Bit of a Blur

by Alex James

  Mark, Dom and I played together and smoked together and went to Pokesdown to look at guitars together. It was good but we didn’t have a singer. Singers weren’t that important in the sort of music we were listening to, or making, but to do gigs we needed a singer. We were at Mark’s house, near school, for a rehearsal. There were two drumkits in the bedroom he shared with his older brother, who was learning the drums as well. Mark said, ‘I saw Pete Arnold in town yesterday, he’s got a keyboard and some lyrics. I told him to come.’ ‘Arnold!’ said Dom and me, ‘Eew!’ Pete Arnold was the dribbly one who used to get the 17 bus with me. He didn’t get the bus any more. He’d moved house. As far as I knew, he was a grebo these days – a greasy headbanger. He arrived from the other direction, but still on a 17 bus, with his keyboard, which was large. He’d gone goth, big black spiky hair and an overcoat. He was, touchingly, very proud of his keyboard. He kept calling it a ‘synthesizer’, which was unfortunate, because it involved a lot of lisping and saliva. We played him what we’d been doing, but he wasn’t that impressed.

  He started playing the chords of ‘Blue Monday’ at which point I started to think he might be all right. After all, we had spent all those bus journeys talking about music and I had thought Dom was a retard until I’d played music with him. Maybe it was worth letting him join in. Dom and Mark never wanted to play ‘Blue Monday’.

  He wasn’t bashful. He said, ‘Mark, play a rock pattern. Dom, you play the chords on the second and fourth beats, to give it a reggae feel, bass should just follow the chords.’ We did exactly what he said and he played a melody on the keyboard with one finger. It was brilliant. We were writing our own songs, or rather Pete was.

  Really, no band is ever any more sophisticated an arrangement than that: a group of people who enjoy making a loud noise together, despite their differences.

  There were a lot of bands in Bournemouth and a scene. The nightclubs - and there were loads of them - were full in the summer and at weekends, but during the week they were empty. Some of them were really plush. Some were sticky. On weekdays they were host to dozens of bands who all played for each other and to each other, constantly splitting up and re-forming with new allegiances. It was great to have a reason to be in these places, other than looking at girls. Those nightclubs looked great when they were empty, all the lasers and spotlights blazing at the unemployable outsiders on the stage.

  Odd Jobs

  The first celebrity I ever met was the headmaster’s daughter. Being nobly born and also quite pretty had given her unshakeable confidence. Everybody fancied her and she wore her adulation like haute couture; it really made her look good. She thrived on it. Some of it didn’t fit her or suit her, but it was all precious stuff and she kept it safe. She was a star and she knew it.

  I got to know her when I started working after school and at weekends at The Roysdean. The Roysdean announced itself as ‘a Methodist Holiday Hotel’. It was in Derby Road, just around the corner from home. Derby Road is all largish two-star hotels and prostitutes. The buildings are quite grand, laid to garden squares with avenues of mature pines. It’s really quite beautiful. Sandbanks, five miles to the west, is one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in the whole world: it’s pricier than most of Tokyo and Manhattan. It’s hard to say what makes that part of town so expensive and the Derby Road part such a bargain. From the air you can see that the whole of Bournemouth sits on a river plain. There’s definitely not one part that’s any more special than another; you’d expect to pay a bit more for a house near the sublime beach, but it’s hard to fathom the fiftyfold price difference between the fading Regency elegance of Derby Road and the East Cliff at the low end of the market, and the chintz territory of Canford Cliffs and Sandbanks, the super-expensive end. All the worst bands were from Canford Cliffs and Sandbanks, bad funksters with highlighted hair.

  There were a dozen kids from school who worked at The Roysdean, including the headmaster’s kids and their gangs. We were all united in our disdain for Methodists, the hotel and its management. We were quite good at pretending to behave ourselves, and the jobs did get done, but there was a lot of larking around. You can’t pay people ninety pence an hour and expect them to give everything.

  I was mainly in the kitchens, washing up and mopping. It smelled pretty rank in there, a mixture of slops, cabbage and disinfectant, but the tea was excellent. It’s one thing that hotels full of old people really excel at, tea. They fed us, too. People who work in hotels always get fed. People who are hungry and handling food just tend to eat it. It’s very hard to stop them. It was lowly work, but I was happy. I was in love with most of the girls who worked there.

