9
Fat Les
Like Damien, Keith Allen is a man of action, a lot of action. He’d been a comedian, he’d been an actor, he’d had his own TV show, he’d been in movies, he’d been in prison and he’d written a number one record for my favourite band. Most of all, he was a great talker and his orations could draw a crowd, anywhere. He was the archetypal fearless Soho wayward genius and his energy reverberated, unassailable, from the dive bars of Dean Street to the cloisters of Le Caprice. He was fifty years old and was in touch with the almighty possibilities of the here and now at all times.
He was nagging me to do a football record. I kept telling him I had a musical to write, which was true, but then on his birthday we went to watch Fulham play an away match. The travelling Fulham supporters are very proud of how much noise they make. They sang, chanted, shouted, clapped their hands and stamped their feet through ninety minutes of drizzle and poor passing and Keith was their conductor. There was someone playing a drum, a lop-sided, clowny rhythm that would stop occasionally and start again, with renewed vigour.
I said maybe we could do something with those drums, but the World Cup was starting in six weeks. We wrote the song ‘Vindaloo’ around the drums a couple of days later. Once I know what the drums are doing and what it’s going to sound like, it’s just a question of joining the dots together. I knew it had to sound like the Fulham supporters singing in the rain. It took half an hour to write, words and everything.
I was playing snooker with Andy Ross, from Food, a couple of days later. In the middle of a break he took a call from the EMI chairman. The FA were desperate for a football song and wanted to know if Damon could do anything to help? I overheard and told him I’d just written one. He gave me a ‘Don’t interrupt when the chairman’s on the phone’ look, and that was that. I played it to Smithy, but he thought it would struggle to get on the radio.
Keith had started singing the song, and he hadn’t really stopped. Damien liked it. He wanted to set up a record label and release it. We christened the band Fat Les, asked everyone we liked to be in it and booked a couple of days at Townhouse Studio.
There were four weeks until the World Cup kicked off when Damien, Keith and I ran into a PR guy called Phill Savidge on Dean Street. I said, ‘We need this guy.’ Damien had a large amount of cash in a carrier bag, a few tens of thousands in fifties. He pulled a bundle out, gave it to Phill and said, ‘Tell me when you need some more.’
I knew when I arrived at the studio at ten-thirty that the record would either be a dismal failure or an improbable triumph. We had a day to record everything and a day to mix. The drummer was arriving at eleven, and we had to do the drums and lay the bass down before lunch. They were the only instruments on the track. Simplicity is often the key. The afternoon was timetabled with various singers, shouters and schoolchildren.
Basslines, my stock-in-trade, are a kind of musical glue; the bassline makes the drums, vocals and guitars stick together and stand. Aside from the music, the role of my character within Blur was similar to that of a bassline in a piece of music. I often acted as a mediator between Damon and Graham. My blasé temperament was a pivot for them both and perhaps it suggested an underlying harmony in an arrangement that might otherwise have collapsed.
Making this record was a different situation. I was the producer. Producing is mainly about getting the best out of everybody. I took a deep breath, plugged the bass in and sang the song to the drummer. The drummer was Roland Rivron. He was famous for being able to ride his bicycle down the main staircase at the Groucho Club. Keith had said we should have him on drums. As it turned out, he was an exceptionally good drummer. By the time the sandwiches arrived the sound engineer and the tea boy were grinning and humming the song. Keith did his vocal in one take and it sounded like a hit. Phill generated quite a bit of press interest, so that with three weeks till kick-off we had sold the master recordings to Telstar in return for an advance on royalties and enough money to make a video. Keith wanted to direct the video. He wanted a hundred people dressed up as Max Wall and as many fat, drunk people as possible. It’s not quite what we ended up with, but, with a week to go, his video went straight to number one at The Box and Woolworths ordered half a million copies of the record. It was the biggest week for singles sales since the ‘Blur vs. Oasis’ pantomime.
Promotion
It all happened so fast. The record didn’t get any radio play, but it quickly outsold anything Blur had done. The producer of Top of the Pops really liked the song and did a special deal with the producer of EastEnders, who, I guess, must have liked it as well and the band were filmed marching around Albert Square.
