8
Cavemen
It was hard to say what was going to turn up in the loo at the Groucho. One night in those toilets I got talking to a guy who said he had a twenty-thousand-year-old flute, so I gave him my number. Rarely for the Groucho, he called me in the morning and asked if I wanted to see it. We met at a warehouse in King’s Cross. There are lots of warehouses around there, but this must have been the strangest. The entrance was nondescript. A steel gate on a grubby street gave on to a loading bay with the usual pallets and forklifts. We walked through more heavy doors into great rooms full of incalculable amounts of treasure of all kinds. There were Egyptian artefacts, sculptures from ancient Greece, manuscripts, icons and jewellery in endless, neat rows - all of them priceless. It was the property of the British Museum. The museum only displays a fraction of all its assets at any particular time, and this was one of several places where the nation’s surplus hoard was stored, a holding bay. Some of the pieces would be loaned to other museums, some were being studied, some were just waiting there to come back into fashion. It would have made any vulgar New York billionaire art collector weep to peek in there. The warehouse setting was a good environment to see wonders like that. I had no desire to possess any of it. It was all too precious to have a private owner. The abundance of rarities was devastating. Some of the things were in glass cases, some were packed in boxes with labels stating their contents. They were free from any kind of marketing or presentation hocus-pocus, but everything there had some historical significance, and hundreds and thousands of years after it was made still had the power to take my breath away. It made Damien’s stuff look piffling and flimsy by comparison.
The ancient musical artefacts section was on the third floor. There was an expert in these matters in attendance. I recognised a flute-type thing, a clay pipe with finger holes, but she said that was relatively recent, only a few thousand years old. The oldest musical instruments do date back twenty thousand years. Archaeological findings show that there was almost nothing in the way of art until twenty thousand years ago and then suddenly there was an almost instant gush of cave paintings, tools and musical instruments. The first instruments were drums, probably mammoths’ skulls, bashed with mammoths’ bones. Not much has changed in the drum world.
The earliest tonal instruments were made from reindeer toe bones. They’re closer to a whistle than a flute to look at, but they are technically flutes because you blow across the hole, rather than down it. You get different notes in the harmonic series depending on how hard you blow. Of all the things in that warehouse, they were among the least obviously beautiful. If one turned up in the kitchen the morning after a big night, I wouldn’t have said, ‘Wow, someone’s left this amazing thing here.’ I’d probably have thrown it away before realising what it was. It didn’t look like much, I must be honest. It didn’t sound great either but those little crusty bones were where it all started. A primitive musical instrument made by a primitive scientist.
Twenty thousand years later, anyone sitting down at a piano is sitting on top of a huge mountain of accumulated knowledge. When you hold even the cheapest guitar, you’re wielding a very sophisticated tool. The twelve-tone scale is a triumph of scientific understanding. It’s such a perfect structure that it’s rarely questioned or even understood by the people who use it. All musicians know how to tune up their instruments, but very few have any idea what they are actually doing as they tune. Musicians rarely have any more of an inkling of what music is than an electrician knows what electricity is.
All the really tricky business of the evolution of music has taken place, and it’s not important to know everything. It’s just important to know what sounds good. All anyone needs is one little idea. It can even be someone else’s idea. All you’ve got to be able to do is pick the good ones. There are no rules that can’t be broken in music making. Confidence is all-important. Things that are completely wrong can sound new and interesting if they are done with conviction.
Sometimes we struggled with songs and it paid off; sometimes we struggled and got nowhere. Sometimes it was easy. Our most popular song was written in fifteen minutes while we were waiting for a piece of gear to turn up. We just thrashed it out. I hadn’t been to bed. None of us took it very seriously; it wasn’t long enough to be a single and the only words you could hear were ‘Woo-hoo’.
If musicians only talked about writing songs in interviews, they would be very dull to read. It’s an exhilarating process though, songwriting. Writing a new song felt better than anything else that happened with the band. It was better than a hundred thousand people screaming at us, or sex with strangers, or meeting the Queen at Buckingham Palace. It always starts off with the certain feeling that I will never be able to do it. Then something always happens. Making music isn’t something you do by thinking about it or talking about it; it’s something that you do by doing it. The four of us would all play together and usually it was good. You can’t usefully analyse it any further. The equations of music-making chemistry are complex. Turn up to work and turn up the volume.
