Bit of a Blur

by Alex James

  We went to bed insensible and woke up invincible. Cambridge was a town completely different in every detail from the one where we’d spent the previous day. It was very odd, perpetually being somewhere new, and with some money in my pocket. The following day we were on a university campus in Staffordshire, playing football with a band called the Family Cat. Jason was our star player. He’d had a trial for West Ham. We were bottom of the bill that night, but there was a bit of a rumpus going on about the picture of the girl on the hippo on the record sleeve. It was degrading to women in the opinion of some of the young ladies at the college, and they mounted a protest and tried to stop us from playing. It seemed ridiculous, but it was in the newspapers the next day. Quite why that was in the news over everything else that was happening in the world that day was hard to fathom. Maybe it was just a good picture.

  Difficult Second Single Syndrome

  The really great thing about the band was that it was just that, a band: four people. Together, we were greater than the sum of our parts. Damon was dynamic, an initiator. The whole thing was driven by his energy, but he and Graham were childhood best friends and complemented each other perfectly, musically. Graham was simply the best guitar player of his generation. He was consumed by music; listening to it, playing it, whistling or tapping his fingers the whole time. He was biologically a guitar player in the same way that Damon was a born frontman. The bass guitar was my instrument. Unlike the others, I hadn’t had any formal training. I learned by listening and actually playing in bands. I was in a band from that moment I’d played my first lick in Jay Burt-Smale’s bedroom.

  I played in quite an unconventional way with no respect for the boundaries of the instrument. It was more like having someone playing a second lead guitar in the basement. The sparse mechanical precision of Dave’s drumming was well suited to two guitarists both going at it hammer and tongs. It was uncanny how, with very little discussion, whenever we were all in a room together with our instruments, it all usually just seemed to work.

  It didn’t always. The second recording session was a disaster. We needed to make another record. Steven Lovell wasn’t around, but we went back to the studio with Steve Power. Nothing went right. He even got Graham to try playing bass, which didn’t work. It was the worst session I’ve ever been on. We chose the wrong songs, and we made them worse than they were already. It all sounded crap. The guys from EMI came down and stroked their chins. Even with more experience a bad session always feels like the end of the world. There aren’t many really bad days, but they’re certain to happen, sometimes. At this embryonic stage it felt catastrophic, spending all that time and money making something that was lifeless and worthless. It was Christmas, so we all went home for a rest.

  It was nice going back to Bournemouth and being signed to EMI. I had a sense that I was changing, still growing and leaving Bournemouth behind. In the pub on Christmas Eve I ran into Jackie who I’d had a crush on at an early age that I thought I’d never recover from. She suddenly seemed like quite a small and ordinary person. She was still going out with the drummer with ten A grade ‘O’ levels. Now he was back from college, training to be an accountant. She was standing at the bar, when I went to get a drink. I said, ‘Oooooh, hello.’

  ‘What are you doing now?’ she asked, barely disguising her boredom. I said, ‘I’m an accountant.’ I talked about how happy I was doing accounts. It was really quite interesting when you got into it. I was up for promotion, and maybe a car, I said, and started to quite enjoy myself. I said I had to go now, though, because I had to work on Christmas Day.

  A couple of years in London had given me a whole new outlook. It was something of a reunion in the pub on Christmas Eve, but you could already tell which people had spent time in London. Poor old Jackie hadn’t made it.

  Despite going home and showing off, the band were actually sliding right down slippery shitstrasse. The first record, despite reaching number forty-eight and being featured on Juke Box Jury, did not seem to impress EMI as much as it impressed our friends, and the abortive session before Christmas hung heavy. We needed a hit. Very early in the New Year, out of the blue, Balfe got a phone call asking if Blur needed a producer. It was Stephen Street.

  We all got the next train back to London and met him at Food in Soho. It was good to get back to London. It was home, now. I knew it was home as the train rolled into Waterloo and it all rose up around my ears and I thrilled in my stomach. I felt it that day, more than ever. Stephen Street needed no introduction. He’s about the only record producer whose name I knew. He produced the Smiths.

  He’s a handsome devil, Streetie. He’d actually been a teen mag cover star, on the back of his role as the Artful Dodger, in a stage production of Oliver!. We only found that out later, though, when his mum brought all her scrapbooks to his fortieth birthday party. We all instantly liked him. He said he’d never chased a band before - bands usually called him - but he had a good feeling about this one. He had a few days free the following week and suggested we try something. He liked to work at Maison Rouge, a proper eighties ocean liner of a studio, tucked in a little mews in Fulham. The eighties were just starting to founder, but it was still immaculate in there. I arrived one morning and Debbie Harry was standing in the brasserie having a coffee at the bar. I ordered a crème de menthe as I knew it was all they had left, and she laughed at me. It all seemed quite normal.

  Streetie is good with drums. He once said to me that a hit record is nearly all about the drums and a bit about the vocal. He said everyone else could do whatever they liked, really, if you got the drums and the voice right. Some producers would say that in a way that would make a bass player feel a bit redundant. He said it in a way that made me feel I had total freedom to groove my pants off. He’s a great diplomat, a statesman. I can say without any hesitation or doubt that he is the nicest man in pop. He’s one of the nicest men in the world and I still always get a birthday card from him.

