7
Divas
In interviews we were often asked who we wanted to meet the most. Pretty soon those people started turning up everywhere. I never expected to meet them, let alone not be able to avoid them.
Graham was quite absorbed by a French diva called Françoise Hardy. He talked about her in interviews sometimes, especially in France. Françoise liked our records, too, and wanted to record a version of the ballad ‘To the End’, in French. We jumbled, hungover, on to the Eurostar to have lunch with her. The French don’t have a royal family. Instead of having one monarch for everybody, everybody seems to have a slightly noble quality in France. If they could have voted for a king, they probably would have had Serge Gainsbourg. He was a cross between a poet, a singer and a tramp. He made some good records and seduced all the most beautiful women in France. That’s what French kings should be getting up to. He was dead, from Gitanes and pastis, and she was married to a film director, but she was a fair queen to his king.
Paris was yet another parallel universe of nice surprises and new smells. I really liked the people at the French record company. It was quite a small office in Paris. They were a bit like a band, the staff. Even the drivers seemed cool enough to have record deals themselves. They added flair and finesse to all bad traffic situations. The people who looked after us genuinely enjoyed being with us and wanted to show us the finest restaurants, the best nightclubs and all the wonderful things in life.
Madame Hardy lived in a secluded, sumptuous apartment block in Montparnasse. It was all painted black inside and full of sunshine and exquisite treasures. Serge Gainsbourg’s pinball machine was in the corner of the salon. There was a cheeseboard with some very rare cheeses and exotic accompaniments - figs and dates, gooseberries, even. The first thing she said was, ‘’Oo like cheese?’ It was practically a dream sequence. I answered, in French. None of the scenarios we had improvised at Goldsmiths’ French conversation classes had been about being invited to Françoise Hardy’s apartment and shown an enormous cheeseboard. I suppose it’s quite unlikely. It was why I’d wanted to learn French all along, though. It all made sense now.
She explained the cheese, to break the ice. Having the cheese explained is one of life’s great pleasures. It is a moment to step outside of the traffic and into the senses. Here was one from the Alsace region that was so smelly that it was illegal to take it on public transport. There was a ewe’s milk variety from Corsica, rolled in spices; a sharp, hard cheese from the Pyrenees and so on. I’d never seen any of them before.
She was a truly beautiful woman, around fifty, skinny as an elf and confident, yet delicate. She looked good in that black apartment. It really set off her light poise and bearing. In her grace, she was a balancing act. Graham was chewing his fingers off and trying to smoke a cigarette on one of the huge sofas. Damon cut the nose off the Brie, which is extremely bad manners, sniffed, and said, ‘Are we fackin doin’ this, or what?’ She really liked him straight away, you could tell. She started to talk about her husband, and how Damon reminded her of him. He was in the jungle, or something suitably swashbuckling. It was an enchanted afternoon. If there’s such a thing as making it, she’d made it. She had everything money could buy and beauty could bring. She was fabulous with a fabulous life and fabulous friends. Life was all about buying cheese, large yachts, art and the freedom and great quiet of huge wealth. The security and abracadabra of immortal celebrity status throughout France was assured. It was nice being Françoise Hardy, and nice being with her.
In the early days of the band, Damon had expressed a soft spot for Martha from Martha and the Muffins, but we never heard from Martha. My favourite record was Strange Weather, by Marianne Faithfull. It’s a collection of classy laments that she delivers in her knackered baritone. I loved that voice. I don’t think I could have coped with working in a supermarket if it hadn’t been for Strange Weather.
The very first time I’d been completely spellbound by music was watching a mechanical organ at a steam rally in Dorset when I was a toddler. My mother tells me I stood in front of it for hours in a trance. Christmas carols, Ray Conniff, Prokofiev, the songs from Bugsy Malone, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Mike Oldfield, New Order and countless others all held me in their spell at one time or another, but Strange Weather was the record that Justine and I had fallen in love to.
I went to a party in Chelsea with Keith and Helen Terry. She’d sung backing vocals in Culture Club’s ‘Church of the Poison Mind’. She was a television producer now. People who’d done odd things like that kept turning up in other guises, especially at the Groucho. I have no idea whose house it was. It was a big mansion and Princess Leia was alone in the dining room, unconscious. Rifat Ozbek was in the kitchen. In the next room there was Marianne, sitting on a sofa, holding court and smoking theatrically. I could tell something was going to happen.
