5
Grunge
The music media moved to a weekly rhythm. The seven-day cycle of charts, playlists, the NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and Record Mirror meant that scenes and styles came and went quickly. It was around the end of baggy and the start of shoe-gazing when we left London to go and sell our T-shirts.
Thirteen weeks, a quarter of a year, is quite a long time however you look at it. The day we arrived in New York was a noteworthy one in the annals of pop. It was the exact day, in September 1991, that Nirvana released their masterpiece, Nevermind. It’s no exaggeration to say that Nevermindwas the most significant American record of the decade and that the world changed that day.
American rock music had been quite dull for as long as anyone could remember: squeaky-clean and faintly ridiculous. Suddenly here was a sound, a look, an attitude and a record that united all disaffected young white Americans. Right up until then, British music had been selling well in America. A succession of pop acts like EMF and Jesus Jones had number one singles in the Billboard charts and a string of Manchester bands, the Stone Roses, the Charlatans, the Happy Mondays, had staged a British invasion of college radio stations.
Until Nirvana there was no subversive American music to compete with the stuff that was being made in England. American radio stations were crying out for bands from Manchester, like you or I might insist on having some cheese from France or chocolate from Belgium. A&R men gave huge sums of money to bands like Northside, and the High on the basis that Manchester was an enchanted place where great music comes from. Of course it is, but it very quickly became yesterday’s news. It shouldn’t have affected us, because we weren’t from there. The trouble was that everyone assumed we were. They said we had that Manchester sound. Manchester was dead and buried by the end of the week. The only place it was reasonable to come from if you wanted to make records at that time was Seattle.
SBK Records was on the forty-second floor of a skyscraper on the Avenue of the Americas, slap in the middle of Manhattan. A peculiarly tidy workplace and more like our accountants’ offices than the EMI building, it had zero glamour, a stiff atmosphere. Nobody laughed or had a hangover or called us darling. The company had already requested we make a different video for ‘There’s No Other Way’ which we had done, and it was soon clear that they were keen for us to make other changes; drink less; smarten up our act generally: don’t stay out late; don’t fool around with women - it was like we’d got married to them.
For the American record company the ideal band would all be sober, constantly grinning, nice about everybody and happy to let the label make the records and videos. We were used to record company pressure from Food. It’s a healthy thing. Ultimately, Food’s idea of what a great rock and roll band sounded like and behaved like was quite similar to our own, that’s partly why we signed to them - that and the fact that nobody else liked us. The rub is always that bands are trying to express themselves, which is satisfying, creative and worthwhile; record companies are trying to please everybody, which is pointless, vacuous and not what art is.
There were piles and piles of Blur promotional CDs around the office, which were in the process of being mailed to radio stations. We didn’t know anything about these records. What were they? The artwork on the cover was weak, a ‘blurred’ image. The colours were not strong either. The title was also bad, ‘Blurti-go’.
The man with the oral hygiene spray called us into his big office and gave us all the thrusting handshake. He said he was ‘toadally pumped’ about the remix. We said, ‘What remix?’
He explained that our record hadn’t been quite right, but they’d managed to fix that. ‘These remixer guys, they’re reeelly, reeelly haat.’ It took him a long time to say each ‘really’, and ‘hot’ came out with a wallop. It had about five exclamation marks. He put a lot of himself into the statement and we all felt his pain. He played the remix at low volume and tapped his foot and shook his head around. He was burning. He believed in energy.
The mix, which was of ‘Bang’, was exceptionally bad. The band had been removed and replaced by a mixture of the High and Northside with a baggy beat. It was a disaster, an embarrassment, and it was already being sent to radio stations. The worst thing that could happen would be that radio stations played it. He said, ‘Guys! You gotta trust me on this one’, and he showed us his pain again.
I woke up in The Paramount with a girl called Mary, who I met at a Dinosaur Jr gig. We had some strawberries for breakfast and I went to Boston.
Bands always go to Boston after New York. There’s probably nothing wrong with it but leaving New York is a wrench every time and I always arrive in Boston and wonder what the hell I’m doing there. Record companies are terrified of Boston just like indie bands were terrified of Neil at Syndrome. There are so many college kids there that it’s become a sort of test market. If the radio station in Boston starts to play a record, dozens of others across the USA follow the lead.
It’s still about the most important thing for a record, radio play. If the record gets on the radio, then you’re in business. So Boston is important.
