6

Triumph

Smile!

We were at a photo shoot in a garage kind of place on King’s Road, Chelsea, the same place we’d had our photo taken with Sherman, the big dog. There weren’t that many photographic studios, just like there weren’t that many recording studios, and we’d seen most of them by now. Andy Ross arrived with champagne because he’d just got the midweek chart position for ‘Girls & Boys’. It was number five, which was good whichever way we thought about it, and we thought about it a lot. That was the start of the champagne and a long, long sunny day that dissolved into bubbles.

Success at home was a completely different thing from being big in Sweden, or Japan. That was like going on a strange holiday. I still came back to my old life at the end of it. Even though we were away a lot, and loving it, London was home. The more I travelled, the more I felt that. Our lives had been changing a lot, but actually the pattern of our lives changed very little when we started to sell lots of records. We played gigs, had our photos taken, did interviews, just like we did before.

The two most important things in the world when I was growing up were Smash Hits magazine and Top of the Pops.

Smash Hits was a blend of sophistication and stupidity that somehow managed to unify the whole of pop music. Its pages held the evidence that bored children needed that everything was, in fact, brilliant. Sometimes Wham! were on the cover and sometimes it was Morrissey and Pete Burns. At its peak the magazine was selling nearly a million copies a fortnight and the music industry flourished. The most popular bands made videos that cost a million pounds, while tiny independent labels thrived at the other end of the scale. That magazine spawned monsters every bit as irritating as today’s celebrities, possibly more irritating, because these people considered themselves ‘Artists’, but Smash Hits made music the focal point of all youth culture and the ‘ver hits’ era was the golden age of the pop song. Music is not the focus of the heat generation. In the early twenty-first century there are more music magazines for people aged over thirty than there are for teenagers, and I wonder whether youth culture has had its fifty years in the sun, whether we’ll ever see another band that absolutely everybody loves or hates. In America there’s never been anything like Smash Hits. Maybe that’s why six out of the all-time top ten records in Rolling Stone magazine are by British bands. In America, it seemed a band could sell a billion records but most people would still have never heard of them. Smash Hits would never have allowed that to happen.

The Smash Hits office was in Carnaby Street, just around the corner from Food Ltd, and the writers used to spend a fair amount of time in the Old Coffee House, a pub on the corner of Beak Street, one of our haunts. They were exceptionally bright, mainly female and mostly younger than us. I liked being in that magazine, but it was actually more enjoyable just getting drunk and being stupid with those girls on Monday afternoons, playing darts, arguing about haircuts and who was fanciable, before they started writing about us. That was actually more like being in the magazine than being featured on its pages.

Top of the Pops was the other fundamental force. It was more than a TV show, and it’s hard to believe it’s actually gone. Its final broadcast was in July 2006. It’s still probably the most powerful brand name in music broadcasting. There weren’t many things that were exactly as I thought they’d be, but appearing on that show was just like walking inside the television. It was almost magical. Practically everyone there seemed hardly able to believe that they were inside it. There was always a wide-eyed, open-mouthed glee about the studio audience. The acts on TOTP were just a part of the spectacle. Everybody mimed, which made it even more unreal and dream-like, but it was all the bit-part players and extras who made it special: a mammoth blast of bright lights, cameras, smiles and flesh.

The canteen at the studio in Borehamwood was completely surreal. It was jam-packed with the casts of Grange Hill, EastEnders and whatever top bands were in the country that week. People on telly do have faces you can just stare and stare at. It’s what they get paid for. When we’d been on it in the past we’d been looking at everybody else and thinking, ‘Wow! It’s them.’ Everybody was looking at us this time. It was a good line-up. Vic Reeves, the comedian, was performing his version of ‘Born Free’ with a couple of long-leggedy backing dancers and Mark and Robbie from Take That were presenting the show. The crowd were panting, hysterically screaming and throwing themselves around. All the other bands came out to watch us mime ‘Girls & Boys’ and the audience went berserk at four grown men pretending to play their instruments. It was brilliant.

I had a very small suitcase with a clean pair of pants and socks, the collected writings of Colette, a large bottle of gin and as many small bottles of tonic that would fit in. We’d just come back from Belgium. We seemed to go to Belgium a lot in those days. There was never a moment to sit back and enjoy the fact that we were actually going to be on Top of the Pops. We were too busy enjoying Belgium.