When I used to go to Peter Robinson’s house on Tuesdays, we’d play a game we called Barnes and Kidd. They were famous football players. Barnes used to run up the wing and knock the ball to Kidd who’d nod it into the goal. Every Tuesday we played that game in the alley behind the stamp shop, practising it, polishing it and fantasising. We played half in the alley and half in our imaginations. I loved football, but we were always getting thumped because ours was only a small school. We actually had a handful of good players and when the junior six-a-side tournament took place one sunny Saturday in May we got through to the quarter-finals, much to everyone’s amazement. At that stage we faced a school that had thrashed us earlier in the year. We held them to a draw until the last minute, when Martyn Whittingham danced up the right flank and floated a perfect cross into the six-yard box. I was on the end of it. I’ll never forget the feeling as I headed that ball home. It was my finest moment.
Ten years later I sat on the X1 bus on the way back from Salisbury to Bournemouth in the first spring sunlight of late February with Justine. It was the first time we’d gone on an outing together. I was falling in love with her, but she had a boyfriend in a band and I worked in a supermarket. I’d said, ‘My breath stinks’, and she’d said, ‘Let me smell it.’ I put my mouth up to her nose and opened it and, completely unexpectedly, she’d kissed me, for the first time. That was better than football.
Music had been so important to me for so long and Marianne had made my favourite record ever and there she was. ‘Hello, Marianne,’ I said, ‘I’m Alex. From Blur.’ She said, ‘Ah, dear Alex, I’m going to roll a banger, and you’re going to write me a song. Deal?’ That was right up there, too.
I went to stay with her for the weekend, to record a vocal. I could really talk to Marianne. She’d been through everything, from top of the pops, to the bottom of the slops, from being the most famous daughter of the sixties to a smackhead on the streets of Soho. She’d had it all and chucked it all away. Now she lived in a cottage made of shells in the demesne of a big castle in County Kildare. She had a grand piano and a chef, but that was all. I wonder if you really need anything else.
I’d tried snogging her at her friend’s house a couple of weeks before when I’d gone to play the demo to her. I’d passed out after a half-bottle of eau-de-vie and woken up on the sofa in the morning with her bending over me. I just thought I’d give it a go, you know. She said, ‘You dog! Do you want some coffee?’ I said, ‘Oh, fuck! I’ve got to go to Iceland. What’s the time?’ She said, ‘It’s time to have some coffee and go to Iceland.’ It certainly was.
Iceland
It’s hard to stay really alive, to keep really stimulated. Hedonism is a full-time job. To keep finding new ecstasies and not get stuck in old routines takes all of a man’s might and all the world’s serendipity.
Iceland is somewhere else altogether. It has different geography from the rest of the world. It doesn’t look that big on maps, but when I got there it was gigantic. It’s got big weather, distant horizons and hundreds of miles of nothing at all. It’s not really built on the human scale. Maybe that’s what it is. Trees are usually there to help to put things in proportion, but there aren’t any trees in Iceland. It goes straight from little bushes to huge mountains and volcanoes. It’s quite a new place, geologically. Actually it’s the newest land mass on earth. It burped out of a submarine volcano not long ago at all, and is still a planetary building site. It’s totally topsy-turvy. The water is either frozen solid or steaming and the landscape, with its petrified lava flows, gives an impression of fluidity. Reykjavik is only about the size of Bournemouth. It’s very cosy and clean. The water in the river that runs through the centre is absolutely pure and tastes delicious. There are docks with fishermen and parks with no tramps in. You can’t really be homeless that far north. Damon hadn’t stopped talking about it since he’d first been in January. He had stayed a few weeks, written some songs and accumulated an entourage. It was about midnight when we went out. It was still sunny though. There is one high street of shops and bars and it was thronging with people. We stood on a roof terrace and watched the good times roll. There was a semi-official welcoming committee with sausage rolls and brennivin. Brennivin is the local tipple. It’s definitely got cumin in it, and alcohol. It’s drunk in little snifters alongside a tall, thin, cool glass of lager.