The gig in Boston was part of a radio festival spectacular. The station had put a lot of oomph behind the event and the record company saw it as a vital building block. We’d discovered a new drink called Jägermeister. It tasted a lot like cough medicine. I’d spent the previous night at a bar on Lansdowne Street drinking those. There are half a dozen clubs on Lansdowne and if you’re playing at one of them you get a pass for all of them. I left Graham at the one that was playing Dinosaur Jr records and went to the one that was playing Sister Sledge. It had girls dancing in cages. The Sugarcubes were on an American tour as well and I’d seen Einar the night before in New York. He was a poet sort of person. He was having a lot of fun dancing to Sister Sledge with Björk. He was so happy. We had some Jägermeister and he said, ‘I’m gay’, pinched a girl’s bum and fell over laughing.
It’s easy to meet people in America, especially if you’re English. I asked the girls in the cages if they wanted to come back to the hotel for a game of cricket. The hotel lobby was deserted as everyone goes to bed at eleven o’clock in Boston. The cricket got out of control when Graham arrived and insisted on fast bowling. The girls didn’t have a clue what cricket was, anyway.
Riots, Fights, Guns
There were a lot of bands playing at the festival and there was a girl dressed up as a cowboy dobbing out Jägermeister, which we didn’t have to pay for because we had special badges. We went onstage really late and by that time we had drunk all the Jägermeister.
It was one of the times when the band was drunk and better for it. It was a tiny club and it was packed. There were people outside who couldn’t get in. Everybody was drunk. The sound man had been warned not to turn the PA up too loud. I’d heard him scream, ‘FUCK OFF!’ to the man from the record company. Inspired, we all turned everything up to maximum and let it rip.
The crowd went totally berserk: a mob of moshing, surfing, stage diving and screaming. All the crap with the remix and the manager and the people who thought we were from Manchester flew out the window and we played better than we’d ever played before. We could all play really well by then. We knew exactly what we were doing and we were brilliant.
It was the perfect recipe. A pissed-off and pissed-up, passionately anticipated band with a lot to prove playing in a packed venue. We whipped up a frenzy. It was everything you’d hope for if you were in a band or in the audience, but it was absolutely out of control and the venue cut the power after the third song. The crowd started to riot. They were destroying the place and we had to run for it. We got out before the police arrived, but a lot of people were arrested.
The radio station had never seen anything like it and washed their hands of us. The record company were aghast and they sent a bossy lady down to keep an eye on things. They were threatening to pull the finance for the tour, which would have meant no T-shirt money and big trouble. The bossy lady kept putting her hand on my knee and looking into my eyes.
The next show was in Ithaca, New York State, in a small bar. Jim Merlis, our American publicist, had fast become a friend. He was always asking me to say, ‘Cheers.’ He really liked the way I said ‘Cheers’. I really liked the way he said, ‘Coffee.’ ‘Corfee.’
His girlfriend’s parents lived in Ithaca. We were invited to dinner at their home. They are physicists working at Cornell University. Bob Richardson won the Nobel Prize for Physics when he discovered superfluidity. He said he was as surprised as anybody that he’d found it. He stumbled across it when he was cooling some helium down to a very low temperature and the helium started doing weird things. He said that if you stir a superfluid, it spins forever. ‘Forever?’ I said. He smiled and nodded. It was during the asparagus hollandaise that I realised I really liked these people. They were both highly intelligent. I asked them questions all night. We talked about cosmology a bit. I didn’t get to talk about those things very often, and my mind was full of it, from the astronomy book.
We went along to the local radio station in the morning. The DJ instantly identified himself as a buffoon. He had appalling coiffure and perfect teeth. It was a disaster from the moment he opened his mouth and introduced us as ‘the Blur’. From Manschester. He asked Graham what he thought about the new Seattle sound. Graham said he fucking hated it. Our hapless host put a record on straight away and flew into a rage. Radio stations can be fined for broadcasting swearing on the airwaves, but it was Graham’s flat refusal to engage in platitudes that had really riled him. After the adverts we were back on air, but someone accidentally said ‘shit’ again and that was the end of it. We were hauled up before the director of programmes to apologise. He seemed like quite a nice bloke. He said, ‘Just don’t fucking swear on my airwaves.’
The tour staggered slowly along the East Coast. In the taxi on the way to the 9.30 club in Washington, DC, I felt Damon bristling next to me. He must have been pulling faces at the dudes in the next car, because as I looked up one of them had pulled a gun out and was pointing it at him.
By the time we got down to Atlanta for a couple of days off, I was the only man standing. The Beastie Boys were staying at the hotel, which was on Peachtree Street. Everything in Atlanta is on Peachtree Street.