I went to drink my gin in the bar and Vic Reeves was there with his friend Jonathan Ross, who had given our first single the raspberry on Juke Box Jury. I changed my mind about hating him forever when he offered to buy me a drink. Then they took me to a place called the Groucho Club.

The Groucho was quite a small place. There were comfy chesterfields and good-looking staff. It reminded me of an airport lounge and most people there were probably in between flights. There were bowls of Twiglets and someone was playing the piano. That was the furniture, same as anywhere else, with Twiglets thrown in. What set it apart from everywhere else were the people who went there. All towns have one place where everybody wants to go more than everywhere else. Les Bains Douches was the top spot in Paris; in New York it was Spy; Shocking in Milan and so on, all the places I was most likely to run into Einar from the Sugarcubes again. In London, the Groucho was the place, the place where anybody at all might walk through the door. In fact, everybody always looked up when the door opened, to see who it was. Everyone was very friendly. They are when you’re number five.

It was a long evening that ended up at Dave Stewart’s house in Covent Garden: Dave, myself, a Pet Shop Boy, Vic Reeves, a billionaire and a transvestite. Dave was explaining his art collection, like a proper grown-up rich person. I spilt a drink on the fibre optic carpet. I’d been pretty well behaved up until then. I was living just around the corner, but I still didn’t own much more than I had in the suitcase. Dave Stewart had lots of toys. It was a house for impressing other rich people with, a cross between an old-fashioned imperial castle and a spaceship. I wandered home as day was breaking. Jus wasn’t there. I didn’t have any keys so I scaled the front of the building and climbed in through the window. There was a message on the answerphone from Justine. She was calling from Charing Cross police station to say she’d been arrested for some kind of altercation with a police officer in St James’s Park and was having a night in the cells. She’d been with a booze head from another band who were also signed to Food. When the limo came in the morning, I took it round to the police station and tried to get her out, but they hauled her up before the magistrate. I had to go to Belgium. It was going crazy in Belgium, they said.

Young, Free, Single, Rich, Famous, Unbearable

Since I’d got back from Japan to an empty flat a few months before things had not been so sweet at home. Justine moved out as I became more selfish, drunk and unfaithful. It’s hard for a relationship to survive one person becoming successful all of a sudden. Apart from that one arrest, she handled it very well, but I didn’t. I missed her when she was gone and there was no peace.

To start with, I’d go away on tour and, basically, riot, but I always came home to her calm, stabilising influence. As Parklife gathered more and more momentum I slipped anchor and blew adrift on the shallow sea of a permanent backstage party. There was always one more place to go and I leapt into London’s deep and dark night.

I decided to stick mostly to champagne. I’d always liked that stuff. I think it started on aeroplanes. They threw champagne at people on aeroplanes in those days, little quarter bottles. Leaving behind a grey Saturday morning at Heathrow they brought the champagne round as soon as the sunshine started crashing through the little windows. It lit up the bubbles as they rose to the top of the glass. Cheap aeroplane champagne: it was a wonderful colour in the brilliant sun. I contemplated the bubbles and measured the gold against the blue sky behind and was happy. In motion, travelling somewhere at great speed, completely serene and still as those bubbles whizzed and fizzed.

I started on the monopoles. Monopole is one-year-old plonk and good for mixing but I soon developed a taste for Taittinger. That’s quite crispy and biscuit-flavoured. I found Bollinger and Moët a bit yeasty. Taittinger was just a phase and I settled on Cordon Rouge. I got three bottles of that on the rider every day for about five years, but I supplemented it with a systematic tour of all the great champagne houses, Krug, Dom Perignon, La Veuve, all colours, all sizes, all years. On special occasions, or given the choice, I went for Cristal. That was my favourite. It’s in a clear bottle and has a very delicate flavour; a liquid gold that transmogrified into sizzling suds on my tongue and left me thinking about violets.

They’re all marvellous. I got quite good at opening a bottle with just a gentle hiss, with one hand. It was important to get all the foil off, to avoid lacerations, and hold it at forty-five degrees, to stop it going everywhere, but the most important thing of all about champagne is that you have to eat a fresh carrot for every bottle that you drink. It’s very acidic and if you guzzle it it makes your breath stink.

