Boys Keep Swinging

by Jake Shears

  Everybody and their grandma’s dog came and saw us in DC. Turned out to be a great night because afterward there was a really hot guy named Chris waiting there with a bucket of meringues, obviously sent by Christoph.

  I froze when I first saw Chris. He wore a busted black leather bomber, had thick curly black hair and a nose that looked like it should be on display at the Louvre. Ana pointed him my direction. “I think those are for Jake.”

  He handed a bag of puffy cookies to me. “These are from Christoph, not me, really,” he said. Christoph was a sexy, burly friend of mine I knew from London. Before shows, he always brought me homemade meringues, delivering them personally to the dressing room. “He asked me to come and bring this for you,” Chris said. “I told him I would. I just live down the street.” He was soft-spoken—gentle, even.

  I asked him how he knew Christoph. Apparently they’d met when he spent a semester in London last year. Chris was code-red hotness, I wasn’t going to let him just walk away. I couldn’t tell if he was gay, either. But fuck, he was so handsome.

  “So . . . what are we doing tonight?” I blurted. “Where is the fun place to go?” A question I ask guys sometimes when I can’t tell their sexual orientation.

  “I don’t know that much about tonight, but there’s always JR’s, where I bartend.” Okay, thank God, a gay bar, I thought. I was heading to dinner with my family, but he and I agreed to meet up after.

  When I found my mom a couple minutes later, I said, “I think I just met my husband.”

  I was correct.

  IT FELT LIKE MONTHS SINCE we’d had a proper day off. Life was all tracers, a blur of dirty club benches and vinyl upholstery, darkness. There could suddenly be swells of people crashing all around us at any given time. Record label folks, fans at shows, interviewers, photographers, radio people, festival security. There was no time for names. Hours seemed like they were coming from above and backward. No matter how tired I was, though, I kept eye contact. I refused to totally slip away.

  We played an Attitude magazine party and Elton John showed up with his partner, David Furnish; George Michael; Emma Bunton; and Lulu. The band played in custom pajamas: I almost felt naked in my silky leopard-print set. Afterward they came backstage, and it felt as if the band had just won some kind of game show. I could see Elton out in the crowd while we played. Every time a song ended he would hold up his hand and wave like the queen instead of clapping. And now here suddenly were multiple legends in our dressing room. George was kind and complimentary. In moments like this I’d start to feel as if I were having a dream, the scenario was so illogical.

  “How you doing? Really?” was the first thing Elton asked me.

  I was tongue-tied, but I managed to tell him how excited I was, but overwhelmed with the pace.

  He reached up and pinched both my cheeks. “Welcome to show business!”

  During this visit to London, the record label Parlophone was doing a greatest-hits collection for Kylie Minogue and needed a couple of singles, so they put Scott and me together with her in a studio in London for a couple days to see what we came up with.

  I was never a huge pop music fan, but Kylie was another story. While Scott and I were recording the first album, I’d just had this feeling that I really wanted to work with her. It was a hunch that we could make something really special together. Kylie and I talked on the phone the day before we met, and I ran some title ideas past her. I was unable to sleep that night.

  The moment she walked in the room I was bowled over by her specific, delicious charm. We clicked right away, laughing and getting weird, doing interpretive dances, hooting when we wrote a good hook. It was like we’d known each other for a long time. We wrote two great songs in those two days. One was called “Everything I Know,” and one was called “I Believe in You.”

  Kylie was fast family—someone I immediately cared about and wanted to spend time with, create with, and make memories with. She’s a good person who loves what she does, a proper showgirl, effervescent and grounding at the same time. You’ll never hear her say anything bad about anyone, and she sings supernaturally. When you record her voice, it has this automatic flange in it—you don’t need to bathe it in any effects. My first thought when recording her was that the only voices I could compare hers to were Dolly Parton’s and Kate Bush’s. She’s a woman whom I feel a very deep bond with. And on top of that, she and Scott and I turned out to be a great songwriting team.

