Bit of a Blur

by Alex James

  Home

  I loved staying in hotels, and going everywhere, but I wanted to live in Soho. It’s an enticing place. I found it surprising that more people didn’t want to live there. Soho is a constant carnival. It’s where people go to enjoy themselves and there is something there to please everybody. It has glitz and it has grime. Immeasurable wealth and absolute destitution rub along side by side. The overwhelming rush of chic sophistication, theatres, restaurants, neon, and the crude sexiness of people drunk en masse made my heart beat faster. Soho has a fairy-tale history and a future that’s open wide. The present moment always holds more possibilities in Soho than anywhere else in the kingdom, thousands of faces behind thousands of open doors, countless things about to happen. It’s alive and you never know what it’s going to do next.

  I loved it. It seemed infinite and I just wanted to hurl myself into the chaos. After much searching and disappointment, viewings of dingy bedsits that shared bathrooms with prostitutes, and portered blocks that smelled of gravy, Justine and I discovered an unfurnished one-bedroom flat above a shop in Covent Garden on the corner of Endell Street and Shaftesbury Avenue. It had a tiny loo, a lounge with an open fire, and people thronging past in the street below. The bedroom was sunny, the kitchen was slug-free and there was hot water in the bathroom. It was being refurbished; it was still a building site but it was perfect.

  I’ve never wanted to live anywhere quite as much as I wanted to live there, the moment that I walked in. It was on the first floor of a four-storey building between a church and an enormous hostel for the homeless and the entrance to the flat was down a little alley where the drunk ones staggered to urinate and vomit. It’s rare that you get to choose exactly where you live. There’s usually some practicality or other to consider, but once we’d tiptoed through the puddles, that was the perfect spot.

  I paid the support band’s roadie to help move all our crap up from New Cross. Everything we owned fitted into his van quite easily and it all looked revoltingly dirty in the pristine new flat. There was an old tapestry screen that had seemed quite exotic in the borough of Lewisham; it looked like junk in Covent Garden. We didn’t have a fridge and there was no furniture, but it didn’t matter. I quite liked not having anything. Having nothing is quite relaxing. Being alive and in the middle of the chase was all that mattered. You can live without chairs, but you can’t live without dreams.

  Dreams were all I had when I met Justine. I was a romantic at heart, full of indefinable yearning and impossible schemes. I didn’t have ruthless ambition, but I’d stumbled into something that was beginning to find a momentum of its own.

  She loved me when I was a write-off, an unqualified supermarket no-hoper. As the band started to become successful the new friends that I started to make liked me partly just because I was a part of something successful. It became a part of me. But Justine and I always had a natural, easy-going magnetism for each other. We had no television. We played board games and walked the streets together, read to each other. We both loved music. I expressed myself through it and she expressed herself to it. She was effortlessly elegant, a natural dancer. She listened and she laughed and she was always surprising me. She understood me in ways that I couldn’t. I loved her.

  The tragedy of getting what you want is that when you do actually get it, you always lose what you had.

  Canada

  The practicalities of the big time started to take over. The band’s growing popularity meant that I could afford to live in the flat in Covent Garden, but when we weren’t in Maison Rouge finishing the album we were on the road touring or doing promotion. Despite mediocre album sales, the success of ‘There’s No Other Way’ catapulted the band into the international arena. The day after we moved to Covent Garden, the first North American tour kicked off. The first date was in Toronto. For some reason there was no direct flight, and we had to keep getting on smaller planes. It was quite all right to fly back then; planes were like flying pubs. You could smoke and you didn’t have to pay for anything. I was happy getting drunk with Graham, wherever it was. You have to get used to being on planes if you want to sell records, anyway.

  None of us had crossed the Atlantic before. I don’t know what I was expecting. I imagined the mustard in America would be hotter than it is at home, that America would be somehow more intense than England. It’s quite nice, American mustard, but it’s rather mild. Japan has got the really hot stuff.

