3

Food ltd

Contracts

We were living in squalor with the slugs and Mad Paul creeping around with his candle upstairs, but I had the thing I wanted, a record deal. It was an incredibly mean record deal and once we’d paid the lawyers there was just enough to buy a new bass.

A recording contract is a hefty, confusing document. In the past, as one of the many formalities of business law, all contracts had to be written in Latin. It’s quite hard to say what language they’re written in now. There’s still quite a lot of Latin in there. There wasn’t a single paragraph that made sense to any of us, apart from the bit about if the drummer performed in pyjamas he was in breach. They put that in for a joke. We didn’t mind him wearing pyjamas, but we agreed to it because we understood it. We had to go to the lawyer’s three evenings in a row to have it all explained to us. It was very dull. The lawyer said it was the worst fucking deal he’d ever seen. He swore quite a lot. They do that, lawyers. We thought we were going to be catapulted into a new stratosphere and live happily ever after since we were about to become professional recording artists, and that we wouldn’t have to worry about anything. All there was to start with was hours and hours of things to think about. In fact, the more successful we became the more we had to deal with lawyers and accountants and management. That is the stratosphere of success. How I wish we’d listened. I’m still in that same recording contract now.

Eventually we signed the deal, the only one going, and chinked champagne glasses with our new record company at their lawyer’s office. The two lawyers, ours, and the record company’s, had a good old ho-ho-ho about the pyjama clause and said things like ‘Whatever happened to old Dickie?’ They all know the same people, music lawyers.

Throughout contract negotiations, which weren’t negotiations so much as ‘take-it-or-leave-it’s, the record company was referred to as ‘Food Ltd’. The Ltd bit wasn’t very sexy. On the radio they never said, ‘Now, on Food Ltd here’s Jesus Jones with “Info Freako”,’ they just said Food, or Food Records. It said ‘Food Ltd’ on the buzzer of their offices in Soho, too. As a business entity, Food was an independently owned company, but it was plugged into the marketing, sales and international distribution mechanism of EMI Records.

Food was two people and a cute receptionist in an office on Brewer Street. It was a tiny label. They only had three other acts, but one of them, Jesus Jones, had the number one song in America. Being number one in America is the ultimate goal of all record companies on the planet and morale was high. In the mornings Andy Ross was usually working hard on The Times crossword. Dave Balfe was always cross about something on the phone in the other room.

Food wanted to change our minds about some things. They particularly hated the name Seymour and insisted we come up with a list of ten other suggestions. They made a list of ten suggestions too. Blur was on both lists, so we changed our name to Blur.

It was actually really valuable to have somebody at the record company going to great lengths to point out precisely how crap he thought we were at all times. All artists need someone to argue with. In the initial meetings, Balfe ripped everything to shreds, like a college don with a bad essay. It was devastating. He flew into rants, made taunts and offered delicate torments. This was art-wank; that was dull; this was stupid; that was commercial suicide! ‘YOU’RE SHIT! You wankers’ was his vital message and he really enjoyed himself. He had worked with a lot of bands and had great skill in the art of disabusing cocky layabouts who thought they were the Second Coming. He was a total bully. I really liked him, and hero-worshipped him a bit because he’d been in the Teardrop Explodes. He wasn’t always right, but it was all quite necessary. We had to learn to fight our corner. He was just toughening us up a bit before we got thrown to the press.

Andy liked to do business in the pub. There was never anyone more at home in a pub. He could empty the quiz machine every time, because he could get all the sport questions. He was also an expert at darts, pool, the Racing Post and crosswords. He always had a new joke to tell me, and he had a huge appetite for new music, forever brimming with a brilliant band he’d seen last night or how crap something everybody said was great was. He was somehow a man of leisure, or he’d managed to incorporate everything he liked into his job.

It was great to spend an afternoon in the pub with Andy after Balfe had kicked us all around the office. We spent happy hours dreaming and scheming. They hadn’t given us much money, but they did give us all their attention. Balfe was a megalomaniac and wanted us to be the biggest band in the world. Andy just loved pop music and emptying the quiz machine.

London Shows

We thought we were ready for everything, but maybe everything wasn’t quite ready for us. The few shows that we had done had been very chaotic. Taking to the stage was an opportunity to make as much noise and mess as possible. There were long pauses as drums were reassembled, guitars came off their straps and we decided what song to do next. It seemed important to react to situations with as much creative spontaneity as we could muster.

‘No, no, no. Decide what it is you’re going to do and deliver it,’ said Balfe. He got so angry about one onstage bundle that he had saliva in his beard after the show. He made us go and watch Jesus Jones. Jesus Jones did everything he told them to do. They appeared to go mental, but no leads came unplugged, nothing broke and there were no long gaps while the guitarist tried to find the plectrum he’d dropped. They had spare guitars, too, and someone who passed them the spare guitars. A roadie. We couldn’t fit any more in the drummer’s car. There was just enough room for drums, amps and two guitars. The practicalities of being a drummer in an unfamous band are harsh. Drummers always have estate cars, so they usually get lumbered with all the other gear as well. Singers don’t have any gear to think about at all, so they tend to fixate on their hair and clothes. I used to like carrying my guitar around. It made me feel cool.