  Our day-to-day went haywire. I remember running through Heathrow in stage clothes with half my ass hanging out, entertaining everyone in airport security. I climbed up on a speaker in Glasgow and some drunk person in the audience tried to pull me down. I burnt my back on a hot stage light. Paddy started a fistfight, drunk at our bus door. We got shoved around by Eminem’s security at our second Top of the Pops performance. I almost got arrested for smoking pot outside of a gig in Manchester. We played just about every small city in Britain twice. We shot the video for “Take Your Mama” on a couple hours’ sleep, then left for a small tour of two-hundred-person senior college banquets with us and Amy Winehouse opening for Ash. I met up with Carly Simon in New York to write but we ended up pouring our hearts out to each other while we fiddled with chords on a piano. We did a whole UK tour opening up for Duran Duran in arenas. Elton had us come play some outdoor shows with him in the countryside. During one of those performances my pants busted and my balls popped out. DJ gigs were packed up against theater gigs and then we’d go back out the same night for a club gig. We played the Astoria in London and our whole guitar rig shorted out, so Ana had to sit on the stage for twenty minutes and tell stories to the audience while our tech guys tried to fix it. We took DJ Sammy Jo and Kiki and Herb on the road with us through England. I was so proud to be playing with friends who had brought me so much inspiration. After releasing the record in North America, we played Saturday Night Live, where I wore a backless Heatherette woman’s pantsuit. John Cameron Mitchell directed the “Filthy/Gorgeous” video starring just about every drag queen in New York.

  You realize they might be onto something when multiple journalists ask you: “What does it feel like to be the hardest-working band in the world right now?”

  Since record releases were staggered around the world at that time, the album didn’t come out in the United States until June. The band was just beginning to make some headway in America when the New York Times ran a small piece about us with the headline “Hot over there, cool over here.” It wasn’t a fair assessment. It had taken five months for us to break into the UK after our record was released there. We hadn’t had that opportunity or time to do that yet in the States. But the general perception of us in the media was that it wasn’t really working in America. I believe that this can be traced entirely back to that bogus New York Times sidebar. It’s interesting how much it affected the band’s story. But I didn’t really care all that much, it didn’t feel like any kind of failure from our perspective.

  My face looked different: haggard, drawn, older. I had gotten so skinny you could count all my ribs. It was hard to keep any pants on, as I had gone past the last loop of every belt I had. I stopped wanting to eat. With all the adrenaline pumping through my veins each day, food didn’t look very appetizing. The shows were marathons, and I was burning more calories than I was consuming. We’d take flights late and early. I’d fall asleep on airport floors. There were two-day periods when we wouldn’t be able to go to bed, and would just have to wait for the next night to pass out. I couldn’t escape anyone, not even on the toilet. There were doors being knocked on, questions being asked, decisions to be made, the hiring and firing of people to be attended to.

  I had to wear an eye patch for a week with an eye infection as we went through freezing Scandinavia. It was at a tiny Stockholm gig where an owlish young man and his kind sister approached me with the album they’d just finished. They were called the Knife and the album was Deep Cuts.

  Late nights were for talking strategy wi
th Scott: We’d conjure arguments over small choices that were neither here nor there, but could feel like life-or-death to us at the time. The pressures were intense, and if someone in the band was in a bad mood it could color everyone else’s day. There were some nasty little fights—I could explode easily. Afterward I would sit by myself in a parking lot, feeling ashamed that my fuse was so short.

  All of this fell away when I stepped out to play. I would shed my thoughts, forget who I was, and relish the drug of the stage, which came in phases. I detonated at the first note, running in circles like a sheepdog, in a kind of frenzy, unable to stop moving and shaking. The first few songs were always scary, and for the first third of each show I was nothing if not a bundle of fright. My eyes bugged out. I was like a junkie getting sick after shooting up, but soon, bliss washed over me. The high flooded through me and took over, allowing me to stomp my feet and slam myself around the stage without feeling pain.