  He really liked a song we had called ‘There’s No Other Way’, but we’d stopped playing it live. He said it was too fast, and that it would sound better at this speed. He pushed some buttons, which played a drum loop he’d made at home, in his shed. It was true about drums. It sounded like a hit already. I put the bass down in about ten minutes, and Graham had done the guitar before lunch. No one had said ‘tempo’ once. We came back after lunch and listened to it on the big speakers, as Damon sang the melody into my ear. It was heart-stopping. It made me shiver. Damon put a new keyboard line at the beginning. Dave added some drum fills. We turned the tape over so that the track played backwards and Graham played a guitar solo, so that when the tape was back up the right way, the solo played backwards. Balfe came down and went mental. He said ‘Top ten! Top ten!’ and dribbled all over his beard, and then he played the keyboard line from ‘Reward’ on our synth.

  There was a club called Syndrome in a basement in Oxford Street. All the indie bands used to go there on Thursdays. I think we started it, but everybody else thinks they did too. I first went there with Terry Bickers; he played guitar in the House of Love and he was a proper mad-eyed genius. Everyone in his new band, Levitation, had the mad-eye thing, especially the drummer. It was Neil’s night, really, Syndrome. Neil was the DJ at Syndrome on Thursdays and the number one indie fan in the whole of London. I’m sure A&R men took his opinions more seriously than their own. Neil just liked listening to music. He had no agenda whatsoever other than the fact that he particularly loved scruffy outsider guitar bands, and he hitched around the country seeing them. He came on our bus sometimes. We’d get really worried if he didn’t like something, or if he stopped stalking us. We thought it meant we’d lost our touch. Syndrome became the official headquarters of the London music underground. It didn’t get going till about midnight in there, so people who had to get up on Friday mornings weren’t likely to go. It wasn’t like it was anything worth seeing, if you weren’t in a band or an indie music journalist, although towards the end quite a lot of Japanes
e girls started to show up. We didn’t mind, because they wanted to buy us Pernod.

  At Syndrome it was fashionable to drink Pernod with everything and, as the drinks flowed, all the bands got to know each other. It was a scene. As soon as we’d finished recording ‘There’s No Other Way’, we took it straight to Neil’s night at Syndrome, like all the other bands did. Neil used to put the records on and dance madly to them, on the empty dance floor. He was really talented at picking good songs. Someone should have given him a record company to run, or a radio station, but all he really wanted to do was flap his arms around to new music all night. We stood at the bar waiting for the reaction of the test audience of die-hard, late-night indie kids. Lush were at the bar, so were Ride: they were eager to hear if our new record was as good as theirs. It was much more nerve-racking than Juke Box Jury. Chapterhouse, who were supposed to be better than all of us, that week, were listening carefully, and Moose, who Graham really liked, and Spitfire, and Slowdive and Suede and an unassuming American guy called Kurt and his girlfriend Courtney.

  The dance floor was full when the record started. It was still full at the end of the record. It didn’t really mean anything. It was two o’clock in the morning. It was when we were getting on the tour bus the next week and it unexpectedly came on the radio that we knew something different was happening.

  4

  the beginnings of success

  A Glimmer of Glamour

  ‘There’s No Other Way’ was a bona fide hit. It sold more and more copies each week and crept into the top ten. People knew all the words and sang along at the concerts, which were getting bigger and madder. More dates were booked. We started to appear on television. After shows I noticed that sometimes when I met people their hands were shaking.

  We were just beginning to taste something new and extraordinary: a cocktail of adulation and freedom. Balfe called us into his office for a meeting and said, ‘Watch out, guys, success can fuck you up more than failure.’ He was an expert bubble-burster. Andy Ross kept referring to our ‘career’. Career was a dirty word. It suggested work and conformity. I was an outlaw, a rebel. I didn’t want a career. I wanted to cause havoc. I was a hedonist. I wanted to get drunk and be irresponsible.

  I was quite resolute about that. I saw life merely as an opportunity to have as much fun as possible. All young people do, I think. Up until now excess had been limited by lack of funds, by having to get up in the morning and go to language laboratory and having to behave reasonably at college. Bands are quite exceptional in having absolutely no one to answer to. Once we’d made a good record, we could all do whatever we liked, whenever we liked, for as long as we liked. If I rationalised my decadence, I’d tell myself it was the duty of rock stars to indulge themselves beyond reasonable limits. If I couldn’t be reckless and extreme, I wasn’t doing my job properly.

  For me drink and drugs weren’t about escapism; they brought me more into the world, made me feel more alive, gave me the same stir of giddy, weightless acceleration as jumping off the cliffs at Fisherman’s Walk in Bournemouth. Making music, on the other hand, does take me right out of the world. It is a supreme feeling, touches ecstasy. It’s actually much the same sensation no matter how modestly or grandiosely I’m doing it - whether just sitting alone with a guitar or standing on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. It’s quite possible to get from one to the other in a very short space of time, but however large the audience may be, the feeling I get from making music is basically the same.

