by Alex James
We walked along Peckham High Street after midnight. Damon was full of beans. He always is. He was climbing up lamp-posts and dancing on bus-shelter roofs. He said, ‘Watch this, I’m going to get arrested!’ and ran off down Queen’s Road with a Belisha beacon, shouting random things in a very deep voice. They threw him in the cells with a mad Gurkha, until he calmed down. Graham had been arrested at the Student Union for pissing on the stage while a reggae band was playing. He was very remorseful after that, but Damon was quite proud after his night in the cooler. ‘I told you I was going to get arrested! I made it happen,’ he said, eyes wide.
Seymour
The Beat Factory became our new headquarters. Paul got fed up that Graham and I were spending so much time there and always talking about it. We often stayed there all night, Damon, Graham and me. We could only use it when it was empty, and it was reasonably busy so we grabbed time whenever we could get it. Courtney Pine, the jazz man, used to record there, and loads of other people who I’d kind of heard of their old band, but not their current one. It was a good little studio, with a pretty courtyard, clean carpets, TV and video. We watched every film they had. There was tea and coffee. The fridge always had some cheese in, too. There was never any cheese in my fridge.
In Bournemouth, the Rising used to make demos at my house. We never bothered sending them to record companies, though. Damon had been left some money by a relative and spent it recording some songs at the Beat Factory. He was obviously very decisive. The people who ran the studio gave him a job as a tea boy, with the aim of moulding him into a pop product, but he was still at the tomato end of things, rather than the purée stage. We all were.
I always felt special walking into that studio. It was just what we needed. None of us had any idea how the posh mixing desk worked, but Damon had a four-track and there was a piano, a few amps and room to set up drums.
We were getting songs together. We liked being there; it was nicer than Camberwell and we spent ages just messing around, jamming into the middle of the night. We’d walk back to town at dawn and get the bus to college.
Sometimes, when the studio was booked, we’d go to Damon’s parents’ house for the weekend and play there, in his mum’s studio. She was an artist, too, and the studio was full of intriguing papier-mâché totems. Keith and Hazel Albarn are exceptionally nice people. I was overwhelmed by the sheer tastefulness of their home. They lived in an old bakery in rural Essex. It was full of books and rugs and smooth wooden obelisks. There were always nice smells, faintly spicy, wafting around. It was quiet and the sun beat in through the windows.
Sometimes I stayed at Graham’s parents’ house but usually we all went to Damon’s where Graham and I shared Damon’s sister’s vacant four-poster. Hazel Albarn’s table d’hôtesse was exquisite and mealtimes were eagerly anticipated. We all sat round the big table, where Damon would proceed to drive his parents mad.
It was beautiful there. We wrote some good songs in Hazel’s studio, including ‘Sing’, which was on the first album. The band was called Seymour. It was Paul’s idea, after the J. D. Salinger character. We all liked The Catcher in the Rye and agreed that it was best to own the edition with the silver cover.
Seymour’s first public appearance was at the college in the Student Union on the night that the Fine Art degree show opened. For the art students it was a big climax: the whole three years at college led up to that one show. It’s quite a dramatic situation. Hearts could be broken and dreams come true as tutors and suitors - galleries, dealers and buyers - decreed who would have a future.
We looked at everything. Damien Hirst’s work was obviously good. It stood out. He’d done some medicine cabinets full of cute little phials. If their meaning was obscure, they were certainly nice to look at. They were only five hundred quid, his degree-show pieces. I wanted one. I’d never ever had five hundred quid, though.
Charles Saatchi was very clever. He scoured all the degree shows and bought the work that he liked. He didn’t invest in art by established names, like most rich people. He invested in artists. He bought Damien’s work. He could pick out the good stuff. Choosing the right option, ticking the right box, knowing the good from the bad is about the cleverest thing anyone ever has to do. No one’s right all the time, but some people have a knack for picking winners, and they become winners themselves.
The Union was packed, and we deafened everybody.