Astronomers
I was reading the astronomy book for about the fifth time when I joined the British Astronomical Association. They sent me a newsletter telling me where to look for meteorite showers, comets, planetary conjunctions and eclipses. The tone of their correspondence was very friendly and encouraging. I was also welcome to use their library at Burlington House, in Piccadilly. It’s one of London’s finest buildings, Burlington House. It’s the home of the Royal Academy of Arts, as well as a number of learned societies. I love that part of town; ambling around St James’s with nothing in particular to do was about my favourite daytime activity. There are people who still dress like Sherlock Holmes in St James’s, south of Piccadilly.
At the desk at Burlington House I said I was a member of the British Astronomical Association and asked where the library was. I was shown into a vast, galleried, oak-panelled hall with books from floor to ceiling. It had those ladders on wheels attached to rails, to enable you to reach the books on the top shelves. There was one other person in there. He was deep in thought with a book on his lap.
I could hardly believe how brilliant that room was. It was like walking into a dream I’d been having. I wanted to stay there forever and read everything. It had to be the finest collection of books for space heads in the world. There was a huge section on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, none of which sensationalised it in any way. It was all cold and rational and delicious. It was immensely calm in there and sun flooded through the vast windows. The Queen lived at one point in a house not far away, and I felt almost certain that she might pop in to get away from everything and perhaps consider briefly the moons of the outer planets or read the latest published papers. The photocopied monthly newsletter didn’t suggest anything like this. It was an excellent deal for seventeen pounds a year. I took out a dozen books.
I didn’t tell many people about that place. I liked keeping it to myself. No one would have been interested anyway. I’d been going there for quite some time when I mentioned that I hadn’t received my newsletter, as I was returning some books. The librarian said, ‘Newsletter? We don’t publish a newsletter! Are you sure you’ve come to the right place?’ I said, ‘This is the Astronomical Association, isn’t it?’ He said, ‘This is the Royal Astronomical Society. Perhaps you’re looking for the British Astronomical Association? That’s upstairs.’ Another gentleman came over. He seemed to be in charge. He said that I was welcome to come here if I could get two other Fellows of the RAS to propose me as a member - as if that wouldn’t be a problem - and they shooed me upstairs. In a tiny room at the top was an old lady sitting in front of a small bookcase. She was typing. She was very friendly and said if I wanted to borrow any of the books I was quite welcome.
I was usually the only person in that library. It was a shame.
I prefer playing music to listening to recordings of it. Maybe the Victorians had the right idea. Where there is now a plasma screen, there might once have been a piano. I’d rather sit with a guitar or at a piano with a songbook and let it all flow through me. It’s like being able to get inside a painting or a dream or the mind of the person who wrote it. Graham was forever right inside some musical landscape; he always had lots of CDs with him on tour. Dave always took a computer wherever we went. Damon usually took an acoustic guitar, herbs for making tea and a selection of magic hats. I always took a guitar, too. I worked my way through the great pop writers: Roy Orbison, who the Beatles learned a thing or two from; Holland-Dozier-Holland, who wrote a lot of the Motown classics; Jimmy Webb, for ‘Up, Up and Away’ and ‘Wichita Lineman’; the Gibb brothers - the Bee Gees-Imarvelled at their sophisticated key changes, wonderful harmonies and the best grooves of anybody; the melodies of The Mamas & the Papas written by John Phillips, and countless others besides.
A guitar is a good companion on the road. When I felt wretched, broken, guilty and disgusted with myself, it was a source of comfort. When I was feeling cheeky I dived into its mysteries. It’s a good piece of furniture and every home should have one to go with the piano. Houses without musical instruments are slightly barren places.
As well as a guitar I had my trusty book, Foundations of Astronomy. I’d been reading it from cover to cover for years by then. As I learned more about astronomy, the less I realised I knew. The ordinary, everyday part of life is so overwhelming it’s easy to forget that we’re floating on a pure and beautiful blue sphere in space and that the greatest adventure is about to begin. We’re on the cusp of new paradigms; shifts in our understanding of everything and things are changing fast. The astronomy book had had two revisions since I had started reading it. In the 1990 edition, no planets had been positively identified outside the solar system. Since then, they’ve started turning up everywhere.
My favourite place is called the Oort cloud. It’s a big jumble of icy rocks way, way beyond Pluto. They float gently around the sun in endless silence. Occasionally one of them falls out of its orbit and starts hurtling towards our star, which heats it to an incandescent fireball before slinging it back where it came from. Most comets come from the Oort cloud.