I asked to be put through to a Beastie and said, ‘Hey, I’m Alex from Manschester, what’s up?’ He didn’t want to come drinking. I went to a bar on my own and met a girl called Michelle. She had an Alfa Romeo Spider and she took me on a tour of the city. There are a lot of people who want to have a good time in Atlanta. We went to a gay bar, a lesbian bar, a college bar. We went everywhere. It was a great city and a great car. She drove fast while slugging tequila from a bottle. She said she had another car and the B52s had used it in the video for ‘Love Shack’. They were friends of hers. As I try to recall the weekend we spent together it feels like I spent it inside that video. She personified everything about the song and I wondered at the time if it had been written about her. She was a singularly striking presence. Everywhere we went everyone seemed to know her. She was from Athens, where R.E.M. are from. She told me she had been Michael Stipe’s girlfriend. Much later on, I mentioned her to him and he said, ‘Uh-oh!’
It was unusual to meet anyone beautiful who hadn’t been involved with another musician. I discovered that I’d shared the model from New York with Jesus Jones’ keyboard player, who I’d met in Freud’s a few weeks earlier.
Michelle gave me her address in Athens and the next time the band were in Atlanta I got someone to drive me to Athens to look for her, but I never found her again.
We wound all around the South, through Texas and back up north to Chicago and Minneapolis. The gigs were going brilliantly, but the organs of the mass media were focused on Seattle. I was in an alcoholic stupor and drank beer for breakfast. I had two black eyes, one from Dave, the other from Graham.
Graham became very lively in drink. Dave just got on with it quietly. I can’t remember why Graham punched me, but I was always annoying him. He became very distressed when Audrey Hepburn died and listened to loud, doomy music in the front lounge on his own for days. Even though we fought, we were united. There was never any question of us not wanting to be in a band together.
It takes three days to drive from Minneapolis to Vancouver, a terrifying thought. Dave asked if I wanted to learn bridge and we dealt the first hand as the bus pulled away. We were still playing when we arrived in Vancouver.
We’d stopped halfway in a place called Miles City, Montana. Cities everywhere have similarities, and tiny places do, too. We could have been in a village in the African bush. It was hot and dusty and there was a prefab supermarket that never closed, a motel, a few houses and car parks. A local approached one of the crew for their autograph; they’d never met anyone from England before.
I went for a walk with Damon. When I was wandering around somewhere I’d never been before, as I often was, I found it hard not to get lost. I usually walked in a straight line. It served me well, the straight-line principle. I never get lost heading in a constant direction. We walked out of Miles City and kept on walking, and pretty soon we were out on the searing plains. It was sweltering and hazy and ever so quiet. I spotted a squashed snake in the road, and all of a sudden noticed another. Then there were squashed snakes everywhere I looked. I was wearing shorts and plimsolls, and I didn’t have my cricket bat with me. Damon is never scared of anything. He said, ‘Just watch where you’re going. They’re just snakes, they’re not going to bite you.’
I recognised that I was in one of those situations that I only seemed to get in with Damon. A similar thing had happened in Alabama when the bus had stopped in a lay-by. We sprang from the bus and ran as fast as we could through the fields until we were out of breath. I found myself standing next to a waist-high, muddy tower. I said, ‘Look at this! Strange! Looks like a nest.’ I peeked in the top, and there was a huge spider as big as a fist in there. I said, ‘Good job we spotted that!’, then we realised that the whole swampy field was high-density spider accommodation. They were huge, and they were everywhere. The bus driver had been winding us up about them. He’d said if you get bitten by one of those critters, all you have time to say is ‘I’ve been bitten by a f—’ before you died. He was definitely lying, but we weren’t in a good place. There were flies landing on us, and a lot of whirry bugs bombing around, the sort that really big spiders like to eat. The whole place was humming, really noisily. It was only when I stood still that I realised I was sinking into a bog. It was unpleasant, and we crept out of there very carefully.
