4
A Glimmer of Glamour
‘There’s No Other Way’ was a bona fide hit. It sold more and more copies each week and crept into the top ten. People knew all the words and sang along at the concerts, which were getting bigger and madder. More dates were booked. We started to appear on television. After shows I noticed that sometimes when I met people their hands were shaking.
We were just beginning to taste something new and extraordinary: a cocktail of adulation and freedom. Balfe called us into his office for a meeting and said, ‘Watch out, guys, success can fuck you up more than failure.’ He was an expert bubble-burster. Andy Ross kept referring to our ‘career’. Career was a dirty word. It suggested work and conformity. I was an outlaw, a rebel. I didn’t want a career. I wanted to cause havoc. I was a hedonist. I wanted to get drunk and be irresponsible.
I was quite resolute about that. I saw life merely as an opportunity to have as much fun as possible. All young people do, I think. Up until now excess had been limited by lack of funds, by having to get up in the morning and go to language laboratory and having to behave reasonably at college. Bands are quite exceptional in having absolutely no one to answer to. Once we’d made a good record, we could all do whatever we liked, whenever we liked, for as long as we liked. If I rationalised my decadence, I’d tell myself it was the duty of rock stars to indulge themselves beyond reasonable limits. If I couldn’t be reckless and extreme, I wasn’t doing my job properly.
For me drink and drugs weren’t about escapism; they brought me more into the world, made me feel more alive, gave me the same stir of giddy, weightless acceleration as jumping off the cliffs at Fisherman’s Walk in Bournemouth. Making music, on the other hand, does take me right out of the world. It is a supreme feeling, touches ecstasy. It’s actually much the same sensation no matter how modestly or grandiosely I’m doing it - whether just sitting alone with a guitar or standing on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. It’s quite possible to get from one to the other in a very short space of time, but however large the audience may be, the feeling I get from making music is basically the same.
Big hits all start life as tiny little ideas. Damon is left-handed, but he plays the guitar right-handed. He’s developed a unique technique that doesn’t use any of the normal chord shapes. He made demos on his four-track at home, and almost everything started with those. They usually consisted of a drum machine playing a preset pattern, an acoustic guitar playing the chords and him singing. They were short, unstructured, rough sketches, but they contained the vocal melodies that everything was ultimately built around. Graham didn’t often have to be told what the chords were and was usually playing along before the end of the tape.
Usually we were all pulling in the same direction. Damon and Graham’s strengths complemented each other well and I added an element of groove to their architecture. The four of us had good musical chemistry. We were still developing, but we sounded like a unit.
The distilled bold precision of a well-rehearsed four-piece letting fly can be as dynamic and complete, sonically, as a symphony orchestra. Playing with the band was utterly exhilarating and there wasn’t much to argue about. Chart success had given us all confidence and we were united. When Damon was unhappy about something he tended to become very animated. When Graham was unhappy, he became very withdrawn. Dave was just happy he didn’t have to drive the gear around any more.
The material we recorded for the first album, Leisure, had been well honed over the course of the live shows, and in the studio there wasn’t a lot of writing left to be done. It was just a question of playing the songs well.
Hotels
Leisure came out to lukewarm reviews, but it made the top ten in the album charts. We released a new single, ‘Bang’. It got stinker of the week in Smash Hits. It snuck into the top thirty, but it didn’t catch fire. The disappointment was cushioned by a sold-out national tour to promote the album.
We lived in hotels roughly half the time. Hotels fall into two categories: slightly decrepit, formerly grand places in city centres and newfangled execu-centres on ring roads with little hedges and leisure facilities. They both have their merits. We were quite at home in the venues, among the graffiti, the stickiness and the bad smells, so we didn’t turn our noses up at hotels. They are less sticky and smelly on the whole.
Dave became fascinated by Corby trouser presses, which are a feature of every hotel room in the land. He said you could tell if they would keep the bar open all night by whether the trouser press was wall-mounted or free-standing. He could tell you exactly how good breakfast was going to be, just by looking at the trouser press. Having worked in a hotel, I knew exactly how demanding guests could be and I set about making myself a nuisance, calling reception and asking for more pillows, more towels, more bubble bath, some matches, board games, books, whether they served Ricicles at breakfast and if they knew anywhere I could get Golden Nuggets.