We were offered a gig at a private party in a warehouse in Islington where the match would be showing on a cinema screen. Keith said we’d do our only song for five grand, cash, and a goat. I think we probably would have gone to the party anyway; it sounded like it was going to be all right. It was good just to be able to assemble the cast. There were a lot of people in the band, particularly after the record took off. It was a happy crowd. Matt Lucas and David Walliams; Paul Kaye; Vivienne Westwood’s six-foot mucky muse, Sara Stockbridge; Keith; Lily and Alf, his children; their friends; Joe Strummer; various models and obese men and, sometimes, Bez. The song ‘Vindaloo’ was so simple that it could be played entirely on the bottom string of a bass guitar with one finger. I had a bass guitar with just one string, so it was quite a weird-looking thing. I’d bought it from a man up a mountain in Japan. It was the obvious choice of guitar. Roland had a square snare drum that he was quite keen on, and Keith had his goat.
It was a marching band, really, and Keith marched in with his goat at the head of the procession. We got on to the stage and the drumming started. The bass comes in on the chorus. I wind-milled my arm around histrionically for the first note and, as my finger hit the one and only string, it snapped. I didn’t have any spares. It’s really unusual to snap a bass string, particularly when it’s the only one you’ve got, and the bass is the only instrument. No one seemed to mind; actually it sounded more like it did on the terraces with just drums and voices. England won, so the party rose out of control to extravagance. Forget the sixties. In the summer of 1998 London was in the grip of a hedonistic fervour not seen since the days of gin houses and the Hellfire Club.
Keith got a taxi home. The taxi was for sale and he had the five thousand in his pocket, so he bought it. Damien painted spots on it, which made it quite valuable. Damien couldn’t paint enough spots. People loved those spots.
There was a homeless man who begged in the doorway of the Groucho. His name was Outside Dave and Keith used to let him have a bath and cook him a hot meal occasionally at his home. They came to an arrangement with the taxi where Outside Dave lived in it, but he had to keep it as close to the Groucho as possible so that if Keith needed to go anywhere he had a driver.
It worked quite well, although it broke down quite often and it could smell a bit ripe. He seemed all right, Dave did. He claimed that there were a couple of women who went to the club who used to take him home for sex occasionally, but he also said he didn’t drink, and I think he did sometimes. He was a man of mystery.
I went with Keith and Outside Dave in the taxi to Reading Festival. We didn’t have tickets, but Keith was performing with New Order on Saturday night. I was sure that between us we could talk our way in. We didn’t have to. The taxi had a Jedi effect on security: all the gates just opened for it and we were waved through the crowds. Dave the tramp drove it right into the backstage area and parked it next to Jay Kay’s Ferrari without having to do any talking. Then he disappeared into the hospitality area and was never seen again.
New Order were my favourite band. They wrote modern pop symphonies. I’d learned more about music from listening to their records than I would have done from any amount of music lessons. I had listened to those songs again and again. I studied their compositions without realising what I was doing. I learned the drums, the guitar parts, the keyboard lines. I suppose it was like Patrick Moore looking at the moon through his telescope. The music intrigued me and I scrutinised it and drew my own conclusions.
I went out into the crowd and watched my friend take the stage with my favourite band for the finale. As they finished, the crowd started to chant for ‘Vindaloo’. It felt better than standing on that stage ever had.
Mexico
Blur were supposed to go to Chile, as part of a South American tour. I was reading The Times, which I still mainly bought for the crossword, and there was an article with the headline ‘Blur To Play Santiago, Despite Warnings’. I hadn’t had any warnings. It said the Home Office was advising against travel to Chile in the current political climate. I wondered where Chile was and what politics could be happening there. I’m sure my dad had been; that meant it had to be OK. I called Chris Morrison, our manager, and asked him if he’d be joining us on the Chile leg of the tour. He’d seen the paper, too. He said we’d have to pull the show in Santiago, which was a shame, because, looking at the record sales figures, we were about the most popular band in the country’s history. Then he did his big laugh.
It’s always surprising how popularity waxes and wanes from place to place on a world tour. Even in Europe. For some reason Blur have never managed to make the slightest impression on the Dutch. They didn’t like baggy, weren’t interested in Britpop, the ‘Woo-hoo’ thing passed them by completely and going there to promote the new record had been merely a polite formality. The articulated lorries full of super troupers, mega woofers and special effects would drive right through the Netherlands on a European tour. Most of the convoy would go straight to Denmark to wait at the stadium for us while we performed in the back room of a bar in Amsterdam.