There aren’t many nice places to play in London. Even when I lived in a condemned building, venues seemed sticky, unpleasant places. Andy was at home in these dives; he always knew which beer to get and which was the best pool cue. Anything threatening about those places was removed by his sense of belonging there and being at home. They were nasty, but we were able to make them our own. London is highly civilised. There was always a slight risk of being beaten up in central Bournemouth pubs and clubs, which were all a lot smarter looking. Places that have live music tend to attract pretty nice people, so after the initial shock of sticky floors and niffiness, the rock music venue became our natural habitat.

We played all over London, dragging our faithful entourage of freakouts and crazies around town with us. Some people lost interest now that we’d sold out and signed to a label, but we picked up more people as we went. We played twelfth on the bill at all-day marathons and headlined in empty pubs. The Alice Owen, a spit-and-sawdust joint in Islington, had a light in the ceiling that came on if the music got too loud. If it stayed on for more than five seconds, it automatically cut the power. In a bar in a shopping centre in Shepherd’s Bush, Damon climbed up the PA and hid in the ceiling. A booking agent came to see us and took us on. Then we started getting support slots at proper concert halls. The first one was opening for the Cramps at Brixton Academy.

I think Brixton Academy is probably the perfect venue for loud music. It’s all standing downstairs and it’s pretty big, about eight thousand people. The balcony rocks up and down when things get going. You can put a proper show on there with explosions and a full choir. It seemed like a scary, horrible place that night, though. Backstage areas were all new to us. Most of the places that we’d played didn’t have dressing rooms. Here there were long corridors of them with names on the doors: dozens of rough-looking people loitered around, farting and swearing. It was like being in a hospital, only everyone looked a bit iller than they do in hospitals. There was food, too, a buffet, a hot food menu, free drinks and bowls of sweets everywhere. We sat in the strange restaurant eating sweets and staring. Someone came over to our table and said, ‘Don’t talk to the band, guys, OK? And when you’ve eaten go to your dressing room. Right?’

You wouldn’t want to lose your plectrum on a stage that big. We didn’t have a soundcheck because it would have interfered with the Cramps’ vibes. We went on as the doors opened and eight thousand goths arrived. I was very pleased to be holding on to a bass guitar. It’s hard to wear a bass and not look cool. It’s like sitting in an Aston Martin. You can be sure you look good and that people will stare. Damon fiddled with his hair. Graham turned his amp right up but it still sounded too small for that room. Even kicking over the drums would have been quite a futile gesture. We ripped through the set. A Cramps crowd has really come to see the Cramps, and not four twerps in secondhand clothes. It wasn’t easy. At that stage we were fragile. Our future was riding precariously on every gig. It could have been disastrous. We grew up in half an hour on that stage. When we came off we went to the Cramps’ dressing room and said hi.

Studioland

We were getting the hang of playing live, but we’d yet to try making a record. Recording studios are complex. We’d never really used any of the equipment in the Beat Factory, apart from the fridge. We used it as a place to rehearse, mainly, and just recorded everything on cassette, so we didn’t forget it. We left the Beat Factory when we signed to Food. It had been a luxury having a place to hang out and play. In Bournemouth, too, band practices had been enjoyable semi-social events, but there’s nowhere a band can play for free in central London. It’s pay by the hour. Cheap rehearsal rooms are depressing places. They have all the grime and sleaze of a gig, but no girls and no beer. There was a bunch of sad hopefuls making a suffocating din behind every door. We tried a few places before we found somewhere we could bear to be at all. The Premises, behind a café on Hackney Road in Shoreditch, was clean and bright and pleasant. The café was really quite nice. It was more of a jazzy scene there. The clientele tended to be workaday jobbing musicians, rather than hopefuls with day jobs. There was no one trying to be cool or intimidating. We were quite focused when we were there, and it worked well. It was good to be surrounded by other kinds of music. There were photos of famous accordion players and tin whistle men on the walls in the café. There was a seventeen-year-old, called Jason, who worked there. He was cool. He drove a VW van that belonged to the Premises and offered to take our gear to gigs and help set up. The label thought it was important to create a bit of a stir about Blur before we released any records, so it was a while before we got into a recording studio. When we finally did, it was like dying and going to heaven. In the sixties, studios were like laboratories, utilitarian and staffed by men in white coats. In the seventies bands made records in converted castles and manor houses. During the eighties studios began to look like custom-built luxury yachts inside. They competed for trade by outswanking each other. They could do this because the cost of making a record is quite small compared to the cost of making videos and marketing budgets. The expense of a posh studio doesn’t make much difference when it comes to the bottom line. Where venues were grotty, studios were smart. They boasted brasseries, bars, video games, nice pool tables, magazines and expense accounts. There was always an appealing girl on reception. There is no grime or stickiness in the studio environment. Record producers are all quite particular about washing their hands.