From the terrace, everywhere I looked there was something else that caught my eye: a distant wilderness, a volcano, a silent sea, a couple snogging, a startlingly beautiful girl. It was all new and interesting. I sipped on a beer and drank the views. A few people had asked if I’d seen any pixies yet. Pixies are a thing in Iceland. People became more friendly when I said that I thought I might have seen one, actually. Thor said it was more likely an elf, when I described it to him. Thor asked me what I wanted. I was beginning to get used to that happening, recently: strangers asking me if I needed anything. I said I wanted to go horse riding, please. He said that was easy and before I had time to finish my beer we were driving up a dirt track in a large, old car. First they had to catch the ponies. A couple of Vikings ran around shouting and chasing, falling over and laughing. Pretty soon they’d caught a couple. Saddles appeared, but there was only one hat. Thor said, ‘This horse is good boy, no trouble, don’t need hat so much. If you want hat take this horse. Maybe this other a bit, you know, need hat.’ It was two a.m. and the sun had come back after an hour’s twilight. It just makes a big circle in the sky in summer. The ground was all mossy and soft. I hadn’t ridden a horse before. I’d been trying to for ages. Thor said, ‘Just hold on.’ The guys who had caught the horses were riding around bare-back and falling off occasionally, laughing and swearing. I had a slug of brennivin and climbed on the one that didn’t need a hat while everybody held it still. It was fine. It just stood there. Soon everyone who wanted a horse had one and we were cantering up a green mountain alongside a stream. Reykjavik and the sea were way down behind us. I hadn’t known any of these people for more than three hours. Most of them believed in elves. It was only twelve hours since I’d woken up on a sofa in Barnes, south-west London, with Marianne bending over me. Things were happening fast. I don’t think you need to be famous to find yourself riding a white horse at two o’clock in the morning, it can happen to anyone, but it was the rate at which unusual things were happening which was overwhelming.
There were quite a lot of girls outside the studio, and following us around everywhere. It’s considered very bad form to have sex with girls who hang around outside. I tried it in Barcelona and it was great. I didn’t always sleep with every girl that I met - it wasn’t all I wanted to do - but sometimes it was all they wanted to do. I didn’t seem to want sex as much when it was constantly available. Riding horses up mountains was fine.
I went with Damon to a little bar just off the high street. It was called Kaffibarrin. There and then, the owner, name of Inqvar, offered Damon a stake in the business if he drank there while we were in town. Drinks would be free. There didn’t seem to be a downside. We needed an HQ. We were introduced to all the high-ranking booze heads as they arrived. Here was a poet; here was the minister for something or other; here was the singer from Fonkstrasse, Reykjavik’s hottest new band. Then Einar from the Sugarcubes arrived. I’d been wondering when he’d turn up again. I greeted him like a long-lost brother. Inqvar told everyone that it was Damon’s bar now. I don’t know if Damon ever saw any money out of the partnership, but there was always somewhere to go. The place was rammed by the time the sun came up again and I stumbled outside to throw up. It seemed to be quite acceptable, like burping in Japan; a lot of people were doing it. It was a madhouse. It was nice outside. A long-legged elfin girl with olive skin was tittering at me. I said, ‘I’m going home, do you want to come?’ She said, ‘Oh, OK.’ That’s how I met Magnea, who I suppose I nearly married.
She lived above the pet shop on the high street, had a philosophy degree from Paris and very long legs. She’s the only girl I’ve met who could drink more than me. She liked whisky, but we tried everything. Halfway up a mountain on a horse is nothing. It’s quite easy to describe geography, but Iceland really started with her, and I couldn’t go back now, for all its wonders, without being overcome with thoughts of her. She was pure mischief: a pixie.
Manhattan
Damien had a show in New York. It was at the Gagosian Gallery in SoHo. Larry Gagosian, the proprietor, is the number one art dealer in the world. He’s said to know the whereabouts in the world of every piece of modern art worth more than a million dollars. He’s mustard.
A whole lorryload of Dolce & Gabbana catwalk couture turned up at the flat. I picked the best suit. I could see my face in it. There was a matching bodice and pointy shoes. I got dressed up, hailed a taxi and went to New York for the weekend for Damien’s show. I just took my passport and my wallet. There weren’t many pockets. I figured I could stay awake for three days, no problem, so I wouldn’t need to worry about a hotel. Something always turns up in New York, anyway.
SoHo was the latest bit of New York to be beautiful. Initially it was great not having a bag or a hotel to worry about. I got a taxi straight to the gallery. The show was opening the next day. Art shows are never ready until the last minute and there were lots of skinny women on mobiles and beardy kids building things. Damien had stopped swearing and had a steely kind of a vibe. All the most rich, most ghastly people who buy art live in America, and they were all coming. America has proper rich people, like it has proper famous people, and fatties. They’re just richer and famouser and fatter in America.
I went to a bar called Toad Hall with a guy called Michael. As soon as you arrive in New York, you’re off to some new place with some new face. Toad Hall was a proper American bar. In many ways it was similar to the Good Mixer, Graham’s pub. The pockets on the pool table were bigger. The jukebox had one good song on it, ‘Cool for Cats’ by Squeeze. If you’re at home in one bar, you’re at home in them all. I bought the barman a drink, played pool with Michael and wondered what was about to happen. You can never tell in New York. It’s a boom-bust economy. One minute you can be on the twenty-eighth floor of a portered apartment block in mid-town asking for fresh lemons, the next thing you know you’ve lost all your friends and are walking along a dark street with no shoes on. That is what happened next. I’d thrown my shoes out of the taxi window. They were really hurting. My feet aren’t catwalk size. I was ejected from the apartment for saying that Blind Melon were crap. I didn’t realise it was the singer’s apartment. I’ve since come to like them, but he died shortly after my visit. I wanted to tell him I’d made a mistake, but it was too late. That’s how it is in Manhattan. It all happens so fast. You just get the one shot in all your encounters. I made it back to Toad Hall but there was no one I recognised. When you’ve lost all your friends in New York, it’s time to have a dry martini.