I was quite happy with my three bottles of Cordon Rouge and my three large carrots.

Champagne was the perfect toast to a time of hope and new beginnings in London. Whole swathes of the city were in a redevelopment boom. Social and cultural interest was rejuvenating; something was stirring in the art world; a new government was looking increasingly likely; Parklifeknocked Pink Floyd’s new album off the number one slot, to everyone at EMI’s surprise. Blur weren’t part of a movement; we were right out on our own musically, but we were a part of London’s almost instantaneous rebirth as the world’s hippest city. There were two faces on the covers of all the music magazines. One was Damon’s and the other was Kurt Cobain’s. And suddenly one of them was dead.

New Friends

It was the premiere of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Damon and I had been for a couple of Long Island Iced Teas and were in no mood to sit down for an hour and a half. We shouted at the screen for a while and left. We decided to go to the Groucho. I’d been telling him about it. It’s a member’s club, but we got in by saying we were meeting Dave Stewart. We figured he wouldn’t mind.

Damon went off to argue with a guy with a ponytail and I sat at the bar staring at myself. This was a good club. There was no way of knowing what would happen next. Damon came back twenty minutes later with Helena Christensen. She was the most beautiful woman in the world. I was very interested in her face. I suppose everybody was. It was a face that made suggestions that great things might be true and pictures of it always made me feel better. I wondered how else I might have come to meet this woman. Appearing on Top of the Pops and being in Smash Hits was very satisfying, but it wasn’t my ultimate aim in life. Being face to face with, in my considered opinion, the most beautiful woman in the world was an absolutely concrete result. I suddenly felt I’d arrived somewhere new. It was completely ridiculous that all I did was put my fingers on strings. I said, ‘God, I think you’re beautiful. Do you like cheese?’ She seemed to know a fair bit about cheeses. There was one you could get in Denmark that had worms inside it. It was a lot to take on board all of a sudden.

She said, ‘Come to Browns.’ There was a driver waiting and Damon and I got in the car with her and Michael Hutchence.

Browns was very glitzy, gaudier than a wedding cake. It was built on different foundations from the Groucho. It was a house made of the very finest straw. Despite most of the people in the Groucho being off their faces, it was quite an intellectual, brainy kind of a place. Huge minds set free in drink and exploring each other, quipping bons mots and scheming. Browns was more the bodies exploring each other kind of place and it was best to check your brain in at the door. Soap stars, boxers, footballers, princes, models and gangsters traded money, fame and sex. It was quite dark for somewhere that was made entirely from lights and mirrors. On the whole, Browns attracted a worse kind of person than anywhere else in the universe and at that point I was the worst person in the universe. Arrogant, drunk and indomitable, and yet everybody was saying come on in.

I went out every night. Film extravaganzas, magazine launches, parties in shops and bashes in museums and big houses in Chelsea and Notting Hill, gigs at the Astoria, gay discos, the Groucho, Browns, an endless circle of red carpet.

Graham had now moved to Camden and sometimes I went to see him there in the Good Mixer public house. He shunned the garish drama of the party circuit but he couldn’t escape from the circus either. He had become the mad king of a strange people who all looked like him, and he held his court at the Mixer. Dave never went out. He bought an aeroplane as a means of escape and occupied himself with that. Damon moved to Notting Hill. He was starting to get pursued by paparazzi, and there were often fans and photographers outside his house. He kept on working. We all got on well with one another but nobody really liked each other’s friends. We weren’t so much of a gang any more. We all had our own gangs.

I was sitting at the bar in the Groucho on my own. It was pretty empty in there as it was a Saturday. I didn’t recognise anybody. I was just sitting at the bar drinking a Brandy Alexander: brandy, cream and nutmeg in a martini glass. It was nice to have a quiet drink, and a think. I was smoking a Camel filter, checking myself out in the mirror and wondering who to call and where to go next. A silly voice said ‘Alex! Alex from Blur!’ I ignored it. Then it said, ‘I love you, Alex!’ I looked up and at the end of the bar someone was pulling the funniest face I’d ever seen, puckering his lips and batting his eyelids. I laughed and said, ‘I love you too, darling.’ And went back to my thoughts. The voice said, ‘Don’t you remember me? From college? We played pool together! I’m Damien! Damien fuckin’ ’irst!’ I said, ‘Wow, I was wondering what you looked like.’ He brought his wine over. He lived in Germany and he loved the Beatles. He swore a lot. He seemed very interested in everything I said. It was unusual to meet someone so forthright and curious. He was fascinated, more fascinated than anyone had ever been by exactly what had happened with the band. He quizzed and queried, prodded and probed. It’s usually dull to answer questions. People ask you questions all the time if you’re in the papers and on the telly. I was beginning to recognise that celebrity status was like living a kind of perpetual interview. It’s like you just sprouted another weird head in place of your old one and everybody wants to stare at it and ask it questions all of a sudden. After a while, it’s too late and your old head will never grow back and you’re left with the one that people point at. It’s your own fault, too.

