by Jake Shears
I was no saint, with my big mouth. Onstage I would let jokes fly, certain ones just for shock value. Often I could be offensive and insensitive, crudely sexual or misogynist. I’m sure it made Ana feel like shit. I could be oblivious to these things for days, and the resentment would bubble over, me not understanding or realizing what I had done. It would pop out in little firecracker arguments. Even after I said I was sorry, I knew I hadn’t changed the band view of me as bossy and callous. I could still act like that child, nicknamed so many years ago “The Little Dictator.” They were right—I often was. My learning curve was steep, but over time, over years, I did change. I figured out that no one likes to be told what to do, and that some fights are more worth it than others.
By midnight at Glastonbury I was in a stupor, could barely feel myself walking on the wet grass. The second set had been a gorgeous assault on my own senses. Chris had stood there smiling with his camera in hand, waiting for me as I exited the side of the stage. It was all happening at once. We’d played on the main Pyramid stage in the afternoon, done hours of press afterward, and then played the Dance tent at eleven.
The daytime set on the Pyramid stage had been lighthearted: We’d played as the crowd was bathed in a gentle, temporary rain. Ana had some great lines like “If you holler loud enough, a big sunny rainbow is going to shoot out of Jake’s ass!” There was nothing purer than us surprising one another with a quick joke or a look. Or sometimes we’d literally just fall on our asses, which was never not hilarious.
The Dance tent show had been almost the opposite. The crowd’s simmer had quickly turned into a boil from the top of the set, creating an energy so boisterous and electric, it almost felt devilish. We ended with absolute chaos, all of our freak friends and creatures joining us onstage. I wore a catsuit printed with hundred-dollar bills. It was the first time we’d had an audience that large, teeming with an expectation that we were fulfilling in front of their eyes. It was like I’d harnessed a new level of control, and the sensation was overwhelmingly satisfying.
I got offstage and Chris and Christoph and I were ready to party. We met up with my friends Kat and Will, traipsed across the entire festival to head to Lost Vagueness, a section of the festival that was known for its jaw-dropping installations and debauchery. I had a pocketful of MDMA, and even though I was completely spent, the exhilaration from the shows had me floating. I’d walk along crowded trails sticking my hands out behind me for Chris to hold.
As though some switch had been thrown, suddenly everyone knew who I was. Strangers were happy to see me at every step, screaming and hugging me like long-lost friends. It was my first taste of this kind of thing. It’s an incredible feeling, when people you’ve never met before are thrilled to just see you; when you walk into a party or stroll down the street and they just want to talk to you and hug you.
We ended up in some ’50s-style diner playing oldies on the jukebox and didn’t move from there the whole night. Little Richard screeched as salty waitresses walked around with pots of coffee. The place looked exactly like an old greasy spoon, down to the checkered floors and ketchup bottles. We danced well into the next day.
I fell in love with Chris that night. In a moment of absolute clarity and inspiration I asked him if he’d marry me. He said yes. It was our first date. I just inexplicably knew he was the one I would be spending my life with.
We sat in the grass by the stone circle monument, a popular gathering spot at Glastonbury with twenty standing stones, where people play drums and lie about in the grass. Fog rolled through, the silhouettes of festivalgoers just barely perceptible through the mist. I held Chris’s hand and kissed him again, both of us knowing that our lives had just dramatically changed in a matter of hours.
I thought about being alone on that beach in Barcelona, years before, dressed as a mime, knowing this moment would arrive. And here it was. I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced such pure, unadulterated happiness.
Our album went to No.1 in the UK charts the following Tuesday and stayed there. It would be the highest-selling album in the country that year.
We were in New York for just one night. The band was performing at PS1 for a summer Warm Up party—the same party that had started when I lived at the Cake Factory, where I first saw Fischerspooner, where I spent so many wild and sweltering afternoons, slugging back beer and dancing. We were playing the steps of the museum. The turnout was in the thousands.
I asked Klaus Biesenbach, the director of the museum, if there was a place away from everyone that Chris and I could go spend a few minutes together. He took us to a sparsely furnished but airy room with a couch that overlooked the courtyard. We had a perfect view of the entire crowd.
It was the only time Chris and I would have alone that day. We put the hour to good use. Afterward I lay in his arms and gently dozed off. When I extracted myself from his naked limbs, my face bleary, I sat up on the couch. “I think it’s time. I need to go down and start getting dressed,” I said.
“Where’s your mom?” He looked around us, as if we had lost her in the room. I laughed.
“Oh, I’m sure she’s making new friends.” I reached over to the window and pulled back the shade. The courtyard was jammed with people waiting for the show. They spotted us and started cheering. We were shirtless, with our arms around each other, smiling in our post-sex glow. It was as if they were celebrating the fact we’d just found the loves of our lives.
I got down to the dressing room and Bono was there, wearing his sunglasses and perusing our looks for the day’s show. “There he is, the man of the hour.” He reached out and hugged me. My mom’s eyes bugged out as he gave her a hug as well.
“I didn’t know you would be here,” I said to him like an idiot.
“If you knew everything that was going to happen, then there would be no surprises,” he replied.
