Bit of a Blur

by Alex James

  Both Balfe and Andy started ranting, ‘You can do it your way or you can do it our way. Either way, it’s your last chance.’ ‘You drink too much.’ ‘Nobody is interested in British pop. It’s not going to happen.’ Balfe started playing ‘Reward’ on the keyboard again and everyone ignored him. I finished the bass on ‘Star Shaped’ and went Christmas shopping at Harrods with Graham.

  Damon wrote a song called ‘For Tomorrow’ at his parents’ house on Christmas Eve. We were supposed to have finished the recording by Christmas but it was too good to leave off the album. We went straight back to Maison Rouge in January and recorded it. It was symphonic, sophisticated, elegiac and elevating. We nailed it. Streetie said it was the best thing we’d ever done.

  British Image 1

  We posed for photos with a huge dog called Sherman, and scrawled ‘British Image 1’ on the backdrop. The photos were damned as xenophobic. Nobody wanted to play the video. The record went to number twenty-eight. The reviews said it was ambitious but anachronistic, and bade us farewell. We hit the road.

  We were always a kick-arse live band. A curious thing happened as we toured Modern Life. The audience changed. Throughout the first record the crowd had been mainly girls, but now the front row was mostly men. Suited and scootered, like a lost cavalry, came the mods.

  We kept on playing and we kept on recording.

  We were right on the breadline. We went to Japan to earn some more cash, and to investigate. Quite why the Japanese love British pop music so much is open to interpretation. They do, though. They love it. We had no idea we were big in Japan, but we got to the airport and there were quite a lot of people there, with presents, cameras and pieces of card for us to sign. It was surreal to disembark from an aircraft, jetlagged, poor and struggling, and to be greeted like princes, in a strange and wonderful land. They knew all about us. We each had our own little fan club. Graham seemed to have the biggest following. We were followed everywhere we went and were provided with security guards. They were completely unnecessary, as the girls were very respectful and polite. I think the security guards were there to make the girls feel more important.

  It takes a while to get the hang of Japan. There were fans in the hotel, fans at the record company, on the train, in the lift. They giggled and smiled and pointed. It was very pleasant, but interviews were difficult. There was usually an interpreter involved, and a hangover.

  The best nightclub in the world is in Roppongi, Tokyo, but it serves the worst booze. It’s called the Lexington Queen. It’s Bill’s place. If you’re ever in Tokyo, go and find Bill and tell him I sent you. There are many reasons why it is the best nightclub in the world. The first is that I never had to pay for a drink. There aren’t very many Western people in Japan. No one goes there on holiday, which is a shame. The majority of young Westerners in Tokyo are people in rock and roll bands, and models. Modelling is big business in Tokyo. Bill lets bands and models in for free, and doesn’t charge them for drinks. It was hard to understand how an arrangement that wonderful could exist, that I could go somewhere that was full of beautiful women and the drinks were free. Models love meeting people in bands. I met two or three girls at the Lex that I’d met in other places, one in Milan, one in Atlanta and one in London. That booming basement became my office in Tokyo for many years. I don’t ever remember it closing. The only drawback is that the Lexington Queen hangover is the most vicious and overwhelming of all the hangovers in the world. It is especially bad when combined with a ride on the bullet train, or a morning of interviews. It is a small price to pay. The Japanese also embrace getting absolutely smashed and smoking fags, and they have very good systems for beating hangovers. The spas are sensational, and a big bowl of noodle soup works wonders.

  We still managed to mess everything up in Japan. We were late. We were rude. We didn’t bow low enough. We didn’t play for long enough. We weren’t deliberately offensive, just naive. There is a lot of etiquette to observe in Japan and we burbled with bad protocol. I was often asked if I had any messages for my fans. I said, ‘Please stop throwing cheese at me.’ Cheese is very hard to get in Japan. It is so rare that it comes in tins, to preserve it. I had always expressed great interest in cheese in interviews. The fans had gone to great lengths to find cheese. A journalist reported me to the record company, and I was asked to apologise for abusing their generosity.