I liked Damien’s questions. They were unusual. Soon I was trying to explain where Jupiter was. Damien liked the fact that it didn’t have a surface. Something without a surface was very exciting to him. It was to me, too. I was drawing him a map of the solar system and he was making me laugh.

I’d done a fair bit of hobnobbing with famous people by this time. They didn’t seem to have anything in common, particularly. Famous people generally seemed like everybody else, only a bit more famous. Rich people aren’t particularly different from anyone else either. They’ve just got more money. Fame is just another kind of money. It can do things that money can’t, but it’s just a currency. No one ever loved anyone because they were rich. No one ever really loved anyone because they were famous, but it’s an attractive quality.

Over the course of our conversation, I gradually became aware that I was talking to somebody quite exceptional. He was very, very funny. That was the first thing about him. He was an irresistible combination of rudeness and wit. The two qualities set each other off. He drew everybody in: the barman; people on either side of us; the piano player. He bought drinks for everybody. It was the kind of place where that happened. A lot of comedians drank there, too, so there was no shortage of funny people buying drinks. It was a good place to be. Damien was intensely engaging, though. He was trying to tell me something that I realised I really needed to know, and he was illustrating it with farts and stupid facial expressions.

He wasn’t yet famous, but he was obviously a genius. When I woke up, my pockets were full of his drawings.

The Brits

On the day of the Brit Awards I had breakfast with Mike Smith, my publisher, as I often did. He was nursing an extra spiky headache and trying to draw me. He always had a sketchbook with him, in his satchel. He was perpetually losing that bag. He left it in Freud’s so many times they had a special place behind the bar for it. You could tell if he’d had a big night by whether he had his bag with him at breakfast time. He always got it back by mid-afternoon, although sometimes it took all morning to locate, when he should really have been trying to sign the Cranberries. Quite often it turned up at the Bull and Gate, Kentish Town. That was always a good place to start looking. He had a black taxi account so he could always trace it when he left it in his cab. It sometimes spent the night in restaurants and it did a whole run at the Astoria, Charing Cross Road. It always came back in the end, apart from once. He completely lost his old bag at the Brit Awards. He went back and checked the whole of Alexandra Palace, but he never found it. Sometimes he would become maudlin, and mourn for that bag. It was still a talking point. He was wondering whether to leave it at home altogether tonight.

The Brits was a no-holds-barred piss-up. It was a night of complete carnage every single time. It’s the music industry’s biggest night of the year. The music business is a succession of big nights: parties, awards and launches, openings anniversaries, presentations, big gigs and festivals, and that’s just work. The Brits is the daddy of all parties. All the big guns line up for the Brit Awards. Madonna, Elton John, all the evergreens, the unsinkable battleships in the business, would be there. I’d never been before. We were probably considered a risk by the organisers, too likely to act up, and, besides that, the band had never been nominated for anything. Every year as the awards came around and we didn’t feature in the line-up, there had always been time to dwell on our disappointment. This time we were up for something in practically every category and there had hardly been a moment to consider what it all meant. We were performing a couple of songs, including ‘Parklife’ with Phil Daniels who’d become a fifth member of the band.

It was a vast glittering spectacle, a multimillion pound trifle. America has the Oscars and we have the Brits. It’s the annual showbiz party that everybody wants to go to, the one that reaches beyond the music and gossip pages and into the headlines.

In a sea of onlookers, beyond a moat of international media, the whole of Alexandra Palace was bedecked, bejewelled and lit up like a Christmas tree. Inside there was a full-sized fairground with carousels, bumper cars and a big wheel. Hundreds of waiters tended to acres of white tablecloth. Champagne flowed, cocaine snowed and a steady rain of superstars took a bow.

