisitive. His dad, Ken, was a plumber and Paul manipulated high-falutin’ art concepts in a west London drawl, with a mild stutter. ‘Owls!’ - he called me Als - ‘Maaate, have a word with Brownlee, he’s s-pouting Were-Were-Wittgenstein; the wanger.’ Jason Brownlee was another artist. He had the room opposite me. He had fallen for Wittgenstein, utterly. He hadn’t properly grasped Joy Division lyrics yet; he was straight in the deep end wallowing in a big morass of intellectual spaghetti. Possibly he was looking down the wrong end of his mind, like when you look through a telescope backwards and fall over.

The Fine Art reading list was all pretty chewy. The undergraduates were encouraged to launch themselves into the wits of the great thinkers and ransack what they needed, like they were trawling through a skip. Paul was dipping his toe into some Nietzsche. He always referred to figures he was engaging with by their Christian names, as a nod to his intimacy with them. It’s a good system. It humanises the mythical characters of human history. When Paul called anyone by their surname, it was a dis. ‘Ner-ner-Nietzsche’s n-not funny at all. No jokes in there, mate,’ he said with a grin.

It was through Jason and Paul that I got to know Graham. The art department was a member’s club, really. The artists didn’t mix with the rest of the college. I got to know Paul in the kitchen. He was on first-name terms with the abstract expressionists but he had no idea how to feed himself. I had a year of low-budget culinary experimentation behind me. He’d come straight from his mum’s. He didn’t know how pasta worked and was quite spellbound by tomato purée. He had an artist’s fascination with the mundane. There was something magical for him in a tube of tomato purée, a tomato being transformed into its essence and re-presented as a packaged consumer product. Was it more of a tomato or less now? Was it art? Was it good on toast? Jason waded around in the primary flavours like they were huge splashes of bold colour. He always put too much garlic in. His drawings were very dense, too.

Paul and Jason said I should meet Gra. It rhymed with car, Gra. We went up for some pasta sandwiches. Graham’s door was open and there was loud music. He was a bit drunk. His room was completely full of junk; we’d only been there for three weeks and he’d managed to give the impression that he’d been born there and never tidied up. There were piles of clothes from the flea market, a lot of paintings and posters, some of which were still attached to hoardings. There was a huge fan lying on the floor taking up most of the middle of the room. I’d seen that fan on a skip outside. Stuff was spilling out of cupboards, quite a few records and cassettes but mainly clothes. There was a charm about the magpie clutter. It didn’t look like anyone else’s room, except maybe Paul’s. Paul had a neat little row of books as well, though. Graham only had one book, Thérèse Raquin by Emile Zola. It looked like he’d read it a few times. It was dogeared and the spine was all cracked. I was glad Graham had a French book. I had a lot of them.

The first thing he said was, ‘How long have you been playing the guit?’

Graham

Graham was as brilliant as he looked like he would be. He was excellent at drawing things - faces, girls, monsters. The morning after we met he dangled the flex from his standard issue student Anglepoise lamp out of his bedroom window so that it banged on the glass of mine. I stuck my head out of the window. ‘Brekkers, cheers? Nice.’ He communicated mainly with facial expressions and in his own language. He was always playing with words. The linguistics department at college would have been fascinated.

There was a student demonstration taking place that day, to protest against the abolition of grants. College was cancelled, and we were to march on Westminster. We had breakfast at the Camberwell Grill in Camberwell Green. There isn’t much green in Camberwell. It’s grey, mainly. The café was all red and yellow plastic. We didn’t ever have enough money to go out for dinner, but breakfast was cheap. There were the four of us - Paul, Graham, myself and Jason. Paul was still interested in tomato sauces. So was Graham. Graham squirted ketchup all over his food. Paul and Graham both saw the possibilities of tomatoes as art, but they were different types of artist. Paul wanted to create the essence of tomato and Graham wanted to make pretty patterns.