But we had wandered into snake territory this time. Damon was wearing sandals. He’d found a stick that he was whacking and swishing around in front of him. My strategy was more the creeping-along-quietly approach. He walloped a big cactus and said, ‘Don’t be a poof!’ I said, ‘Well, why are you trying to fight them, they’ll get out of your way if you give them time.’ We’d seen quite a lot of live ones by now. They were rattlesnakes, and if you listened carefully you could hear the odd rattle and hiss. A man with a rifle appeared on top of the hill we were headed towards. He was in full survival nutter gear: big boots, fatigues, ammo belt, combat jacket, peaked cap and mirror shades. He was performing some kind of drill or ritual. He’d take a few paces then drop on one knee and take aim with his rifle. It would still have been alarming even if every time he took aim he hadn’t been pointing his gun directly at us. His movements were jerky and insane. He was definitely trying to scare us; whether he was going to shoot us remained to be seen. I thought probably not, but when you’re in the desert and a particularly strange man is pointing his gun at you, you can’t be sure. Damon is the only person I’ve ever known who would use a bent stick to front up a man with a gun. It was the second time that fortnight that someone had a gun on him and I’d been right beside him. There was no cover. I thought it was best to ignore them both and concentrate on not standing on a snake.
America had been frustrating in many ways. We didn’t fit in. We weren’t from Manchester, or Seattle. The remix greeted us everywhere we went. Graham was beside himself about Audrey, Dave was very quiet. People kept pointing guns at Damon. I had two black eyes. We crossed the Canadian border and it felt like someone had flicked a switch that made everything all right again. We’d been playing in bars, mainly, in America, but the venue in Vancouver was huge. We went along to the radio station, and ‘There’s No Other Way’ was number one in their chart. Everybody was really pleased to see us. The presenter knew that I was from Bournemouth and liked cheese. He knew that Damon liked Hermann Hesse; that Graham was a painter and Dave was the quiet one. They were all asking about ‘the Boston Riot’, enthralled and laughing about the bad remix. The station had been playing the album cut of the track. The presenter said that the Seattle sound sucked. Seattle is the next town south down the coast. We were being hailed as the saviours of music. We were fêted. It was Damon’s birthday, too.
The venue was on the waterfront and there were speedboats for hire. Graham and I didn’t have any ID but the speedboat man recognised us and let us take one. I was just opening up the throttle when our record came on the onboard radio. We opened her up and spent the afternoon zooming around the harbour.
Back at the venue, things weren’t going so well. The dressing room was the smartest, newest, cleanest one we’d had on the whole tour and Damon and Dave had demolished it. They’d taken the ceiling down and were starting on the walls. At some time previously there had evidently been a food fight and a beer-throwing contest. The people from the radio station had come along to hang out and thought it was brilliant. I went out to the bar with Damon. We were celebrating his birthday and being number one in Canada. There was a bottle of Tabasco on the bar, for Bloody Marys. He said, ‘Watch this!’ and necked the whole thing. Temporarily, he went into convulsions and was sick. Then the hiccups started. They were the biggest hiccups I’ve ever seen. There was an element of sneeze in each hiccup, and each one possessed his entire body. It wasn’t deadly serious, but we were supposed to be onstage in twenty minutes. We went on late. I smashed a guitar and a few drums. Having destroyed backstage, Damon tore into the front of house. Dave swan-dived into the crowd and was devoured, so I finished the drums off. We hadn’t done that for a while. It is very satisfying to make a lot of noise and break stuff.
I bought a flute in Seattle the next day. All the kids had sold their flutes and violins and were taking up guitar and heroin. The flute was a real bargain, solid silver. We worked our way down the West Coast, playing on a boat in San Francisco. That’s a great city. Playing on a boat doesn’t work, though. When we came onstage, everyone rushed to the front and the thing practically capsized. The captain stopped the show and we had to wait until the boat was moored alongside the quay to start playing again.
It struck me once more that there are so many places I could live and be happy, and so many people I could do it with. A little success gives a perspective on life’s embarras de richesse, but London was home, and where the girl that I loved was.
Regroup
America had fried us. We’d thrown ourselves right in. We’d come out still standing, but we were still totally skint. EMI released another single, ‘Popscene’, a tougher-sounding record than anything we’d released previously. It stalled outside the top thirty. Radio weren’t interested, we didn’t get on Top of the Pops and we were suffering quite a backlash in the press. We ignored grunge. We didn’t look like anybody else or sound like anybody else.
We did a tour of the UK with the Jesus and Mary Chain, Dinosaur Jr and My Bloody Valentine. From some quarters we were perceived as quite a lightweight pop act but we could hold our own with the noise heavyweights.
The rollercoaster took further tolls on our health. I was drinking more and more. We were complete outsiders, with nothing to lose. We started dressing like we used to at college, Oxfam suits and big boots.
It was a very quiet time for British music. There seemed to be nothing happening at all. The British media were only interested in American grunge bands. We were out of favour, but we knew what we were doing at last and when you know what you’re doing you just have to keep doing it.