They blew hot and cold in Belgium. At one point we were going to Belgium so often it hardly seemed to make sense and then we didn’t go back for years.
Throughout Asia, our popularity rode a similarly random rollercoaster from nation to nation. In Korea, the venue was the same kind of size as most places we played in Europe. In Singapore I wasn’t allowed into the venue for being too wayward looking. I had to call the tour manager and tell him I was outside.
The next day, when we landed in Bangkok, we were each appointed four security guards, airside, and bundled through the terminal where there were thousands of massed, hysterical fans. A police escort zipped us to our penthouse suites. It was quite bizarre. A throne was erected at the venue and we were briefed by a member of the royal household on how to conduct ourselves in the presence of the princesses.
By this time we had our own security. Graham and I had particularly random behaviour, and quite often, especially if we all went out together, we were mobbed in the street. There’d be a giggle and I’d turn around to see a couple of girls following me. The next time I’d turn around there’d be a dozen of them. Then one or two would start to run ahead and take photos. It’s the flashbulbs popping that makes everyone else take notice. Pretty soon after the cameras started the situation would get out of control and I’d be surrounded by people smiling and asking questions. It was rarely unpleasant or dangerous. It just meant everything took ages.
It can get hairy at night, though. Anyone attracting a lot of attention is always going to annoy someone. It’s hard and churlish not to go out at night. The lure of wine, women and song is almost irresistible. Nightclub owners fight each other to get bands to come to their establishments in the big cities. Adventures could end almost anywhere, but they often started in nightclubs. Normally we were made a big fuss of and shown to the best table. Drinks were usually free. Girls appeared and, if there was anything else we needed, someone would take care of it. People did take exception sometimes. It’s hardly surprising; it must have been like being invaded by a longboat of drunken Vikings with weapons that there was no defence against. Most of the time, though, the security guys just had to make sure we didn’t get run over crossing the road. Graham particularly suffered from getting hit by cars.
None of us had been to South America, but we were told we’d be needing armed security, and that we shouldn’t fuck about under any circumstances. On the way to Mexico City at Heathrow was a guy called Rowan, who I’d been running into quite a bit recently. He was part of the glamorous crowd that had put on the goat party where Keith bought the taxi. He said that he was going to Mexico City, too. His brother had a nightclub there and we should all come that evening because there was a big film festival in town and there would be loads of people.
Mexico is one of those places where you sit on a plane for ten hours and when you arrive it’s still the same time it was when you left. En route there was quite a lot of speculation about what to expect. Dave said you couldn’t have a bath, because things swim up your bottom and lay their eggs. The tour manager warned us about getting kidnapped or arrested, which amounted to the same thing. There was talk of feral children living in sewers and bandits who’d shoot you for your shoes. I thought maybe I’d take it easy in South America.
As soon as we stepped off the plane, it was all instantly and obviously brilliant. It was hot as hell and as green as Eden. It was a kind of a green that was new to me, somewhere between a lime and a lemon. There were about a million people at the airport and there was more bundling going on than queuing. Just getting through immigration and customs was a caper, like an old black and white movie where everything happens too fast. It was a big lovely slap in the face from the unknown. I really thought I knew everything by now and suddenly there was all this as well. Mexico City makes New York look bijou. Miles and miles of jam-packed everything, people living in the central reservations of the carriageways, shanty towns, suburbs, skyscrapers and smog. On and on it went and it was hard to remember anything else existed.
The hotel was of the super-modern business resort variety with ninety-nine floors and glass lifts. There were strange keys for doors that opened automatically like on spaceships. In the suite there was a bottle of Dom Perignon on ice from the record company, an enormous basket of fruit from the promoter and flowers and a thoughtful selection of nibbles to complement the champagne from the hotel manager. The Bang & Olufsen stereo went quite loud. They usually have limiters on them in hotels, but the suite was so enormous it wasn’t going to bother anybody. The triple-aspect windows looked out from on high over a roof terrace to the brightly-lit metropolis. I called Graham and told him to bring his champagne.