It was quite rowdy when we got to Waterloo. There was a good turnout, thousands of students. All the colleges in London had closed for the day. There were placards and banners and people were chanting, and singing, ‘The students united will never be defeated.’ The march came to a standstill. We couldn’t work out why. The tense and menacing atmosphere was gradually building into a physical uprising. Everyone was shouting and jeering. It was very noisy and exciting. We pushed our way down to the front, like at a concert. There was a line of police defending the end of Waterloo Bridge. They didn’t want thousands of rebelling students going anywhere near the Houses of Parliament on the other side of the river. A police helmet was being thrown high in the air around the crowd. Every time it soared there was a huge round of applause and cheering. Down at the front it was a perilous crush with everyone shoving from behind. I reached out and grabbed a helmet and flung it in the air. There was a big cheer from behind as I felt the hands of many police officers seize me. As I was wrenched bodily from the mob a dozen more hands from the crowd grabbed my arms to pull me back in. I was on my back on top of a sea of people with the police on my feet and the students on the other end playing tug-of-war with my body. I kicked my feet, got one leg free and lost a shoe as I hauled the other leg from the arms of the law. I disappeared back into the throng with the police swearing and the students cheering. You needed two shoes that day, especially when the riot police arrived. The riot police are like a branch of the army, really. You can’t fight them. It’s time to go home when they arrive. Nobody did, though. The police were on horseback and they galloped at the crowd. People were crushed and some were quite badly hurt. Speccy girls reading botany at Bedford New College or anyone who happened to be in the way got charged and flattened. A few people hung around throwing things but it had certainly broken the crowd up. I couldn’t find my shoe, or Graham. It was a big day, though, and we were mates after that. I’d liked Graham from the moment I saw him. He was cool. Everyone doing art was cool, but Graham was the coolest and he floated around college.

He was listening to the Pixies a lot and he had their lyrics pinned up on his walls. He was really good at guitar. He could play anything, even the Smiths. I still find those guitar parts tricky. He was in a few bands. One was called Idle Vice. The songs were mainly about beer, but some were about vodka. He played the drums as well, but there were no drums around so he played on his knees, with air cymbals. There was a piano in the hall and we used to sing ‘Blue Moon’ a lot. Graham only knew how to play ‘October’ by U2 on the piano, so we sang that a lot as well. We were friends. We were interested in each other’s record collections and we both had guitars; we connected through music, but it went beyond that. We were happy in each other’s company just waiting for a bus or sharing a packet of cigarettes and making up words. I liked him because he was instantly brilliantly artistic, but vulnerable; strikingly stylish, but quite awkwardly shy. Why he liked me, I don’t know. Maybe it was mainly because I liked him. Still, when you do know exactly why someone likes you, that’s not really a friend. That’s a fan.

We didn’t often go anywhere apart from college and places that sold breakfast. We didn’t have any money so we just sat in each other’s rooms listening to each other’s records, me, Graham and often Paul as well. Jason got involved with Jo from English and drama and disappeared.

One of Graham’s proudest possessions was a half-drunk bottle of tequila in a sealed plastic bag with a ‘police evidence’ sticker on it. He was planning on keeping it forever, but that was patently never going to happen. We did get drunk and run out of booze quite a few times before it went, though, and we’d try and persuade him to open it. Then one morning the bottle was empty and Paul and I were quite disappointed he’d drunk it without us.

Paul loved the Beatles, but not as much as Graham. Graham’s dad, who was a clarinet teacher, had brought him up on the Beatles and Beethoven. Paul’s sister was friends with Captain Sensible, the singer, so he had the final say in all conversations about punk rock, but Graham was the authority on the Beatles. I had some quite odd records. Papa’s, mainly: he was a big-band man. I worked my way through them all keeping the ones I liked and selling the ones I didn’t to Ray’s Jazz in Covent Garden.

Occasionally Graham would disappear to a studio in Euston, where he was recording with a band. I was insanely jealous. I’d messed around with four-track recorders a lot, but I’d never been inside a studio.

Goldsmiths

Goldsmiths College is a wonderful place. It’s taken over most of New Cross. It’s spilled out of the original building into the surrounding Victorian terraces and municipal buildings. There are new additions too, the latest in library chic and all sorts of departments, faculties and facilities. It’s really thriving. The university buildings are bisected by the flooding A2, but to turn into one of the little side streets is to enter a world of studious calm. Most of the French department was in a neat little antique cul-de-sac called Laurie Grove. London SE14 doesn’t have the grandeur of Oxford: more screaming tyres than dreaming spires. It’s very much a feet-on-the-ground part of town. It’s quite bewildering how many things are happening at once around there. New Cross manages to be part campus, part ghetto, part middle-class suburb and part motorway, with a lot of pubs. There are always all kinds of people striding around. It is easy to spot the students, especially in October. It doesn’t conform to the traditional image of a hallowed seat of learning but you’d learn more about the world in a couple of terms at Goldsmiths than you would in ten years of eating crumpets and punting around Cambridge.