We recorded Modern Life Is Rubbish at Maison Rouge, mainly with Stephen Street. There was just enough in the band’s bank account to cover the rent, but when Justine didn’t get any jobs we were as poor as we’d ever been. Whenever we were in the studio the owner gave us fifty quid a day. Split four ways it was enough to buy lunch and a packet of fags. There were few distractions and we were able to concentrate on the one thing that we all really wanted to do, which was to make a great record. Modern Life Is Rubbishis my favourite Blur record. I think it’s our magnum opus. The scope of the album was vast. We were all listening to different music and pulling in different directions. ‘Musical differences’ are often cited as the reason bands disintegrate, but they are actually what make a good group great.
By now we’d spent enough time in studios to know the difference between a compressor and a limiter. We weren’t bamboozled by how long it took to set the drums up or confused by click tracks and we started to become more adventurous. The songs grew from Damon’s home demos as before, but we developed most of them in the studio, rather than in rehearsal rooms, so we were able to take our ideas further. String quartets were added to some of the tracks, brass sections, oboe and orchestral percussion.
I hadn’t worked with ‘professional’ musicians until we recorded ‘Popscene’, and at that time I wasn’t sure how we would measure up. The brass section had given the impression of a gang of painters and decorators as they unpacked their equipment. It was as if they were unfolding stepladders and unloading brushes. They splashed their bright paint all over the song. They played mainly by ear, just like we did.
The string players had music stands and reams of manuscript paper. Their visits were more like a maiden great-aunt coming for afternoon tea. ‘Quick, tidy up those drum takes, they’ll be here in a minute!’ We weren’t really allowed physically to touch their instruments; fair enough, I suppose, but it did highlight a class division between classical musicians and rock musicians. We worked very differently from the string players. I’d never written down a single note.
The four of us rarely had to tell each other what to play, but with session players it’s vital to explain very clearly exactly what’s required. Working with these highly trained, accomplished musicians made me realise just how quickly the band worked together and how well we understood each other; that actually, one way or another, we had all become very good musicians ourselves. My confidence grew.
Other songs sounded better completely raw, on the bone, as it were, and the four of us recorded those live. There were mad instrumentals and psychedelic expeditions; there was music-hall melody and mosh pit madness. It didn’t sound like anything else. We worked hard. Christmas was approaching, and we announced a show at the Hibernian Centre, right next door to the studio. The Salvation Army band opened the show with carols. A feminist punk collective called Huggy Bear played next and one of Damon’s old friends from drama college dressed up as Santa and gave away copies of an ancient carol we used to sing in the dressing room called ‘The Wassailing Song’. There were only about three hundred people at the gig, including the Salvation Army band. It didn’t get reviewed - not one music editor felt our new ‘British’ sound was worthy of interest. Even a bad review is a thousand times better than no review. It was the first time we played most of the Modern Life songs and they went down very well. Santa was stampeded by the faithful and to this day ‘The Wassailing Song’ is Blur’s most sought-after rarity.
Outside of the four of us, confidence in the band was at an all-time low. The Food guys came down to the studio the next day and stroked their chins. I was in the middle of recording the bass on a song called ‘Star Shaped’. They listened to everything we’d done and shook their heads. They said there were no singles, and that it was ridiculous that a band with so much potential should be making such a doggedly British record. There was pressure from the American company for us to rerecord everything with Butch Vig, who had produced Nevermind for Nirvana.
Both Balfe and Andy started ranting, ‘You can do it your way or you can do it our way. Either way, it’s your last chance.’ ‘You drink too much.’ ‘Nobody is interested in British pop. It’s not going to happen.’ Balfe started playing ‘Reward’ on the keyboard again and everyone ignored him. I finished the bass on ‘Star Shaped’ and went Christmas shopping at Harrods with Graham.
Damon wrote a song called ‘For Tomorrow’ at his parents’ house on Christmas Eve. We were supposed to have finished the recording by Christmas but it was too good to leave off the album. We went straight back to Maison Rouge in January and recorded it. It was symphonic, sophisticated, elegiac and elevating. We nailed it. Streetie said it was the best thing we’d ever done.
British Image 1
We posed for photos with a huge dog called Sherman, and scrawled ‘British Image 1’ on the backdrop. The photos were damned as xenophobic. Nobody wanted to play the video. The record went to number twenty-eight. The reviews said it was ambitious but anachronistic, and bade us farewell. We hit the road.