Strait is the Gate
At the end of the first year, the start of the summer, we had to vacate the halls of residence in Camberwell. Graham’s friend Ads had just graduated. He knew some people who were squatting in a building right next to the college in New Cross. They, too, had sat their finals and were leaving. I went back to Bournemouth for a couple of weeks to see Justine and take the sunshine, but really I needed to be in London. The band was gathering momentum. Graham said I could stay in the squat. He’d saved me a room.
It was a horrible room. It’s hard to imagine anything more horrible. Noisy and toxic from the A2, which it overlooked, busted up and broken down and filthy, but it was free. The squat was just somewhere we could stay while things developed musically. There was no college and nothing else to do. Dave the drummer quit his day job and the four of us spent the whole time rehearsing, songwriting, getting to know each other and dreaming about what might happen next. All we wanted to do was to make music. Music never yet heard, music so powerful and beautiful that people would stop what they were doing and forget everything else.
We had no money at all. Graham’s mum sent him twenty pounds on Thursdays but he always went straight to the Co-op and spent it on Tennent’s Super. The whole building was empty to begin with, but it soon filled up with mad people, mainly Adam’s friends. It was summer and all the windows were open. I lived out of a very small bag. I always had a notebook, and some French vocabulary to learn. It was getting difficult at this stage, as I wasn’t even sure what some of the words meant in English.
There were a lot of people with no money in their pockets in New Cross. On the other side of the A2, down Clifton Rise past the cool off-licence, there was a largish park, all laid to grass. An endless game of cricket took place, all summer long. We went and played, some days. There was a pub in the park, the Dew Drop Inn. It stood as a monument to a more beautiful era, dwarfed now by the cold-blooded scale of dozens of modern high rises obscuring the horizon. I’d been to the Dewie a few times with some of the sassier girls from French, and got drunk on Newcastle Brown, listening to the Joy Division songs on the jukebox. It was the best pub in New Cross.
We took my dad there when he came to stay at the squat. He stayed in London a fair bit. He only stayed with us once, though. He had a good time. My mum wouldn’t have liked it. There were a lot of flies in that flat. Adam used to catch them with a beer glass and put them in the freezer. When you freeze flies, they don’t die. They just go into cryogenic suspension. They come back to life when they warm up again. While they were unconscious he tied bits of cotton on to their legs. The other end of the cotton he stuck to the wall with Sellotape so that they flew around in circles when they woke up. Others bombed around the flat slowly trailing their cotton tails.
There were a lot of mouth organs in the house at that time, too. Everybody had one, and we took them everywhere with us. They really sound best one at a time, mouth organs, but we all learned ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ and played it for my dad. That was when he said, ‘Shall we go to the pub?’
People are very friendly in that corner of town. There are a few maniacs wherever you go, but it never got hairy in the Dew Drop. There were tattooed bikers, squat punks, goths, art students, Jamaican cricket players, my dad and a few of the old boys you get in every London watering hole. The pubs in Bournemouth often had quite aggressive, unfriendly atmospheres. In London, pubs are wonderful places. You just never know what might change when you walk into a pub in London. They’re the synapses of the city, full of connections and paths that lead in all directions.
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br /> There was a street market in Deptford on Wednesdays and Fridays. We got all our things from there - records, books, clothes. I could buy as much as I could carry for about five pounds. Everything was so cheap I always felt like a rich man when I arrived. One could afford to speculate. I bought a copy of Abba’s Greatest Hits for ten pence. I wouldn’t have paid much more, but it turned out to be incredibly good. Probably the best ten pence I ever spent. Graham bought armfuls of clothes every week, and he was accumulating large numbers of shoes, particularly big boots. We all had suits from Deptford Market. Ads and I bought dresses one week. We put them on and went straight to the nastiest pub that we could think of. Nobody cared.
It was good to pass the time with Adam. He was very handsome, pursued by beautiful women, but often he just hung around with the down and outs by the big anchor at the end of Deptford High Street. He was a young man who lived without fear. He wasn’t afraid of being beaten up, or arrested, or laughed at, or of not being able to get the last bus home. He didn’t need rhododendron branches or the soft sea to catch him. It was a new kind of freedom, his company. Most people worry about something or other, but he didn’t. He left for New Orleans at the end of the summer. All he took with him was his sketchbook and a hammock.