We went to Battery in Willesden, to record two songs, ‘She’s So High’ and ‘I Know’, with a production duo from Liverpool called Steven Lovell and Steve Power. It is hard to say what a producer does. He’s sort of in charge, like an architect on a building site, but he’s your architect and you have to make sure he’s building your castle and not his.

In a recording studio, there is also someone called an engineer. He is always asking the producer about microphones and levels. Then there is an assistant who sits quietly in the corner trying not to look bored, and who asks you if you would like anything every half an hour.

Battery was huge. There was loads of complicated gear in racks in the control room and a colossal mixing desk. There must have been hundreds of buttons and thousands of knobs in that room, a sea of switches and little lights. A long, tall, wide window in the wall behind the mix console looked over a church-like live room, a vast space with pine floors and carpet going up the walls; a grand piano as long as a barge sat in the middle. There were anterooms with tape machines; soundproof booths for guitar amps; echo chambers; cupboards full of looms and wires and huge fridges containing power supplies. All the rooms had double doors. The restaurant and leisure facilities were down a long corridor.

It was intimidating to start with, but all studios are pretty much the same. Once you’re at home in one, you’re at home in them all.

We didn’t have much gear. Jason, the kid from the rehearsal studio, brought it all down in the van. I was playing a Fender Jazz copy through an amplifier that cost sixty quid. It was good, that amp. I showed it to the producers and they looked at each other and I could tell they didn’t like it. Graham kept breaking his guitars, and he was down to his last one, an Aria, but there was an affiliated hire company next door to the studio.

It was a painstaking process, making a record. We’d written the songs we were going to record and we could play them fine. It took all day to set up the drums with microphones, so that they sounded good. They just sounded like drums to me. By the evening we were playing through the first song, ‘She’s So High’. We played it so many times it was impossible to tell whether it was good any more. That does happen in studios. You get lost inside things. You often can’t tell if anything is good until you’ve had a cup of tea and listened back to it later. Sometimes getting it right is a joy; sometimes it’s a chore. It depends on the producer, too. Some producers like to do everything a hundred times, some like to use the first take.

We were all wearing headphones, which had a clicking metronome coming through them that was louder than anything else. It was very offputting. Lovell said we had to get the tempo exactly right. I knew what a tempo was, but I’d never heard anyone say it before. We persevered, trying it slightly faster, then a bit slower, then in between. Then he said, ‘That’s brilliant, guys, we’ll record the drums in the morning’, and I was driven back to my hovel in a limousine.

We spent the whole of the next morning recording the drums and the whole of the afternoon listening to them, just the drums on their own. Again and again, considering the sound of the hihat, the steadiness of the rhythm itself, whether any bits needed patching up, was the tempo definitely exactly right? It’s the usual procedure these days, to start by recording the drums. When the drums are spot on, all the other instruments are overdubbed one at a time. Sometimes a song sounds better if everything is recorded at once, but it’s usually easier to concentrate on one thing at a time.

After dinner we checked the drums one last time and started on the bass. ‘I Know’ was a song based on a metronomic groove and the producers thought it would be more mesmerising if we looped the bass. I hadn’t done that before. Looping is used a lot in dance music, rap and hip-hop.

The fundamental unit of groove is the riff. If the riff is good, the groove is good. A groove is usually the same riff played again and again with subtle variations. With a looped groove, you’re actually hearing exactly the same thing over and over. The bass player jams along with the drums and a small section of the performance, usually eight beats long, is cut and pasted together to make the bassline for the whole track. Computers make this easier to do, but bands had been using tape loops before computers arrived. The Bee Gees used a tape loop for the rock-solid drums on ‘Stayin’ Alive’. I’m pretty sure they used that exact same drum loop for some of their other big hits, too.

There is something very earcatching about the same thing repeating, a hypnotic perfection. Eight beats is quite a small amount of time, but it is actually long enough to change the course of popular history, if you get it exactly right. Making good loops is no easier than playing well through the whole song. In fact, it puts even more emphasis on the ‘feel’. ‘Feel’ is the subtle quality that separates the great players from the ordinary ones. It’s largely innate, like a person’s way of walking or talking. A hundred different guitarists will all play the same riff in exactly one hundred slightly different ways. The subtle pushing and pulling at the rhythm, the exact length of the notes and how hard the strings are hit and bent, mean that no riff is ever quite the same in different hands. Things played with clinical accuracy often sound quite lifeless and mechanical. If it feels good, it is good.

Knowing what is really good and what isn’t quite so hot is the key to making a good record. I played the riff over and over and listened to it again and again until we found ‘the one’. It had a slightly lazy lilt and, boy, it made the drums sound good. It was a crap guitar but it was a great bassline.