The Oort cloud is too far away to get to at the moment, but Mars seemed like a reasonable place to be aiming for.
The Idler magazine sent me to interview Patrick Moore, the astronomer. He’s also a musician and there were quite a lot of things I wanted to ask him about. His house was full of books and silence. It was a good place for thinking. He interviewed me, really, to start with. Patrick Moore is a mighty scholar; he’d written at least fifty books about astronomy. True expertise is a rare thing, a combination of flair and an almost involuntary awareness of detail. I saw it in Damien and in Graham. It’s what drew me to them. Patrick Moore was self-taught, an autodidact. His tenacious, rational mind had just dragged him along with it. He had the experts’ gift of making things that are complicated sound simple.
I’d been wondering what shape the universe was. I’d kind of got to thinking it was hyperspherical and I’d been drawing hyperspheres a lot, and staring at them. I asked him what sort of shape he thought it all was. He said he’d asked Einstein the same thing, and Einstein didn’t know either. Personally he wouldn’t be drawn to conjecture. He wasn’t really a magnet man, either. Even the hot topic of magnetic monopoles didn’t really stir him up. We thought about the Oort cloud for a bit before we got round to Mars. He probably knows that planet better than anybody. He’s been studying it for decades and knows its geography, its geology, its weather and seasons, its chemistry and its history. He’d studied it with telescopes and spectrometers, he’d been in continuous conversation with other leading Mars authorities for decades and he was of the same opinion as me on one thing in particular. One day soon we’ll live on Mars. No doubt about it. He said the first man to walk on Mars has probably already been born, which hadn’t occurred to me, but it could well be true.
We considered the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons, and the kind of things that would have to happen to make Mars habitable. The idea of transforming a dead planet into a lush green paradise was such a triumphant notion for humanity. In ancient Greece, man saw himself as an all-conquering hero. I can see that very clearly in the art that survives from the period: the great thinkers, the great athletes, the great species of mankind. For the ancient Greeks, there was no doubt that the human being was the greatest thing that had ever happened. In today’s deforested greenhouse, we all share a burden of guilt that we’re destroying the planet we live on and it’s depressing. While cooking some poached eggs, Patrick Moore said the scariest thing I’ve ever heard. We’d been talking about life on Mars, and it naturally led to the question of life elsewhere. Here was a man of profound learning and vastly superior understanding, I think one of the three cleverest people I’ve ever met. He’d quickly tired of my childish, whimsical wanderings, and really was just being kind by telling me stories. I soon know when I’ve met someone who’s cleverer than me; it’s daunting but alluring. Big minds are irresistible places, but dangerous.
‘I have absolutely no doubt,’ said Patrick Moore, ‘that beings of far greater intelligence than ours exist and know all about us. We are as far from them as King Canute was from television.’
It was scary because I’d been thinking the same thing myself. An intellect as advanced as his would have been quite enough for one day.
‘I think the toast is burning,’ I said.
Hollywood, Mars
After talking to Patrick Moore, I wanted to go to Mars. I thought about it a lot. I talked about it with the others. Damon and Graham thought I was being ridiculous. Dave was my astronomy cohort in the band. He had been a keen astronomer as a boy, and knew the difference between pulsars and quasars. He was enthusiastic. We both wanted to go to Mars, but for the time being we had to go to America a lot, more than usual. Usually they couldn’t wait to get rid of us with our sloppy drinking, unprofessional conduct and irrelevant Britpopping but ‘Song 2’ was taking off in the States. That meant we had to go to Los Angeles a lot and it also started to make me think that nothing was impossible. America was the one place we’d never really had a proper hit. As my ambitions were serendipitously fulfilled, one by one, the thing I needed most of all was a new objective. I kept thinking about Mars.
Los Angeles, where the new record company was based, is like an onion: it has many layers and there is nothing in the middle. Dealing with it was enough to make our eyes water, but it’s an essential ingredient in all recipes for global success. Either nobody wants you in that city or everybody does; nowhere else deals quite so straightforwardly in human currency than the Hollywood celebrity stock market. It’s more hierarchical than Japan, it’s dumber than Disneyland, it’s awful and it’s great.
There are so many ridiculous schemes afoot in that city that a trip to Mars seemed quite a realistic prospect. Although going to another planet was a far-fetched notion, and everyone apart from Dave took it as a kind of madness, my interest in space was actually one of the things that kept me sane. It was really quite grounding. Everything makes sense in space. It’s all knowable and predictable. It makes a lot more sense than Hollywood, that’s for sure.
