Bit of a Blur

by Alex James

  I left the venue with a model, and went back to her warehouse in SoHo. She was on the cover of Vogue. It was on the coffee table.

  Another one-night stand. It wasn’t like I pursued these women. It was suddenly as simple as not resisting. Still, I was more than willing and it was the same act of betrayal. There were so many reasons to say yes and only one reason to say no, and she was an ocean away.

  When I woke up it was gone breakfast time and I scarpered back to the hotel. The manager was waiting outside the door. He was red. He said, ‘Where the hell have you been?’ I said, ‘I’ve been to the top!’ He said, ‘Go and clean your teeth and get back down here, to the bottom. The record company want to have words.’

  The man from the record company obviously had something difficult to say. I don’t think he had encountered drunkenness on the scale that he had seen last night, and he was disappointed. His job was probably on the line. He said we needed to ‘seize a golden ring of opportunity’, and other half-baked motivational hocus-pocus. We stayed very quiet.

  I wanted to buy a guitar. Graham came with me. We walked out of the meeting into the lobby. Sitting on one of the architectural sofas, like a holy apparition, was Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine. They were one of five bands that we name-checked in interviews. The other four bands had either split up or died. He nodded to us, so we walked over, nudging each other. He said he’d been to the show and it was great. He told me where to go to get a good acoustic guitar. Any psychiatrist will tell you that the respect of your peers is more valuable than any amount of record company bollocks.

  Then we went to New Jersey.

  London

  We got back from that tour the day before my twenty-third birthday, back to a new life in the West End. There is rumoured to be treasure buried beneath Trafalgar Square. I’m sure there is. Even if it’s just a rumour, a big proportion of all the wealth in the country is within about half an hour’s walk of Nelson’s Column and every day I woke up in the middle of it and felt it all around me.

  I picked my way around town, never happier than when I had nothing in particular to do apart from maybe buy some rope and a piece of cheese. The very first flush of success was the most enjoyable, the initial paradigm shift from wanting something to actually getting it, but by then it was already too late. Success is the most addictive commodity in the cosmos.

  My heroes were an old bastard called Jeffrey Bernard, a reprobate drunkard and writer of columns of great wit, and a fictional prostitute called Aunt Augusta from Graham Greene’s Travels with my Aunt. I decided to concentrate on being an alcoholic genius.

  I’d seen how the record company arranged things while we were in America. They’d call wherever it was they wanted to take us and say something like, ‘Hiii, this is SPUD FENSTER from EMI RECORDS, I’ve got the GUYS FROM BLUR in town, they’d love to come around. CAN YOU PUT THEM ON THE LIST?’ It never failed in America. It’s an expensive business, being a man-about-town. I thought I’d try my luck, and got the phone book out. Justine called and said the magic words EMI, Blur and guest list. It worked nearly everywhere. Ronnie Scott’s, the jazz club in Frith Street, was about the only place where it wouldn’t wash. I got through to Ronnie. He said, ‘Blur? Never heard of ’em. They’ll have to pay like everyone else.’ It was towards the end of the evening, and I started arguing with him. The last thing I remember saying was ‘wanker’ and the next thing I heard, a couple of weeks later, was that he was dead. I felt bad about that.

  I was systematically working my way through all places of revelry in the whole of the West End, but what I really needed to set myself up in business as a practising alcoholic genius was an HQ.

  Freud’s was a subterranean cocktail bar on Shaftesbury Avenue. I’d been there once, as it was near the house. The barman had mad dreadlocks, and I saw him at a party after a Jesus Jones gig a couple of weeks later. His name was Mark, and he said, ‘Come down, I’ll make you a cocktail.’ I went there the next night. It was a tasteful room, all slate and plaster with mood lighting around the tables and tracklights on the bar, which was very well appointed. There were hundreds of bottles of different spirits and liqueurs on shelves, sticks of celery, bowls of lemons and limes, whizzers, twizzlers, whirlers and shakers, juicers, a coffee machine and a sandwich toaster. You could buy the art on the walls if you got drunk enough. There were pretty girls there, too.

  I’d never drunk cocktails really properly. We were still Newcastle Brown men at heart. To start with, Mark made me one called a Long Island Iced Tea. It’s all the clear spirits shaken with ice in a large tumbler and topped to the brim with orange juice. It tasted like lollipops. It was very good indeed. He was an expert. We had some B52s next. They’re on fire and you have to drink them through a straw. Then he made margaritas, very dry, with the glass dipped in salt so that you tasted it on the rim. I said that I was going to come here every day. He said, ‘You should, you’ve got your own entrance!’ There was an iron staircase at the back of the room behind the piano. It went straight into our alleyway. It was true. It was my own entrance. He said we’d better have a beer. He said you needed to drink a fizzy one after every three cocktails. The bubbles help your body absorb the spirits, otherwise they build up in your stomach and you drink more than you can manage. I love the nuggets of advice shared by seasoned booze guzzlers. The best one ever was to have one day off drinking every week. That’s the vital one. Then bills got paid, I phoned my mum and I learned how to say no. A door that I’d lived next to for three months had suddenly opened on to what became an extra room of the flat. A city is just a whole lot of doors, and if you walk through the right ones anything can happen.