The New York dry martini is a bit of Western voodoo. It’s the ultimate cocktail. Administered correctly, it parts the clouds of fear and the brilliant sunshine of resolve floods the darkest corners of the mind. ‘Bombay Sapphire, up, with an olive!’ I said to the barman. That’s gin, shaken with ice and the tiniest dash of vermouth, served in a conical martini glass, with an olive. Some people like a lemon twist, or even a raspberry. Olive is best. You can tell how good a martini is by looking at it. It should be tiny, not more than a gulp, if you want to knock it straight down. There should be a mist of condensation on the glass, indicating that the contents are ice-cold. A good martini is a pure concentrated triumph of minimalism. Some bars keep their gin in the freezer so that the ice doesn’t melt during the shaking; that keeps the final product as undiluted as possible. When made with very cold gin, it’s called a Gibson. Not many barmen know this, though, and it’s pointless trying to explain. I’ve tried. You just have to find a man who knows and stick with him.
The Toad Hall martinis were big and sloppy with whopping great olives. At least they were made with good gin. I sat on the barstool, sparked up a Camel and cast my clearing thoughts wide. That was when I knew I had to get some magnets. I had a really good chew over the properties of magnets, a whole martini’s worth. They suddenly seemed very strange and interesting. Why did they want to stick to each other, and why did they have two ends?
I said, ‘Where can I get some magnets?’ to the next guy at the bar. He said, ‘Canal Street, they’ve got all kinds. Yikes, what a nasty martini. It’s too long. The gin wasn’t cold enough. They should keep it in the refrigerator.’
He took some postcards out of a jacket that had a lot of pockets and began to hunt for a pen. He offered me a postcard, which I wrote to Magnea. I explained to her that I was in New York, looking for magnets. I bought the guy a beer. His name was Robert, he was an artist and his father was a scientist, and he knew a lot about magnets. We decided to get some good martinis. I called Kelly. Kelly ran Spy. In London, going out was straightforward. The Groucho was the best place to go. Everybody knew that and everybody went there. In New York, the best place to go was always changing. You’d go somewhere in February and Jasmine Guinness and Liberty Ross would be there and you’d leave with Chloë Sevigny, and then if you went back to the same spot in April it would have closed and the whole neighbourhood become completely passé and unmentionable. Spy had a good eighteen months at the top. It was a huge cave with big sofas and small martinis, low lighting, and all the most expensive and impossible women in New York.
‘Kelly, it’s Alex James, cheers, mate. Yeah, great, look, I’m round the corner, but I’ve lost my shoes. Is that going to be all right? Two of us. Of course I’m drunk! Best behaviour, promise. See you in a mo, then.’
It’s most pleasing to be told by a door gorilla that there is absolutely no way you can come in without any shoes, asking for the boss and being greeted by him with open arms and escorted to a table. Robert had taken his shoes off and hung them around his neck. His hands were covered in oil, his hair was a mad frizz and he was wearing supermarket clothes. He was good-looking though.
We had a couple of martinis and went back to Toad Hall. Angela was there. She was Damien’s ex-girlfriend. She’d lost everyone, too. It was getting late and the three of us went to play snooker. She was quite good at it. I crashed in her room at The Gramercy Park Hotel, woke up, got some new shoes and a toothbrush. Things always work out eventually in New York.
I managed to stay up for the rest of the weekend and took the redeye back to Heathrow, arriving Monday morning. I wasn’t allowed to take any of the magnets on to the plane, though. They set off every buzzer in the airport. I got to the studio in time, but I was in pieces. I could hardly speak. Damon’s face was as tightly set as Damien’s had been before his show when I arrived at the session, in my ragged couture. Everything was set up and ready to go. As soon as Graham started playing the guitar I felt superhuman. I picked up the bass and music was pouring out of me. Melody had an intensity that it lacked in my everyday state of mind. The music collected and connected all the strange emotions I was brimming with. By midday we’d written ‘Beetlebum’. It was a completely new sound.