I had a reasonably thorough knowledge of physics and chemistry. I’d enjoyed science since Jimmy Stubbs and I had tried to make big explosions when we were ten, and I’d never really stopped enjoying it. I am naturally inquisitive. It’s my greatest gift. Science explains how things work, so I embraced it. Music could easily be categorised as a scientific discipline. Under analysis it is a species of pure mathematics. The sound of music is the hum of the harmonic series, the number sequence 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6 . . . You could say it’s just maths with the volume turned up. I just tried to put the notes together so that they exploded.
Hollywood is a small part of a big city. It has the most transient inhabitants of anywhere on earth. People zip in for twenty-four hours, get their faces on the telly and zoom off again to spend their money. Even the people who live there don’t live there. They just work there and have homes elsewhere. It’s one big office, really.
From the rock and roll district of West Hollywood, the distant dolls’ houses of Beverly Hills precariously and clumsily stuck on to the cliff faces give the impression of a world designed by a child, a world teetering permanently on the edge of collapse.
Everyone in Hollywood, it appeared, would have me believe that they were in some way essential to the business of super-stardom, or intimately connected with it. It’s a gold rush town; everyone is a prospector and anyone could get lucky.
There must be more hotels in West Hollywood than anywhere else in the world. From rent-by-the-hour sleaze holes to castles fit for mad movie stars and everything in between and, over the years we’d stayed in them all.
The Hyatt on Sunset Boulevard is the hotel where most bands stay the first couple of times they go to Los Angeles. Sunset is a long and quite ordinary road whose most valuable characteristic is that it’s famous. It’s famous because famous people go there. The Whisky is on sunset: The Doors played there, famously. Johnny Depp, the famous actor, has a well-known, famous nightclub called the Viper Room on Sunset. A lot of famous people do their shopping at Ralphs supermarket on Sunset. It’s famous for it. In Paris no one tells you that the Eiffel Tower is famous, or that many famous French people have lived there over the years. The elegance of the boulevards is ennobling. The cartoon crappiness of Los Angeles and its insubstantial garishness are undignified and have the opposite effect. The place is as nasty and delicious as a big slice of fresh pizza and, for all its ghastliness, there are always a lot of people it would be good to meet in the city.
The Hyatt is the most famous of all the rock and roll hotels. It cultivates its heritage carefully. A member of Led Zeppelin once drove its motorbike into the lift and there is, I think, a small plaque in there, commemorating the event. The first time we stayed there Graham was evacuated from his room by armed police officers carrying out a raid on the room next door. The famous elevator arrived, the doors opened theatrically to reveal a lift empty apart from Noel Edmonds. Graham said it was the strangest thirty seconds of his life so far and asked me if he was definitely awake.
Anyone wanting to mingle with more inspiring creatures than bikers and Noel Edmonds in the lift needs to go along the road to the Chateau Marmont, a kind of imitation castle. I popped in there once, very late; it was empty apart from Faye Dunaway, sitting at the bar alone. I winked at her but she told me to piss off. It was refreshing to hear someone say what they really meant.
After shopping around a bit, the band settled for Le Parc Suite Hotel. That became our Hollywood home. We all had our own sets of friends in Los Angeles, much as we did in London, but we all liked Le Parc. It’s comfy and quiet. In Hollywood, more than anywhere else, it’s important to have somewhere to retreat to, away from the unrelenting babble. There is no such thing as a comfortable silence in LA. People just don’t ever seem to stop talking. The taxi drivers are exhausting. The only way to shut them up was to say I was planning a trip to Mars.
Inside Le Parc, all is calm. Everything is big and simple. The rooms are big; the beds are big; the phones are big. Everything is so big I felt like a little baby.
Things were going well, I felt, as I opened another bottle of champagne on a lilo in the pool on the roof of Le Parc. Graham was having a nap in the Jacuzzi and we’d just heard that ‘Song 2’ had been added to super-heavy rotation at MTV, which meant things would soon start going crazy.
In drink I had started to tell people I wanted to go to Mars. Even in the mornings, lately, I’d been talking about it. It was on my mind. People would go very quiet when I started talking about it. Everyone thought it was unreasonable and said ‘Why?’ rather than ‘Why not?’, but we’re in a golden age of planetary science.