  It didn’t seem to matter which direction I walked from Covent Garden; there was a lot to see and I did a lot of wandering. It was part of my broader research. The Inns of Court and the eerie shanty town of mad, masturbating down and outs at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The river: Cleopatra’s Needle with its inexplicable consort of sphinx and unthinkable Second World War blast damage. There were few overt reminders of the ravages of war in London. It was fundamentally a city at peace. I wandered through the parks, the alleys and thoroughfares feeling a part of it all and gradually finding myself at home.

  Justine left The Body Shop and started doing make-up for photo shoots; she usually got a couple of jobs a week, but it meant we were poor again. Despite my infidelity, we were closer then than ever. We’d been together for four years by that time. She was the first woman I’d ever been able to be myself with. She gave me confidence and banished doubt.

  Until then the band had all lived within walking distance of each other. But around the time Leisure came out we balkanised. Graham moved to Marylebone, which was still in walking distance, but he went to the pubs there mainly. We’d always gone to the same places before. Damon went west, to Kensington, where the pubs weren’t very nice, and Dave went north to Archway, where they were really horrible.

  Trouble

  There are all kinds of deals to be done when people start to like your music. A record deal is the obvious one; that’s for the records. Publishing is for the songs. They’re different things, records and songs, so if Blur recorded a song written by someone else, Blur would get a recording royalty and whoever wrote the song would get a publishing royalty. It’s called publishing because it goes back to the days of sheet music, when songwriters had their music physically published. We did a publishing deal, which should have put some money in our pockets, but Balfe had persuaded us to spend the money on some more mental crazy amazing lights for the live shows. But they were a flop and he bought them back from us, cheaply. Come to think of it, I never saw the ‘She’s So High’ lights again, either.

  Mike Smith was Blur’s publisher and he moved into a bachelor bedsit on Rupert Street. Rupert Street was about the sleaziest, nastiest, low-downest corner of Soho. I went round to see him with Justine. It wasn’t the sort of flat that you could entertain in, or even really stay in for very long. It just had a bed in
it and approximately a million records. We went to the Crown, Brewer Street, and played darts even though he wasn’t drinking and I was having a day off. He was one of the best people to go out for a few drinks with, or go without a few drinks with. At that particular moment he was trying to sign Teenage Fan Club. He was always trying to sign someone. That was his job: deciding which bunch of drunk idiots he should give a big slice of corporate cash to next. We were the first ones he’d signed.

  I always liked listening to the demos Mike got sent. We were both big fans of the Keatons. They were a twelve-piece sonic terrorism outfit. One of them didn’t play an instrument. Instead he did things with honey. It got sticky at Keatons’ gigs. He wasn’t sure whether to sign them or not. For me, the Keatons were a no-brainer. He played a song called ‘Creep’ by a new band called Radiohead. We quite liked it. It was a bit depressing though. He said that they hardly drank at all. I passed on them. He couldn’t afford them. The Cranberries took us all by surprise. He was really miffed about not spotting the Cranberries, they were a bargain.

  I was living the good life, but I wasn’t really making any money. It didn’t bother me. Accumulating wealth wasn’t the purpose of the band. I did start to notice that bills weren’t always paid. Sometimes we couldn’t use a particular hire company any more. Quite often people would ask us how we got on with our manager, and whether it was working out.

  Some of the big retailers stock records on a sale or return basis. The album had stopped selling and Woolworths returned quite a lot of copies. Then a really big bill came from the VAT man and we couldn’t afford to pay it. It was serious. I had no idea what VAT was. I was good at playing the bass and showing off. That was my job. We trusted our manager to make sure that those kinds of unpleasantnesses were taken care of. It turned out that quite a lot of bills remained unpaid. We owed everybody money. We brought in new accountants, who told us we were staring bankruptcy in the face and facing prison if we couldn’t come up with the cash to pay the VAT. Whenever this happens it’s time to start looking for a new manager.

  We went back to see Chris Morrison, the manager who hadn’t taken us for lunch the first time. He had spent the whole meeting talking about business and Ultravox and Thin Lizzy and laughing like Basil Brush occasionally. He took us on. He said, ‘You’re going to have to go back to America to get some cash.’ He loves doing deals. He did a deal with a T-shirt company and signed us up for a thirteen-week American extravaganza, so that we could sell some T-shirts and posters and pay off our debts. It was the only way to get money. Fortunately Jesus Jones, our label mates at Food, had the number one album there, and the American record company really had no choice but to finance the tour. We’d lose about a quarter of a million dollars on a thirteen-week stint, but we’d just owe that to the record company, which is what record companies are for. The main thing was we’d get some instant cash from selling T-shirts. We were ready for another American odyssey. We thought.

  5

  the genesis of britpop

  Grunge

  The music media moved to a weekly rhythm. The seven-day cycle of charts, playlists, the NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and Record Mirror meant that scenes and styles came and went quickly. It was around the end of baggy and the start of shoe-gazing when we left London to go and sell our T-shirts.