He was still a bit worried about worms going up his bottom, but you could tell it wasn’t that kind of place. The dude from the record company wanted to take us out for dinner. It’s important to break free from luxury’s subtle suffocation. It would have been easy to stay in the hotel having huge bubble baths and massages, but luxury is more or less the same everywhere and I wanted a big slice of Mexico.
The record company dude said it was all a big load of bollocks about worms, but it was true about getting kidnapped and people living in the sewers. Dinner was ridiculously good. I hadn’t quite put Mexico together with Mexican restaurants. There were enchiladas and burritos galore, but dinner mainly involved drinking shots of tequila and slapping each other on the back.
I remembered the nightclub and we went there. It was all happening at once, as usual. After a few tequilas we’d given up on the idea of not having ice in our drinks and started on margaritas. On the plane, someone had said that ice was poisonous. The ones we were drinking now, caipirinhas, seemed to have some kind of salad in them as well, which was another no-no.
It was at the nightclub that someone started talking about the pyramids. There were huge pyramids, they said, better than the ones in Egypt. All aligned with the bright stars and inexplicably engineered. I wanted to see those pyramids. I ordered a taxi immediately and we were on our way. It was two a.m. and we drove for a couple of hours through the city. It was built up in every direction and the roads were heavy with traffic all through the night. We cruised through the bright lights, skyscrapers and matrices of traffic lights, all new and enticing.
Then the buildings became shacks and we were in a desert. The walled sanctum of the pyramids rose in the distance. It was strangely still and peaceful at the entrance after the constant whizz of the city. We gave the guards fifty dollars to let us in. It was simple. The ancient citadel was built on a biblical scale. It was ginormous. Maybe these people had been giants. As the morning light began to break, the features of the kingdom became more apparent. There were a number of whacking great pyramids dissected by avenues, gateways, temples and stairs. It was more humbling than Mexico City itself, vast, crumbling and beautiful in the breaking twilight. We walked a couple of miles to the foot of the Pyramid of the Sun, the big one. From the bottom you couldn’t see the top without craning your neck uncomfortably.
It was just sitting there, the enigmatic remnants of a completely lost civilisation. It was all the more powerful because I had been completely unaware of its existence until a couple of hours before. We grow up knowing about the pyramids in Egypt. Even though they are miraculous, they are familiar to us. That familiarity takes away some of their power to enchant. Suddenly, here I was in a strange desert, which is enough to make anyone come over a bit different at the best of times, but this huge and magical city with its dense aura of mystery sent me spinning. We spend so much of our lives underwhelmed by the ordinary. It is hard to remember that life is a constant miracle in a vast, unexplored universe full of secrets.
It was a long, long way to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun and we wanted to make the summit before the sun rose. The sky was getting bluer and bluer and our faces redder and redder. There were half a dozen of us, the girls in their film festival frocks, the boys doing a tequila relay. Up and up we went, thousands of steps, big steps, perfectly regular. Dizzy, exhausted and freaked out, I collapsed on the top. The sun was coming. The hazy vista was immense, a big long brown turd of pollution sitting on top of Mexico City. That was when the police van arrived. You could tell it was a police van because it had a flashing light. It was very small and it stopped at the foot of the giant staircase. There was no escape, so we sat there trying to enjoy the spectacle of nature on a large scale at dawn as two policemen began to mount the stairs.
It took them a long time to get to us. They were knackered by the time they got to the top and really pissed off. One of them started ranting in Spanish and then spat out a big wad of phlegm with a nod of his head as a full stop. The DJ from the nightclub, a handsome, upmarket American, was able to translate. ‘He said we’re charged with desecrating a holy relic and that we’re in deep shit. Then he spat on the holy relic, just to show he’s in charge. We’d better do what he says.’ We were marched down the side of the man-made mountain and confronted with their superior, who was standing by the van smoking and spitting. I wondered what would happen. I knew one of our gang was carrying a very large amount of drugs somewhere about his person. He seemed to be the least flustered of all of us. He started to negotiate with the boss man who was demanding we get in the van. They argued for ages. We stole glances at each other but it was impossible to tell what was happening. The DJ kept raising his eyebrows and shaking his head. Then it was settled. We could walk away for five hundred dollars. I’d have given five hundred thousand.
It was a long, long drive back to the hotel through the rush-hour traffic. An endless journey in the thick pollution with a cheap tequila hangover. I’ve never felt so bad and so good at the same time.