I do like Oxford and Cambridge; Goldsmiths just happened to be the best place to be in the world at that time. I’d underachieved my way into the right place and dallied on my way to arrive at the perfect time. The cataclysmic big bang that kick-started the ultimate decade of the last millennium can be traced back to a small area of the bar at the Student Union at Goldsmiths College in 1988. Somehow or other the drunkest people in that bar went on to instigate a British cultural revolution that reverberated in everything from football to rocket science. There were music students, too, and drama courses, but the art department was where the nineties started.

I had trouble getting up on Wednesdays and kept missing language laboratory, which was at nine o’clock. I took a 36 bus from Camberwell to New Cross. It is not a glamour run that route, through Peckham and the cheap end of the Old Kent Road, but it never felt like I was in the wrong place, like it did at the supermarket.

I didn’t miss lingo lab on purpose, but it did gall me a little bit that Brownlee was free to ingest yet more of Wittgenstein’s axioms in the bath when he rose at midday, that Graham would go on skip trawls with Paul, while I listened carefully and repeated, but I enjoyed French. There wasn’t one of the lecturers that I didn’t like. They were all terribly clever. It was a very thorough course. It got reality right up on the jacks and had a good look at the underneath. In cosy classrooms we learned about the birth of language, the dawn of civilisation and the first stories, civilisation’s collapse and the onset of the Dark Ages, architecture, art, and archaic and extant forms of music and verse through the ages. The staff all wrote books with long titles: analyses of the principles of linguistic transference; guides to the medieval romances and the works of the great authors of antiquity.

The books that we read in the first couple of terms of French were carefully selected to blow our tiny minds. Many of them attacked the core of the cosy existence we led. We loved that. We embarked upon an intellectual cruise; took a tour through the twisted, terrifying thoughtscapes of André Gide. We took a ramble through Rabelais’ ribaldry. We dabbled in Dadaism, supped on surrealism, ripped through Romanticism and embraced existentialism. There was plenty to talk about.

The college library had very tight security. There must have been millions of pounds’ worth of books in there. They could probably have left the door open, though. Books are the most unlikely things to get stolen in New Cross. Street lamps and traffic lights are more at risk of theft than academic treatises. I didn’t go to the library. I made a point of not going to France and not going to the library while I was there. I think I had an attitude problem. The head of the first year said she wanted to see me about my essays. She seemed quite well connected and I assumed she had found a publisher. I was quite excited when I arrived at her study. Maybe she wanted to discuss some of my new ideas. She was, in fact, appalled, she said, at the standard of my French, and how, she wanted to know, could I hope to express ideas, however original I thought they were, without a grasp of a language? I still thought she was wrong. Conceit is vital.

While working at Safeway I’d got quite good at copying the illustrations out of Winnie the Pooh and brushing on the watercolour, but my sister Debs has always had much more in the way of visual acuity than me. She can do jigsaws faster than anyone. We knew that she was destined for greatness when she won the Regatta Week pavement drawing competition in Bournemouth when she was five.

Art was bound to take on a new importance in the environment at Goldsmiths. I’d aligned my on-board compasses with the books and records that I liked, but I didn’t know much about art. There was art going on everywhere - on the upper floors of the main building, in an old car showroom opposite. People were talking about abstract expressionism in the canteen, Fluxus in the bar. There was sculpture, film, installation, photography, painting and drawing but absolutely no one was doing watercolours.

There were loads of big ideas flying around. Everyone was reading books, listening to records, going to Cork Street and gatecrashing first-night art openings. There were theatre trips, museum visits and gigs in the union. Paul really liked football, too.

I went to Paul’s space in M.B. Motors one day, the converted garage opposite the main college building. He was working on a huge grey and black abstraction. I was very impressed. He said, ‘I like this bit in the ker-corner.’ The corner was a good bit, you had to admit. It had pleasing asymmetry, it had dimensionality, I said. I was way out of my depth, but so was he, probably. Paint was all over his space like engine oil in a garage. Everyone had a space, a white cubicle. The spaces were all crammed together, so that everyone interacted. The space opposite Graham’s on the first floor had spots painted all over it, a pleasing array of dots. We all liked those spot paintings. They were easy on the eye. They were nice to look at. Graham said they were the work of a madman called Damien. Damien Hirst.

Minds were racing everywhere. Opposite Paul, a right geezer called Jim who had been a plumber for some years was doing something with maps. He’d pasted a London A-Z together and was subverting its reality in some way that I was embarrassed not to be able to grasp. He said ‘Luvly-juvly’ quite often. By the end of the second year, he was saying ‘lubbly-bubbly’ and going out with an upper-middle-class girl from French and drama.