  My passport came under close scrutiny at immigration control. I’d jumped in a fountain after a show in Lille a couple of weeks earlier, and it had been in my pocket. The official was quite appalled by this. The Canadians, particularly, like to have a really good look at everyone before they let them come into the country. We were taken into little booths and questioned. They want to make sure that you’re not going to try and overthrow the established order. I ticked a box on the immigration form that said this was not the purpose of my visit, but the official was suspicious. And I suppose she was right. As I stood outside the airport, waiting for the next thing to happen, I started to feel that travel is the great adventure. I was glimpsing the world beyond the one that I knew and getting a sense of how big it might be.

  A sense of vastness looms in Canada. We mainly have towns in the British Isles. Even London gives the impression of being a town. It’s built on the human scale. In North America they mainly have cities. Even places that could really be quite small are built along supergalactic dimensions; skyscrapers and ten-lane road networks with flyover systems that look like scribble. I’d never thought of Toronto, particularly, and here it was, enormous, in an enormous country.

  I went down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast, alone. I was trying to work out what an English muffin was, and whether to have that, or an omelette. It was nice to be ordering breakfast in Canada. I was quite content there, alone, studying the menu. Someone was looking at me. He came over and said he was from the record company and hi there. I said oh, hello, I was thinking I might just have a look around the city today, and wouldn’t that be nice? He straightened up and said, ‘Well, sure thing. Perhaps we could do that after dinner and before the show.’ And gave me a list and said, ‘Here’s your promo.’ It said something like:ALEX JAMES PROMO SCHEDULE, TORONTO, OCTOBER 1991

  Press

  0930 Scenester, music glossy - 45,000 readers

  1000 Toronto Sun, daily broadsheet -1 million readers

  1030 HMV In-store magazine - record store giveaway

  1100 Glitz n Bitz, women’s glossy - 120,000 readers

  1130 Break

  1145 Phoner with Halifax Echo, regional daily -100,000 readers

  Radio

  1200 Alex and Damon to CFNY, syndicated national radio I/V

  TV

  1330 Meet Dave and Graham at MTV for acoustic set

  1500 Arrive venue Lee’s Palace for soundcheck

  At Venue

  1700 Meet and greet with competition winners

  1800 Dinner

  2100 Showtime

  After Show

  Meet and greet with EMI staff and key media.

  It was only 0900 so I went back to my room and called Cousin Dick, who lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a couple of hundred miles away. I hadn’t spoken to him since I’d sat on his knee and watched Tom and Jerry. I said, ‘Dick, it’s Alex James, Jason’s son. I’m in Toronto!’ He said, ‘I know, it’s in the paper.’ We were evidently quite famous in Canada. That didn’t make any sense at all. We’d never been there or anything. I went upstairs to be hot-wired to the media main.

  Journalists are all quite clever, often cleverer than I am, I find. When they don’t like me it really annoys them that they are clever and they are getting fifty pence a word and I’m an idiot with a fancy haircut and getting all the money and all the girls. It’s best not to talk to those ones. Generally the cleverest ones work for the papers with the stupidest readers. These papers have the biggest circulations, so they can afford to pay the most. That’s how it works.
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  There is a knack to doing interviews. It’s mainly a knack thing, the interview, like playing the bass is. We didn’t quite have the knack, yet. It takes a while to come. For addressing the press there was a big suite on the top floor of the hotel, The Plaza on Bloor Street. I like that hotel. It’s a tall building and the sun screeches in. The first interview was with a music journalist, and we talked about the Undertones for ages. He loved the album, and couldn’t believe he was being paid to talk to me. I ordered some Bloody Marys for us. It was nice.

  The man from the Toronto Sun was interested in our controversial artwork. I said it wasn’t controversial, it was a pair of tits. He wrote that down. I ordered six Bloody Marys and he wrote that down as well. I knew he would. It seemed easy, being in the paper. I launched into a kind of acceptance speech, thanking the Canadian people for everything and said a big hello to my relations, the Vines, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. That didn’t seem to get to him, though. He was getting bored. He was probably off to talk to the Prime Minister next. It seemed to be quite a serious newspaper. I was on my fourth Bloody Mary and showing him my handstand when the Glitz n Bitz lady came in. Graham and I had been doing a lot of handstands.