The gig was in a stadium and there were fans at the hotel, fans at the radio stations, fans at the TV studios. They waved, screamed and gave us letters. It was another vast continent, another green world.
Brazil, Argentina
Rio is such an evocative place. It’s been mythologised by music to such an extent that it hardly seemed real at all. I walked for miles without ever leaving a song, from Ipanema to Copacabana, along the beaches among the palm trees. It was like Mexico with the contrast turned right up, the strikingly beautiful rubbing shoulders with the grotesque, the diseased, the toothless and the insane. Somehow, the insane seemed to be madder, the further I got from home. There was more of a sense of peril on the streets, but they were all the more enticing for it. We live in a climate of fear, but the world is a safe place as long as you know how to behave like everybody else does. If you stand around holding a map waving a video camera with your shirt tucked into your waist-high trousers, you’re in trouble wherever you go. Millions of people live in Rio, after all, and they eat salad and have ice in their drinks and they don’t get murdered very often.
We were playing in a bar in Rio. It was a bit of a jolt after the mass adulation of Mexico. I thought there were some fans at the hotel - they kept smiling at me - but they were prostitutes. I was exhausted from my Mexican antics and kept out of trouble in Rio. My birthday fell on a Sunday, the day of the show in São Paulo. São Paulo is like Rio without the songs or the beach. It’s big, bigger than most countries, a city with a population greater than Ireland, New Zealand, Costa Rica and Portugal combined. No wonder Brazil are always winning the football. I’d never heard of this São Paulo and it was fair to say most of São Paulo had never heard of Blur, but it was a bigger gig than in Rio.
On my birthday, most of all I like to play the blues, with Graham. It’s a tradition that started at college. Playing the blues involves the thumbs a lot, more than any other kind of guitar music. You strum with the thumb of the right hand and curl the left thumb over the top of the guitar so that it can hold down the bottom string. Then you just need some whisky and you’re all set. We’d go on for hours.
It was hard to know how to take things up a notch on my birthday. I was permanently living in the rock and roll fast lane. The year before I’d had a party that all kinds of nice people had shown up at. I did actually throw a television out of the window, just to see what happened, but I had checked that there was no one coming beforehand and it was my television to do what I liked with, which I explained to the police when they arrived. They were very understanding. Overall, it was quite disappointing. It didn’t explode, particularly; it just went thud on Shaftesbury Avenue.
Somehow the tour manager managed to find me a Balthazar of champagne. I think a Nebuchadnezzar is bigger - you need a couple of footmen for the Nebuchadnezzar - but the Balthazar is big, the biggest bottle that one person can carry. You really need to put it over your shoulder to pour from it properly and even then it’s tricky. There’s enough for a party in there, though. It was quite late when I got back to the hotel with my big bottle, but there were quite a few fans there. I invited the five prettiest ones to come up to my rooms. You need five girlfriends when your bottle of champagne is that big. I collapsed on the bed and they jumped on me and covered me in champagne and kisses. It was a good birthday party. I stopped having sex occasionally, but only so that I could have some more drugs. That image of myself soused in champagne being devoured by lusting women in a luxury hotel suite in a vast and unknown city was the pinnacle of my rock and roll excesses.
After the mayhem of Mexico and Brazil, Buenos Aires, Argentina, was a stately and sophisticated city of wide boulevards, grand statuary and chic endroits. It’s posher than Paris, in fact, which was all quite surprising. It didn’t look like the lettuce would cause any harm in that fair city. More surprising was that the Argentinians adore the English, and more surprising still that I at once felt completely at home there. The other mammoth metropolitan centres of South America had thrilled and tickled. I could never quite get enough of anything, but just to see those places had almost been enough. Here I felt I could live and be happy. I just never knew when I was going to get that feeling. Even though there are an infinite number of ways to live a life and be happy, it didn’t actually come out and grab me often that I would instantly and obviously be very at home somewhere.
Justine sent her friend Walter to show me around and keep an eye on me. He was handsome, aristocratic and gay and a fan of the Smiths. Walter took me to gay bars, to lounges, to cafés, to a candle-lit walled garden where they served tea and coffee all night. I met his friends and their friends and it was all benign and agreeable.