Next door to Paul the space was vacant, though. I asked him what had happened and he said that the guy came in one day, didn’t paint anything, just stared at the wall and was never seen again. ‘He dried up,’ said Paul, with great foreboding. It was like a horror story: like someone had died. I could tell Paul was terrified, as if they were infantrymen and the next guy in the line had bought it. For some sad reason, the unknown artist had given up. I don’t think anyone ever stops having ideas. It’s impossible to stop having ideas. He must have lost his bottle, or realised he wasn’t good enough. It’s a struggle to make art. It was a forlorn sight, that empty space, but it soon filled up with Paul’s debris and spare ideas. Boundaries were being tested. It was a very competitive environment. A lot of discussion went into trying to say exactly what Fine Art is. It’s a hard thing to define, art. If you can say exactly what art is, then you probably are an artist.

We went to the Tate to see the de Koonings. Paul marvelled at ‘Willem’s’ sexy pink swirly-girly abstractions. My favourite place was the British Museum, a huge castle full of treasure. They’ve got everything there from Beatles’ lyrics on the back of an envelope to mouldering pharaohs. I spent days in there, giggling at the clocks. The early clocks were mesmerising. I thought about those a lot.

Damon

Damon’s dad is an art man. He ran the art foundation course in Colchester that Graham had attended, and he ran the art department at Essex University. I knew all this before I met him, because Graham told me. Graham had talked quite a lot about Damon. Damon is someone people talk about.

Graham and Paul and I went to the Beat Factory, a bijou, pristine studio near King’s Cross. We were going to listen to what this band of Graham’s had been doing. They’d just finished recording some new songs. We didn’t hit it off straight away, Damon and I. He was wearing a necklace and he still had ‘up’ hair. No one at college was doing the ‘up’ hair thing any more. Hair spent most of the eighties going in the wrong direction, but things were getting back to normal again.

The first thing I can remember Damon asking me was whether I’d been in a recording studio before. I had to admit I hadn’t. They played the songs, which were a bit cheesy. I was very relieved about that. We went off to Eddy’s house to drink poitin, Irish moonshine made from potatoes. It’s really nasty stuff. Eddy was Damon’s friend. They had been to drama college together. Eddy was a huge personality squeezed into a fairly large body. He played the guitar in the band and his little mate played bass; it was a nasty Paul McCartney Beatles bass. There were quite a few people at Eddy’s house. The people who ran the studio and managed Damon, Eddy’s girlfriend, some other drama types and poitin sniffers. It was pretty dull and we had to listen to the songs again. They really weren’t that great. They were too drama college; they needed to be more art college.

Damon asked me what I thought of them, what they sounded like to me, just, you know, as someone who had never been in a recording studio before. Damon was an instantly provocative person. I’d gone along to meet Graham’s friend assuming Graham’s friend would be similar to Graham, I suppose. They couldn’t really have been more different. Damon had buckets of confidence and gumption and he wore sandals.

If I’d liked the songs, I would probably have burst into tears, but I told him I thought they weren’t quite right, which they weren’t. He kind of knew it, really, but he was obviously shocked. I didn’t mince my words. It was the only stick I could possibly have bashed him with. In the Robin Hood stories, Robin likes to have a fight with everyone he meets before he becomes their friend. Damon loves Robin Hood and he loves a tussle. We said, cheerio then.

The week before the end of the first term at college, December 1988, Graham came to my room, where I was playing chess with Paul. We’d decided that chess was a fine pastime and that it would sound good in later life to be able to say, ‘Well, I played a bit of chess when I was at college.’ We only ever played each other, though. We were both scared of losing to anyone else. Graham said, ‘Been to the Beat Fac. We’ve sacked the other guitarist and the bass player!’ Then, after a long pause, ‘And we want you to play bass.’

I was definitely up for playing in a band with Graham, and Damon, if he had the keys to a recording studio, and the other guy on drums. Dave, he was called - Dave the drummer. I went down to the payphone with Graham and we called Damon. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, there’s a bass at the studio, come down on Friday.’

So Graham and Damon and I met in the studio on the last day of the first term. Damon had the keys, as he was sort of an assistant there. There were a couple of things that Damon and Graham had been working on together that we bashed around for a while. I showed them some chords that I’d been strumming in my room. Graham started to play them on the guitar, there was a drum machine going boom whack and I started grooving along on the bass that was lying around. Damon started jumping up and down and saying, ‘Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant! You’re a natural!’ He got his lyrics book out and started singing, ‘She is so high, she is so high.’

It all happened there and then. It was instantaneous, shockingly so. Graham wrote the lyrics for the verse, over the same chords, and sang a backing vocal on the choruses. I’d never been in a band with backing vocals. The two of them sang really well together, they’d been doing it for years. We made a tape and I went home for Christmas thinking, ‘I’m in the best band in the world.’

