Bit of a Blur

by Alex James

  I went to meet Colin at the Eagle, a pub in Cambridge near his laboratory. It was in that pub that James Crick and Francis Watson, the scientists who first identified DNA, burst through the doors shortly after they’d made that Nobel Prize-winning discovery and pronounced to all present that they had found the secret of life. They too may well have been taken for lunatics. At the best of times it’s difficult to tell the difference between madmen and geniuses.

  The laboratory where Crick and Watson made their discovery was right next door to Colin’s office. By some strange coincidence, the door was at the top of an external spiral staircase. ‘Look at that,’ said Colin. ‘Dead giveaway! I reckon that staircase saved them years of research.’ It did seem quite likely that the helical structure of DNA might have sprung to mind on one of countless journeys up and down that staircase. It was the exact shape they were looking for.

  If Beagle were to fly, it would be the combined effort of forty university research departments, dozens of businesses and hundreds of engineers. We went to a big hangar in Hertfordshire, where satellites were made. It seemed such an ordinary place, another neat network of roundabouts, grass verges and modern light-industrial units. I’d have thought they might be making lawnmowers or maybe roundabout parts in those mundane-looking factories, but they were making spaceships, quite a lot of them, little cosmic canoes that get fired into near space to float motionless above a fixed point on the Earth’s surface as it spins.

  There was a high-security research facility in rural Oxfordshire. There was some far-fetched stuff going on in there. There were rows of radio telescopes visible from a distance. It’s quite a famous row of radio telescopes. It was at this lab, the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, that a research student called Jocelyn Bell thought she had discovered intelligent alien life while studying for a Ph.D. It was a false alarm, but what she had found was almost as weird-a star as big as an iceberg that weighs as much as the sun. Radio telescopes are dope.

  Farnborough

  I remember going to the Farnborough Airshow as a small, excited boy. The high point of the day was the British-built supersonic jet, the Lightning. It flew along the runway at head height, its engine screaming as it accelerated to break the sound barrier right in front of the crowd. The turbine noise made my hair stand on end and the sonic boom, loud as a crack of thunder, hit me right in the stomach. It was overwhelming, the speed of the thing, as fast as a bullet, its toy-like beauty and supernatural power, the little red, white and blue decals that said it was one of our things. It spoke a language everyone understood and the spontaneous round of applause and cheering that followed sounded paper-thin after the roaring tsunami sound of a fleeting fighter. It was a true spectacle, something to witness and wonder at.

  The next year, by way of upping the ante, the organisers arranged for two Lightnings flying in opposite directions to cross each other at the centre point of the runway, going supersonic as they met. Both aeroplanes pulled straight into vertical climbs and performed an aerobatics display. It didn’t seem like anything could ever be better, but at the following show they had six of the things, three flying in each direction in formation. The report as they met was so loud that it broke windows in the town of Farnborough, miles away, and then they weren’t allowed to do that kind of thing any more.

  There is a thrill of vulnerability at all airshows. There is no way of making everything completely safe. When the machines are being thrashed to capacity and the pilots are flying at their limits to dazzle, things are bound to go wrong sometimes. There have been some historic disasters, but the danger is a part of the attraction.

  Farnborough is a big event. It’s not just about flying displays. There are dozens of hangars with hundreds of exhibitors from the aerospace industry. They range from companies that make the plastic trays that in-flight meals are served on, to seat-belt specialists, to supersonic engine manufacturers and businesses that will launch anything, from your ashes to your communications satellite, into the Earth’s orbit. There are even people who will build you a rocket if you need one. Rockets are pretty much off the shelf these days. If you had the money, you could go to Farnborough and buy everything you need to make a pretty good spaceship, and the expertise to build it.

  Although they never did, the first man to fly and the first man to walk on the moon could have met. Things have happened fantastically fast in aerospace and the engine that drives the technology into the future at such a blistering pace is the weapons industry. The advance of mankind and his possible self-destruction dance a strange tango. Weapons manufacture gives momentum to research; it creates a need for precision engineering; it provides the money to develop new technologies. It makes it all necessary. Supersonic jets are, after all, weapons of war.

  It was impossible to tell the weapons of mass destruction guys from the academics or the guys who made seat belts.

  I’d spent so much time bored on aeroplanes I’d completely forgotten how absolutely brilliant they are. Dave was happier at Farnborough than I’d ever seen him. He had just got his pilot’s licence, and asked the exhibitors lots of questions. Colin’s stand was attracting a fair bit of interest. He had improved his Beagle model, and it looked quite professional now, although I preferred the one made out of cardboard and Sellotape.

  There are so many things to see at Farnborough that, by the time most people arrived, they were numb to further stimulation. After having seen the biggest aeroplane in the world, the Red Arrows, hovering Harrier jets, Stealth bombers and jet packs, a tiny Mars lander seemed quite run of the mill. The science minister, Lord Sainsbury, attended a press conference and gave the Beagle his support. It was looking good, Milton Keynes.