The record, a double A-side featuring both tracks, sounded amazing. It sounded like a record. It was all shiny and shimmering and it floated. We got the tempo spot on. We got the feel spot on. We listened to it a hundred times and played it to all our friends, and also, and especially, to people we didn’t like. We were In Business. We were best friends. It was very exciting, but we began to separate from the lives we’d lived before. All our friends were either unable to relate to what we were so excited about, or slightly envious. We went up to Manchester Square to meet everyone at EMI. There were a lot of people to meet: a product manager, a press lady, a TV promotions man, a radio plugger, lots of people behind desks and fax machines, the marketing department, the head of the label, the head of international sales, the chairman. It was a five-storey office building full of people who worked for us.

We still had to make a video. Balfe wanted to do something weird. He said, ‘Lets build a really mental flashing doughnut and wobble it around in the dark. It’ll be brilliant.’

When we got to Pinewood Film Studios, the light wasn’t quite as mental as we’d been led to believe it would be. It was a bunch of neon hoops. There were problems with wobbling it, too. It flashed quite nicely, though. There were dozens of people running around, speaking into walkie-talkies, smoking and sipping coffee out of plastic cups. It was very cold on the hangar-sized set, but glamorous women strutted around saying ‘OK, darling?’ and kissing everybody, even the scary looking light wobblers and grumpy focus pullers. There was make-up, there was hair, there was wardrobe, there was catering, cameras, playback, riggers, grips, lampies, sparkies, producers, commissioners, runners and drivers. No wonder film stars have trouble with the real world. This seemed like a much nicer place. All that fuss over the song we’d written before we went home for the Christmas holidays a year ago, the chords I’d sat up in bed playing when I should have been reading eighteenth-century French literature.

Daytime radio would have trouble with the word ‘high’, they said at the label. Really it was just too slow and too indie and not quite brilliant enough for daytime radio. It got played a bit in the evenings, on Mark Goodier’s show, and the BBC offered us a session at Maida Vale.

Graham wasn’t phased about going to the BBC. He’d been on Blue Peter, twice, playing his clarinet. Dave’s dad had worked at Maida Vale and Damon took everything in his stride. The BBC reminded me a bit of college. They do things properly at the BBC and Maida Vale was even more impressive than Battery, a titanic complex of sound studios, from huge rooms for recording orchestras to little voiceover cubicles. It’s steeped in history, and you couldn’t move for sitting somewhere Jimi Hendrix had sat, or standing where a Beatle had farted. It’s quite serious at the Beeb. I suppose it has to be. Everyone there knew exactly what they were doing. The staff are all cherry-picked from the best of the best, and it was all so illustrious it made me want to scream. It’s hard to rebel against. You can’t really have a career in music unless you can interface successfully with the BBC, and you sort of have to do it on the BBC’s terms, which are reasonable enough. You’ve just got to do what you do; if enough people like it, pretty soon they’re knocking on your door.

Food really liked ‘There’s No Other Way’, one of the new songs we recorded on that session. We all thought it was a B-side but were pleased they were nice about something. Most radio is broadcast live. It’s more exciting to do things live, but it does take a while to get the hang of talking on the radio. There are only really two rules in broadcasting: no swearing and no silence. Silence does not broadcast well. People who haven’t been on the radio very much tend to think that the few words they are about to say are what they’re going to be remembered for, and they tie themselves up in knots trying to say too much. In my experience no one can remember much about what I’ve said on the radio, just odd lines here and there. It’s like trying to recall what someone on the bus was talking about. It is quite scary, though, to start with. It’s a knack, like swimming. When you relax, there’s nothing to it. You can do it all day.

Images

Being in a band embraces a lot of things. There are your thoughts, which you are constantly expressing in your music, and being probed about by journalists and presenters. There are your clothes, which have to say who you are, too. Hair is cheap but hard to get right. You have to be able to think of things to say that are worth repeating, or at least repeat things that are worth repeating. You’ve got to be able to play an instrument, or sing, if you want to get any satisfaction out of it. You need to enjoy travelling, because there’s a lot of it. Stage design, record sleeve design, videos, photo shoots . . . There is always an expert to hand, but you need to know what you want or it all just looks like everyone else’s.

It takes a while to get the hang of everything. None of the early photo shoots were that spectacular. We didn’t look like a band. We still weren’t really, yet. We had written some songs and hung around together, but we hadn’t played more than a couple of dozen shows. Some touring was planned around the first single.

We went to meet with a design company in a mews in Paddington. It was the sort of place at which everyone who did art at school would have dreamed about working. They’d designed the covers of all the greatest records ever made, by the looks of things, and there were gold discs all over the walls in reception. The offices were bright and sunny, and hip-looking people were ‘just working on ideas’ at big draughtsman’s boards. The idea they’d had for ‘She’s So High’ was a naked bubblegum queen astride a hippopotamus. It was a painting by a San Franciscan artist called Mel Ramos. We all agreed it was brilliant, even Balfe, who said it was important to break minor taboos. It was just a good picture, I thought.