Life on the road had a physical impact on all of us. One of Graham’s front teeth fell out while he was crawling around the corridors of The Swallow, a five-star hotel in Birmingham. I had heard him go past my room, pretending to be a dog again. He didn’t seem to be causing any more bother than usual but we were banned, which was a pity as it was a nice hotel. I’d developed a large boil on my chest. It really hurt when it popped, and the goo that came out smelled really nasty.
Damon was holding it together, apart from his hernia, but no one really knew what Dave got up to. One day his nose was smashed all over his face and he was very quiet. Even when we weren’t on tour he seemed to suffer. Another time he’d caught fire and Damon had had to put him out. They lived next door to each other in Greenwich. A lot of hotels won’t take bands. There are only a handful of travel agents and they deal with all the bands on tour at any one time, so quite often there’d be another band staying at the hotel.
We stumbled back to the Ramada Jarvis in Leicester, the willing, worn and comfy seat of many a travelling rock circus. We’d been playing at the university. The Darling Buds were in the bar, a pop band from Newport, South Wales. They’d played at the De Montfort Hall.
I always seemed to have a lot to talk about with Graham and we sat at the bar inventing cocktails. He was interested in combinations of port and brandy. We were trying to make them catch fire. It was wonderful suddenly to be staying in places where the bar never shut and the other people there were some nice doctors having a medical conference and bands we liked.
The first time I was unfaithful to Justine was about halfway through the first year at Goldsmiths. I was in London. She was in Bournemouth. I was drunk. It wasn’t premeditated. It was a brief pornographic fantasy scenario with someone I’d never seen before, never saw again. I regretted it terribly and confessed. Justine was devastated, more hurt than angry. We both cried a lot and I knew I’d never do it again. Of course, there were pretty girls at college. I flirted with one or two of them, but I never had any intention of getting involved. I suppose, if I’m brutally honest, if I’d fallen in love with somebody else, I would have been a bit stupid to stay with Justine, but I didn’t. I wanted to be with her.
The second time was a real disgrace. I snogged Raych. She wasn’t going out with Adam any more, but he still loved her, I think. He was long gone, but when I thought about it afterwards it seemed like a double whammy of treachery against him and against Justine. It was only a quick affectionate snog, but I definitely fancied Raych, which made it a worse crime. I didn’t tell Jus about that.
Andrea, the singer from the Darling Buds, was a pin-up platinum blonde and that was the third time.
The world had started to open up to us and it appeared there was no town that didn’t have beautiful women I could have married or interesting people I could have quite happily spent my life with.
Home
I loved staying in hotels, and going everywhere, but I wanted to live in Soho. It’s an enticing place. I found it surprising that more people didn’t want to live there. Soho is a constant carnival. It’s where people go to enjoy themselves and there is something there to please everybody. It has glitz and it has grime. Immeasurable wealth and absolute destitution rub along side by side. The overwhelming rush of chic sophistication, theatres, restaurants, neon, and the crude sexiness of people drunk en masse made my heart beat faster. Soho has a fairy-tale history and a future that’s open wide. The present moment always holds more possibilities in Soho than anywhere else in the kingdom, thousands of faces behind thousands of open doors, countless things about to happen. It’s alive and you never know what it’s going to do next.
I loved it. It seemed infinite and I just wanted to hurl myself into the chaos. After much searching and disappointment, viewings of dingy bedsits that shared bathrooms with prostitutes, and portered blocks that smelled of gravy, Justine and I discovered an unfurnished one-bedroom flat above a shop in Covent Garden on the corner of Endell Street and Shaftesbury Avenue. It had a tiny loo, a lounge with an open fire, and people thronging past in the street below. The bedroom was sunny, the kitchen was slug-free and there was hot water in the bathroom. It was being refurbished; it was still a building site but it was perfect.