Gay bars are the most decadent of all. I found it relaxing to go out and take sex out of the equation. The music is always really good, too, in gay bars.
Trying to Build Jerusalem
‘Vindaloo’ had made quite a lot of money, so we set up an office. One of the barmen from the Groucho seemed really keen on running a record company, so we let him do it. Then we had to think about our next move. We had a meeting in our office. Where to go next? What should we tackle? I wanted to make gay disco records. Keith wanted to sign his daughter. I was always seeing her out and about, but she was only twelve and twelve’s a bit young for showbusiness. Damien said he wanted to do a Christmas record and it seemed like quite a good idea. It seemed the perfect follow-up to a football record and it’s the best time to have a hit record as you sell about ten times as many.
I went into a studio with Keith and Roland Rivron, Rod, the piano player from the Groucho, and Joe Strummer, to write something. It was a combination of personalities with a lot of seasonal promise. Christmas had started early that year and it was hard to keep things under control. By the second day there was a gospel choir hanging out as well. By the time it was finished, more or less the whole of the Groucho Club and Browns were in the studio. Lisa from Browns sang the song with Keith, who dressed up as a goblin in the video.
It went top twenty, but we manufactured too many copies of the record, about a quarter of a million too many. It was hard to compete with the major labels at Christmas time. We lost all the money from ‘Vindaloo’ and a bit more. Keith also lost the taxi, in Rotterdam, which was a shame.
It took a while to recover our pride, and we thought we’d better stick to football records. The singer was, after all, a fifty-year-old baldy man. We were ready by the time the next football tournament came along. I wanted to do something spectacular. The way forward came to me over a martini in Peg’s, a member’s club I’d just discovered that I lived next door to. It was so exclusive and discreet that it was invisible to passers-by and even livers-next-door-to.
George was usually there. I like George’s company. He’s an upper-class pixie of some vintage, gay and fabulous. He’s from another world that involves things like cufflinks, bone china and ballet. Sometimes it was just George and myself there for lunch, other days there’d be a minor royal or a mega-dega film director, lunching his stars. It was ludicrous. A bar that was empty apart from people who were so famous that they had to hide there between meetings in town. It was a good place to go and have ideas. The barman never spoke. He just made fantastic martinis.
It was behind one of those martinis, my second of the day, that I conceived the most expensive record ever made. Our last football song had been a loutish, one-note wonder. The only way forward now was to go way upmarket. We needed a new national anthem, a song you could take anywhere, that your granny could sing; that would stir the hearts of wayward teenagers; that would scare goalkeepers. It was going to be tricky. I was sucking the olive when I realised the song had already been written by William Blake. We’d do ‘Jerusalem’, and we’d do it big.
Three weeks later we were in Air Studios with a one-hundred-and-twenty-piece orchestra. Air is the biggest studio in London and that’s about the biggest orchestra it can house. Keith wanted to conduct. He didn’t know the difference between a French horn and a cor anglais, but he did have winning vivacity and bags of confidence. Confidence is the most important ingredient on the songwriter’s shopping list. Nothing else is half so important.
There were harps and percussionists, a long line of double basses. There were violins everywhere you looked. We had cannons. We had five massed choirs: a big gay choir, a children’s choir, gospel choir, close-harmony barbershop choir and a chorus. It was immense. There were cameras. There was Michael Barrymore. George Martin was wandering about the place. We didn’t leave anything out. Everyone had learned their parts and I stood in the control room and took a deep breath. The next three minutes were costing a lot of money, more than any other record ever has, and there was a good chance we’d built an aeroplane that wouldn’t fly.
I was in tears by halfway through the first chorus. It was immense. I didn’t care if it sold five copies. It was a record that needed to be made. It’s such a beautiful tune, rousing, but noble, a prayer for the weak and a battle cry for the strong, a poem, a patriotic paean and a perfect pop song. Well, you’d hope so for two hundred grand.