I spent my time at college surrounded by women in the matriarchy of the French department. It was a far cry from the threatening, all-pervading manliness of the building sites, but other girls just reminded me of Justine. Towards the end of the summer, just before the second year of college began, she moved to London.
Justine was bold and stylish and she was a winner. She could run faster than anyone in Bournemouth - she’d been the town junior sprint champion. Everybody wants to run the fastest. I think that it was being the best at something at an early age that had given her absolute confidence and wisdom. She’d been naturally gifted with good looks and athleticism, which had always made her popular. She didn’t have to learn how to do anything to win anyone over. She had nothing to prove to anybody.
We took over the flat downstairs. Flat 2, 302A New Cross Road, was lying empty because the building was condemned. There was no heating, we had to boil the kettle to have a bath, and even though there were only ever a few inches of water in there, it took all day to empty. The kitchen had a collapsing, rotten floor and was infested with slugs. They left their goo on the lino. They weren’t there all the time, but occasionally there were invasions. I didn’t mind the slugs. They were slow and quite interesting. There were nasty white ratty things in the cellar, though, and dripping pipes. It was precarious. The next building along the terrace burned down. Someone knocked on the door and said, ‘You’re on fire.’ Outside there were flames roaring out of all the windows and high into the sky from the roof like a huge incinerator.
Living in that flat was like camping. There was a little walled garden overgrown with honeysuckle and ivy and the sun came through all the windows. A hostile motorbike beardy lived in the building behind the wall, but one day it was demolished and he was gone. That left us with half an acre of space, through a door in the garden wall. I became quite absorbed by the garden and planted anything that might grow. I threw old vegetables over the wall and they sprouted. The potatoes did really well. Graham came round and we made chips with them. We mainly cooked on a fire in the garden, using all the demolition debris. We were cavemen really.
Ours was the only flat that had electricity by that time, all the others having been disconnected as bills went unpaid. Adam had gone to the States and the rest of the crowd moved on. Graham went to live in a cupboard in a house in Lewisham but one of his friends from Colchester called Mad Paul still lived upstairs. He was a sculptor and the main theme of his work was death. He wanted his degree-show exhibit to be his head in a box. He dribbled when he got excited, but he was an enigmatic presence on the whole. We gave him candles and he crept around in the dark alone with his mad thoughts.
Justine packed her bags regularly but never left. It was tough to start with. The flat wasn’t safe. The whole neighbourhood was insecure. She didn’t know anybody and there was no money. In the band I had acquired a new family, plus I was at college during the day. She got a job in The Body Shop in Oxford Street. She’d been sacked from the Bournemouth Body Shop for messing around. She had an endless capacity for messing around. That was why I liked her. Oxford Street didn’t seem to mind either and she worked on the cosmetics stand giving makeovers.
When we were together it was always wonderful. We brought bicycles up from Bournemouth and rode or walked all over town. Sometimes we took vows of silence. Sometimes we stayed up all night talking. We were young and in love and all we really needed was each other.
We went to the Natural History Museum on my twenty-first birthday, Justine, the band, Paul and some old friends from Bournemouth. Then there was a party at the flat. Large numbers arrived. Adam’s girlfriend, Raych, set fire to a pile of debris behind the wall and it burst dangerously out of control. Someone fell through the kitchen window. Damon climbed on to the roof of Deptford Town Hall next door and changed the time on the big clock, which stayed at the wrong time for several years. Dave locked himself in the bathroom. Graham passed out early on the sofa. My mum and dad arrived in the morning; they were flying back from Hong Kong, and came into town from Heathrow to say Happy Birthday. We put the fires out and mopped up a bit before they arrived. The flat had been trashed, burned, soaked and soiled and it stank. I could see my mum was shocked at our circumstances.