I’ve never wanted to live anywhere quite as much as I wanted to live there, the moment that I walked in. It was on the first floor of a four-storey building between a church and an enormous hostel for the homeless and the entrance to the flat was down a little alley where the drunk ones staggered to urinate and vomit. It’s rare that you get to choose exactly where you live. There’s usually some practicality or other to consider, but once we’d tiptoed through the puddles, that was the perfect spot.
I paid the support band’s roadie to help move all our crap up from New Cross. Everything we owned fitted into his van quite easily and it all looked revoltingly dirty in the pristine new flat. There was an old tapestry screen that had seemed quite exotic in the borough of Lewisham; it looked like junk in Covent Garden. We didn’t have a fridge and there was no furniture, but it didn’t matter. I quite liked not having anything. Having nothing is quite relaxing. Being alive and in the middle of the chase was all that mattered. You can live without chairs, but you can’t live without dreams.
Dreams were all I had when I met Justine. I was a romantic at heart, full of indefinable yearning and impossible schemes. I didn’t have ruthless ambition, but I’d stumbled into something that was beginning to find a momentum of its own.
She loved me when I was a write-off, an unqualified supermarket no-hoper. As the band started to become successful the new friends that I started to make liked me partly just because I was a part of something successful. It became a part of me. But Justine and I always had a natural, easy-going magnetism for each other. We had no television. We played board games and walked the streets together, read to each other. We both loved music. I expressed myself through it and she expressed herself to it. She was effortlessly elegant, a natural dancer. She listened and she laughed and she was always surprising me. She understood me in ways that I couldn’t. I loved her.
The tragedy of getting what you want is that when you do actually get it, you always lose what you had.
Canada
The practicalities of the big time started to take over. The band’s growing popularity meant that I could afford to live in the flat in Covent Garden, but when we weren’t in Maison Rouge finishing the album we were on the road touring or doing promotion. Despite mediocre album sales, the success of ‘There’s No Other Way’ catapulted the band into the international arena. The day after we moved to Covent Garden, the first North American tour kicked off. The first date was in Toronto. For some reason there was no direct flight, and we had to keep getting on smaller planes. It was quite all right to fly back then; planes were like flying pubs. You could smoke and you didn’t have to pay for anything. I was happy getting drunk with Graham, wherever it was. You have to get used to being on planes if you want to sell records, anyway.
None of us had crossed the Atlantic before. I don’t know what I was expecting. I imagined the mustard in America would be hotter than it is at home, that America would be somehow more intense than England. It’s quite nice, American mustard, but it’s rather mild. Japan has got the really hot stuff.
My passport came under close scrutiny at immigration control. I’d jumped in a fountain after a show in Lille a couple of weeks earlier, and it had been in my pocket. The official was quite appalled by this. The Canadians, particularly, like to have a really good look at everyone before they let them come into the country. We were taken into little booths and questioned. They want to make sure that you’re not going to try and overthrow the established order. I ticked a box on the immigration form that said this was not the purpose of my visit, but the official was suspicious. And I suppose she was right. As I stood outside the airport, waiting for the next thing to happen, I started to feel that travel is the great adventure. I was glimpsing the world beyond the one that I knew and getting a sense of how big it might be.
A sense of vastness looms in Canada. We mainly have towns in the British Isles. Even London gives the impression of being a town. It’s built on the human scale. In North America they mainly have cities. Even places that could really be quite small are built along supergalactic dimensions; skyscrapers and ten-lane road networks with flyover systems that look like scribble. I’d never thought of Toronto, particularly, and here it was, enormous, in an enormous country.