We were always a kick-arse live band. A curious thing happened as we toured Modern Life. The audience changed. Throughout the first record the crowd had been mainly girls, but now the front row was mostly men. Suited and scootered, like a lost cavalry, came the mods.
We kept on playing and we kept on recording.
We were right on the breadline. We went to Japan to earn some more cash, and to investigate. Quite why the Japanese love British pop music so much is open to interpretation. They do, though. They love it. We had no idea we were big in Japan, but we got to the airport and there were quite a lot of people there, with presents, cameras and pieces of card for us to sign. It was surreal to disembark from an aircraft, jetlagged, poor and struggling, and to be greeted like princes, in a strange and wonderful land. They knew all about us. We each had our own little fan club. Graham seemed to have the biggest following. We were followed everywhere we went and were provided with security guards. They were completely unnecessary, as the girls were very respectful and polite. I think the security guards were there to make the girls feel more important.
It takes a while to get the hang of Japan. There were fans in the hotel, fans at the record company, on the train, in the lift. They giggled and smiled and pointed. It was very pleasant, but interviews were difficult. There was usually an interpreter involved, and a hangover.
The best nightclub in the world is in Roppongi, Tokyo, but it serves the worst booze. It’s called the Lexington Queen. It’s Bill’s place. If you’re ever in Tokyo, go and find Bill and tell him I sent you. There are many reasons why it is the best nightclub in the world. The first is that I never had to pay for a drink. There aren’t very many Western people in Japan. No one goes there on holiday, which is a shame. The majority of young Westerners in Tokyo are people in rock and roll bands, and models. Modelling is big business in Tokyo. Bill lets bands and models in for free, and doesn’t charge them for drinks. It was hard to understand how an arrangement that wonderful could exist, that I could go somewhere that was full of beautiful women and the drinks were free. Models love meeting people in bands. I met two or three girls at the Lex that I’d met in other places, one in Milan, one in Atlanta and one in London. That booming basement became my office in Tokyo for many years. I don’t ever remember it closing. The only drawback is that the Lexington Queen hangover is the most vicious and overwhelming of all the hangovers in the world. It is especially bad when combined with a ride on the bullet train, or a morning of interviews. It is a small price to pay. The Japanese also embrace getting absolutely smashed and smoking fags, and they have very good systems for beating hangovers. The spas are sensational, and a big bowl of noodle soup works wonders.
We still managed to mess everything up in Japan. We were late. We were rude. We didn’t bow low enough. We didn’t play for long enough. We weren’t deliberately offensive, just naive. There is a lot of etiquette to observe in Japan and we burbled with bad protocol. I was often asked if I had any messages for my fans. I said, ‘Please stop throwing cheese at me.’ Cheese is very hard to get in Japan. It is so rare that it comes in tins, to preserve it. I had always expressed great interest in cheese in interviews. The fans had gone to great lengths to find cheese. A journalist reported me to the record company, and I was asked to apologise for abusing their generosity.
Fan culture is highly developed in Japan.
Festivals
When I got back from Japan Justine had gone missing. I located her, finally, staying with friends in Worthing. I walked down to Leicester Square after a couple of refreshers at Freud’s, and soaked it all up. A fight broke out between a horrible thug and a little guy. I’ve never seen someone hit another person so hard. It was all the more shocking for coming straight after Japan’s whizzing serenity. Japan was so different from anywhere else I’d been. I found my perspective had shifted, that I was seeing the country of my birth through fresh eyes.
We’d been travelling around Britain on and off for the last two years; I had a working knowledge of all the major cities and I liked every single one of them. On the whole people who live in sunny Bournemouth believe that people who live anywhere else are slightly mad. Why, they say, would anyone want to live in Coventry? It has no beach.
At first glance, Britain has all the ugliest large towns in Western Europe and the most unfathomable metropolitan geography in the world. I had Manhattan worked out in about ten seconds. It’s almost impossible to get lost there. Modern cities are designed, designed around modern life. Britain’s historic towns have grown madly out of control like a force of nature, gardens running wild into a space age.
In medieval Coventry all people really needed was somewhere to go to church, park their horses, swap turnips and watch Shakespeare, and no doubt it was as neat as a row of buttons back then. It underwent explosive growth during the industrial revolution and local planners must have just been getting their heads around the arrival of the ‘motor car’ and where to put the Rolls-Royce factory when the city was blitzed in 1940. It regenerated and expanded further to accommodate more heavy industry, which has since mostly vanished, to be replaced by technology-based businesses, and bands like the Specials. It’s been a continuous success story and I wouldn’t swap Coventry for Vienna. All those layers of history and transformation; it’s beautiful.