  I loved girls, music and France. I fell for France on holiday and on French exchanges. I went to Germany, too, but they just wanted to play table tennis. In France everything was exotic, erotic, dangerous and fabulous. Cool women on mopeds smoked cool cigarettes and knew about cheese and poetry.

  I liked reading too, but writers themselves didn’t seem to be very appealing people until I turned over a school copy of L’Etranger by Albert Camus in the first year of the sixth form. There was a picture of Albert on the back: Gitane glowing from the corner of a sulky pout, long skinny mac and James Dean hair. It said on the flap that he played football, in goal, for Algiers.

  Everything about that book resonated. It ding-donged with adolescent feelings of pointlessness. I bought a long mac with pockets big enough to carry books in. Books and records were the great sources of truth.

  Green Road

  My ‘A’ level results weren’t just bad, they were astonishing. I had been a model student throughout school, I’d been encouraged to sit entrance exams for Oxford in French and in Chemistry just a few months before, but things had gone downhill rapidly. A succession of girlfriends and late nights in empty nightclubs had taken their toll. Life is not wide enough for Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll, and French and Chemistry. I had been expected to get A grades, but I’d dive-bombed out of the system. It was very scary all of a sudden.

  I’d missed my second-choice college as well, and even failed to match what was basically an unconditional offer from a grubby college called Goldsmiths in south-east London. In three very clear letters the flimsy piece of paper spelt out doom. I went round to my girlfriend’s house.

  She’d got two As and a B and so had her friend, who was there. They were ecstatic. They were both going to Bristol. The fragile veil of young love was shaken hard by the spectre of failure. I was pretty much dumped there and then. I went home to sleep it off. It was pretty rough at home, too. My mum was despairing. I wrote things down a lot and listened to Joy Division.

  I got a job at Safeway, stacking shelves. Nothing could be as horrible as working in that supermarket. Everything about it was off. The management team were all bullied and all bullies. I had to wear a bow tie and a bright green apron. There were quite a lot of staff, but there was no camaraderie or joy. I started at the bottom. The further up the chain you got the more horrible you had to be to stay there. I found it hard to hang on to that job and I was broken-hearted and bandless. The Rising, my first group, had disintegrated, but I was playing the old piano more than ever.

  All the bands used to go to Circles coffee shop on the top floor of Dingles, the department store. It was the daytime headquarters of the Bournemouth music scene. I used to meet my friends there, too, and that was where I first laid eyes on Justine. Everybody knew Justine. Justine Andrew was the prettiest girl in Bournemouth and she was going out with the bass player in the best band in town.

  A few years ago I was looking through some photographs of a backstage party at the Beastie Boys’ ‘Free Tibet’ concert in New York. There were photos of all the New York models, and the photographer had done a little book. They were all in it - Helena Christensen, Stella Tennant, Liberty Ross, Jasmine Guinness. I turned over another leaf and there was a full-page photograph of Justine: she was quite at home in the pretty girls’ big league with her green eyes, pointy nose a
nd huge open smile, a smile that melted rocks.

  I remember very clearly that the first time I saw her she was wearing a poncho and eating a toasted teacake, which seemed quite extravagant.

  Duncan Collier, from Mulberry Phut, the band with the seventeen guitarists, who used to get the 17 bus with me, was moving to Ireland and the house in Charminster, where he lived with other members of the Phut, was available to rent. Justine was going to live there with the keyboard player from the now defunct Reader’s Wives. They, too, had been torn apart by the university system. The drummer with the ten A grade ‘O’ levels had left to study accountancy. I was offered a room in the house.

  I worked more at the supermarket, to pay the deposit, but it was worth it. Things turned around pretty quickly. We moved in on New Year’s Day and I soon forgot about all the other girls I’d known before. Justine and I spent hours doing nothing in particular. Some girls might have been put off by the bow tie and bright green apron, but Justine thought it was hilarious. She had a crap job as well, running a hotel.

  I handed in my notice at Safeway and got another job at a scaffolding depot, putting blobs of purple paint on everything. If it belonged to the yard, it had to have some purple paint on it. It was nasty stuff that paint, took my skin off, but I liked working there. Pretty soon I was labouring for scaffolders on building sites. Scaffolders pride themselves on being the wild men of construction. I worked with a murderer called Bill. He nearly killed me a couple of times, accidentally, but he wasn’t nearly as nasty as the supermarket people. He carried a revolver in the glove compartment of his horrible car, which he drove appallingly badly. We travelled all over the place together, until he had a bad fall. I was lucky to escape from that job with only a few blisters. The gangs often used to drink quite a lot at lunchtime, as much as four or five pints in an hour, and then spend the afternoon swinging from poles high above the ground.