  Justine was in another world a long, long way away. The Glitz n Bitz lady was attractive and intelligent. We lay on the bed. She had a Bloody Mary, and reached inside my trousers and gave me a handjob. My moral cloth was degenerating further. That definitely was my biggest crime so far. But, good God, I was enjoying myself.

  There was a jam of people clamouring outside the radio station when we arrived, and at the gig for soundcheck. They were much more enthusiastic than people had been at home. They were crazy about the record, and some of them started to get hysterical. Things were already well past weird when Glenn Tilbrook from the band Squeeze appeared in the dressing room. He was quite drunk, and very happy. Graham was beside himself. Some men with natty suits appeared and said hi they were from our American record company and that they’d flown up from New York wasn’t everything in-credible and grinned and gave pumping handshakes. One of them had a penetrating stare and a breath-freshener atomiser that he kept dosing himself with. Graham and Glenn were drinking a bottle of brandy and doing handstands and knocking everything over. Squirt-squirt went the atomiser. The Glitz n Bitz lady came in and started snogging me. Squirt. No one could find Dave or the lighting guy. Squirt-stare-squirt.

  Dave finally arrived in great spirits. The show was raucous and the man from the American record company’s eyes were popping by the time we’d finished. He shook his head and said it was too loud.

  We drove around the shores of Lake Ontario, stopping at Niagara Falls for lunch on our way to the USA. On the road the same things repeat themselves every day - the travelling, service stations, interviews, soundchecks and shows. We launched ourselves at everything with missionary zeal, but there is a steady rhythm beneath the apparent total chaos, although the barometer was still rising all the time. Things were getting more spectacular and happening faster.

  Touring had changed a bit from the days of playing to thirty people in York and driving back in the middle of the night in Jason’s VW, taking it in turns to sit next to him and pinch him when he looked sleepy. Being on tour is a hard feeling to explain or even remember, a gale of constant accelerations and stimulations and no time to dwell on anything.

  All our petty wishes were granted - sex on tap, bars that never closed and where we didn’t have to worry too much about the bill. It was a constantly unfolding escapade. I loved it, but I felt crap the majority of the time. The part of my brain that makes sense of everything was having a great time, but the part of me on the ground was having trouble functioning on not enough sleep, excess alcohol intake and travel fatigue.

  There was more friction on tour than in the studio, naturally. We couldn’t escape each other’s irritating behaviour. Damon and his stupid love beads, Graham and his stupid skateboard collection, Dave’s overall lack of panache and my own annoying habit of pointing these things out to them; but disputes were short-lived. We were brought back together nightly, in the rapture of playing loud music.

  By now we had a road crew and these were the people we spent our days with. The road crew live on a bus and wear free T-shirts and smelly jeans. They are men of vast experience. They do tend to be quite nice people, despite appearances and reputations. The front-of-house sound man is usually the most sophisticated member of the crew; he’s generally a bit less sticky looking than everyone else. Sound men are always fiddling about with soldering irons. You know you’ve got a good one when he shows you a strange-looking box he’s made for making guitars louder.

  The front-of-house sound man is the senior member of the sound crew. The backline guys deal with the stuff that’s on the stage, the instruments and amplifiers. They are the rock gentleman’s gentlemen. I inherited my roadie from Motorhead. He’d given many years’ service and knew every bassline, hotel, service station and rock venue in the Western world. He was always polishing my guitar and twiddling screws on it and asking me to stop throwing it in the drums. He loved guitars. He really cared about them. I used them a bit like biros, chewing them up and losing them.

  You can’t have a show without lights so there has to be a lighting crew. Lampies are often maniacs so they have an affinity with drummers. They are feral creatures, modern-day pirates. They sail the land seeking only drugs, women and free T-shirts.

  There is a tour manager, too. He has to stop fights, get everyone on the bus and look after the money. Tour management is acknowledged to be the toughest job in all showbusiness. We seemed to get through a lot of tour managers.