Still, it was relentless. It was Dave’s birthday and he wanted to go out. London was in full swing, Cool Britannia was in business and governed from its headquarters, the Groucho Club, which was getting bigger and more packed with out-of-control success stories. I took Dave there. He hated everything about it and had a really good time. The walking wounded were returning from New York and there were cheers as unaccounted-for stragglers arrived.
Mayfair
I was missing Iceland. I thought about Magnea sometimes, living in that faraway place. We had similar minds. She was as full of hedonistic abandon as I was. I wondered what life with her would be like. She was carefree, clever and pretty and it was impossible to say where life would whisk her. She had everything; she had the whole world at her fingertips and the whole world wanted to grab her and swallow her. Damon had found something in Iceland, too, not a woman but a place of sanctuary. He wanted to record all his vocals in Reykjavik.
We both couldn’t wait to get back there. Graham wasn’t keen on leaving Camden. The four of us laid down more backing tracks at Mayfair Studios in Primrose Hill. Maison Rouge had become too smelly.
Primrose Hill is a precious enclave of beautiful houses and beautiful people just to the north of Regent’s Park, a quiet and pretty haven. A trip to the ciabatta man at lunchtime would often yield a minor celebrity encounter.
Mayfair was a new studio and a new way of working. Until then, everything had been recorded on to tape but Streetie had a new computer-recording system. Songs and parts could be edited, slowed down, speeded up, reversed, quantised and cut and pasted together very easily. ‘Essex Dogs’, the last track on the album, used a lot of computer trickery. Musically, it’s probably the most accomplished thing the band have done, with quite sophisticated counterpoint and cross rhythms, virtuoso playing. Those are never the ones people remember, though.
‘Song 2’ was about the simplest thing we’ve ever done, and the quickest. Dave set up two drumkits and he and Graham played them both at the same time. The loud guitar in the chorus is actually a bass going through a home-made distortion box. The whole thing was done in about fifteen minutes. I had a bad hangover and I felt horrible. It’s a nasty record and it wouldn’t have sounded so nasty if I’d gone to bed early the night before. We did it without thinking too much about it and felt better afterwards.
‘Beetlebum’ and ‘Song 2’, the two big singles on the Blur album, our fifth, were written much the same way as we’d written everything, around a chord sequence or riff or melody initiated by Damon, four guys in a room with no windows, kicking arse. Some of the other songs on that record were more individual efforts. We were all making records with other people and we didn’t need each other so much as we had, but when the four of us were all on form, collaborating, was when the best music was made.
Graham and I were both the worse for wear one Friday morning and popped into the Queen, a pub on the corner of Regent’s Park. For some reason we had our Ivor Novello awards with us. I guess we were showing off. They’d just been delivered to the studio as we were leaving for the pub. Among musicians, ‘Ivors’ are probably the most coveted of all the industry gongs. They are awarded for songwriting. Having gold and platinum discs on display at home is in bad taste. I gave those to my mum. I always find it peculiar when people have big pictures of themselves on the walls, too. It’s not quite right. Most awards get lost, given away or broken on the night they are received. Even if they survive the evening, awards belong in offices, not in the home. Apart from Ivor Novellos. You can put those on your mantel-piece and people in the know will think all the better of you for it. Graham and I were sitting on stools in ‘the top Queen’ with the awards sitting on the bar in front of us. They are quite distinctive, a small figurine of a Muse.
The pub was quite empty. We sat there, easy in each other’s company. Graham and I so often spent time in an empty pub, somewhere or other. I hadn’t really seen much of him lately, because I’d been in Iceland with Damon and also because he had a new girlfriend. I could talk to Graham about anything, and he usually knew more than I did, but he needed looking after. That was part of his charm. He was very lovable. There was no one cooler than Graham. He always fucked things up more fantastically than I could ever manage, which, somehow, I respected him for. If I was drunk, he managed to make me look less ridiculous by being always a little bit drunker. If I was worried about something irrational, it usually turned out that he was slightly more worried about something slightly further fetched. I worried about a lot of things. Unsupportable anxiety was commonplace, especially in the mornings, when the gross misconduct of the night before came flooding back. Despite all our triumphs and conquests we all worried and felt just as hopeless and stupid as everybody else.
All four of us drove each other into rages occasionally but we all wore each other’s company well, usually. I felt closer to Graham than anybody, though. He was my best friend; not just in the band: in the world. I would have sat next to him at school. There was nothing I ever had to hide from him, no matter how heinous it seemed. He was totally absorbed by music and had such an obviously brilliant musical mind that I don’t think he ever felt the need to demonstrate anything to anybody, unless he was in the mood. Most people accept the mindless drudgery of record promotion. It was painful for him. He was only interested in playing the guitar. Music is a natural, continuous quality and it flowed from him.