I invited Justine but she was too busy dancing with the bass player from Pulp and I ended up on a park bench with Keith Allen. He’d just kind of appeared and he just kept appearing from then on.

When I woke up in the morning, I knew my life had changed forever. We’d won everything going; it was a record-breaking haul. Blur had become a household name over the course of the evening. I went out to get The Times for the crossword. A young girl walking along the street with her mother went into hysterics and there was a picture of me on page three of The Times. It’s always a jolt to be confronted by your own image when you’re not expecting it, especially the first few times it happens. There is no image more shocking or scary than your own. I can see why some of those people who lived in the jungle thought their souls were being stolen when they had their photograph taken. It was like there was a bit of me that had gone beyond my reach. I’m sure the jungle-dwellers didn’t think it was their souls being stolen anyway. It was just a bit of media vertigo as far as they were concerned, too.

We were in all the newspapers. Until the night before we’d been strictly music magazine fodder. I’d always found it slightly depressing when taxi drivers, having established that I was a musician, would ask the name of the band and then say, ‘Nah, mate.’ A lot of time was spent in taxis. They’re one of the perks of being in a band. If you’re a TV presenter, you get free clothes. If you work in a hotel, you get fed. As soon as we signed our record deal there seemed to be a taxi waiting constantly. Record companies don’t perform miracles, but they do make sure bands turn up to things.

Suddenly taxi drivers had heard of us. It was much worse. Being grilled by a thrilled taxi driver trapped inside a hangover trapped inside a taxi trapped in thick traffic, first thing in the morning, was harder to bear than being obscure. I do like talking to taxi drivers, just not about those kinds of things. It’s too repetitive. I started to say I was an accountant, which was usually good enough to kill it. I thought accountants probably needed to pretend they were rock stars occasionally, but I had no idea people in bands sometimes had to pretend they were accountants.

The Great Escape

Our lives were changing. Graham split up with his girlfriend and Dave married his. Dave’s new wife’s ex-flatmate was going out with a singer-songwriter person called Stephen Duffy. He’d been the original singer in Duran Duran and had written some good songs, mainly about girls. I met him at the wedding and we talked for a long time, mainly about girls. We decided to make a record together. I wrote some songs about girls and a month later we were on Top of the Pops. Damien Hirst liked one of the songs, ‘Hanging Around’, and used it in a film he was making. I was seeing a lot of Damien by this time. He’d moved back from Berlin to London where he was making quite a noise. He was intrigued by success and by Blur as we’d been at Goldsmiths together.

He and Keith Allen were a double act. They could really make each other laugh and the euphoria of their humour created a strong bond between them. I saw a lot of Keith, too. He was a permanent fixture in London’s nightscape. He knew absolutely everybody and everybody either loved him or hated him. His younger brother is a Hollywood film director; his ex-wife is an Oscar-winning film producer; his daughter is a pop star. I can see a small part of his essence in all of them, but he was the devastating big bang from which they all evolved, a free spirit; that’s what Damien really liked about him. There was always a danger that Keith might set the house on fire or be absolutely disgraceful in some way. He must have been nearly fifty. He’d just lost his hair and started wearing bad jumpers.

The final member of the Groucho squad was a chef, a Frenchman named Charles Fontaine. He was credited with inventing the fishcake, but that wasn’t why I liked him. He just liked cooking and enjoying himself. He wasn’t part of the fame rat race. I made records with Duffy and I made merry with Keith and Damien and Charles.

During the making of The Great Escape there were people outside the studio, outside all our houses. The recording process was interrupted by TV appearances, awards shows and late nights. There were journalists in the studio control room, observing the band at work, photographers taking pictures of us recording our parts and picking our noses. We all had our own circles of friends - it would have been weird if we hadn’t - but we still spent more time together than with anybody else.

We got a lot of fan mail. Ninety per cent of fan mail says the same thing. The majority of letters are written by a small number of people who write lots of fan mail. They didn’t just write to us, they wrote to everybody, asking for photographs, autographs, tickets, favours and so on. Then there’s the other 10 per cent, from people who had something particular to say to all of us, or one of us, because we’d moved them in some peculiar way. Some of it was beautiful and lifted my heart. Some of it was very, very scary. Graham seemed to get the hairiest stuff; he showed me photographs of people maiming themselves and threatening the worst if he wouldn’t help them. My weird ones tended to veer towards pornography, which I was much more comfortable with.