  And when there was the rare quiet moment in the shower or a hotel room, by myself, I began to feel something new in my core. A sensation of the floor dropping out, or as though I were falling over the edge of a roller coaster. There was a voice that appeared, speaking to me in my head, circuitous negative thoughts that reminded me that I wasn’t creating, being productive, or writing songs. The voice would tell me that maybe I wouldn’t ever be able to write another song again with the magic that I’d found. I had reoccurring nightmares that we’d be playing a show and people would start leaving in droves, or that I couldn’t remember the words of any of the songs. Or that Ana refused to perform because her horoscope told her to. My diary entries from this time are full of pleading, of me telling myself that I wasn’t good enough or capable of doing better. I was suddenly terrified of failure. It was out of control. The abundance of adrenaline in my system was making me sick, and a little crazy.

  In one of my journal entries during this time, I wrote: I need to dispel this notion of myself. The sadness that I have somehow become creatively infertile, that somehow I have nothing left to say.

  I had various lovers in many different cities. This boy named James in Sheffield, who was stocky and hairy. There was Jan, whom I nicknamed Yawn, he was from Norway, dreadfully boring, really handsome, but a snooze in the sack. There was Sven in Brussels. Every time I played there he would sneak away from his boyfriend and give me head in an unused dressing room.

  I was around so many people at every moment, but at the same time felt so lonely. In a band, it’s unnatural the way you’re forced to be together for insanely long stretches of time, all sleeping together in a cubicle. I read a study about chimpanzees that said when they were put in areas too small and crowded, they would begin to look everywhere they could except at each other. Sometimes we just had to pretend that we weren’t even there.

  I never got high or drunk before I went out onstage, and I still don’t. So many people over the years have said to me, “I’ve seen you onstage, mate, you must have been off your face.”

  “No, that’s just my face,” I explain. When we first started, I enjoyed a drink to calm my nerves before I went on, but soon I realized that even just a tiny bit of alcohol would make me feel like I was chasing after my own dance moves. My control wouldn’t be as tight. Sometimes, a crew member would pour me a drink for the encore, but the effects wouldn’t hit while I was still onstage. Even offstage I wasn’t a big drinker. There was just no way to get as little sleep as we did and feel hungover at the same time. I was also plagued with constant colds and coughs.

  In the mornings, my legs and feet would be in such pain, I would wake up and barely be able to walk. I have big, flat feet that can give me trouble if I’m on them too much in one day. But every night, I was dancing and banging my feet on the stage in wood-soled shoes. Every stomp sent a sick wave of agony up my leg that I knew I would pay for the next morning. It would take me five full minutes to stop limping and walk properly after I woke up.

  Some nights I would sit at the front of the double-decker bus, on the second floor, after everyone had gone to bed, and sink into the relative silence, like when I rode the ferry at night as a kid, trying to forget the rehab centers or counselors we’d seen that day. Or seeing New York from the fire escape, enshrouded by an infinite nothing during the blackout. There was comfort in the darkness beyond the bus’s headlights. I’d gaze at the street median and let it hypnotize me into a lull. It felt like we were building and climbing with no end in sight. Before some shows I’d feel like I had no energy to access. I would dread walking out and have to run the equivalent of a triathlon. It felt like there was no light to look forward to, no escape from the grind. But again, the moment I did step out on the stage, all that went away.

  I WOKE UP VERY EARLY in the stale pitch-black of the bus. Falling sideways out of my windowless bunk, I could tell by the chorus of snores floating from every angle like buzzing bugs in the night that I was the first one up. I waded through the loamy, narrow hall, trying not to step on or touch any of the hair and hands hanging over the edges. Opening the door to the light of the sun was like being freshly born. It was a magnificent day at Glastonbury.

  I’d never seen anything so big. Standing on the bus steps, I could see the renowned festival stretch to the horizon. Rainbows of plastic tarps and tents swept like a patchwork wave behind a huge pyramid stage in the distance. I slipped my shoes on and buttoned my small-waisted American-flag pants. I didn’t bother looking in a mirror. I knew what I would see: someone who didn’t even look like me anymore.