I went down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast, alone. I was trying to work out what an English muffin was, and whether to have that, or an omelette. It was nice to be ordering breakfast in Canada. I was quite content there, alone, studying the menu. Someone was looking at me. He came over and said he was from the record company and hi there. I said oh, hello, I was thinking I might just have a look around the city today, and wouldn’t that be nice? He straightened up and said, ‘Well, sure thing. Perhaps we could do that after dinner and before the show.’ And gave me a list and said, ‘Here’s your promo.’ It said something like:
ALEX JAMES PROMO SCHEDULE, TORONTO, OCTOBER 1991
Press
0930 Scenester, music glossy - 45,000 readers
1000 Toronto Sun, daily broadsheet -1 million readers
1030 HMV In-store magazine - record store giveaway
1100 Glitz n Bitz, women’s glossy - 120,000 readers
1130 Break
1145 Phoner with Halifax Echo, regional daily -100,000 readers
Radio
1200 Alex and Damon to CFNY, syndicated national radio I/V
TV
1330 Meet Dave and Graham at MTV for acoustic set
1500 Arrive venue Lee’s Palace for soundcheck
At Venue
1700 Meet and greet with competition winners
1800 Dinner
2100 Showtime
After Show
Meet and greet with EMI staff and key media.
It was only 0900 so I went back to my room and called Cousin Dick, who lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a couple of hundred miles away. I hadn’t spoken to him since I’d sat on his knee and watched Tom and Jerry. I said, ‘Dick, it’s Alex James, Jason’s son. I’m in Toronto!’ He said, ‘I know, it’s in the paper.’ We were evidently quite famous in Canada. That didn’t make any sense at all. We’d never been there or anything. I went upstairs to be hot-wired to the media main.
Journalists are all quite clever, often cleverer than I am, I find. When they don’t like me it really annoys them that they are clever and they are getting fifty pence a word and I’m an idiot with a fancy haircut and getting all the money and all the girls. It’s best not to talk to those ones. Generally the cleverest ones work for the papers with the stupidest readers. These papers have the biggest circulations, so they can afford to pay the most. That’s how it works.
There is a knack to doing interviews. It’s mainly a knack thing, the interview, like playing the bass is. We didn’t quite have the knack, yet. It takes a while to come. For addressing the press there was a big suite on the top floor of the hotel, The Plaza on Bloor Street. I like that hotel. It’s a tall building and the sun screeches in. The first interview was with a music journalist, and we talked about the Undertones for ages. He loved the album, and couldn’t believe he was being paid to talk to me. I ordered some Bloody Marys for us. It was nice.
The man from the Toronto Sun was interested in our controversial artwork. I said it wasn’t controversial, it was a pair of tits. He wrote that down. I ordered six Bloody Marys and he wrote that down as well. I knew he would. It seemed easy, being in the paper. I launched into a kind of acceptance speech, thanking the Canadian people for everything and said a big hello to my relations, the Vines, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. That didn’t seem to get to him, though. He was getting bored. He was probably off to talk to the Prime Minister next. It seemed to be quite a serious newspaper. I was on my fourth Bloody Mary and showing him my handstand when the Glitz n Bitz lady came in. Graham and I had been doing a lot of handstands.
Justine was in another world a long, long way away. The Glitz n Bitz lady was attractive and intelligent. We lay on the bed. She had a Bloody Mary, and reached inside my trousers and gave me a handjob. My moral cloth was degenerating further. That definitely was my biggest crime so far. But, good God, I was enjoying myself.
There was a jam of people clamouring outside the radio station when we arrived, and at the gig for soundcheck. They were much more enthusiastic than people had been at home. They were crazy about the record, and some of them started to get hysterical. Things were already well past weird when Glenn Tilbrook from the band Squeeze appeared in the dressing room. He was quite drunk, and very happy. Graham was beside himself. Some men with natty suits appeared and said hi they were from our American record company and that they’d flown up from New York wasn’t everything in-credible and grinned and gave pumping handshakes. One of them had a penetrating stare and a breath-freshener atomiser that he kept dosing himself with. Graham and Glenn were drinking a bottle of brandy and doing handstands and knocking everything over. Squirt-squirt went the atomiser. The Glitz n Bitz lady came in and started snogging me. Squirt. No one could find Dave or the lighting guy. Squirt-stare-squirt.
Dave finally arrived in great spirits. The show was raucous and the man from the American record company’s eyes were popping by the time we’d finished. He shook his head and said it was too loud.