  Big hits all start life as tiny little ideas. Damon is left-handed, but he plays the guitar right-handed. He’s developed a unique technique that doesn’t use any of the normal chord shapes. He made demos on his four-track at home, and almost everything started with those. They usually consisted of a drum machine playing a preset pattern, an acoustic guitar playing the chords and him singing. They were short, unstructured, rough sketches, but they contained the vocal melodies that everything was ultimately built around. Graham didn’t often have to be told what the chords were and was usually playing along before the end of the tape.

  Usually we were all pulling in the same direction. Damon and Graham’s strengths complemented each other well and I added an element of groove to their architecture. The four of us had good musical chemistry. We were still developing, but we sounded like a unit.

  The distilled bold precision of a well-rehearsed four-piece letting fly can be as dynamic and complete, sonically, as a symphony orchestra. Playing with the band was utterly exhilarating and there wasn’t much to argue about. Chart success had given us all confidence and we were united. When Damon was unhappy about something he tended to become very animated. When Graham was unhappy, he became very withdrawn. Dave was just happy he didn’t have to drive the gear around any more.

  The material we recorded for the first album, Leisure, had been well honed over the course of the live shows, and in the studio there wasn’t a lot of writing left to be done. It was just a question of playing the songs well.

  Hotels

  Leisure came out to lukewarm reviews, but it made the top ten in the album charts. We released a new single, ‘Bang’. It got stinker of the week in Smash Hits. It snuck into the top thirty, but it didn’t catch fire. The disappointment was cushioned by a sold-out national tour to promote the album.

  We lived in hotels roughly half the time. Hotels fall into two categories: slightly decrepit, formerly grand places in city centres and newfangled execu-centres on ring roads with little hedges and leisure facilities. They both have their merits. We were quite at home in the venues, among the graffiti, the stickiness and the bad smells, so we didn’t turn our noses up at hotels. They are less sticky and smelly on the whole.

  Dave became fascinated by Corby trouser presses, which are a feature of every hotel room in the land. He said you could tell if they would keep the bar open all night by whether the trouser press was wall-mounted or free-standing. He could tell you exactly how good breakfast was going to be, just by looking at the trouser press. Having worked in a hotel, I knew exactly how demanding guests could be and I set about making myself a nuisance, calling reception and asking for more pillows, more towels, more bubble bath, some matches, board games, books, whether they served Ricicles at breakfast and if they knew anywhere I could get Golden Nuggets.

  Life on the road had a physical impact on all of us. One of Graham’s front teeth fell out while he was crawling around the corridors of The Swallow, a five-star hotel in Birmingham. I had heard him go past my room, pretending to be a dog again. He didn’t seem to be causing any more bother than usual but we were banned, which was a pity as it was a nice hotel. I’d developed a large boil on my chest. It really hurt when it popped, and the goo that came out smelled really nasty.

  Damon was holding it together, apart from his hernia, but no one really knew what Dave got up to. One day his nose was smashed all over his face and he was very quiet. Even when we weren’t on tour he seemed to suffer. Another time he’d caught fire and Damon had had to put him out. They lived next door to each other in Greenwich. A lot of hotels won’t take bands. There are only a handful of travel agents and they deal with all the bands on tour at any one time, so quite often there’d be another band staying at the hotel.

  We stumbled back to the Ramada Jarvis in Leicester, the willing, worn and comfy seat of many a travelling rock circus. We’d been playing at the university. The Darling Buds were in the bar, a pop band from Newport, South Wales. They’d played at the De Montfort Hall.

  I always seemed to have a lot to talk about with Graham and we sat at the bar inventing cocktails. He was interested in combinations of port and brandy. We were trying to make them catch fire. It was wonderful suddenly to be staying in places where the bar never shut and the other people there were some nice doctors having a medical conference and bands we liked.

  The first time I was unfaithful to Justine was about halfway through the first year at Goldsmiths. I was in London. She was in Bournemouth. I was drunk.
It wasn’t premeditated. It was a brief pornographic fantasy scenario with someone I’d never seen before, never saw again. I regretted it terribly and confessed. Justine was devastated, more hurt than angry. We both cried a lot and I knew I’d never do it again. Of course, there were pretty girls at college. I flirted with one or two of them, but I never had any intention of getting involved. I suppose, if I’m brutally honest, if I’d fallen in love with somebody else, I would have been a bit stupid to stay with Justine, but I didn’t. I wanted to be with her.

  The second time was a real disgrace. I snogged Raych. She wasn’t going out with Adam any more, but he still loved her, I think. He was long gone, but when I thought about it afterwards it seemed like a double whammy of treachery against him and against Justine. It was only a quick affectionate snog, but I definitely fancied Raych, which made it a worse crime. I didn’t tell Jus about that.

  Andrea, the singer from the Darling Buds, was a pin-up platinum blonde and that was the third time.

  The world had started to open up to us and it appeared there was no town that didn’t have beautiful women I could have married or interesting people I could have quite happily spent my life with.