  Scissors had been looking forward to Glastonbury, a festival we had only heard spoken of with reverence. We hadn’t been exactly sure what to picture, but we knew it was a big fucking deal. Two days before, our drum tech, Nigel, in all seriousness, had made us gather around him and he’d given us a talk: “A band’s career can be made at Glasto,” he told us. “A good gig there can become stuff of legend. This one’s yours for the taking.”

  I walked for what seemed like a mile and found Chris. He and Christoph were setting up our tent for the weekend. I could see the surprise on Chris’s face. I wasn’t as handsome as I had been a month ago. He was seeing firsthand the toll of being on the road. He, on the other hand, looked just like the knockout I remembered. I hadn’t expected to ever see him again, and I’d stopped thinking about him after our first night together. But he’d called me two whole weeks after. Sure, he was gorgeous and funny (the morning after we’d hooked up, I’d walked in on him in the shower, where he was nonchalantly wearing a pair of wax lips). But being as busy as I was, I had made a pact with myself to stop being so boy-crazy. Even though I was dazzled at first sight, I had talked myself out of getting hung up on him. I thought, That guy sure would make an amazing boyfriend for somebody. It just didn’t cross my mind that it could actually be me.

  When he finally called me, it turned out he was going to be in England, so I invited him and Christoph to come for the Glastonbury weekend as my guests. I still wasn’t thinking it would be anything romantic. He and Christoph were both ridiculously hot; I just assumed that the three of us would have some great sex.

  Chris wore an old Adidas hat that looked like it had gone down a garbage disposal, gotten covered in mud, and then dried in the sun. It was an oddly beautiful thing, and so was he. On that crisp day, I couldn’t stop looking at him, at his strong features and frame. He didn’t look like anyone I had ever seen. His body wasn’t overcooked from too much gym—it was solid and hairy and real.

  I had a couple hours free before we had to get ready for our afternoon show on the main stage. The three of us marched over to see some of PJ Harvey’s set on the Pyramid stage. Chris and I were a little awkward. A picture of Paul McCartney flashed on the side screens: He’d be playing that night.

  “Damn, he’s looking old,” Chris said.

  “Have a little fucking respect,” I snapped back. It was a strange moment. I know he must have thought, Who the fuck is this guy? This is never going to work.

  At around
3 p.m., I had to say goodbye to Chris and go get my press drag on. But first there was a band meeting with Neil. It was outside by the buses; the day had become warm. The band sat in a circle, and the general feeling was one of excitement to be there, but a malaise and dissatisfaction with our reality had set in. It would continue for the next ten years. Everyone was exhausted, complaining about the amount of work, the lack of time off. The grousing was something I couldn’t help but take personally. Scott and I were stoic about the fact that we were overdoing it. But he and I were aware of the work getting our music to people’s ears was actually going to take. I refused to take that opportunity for granted.

  Everyone was solemn, chastising Neil that we were going too hard. I felt guilty. Whenever people were upset, I thought it was my fault. “I’m not going to let this band affect my relationship,” someone would say. “I don’t want to lose my life.” And here was the rub: I knew in my heart that we were losing our lives as we knew them, but I also knew that the trade-off was going to be a singular experience that few people get. It’s like boarding a space shuttle for years. Your regularly scheduled existence is gone, but still you get to see the earth from an angle that no one else ever will.

  Ana pointed at me and said through her tears that whether I liked it or not, this was my baby. I would carry these words with me. When the band was unhappy, the blame easily fell on my shoulders. I was the one dragging them through this circus. But still, no one was forcing anyone to do it. People could leave at any time.

  These insecurities were tough. The band could be angry at each other after interviews, not approving of how we discussed our experiences or one another. Sometimes I’d yell, telling someone they were being ridiculous, then concede and apologize. When any of us got mad onstage in front of an audience, I’d be furious. Whatever was going on in our heads, my biggest stage rule was not to impart that to the audience. It wasn’t their fault: Nobody in the audience cared or wanted to know if you’d had a bad day. If Derek’s guitars were fucked-up, he would glower and not acknowledge the crowd. Ana would complain during the show about how tired she was, or how crappy the hotel we had been staying at was. I would explode afterward in the dressing room, in front of everybody.