Andy Ross thought it would be a good idea for Damon and me to go and be nice to everyone at the EMI annual sales conference, which was taking place in a hotel near Gatwick airport.

It was the start of the nineties. It was a glittering affair and things got interesting after dinner. It was the tail end of the good old days in the record business. Record companies were still expanding and setting up film divisions. They’d made a fortune from rereleasing everything on CD. Record sales were higher than ever. British artists outsold American stars and it was a good time to be in the music business. It must have been quite an expensive event. There were hundreds of people there, including some proper pop stars. The boss of the company, Rupert Perry, made a speech on a little stage and said he wanted to introduce some special guests. Iron Maiden drove on to the stage in a bubble car and started swearing at everybody. Damon had a funny turn and ran outside. I was having an excellent time. There was a party in every room in the hotel. Nigel Kennedy, a strange kind of violin-playing arch-yobbo and the biggest-selling artist in the world at the time, was trying to throw a television out of the window of the first room I went into. A lot of men in suits were laughing. He fell in a heap on top of the telly before he got to the window. It was good in that room. I sat on the bed sharing a bottle of Scotch with a guy with a silvery beard who seemed quite interested in everything I had to say. We shot the breeze for ages. He knew all kinds of things. I liked that guy. We drank all the whisky. Eventually I said I’d better go and find Damon, who had last been spotted in a field trying to talk to some horses. Andy Ross said, ‘What the hell were you talking to Andrew Prior about for an hour?’ I said, ‘Who the hell is Andrew Prior? I’ve been drinking whisky with my mate over there!’ He said, ‘That’s Andrew Prior, you berk. He’s the head of the label. I’m lucky if I get thirty seconds!’

I suddenly had a feeling that I might be able to do all right in the music industry.

I enlisted my next new friend, who was spectacularly pissed, to help me find Damon. We got into his car and put on Marianne Faithfull, really loud. It had never sounded so good, her voice. My new friend just wanted to drive his car over the golf course; it was good fun, but I was a bit worried about Damon. I found him in Balfe’s room having an argument with the singer from Jesus Jones. Singers never agree with each other about anything. I was really drunk by that point and I went down to the bar to have a fight. Bruce Dickinson was at the bar. I hate Iron Maiden. They’re devil-worshipping ponces. I said, ‘The devil can suck my cock and you can kiss his arse, you fucking poodle.’ He got me in a headlock and sucked the end of my nose really hard. I was laughing quite a lot, not really resisting. We left it at that.

In the morning, the pretty girl who was organising everything asked me if I would mind sharing a car back to London with Adam Ant. There is always a pretty girl who organises everything at record companies. ‘Kings of the Wild Frontier’, by Adam and the Ants, was the first album I’d bought. I said, ‘That would be great, actually’, and she winked at me. He was really nice and we talked about music all the way, just like I had done on the bus to school. He sent me Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake by the Small Faces a few days later.

I got home, back to the squat, and Justine said, ‘Has anyone seen you this morning?’ I said, ‘Only Adam Ant.’ She said, ‘Aren’t you clever! Did he mention your nose, darling?’ I looked in the mirror and it was bright red on the end. It took days to go back to being the right colour.

The record was finally released and the video was on Juke Box Jury. Jonathan Ross, quite an important voice, said it was crap and I swore to hate him forever. A soul singer called Kym Mazelle, who had stayed in a hotel Damon had been working in, The Portobello, gave it the raspberry too. He said it was because she’d put the moves on him when he took her up a sandwich in the middle of the night and he’d shunned her advances, which may or may not have been true. It was voted a miss, but it went into the charts at number forty-eight, which we thought was massive.

Telescope

Existence was still hand to mouth. We didn’t have much money, but a cheque for three hundred and twenty-five pounds from the musicians’ union came through the door, quite unexpectedly. I went straight out and bought the thing I wanted the most, a telescope. Along with the notion that I might be able to do what I’d always wanted came an all-pervading rush of optimism. I started to feel more and more alive. The more alive I felt, the more interested I became in absolutely everything. My natural curiosity burned like a bonfire. All of a sudden, the sky was the limit, and that too seemed limitlessly beautiful and benign.

I also bought a book, Foundations of Astronomy by Michael A. Seeds. I spent the next five years reading that book, over and over again. I took it everywhere with me. Even through binoculars, the moon is a staggering sight. I’d never looked through a telescope before, but soon I was lugging it all over the place on tour. I gazed at Jupiter, Saturn and Venus and wondered what they were doing there.

We still didn’t have a manager and we needed one. A good manager understands how record companies work. He knows a good sync licence fee from a bad one and he is always on the phone bollocking someone about mechanical royalties in the minor territories. That’s what a manager should be doing. Fighting battles you don’t understand so that you can float around getting drunk and shagging. A management company is similar to a record company. They work alongside each other. They generally get along great and help each other. The rub is always with someone in ‘Business affairs’ at the label. That’s the record company’s legal department. No one in the world cares about business affairs departments, except for managers. Managers care about them all day. As an artist you would hope never to meet anyone from business affairs. Life is too short. That’s why you pay your manager 20 per cent of everything, to deal with them. Most people who work in record companies are pretty cool. They all love music. You’d have to.