One of the first things we recorded for The Great Escape was ‘Stereotypes’, which we were all very excited about at the time. We thought that it would be the first single. The demo version of ‘The Universal’ had a calypso feel. It was a tune and a half, using Mozart-style chord suspensions and Bacharach-flavour modulation, but we couldn’t get the arrangement quite right. We battled with it for two days, on and off, and were just about to give up when Damon hit upon the string figure that ultimately became the intro. After that, everything clicked into place at once. That was two good ones in the bag. There was a baroque oompah song about Balfe selling Food Ltd and running away to live in a big house in the country, but that was just a joke.

We were halfway through recording The Great Escape when we played a one-off gig at Mile End Stadium in east London. It was a huge outdoor show. We’d broken out of the usual circuit of arenas into the big time. I don’t know how many people it held, maybe twenty-five thousand. It was a stadium. We were used to playing to large audiences at festivals, but this was a home crowd. It was a rainy day in a part of town not normally associated with rock and roll, but it was a hot ticket and it wouldn’t have mattered if it had snowed.

We played ‘Country House’. We’d just finished recording it and although it was an odd one, Streetie suggested it might go down well live. I had to concentrate harder than usual on what I was doing as it was the first time we’d played it. I remember looking up after making a mistake halfway through the first chorus to see if anyone had noticed and the whole crowd was bouncing as one, waving their arms in time and smiling as they squashed each other senseless. By the last chorus they were all singing it. When that happens that means it’s a single.

It was a strange day overall. I was expecting it to feel like a crowning moment, but I remember being surrounded by a lot of people I didn’t particularly want to see. Blur had become public property.

Battle of the Bands

The day after the show at Mile End we flew to America, where we were still playing in bars. It was a blessed relief to be incognito, free again to have random adventures with girls in red cars without it turning up in the Sunday newspapers.

We’d all suffered a bit from tabloid shame. Graham was going through a phase of getting run over by cars. Damon’s ex-girlfriend, who he’d once written a sickly, sentimental ballad about, sold her story to one of the more ghastly newspapers. She looked small and plain in the photograph, not like in the song.

The stories came thick and fast. One tabloid had me dating Helena Christensen. According to the front page of the Daily Sport I was involved in a lesbo-slut triangle. Another tabloid had me down for a make-up artist who was servicing the whole of Browns. The Star printed a photo of me with a music journalist called Sylvia Patterson. None of it was true. Sylvia sued the Daily Star and got five hundred quid. She was thrilled about that and bought me a drink.

I discovered another bar in Endell Street: the Mars Bar. It was open for an hour longer than Freud’s. I went there with the bar-maids from Freud’s after that shut. All the girls who worked in Freud’s were pretty. It was that kind of a place. I was very at home in the Mars. It was a good building, a five-storey town house with a restaurant on the ground and first, and a mad chef in the cellar. Freddy, the Dutch owner, offered jobs to the bar-maids I brought with me. He was grateful to me for bringing them round there and gave me a set of keys to say thank you. He asked me to replace what booze my friends and I drank, but we could help ourselves. It was a happy arrangement and I tried not to abuse it.

‘Country House’ was pencilled in for high-summer release. It seemed like more than just another record. It felt like the world was changing. The band’s influence had become so noteworthy that even the Labour Party had their eye on us. Damon went to the Houses of Parliament to see Tony Blair and came to the flat with a couple of bottles of House of Commons gin afterwards. I could imagine Damon looking the future Prime Minister right in the eyes and saying, ‘What?’ and Tony Blair saying, ‘Excuse me?’ and Damon saying, ‘WHAT MATE?’ and making him feel uncomfortable. This was one of the times when Damon had the gun and the other guy had the little stick. People were shouting, ‘Je-sus, Je-sus’ at Damon, quite a lot at gigs. He didn’t need a pat on the back from anybody. Mike Smith had a big new office all of a sudden. He had been trying to sign a band called Oasis. They were from Manchester. Their first album was doing well and their girlfriends were always in Browns. They were signed to Creation Records where Dave’s wife worked. She called me when their single went to number one and asked if I knew where they could have a party. I was the party guy. She booked the Mars Bar and we all went along. It was just another night in the Mars Bar. I went to the Groucho and they went to Browns and I thought no more about it.