Justine was renting a room in a house in Charminster and working at The Body Shop. I’d been in London for ten weeks, but most weeks either she came to London or I went back to see her.

Graham and I went back to London a week before college started, to write some more songs with Damon. We tried one of my mates from Bournemouth on drums, but he wasn’t as good as the guy who wore pyjamas and worked for Colchester council that they had already, so we stuck with him.

Damon had a job, so he had a little bit more money than we did. It was an awful job, some fast croissant hellhole at Euston Station. He was a tiny bit older than Graham and me, a fact he never let us forget. Once we were allies he was incredibly generous. He was very liberal with his hard-earned cash. I was terrified of money. Damon knew how to use it to get what he wanted. He splashed it around, gave it to tramps. We went to the Town and Country Club to see the Pixies. He bought tickets for the three of us from a tout outside for sixty quid, which was more than I got a week to live on. It was a brilliant gig. We went to see quite a few gigs, the Happy Mondays, mainly bands that were on the cover of the NME. Damon nearly always paid.

He was very at home in London. He’d grown up there, but he didn’t come across as a cockney. He was hard to place, actually. I liked him a lot by this time - we were becoming brothers-in-arms - but I never knew what he was thinking, not like Graham. I found Graham was often thinking what I was thinking; that’s one of the reasons Graham was my best friend. We went out drinking, the two of us, Damon and me, in New Cross, to get to know each other a bit better. He liked the theatre. He liked Hermann Hesse. He loved Spain, wore sandals and he followed the cycles of the moon very closely. He said his mum could do magic.

We talked about music, but not about bands, really, more about what it was and how it worked. We both wanted to be in the best band ever shaped on earth, but all boys with guitars do. I always thought it might just happen to me. He was much more direct, full of plans, schemes and determination to make things happen. He had so much energy. That’s what creativity is, really, that vigour.

We walked along Peckham High Street after midnight. Damon was full of beans. He always is. He was climbing up lamp-posts and dancing on bus-shelter roofs. He said, ‘Watch this, I’m going to get arrested!’ and ran off down Queen’s Road with a Belisha beacon, shouting random things in a very deep voice. They threw him in the cells with a mad Gurkha, until he calmed down. Graham had been arrested at the Student Union for pissing on the stage while a reggae band was playing. He was very remorseful after that, but Damon was quite proud after his night in the cooler. ‘I told you I was going to get arrested! I made it happen,’ he said, eyes wide.

Seymour

The Beat Factory became our new headquarters. Paul got fed up that Graham and I were spending so much time there and always talking about it. We often stayed there all night, Damon, Graham and me. We could only use it when it was empty, and it was reasonably busy so we grabbed time whenever we could get it. Courtney Pine, the jazz man, used to record there, and loads of other people who I’d kind of heard of their old band, but not their current one. It was a good little studio, with a pretty courtyard, clean carpets, TV and video. We watched every film they had. There was tea and coffee. The fridge always had some cheese in, too. There was never any cheese in my fridge.

In Bournemouth, the Rising used to make demos at my house. We never bothered sending them to record companies, though. Damon had been left some money by a relative and spent it recording some songs at the Beat Factory. He was obviously very decisive. The people who ran the studio gave him a job as a tea boy, with the aim of moulding him into a pop product, but he was still at the tomato end of things, rather than the purée stage. We all were.

I always felt special walking into that studio. It was just what we needed. None of us had any idea how the posh mixing desk worked, but Damon had a four-track and there was a piano, a few amps and room to set up drums.

We were getting songs together. We liked being there; it was nicer than Camberwell and we spent ages just messing around, jamming into the middle of the night. We’d walk back to town at dawn and get the bus to college.

Sometimes, when the studio was booked, we’d go to Damon’s parents’ house for the weekend and play there, in his mum’s studio. She was an artist, too, and the studio was full of intriguing papier-mâché totems. Keith and Hazel Albarn are exceptionally nice people. I was overwhelmed by the sheer tastefulness of their home. They lived in an old bakery in rural Essex. It was full of books and rugs and smooth wooden obelisks. There were always nice smells, faintly spicy, wafting around. It was quiet and the sun beat in through the windows.

Sometimes I stayed at Graham’s parents’ house but usually we all went to Damon’s where Graham and I shared Damon’s sister’s vacant four-poster. Hazel Albarn’s table d’hôtesse was exquisite and mealtimes were eagerly anticipated. We all sat round the big table, where Damon would proceed to drive his parents mad.