  Fan culture is highly developed in Japan.

  Festivals

  When I got back from Japan Justine had gone missing. I located her, finally, staying with friends in Worthing. I walked down to Leicester Square after a couple of refreshers at Freud’s, and soaked it all up. A fight broke out between a horrible thug and a little guy. I’ve never seen someone hit another person so hard. It was all the more shocking for coming straight after Japan’s whizzing serenity. Japan was so different from anywhere else I’d been. I found my perspective had shifted, that I was seeing the country of my birth through fresh eyes.

  We’d been travelling around Britain on and off for the last two years; I had a working knowledge of all the major cities and I liked every single one of them. On the whole people who live in sunny Bournemouth believe that people who live anywhere else are slightly mad. Why, they say, would anyone want to live in Coventry? It has no beach.

  At first glance, Britain has all the ugliest large towns in Western Europe and the most unfathomable metropolitan geography in the world. I had Manhattan worked out in about ten seconds. It’s almost impossible to get lost there. Modern cities are designed, designed around modern life. Britain’s historic towns have grown madly out of control like a force of nature, gardens running wild into a space age.

  In medieval Coventry all people really needed was somewhere to go to church, park their horses, swap turnips and watch Shakespeare, and no doubt it was as neat as a row of buttons back then. It underwent explosive growth during the industrial revolution and local planners must have just been getting their heads around the arrival of the ‘motor car’ and where to put the Rolls-Royce factory when the city was blitzed in 1940. It regenerated and expanded further to accommodate more heavy industry, which has since mostly vanished, to be replaced by technology-based businesses, and bands like the Specials. It’s been a continuous success story and I wouldn’t swap Coventry for Vienna. All those layers of history and transformation; it’s beautiful.

  I loved the brilliant chaos of our cities. The mood, as we toured the country with the new millennium slowly appearing on the horizon, had been nothing short of festive. Grunge music expressed pain, dissatisfaction and self-loathing, like the Smiths had ten years earlier, but young people in Britain had money, opportunities and each other and they were celebrating.

  No matter what anyone said, we knew we were a great band. The second single from Modern Life Is Rubbish was called ‘Chemical World’ and it went to number twenty-eight, too, the same as the last record. It wasn’t a smash, but there were some good signs. Eddie Izzard, my favourite comedian, mentioned in an interview that he listened to that song before he went onstage. We demoed some new tracks even though the album had only just been released. They were the best songs we’d ever written.

  It was the summertime and we went to Europe to play at some festivals. Festivals were a phenomenon that exploded in the nineties. The festival transformed from a countercultural beardy bong session into a mainstream mass phenomenon, like fishing and football. I think it was because the best music attracts the prettiest girls and when the pretty girls come, everyone else soon follows. What was basically a cross between a stadium gig and going camping suddenly became very appealing once the magic ingredient of pretty girls was added.

  The word ‘festival’ is a marketing device. It suggests a celebration, religious significance and culture. Festivals are just big gigs. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s more effective to do things on a huge scale. Huge bands, huge festivals and huge numbers of people mean the media come to cover the event and pick up on new things that are happening. A
band can’t really operate without getting involved with festivals. These temporary cities are all built on the same model. The crowds are out the front and they stay in tents, light bonfires, get spaced out and see all their favourite bands. Backstage is a like school for bad children.

  Some festivals are more like theme parks than others.

  Hultsfred in Sweden is a special one. Sweden is a beautiful place. People tend to head for the sun on holiday, but the north has a wide-open beauty about it and a mystery that the packed beaches of southern Europe lost as soon as they started charging for deckchairs. There is space and wilderness and water everywhere. There is a sense of things being clean, fresh and wholesome. The Swedes are sexy and very friendly. They seem to like the English more than is rational. Hultsfred is out in the wilds. There are lakes and forests, streams and sunshine. In midsummer it doesn’t get dark until after midnight, when the whole place becomes a mass of bonfires and candles. It’s Utopian. For once we didn’t seem to be the drunkest people. We were quite wide-eyed with wonder. Something amazing was happening.