I was trying to draw Magnea’s nose, to show Graham exactly what it looked like. It was a good nose. An elderly gentleman came to the bar to order a drink. He said, ‘I’ve got one of those.’ I said, ‘What? One of Magnea’s noses?’ He said, ‘No, one of those - an Ivor.’ We didn’t believe him at all, so he went home and got it. Then he put it on the bar next to ours. His name was Sandy, and he’d got his Ivor for writing the theme music to Upstairs, Downstairs. It happened to be Graham’s favourite song ever. They became very involved after that, and I wandered back to the studio. Damon had put his award on one of the speakers behind the mixing desk. I put mine on the other one, to make a stereo pair. Many hours later, Graham arrived back at the studio with Sandy. Damon saw them stumbling through the front door on the CCTV. He said, ‘Who the FUCK has Graham dragged in now?’ I said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s a songwriter he met in the pub.’ ‘Songwriter?’ said Damon. ‘Songwriter! He’s a songwriter, is he? Has he got a fucking Ivor Novello award? No. I don’t think so.’ At which point Sandy fell through the door clutching a figurine in an outstretched hand.
Favourite Places
We all occupied different corners of London. Dave was married in Hampstead. Graham was a confirmed Camden Town person. He spent most of his time in the Good Mixer with his entourage, like it was his dressing room. He was cock of the roost there. It was a cul-de-sac though. There was never anyone new and interesting in that pub. Damon lived in Notting Hill. I find that part of town particularly irritating. It suits him because he thrives on antagonism. All the most annoying people in the world live in Notting Hill. The people who live there think they’re it because they had dinner in a restaurant and that Damon Albarn was there and he was making such a fuss, and they’re on the guest list for Reading because Hugo did the sponsorship marketing. Damon is the only cool person who lives in Notting Hill. Forget about the rest of them, they don’t know Jack, even if they’ve got his phone number.
I loved living in the West End, the fountain of everything new and wonderful. The others muttered their disapproval about the company I was keeping. It’s fair to say that the Groucho Club was not a wholesome place. Damon and Graham weren’t the only ones who objected to it. To some people, it was objectionable overall in every way imaginable: a proudly exclusive, sugary cocktail of celebrity, money, frocks and genius. I loved it. In 1996, forget New York: the Groucho Club was the best place in the world to go for a drink. Famous people are the worst star-fuckers of everybody and there’s nothing that goes down better in the Groucho than the latest new famous person, and, just for a moment, that was me.
Like a toddlers’ playgroup, the place was run almost entirely by women. There were men working behind the bar, but the power and the discipline were in the hands of no-messing matriarchs. Bollockings for atrocious behaviour were meted out with terrible feminine force, usually in the cold light of day, when offenders were confronted with a laundry list of misdemeanours. Gordanna was the most feared manageress. ‘Forget about what Keith was doing, I’ll be talking to him about that separately, you can’t keep riding that bicycle down the stairs. Someone is going to get hurt.’ ‘What? Well, I’m not surprised you’ve got a sore leg. You’re a bloody idiot. Do you want another Bloody Mary? And if you want to pay the pianist five hundred pounds to play “Wichita Lineman” for an hour, get him to come round your house and do it.’ ‘Well, I’m not surprised you can’t remember, you’re a fucking idiot. Honestly, Alex.’
In the Groucho it was sometimes hard to tell whether the person next to me at the bar was someone I’d recently met, or someone I recognised vaguely from off the television. Sometimes it was both. It didn’t seem to matter too much. Quite regularly now people were making that kind of mistake with my face. ‘Hey, don’t I know you? I’m sure we’ve met.’ They were always mortally embarrassed when they realised. Living behind a familiar face is like driving a flash car. There are always some people who’ll want to put a big scratch on it, and you have to be careful where you park. The Groucho was the right kind of car park, but the thing that made it really special was that Damien was often there. Britpop was never a scene. It was a lot of not very brilliant bands copying two or three good ones, and the good bands never really saw eye to eye. The burgeoning art explosion was exactly the opposite. The artists were unified as a group and they relied on each other but they didn’t plagiarise each other.
Damien’s star was rising. He’d completely charmed the entire staff of the Groucho by buying them drinks, telling them jokes and doing drawings for them. They vied for his attention and the place was never closed to him. He could delight and attract people in a way that opened doors and arms, like Tabitha’s face did. Even when he was wearing Prada he had a faintly agricultural mien. His main talent, and he had many, was that he was good at getting the best out of people. He raised everyone’s game.