  Mercer Street

  We’d been travelling non-stop for the best part of nine months, but, as activity around the Blur album gradually eased off, I began to spend more time in London. Justine and I gravitated back together and she moved back into the flat in Endell Street. We started looking for somewhere to buy together. The money arrived quite quickly, quicker than the flat did. When we started, we were looking at the cheapest places the estate agents had on their books. A couple of months later, we had more money and were looking at one-bedroom flats. By the time we found somewhere that was right, it was the most expensive property on the agent’s books.

  We bought a five-storey converted cheese warehouse with a little balcony that backed on to a hidden courtyard. It was bright and opulent with high ceilings and a good showbusiness history. I bought it for cash from an American who wrote musicals. I’d always wanted to live there. It was the nicest house in Covent Garden. Tourists with flapping maps would stop and look up at it. The bedroom overlooked the dressing rooms of the Cambridge Theatre opposite where we could see the hoofers getting their slap on. The back windows looked on to the boutiques and offices of the courtyard.

  It had the hallmarks of being one of many homes of its former owner, hotel-like qualities. There was a minibar and a trouser press in the bedroom on the top floor and the whole house was assiduously serviced. It had a staff of two, a private secretary, who the owner took with him, and a housekeeper, who stayed. She wore an apron and everything. She gave me hell about not keeping the place tidy and she didn’t like my old piano, either. She kept telling me about the grand piano that the previous owner had, and made it clear that I needed to get one of those. Then she banned me from slopping around smoking in my pants. I wasn’t ready for a housekeeper. It was nice having everything in the cupboards and in neat rows, sparkling clean, but when she told Damien it was time for him to go home one morning after we’d been up all night writing poems in the kitchen, I knew she had to go. She went next door to number 25, a house that belonged to a family that had made a fortune from processed cheese triangles.

  I was probably the worst person to live next door to in London. Most nights the kitchen would be full of people singing ‘California Dreamin” and dancing to the Bee Gees. Sometimes we brought the piano player back from the Groucho with us, as
recommended by management. London was raging. It was about this time that absinthe arrived in the country. That stuff took drunkenness to new levels. It’s only alcohol, but it’s different from any other drink. It’s pure ethanol with green dye and aniseed flavouring. It has twice the alcohol content of whisky, but even when I tried diluting half a shot of absinthe with twice as much water as I would have with a whisky, I still got twice as drunk, or possibly it was four times as drunk. It was hard to say because the ability to do multiplication was beyond anybody drinking absinthe. It took away the maths part of the brain, but it never failed to rouse the wanderlust lobes. I’d had ‘the Green Fairy’ before in Barcelona. That was the only place it was to be found until then, in the dirty little bars around the Ramblas. It was harder to gauge how drunk I was in foreign countries, though, where nothing was familiar. I woke up on a boat after the first time I drank the stuff in Barcelona and I didn’t think twice about it then, but when absinthe arrived in London, I found myself waking up in all kinds of strange places: Dalston, Richmond, Highbury, even Wapping. I would never go to these places normally. They were all quite far away. In fact it’s the only time I’ve been to Richmond.

  I left the Groucho at closing time and went to another club, Soho House, with Zodiac Mindwarp, a heavy metal monster with lots of tattoos and scars. He was my new best friend and we sat at a table drinking pints of Guinness. A pretty girl came and joined us and we told her our plans. We’d decided to walk to Rome, and we were just stopping off for a Guinness on the way. That was when Johnny Depp sat down next to me. I don’t know why he got so upset, but soon he was very unhappy. He poured a pint of Guinness on my lap. It is hard to know what I might have said in the steam of an absinthe stupor, but things were definitely not going so well to the right. On the left, with the girl, it was looking quite good. She said she lived in Richmond. When I woke up I was in her bedroom. I was emptying my bladder all over her dressing table. People had told me about this kind of thing. It had never happened to me before, though. She woke up and asked what I was doing. I said it looked like I’d made a big mistake. We cleaned it up. We’d only known each other a couple of hours and I don’t think anyone could have been any more drunk than I was. Usually being that drunk would make you unconscious, but with absinthe you go on expeditions. I did see her again. Some people you try and make a good impression on and nothing works, others you piss all over their make-up and they’ve decided they like you and it doesn’t seem to matter. Anyway, that was the only time I ever went to Richmond.

  9

  how I made them sing

  Fat Les

  Like Damien, Keith Allen is a man of action, a lot of action. He’d been a comedian, he’d been an actor, he’d had his own TV show, he’d been in movies, he’d been in prison and he’d written a number one record for my favourite band. Most of all, he was a great talker and his orations could draw a crowd, anywhere. He was the archetypal fearless Soho wayward genius and his energy reverberated, unassailable, from the dive bars of Dean Street to the cloisters of Le Caprice. He was fifty years old and was in touch with the almighty possibilities of the here and now at all times.