We drove around the shores of Lake Ontario, stopping at Niagara Falls for lunch on our way to the USA. On the road the same things repeat themselves every day - the travelling, service stations, interviews, soundchecks and shows. We launched ourselves at everything with missionary zeal, but there is a steady rhythm beneath the apparent total chaos, although the barometer was still rising all the time. Things were getting more spectacular and happening faster.
Touring had changed a bit from the days of playing to thirty people in York and driving back in the middle of the night in Jason’s VW, taking it in turns to sit next to him and pinch him when he looked sleepy. Being on tour is a hard feeling to explain or even remember, a gale of constant accelerations and stimulations and no time to dwell on anything.
All our petty wishes were granted - sex on tap, bars that never closed and where we didn’t have to worry too much about the bill. It was a constantly unfolding escapade. I loved it, but I felt crap the majority of the time. The part of my brain that makes sense of everything was having a great time, but the part of me on the ground was having trouble functioning on not enough sleep, excess alcohol intake and travel fatigue.
There was more friction on tour than in the studio, naturally. We couldn’t escape each other’s irritating behaviour. Damon and his stupid love beads, Graham and his stupid skateboard collection, Dave’s overall lack of panache and my own annoying habit of pointing these things out to them; but disputes were short-lived. We were brought back together nightly, in the rapture of playing loud music.
By now we had a road crew and these were the people we spent our days with. The road crew live on a bus and wear free T-shirts and smelly jeans. They are men of vast experience. They do tend to be quite nice people, despite appearances and reputations. The front-of-house sound man is usually the most sophisticated member of the crew; he’s generally a bit less sticky looking than everyone else. Sound men are always fiddling about with soldering irons. You know you’ve got a good one when he shows you a strange-looking box he’s made for making guitars louder.
The front-of-house sound man is the senior member of the sound crew. The backline guys deal with the stuff that’s on the stage, the instruments and amplifiers. They are the rock gentleman’s gentlemen. I inherited my roadie from Motorhead. He’d given many years’ service and knew every bassline, hotel, service station and rock venue in the Western world. He was always polishing my guitar and twiddling screws on it and asking me to stop throwing it in the drums. He loved guitars. He really cared about them. I used them a bit like biros, chewing them up and losing them.
You can’t have a show without lights so there has to be a lighting crew. Lampies are often maniacs so they have an affinity with drummers. They are feral creatures, modern-day pirates. They sail the land seeking only drugs, women and free T-shirts.
There is a tour manager, too. He has to stop fights, get everyone on the bus and look after the money. Tour management is acknowledged to be the toughest job in all showbusiness. We seemed to get through a lot of tour managers.
New York
After the first American show in Boston, Damon and I flew down to New York for promo, just the two of us. We were a four-piece band and I was always slightly piqued when I was left out of things. We were all constantly jockeying for position - that’s what gave the group its dynamism - but lately the other two were unbroadcastable, so they were happy to stay in bed.
There was a white stretch limo waiting for us at the airport. It was full of booze and televisions and phones. I called my mum. I said, ‘It’s all fine, I’ve moved out of the squat. I’m in New York, in a limousine.’
Two of my mother’s aunts were hoofers, and my father’s uncle was a jazz pianist. There were showbusiness genes on both sides of the family, but as far as my parents were concerned I might as well have told them I was joining the circus when I left college. They were always supportive, but the music industry was quite beyond their experience - theirs and almost everyone in Bournemouth. It would have been impudent to tell the careers officer at school that I wanted to be in a band. For a start I hadn’t studied music. But it was just there in my blood and in my racing heart.
We sailed over Brooklyn Bridge and landed at The Paramount Hotel in Times Square. There aren’t many places that overwhelm quite like New York. It was hard for someone who’d been living in a squat until a week before to accept just quite how wonderful The Paramount was. It was the first great hotel of the nineties, the monumental vision of Ian Schrager, one of the people behind Studio 54, the most legendary nightclub in history. Studio 54 was where Andy Warhol and Truman Capote danced with Liz Taylor and Audrey Hepburn, while Chic and Debbie Harry drank cocktails.
The Paramount was almost as glamorous. The staff were all hired from modelling agencies and wore designer costume; the cavernous reception area was a kind of ark in which all the best things in the world had been tastefully assembled.