Three hundred years ago it took three months to get to Australia. Now it only takes three months to get to Mars. Soon we will go to other planets. Not because space is a place of infinite resources, but because it’s in man’s nature to explore. New horizons are exhilarating. Space is the new ocean and spaceships are the new cathedrals.
In Los Angeles fame has long been recognised as the most precious commodity in the universe. Famous people have great influence everywhere, but nowhere is it more obvious than in Hollywood. It’s built on fame. The easiest way to sell something is to get a famous person to use it, wear it or stick a picture of their grinning face on it. The big clothes companies are well aware of this and employ celebrity product placement coordinators. Even before our first photograph appeared in the NME, we were all wearing free Levis. It’s not just the big corporations, either. Even the smallest, most ethical producer of recycled Third World Fairtrade plimsolls would love to supply free plimsolls to recognised persons; it’s the most effective form of advertising.
Rather than become another clothes horse, I wondered if I could use my prominence to jump-start a Mars rocket. I called my accountant and told him that I wanted to initiate a space programme. He said he’d see what he could do. He was a very good accountant. I was sure nothing was beyond him.
He called back fifteen minutes later. He said he’d arranged a meeting with someone in Milton Keynes.
Milton Keynes
Milton Keynes is a tidy new town, designed with cars in mind. Whoever designed it was obviously a big fan of roundabouts. It doesn’t feel like you’ve ever arrived. The only way to tell is that there are suddenly a lot more roundabouts than usual. The roads in Milton Keynes do seem to have been laid out with the idea of avoiding the centre of the place. I wonder if it actually has a centre at all. I’ve got a feeling there is an extra large roundabout in the middle. There is something gently benign about the town. It seems to want to help you, and would like you to stay.
Actually, I was banned from Milton Keynes in 1991. At the peak of the finale of a particularly good show, I threw my guitar into the audience thinking someone would catch it and go home happy. It hit poor Kevin from Newport Pagnell right on the bonce and knocked him senseless. It was very lucky that it wasn’t worse. Kevin seemed to be quite thrilled by the whole experience of being bashed by a flying bass, but his poor mother was beside herself. It wasn’t good at all and I shrink now, thinking about it. I’d already sneaked back in a couple of times to go to the Marshall amplifier factory, which is either in or near Milton Keynes, it’s often hard to say which.
The Open University campus was a microcosm of the larger municipality, more roundabouts and car parks with no definite heart, as neat as Germany and as clean as Japan. I found it to be very quaint, somehow, and serene.
I was with Dave. We were shown into an office and a man with very large sideburns appeared. He fished around for something in his pocket and passed it to me. ‘Know what that is?’ he asked, smiling. It was a small rock, quite round and pleasing to hold. ‘It’s a bit of Mars!’ he said, as we puzzled over it.
‘What? Where did you get it? How did you get it?’
My sense of being alive really kicked in and I realised I was staring at him. I transferred my stare to Dave. He was staring at him, too. He rarely stares, except when he’s playing drums. All drummers stare. It wasn’t a drumming stare, though. It was more focused and it was fixed on our host, Professor Colin Pillinger, who explained, in a thick West Country accent, that it had been found in Antarctica.
Most of Antarctica is so cold that it never snows. Virtually the whole of the continent is a vast, beautiful frozen desert. Things drop out of the sky and lie there waiting to be discovered. Any rocks found on the ice must have come from space. This can be confirmed by analysing their chemical compositions, which, in the case of this little nugget matched the make-up of Mars.
He talked a lot and we were dumbstruck. Seventy tons of Martian rocks fall out of the sky on to the Earth every year. He thought there was a good chance life started on Mars before it got going on Earth. Mars is a bit further from the sun and would have cooled more quickly to temperatures that would allow life processes to begin. If that was the case then there was a good chance that a bit of Mars with a living cell inside it could have been smashed off the Martian surface by a meteorite impact, landed on Earth and started the ball rolling here. So we could well all be Martians. I loved that feeling of being bamboozled by scientific hypothesising. He saved the best bit until last.
‘We need to put a lander on the surface of Mars in 2003. It would be stupid not to. I think I can show there is life there,’ he said.
I knew then that I’d found a friend.
We went through a door into a large laboratory. There was a clamour of silent concentration and dexterity. Everyone was wearing white coats. In the middle of the room, which was large, was a small model made from cardboard and wire. It was about the size of a car wheel.
Beagle I
‘This is what I want to build. It’s going to cost twenty-five million quid. It’s a bargain,’ he said. I had to agree. Colin was standing proudly beside his model. Even though it was made out of bog rolls, you could tell it was going to be quite complicated.