  He was nagging me to do a football record. I kept telling him I had a musical to write, which was true, but then on his birthday we went to watch Fulham play an away match. The travelling Fulham supporters are very proud of how much noise they make. They sang, chanted, shouted, clapped their hands and stamped their feet through ninety minutes of drizzle and poor passing and Keith was their conductor. There was someone playing a drum, a lop-sided, clowny rhythm that would stop occasionally and start again, with renewed vigour.

  I said maybe we could do something with those drums, but the World Cup was starting in six weeks. We wrote the song ‘Vindaloo’ around the drums a couple of days later. Once I know what the drums are doing and what it’s going to sound like, it’s just a question of joining the dots together. I knew it had to sound like the Fulham supporters singing in the rain. It took half an hour to write, words and everything.

  I was playing snooker with Andy Ross, from Food, a couple of days later. In the middle of a break he took a call from the EMI chairman. The FA were desperate for a football song and wanted to know if Damon could do anything to help? I overheard and told him I’d just written one. He gave me a ‘Don’t interrupt when the chairman’s on the phone’ look, and that was that. I played it to Smithy, but he thought it would struggle to get on the radio.

  Keith had started singing the song, and he hadn’t really stopped. Damien liked it. He wanted to set up a record label and release it. We christened the band Fat Les, asked everyone we liked to be in it and booked a couple of days at Townhouse Studio.

  There were four weeks until the World Cup kicked off when Damien, Keith and I ran into a PR guy called Phill Savidge on Dean Street. I said, ‘We need this guy.’ Damien had a large amount of cash in a carrier bag, a few tens of thousands in fifties. He pulled a bundle out, gave it to Phill and said, ‘Tell me when you need some more.’

  I knew when I arrived at the studio at ten-thirty that the record would either be a dismal failure or an improbable triumph. We had a day to record everything and a day to mix. The drummer was arriving at eleven, and we had to do the drums and lay the bass down before lunch. They were the only instruments on the track. Simplicity is often the key. The afternoon was timetabled with various singers, shouters and schoolchildren.

  Basslines, my stock-in-trade, are a kind of musical glue; the bassline makes the drums, vocals and guitars stick together and stand. Aside from the music, the role of my character within Blur was similar to that of a bassline in a piece of music. I often acted as a mediator between Damon and Graham. My blasé temperament was a pivot for them both and perhaps it suggested an underlying harmony in an arrangement that might otherwise have collapsed.

  Making this record was a different situation. I was the producer. Producing is mainly about getting the best out of everybody. I took a deep breath, plugged the bass in and sang the song to the drummer. The drummer was Roland Rivron. He was famous for being able to ride his bicycle down the main staircase at the Groucho Club. Keith had said we should have him on drums. As it turned out, he was an exceptionally good drummer. By the time the sandwiches arrived the sound engineer and the tea boy were grinning and humming the song. Keith did his vocal in one take and it sounded like a hit. Phill generated quite a bit of press interest, so that with three weeks till kick-off we had sold the master recordings to Telstar in return for an advance on royalties and enough money to make a video. Keith wanted to direct the video. He wanted a hundred people dressed up as Max Wall and as many fat, drunk people as possible. It’s not quite what we ended up with, but, with a week to go, his video went straight to number one at The Box and Woolworths ordered half a million copies of the record. It was the biggest week for singles sales since the ‘Blur vs. Oasis’ pantomime.

  Promotion

  It all happened so fast. The record didn’t get any radio play, but it quickly outsold anything Blur had done. The producer of Top of the Pops really liked the song and did a special deal with the producer of EastEnders, who, I guess, must have liked it as well and the band were filmed marching around Albert Square.

  We were offered a gig at a private party in a warehouse in Islington where the match would be showing on a cinema screen. Keith said we’d do our only song for five grand, cash, and a goat. I think we probably would have gone to the party anyway; it sounded like it was going to be all right. It was good just to be able to assemble the cast. There were a lot of people in the band, particularly after the record took off. It was a happy crowd. Matt Lucas and David Walliams; Paul Kaye; Vivienne Westwood’s six-foot mucky muse, Sara Stockbridge; Keith; Lily and Alf, his children; their friends; Joe Strummer; various models and obese men and, sometimes, Bez. The song ‘Vindaloo’ was so simple that it could be played entirely on the bottom string of a bass guitar with one finger. I had a bass guitar with just one string, so it was quite a weird-loo
king thing. I’d bought it from a man up a mountain in Japan. It was the obvious choice of guitar. Roland had a square snare drum that he was quite keen on, and Keith had his goat.

  It was a marching band, really, and Keith marched in with his goat at the head of the procession. We got on to the stage and the drumming started. The bass comes in on the chorus. I wind-milled my arm around histrionically for the first note and, as my finger hit the one and only string, it snapped. I didn’t have any spares. It’s really unusual to snap a bass string, particularly when it’s the only one you’ve got, and the bass is the only instrument. No one seemed to mind; actually it sounded more like it did on the terraces with just drums and voices. England won, so the party rose out of control to extravagance. Forget the sixties. In the summer of 1998 London was in the grip of a hedonistic fervour not seen since the days of gin houses and the Hellfire Club.