  Thirteen weeks, a quarter of a year, is quite a long time however you look at it. The day we arrived in New York was a noteworthy one in the annals of pop. It was the exact day, in September 1991, that Nirvana released their masterpiece, Nevermind. It’s no exaggeration to say that Nevermind was the most significant American record of the decade and that the world changed that day.

  American rock music had been quite dull for as long as anyone could remember: squeaky-clean and faintly ridiculous. Suddenly here was a sound, a look, an attitude and a record that united all disaffected young white Americans. Right up until then, British music had been selling well in America. A succession of pop acts like EMF and Jesus Jones had number one singles in the Billboard charts and a string of Manchester bands, the Stone Roses, the Charlatans, the Happy Mondays, had staged a British invasion of college radio stations.

  Until Nirvana there was no subversive American music to compete with the stuff that was being made in England. American radio stations were crying out for bands from Manchester, like you or I might insist on having some cheese from France or chocolate from Belgium. A&R men gave huge sums of money to bands like Northside, and the High on the basis that Manchester was an enchanted place where great music comes from. Of course it is, but it very quickly became yesterday’s news. It shouldn’t have affected us, because we weren’t from there. The trouble was that everyone assumed we were. They said we had that Manchester sound. Manchester was dead and buried by the end of the week. The only place it was reasonable to come from if you wanted to make records at that time was Seattle.

  SBK Records was on the forty-second floor of a skyscraper on the Avenue of the Americas, slap in the middle of Manhattan. A peculiarly tidy workplace and more like our accountants’ offices than the EMI building, it had zero glamour, a stiff atmosphere. Nobody laughed or had a hangover or called us darling. The company had already requested we make a different video for ‘There’s No Other Way’ which we had done, and it was soon clear that they were keen for us to make other changes; drink less; smarten up our act generally: don’t stay out late; don’t fool around with women - it was like we’d got married to them.

  For the American record company the ideal band would all be sober, constantly grinning, nice about everybody and happy to let the label make the records and videos. We were used to record company pressure from Food. It’s a healthy thing. Ultimately, Food’s idea of what a great rock and roll band sounded like and behaved like was quite similar to our own, that’s partly why we signed to them - that and the fact that nobody else liked us. The rub is always that bands are trying to express themselves, which is satisfying, creative and worthwhile; record companies are trying to please everybody, which is pointless, vacuous and not what art is.

  There were piles and piles of Blur promotional CDs around the office, which were in the process of being mailed to radio stations. We didn’t know anything about these records. What were they? The artwork on the cover was weak, a ‘blurred’ image. The colours were not strong either. The title was also bad, ‘Blurti-go’.

  The man with the oral hygiene spray called us into his big office and gave us all the thrusting handshake. He said he was ‘toadally pumped’ about the remix. We said, ‘What remix?’

  He explained that our record hadn’t been quite right, but they’d managed to fix that. ‘These remixer guys, they’re reeelly, reeelly haat.’ It took him a long time to say each ‘really’, and ‘hot’ came out with a wallop. It had about five exclamation marks. He put a lot of himself into the statement and we all felt his pain. He played the remix at low volume and tapped his foot and shook his head around. He was burning. He believed in energy.

  The mix, which was of ‘Bang’, was exceptionally bad. The band had been removed and replaced by a mixture of the High and Northside with a baggy beat. It was a disaster, an embarrassment, and it was already being sent to radio stations. The worst thing that could happen would be that radio stations played it. He said, ‘Guys! You gotta trust me on this one’, and he showed us his pain again.

  I woke up in The Paramount with a girl called Mary, who I met at a Dinosaur Jr gig. We had some strawberries for breakfast and I went to Boston.

  Bands always go to Boston after New York. There’s probably nothing wrong with it but leaving New York is a wrench every time and I always arrive in Boston and wonder what the hell I’m doing there. Record companies are terrified of Boston just like indie bands were terrified of Neil at Syndrome. There are so many college kids there that it’s become a sort of test market. If the radio station in Boston starts to play a record, dozens of others across the USA follow the lead.

  It’s still about the most important thing f
or a record, radio play. If the record gets on the radio, then you’re in business. So Boston is important.

  The gig in Boston was part of a radio festival spectacular. The station had put a lot of oomph behind the event and the record company saw it as a vital building block. We’d discovered a new drink called Jägermeister. It tasted a lot like cough medicine. I’d spent the previous night at a bar on Lansdowne Street drinking those. There are half a dozen clubs on Lansdowne and if you’re playing at one of them you get a pass for all of them. I left Graham at the one that was playing Dinosaur Jr records and went to the one that was playing Sister Sledge. It had girls dancing in cages. The Sugarcubes were on an American tour as well and I’d seen Einar the night before in New York. He was a poet sort of person. He was having a lot of fun dancing to Sister Sledge with Björk. He was so happy. We had some Jägermeister and he said, ‘I’m gay’, pinched a girl’s bum and fell over laughing.

  It’s easy to meet people in America, especially if you’re English. I asked the girls in the cages if they wanted to come back to the hotel for a game of cricket. The hotel lobby was deserted as everyone goes to bed at eleven o’clock in Boston. The cricket got out of control when Graham arrived and insisted on fast bowling. The girls didn’t have a clue what cricket was, anyway.