Their album was selling fast and the music press started to draw comparisons between the two acts. I didn’t really have any strong feelings about them. The singer had a good voice, but the music was honky. They were quite a different thing from Blur. They seemed to have a lot to say about us. I always sniggered when they slung their muck in our direction. Both bands were in the papers quite a lot and journalists would ask us what we thought about them and no doubt they had to answer lots of questions about us. They worked themselves up into quite a froth. I always dodged questions about other bands.

Oasis kept rising to the bait, like dogs barking at cats. We seemed to be the main thing they talked about. The NME particularly liked to stir things up and antagonise them. They definitely wanted to see a fight. Record companies usually cooperate with each other with big releases. Not this time. Both bands were pencilled in to release the lead singles from their new albums on the same day and nobody wanted to budge.

Damien Hirst directed the video for ‘Country House’. It used the language of breasts and bottoms. Graham’s new girlfriend was on a crusade against that kind of thing. She had a real zeal for it. She hated the video, and us. Particularly me, I think. Graham became quite despondent. He was the only person in the whole country who wasn’t interested in the record war. As the release date drew nearer, everything escalated to a full-on frenzy. Everything.

I suppose if I was trying to explain to a very old lady what I did for a living, which I do have to from time to time, I would have said, ‘I’m a musician, I make records and behave appallingly. It’s great.’ If the old lady said, ‘Do you mean like Oasis?’ I would have to say, ‘Yes, exactly.’ There wasn’t that much difference between the two bands and, when viewed from a little old lady’s point of view, they were pretty much the same thing. That said, I think on the whole old ladies prefer Blur to Oasis. Oasis probably had the edge with ‘geezers’ and ‘lads’. As the insults flew and grew, what might have been a page three, five or seven story became a matter of national interest and a front-page news item. The week the records came out I went to stay with Damien in Devon. He had bought a farmhouse on Exmoor. Phones didn’t work there, but I kept up with what was happening. It was impossible to avoid. There was something in the papers every day. It was on the television news, on the radio. It was on the breeze, even. I found out we were number one in a car on the way back to London, listening to the top forty countdown like everyone else. There was a party in Soho and Graham surprised everyone by trying to jump out of the window.

Here it was, the great national success story, but I think we were all confused. Damon was trapped inside the most famous face in the country and he couldn’t buy a bottle of beetroot juice without causing a sensation. Graham felt he’d gained the world and lost his soul, that the juggernaut of attainment had compromised his principles. I think he felt he’d lost control of what he wanted the band to be, and that we’d made a terrible mistake. I didn’t think we’d compromised, but I had lost the thing I loved the most. Justine was still the only woman I’d had anything approaching a sophisticated emotional connection with. Everything else had been skin-deep and selfish.

Apart from Belgium, where things had inexplicably cooled off, there was hysteria across the whole of Europe. In Italy we were mobbed, we had police escorts in Portugal. Shops were closed for us. Roads were closed. We were trapped inside a radio station in Madrid and our private jet had to wait with its engines running while the Guardia Civil extricated us. Even they all wanted our autographs. There were thousands of screaming people outside. The screaming at gigs was deafening. From the end of summer to the start of Christmas, the screaming never stopped. It’s really bad for your ears. Graham didn’t like it at all. He wanted to play his guitar out of tune and draw monsters.

Proper Girls

We had a fortnight off for Christmas. I went to the House of Commons and got drunk. It was good in there. It was reassuring that there were so many clever people doing their best, behaving responsibly and acting for the greater good. I met Clare Short, MP, on the way out. She’s my favourite politician. I kissed her and said, ‘Happy Christmas, darling.’ I was still enjoying my lack of responsibilities. Being able to have whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, had made me grotesque and self-centred, but there was a huge upside to being cash rich and morally bankrupt.