Football was very fashionable. It seemed to be easier to get a table at the Ivy than it did to get tickets for the Arsenal. There was an almighty brouhaha about the tournament, Euro 2000. The song was a news item and I went to Wembley to have my photograph taken with the players. There were about a thousand photographers there. The squad were having a kickaround in the new England strip. Someone blew a whistle somewhere and they all ran to the centre circle and stood in a line with the goalkeepers at one end and the forwards at the other. I could hardly believe it. They were so well drilled. Peep, peep and there they all were in a neat little row. I was asked to stand on the end, next to the goalies. My heart sank as I took my place. I looked along my right shoulder down the line. I was head and shoulders taller than the back four. We didn’t stand a chance. Keith and I figured we’d get back the money we’d spent if the team got to the semi-finals. Any further and we’d be in the clover. It was a gamble. Keith said we were going to win. Good football records never go away, though. EMI shareholders should have their money back by the World Cup tournament in 2018, as long as England do well. In the meantime they’ve got that song.
Decadence
I’d graduated from the Groucho to the Colony Room, a couple of doors down. The Colony was the drinking club that had made Jeffrey Bernard’s legs fall off. It has a greasy spoon kind of feel and to enter is to be overwhelmed by an awareness of green. It’s like a front room, but it’s green, and there is a lot of art on the walls, given by the people who have spent time there over the years. The value of the art is probably worth more than the entire Groucho Club, a roll-call of the great British artists since the Second World War. There was also a piano, which I often played, and Michael, the current heir to the establishment, was always there. Sometimes it was jam-packed and everyone seemed to be mad; sometimes it was peaceful and a supermodel would walk in. I could never tell what was going to happen next there. That was what was good about it.
I was drinking more and more and it took me further into the night.
I liked Trade, a big, gay bonanza in what seemed to be a huge network of underground sewers in Clerkenwell. Parties cost a lot of money and they usually happen to promote someone or something. Trade was different. It was just a party. I started going to Trade because it was open all night and it was mental. It made any party that was ever thrown by a band look like kids’ stuff. There was shagging in the bogs, fellatio on the dance floor and people queuing up to buy drugs like it was the end of the world. Somehow it was quite civilised and it never felt as sleazy there as it did in other places that were open after three a.m. People would really lose it in there, though. There was even a kind of casualty ward on site. I know because I woke up there once, covered in blood, being attended to by paramedics.
There was a boat at Blackfriars Bridge, where scary people played cards, basements in Chinatown full of transvestites, stained attics along Berwick Street full of crackheads and prostitutes, mansions in Holland Park full of crackheads and prostitutes. At night the city belonged to all the people who didn’t have to get up in the morning - musicians, artists, actors, models, criminals, the aristocracy, the insane, drug dealers, wheelerdealers, comedians, drug addicts, the fabulously rich, writers, a random bag of all ages, creeds and classes. I never knew whether I was going to meet a murderer next or the most beautiful woman in the world. People only stay up all night for three reasons: sex, drugs and rock and roll. It’s not the best time for getting things done.
13
I’m not a huge fan of remixes. A pop record is a distilled, definitive work of art, so changing it in any way is unnecessary. Record companies saw remixes as a way of winning over new audiences, but the results were often less than the sum of the parts. Food commissioned some remixes of tracks on the Blur album, mainly because we were short on B-sides. The band had a prolific output and there was usually plenty of unused material around, but releasing three or four singles from an album eats up a lot of extra tracks. Each single came out in three formats and each format needed two or three B-sides. The biggest fans buy everything, so if the B-sides were crap, we were ripping off the people who loved the band the most.
Most of the remixes would have only interested people who knew when Graham’s birthday was, or which drama college Damon had been to, but William Orbit’s adaptations were astonishing. His Strange Cargo album had long been a tour-bus favourite and he was on a roll. He’d just helped Madonna make Ray of Light, her best record, and he was the most sought-after producer in the world. He was keen to produce Blur’s new album and we went to see him. He lived in a huge rented house in St John’s Wood with dozens of assistants who worked through the night polishing drum loops, programming digital sequencers and editing guitar parts on computers. It wasn’t so much a home studio. It was more a studio that he lived in.
I had a little studio at home, and I’d looked at buying a bigger one with Damien, Keith and Joe Strummer, but big studios are like jumbo jets. In order for it to be worthwhile owning one, it has to be used all the time otherwise it just sits there costing a fortune. I was too happy-go-lucky to want to go to a recording studio every day of my life but my set-up at home was good for songwriting, and when I’d written some tunes I’d take them to a bigger studio and record them.