I loved the brilliant chaos of our cities. The mood, as we toured the country with the new millennium slowly appearing on the horizon, had been nothing short of festive. Grunge music expressed pain, dissatisfaction and self-loathing, like the Smiths had ten years earlier, but young people in Britain had money, opportunities and each other and they were celebrating.
No matter what anyone said, we knew we were a great band. The second single from Modern Life Is Rubbish was called ‘Chemical World’ and it went to number twenty-eight, too, the same as the last record. It wasn’t a smash, but there were some good signs. Eddie Izzard, my favourite comedian, mentioned in an interview that he listened to that song before he went onstage. We demoed some new tracks even though the album had only just been released. They were the best songs we’d ever written.
It was the summertime and we went to Europe to play at some festivals. Festivals were a phenomenon that exploded in the nineties. The festival transformed from a countercultural beardy bong session into a mainstream mass phenomenon, like fishing and football. I think it was because the best music attracts the prettiest girls and when the pretty girls come, everyone else soon follows. What was basically a cross between a stadium gig and going camping suddenly became very appealing once the magic ingredient of pretty girls was added.
The word ‘festival’ is a marketing device. It suggests a celebration, religious significance and culture. Festivals are just big gigs. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s more effective to do things on a huge scale. Huge bands, huge festivals and huge numbers of people mean the media come to cover the event and pick up on new things that are happening. A band can’t really operate without getting involved with festivals. These temporary cities are all built on the same model. The crowds are out the front and they stay in tents, light bonfires, get spaced out and see all their favourite bands. Backstage is a like school for bad children.
Some festivals are more like theme parks than others.
Hultsfred in Sweden is a special one. Sweden is a beautiful place. People tend to head for the sun on holiday, but the north has a wide-open beauty about it and a mystery that the packed beaches of southern Europe lost as soon as they started charging for deckchairs. There is space and wilderness and water everywhere. There is a sense of things being clean, fresh and wholesome. The Swedes are sexy and very friendly. They seem to like the English more than is rational. Hultsfred is out in the wilds. There are lakes and forests, streams and sunshine. In midsummer it doesn’t get dark until after midnight, when the whole place becomes a mass of bonfires and candles. It’s Utopian. For once we didn’t seem to be the drunkest people. We were quite wide-eyed with wonder. Something amazing was happening.
They just got it in Sweden. They were the first people to get Britpop. They were on to it before the Brits. Maybe grunge didn’t really make sense to them. Sweden is too clean for it to work there. Before we went onstage, journalists wanted to talk to us and were asking pertinent questions about what had happened to British music, and they knew our B-sides. I kept looking at Damon and he kept looking at me, and everyone kept looking at us.
We went on at midnight. It was dusk. The crowd were having a wonderful time. They were singing a song about a little frog that gets lost. It was a beautiful song, reserved for happy occasions. We took to the stage. They were ready for it. They really celebrate summer in Sweden. That’s what makes Hultsfred special. All the anguish of the dark winter months is over and there is a palpable sense of joy and liberation. There were cheers and then it went very quiet. Damon started to sing the chorus of the froggy song and Dave banged the bass drum. Twenty thousand people joined in. We had decided to start the set with one of the songs we’d just demoed called ‘Girls & Boys’. Dave accelerated his bass drum to the disco tempo, 120 beats per minute. There is something special about that tempo; it’s supposed to make your heart beat faster. Mine was thumping. The keyboard crept in with the bass drum. I flicked my fringe and slammed in with the bass. It was the first time we’d played the song. The crowd went absolutely berserk. They went bananas. They were entranced, ecstatic, twenty thousand of them. By the last chorus they knew the words and were singing along. Our lives changed forever during those three and a half minutes. It brought the place down. There were bras flying on to the stage and grins everywhere you looked. People were shouting for B-sides and screaming our names. It was quite a short set. We finished with ‘There’s No Other Way’ and went off. They were screaming for an encore, so we went back on and sang the frog song again and tried another new song called ‘Parklife’.
Everybody I met after that was smiling at me. I realised I had a lot of new friends in Sweden.
The Besançon Balance
After Sweden we knew we were holding a couple of aces. We’d already done the UK tour around the release of Modern Life Is Rubbish and nothing further was planned at home. ‘Sunday Sunday’ was the final single to be released and it went to number twenty-eight. That made three number twenty-eights in a row, but the press were starting to come around and we got our first front cover since ‘There’s No Other Way’. We disappeared to Europe for a short tour.