Damien was the undisputed king of the art set. The artists in his circle were like a huge band. Their work was all highly individual, but his ambition, charisma and acumen drew them all together. He was a true catalyst, he stimulated everybody and as they all tried to outsmart each other, the range and content of their work blossomed. The art crowd’s appetite for each other and for everything raged and they decorated the dives of Dean Street with their presence. Soho was fizzing. It meant staying up all night could lead to interesting encounters. There was a big mad family of extraordinary people who didn’t want to go to bed yet. I was drawn into the crowd by a cocktail of sexual chemistry and intellectual magnetism. Minds raced all through the night. It was inspiring. I found new reference points, my horizons broadened.
Damien’s discourse was a combination of gags, poetry, repartee and swearing and his mind raced to the top and bottom of things and made strange connections. He loved making people change their minds and was good at it. Famous faces might turn heads, but he was someone who could turn minds inside out. He was part goblin and almost insane and could so easily have been in prison; but then you could say that about most of the Groucho’s cast.
The Groucho led inevitably to other glitzy places. All great artists are great cooks and maybe great cooks are all great artists. Charles Fontaine, the fourth member of the gang, was partial to tripe and prone to huge fits of temper. He had been the chef at Le Caprice.
Damien was a big fan of swanky restaurants, the swankier and more expensive, exclusive and elitist, the better. The posh restaurant is part of the natural environment of the artist. The best restaurants are the ones with the best people in. Unless you’re really hungry, people are far more interesting than food. A great restaurant makes the rest of the world seem very ordinary and that sensation of glamour is a hard thing to achieve. Very few places have glamour. Glamour makes hearts beat a bit faster, luxury makes hearts beat slower and, when the balance is right, you float away. Le Caprice is so discreet that you could walk right past it without realising it was there. You wouldn’t ever walk past it because it’s tucked at the bottom of a dead-end street behind Piccadilly.
To eat there is to leave a clamouring world behind and spend a couple of hours in the clouds. It’s the best restaurant in the world. America is great for pizza and anything you can eat with your fingers, but they can’t do the fiddly, classy stuff. There are restaurants in France where the food is better and the rooms are grander, but they are often full of ghastly rich non-French people boasting to each other in loud voices. Le Caprice is chic. From the moment I walked in for the first time and caught the mellow hum of hot gossip, until the brandies arrived, nothing could have been finer.
It was a long summer Sunday evening the first time I went there. We strolled up Piccadilly. I was wearing shorts from Deptford Market. It was easy to see why Keith and Damien irritated people. Damien was going through a phase of shouting exquisite obscenities whenever it went quiet and you just never knew what Keith was going to do next. I sometimes found it excruciatingly funny and begged them to stop, and sometimes I just begged them to stop. Their girlfriends were with us, and Jay Jopling, Damien’s Old Etonian art dealer. The maître d’ greeted Damien warmly and professionally. Then Damien whispered something in his ear that made him practically bend in two. No matter how drunk Damien was, he never lost the ability to make people split their sides, even sometimes people he’d really been annoying. He’d go to great lengths to win people over or exasperate them further. The jokes flowed continuously. I had tears streaming down my face, and pains in my sides.
There was slapstick, wit, wordplay, anecdote, funny faces and rude noises. Because he could deliver a joke so perfectly the punchline spent most of the time waiting in the distance as he elaborated and extemporised. A regular customer on the next table made a complaint about Damien’s language, and having discovered who he was complaining about, came over to say hello. I think Jay managed to sell him a painting. Ideas flew out of Damien, like they fly out of everybody, but he was a man of action. He made his dreams come true.
Infinite Returns
It was such a relief to be on a plane to Iceland again and leaving all the madness behind. Thor sent a hundred and fifty Hell’s Angels to escort us from the airport into Reykjavik. I went straight to Magnea’s house and they all revved their engines outside the window.
Graham and Dave weren’t interested in going to Iceland. All their parts were done, so they didn’t really need to be there. There’s no way I wouldn’t have been there, even if I’d hated the place. But it really was the top of the world.
Magnea liked going to all the bad places, bars in the docks where the fishermen had fights and the place by the bus station where the bad alcoholics and mad people drank. She had the quality of glamour and those dives emphasised her beauty. She conjured a plain, everyday situation into a vivid, whirling world of wonder.
‘Bastard.’
‘Well, you’ve got three boyfriends, you’re worse than I am.’
‘Wanker.’
‘Do you want a drink?’
‘Fucker.’
I think we probably loved each other.
To start with there were quite a lot of girls outside her flat, waiting for me. By the end of the week, there were loads of boys outside. It was her three boyfriends and all their mates. I had to leave via the bathroom window to get to the studio.