Even the largest record company is quite a simple organisation. A relationship with a label starts with the department called ‘Artiste and Repertoire’. An A&R man is a fancy name for someone who was desperate to be in a band, but couldn’t get his hair right. A junior member of the A&R department will see three or four bands a night, every night, more if he can. He loves it. Very occasionally he’ll see a band that he really likes and tell his boss, who will sign them and take all the credit. The senior guys don’t want to be drinking cider at the Falcon in Camden every night, but occasionally, they’ll check out a band because they’ve been sent an outstandingly good demo. It really would have to be brilliant, though.

A&R departments often get nervous about acting alone. They’re much happier about going to see bands that there is ‘a real buzz’ on. ‘A real buzz’ means whatever their mate who is an A&R man at another company was talking about last night, or something that has been mentioned in the NME. Then they all go down together and make a group decision about whether a band are any good or not. Usually every label wants them or no label wants them. Everybody passed on Blur apart from Andy ‘Magic Ears’ Ross. Even Balfe didn’t want to sign us.

Managers like to get involved with bands before they sign to record companies; then they can put their 20 per cent commission on the signing advance. It’s easier to get record companies to see you if you’ve got a manager they know. We went to see a lot of managers. Most of them bought us lunch. We went for the one who bought us the nicest lunch. As a rule of thumb, it’s best to sign to the guy who hasn’t got time to take you to lunch. There’s no way you could ever make anyone in a band listen to advice like that, though.

Mike Collins took us to Fred’s, a member’s club in Soho Square. We’d never been to a member’s club before. We hadn’t been out to lunch much before. We stayed there all day drinking brandy, and Mike Collins told us how brilliant we were, and how charming. He liked my telescope. He liked the idea of the telescope. He liked it all. It was special. It was amazing.

The anticipation of success is the sweetest thing of all. It’s never absolute, success, except when you’re dreaming about it. This was success, really, having lunch bought for us in a member’s club, and being flattered in the sunshine. It’s an endless chase, succeeding. It’s never over, but we were enjoying the chase. The brandies and the cigars kept coming. It was a good day.

We Hit the Road

The flat was behind a vegetarian wholefood paradise called Cross Currants. I’d tiptoe around there in my socks to get a pint of milk in the mornings. It was Dezzie’s business. He was a fresh-looking Asian with infinite calm in his eyes. I liked old Dezzie. He was interested in the band. He was always talking about Barbara Gaskin, who somehow he knew. She’d had a number one record, a Motown cover. It was tantalising, not to have had any hits. I wondered whether one day he’d be telling people he knew me, and we joked about it. He was a good egg. He bought the burned-out house next door, which I thought was an impressive gamble. New Cross was another place that was right on the brink of chaos. The bank down the road took the cash machine away because too many people were getting mugged using it. Des had to put up with all kinds of loonies and whackos as he plied his Fairtrade coffee, organic vegetables and Sosmix. He was spreading his message of goodness and hope to the people of SE14. That flat was the worst place anyone could possibly live in the late twentieth century in the Western world, a polluted, condemned inner-city slum, and yet I was surrounded by kinder hearts there than anywhere else since. Justine was finding her feet, but I worried about leaving her alone in that flat. Des kept an eye on things when we went out on the road.

It was hard to know what was going to happen when we got in the van in the early days. Big gigs are all the same, but the small ones are all very different. As support act, we might be playing in quite a big venue or a tiny little place. We didn’t know until we arrived. Maybe they’d love us or they might throw pints of body fluids at us; we wouldn’t find out until we walked onstage. We hired a van and drove to Birmingham to support the Railway Children. They had a huge sleeper coach, and they were rather pleased with themselves. There weren’t many people there, though. It seemed ridiculous to be in Birmingham on a Sunday evening. We went down quite well. The next time we went to Birmingham was to play at the University Ball, in Aston. There were half a dozen other bands playing, including Voice of the Beehive, who were managed by our record label. They were nice, those Voice of the Beehive girls. They invited us to their dressing room. No one had ever done that before. A dressing room is a member’s club and a party and a home from home all rolled into one. We had some port with them and watched their show.

It was a huge end-of-term celebration party. There were thousands of kids our age there. In some rooms there were bands playing, in others there were people getting friendly. There were bars everywhere, and a huge buffet, a bouncy castle and a bleep-bleep zone with mad lights, full of people I’d never seen before and would never see again, all having the best time of their lives. Just to be there for one night made everything very simple. We were free agents.