I had rather a lot of girlfriends, particularly in London. There were three girls in the flat when I woke up a few days before Christmas Eve. Francesca had appeared all of a sudden a few days before and she was nice. Lisa was usually at Browns, but that had closed for Christmas. Tabitha was a catwalk model. She was astonishingly pretty. That face had catapulted her from Petersfield via Tokyo, where I met her, in the Lexington Queen, to the most exclusive enclaves of New York City and the most fabulous houses in The Hamptons. It was a ticket, her face; a skeleton key for every door there is. There was no room that wouldn’t have been enhanced by her presence. She turned heads and flipped brains over. She was never that famous, but she had everything that famous people have and more. People stared and wanted to talk to her, wanted to follow her. In a way fame would have weighed her down. She didn’t need to be famous. It was kind of beneath her. She had a unique quality of unaffected, lighter than anything, beauty. That was enough for everybody. It’s the most precious and sought-after quality in the universe and she had it. When someone has that, they really don’t need anything else. An endless stream of billionaires, singers and cool daddies sought her company.

A lorryload of clothes arrived and we all dressed up. I wanted nothing more than to go and play the trivia machine in the Crown at Seven Dials. Doing the washing up with three beautiful women is pretty riveting. Sitting in an empty pub is blissful. We had some cocktails in Freud’s, as it was on the way.

Lisa was good fun, a shrewd operator. She’d had a few famous boyfriends. The gene pool of the famous is quite tiny. Everyone in the public eye seemed to be shagging the same handful of girls. Even in other countries, girls I met knew everyone I knew, or so it seemed. It was hard to break out of the circle. Lisa was as unavoidable as taxes. Streetwise, half Jamaican. She could sing and had a record deal, but that didn’t come in to why anyone liked her. She just knew what boys were thinking. She always knew something that I didn’t that I really needed to know. I suppose that’s the definition of a beautiful woman. Making records has got nothing to do with it.

We all stayed up for a few days at my house, dancing to the Bee Gees in the Mars Bar and playing cards. I called my mum on Christmas Eve and said I was coming for Christmas and bringing a girl called Francesca with me. I didn’t think she could handle all three of them. I grabbed a Stilton from the cheese shop and we jumped on the train.

It was nice to be in Bournemouth. We ran into Danny Collier, the cool kid who used to get the bus every day, and went back to his parents’ house for some whisky. I’d sometimes dreamed of leaving and coming back like this from conquering the world. I did what I said I was going to do. I showed those fuckers.

Maybe my mum didn’t see the all-conquering hero. She just saw a drunken buffoon, a glittering ponce with a huge grin all over his stupid face of the moment. She knew the neighbours were all dying to come round and see the famous person, and here he was singing songs about red knickers and trying to buy a horse on Christmas Day.

On Boxing Day I went back to London to get Tabitha and took her to a hotel where I’d always wanted to stay, in Corfe Castle in rural Dorset. Suddenly we were alone and it was very still and quiet. Immaculate. We walked to Kimmeridge, my favourite place, and I built a big bonfire. There’s absolutely nothing to do there, just fossils and shells and rock pools. It’s where you realise if you love someone or not. I felt a bit bored. It was surprising. She was possibly the most beautiful woman in the world. I thought success would be the answer to everything. I’d climbed a hill and seen a mountain in the distance. I climbed the mountain and I saw the moon. I somehow got to the moon and realised I’d left what I loved behind in another world. I missed Justine. I’d come all this way to realise I really was happiest with what I already had. It was a journey that had to be made. I wanted it all. I’d never felt I wanted to escape from Justine. I’d just lost her. I just wanted to sit and be quiet with her, listen to her thoughts and make her laugh.

People were arriving back in London. I went to the Atlantic Bar. I handed my coat in and the girl gave me ticket number 007 and winked at me. God, she was pretty. It was relentless. When I woke up on the floor in Endell Street there was someone trying to suck my cock. It was one of the staff from the Groucho. I clipped him round the ear and he scarpered.

I was woken again mid-morning. Someone was throwing stones at the window. It was Damon. He never rang the door-bell. He said he was having a bad time. I said, ‘You want to hear what’s just happened to me, mate.’ That cheered him up a bit, but I hadn’t seen him like this before. He was really suffering. Everywhere he went he was tormented by Oasis’s music. The balance of power had shifted. Their album was outselling ours. We drank some tea and he told me he was going to Iceland.

Ten days later he called and he sounded like a new man. He said, ‘Get yourself over. It’s heaven up here.’