I opened the door to my room. It was dark apart from a single spot-lit rose in a ceramic phial. I’ve never seen a rose look that good, not in an English country garden. It was exhilarating just to be in that hotel. The rooms were exceptionally small but, from the pencil on the bedside bureau to the power plumbing, exquisitely starched bedding and huge fluffy towels, absolutely perfect. Everything that’s good eventually finds its way to New York. It has such immense gravity that nothing that is truly wonderful can avoid it for long. All the super-models have homes in New York; all the great artists have shows there; film stars; rock stars; writers and the cavalry of wannabes, hangers-on and shagnasties that pursues the moving member’s club of the successful, the beautiful and the fabulous. You name it. It’s there. It’s the best place in the world to go for a drink.
There is always one place that’s the one cool place in New York, and that’s where all the famous people who are in the city that night want to go. They all want to meet each other. It’s difficult to get in to the one cool place, but once you’re in you’re in, and you can’t actually get out. By then it’s impossible not to meet these people. A brief residence in Manhattan is a clamouring, yammering public appearance from the moment you arrive. I’ve stayed under a false name. The phone still didn’t stop ringing. I didn’t answer the phone. Famous people came and banged on the door. It’s full on and non-stop and there’s nowhere to hide. To be in New York is to be on display.
Still, at this stage we weren’t very well known in America, but the gig was quite a hot ticket. The guest list was a roll-call of all the English people in bands in New York on that day. There are always plenty of those, a remarkable number. It would be hard to avoid spotting one in the street or in the hotel. It was quite creepy, the number of times the singer from Del Amitri kept appearing, never at our shows, just randomly around the world. ‘Graham! I saw him again! I saw him again!’ Soon, we started to look out for him.
It was packed at the Marquee. I went out to the bar in the front of house with Damon. We quickly got thrashed to bits on vodkas and limes; told everyone to fuck off; snogged each other and then had a fight on the floor. We destroyed the venue in the course of the show. All the record company cheeses were sitting at tables on the balcony, staring. Damon got on the balcony and danced on the tables and spilled their sparkling mineral waters. Graham had a fight with his guitar. I tried to high-jump the drumkit and had a fight with Dave, quite a bad one. I felt we’d given a pretty good account of ourselves, but the record company weren’t impressed. No one from the label came backstage, but a message was sent requesting a breakfast meeting at the hotel.
I left the venue with a model, and went back to her warehouse in SoHo. She was on the cover of Vogue. It was on the coffee table.
Another one-night stand. It wasn’t like I pursued these women. It was suddenly as simple as not resisting. Still, I was more than willing and it was the same act of betrayal. There were so many reasons to say yes and only one reason to say no, and she was an ocean away.
When I woke up it was gone breakfast time and I scarpered back to the hotel. The manager was waiting outside the door. He was red. He said, ‘Where the hell have you been?’ I said, ‘I’ve been to the top!’ He said, ‘Go and clean your teeth and get back down here, to the bottom. The record company want to have words.’
The man from the record company obviously had something difficult to say. I don’t think he had encountered drunkenness on the scale that he had seen last night, and he was disappointed. His job was probably on the line. He said we needed to ‘seize a golden ring of opportunity’, and other half-baked motivational hocus-pocus. We stayed very quiet.
I wanted to buy a guitar. Graham came with me. We walked out of the meeting into the lobby. Sitting on one of the architectural sofas, like a holy apparition, was Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine. They were one of five bands that we name-checked in interviews. The other four bands had either split up or died. He nodded to us, so we walked over, nudging each other. He said he’d been to the show and it was great. He told me where to go to get a good acoustic guitar. Any psychiatrist will tell you that the respect of your peers is more valuable than any amount of record company bollocks.
Then we went to New Jersey.
London
We got back from that tour the day before my twenty-third birthday, back to a new life in the West End. There is rumoured to be treasure buried beneath Trafalgar Square. I’m sure there is. Even if it’s just a rumour, a big proportion of all the wealth in the country is within about half an hour’s walk of Nelson’s Column and every day I woke up in the middle of it and felt it all around me.