We played a killer show that day. I wore Vivienne Westwood shorts that tied all the way up on the side, half obscene, making me look naked, thin black suspenders, a leather cap, and a giant feather brooch. The stage was set up at the top of the front museum stairs, but behind a railing, so I spent most of the performance climbing it and standing on the edge, singing. The crowd was a sea, and I felt like I was crossing over it on the bow of my own party boat.
Afterward, in a James Turrell room called Meeting with no ceiling, only an unobstructed blue sky above us, Bono gave a toast. “To these times that we will never forget, to pop music, to family. One day we will all look back at this and realize how truly blessed we all are to get to experience such beautiful moments.” I sat holding Chris’s hand. “May the journey be long and fruitful.”
Bono then pulled me aside and gave me “the talk.”
“Jake, you have a road in front of you, you do realize that, yes?” His voice was serious. “You have decisions to make. Hey.” He splayed his hands. “This can be just a moment in time. And that’s fine. But it can be more than that, you see. This—music—can be your life. There’s two paths you can choose. One, you can go and get caught up in all the parties and attention, become interested in art. Or you can remain focused and just keep making music. Building something that lasts more than just now.” I’ve since heard that he gives this talk to a lot of younger artists, but his words stuck with me.
That night, Chris, my mom, and I got to my apartment and it turned out the roommate I had at the time hadn’t found another place to sleep, which he had agreed to do that night because he hadn’t been paying rent. My mom, such a trooper, ended up sleeping in his bed with him. She could see how excited Chris and I were just to be able to spend a few more hours together. “For God’s sake, please don’t tell your father,” she said. We were in such good spirits, someone could have robbed us at gunpoint and we would have thought it hilarious.
Chris and I got in bed together and laid our heads on the pillow, looked into each other’s faces horizontally. We both actually squealed as we embraced. That moment was the most in love with anyone that
I had ever been.
The summer heat had stuck around that following fall in New York City. I stepped into a sunset-kissed Union Square in destroyed black cowboy boots and a Heatherette tie-dyed hoodie with Amanda Lepore’s face stenciled on the front. Waiting there to greet me was Chris, roses in hand.
We were playing Irving Plaza that night. It was a show I’d been looking forward to—a homecoming of sorts. We’d received sad news that day about a friend’s child passing away. There was a dark pall over the dressing room. It turned out to be the first show in New York that we played where I looked out at the crowd and didn’t recognize a soul. Who are these people? I thought. Where were our friends? For the first time I felt homesick in my own city. That night I just didn’t connect with the audience.
After we said our final goodbye from the stage, I trod up the stairs back to the dressing room where Chris took my arm and said, “David Bowie watched the show.”
“What?” All the bustle of the room quickly tuned out, and all I could hear was the ringing in my ears.
“He was up in the balcony.”
“Which side?”
“Your left.”
I suddenly started babbling. “Is he still here? Why didn’t anybody say anything? How come no one told me? The show was fucking terrible! I was fucking terrible. . . .” I paced in a circle, feeling my throat closing up, trying to hold back tears. I stopped and pulled it together, put on a clean shirt, and prepared myself to meet him. He never came backstage. He was gone.
Growing up, no matter what I was doing—whether it was theater, tap dancing, or writing horror stories—his sounds and visions guided my way. And now he had seen my shitty show and left. I was inconsolable. They say never meet your idols. I guess the only thing worse than meeting your idols is not meeting them. The whole thing made me feel like a fraud.
Later that month, I received a somewhat cryptic email:
Hi. I came to your show a few weeks ago. It sounded very good from where I was sitting. db
I froze. What was this? As if I didn’t know he’d been there? From where he was sitting? As opposed to where everyone else was sitting? This just exacerbated my pain. Why did he even bother to write me an email at all? The black type on white just read to me as: “Dear Jake, though you may think yourself a rock star, you will never be me. David Bowie.”
My response took about three weeks to compose. I made sure that even if it was a little longer, at three sentences, I kept it equally terse:
Dear David Bowie,
You mean more to me than any artist on earth. My favorite song you’ve ever written is “Fantastic Voyage.” Thank you so much for coming to my show, but I really hope at this point that we never cross paths. There’s not a lot in this world I keep sacred, but I would rather you just stay imaginary.
Sincerely,
Jake Shears
Now I realize that it was my insecurities that made me prickle. I felt like I didn’t deserve to be so close to what I knew to be greatness. David Bowie, the man who gave me the idea and inspiration to perform in the first place, sent me a note to just tell me he liked my show, and I couldn’t just see that for what it was. I wish I’d just replied with a simple “Thank you.”
That winter, I flew my parents and Mary over for a theater tour that we did in the UK with Le Tigre, which included a show at Royal Albert Hall. After having received so much support from my folks for so long, I was happy to have the money to fly them all over and put them up comfortably.
My mom and dad were beaming and it was touching to see my dad so fascinated with the operation. He couldn’t get over the fact that we had a crew, and trucks! After the show he just wanted to linger and watch everyone pack up and load our gear. I think he finally saw something that we both had in common. He had always been a man who was able to make something out of nothing, fabricating and designing machines that he’d just dreamed up. We had now done the same thing, just in a different way. He had also painstakingly taught himself to make leather pants, many pairs of which I now wore onstage.