It was beautiful there. We wrote some good songs in Hazel’s studio, including ‘Sing’, which was on the first album. The band was called Seymour. It was Paul’s idea, after the J. D. Salinger character. We all liked The Catcher in the Rye and agreed that it was best to own the edition with the silver cover.

Seymour’s first public appearance was at the college in the Student Union on the night that the Fine Art degree show opened. For the art students it was a big climax: the whole three years at college led up to that one show. It’s quite a dramatic situation. Hearts could be broken and dreams come true as tutors and suitors - galleries, dealers and buyers - decreed who would have a future.

We looked at everything. Damien Hirst’s work was obviously good. It stood out. He’d done some medicine cabinets full of cute little phials. If their meaning was obscure, they were certainly nice to look at. They were only five hundred quid, his degree-show pieces. I wanted one. I’d never ever had five hundred quid, though.

Charles Saatchi was very clever. He scoured all the degree shows and bought the work that he liked. He didn’t invest in art by established names, like most rich people. He invested in artists. He bought Damien’s work. He could pick out the good stuff. Choosing the right option, ticking the right box, knowing the good from the bad is about the cleverest thing anyone ever has to do. No one’s right all the time, but some people have a knack for picking winners, and they become winners themselves.

The Union was packed, and we deafened everybody.

Strait is the Gate

At the end of the first year, the start of the summer, we had to vacate the halls of residence in Camberwell. Graham’s friend Ads had just graduated. He knew some people who were squatting in a building right next to the college in New Cross. They, too, had sat their finals and were leaving. I went back to Bournemouth for a couple of weeks to see Justine and take the sunshine, but really I needed to be in London. The band was gathering momentum. Graham said I could stay in the squat. He’d saved me a room.

It was a horrible room. It’s hard to imagine anything more horrible. Noisy and toxic from the A2, which it overlooked, busted up and broken down and filthy, but it was free. The squat was just somewhere we could stay while things developed musically. There was no college and nothing else to do. Dave the drummer quit his day job and the four of us spent the whole time rehearsing, songwriting, getting to know each other and dreaming about what might happen next. All we wanted to do was to make music. Music never yet heard, music so powerful and beautiful that people would stop what they were doing and forget everything else.

We had no money at all. Graham’s mum sent him twenty pounds on Thursdays but he always went straight to the Co-op and spent it on Tennent’s Super. The whole building was empty to begin with, but it soon filled up with mad people, mainly Adam’s friends. It was summer and all the windows were open. I lived out of a very small bag. I always had a notebook, and some French vocabulary to learn. It was getting difficult at this stage, as I wasn’t even sure what some of the words meant in English.

There were a lot of people with no money in their pockets in New Cross. On the other side of the A2, down Clifton Rise past the cool off-licence, there was a largish park, all laid to grass. An endless game of cricket took place, all summer long. We went and played, some days. There was a pub in the park, the Dew Drop Inn. It stood as a monument to a more beautiful era, dwarfed now by the cold-blooded scale of dozens of modern high rises obscuring the horizon. I’d been to the Dewie a few times with some of the sassier girls from French, and got drunk on Newcastle Brown, listening to the Joy Division songs on the jukebox. It was the best pub in New Cross.

We took my dad there when he came to stay at the squat. He stayed in London a fair bit. He only stayed with us once, though. He had a good time. My mum wouldn’t have liked it. There were a lot of flies in that flat. Adam used to catch them with a beer glass and put them in the freezer. When you freeze flies, they don’t die. They just go into cryogenic suspension. They come back to life when they warm up again. While they were unconscious he tied bits of cotton on to their legs. The other end of the cotton he stuck to the wall with Sellotape so that they flew around in circles when they woke up. Others bombed around the flat slowly trailing their cotton tails.

There were a lot of mouth organs in the house at that time, too. Everybody had one, and we took them everywhere with us. They really sound best one at a time, mouth organs, but we all learned ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ and played it for my dad. That was when he said, ‘Shall we go to the pub?’

People are very friendly in that corner of town. There are a few maniacs wherever you go, but it never got hairy in the Dew Drop. There were tattooed bikers, squat punks, goths, art students, Jamaican cricket players, my dad and a few of the old boys you get in every London watering hole. The pubs in Bournemouth often had quite aggressive, unfriendly atmospheres. In London, pubs are wonderful places. You just never know what might change when you walk into a pub in London. They’re the synapses of the city, full of connections and paths that lead in all directions.