Early Performances
The flat was right next to college, but my course work was suffering. I wasn’t concentrating on French. Seymour was starting to get interesting. We did a gig at a place called Dingwalls in Camden, supporting a band from Manchester. When we arrived for the soundcheck with our entourage the headline act were quite unpleasant towards us. They were really nasty, and they were rubbish. Adam was quite drunk. He was going through a phase of contorting his face with sticky tape, so that he looked like a monster. He had stuck his lips back so that you could see his gums, that day. He’d spent a long time with a tampon taped to his forehead at college, but moved on to looking disfigured when he graduated with a 2:1, quite a good degree. He had sold one of his sculptures to a rich aristocrat lady who lived off Regent’s Park and he was feeling invincible.
The second time the singer from the other band said something Adam walked over and punched him in the face. He could handle himself with the Deptford vagabonds: he wasn’t going to tolerate any nonsense from that poodle.
The gig went well. We had written a few good songs by then. We played ‘She’s So High’, ‘Sing’, some short, fast songs and crazy instrumentals, and ended with a very long, very fast one. I went home with Justine on the last tube and after I left it got really nasty. Graham was sprayed with Mace by Dingwalls’ security and Adam had to go to hospital. But there was a review the next week in Music Week magazine, a bone-dry music industry paper, about a new band called ‘the Feymour’. It said that they were good. We did more gigs around Camden and New Cross. People from college came and flailed about down at the front.
I thought it was kind of the people who ran the Beat Factory to let us use the studio and eat all their cheese. It seemed very generous of them. They wanted to manage the band. They sent demo tapes and a copy of the Dingwalls Music Week review to all the record labels. Andy Ross, who had a record company called Food, was the only one who liked the demo enough to come and see us. He bought us beers. He was nice and we appreciated the drinks. Bands don’t get paid for those support slots.
The hottest new bands all played in the back room of a pub in Camden Town called the Falcon. Andy said he’d bring his business partner to see us when we played there. We were the second support band at the tiniest venue in London, but it was the glimmer of an opportunity and we pulled out all the stops to get as many people to that show as possible. Graham designed flyers with a man eating himself and we stuck them up around college. We made certain that all the nutters and
freakers came. There was one guy, a posh American kid, who would go into a completely wigged-out trance. That always looked good. He was confirmed to attend and give it everything on the night. He was in love with Adam’s Amazonian sister Jo, who was rumoured to have lived in a graveyard in Islington. She was coming too. We pulled a crowd of about thirty committed arty outsiders for the big night.
All the early shows were shambolic. We poured wine all over each other before we went on and during the set, and usually smashed up the drums on the last song. Occasionally, when it was going really well, we’d smash them up before the end. That used to annoy Dave. There were gaps where things came unplugged and amps fell over as we bundled around the stage. It was carnage, and very loud. It was great fun.
Some of the songs were supposed to hurt. Andy’s partner, Dave Balfe, didn’t like those very much, he said at the bar afterwards. He asked lots of questions and said we were mainly rubbish, but very occasionally brilliant. All that we knew about Dave Balfe was that he had been the keyboard player in the Teardrop Explodes. He was in his mid-thirties and he talked and looked like a mad headmaster. I liked him straight away. I loved the Teardrop Explodes.
They took us out for lunch, a pizza, near their office in Soho. A month later we had signed to them, with the proviso that the drummer wouldn’t wear pyjamas and that we changed our name.
I went to see the head of second-year French. She was a nice lady. She conducted the Old French Literature module. It was all books about knights and witches. I told her I had been offered a record deal. I was supposed to be going to live in France for a year. She was genuinely quite excited. She said she’d been to see Eric Clapton the night before and that I could sit my end-of-year exams the following month, then take a year out and come back if things didn’t work out. I didn’t go back to college after that except to sit the exams, and I missed one of those. My best result was in Eighteenth-Century Literature, which was surprising because I hadn’t read any eighteenth-century literature. Not going to France had been a mistake. I only got 3 per cent in French Language. There was a lot of red pen on the exam paper. I’d really appalled whoever marked it, you could tell. There were lots of crossings out and exclamation marks, question marks and exasperated triple underlinings. The signing off remark was ‘Is the candidate lucid?’