  They just got it in Sweden. They were the first people to get Britpop. They were on to it before the Brits. Maybe grunge didn’t really make sense to them. Sweden is too clean for it to work there. Before we went onstage, journalists wanted to talk to us and were asking pertinent questions about what had happened to British music, and they knew our B-sides. I kept looking at Damon and he kept looking at me, and everyone kept looking at us.

  We went on at midnight. It was dusk. The crowd were having a wonderful time. They were singing a song about a little frog that gets lost. It was a beautiful song, reserved for happy occasions. We took to the stage. They were ready for it. They really celebrate summer in Sweden. That’s what makes Hultsfred special. All the anguish of the dark winter months is over and there is a palpable sense of joy and liberation. There were cheers and then it went very quiet. Damon started to sing the chorus of the froggy song and Dave banged the bass drum. Twenty thousand people joined in. We had decided to start the set with one of the songs we’d just demoed called ‘Girls & Boys’. Dave accelerated his bass drum to the disco tempo, 120 beats per minute. There is something special about that tempo; it’s supposed to make your heart beat faster. Mine was thumping. The keyboard crept in with the bass drum. I flicked my fringe and slammed in with the bass. It was the first time we’d played the song. The crowd went absolutely berserk. They went bananas. They were entranced, ecstatic, twenty thousand of them. By the last chorus they knew the words and were singing along. Our lives changed forever during those three and a half minutes. It brought the place down. There were bras flying on to the stage and grins everywhere you looked. People were shouting for B-sides and screaming our names. It was quite a short set. We finished with ‘There’s No Other Way’ and went off. They were screaming for an encore, so we went back on and sang the frog song again and tried another new song called ‘Parklife’.

  Everybody I met after that was smiling at me. I realised I had a lot of new friends in Sweden.

  The Besançon Balance

  After Sweden we knew we were holding a couple of aces. We’d already done the UK tour around the release of Modern Life Is Rubbish and nothing further was planned at home. ‘Sunday Sunday’ was the final single to be released and it went to number twenty-eight. That made three number twenty-eights in a row, but the press were starting to come around and we got our first front cover since ‘There’s No Other Way’. We disappeared to Europe for a short tour.

  There were a few shows in the French provinces. Word was getting around that we had some good songs. I like French people. I was wandering around Rennes on a Sunday afternoon, and some cool-looking French guys approached me and asked me, in very bad English, if I was Alex James. They were surprised when I replied in French. We tore around in their old Renault; they showed me the cathedral and we went back to their house. French people love showing you their cathedrals. They made me a soufflé and introduced me to Apollinaire, a romantic poet I’d missed. They insisted I kept the volume of poems and we went to a bar. We picked Graham up on the way. They called some girls they knew and I spent an enchanted evening playing belote, the French national card game, with the barman. There was something very comfortable about that level of celebrity. When things started to go really crazy, I lost the privilege of just bumping into people, going to their homes and having a peaceful, ordinary time, but I enjoyed that day. I was welcomed like a brother, not a rock star. These were people just like me, with the same interests; I never saw them again but it was delightful to step into their lives for a moment.

  Graham had a Ventolin inhaler for his asthma. Ventolin helps oxygen to get to your brain. He’d take a few blasts and do a drawing before the feeling wore off. That’s how Art Club started. Art Club was at two a.m. every day in my room. We needed constants when we were forever on the move, and I looked forward to Art Club. The other member of the club was Cara, the hired keyboard player. I loved Cara. She lived in Malvern with her husband and children, and played the piano in the local grand hotel. She was an exceptionally good card player. We played crib a lot and she was sometimes able to help with the crossword. She was a natural aristocrat. She exuded dignity and also mischief. Her musical ability was daunting. If I played her a record she could tell me what the chords were and if I sang her a melody she could play it back with an accompaniment. When everyone eventually arrived back at the hotel in the evening, the piano became the focal point. I’d say, ‘Play, “The Old Man’s Back Again”, Cara.’ She’d say, ‘How does it go? Sing it, boy!’ I’d sing and she’d pick it up right away. Sometimes we’d sit there all night. Everything about her was musical. I was always asking her to sing ‘English Country Gardens’. I was very attracted to Cara.