  There was a big job at the nuclear power station at Winfrith, rebuilding the main reactor. That went on for weeks. It was spooky in that place, all underground corridors and restricted zones. When we were building the scaffold tower around the core of the reactor we had to wear white suits and Geiger counters. It was still not as bad as Safeway.

  2

  goldsmiths college

  Camberwell

  Goldsmiths College said they’d have me after all, despite my recent lack of form, and I set off for London a year late to start a French degree. Someone else was getting his stuff out of his parents’ car when I arrived at the student halls of residence with my own parents. I saw him unload a guitar. He was covered in paint, but even if he hadn’t been it would have been obvious that he was an art student: pale and skinny; National Health specs; huge trousers and a stripy, baggy jumper. It’s a moment that I remember very clearly. I liked him from the instant I saw him and I had the certain feeling that one of the main characters in my life had just walked on to the stage. His name was Graham Coxon and he had the room above me, but I didn’t see him again for a few weeks. He had friends who were in their final year, and he spent his time with them.

  Camberwell is a far cry from Bournemouth. It’s in the most populous square mile of Europe, in the borough of Southwark, just south of the Thames. Stannard Hall, where we lived, was a rotten eyesore in an otherwise beautiful street that ran around a park with plane trees, tennis courts and a bandstand. It was a leafy enclave in a squalid neighbourhood where civilisation was permanently on the brink of collapse. It really wasn’t safe after dark, or even in the daytime. There were a lot of muggings. In the broad daylight of a Saturday afternoon, a couple of weeks after we all arrived, a gang plundered the hall. There was a high fence around the building and grilles on the windows, but they smashed the doors down and grabbed everyone’s stereos and cameras.

  We were encouraged not to look too much like students, especially in October, when the marauding gangs were on the lookout for bewildered-looking, easy targets. A stick-thin, big-brained, benevolent psychology don lived there in the hall with Laura, his Alsatian. He gave us all hope. He drove a VW camper van and he seemed to enjoy sleeping out on the front line. You went to see him when you got mugged or menaced and he made you tea. I never needed to go and see him. When I got to know Graham he told me that there was dog poo in the lounge when he went in sometimes.

  Paul Hodgson was the first person I really connected with at college. He was always getting mugged. He still is. I ran into him in the street a few months ago and he had a black eye from a thief. He was set upon by rogues even before he started at Goldsmiths, on his way to the interview. He’s quite a dandy dresser. Maybe that’s what it is. Paul talked a lot about Shelley and Byron. He was doing Fine Art and he made me laugh. The people who did art at my school weren’t that clever, or funny. The clever people did physics and chemistry. Paul was very perceptive and inquisitive. His dad, Ken, was a plumber and Paul manipulated high-falutin’ art concepts in a west London drawl, with a mild stutter. ‘Owls!’ - he called me Als - ‘Maaate, have a word with Brownlee, he’s s-pouting Were-Were-Wittgenstein; the wanger.’ Jason Brownlee was another artist. He had the room opposite me. He had fallen for Wittgenstein, utterly. He hadn’t properly grasped Joy Division lyrics yet; he was straight in the deep end wallowing in a big morass of intellectual spaghetti. Possibly he was looking down the wrong end of his mind, like when you look through a telescope backwards and fall over.

  The Fine Art reading list was all pretty chewy. The undergraduates were encouraged to launch themselves into the wits of the great thinkers and ransack what they needed, like they were trawling through a skip. Paul was dipping his toe into some Nietzsche. He always referred to figures he was engaging with by their Christian names, as a nod to his intimacy with them. It’s a good system. It humanises the mythical characters of human history. When Paul called anyone by their surname, it was a dis. ‘Ner-ner-Nietzsche’s n-not funny at all. No jokes in there, mate,’ he said with a grin.