‘It’s quite simple!’ he said. ‘We’re going to burrow under the surface with this drill,’ and he waved a toothpaste tube attached to a piece of string. I’d already taken an instant liking to him, but this was the best idea I’d ever heard and the best thing I’d ever seen. He was so disarmingly straightforward about the monumental mysteries of the universe. ‘In order to find life on Mars, you have to go underground. Mars lost its atmosphere a long time ago, we don’t know why, but it’s gone and the sun has cooked the soil. You won’t find anything unless you get underneath that oxidised layer. NASA build these big bloody rovers, but they’re never going to find anything scratching around on the surface. We can beat them to it, but we need to start building this right now. Mars is about to make its closest approach to Earth for twenty thousand years and if we don’t start now we’ll miss it.’
This was all music to my ears. It was a brilliant idea.
‘Are we alone?’ is the biggest question we are close to being able to get a definite answer to. It’s right up there with ‘Where did we come from?’ ‘Where are we going?’ and ‘Who are we?’ The solutions to those tricky equations still seem to be a matter of opinion, but finding life on Mars would suggest that biology might be commonplace. When you consider the question ‘Are we alone?’, either of the possible answers is quite devastating. Not to know is just irresponsible.
My impression from meeting scientists is that most of them have an inkling that there almost definitely was, and possibly still is, some kind of primordial ecology happening on Mars.
I was spellbound by scientists. I went to their laboratories and tea parties, to their colleges and museums. Colin was a natural TV star and public support for his Mars mission started to grow. There were a lot of big personalities involved in the project as it gathered momentum. Damien was in, straight away. I was particularly interested in meteorites and was invited with Dave to the bowels of the Natural History Museum to meet Monica Grady, meteorite lady. ‘Oh, don’t call me that,’ she said. Her meteorites were sitting peacefully in glass cases, but there was quite a menace about them. The stony ones had fused, blackened crusts, and the metal ones had been aerodynamically sculpted flashing through the atmosphere. Some of them must have made fairly big dents when they landed. Monica had a few bits of Mars, which she had found herself, in Queen Maud Land in Antarctica. Martian meteorites are among the most valuable, and the most famous meteorite of all is from Mars. It’s called ALH84001. ALH stands for Allan Hills, another Antarctic mountain range. It made the front pages when it was first analysed. It’s definitely from Mars and it contains what look like fossilised bacteria cells.
This particular meteorite was in the possession of a NASA scientist called Everett Gibson. He was a great friend of Colin’s. They’d met when they’d both been working on samples of moon rock brought back to Earth by the Apollo astronauts. He was a kind and enthusiastic genius with an infectious pleasure in meteorite matter. I met Everett at a drinks party at Mansion House, the residence of the Lord Mayor of the City of London. Every conversation I had there I thought about for some time afterwards.
‘Of course, if we do find life on Mars, it may turn out that it hasn’t evolved around DNA. It might be a completely different story,’ said one gentleman. Another man told me the majority of the material in the universe was unseen ‘dark matter’ and nobody had any idea what it was. Quite a lot of people were talking about the active volcanoes that had recently been discovered on one of Jupiter’s moons. Cosmologists studying the cosmic microwave background radiation - the edge of the universe - with radio telescopes discussed football with propulsion specialists working on interplanetary engines. Everett Gibson’s prize possession, ALH84001, had recently been stolen from his laboratory but then recovered. Since then he took no chances and carried it around everywhere with him in his pocket. You never knew what these guys were going to pull out of their pockets. A test tube containing an alien life form was the weirdest yet. As he took it out his face cracked into a huge grin. ‘It’s right here. Someone stole it and was trying to sell it on eBay! ALH84001! Bastard got twelve years! Can you believe it?’ It was all quite hard to believe. His prize meteorite was something he liked to share with everybody. That little piece of rock is possibly the most interesting thing ever discovered, and a spring of constant wonder and mystery to him. He was a naturally gregarious character and I could imagine him getting talking to someone in a pub, and producing his test tube. I don’t suppose many people believed him.
I went to meet Colin at the Eagle, a pub in Cambridge near his laboratory. It was in that pub that James Crick and Francis Watson, the scientists who first identified DNA, burst through the doors shortly after they’d made that Nobel Prize-winning discovery and pronounced to all present that they had found the secret of life. They too may well have been taken for lunatics. At the best of times it’s difficult to tell the difference between madmen and geniuses.