There were a few shows in the French provinces. Word was getting around that we had some good songs. I like French people. I was wandering around Rennes on a Sunday afternoon, and some cool-looking French guys approached me and asked me, in very bad English, if I was Alex James. They were surprised when I replied in French. We tore around in their old Renault; they showed me the cathedral and we went back to their house. French people love showing you their cathedrals. They made me a soufflé and introduced me to Apollinaire, a romantic poet I’d missed. They insisted I kept the volume of poems and we went to a bar. We picked Graham up on the way. They called some girls they knew and I spent an enchanted evening playing belote, the French national card game, with the barman. There was something very comfortable about that level of celebrity. When things started to go really crazy, I lost the privilege of just bumping into people, going to their homes and having a peaceful, ordinary time, but I enjoyed that day. I was welcomed like a brother, not a rock star. These were people just like me, with the same interests; I never saw them again but it was delightful to step into their lives for a moment.
Graham had a Ventolin inhaler for his asthma. Ventolin helps oxygen to get to your brain. He’d take a few blasts and do a drawing before the feeling wore off. That’s how Art Club started. Art Club was at two a.m. every day in my room. We needed constants when we were forever on the move, and I looked forward to Art Club. The other member of the club was Cara, the hired keyboard player. I loved Cara. She lived in Malvern with her husband and children, and played the piano in the local grand hotel. She was an exceptionally good card player. We played crib a lot and she was sometimes able to help with the crossword. She was a natural aristocrat. She exuded dignity and also mischief. Her musical ability was daunting. If I played her a record she could tell me what the chords were and if I sang her a melody she could play it back with an accompaniment. When everyone eventually arrived back at the hotel in the evening, the piano became the focal point. I’d say, ‘Play, “The Old Man’s Back Again”, Cara.’ She’d say, ‘How does it go? Sing it, boy!’ I’d sing and she’d pick it up right away. Sometimes we’d sit there all night. Everything about her was musical. I was always asking her to sing ‘English Country Gardens’. I was very attracted to Cara.
The temperature was still rising all the time. Gigs, and the band itself, wherever we went, were becoming something of an event.
We had been booked to play Reading Festival. It’s the last festival of the summer on the August Bank Holiday weekend. We knew it was an important one. Everyone was going to be there. We were playing in the tent. The band on the main stage, The The, were having a bad night and the tent was absolutely packed by the time we went on. We had introduced a new system of not getting too drunk before we played. It was the inevitable triumph of reason. That show was probably the most important gig we’ve ever played. Chris Morrison gave us all a wedge of cash afterwards and told us not to worry any more. It wasn’t long since we’d recorded Modern Life Is Rubbish but we went back to Maison Rouge with Streetie and started recording the new album.
I hadn’t sung a lead vocal before. When we got back from Sweden I’d written a song about the stars and moons that had been preoccupying me. That was one of the hardest things to get right. The rest of the album flew on to tape. ‘Girls & Boys’ was recorded very quickly because we’d been playing it live, and the other singles came together almost effortlessly. The demo of ‘To the End’ had a good feel so we worked from that, rather than starting again.
‘Parklife’ was quite a complete song from the first time Damon had played it to us. We’d been watching Quadrophenia on the tour bus and we sent the track to Phil Daniels, the lead actor, and asked if he wanted to sing the verses. He said yes, simple as that.
The only song that was a great effort was ‘This Is a Low’. The backing track was recorded and sounded musically more emotive than anything we’d ever done, but Damon was struggling with the words. For Christmas I bought him a handkerchief with a map of the shipping forecast regions on it. I can’t take all the credit, but maybe he was blowing his nose when the inspiration came to him. You can never tell when the muse is going to appear. It went on to become Blur’s most popular song.
The company that owned Maison Rouge sold it. The brasserie shut down and there were never any balls for the table football. The toilets were horrible. Yet somehow it was easier to make music in a more realistic working environment, without the comforts, and the album was finished in no time. We’d developed a way of working, and we had a team of people that we knew and trusted around us.
We thought we’d made a great record, but we had no idea what was about to happen. Guitar bands that made great records sold maybe a hundred thousand copies. The Stone Roses had been the biggest selling guitar band of the decade so far - their album had gone platinum - but that was a couple of years earlier. Everybody was listening to rave music and celebrating. Balfe was pleased with the record too, but he obviously had no idea either. He sold Food to EMI and moved to a big house in the country. He could have got a much bigger one if he’d waited six months.