  It was through Jason and Paul that I got to know Graham. The art department was a member’s club, really. The artists didn’t mix with the rest of the college. I got to know Paul in the kitchen. He was on first-name terms with the abstract expressionists but he had no idea how to feed himself. I had a year of low-budget culinary experimentation behind me. He’d come straight from his mum’s. He didn’t know how pasta worked and was quite spellbound by tomato purée. He had an artist’s fascination with the mundane. There was something magical for him in a tube of tomato purée, a tomato being transformed into its essence and re-presented as a packaged consumer product. Was it more of a tomato or less now? Was it art? Was it good on toast? Jason waded around in the primary flavours like they were huge splashes of bold colour. He always put too much garlic in. His drawings were very dense, too.

  Paul and Jason said I should meet Gra. It rhymed with car, Gra. We went up for some pasta sandwiches. Graham’s door was open and there was loud music. He was a bit drunk. His room was completely full of junk; we’d only been there for three weeks and he’d managed to give the impression that he’d been born there and never tidied up. There were piles of clothes from the flea market, a lot of paintings and posters, some of which were still attached to hoardings. There was a huge fan lying on the floor taking up most of the middle of the room. I’d seen that fan on a skip outside. Stuff was spilling out of cupboards, quite a few records and cassettes but mainly clothes. There was a charm about the magpie clutter. It didn’t look like anyone else’s room, except maybe Paul’s. Paul had a neat little row of books as well, though. Graham only had one book, Thérèse Raquin by Emile Zola. It looked like he’d read it a few times. It was dogeared and the spine was all cracked. I was glad Graham had a French book. I had a lot of them.

  The first thing he said was, ‘How long have you been playing the guit?’

  Graham

  Graham was as brilliant as he looked like he would be. He was excellent at drawing things - faces, girls, monsters. The morning after we met he dangled the flex from
his standard issue student Anglepoise lamp out of his bedroom window so that it banged on the glass of mine. I stuck my head out of the window. ‘Brekkers, cheers? Nice.’ He communicated mainly with facial expressions and in his own language. He was always playing with words. The linguistics department at college would have been fascinated.

  There was a student demonstration taking place that day, to protest against the abolition of grants. College was cancelled, and we were to march on Westminster. We had breakfast at the Camberwell Grill in Camberwell Green. There isn’t much green in Camberwell. It’s grey, mainly. The café was all red and yellow plastic. We didn’t ever have enough money to go out for dinner, but breakfast was cheap. There were the four of us - Paul, Graham, myself and Jason. Paul was still interested in tomato sauces. So was Graham. Graham squirted ketchup all over his food. Paul and Graham both saw the possibilities of tomatoes as art, but they were different types of artist. Paul wanted to create the essence of tomato and Graham wanted to make pretty patterns.

  It was quite rowdy when we got to Waterloo. There was a good turnout, thousands of students. All the colleges in London had closed for the day. There were placards and banners and people were chanting, and singing, ‘The students united will never be defeated.’ The march came to a standstill. We couldn’t work out why. The tense and menacing atmosphere was gradually building into a physical uprising. Everyone was shouting and jeering. It was very noisy and exciting. We pushed our way down to the front, like at a concert. There was a line of police defending the end of Waterloo Bridge. They didn’t want thousands of rebelling students going anywhere near the Houses of Parliament on the other side of the river. A police helmet was being thrown high in the air around the crowd. Every time it soared there was a huge round of applause and cheering. Down at the front it was a perilous crush with everyone shoving from behind. I reached out and grabbed a helmet and flung it in the air. There was a big cheer from behind as I felt the hands of many police officers seize me. As I was wrenched bodily from the mob a dozen more hands from the crowd grabbed my arms to pull me back in. I was on my back on top of a sea of people with the police on my feet and the students on the other end playing tug-of-war with my body. I kicked my feet, got one leg free and lost a shoe as I hauled the other leg from the arms of the law. I disappeared back into the throng with the police swearing and the students cheering. You needed two shoes that day, especially when the riot police arrived. The riot police are like a branch of the army, really. You can’t fight them. It’s time to go home when they arrive. Nobody did, though. The police were on horseback and they galloped at the crowd. People were crushed and some were quite badly hurt. Speccy girls reading botany at Bedford New College or anyone who happened to be in the way got charged and flattened. A few people hung around throwing things but it had certainly broken the crowd up. I couldn’t find my shoe, or Graham. It was a big day, though, and we were mates after that. I’d liked Graham from the moment I saw him. He was cool. Everyone doing art was cool, but Graham was the coolest and he floated around college.