I didn’t need any encouragement to go on tour. When the record came out we were booked for three shows over a weekend - Birmingham, Cambridge and Keele University. Jason, the kid from the rehearsal studios, had been sacked for spending too much time with us. He refused to give them their van back straightaway and we got him to drive us. We were playing in Dudley, Birmingham, at a venue called JB’s. It was our first out-of-town headline slot. It was dark when we arrived because we’d got lost, as usual. We soundchecked and a friendly guy, who seemed too scruffy and nice to be in charge of anything, gave us a crate of Newcastle Brown Ale and showed us the dressing room. It was one of those ones with scrawling all over the walls and a couple of knackered but comfy sofas. We left the door open and sat in there necking the Newcastle Browns. Miraculously, the place started to fill up. Soon it was heaving. The guy came back with another crate of beer. We took it onstage with us. There was a huge cheer. These people had come to enjoy themselves. So had we.

Of all the shows we’ve ever played, that was the most memorable. They just got it, the audience, right there and then. They got the whole thing. Over the last few shows, we’d tightened everything up, rubbed off the edges and cut out the boring bits, but that was the first time we brought the house down. The audience invaded the stage. They went crazy, every last one of them. The dressing room was packed afterwards, and more crates of Newcastle Brown kept arriving. Someone said that I was the fastest bass player he’d ever seen. Graham was holding court with a couple of girls. They were gazing at him and laughing at everything he said. People wanted plectrums, people wanted photos, people wanted records signing and all of a sudden we were giving our first autographs. It all happened in a flash, right there in Dudley. The friendly guy gave Jason a huge wedge of cash. We split it between us. There was ninety quid each, a fortune. Jason drove through the night to Colchester, where we stayed, at Damon’s folks. Colchester’s not that far from Cambridge, which was the next gig.

We went to bed insensible and woke up invincible. Cambridge was a town completely different in every detail from the one where we’d spent the previous day. It was very odd, perpetually being somewhere new, and with some money in my pocket. The following day we were on a university campus in Staffordshire, playing football with a band called the Family Cat. Jason was our star player. He’d had a trial for West Ham. We were bottom of the bill that night, but there was a bit of a rumpus going on about the picture of the girl on the hippo on the record sleeve. It was degrading to women in the opinion of some of the young ladies at the college, and they mounted a protest and tried to stop us from playing. It seemed ridiculous, but it was in the newspapers the next day. Quite why that was in the news over everything else that was happening in the world that day was hard to fathom. Maybe it was just a good picture.

Difficult Second Single Syndrome

The really great thing about the band was that it was just that, a band: four people. Together, we were greater than the sum of our parts. Damon was dynamic, an initiator. The whole thing was driven by his energy, but he and Graham were childhood best friends and complemented each other perfectly, musically. Graham was simply the best guitar player of his generation. He was consumed by music; listening to it, playing it, whistling or tapping his fingers the whole time. He was biologically a guitar player in the same way that Damon was a born frontman. The bass guitar was my instrument. Unlike the others, I hadn’t had any formal training. I learned by listening and actually playing in bands. I was in a band from that moment I’d played my first lick in Jay Burt-Smale’s bedroom.

I played in quite an unconventional way with no respect for the boundaries of the instrument. It was more like having someone playing a second lead guitar in the basement. The sparse mechanical precision of Dave’s drumming was well suited to two guitarists both going at it hammer and tongs. It was uncanny how, with very little discussion, whenever we were all in a room together with our instruments, it all usually just seemed to work.

It didn’t always. The second recording session was a disaster. We needed to make another record. Steven Lovell wasn’t around, but we went back to the studio with Steve Power. Nothing went right. He even got Graham to try playing bass, which didn’t work. It was the worst session I’ve ever been on. We chose the wrong songs, and we made them worse than they were already. It all sounded crap. The guys from EMI came down and stroked their chins. Even with more experience a bad session always feels like the end of the world. There aren’t many really bad days, but they’re certain to happen, sometimes. At this embryonic stage it felt catastrophic, spending all that time and money making something that was lifeless and worthless. It was Christmas, so we all went home for a rest.

It was nice going back to Bournemouth and being signed to EMI. I had a sense that I was changing, still growing and leaving Bournemouth behind. In the pub on Christmas Eve I ran into Jackie who I’d had a crush on at an early age that I thought I’d never recover from. She suddenly seemed like quite a small and ordinary person. She was still going out with the drummer with ten A grade ‘O’ levels. Now he was back from college, training to be an accountant. She was standing at the bar, when I went to get a drink. I said, ‘Oooooh, hello.’

‘What are you doing now?’ she asked, barely disguising her boredom. I said, ‘I’m an accountant.’ I talked about how happy I was doing accounts. It was really quite interesting when you got into it. I was up for promotion, and maybe a car, I said, and started to quite enjoy myself. I said I had to go now, though, because I had to work on Christmas Day.

A couple of years in London had given me a whole new outlook. It was something of a reunion in the pub on Christmas Eve, but you could already tell which people had spent time in London. Poor old Jackie hadn’t made it.