  The temperature was still rising all the time. Gigs, and the band itself, wherever we went, were becoming something of an event.

  We had been booked to play Reading Festival. It’s the last festival of the summer on the August Bank Holiday weekend. We knew it was an important one. Everyone was going to be there. We were playing in the tent. The band on the main stage, The The, were having a bad night and the tent was absolutely packed by the time we went on. We had introduced a new system of not getting too drunk before we played. It was the inevitable triumph of reason. That show was probably the most important gig we’ve ever played. Chris Morrison gave us all a wedge of cash afterwards and told us not to worry any more. It wasn’t long since we’d recorded Modern Life Is Rubbish but we went back to Maison Rouge with Streetie and started recording the new album.

  I hadn’t sung a lead vocal before. When we got back from Sweden I’d written a song about the stars and moons that had been preoccupying me. That was one of the hardest things to get right. The rest of the album flew on to tape. ‘Girls & Boys’ was recorded very quickly because we’d been playing it live, and the other singles came together almost effortlessly. The demo of ‘To the End’ had a good feel so we worked from that, rather than starting again.

  ‘Parklife’ was quite a complete song from the first time Damon had played it to us. We’d been watching Quadrophenia on the tour bus and we sent the track to Phil Daniels, the lead actor, and asked if he wanted to sing the verses. He said yes, simple as that.

  The only song that was a great effort was ‘This Is a Low’. The backing track was recorded and sounded musically more emotive than anything we’d ever done, but Damon was struggling with the words. For Christmas I bought him a handkerchief with a map of the shipping forecast regions on it. I can’t take all the credit, but maybe he was blowing his nose when the inspiration came to him. You can never tell when the muse is going to appear. It went on to become Blur’s most popular song.

  The company that owned Maison Rouge sold it. The brasserie shut down and there were never any balls for the table football. The toilets were horrible. Yet somehow it was easier to make music in a more realistic working environment, without the comforts, and the album was finished in no time. We
’d developed a way of working, and we had a team of people that we knew and trusted around us.

  We thought we’d made a great record, but we had no idea what was about to happen. Guitar bands that made great records sold maybe a hundred thousand copies. The Stone Roses had been the biggest selling guitar band of the decade so far - their album had gone platinum - but that was a couple of years earlier. Everybody was listening to rave music and celebrating. Balfe was pleased with the record too, but he obviously had no idea either. He sold Food to EMI and moved to a big house in the country. He could have got a much bigger one if he’d waited six months.

  6

  triumph

  Smile!

  We were at a photo shoot in a garage kind of place on King’s Road, Chelsea, the same place we’d had our photo taken with Sherman, the big dog. There weren’t that many photographic studios, just like there weren’t that many recording studios, and we’d seen most of them by now. Andy Ross arrived with champagne because he’d just got the midweek chart position for ‘Girls & Boys’. It was number five, which was good whichever way we thought about it, and we thought about it a lot. That was the start of the champagne and a long, long sunny day that dissolved into bubbles.

  Success at home was a completely different thing from being big in Sweden, or Japan. That was like going on a strange holiday. I still came back to my old life at the end of it. Even though we were away a lot, and loving it, London was home. The more I travelled, the more I felt that. Our lives had been changing a lot, but actually the pattern of our lives changed very little when we started to sell lots of records. We played gigs, had our photos taken, did interviews, just like we did before.

  The two most important things in the world when I was growing up were Smash Hits magazine and Top of the Pops.