Civilisation was no longer safe anywhere and so we went on an expedition to the interior. In the magazine on the aeroplane it said that the Icelandic interior was uninhabitable. I’d been intrigued by the thought of an inhospitable landscape. Surely you could live anywhere, if you were determined?
I was wrong. No one could live there. The otherworldliness starts with an eggy smell. It’s not a smell that I could ever get used to. It’s constantly updating itself with new overtones and flavours of the day, a multifaceted huge and invisible smellscape. When the wind changed, it seemed to present a new view of the smell, one that I couldn’t have considered from the other side, or the back of it. It lurked and it thrusted and it wouldn’t leave us alone.
Once we got through the stench, we were on to the ice. The ice goes on forever. I never managed to grasp the idea of ‘forever’ quite so clearly as on the Vatnajökull Glacier, Europe’s largest. It’s not just the scale of the thing. It’s the timelessness and the immeasurable silence of the place. It goes beyond geography into the realms of planetary science with its astronomical proportion, a pure, elemental realm. We zoomed around on skidoos, unaffected by the passage of time in the perpetual sunlight, mountains in the distance and the sky blue and constant.
When we emerged, I went with Magnea to visit a poet called Buppi, who lived in a cottage by a lake at the bottom of a valley, which is only right. He was a mad-eyed sprite, bald as a baby and bright and playful as a stream. He was very engaging and I couldn’t help myself from getting involved with his thoughts, which were quite complicated. We walked up a big hill, which is always a good thing to do with a poet. Magnea picked camomile flowers and we sat on the prow. ‘Everyone in Iceland is a poet,’ he declared. ‘Wherever you look, there’s a distant horizon. Everyone’s standing at the centre of a very big circle.’ It was true. The Icelandic people are a race apart. It’s a very modern society. They’re exceptionally well travelled, and resilient. The women are beautiful and the men are quite fearless. There is a Viking streak in all of them. A popular sport was driving bangers at full speed up the sides of U-shaped glacial valleys to see how far up the vertical face they could get. Sometimes the cars just fell off. The great unknown was all around and all-prevailing. They flung themselves into it with bravado. Buppi was a genuine wise man and my brain was starting to overrev.
So much ice and water. Steaming out of the ground, falling from the sky and sitting in huge lakes, streams that tasted so sweet and cool. Iceland. The Vikings called it Iceland so that no one would bother invading it, and stashed all their beautiful women there.
We stopped at a frozen lake that had thawed at the edges. A small wooden hut stood alongside. The hut was built on top of a geothermic spring. There are geysers all over the place. This was quite a steady, calm one; some of them were explosively violent and drew crowds when they were erupting, but there was no one around for miles. We stripped naked and sat in the hut, feeling the supercolossal thrum of the molten core of the earth. It was a great sauna, the very best. When we could bear the heat no longer, we took a running plunge into the frozen lake. Then we needed to get back in the hut. It made our skin prickle.
Things were pretty mental everywhere. The band were booked in for a short tour of North America. I thought I’d have a couple of weeks off the booze for the duration and take stock of everything that was going on in my life.
I was in a band. Good. I was drinking too much, but I’d stopped. Good. I was shagging too much. Hmmm. Good. Writing songs for people whose music I’d always loved. Good. It was all good, but it didn’t have Justine in it anywhere. I called her and invited her out to San Francisco. She said, ‘Yes.’
Even when I went to bed early, all those miles and miles and miles and never knowing where the toilet was and having a new address every day, and new friends, just took it out of me. I wouldn’t have swapped places with anyone, but it was still physically exhausting.
It wasn’t as much fun without the bad things, but hangovers had become ordeals that hung around for days, like bad weather, dealing out every kind of pain, psychological torment, ache and torpor.
I thought as a rock star I owed it to people to enjoy myself to the absolute limit. It was a missed opportunity for everybody if I didn’t. Turpitude, extreme immorality, is the privilege of the rock star. No one else would get away with it. Even film stars and footballers have to conduct themselves with some degree of common decency. They’re all answerable to somebody. Making music is a self-indulgent business and success is just more wood for the bonfire. Absolutely every proper rock star in history has gone through a phase of self-indulgence of proportions inconceivable to the rest of the population. That’s kind of what a rock star is. It would be dull to just turn up and play some songs and leave. It’s not what everybody wants. There’s nothing profoundly evil about what goes on backstage. It’s just mucky.
Damien won the Turner Prize and put it behind the bar at the Groucho, twenty grand. It was a good time to have left the country. I wondered if I knew anyone normal any more. I unwittingly came across an article about Charles Fontaine’s culinary genius in the first bookshop I went into when we arrived in Toronto. He was supposed to be my most normal friend and even he seemed to be big in Canada.