The laboratory where Crick and Watson made their discovery was right next door to Colin’s office. By some strange coincidence, the door was at the top of an external spiral staircase. ‘Look at that,’ said Colin. ‘Dead giveaway! I reckon that staircase saved them years of research.’ It did seem quite likely that the helical structure of DNA might have sprung to mind on one of countless journeys up and down that staircase. It was the exact shape they were looking for.
If Beagle were to fly, it would be the combined effort of forty university research departments, dozens of businesses and hundreds of engineers. We went to a big hangar in Hertfordshire, where satellites were made. It seemed such an ordinary place, another neat network of roundabouts, grass verges and modern light-industrial units. I’d have thought they might be making lawnmowers or maybe roundabout parts in those mundane-looking factories, but they were making spaceships, quite a lot of them, little cosmic canoes that get fired into near space to float motionless above a fixed point on the Earth’s surface as it spins.
There was a high-security research facility in rural Oxfordshire. There was some far-fetched stuff going on in there. There were rows of radio telescopes visible from a distance. It’s quite a famous row of radio telescopes. It was at this lab, the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, that a research student called Jocelyn Bell thought she had discovered intelligent alien life while studying for a Ph.D. It was a false alarm, but what she had found was almost as weird-a star as big as an iceberg that weighs as much as the sun. Radio telescopes are dope.
Farnborough
I remember going to the Farnborough Airshow as a small, excited boy. The high point of the day was the British-built supersonic jet, the Lightning. It flew along the runway at head height, its engine screaming as it accelerated to break the sound barrier right in front of the crowd. The turbine noise made my hair stand on end and the sonic boom, loud as a crack of thunder, hit me right in the stomach. It was overwhelming, the speed of the thing, as fast as a bullet, its toy-like beauty and supernatural power, the little red, white and blue decals that said it was one of our things. It spoke a language everyone understood and the spontaneous round of applause and cheering that followed sounded paper-thin after the roaring tsunami sound of a fleeting fighter. It was a true spectacle, something to witness and wonder at.
The next year, by way of upping the ante, the organisers arranged for two Lightnings flying in opposite directions to cross each other at the centre point of the runway, going supersonic as they met. Both aeroplanes pulled straight into vertical climbs and performed an aerobatics display. It didn’t seem like anything could ever be better, but at the following show they had six of the things, three flying in each direction in formation. The report as they met was so loud that it broke windows in the town of Farnborough, miles away, and then they weren’t allowed to do that kind of thing any more.
There is a thrill of vulnerability at all airshows. There is no way of making everything completely safe. When the machines are being thrashed to capacity and the pilots are flying at their limits to dazzle, things are bound to go wrong sometimes. There have been some historic disasters, but the danger is a part of the attraction.
Farnborough is a big event. It’s not just about flying displays. There are dozens of hangars with hundreds of exhibitors from the aerospace industry. They range from companies that make the plastic trays that in-flight meals are served on, to seat-belt specialists, to supersonic engine manufacturers and businesses that will launch anything, from your ashes to your communications satellite, into the Earth’s orbit. There are even people who will build you a rocket if you need one. Rockets are pretty much off the shelf these days. If you had the money, you could go to Farnborough and buy everything you need to make a pretty good spaceship, and the expertise to build it.
Although they never did, the first man to fly and the first man to walk on the moon could have met. Things have happened fantastically fast in aerospace and the engine that drives the technology into the future at such a blistering pace is the weapons industry. The advance of mankind and his possible self-destruction dance a strange tango. Weapons manufacture gives momentum to research; it creates a need for precision engineering; it provides the money to develop new technologies. It makes it all necessary. Supersonic jets are, after all, weapons of war.
It was impossible to tell the weapons of mass destruction guys from the academics or the guys who made seat belts.
I’d spent so much time bored on aeroplanes I’d completely forgotten how absolutely brilliant they are. Dave was happier at Farnborough than I’d ever seen him. He had just got his pilot’s licence, and asked the exhibitors lots of questions. Colin’s stand was attracting a fair bit of interest. He had improved his Beagle model, and it looked quite professional now, although I preferred the one made out of cardboard and Sellotape.
There are so many things to see at Farnborough that, by the time most people arrived, they were numb to further stimulation. After having seen the biggest aeroplane in the world, the Red Arrows, hovering Harrier jets, Stealth bombers and jet packs, a tiny Mars lander seemed quite run of the mill. The science minister, Lord Sainsbury, attended a press conference and gave the Beagle his support. It was looking good, Milton Keynes.