  New York

  After the first American show in Boston, Damon and I flew down to New York for promo, just the two of us. We were a four-piece band and I was always slightly piqued when I was left out of things. We were all constantly jockeying for position - that’s what gave the group its dynamism - but lately the other two were unbroadcastable, so they were happy to stay in bed.

  There was a white stretch limo waiting for us at the airport. It was full of booze and televisions and phones. I called my mum. I said, ‘It’s all fine, I’ve moved out of the squat. I’m in New York, in a limousine.’

  Two of my mother’s aunts were hoofers, and my father’s uncle was a jazz pianist. There were showbusiness genes on both sides of the family, but as far as my parents were concerned I might as well have told them I was joining the circus when I left college. They were always supportive, but the music industry was quite beyond their experience - theirs and almost everyone in Bournemouth. It would have been impudent to tell the careers officer at school that I wanted to be in a band. For a start I hadn’t studied music. But it was just there in my blood and in my racing heart.

  We sailed over Brooklyn Bridge and landed at The Paramount Hotel in Times Square. There aren’t many places that overwhelm quite like New York. It was hard for someone who’d been living in a squat until a week before to accept just quite how wonderful The Paramount was. It was the first great hotel of the nineties, the monumental vision of Ian Schrager, one of the people behind Studio 54, the most legendary nightclub in history. Studio 54 was where Andy Warhol and Truman Capote danced with Liz Taylor and Audrey Hepburn, while Chic and Debbie Harry drank cocktails.

  The Paramount was almost as glamorous. The staff were all hired from modelling agencies and wore designer costume; the cavernous reception area was a kind of ark in which all the best things in the world had been tastefully assembled.

  I opened the door to my room. It was dark apart from a single spot-lit rose in a ceramic phial. I’ve never seen a rose look that good, not in an English country garden. It was exhilarating just to be in that hotel. The rooms were exceptionally small but, from the pencil on the bedside bureau to the power plumbing, exquisitely starched bedding and huge fluffy towels, absolutely perfect. Everything that’s good eventually finds its way to New York. It has such immense gravity that nothing that is truly wonderful can a
void it for long. All the super-models have homes in New York; all the great artists have shows there; film stars; rock stars; writers and the cavalry of wannabes, hangers-on and shagnasties that pursues the moving member’s club of the successful, the beautiful and the fabulous. You name it. It’s there. It’s the best place in the world to go for a drink.

  There is always one place that’s the one cool place in New York, and that’s where all the famous people who are in the city that night want to go. They all want to meet each other. It’s difficult to get in to the one cool place, but once you’re in you’re in, and you can’t actually get out. By then it’s impossible not to meet these people. A brief residence in Manhattan is a clamouring, yammering public appearance from the moment you arrive. I’ve stayed under a false name. The phone still didn’t stop ringing. I didn’t answer the phone. Famous people came and banged on the door. It’s full on and non-stop and there’s nowhere to hide. To be in New York is to be on display.

  Still, at this stage we weren’t very well known in America, but the gig was quite a hot ticket. The guest list was a roll-call of all the English people in bands in New York on that day. There are always plenty of those, a remarkable number. It would be hard to avoid spotting one in the street or in the hotel. It was quite creepy, the number of times the singer from Del Amitri kept appearing, never at our shows, just randomly around the world. ‘Graham! I saw him again! I saw him again!’ Soon, we started to look out for him.

  It was packed at the Marquee. I went out to the bar in the front of house with Damon. We quickly got thrashed to bits on vodkas and limes; told everyone to fuck off; snogged each other and then had a fight on the floor. We destroyed the venue in the course of the show. All the record company cheeses were sitting at tables on the balcony, staring. Damon got on the balcony and danced on the tables and spilled their sparkling mineral waters. Graham had a fight with his guitar. I tried to high-jump the drumkit and had a fight with Dave, quite a bad one. I felt we’d given a pretty good account of ourselves, but the record company weren’t impressed. No one from the label came backstage, but a message was sent requesting a breakfast meeting at the hotel.