I picked my way around town, never happier than when I had nothing in particular to do apart from maybe buy some rope and a piece of cheese. The very first flush of success was the most enjoyable, the initial paradigm shift from wanting something to actually getting it, but by then it was already too late. Success is the most addictive commodity in the cosmos.
My heroes were an old bastard called Jeffrey Bernard, a reprobate drunkard and writer of columns of great wit, and a fictional prostitute called Aunt Augusta from Graham Greene’s Travels with my Aunt. I decided to concentrate on being an alcoholic genius.
I’d seen how the record company arranged things while we were in America. They’d call wherever it was they wanted to take us and say something like, ‘Hiii, this is SPUD FENSTER from EMI RECORDS, I’ve got the GUYS FROM BLUR in town, they’d love to come around. CAN YOU PUT THEM ON THE LIST?’ It never failed in America. It’s an expensive business, being a man-about-town. I thought I’d try my luck, and got the phone book out. Justine called and said the magic words EMI, Blur and guest list. It worked nearly everywhere. Ronnie Scott’s, the jazz club in Frith Street, was about the only place where it wouldn’t wash. I got through to Ronnie. He said, ‘Blur? Never heard of ’em. They’ll have to pay like everyone else.’ It was towards the end of the evening, and I started arguing with him. The last thing I remember saying was ‘wanker’ and the next thing I heard, a couple of weeks later, was that he was dead. I felt bad about that.
I was systematically working my way through all places of revelry in the whole of the West End, but what I really needed to set myself up in business as a practising alcoholic genius was an HQ.
Freud’s was a subterranean cocktail bar on Shaftesbury Avenue. I’d been there once, as it was near the house. The barman had mad dreadlocks, and I saw him at a party after a Jesus Jones gig a couple of weeks later. His name was Mark, and he said, ‘Come down, I’ll make you a cocktail.’ I went there the next night. It was a tasteful room, all slate and plaster with mood lighting around the tables and tracklights on the bar, which was very well appointed. There were hundreds of bottles of different spirits and liqueurs on shelves, sticks of celery, bowls of lemons and limes, whizzers, twizzlers, whirlers and shakers, juicers, a coffee machine and a sandwich toaster. You could buy the art on the walls if you got drunk enough. There were pretty girls there, too.
I’d never drunk cocktails really properly. We were still Newcastle Brown men at heart. To start with, Mark made me one called a Long Island Iced Tea. It’s all the clear spirits shaken with ice in a large tumbler and topped to the brim with orange juice. It tasted like lollipops. It was very good indeed. He was an expert. We had some B52s next. They’re on fire and you have to drink them through a straw. Then he made margaritas, very dry, with the glass dipped in salt so that you tasted it on the rim. I said that I was going to come here every day. He said, ‘You should, you’ve got your own entrance!’ There was an iron staircase at the back of the room behind the piano. It went straight into our alleyway. It was true. It was my own entrance. He said we’d better have a beer. He said you needed to drink a fizzy one after every three cocktails. The bubbles help your body absorb the spirits, otherwise they build up in your stomach and you drink more than you can manage. I love the nuggets of advice shared by seasoned booze guzzlers. The best one ever was to have one day off drinking every week. That’s the vital one. Then bills got paid, I phoned my mum and I learned how to say no. A door that I’d lived next to for three months had suddenly opened on to what became an extra room of the flat. A city is just a whole lot of doors, and if you walk through the right ones anything can happen.
It didn’t seem to matter which direction I walked from Covent Garden; there was a lot to see and I did a lot of wandering. It was part of my broader research. The Inns of Court and the eerie shanty town of mad, masturbating down and outs at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The river: Cleopatra’s Needle with its inexplicable consort of sphinx and unthinkable Second World War blast damage. There were few overt reminders of the ravages of war in London. It was fundamentally a city at peace. I wandered through the parks, the alleys and thoroughfares feeling a part of it all and gradually finding myself at home.