There was a street market in Deptford on Wednesdays and Fridays. We got all our things from there - records, books, clothes. I could buy as much as I could carry for about five pounds. Everything was so cheap I always felt like a rich man when I arrived. One could afford to speculate. I bought a copy of Abba’s Greatest Hits for ten pence. I wouldn’t have paid much more, but it turned out to be incredibly good. Probably the best ten pence I ever spent. Graham bought armfuls of clothes every week, and he was accumulating large numbers of shoes, particularly big boots. We all had suits from Deptford Market. Ads and I bought dresses one week. We put them on and went straight to the nastiest pub that we could think of. Nobody cared.

It was good to pass the time with Adam. He was very handsome, pursued by beautiful women, but often he just hung around with the down and outs by the big anchor at the end of Deptford High Street. He was a young man who lived without fear. He wasn’t afraid of being beaten up, or arrested, or laughed at, or of not being able to get the last bus home. He didn’t need rhododendron branches or the soft sea to catch him. It was a new kind of freedom, his company. Most people worry about something or other, but he didn’t. He left for New Orleans at the end of the summer. All he took with him was his sketchbook and a hammock.

I spent my time at college surrounded by women in the matriarchy of the French department. It was a far cry from the threatening, all-pervading manliness of the building sites, but other girls just reminded me of Justine. Towards the end of the summer, just before the second year of college began, she moved to London.

Justine was bold and stylish and she was a winner. She could run faster than anyone in Bournemouth - she’d been the town junior sprint champion. Everybody wants to run the fastest. I think that it was being the best at something at an early age that had given her absolute confidence and wisdom. She’d been naturally gifted with good looks and athleticism, which had always made her popular. She didn’t have to learn how to do anything to win anyone over. She had nothing to prove to anybody.

We took over the flat downstairs. Flat 2, 302A New Cross Road, was lying empty because the building was condemned. There was no heating, we had to boil the kettle to have a bath, and even though there were only ever a few inches of water in there, it took all day to empty. The kitchen had a collapsing, rotten floor and was infested with slugs. They left their goo on the lino. They weren’t there all the time, but occasionally there were invasions. I didn’t mind the slugs. They were slow and quite interesting. There were nasty white ratty things in the cellar, though, and dripping pipes. It was precarious. The next building along the terrace burned down. Someone knocked on the door and said, ‘You’re on fire.’ Outside there were flames roaring out of all the windows and high into the sky from the roof like a huge incinerator.

Living in that flat was like camping. There was a little walled garden overgrown with honeysuckle and ivy and the sun came through all the windows. A hostile motorbike beardy lived in the building behind the wall, but one day it was demolished and he was gone. That left us with half an acre of space, through a door in the garden wall. I became quite absorbed by the garden and planted anything that might grow. I threw old vegetables over the wall and they sprouted. The potatoes did really well. Graham came round and we made chips with them. We mainly cooked on a fire in the garden, using all the demolition debris. We were cavemen really.

Ours was the only flat that had electricity by that time, all the others having been disconnected as bills went unpaid. Adam had gone to the States and the rest of the crowd moved on. Graham went to live in a cupboard in a house in Lewisham but one of his friends from Colchester called Mad Paul still lived upstairs. He was a sculptor and the main theme of his work was death. He wanted his degree-show exhibit to be his head in a box. He dribbled when he got excited, but he was an enigmatic presence on the whole. We gave him candles and he crept around in the dark alone with his mad thoughts.

Justine packed her bags regularly but never left. It was tough to start with. The flat wasn’t safe. The whole neighbourhood was insecure. She didn’t know anybody and there was no money. In the band I had acquired a new family, plus I was at college during the day. She got a job in The Body Shop in Oxford Street. She’d been sacked from the Bournemouth Body Shop for messing around. She had an endless capacity for messing around. That was why I liked her. Oxford Street didn’t seem to mind either and she worked on the cosmetics stand giving makeovers.

When we were together it was always wonderful. We brought bicycles up from Bournemouth and rode or walked all over town. Sometimes we took vows of silence. Sometimes we stayed up all night talking. We were young and in love and all we really needed was each other.

We went to the Natural History Museum on my twenty-first birthday, Justine, the band, Paul and some old friends from Bournemouth. Then there was a party at the flat. Large numbers arrived. Adam’s girlfriend, Raych, set fire to a pile of debris behind the wall and it burst dangerously out of control. Someone fell through the kitchen window. Damon climbed on to the roof of Deptford Town Hall next door and changed the time on the big clock, which stayed at the wrong time for several years. Dave locked himself in the bathroom. Graham passed out early on the sofa. My mum and dad arrived in the morning; they were flying back from Hong Kong, and came into town from Heathrow to say Happy Birthday. We put the fires out and mopped up a bit before they arrived. The flat had been trashed, burned, soaked and soiled and it stank. I could see my mum was shocked at our circumstances.