Mercer Street
We’d been travelling non-stop for the best part of nine months, but, as activity around the Blur album gradually eased off, I began to spend more time in London. Justine and I gravitated back together and she moved back into the flat in Endell Street. We started looking for somewhere to buy together. The money arrived quite quickly, quicker than the flat did. When we started, we were looking at the cheapest places the estate agents had on their books. A couple of months later, we had more money and were looking at one-bedroom flats. By the time we found somewhere that was right, it was the most expensive property on the agent’s books.
We bought a five-storey converted cheese warehouse with a little balcony that backed on to a hidden courtyard. It was bright and opulent with high ceilings and a good showbusiness history. I bought it for cash from an American who wrote musicals. I’d always wanted to live there. It was the nicest house in Covent Garden. Tourists with flapping maps would stop and look up at it. The bedroom overlooked the dressing rooms of the Cambridge Theatre opposite where we could see the hoofers getting their slap on. The back windows looked on to the boutiques and offices of the courtyard.
It had the hallmarks of being one of many homes of its former owner, hotel-like qualities. There was a minibar and a trouser press in the bedroom on the top floor and the whole house was assiduously serviced. It had a staff of two, a private secretary, who the owner took with him, and a housekeeper, who stayed. She wore an apron and everything. She gave me hell about not keeping the place tidy and she didn’t like my old piano, either. She kept telling me about the grand piano that the previous owner had, and made it clear that I needed to get one of those. Then she banned me from slopping around smoking in my pants. I wasn’t ready for a housekeeper. It was nice having everything in the cupboards and in neat rows, sparkling clean, but when she told Damien it was time for him to go home one morning after we’d been up all night writing poems in the kitchen, I knew she had to go. She went next door to number 25, a house that belonged to a family that had made a fortune from processed cheese triangles.
I was probably the worst person to live next door to in London. Most nights the kitchen would be full of people singing ‘California Dreamin” and dancing to the Bee Gees. Sometimes we brought the piano player back from the Groucho with us, as recommended by management. London was raging. It was about this time that absinthe arrived in the country. That stuff took drunkenness to new levels. It’s only alcohol, but it’s different from any other drink. It’s pure ethanol with green dye and aniseed flavouring. It has twice the alcohol content of whisky, but even when I tried diluting half a shot of absinthe with twice as much water as I would have with a whisky, I still got twice as drunk, or possibly it was four times as drunk. It was hard to say because the ability to do multiplication was beyond anybody drinking absinthe. It took away the maths part of the brain, but it never failed to rouse the wanderlust lobes. I’d had ‘the Green Fairy’ before in Barcelona. That was the only place it was to be found until then, in the dirty little bars around the Ramblas. It was harder to gauge how drunk I was in foreign countries, though, where nothing was familiar. I woke up on a boat after the first time I drank the stuff in Barcelona and I didn’t think twice about it then, but when absinthe arrived in London, I found myself waking up in all kinds of strange places: Dalston, Richmond, Highbury, even Wapping. I would never go to these places normally. They were all quite far away. In fact it’s the only time I’ve been to Richmond.
I left the Groucho at closing time and went to another club, Soho House, with Zodiac Mindwarp, a heavy metal monster with lots of tattoos and scars. He was my new best friend and we sat at a table drinking pints of Guinness. A pretty girl came and joined us and we told her our plans. We’d decided to walk to Rome, and we were just stopping off for a Guinness on the way. That was when Johnny Depp sat down next to me. I don’t know why he got so upset, but soon he was very unhappy. He poured a pint of Guinness on my lap. It is hard to know what I might have said in the steam of an absinthe stupor, but things were definitely not going so well to the right. On the left, with the girl, it was looking quite good. She said she lived in Richmond. When I woke up I was in her bedroom. I was emptying my bladder all over her dressing table. People had told me about this kind of thing. It had never happened to me before, though. She woke up and asked what I was doing. I said it looked like I’d made a big mistake. We cleaned it up. We’d only known each other a couple of hours and I don’t think anyone could have been any more drunk than I was. Usually being that drunk would make you unconscious, but with absinthe you go on expeditions. I did see her again. Some people you try and make a good impression on and nothing works, others you piss all over their make-up and they’ve decided they like you and it doesn’t seem to matter. Anyway, that was the only time I ever went to Richmond.