Justine left The Body Shop and started doing make-up for photo shoots; she usually got a couple of jobs a week, but it meant we were poor again. Despite my infidelity, we were closer then than ever. We’d been together for four years by that time. She was the first woman I’d ever been able to be myself with. She gave me confidence and banished doubt.
Until then the band had all lived within walking distance of each other. But around the time Leisure came out we balkanised. Graham moved to Marylebone, which was still in walking distance, but he went to the pubs there mainly. We’d always gone to the same places before. Damon went west, to Kensington, where the pubs weren’t very nice, and Dave went north to Archway, where they were really horrible.
Trouble
There are all kinds of deals to be done when people start to like your music. A record deal is the obvious one; that’s for the records. Publishing is for the songs. They’re different things, records and songs, so if Blur recorded a song written by someone else, Blur would get a recording royalty and whoever wrote the song would get a publishing royalty. It’s called publishing because it goes back to the days of sheet music, when songwriters had their music physically published. We did a publishing deal, which should have put some money in our pockets, but Balfe had persuaded us to spend the money on some more mental crazy amazing lights for the live shows. But they were a flop and he bought them back from us, cheaply. Come to think of it, I never saw the ‘She’s So High’ lights again, either.
Mike Smith was Blur’s publisher and he moved into a bachelor bedsit on Rupert Street. Rupert Street was about the sleaziest, nastiest, low-downest corner of Soho. I went round to see him with Justine. It wasn’t the sort of flat that you could entertain in, or even really stay in for very long. It just had a bed in it and approximately a million records. We went to the Crown, Brewer Street, and played darts even though he wasn’t drinking and I was having a day off. He was one of the best people to go out for a few drinks with, or go without a few drinks with. At that particular moment he was trying to sign Teenage Fan Club. He was always trying to sign someone. That was his job: deciding which bunch of drunk idiots he should give a big slice of corporate cash to next. We were the first ones he’d signed.
I always liked listening to the demos Mike got sent. We were both big fans of the Keatons. They were a twelve-piece sonic terrorism outfit. One of them didn’t play an instrument. Instead he did things with honey. It got sticky at Keatons’ gigs. He wasn’t sure whether to sign them or not. For me, the Keatons were a no-brainer. He played a song called ‘Creep’ by a new band called Radiohead. We quite liked it. It was a bit depressing though. He said that they hardly drank at all. I passed on them. He couldn’t afford them. The Cranberries took us all by surprise. He was really miffed about not spotting the Cranberries, they were a bargain.
I was living the good life, but I wasn’t really making any money. It didn’t bother me. Accumulating wealth wasn’t the purpose of the band. I did start to notice that bills weren’t always paid. Sometimes we couldn’t use a particular hire company any more. Quite often people would ask us how we got on with our manager, and whether it was working out.
Some of the big retailers stock records on a sale or return basis. The album had stopped selling and Woolworths returned quite a lot of copies. Then a really big bill came from the VAT man and we couldn’t afford to pay it. It was serious. I had no idea what VAT was. I was good at playing the bass and showing off. That was my job. We trusted our manager to make sure that those kinds of unpleasantnesses were taken care of. It turned out that quite a lot of bills remained unpaid. We owed everybody money. We brought in new accountants, who told us we were staring bankruptcy in the face and facing prison if we couldn’t come up with the cash to pay the VAT. Whenever this happens it’s time to start looking for a new manager.
We went back to see Chris Morrison, the manager who hadn’t taken us for lunch the first time. He had spent the whole meeting talking about business and Ultravox and Thin Lizzy and laughing like Basil Brush occasionally. He took us on. He said, ‘You’re going to have to go back to America to get some cash.’ He loves doing deals. He did a deal with a T-shirt company and signed us up for a thirteen-week American extravaganza, so that we could sell some T-shirts and posters and pay off our debts. It was the only way to get money. Fortunately Jesus Jones, our label mates at Food, had the number one album there, and the American record company really had no choice but to finance the tour. We’d lose about a quarter of a million dollars on a thirteen-week stint, but we’d just owe that to the record company, which is what record companies are for. The main thing was we’d get some instant cash from selling T-shirts. We were ready for another American odyssey. We thought.