Early Performances

The flat was right next to college, but my course work was suffering. I wasn’t concentrating on French. Seymour was starting to get interesting. We did a gig at a place called Dingwalls in Camden, supporting a band from Manchester. When we arrived for the soundcheck with our entourage the headline act were quite unpleasant towards us. They were really nasty, and they were rubbish. Adam was quite drunk. He was going through a phase of contorting his face with sticky tape, so that he looked like a monster. He had stuck his lips back so that you could see his gums, that day. He’d spent a long time with a tampon taped to his forehead at college, but moved on to looking disfigured when he graduated with a 2:1, quite a good degree. He had sold one of his sculptures to a rich aristocrat lady who lived off Regent’s Park and he was feeling invincible.

The second time the singer from the other band said something Adam walked over and punched him in the face. He could handle himself with the Deptford vagabonds: he wasn’t going to tolerate any nonsense from that poodle.

The gig went well. We had written a few good songs by then. We played ‘She’s So High’, ‘Sing’, some short, fast songs and crazy instrumentals, and ended with a very long, very fast one. I went home with Justine on the last tube and after I left it got really nasty. Graham was sprayed with Mace by Dingwalls’ security and Adam had to go to hospital. But there was a review the next week in Music Week magazine, a bone-dry music industry paper, about a new band called ‘the Feymour’. It said that they were good. We did more gigs around Camden and New Cross. People from college came and flailed about down at the front.

I thought it was kind of the people who ran the Beat Factory to let us use the studio and eat all their cheese. It seemed very generous of them. They wanted to manage the band. They sent demo tapes and a copy of the Dingwalls Music Week review to all the record labels. Andy Ross, who had a record company called Food, was the only one who liked the demo enough to come and see us. He bought us beers. He was nice and we appreciated the drinks. Bands don’t get paid for those support slots.

The hottest new bands all played in the back room of a pub in Camden Town called the Falcon. Andy said he’d bring his business partner to see us when we played there. We were the second support band at the tiniest venue in London, but it was the glimmer of an opportunity and we pulled out all the stops to get as many people to that show as possible. Graham designed flyers with a man eating himself and we stuck them up around college. We made certain that all the nutters and freakers came. There was one guy, a posh American kid, who would go into a completely wigged-out trance. That always looked good. He was confirmed to attend and give it everything on the night. He was in love with Adam’s Amazonian sister Jo, who was rumoured to have lived in a graveyard in Islington. She was coming too. We pulled a crowd of about thirty committed arty outsiders for the big night.

All the early shows were shambolic. We poured wine all over each other before we went on and during the set, and usually smashed up the drums on the last song. Occasionally, when it was going really well, we’d smash them up before the end. That used to annoy Dave. There were gaps where things came unplugged and amps fell over as we bundled around the stage. It was carnage, and very loud. It was great fun.

Some of the songs were supposed to hurt. Andy’s partner, Dave Balfe, didn’t like those very much, he said at the bar afterwards. He asked lots of questions and said we were mainly rubbish, but very occasionally brilliant. All that we knew about Dave Balfe was that he had been the keyboard player in the Teardrop Explodes. He was in his mid-thirties and he talked and looked like a mad headmaster. I liked him straight away. I loved the Teardrop Explodes.

They took us out for lunch, a pizza, near their office in Soho. A month later we had signed to them, with the proviso that the drummer wouldn’t wear pyjamas and that we changed our name.

I went to see the head of second-year French. She was a nice lady. She conducted the Old French Literature module. It was all books about knights and witches. I told her I had been offered a record deal. I was supposed to be going to live in France for a year. She was genuinely quite excited. She said she’d been to see Eric Clapton the night before and that I could sit my end-of-year exams the following month, then take a year out and come back if things didn’t work out. I didn’t go back to college after that except to sit the exams, and I missed one of those. My best result was in Eighteenth-Century Literature, which was surprising because I hadn’t read any eighteenth-century literature. Not going to France had been a mistake. I only got 3 per cent in French Language. There was a lot of red pen on the exam paper. I’d really appalled whoever marked it, you could tell. There were lots of crossings out and exclamation marks, question marks and exasperated triple underlinings. The signing off remark was ‘Is the candidate lucid?’

The day I got my exam results was the day I got on a tour bus for the first time.

There was no going back.