Despite going home and showing off, the band were actually sliding right down slippery shitstrasse. The first record, despite reaching number forty-eight and being featured on Juke Box Jury, did not seem to impress EMI as much as it impressed our friends, and the abortive session before Christmas hung heavy. We needed a hit. Very early in the New Year, out of the blue, Balfe got a phone call asking if Blur needed a producer. It was Stephen Street.

We all got the next train back to London and met him at Food in Soho. It was good to get back to London. It was home, now. I knew it was home as the train rolled into Waterloo and it all rose up around my ears and I thrilled in my stomach. I felt it that day, more than ever. Stephen Street needed no introduction. He’s about the only record producer whose name I knew. He produced the Smiths.

He’s a handsome devil, Streetie. He’d actually been a teen mag cover star, on the back of his role as the Artful Dodger, in a stage production of Oliver!. We only found that out later, though, when his mum brought all her scrapbooks to his fortieth birthday party. We all instantly liked him. He said he’d never chased a band before - bands usually called him - but he had a good feeling about this one. He had a few days free the following week and suggested we try something. He liked to work at Maison Rouge, a proper eighties ocean liner of a studio, tucked in a little mews in Fulham. The eighties were just starting to founder, but it was still immaculate in there. I arrived one morning and Debbie Harry was standing in the brasserie having a coffee at the bar. I ordered a crème de menthe as I knew it was all they had left, and she laughed at me. It all seemed quite normal.

Streetie is good with drums. He once said to me that a hit record is nearly all about the drums and a bit about the vocal. He said everyone else could do whatever they liked, really, if you got the drums and the voice right. Some producers would say that in a way that would make a bass player feel a bit redundant. He said it in a way that made me feel I had total freedom to groove my pants off. He’s a great diplomat, a statesman. I can say without any hesitation or doubt that he is the nicest man in pop. He’s one of the nicest men in the world and I still always get a birthday card from him.

He really liked a song we had called ‘There’s No Other Way’, but we’d stopped playing it live. He said it was too fast, and that it would sound better at this speed. He pushed some buttons, which played a drum loop he’d made at home, in his shed. It was true about drums. It sounded like a hit already. I put the bass down in about ten minutes, and Graham had done the guitar before lunch. No one had said ‘tempo’ once. We came back after lunch and listened to it on the big speakers, as Damon sang the melody into my ear. It was heart-stopping. It made me shiver. Damon put a new keyboard line at the beginning. Dave added some drum fills. We turned the tape over so that the track played backwards and Graham played a guitar solo, so that when the tape was back up the right way, the solo played backwards. Balfe came down and went mental. He said ‘Top ten! Top ten!’ and dribbled all over his beard, and then he played the keyboard line from ‘Reward’ on our synth.

There was a club called Syndrome in a basement in Oxford Street. All the indie bands used to go there on Thursdays. I think we started it, but everybody else thinks they did too. I first went there with Terry Bickers; he played guitar in the House of Love and he was a proper mad-eyed genius. Everyone in his new band, Levitation, had the mad-eye thing, especially the drummer. It was Neil’s night, really, Syndrome. Neil was the DJ at Syndrome on Thursdays and the number one indie fan in the whole of London. I’m sure A&R men took his opinions more seriously than their own. Neil just liked listening to music. He had no agenda whatsoever other than the fact that he particularly loved scruffy outsider guitar bands, and he hitched around the country seeing them. He came on our bus sometimes. We’d get really worried if he didn’t like something, or if he stopped stalking us. We thought it meant we’d lost our touch. Syndrome became the official headquarters of the London music underground. It didn’t get going till about midnight in there, so people who had to get up on Friday mornings weren’t likely to go. It wasn’t like it was anything worth seeing, if you weren’t in a band or an indie music journalist, although towards the end quite a lot of Japanese girls started to show up. We didn’t mind, because they wanted to buy us Pernod.

At Syndrome it was fashionable to drink Pernod with everything and, as the drinks flowed, all the bands got to know each other. It was a scene. As soon as we’d finished recording ‘There’s No Other Way’, we took it straight to Neil’s night at Syndrome, like all the other bands did. Neil used to put the records on and dance madly to them, on the empty dance floor. He was really talented at picking good songs. Someone should have given him a record company to run, or a radio station, but all he really wanted to do was flap his arms around to new music all night. We stood at the bar waiting for the reaction of the test audience of die-hard, late-night indie kids. Lush were at the bar, so were Ride: they were eager to hear if our new record was as good as theirs. It was much more nerve-racking than Juke Box Jury. Chapterhouse, who were supposed to be better than all of us, that week, were listening carefully, and Moose, who Graham really liked, and Spitfire, and Slowdive and Suede and an unassuming American guy called Kurt and his girlfriend Courtney.

The dance floor was full when the record started. It was still full at the end of the record. It didn’t really mean anything. It was two o’clock in the morning. It was when we were getting on the tour bus the next week and it unexpectedly came on the radio that we knew something different was happening.