It pained me a little bit that the band didn’t get a studio we could all have shared, but nobody else wanted to. Damon had a studio in a rented building in Ladbroke Grove, west London. It was to studios what the Good Mixer was to pubs. Its beauty was purely in its functionality. At the arse end of a back street, in a slightly rank-smelling building full of shady characters, it was tiny but it worked very well for Damon.
Working in that studio was a bit like making a record in a lift. There was very little space. In the control room there wasn’t enough room to turn round with a guitar on without bashing an award-nominated engineer in the face or knocking over a vintage microphone. Having secured the world’s most expensive producer, most bands would probably have taken the logical step of going to the world’s most expensive studio, but we wrote 13 in one of west London’s best-value, rent-by-the-foot industrial units. There was a window, but it looked through a metal grille on to an uninspiring derelict concrete courtyard, which there was no access to. It was high summer and stinking hot. William, fresh from Madonna’s record, crouched, I think rather shocked, in a corner. There was no room for chairs. Damon picked up his acoustic guitar and started singing a melody. Graham and I joined in; Dave, who was wearing headphones behind a drumkit in the other room, joined in. I looked up and saw William’s jaw drop. He is quite meticulous and contemplative in his approach. He told me much later that the way we were able instantly to conjure an arrangement without talking about it had completely knocked him out. It had taken us a long time to be able to do that. We’d played together nearly every day for ten years and had a keen sense of each other. We could turn it on pretty much instantly. All the recordings were taken to William’s laboratory and tweaked and digitally twiddled by his night assistants.
Things did happen very quickly in the studio. After a couple of weeks we moved back into Mayfair, because it had a good drum room. One morning, Graham and Damon were working on a new song called ‘Tender’. It occurred to me that what it really needed was a double bass. I went home in a taxi to get mine and came straight back with it, but they’d got bored with working on the song by then and gone for ciabattas. The bass was miked up and I tuned it and told William to play the track back to me. He said, ‘I think I’ve got what I need there.’ He just sampled me tuning up and his boffins used their computer technology to turn it into a bassline. It sounded good too, so I was happy. The strange thing was that when we launched the record there were more photos of that double bass than anything else and I hadn’t even played it, really. Cameras just love double basses. ‘Tender’ was a spiritual and we booked the London Community Gospel Choir to sing on the choruses. Gospel choirs come from a different place than rock and roll bands. They are good and godly people. We received a fax requesting that we did not smoke or swear, with particular reference to blasphemies, while they were in the studio.
It was a biggish choir, about thirty strong. They’d learned the backing vocal and harmony parts and rehearsed them beforehand. They arrived en masse and assembled in the live room. We sat behind the window in the control room and William selected the large loudspeakers, turned up the volume and hit play and record. It was shattering. They nailed it first take. As soon as they started singing, it was instantly and obviously a number one record. I’d never been so certain of anything. It was the best thing we’d ever done. The song was a great collaborative effort between Damon and Graham, too, at a time when their relationship was quite edgy. The harmony of those massed voices and the resting consonance of Damon and Graham’s solidarity overwhelmed me to tears. William was in a state of shock again. It was the best we’d all felt for a long, long time. As the song ended, William pushed the talkback button so the choir could hear him. ‘Jesus H motherfucking Christ!’ he said. ‘Ooh shit! Sorry!’
William had another studio on the go in a hotel, where he was building a U2 album. Damon was working on a film score in the mornings at his studio and coming to Mayfair in the afternoons. Maybe that was one of the things that was frustrating to Graham. It was to me. They were finding it hard to talk to each other. Damon is very domineering and maybe Graham had just had enough, but I do think Damon went to great lengths to make Graham feel like 13 was his record as well. Damon gave him one of the strongest melodies, which Graham wrote a good lyric for, but Graham wasn’t happy and he didn’t always turn up. It was frustrating because, when he did, everything he did was brilliant. He never played a bum note. His hearing was the most astute of anybody’s and he could pick things up in mixes that would never occur to me, or mixmaster William for that matter.
Madonna came to the studio and said it was all great, but I’d rather Graham had shown up and said it was all shit, or something at least.
The record was as highly acclaimed as it was difficult to make. ‘Tender’ was released on the same day as a record by a girl doing backflips in school uniform and missed out on the number one spot, but I heard Brad Pitt played it at his wedding.