Mary was enchanted with the UK, a place that she’d never imagined she would actually see in person. We shared hotel rooms when we could and spent late nights watching infomercials with the sound off and dancing in our pajamas. Sometimes she would give me a little look in her eyes as if this was the last place she’d ever expected us to be. She was proud of me.
And “Mary,” the song, was a proper radio hit. I had the money finally so that Mary could get her gastric-bypass surgery. Now, both of our lives would be changed.
BEAUTIFULLY LIT, STOCKED WITH GIFTS, stacked with suitcases and steamers, the dressing rooms were buzzing. As I walked down the hallway, I passed names on each door: THE KILLERS, ROBBIE WILLIAMS, KEANE. It was the night of the Brit Awards, known as the Brits, the UK’s equivalent of the Grammys. Though we had been nominated for three—Best New Act, Best International Album, and Best Live Act—I was on everybody’s shit list.
About three weeks before, we were playing the University of Kansas and were caught in a snowstorm on our way to the gig. We arrived late and had to move the showtime to midnight. As the crew set up our equipment, Scott and I were scheduled for a couple of press interviews, one of which was with Victoria Newton from the Sun in the UK. She’d flown all the way in from London, and I knew in advance the conversation was going to be a minefield. She was a notoriously difficult interviewer, the reason being that she wrote for a gossip rag. I was seasoned enough by then to be careful of journalist traps. They coaxed you into confiding certain elements of your life, only to twist them around for any kind of salacious headline they could get.
“We’ve got to be super-careful,” I told Scott on our way in. “This lady is going to try to get some dirt.”
“We have to think before we answer anything,” he agreed.
“Don’t answer the question if it’s a trap. If we say anything, one way or the other, she’ll turn it into something.”
I always wanted to give interesting interviews. I never saw the point of being a jerk or complaining to journalists. I even excused myself once in a whole-band interview that NME conducted because I felt like everyone was so negative and complaining. It gave me major anxiety. So I did my best to just be positive, and not talk shit about anybody.
Victoria Newton tried everything, even the most basic questions: “Would you ever work with Madonna?” I laughed and wouldn’t answer. If I had answered no, she would say that I slagged her off. If I said yes, she would say that we were “desperate to work with Madonna.” We finished the interview cordially and I hoped that I’d given her enough stuff to at least make her happy. After all, she had traveled all this way.
And today, the day of the Brits, the Sun interview had come out. And made the front page. The headline read: “SCISSORS SHOCKER: ‘I KNOW ROBBIE WILLIAMS IS GAY.’ ” Neil stormed into the dressing room and slapped the newspaper down on the table in front of me as I drank my coffee.
“What the fuck is this?” Veins were popping out on his forehead. “Why would you say this, you fuckhead?”
My stomach dropped and the blood drained from my face. I was confused—how could this have happened? And today? And our dressing room was right next to Robbie’s to boot. Scott sat in a chair in front of a makeup mirror rimmed with bulbs and glowered, shaking his head.
“I didn’t say this!” I grabbed the paper and looked at it in disbelief. “I never said this, you guys. What the fuck?”
“Well, it sure looks like you fucking did.” Neil chewed on a cinnamon stick like an anxious dog with a bone. He’d quit smoking a month before.
“Scott!” I looked at him to defend me; he had been in the interview, too. “Scott, you were there! We specifically avoided saying anything that could be misconstrued.”
“I can’t remember every word,” he said. “You could have said something like that.” I felt betrayed. How could he not remember? We had done the interview only three weeks before. I’d said nothing of the sort.
Neil and Scott acted like they didn’t believe me, which floored me. I had never said it to the Sun, and I sure hadn’t thought they’d go and dig up that quote from some interview we’d done two years ago.
During a quiet moment, when it seemed like no one else was around, I tapped on Robbie’s door. He was at his dressing table, sitting and sipping tea.
“Hey.” I reached out and we shook hands. He looked at me, amused. “I just want to say that I’m so sorry for what came out in the papers today. It’s something I said, being flip. It was years ago. And totally stupid.”
He gave me a hug, gripped my shoulders, and looked me in the eyes. “Jake. Even if people believed everything they read . . . it’s no big deal. Seriously, don’t worry about it.”
That night when he gave his speech accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award, he said he’d like to thank his “boyfriend, Jake Shears.”
We opened the Brits, performing “Take Your Mama,” which was to be the last official project for Jim Henson’s Creature Shop in the UK. The number was intricate, with countless moving parts, and involved days of rehearsal with dozens of puppeteers. It was a meaningful experience for me, to get to spend time and be creative with these brilliant people I’d been fans of all my life. Most of them had worked for Henson and Frank Oz since they were young, and many of them had been a part of The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. The actual baby Toby in Labyrinth was even one of the puppeteers. Our number took place in a barnyard. Ana and I were dressed like birds, me as some sort of turkey. There were dancing eggs, a singing barn, and a background chorus of watermelons. The performance was a triumph.
