by Alex James
Gay bars are the most decadent of all. I found it relaxing to go out and take sex out of the equation. The music is always really good, too, in gay bars.
Trying to Build Jerusalem
‘Vindaloo’ had made quite a lot of money, so we set up an office. One of the barmen from the Groucho seemed really keen on running a record company, so we let him do it. Then we had to think about our next move. We had a meeting in our office. Where to go next? What should we tackle? I wanted to make gay disco records. Keith wanted to sign his daughter. I was always seeing her out and about, but she was only twelve and twelve’s a bit young for showbusiness. Damien said he wanted to do a Christmas record and it seemed like quite a good idea. It seemed the perfect follow-up to a football record and it’s the best time to have a hit record as you sell about ten times as many.
I went into a studio with Keith and Roland Rivron, Rod, the piano player from the Groucho, and Joe Strummer, to write something. It was a combination of personalities with a lot of seasonal promise. Christmas had started early that year and it was hard to keep things under control. By the second day there was a gospel choir hanging out as well. By the time it was finished, more or less the whole of the Groucho Club and Browns were in the studio. Lisa from Browns sang the song with Keith, who dressed up as a goblin in the video.
It went top twenty, but we manufactured too many copies of the record, about a quarter of a million too many. It was hard to compete with the major labels at Christmas time. We lost all the money from ‘Vindaloo’ and a bit more. Keith also lost the taxi, in Rotterdam, which was a shame.
It took a while to recover our pride, and we thought we’d better stick to football records. The singer was, after all, a fifty-year-old baldy man. We were ready by the time the next football tournament came along. I wanted to do something spectacular. The way forward came to me over a martini in Peg’s, a member’s club I’d just discovered that I lived next door to. It was so exclusive and discreet that it was invisible to passers-by and even livers-next-door-to.
George was usually there. I like George’s company. He’s an upper-class pixie of some vintage, gay and fabulous. He’s from another world that involves things like cufflinks, bone china and ballet. Sometimes it was just George and myself there for lunch, other days there’d be a minor royal or a mega-dega film director, lunching his stars. It was ludicrous. A bar that was empty apart from people who were so famous that they had to hide there between meetings in town. It was a good place to go and have ideas. The barman never spoke. He just made fantastic martinis.
It was behind one of those martinis, my second of the day, that I conceived the most expensive record ever made. Our last football song had been a loutish, one-note wonder. The only way forward now was to go way upmarket. We needed a new national anthem, a song you could take anywhere, that your granny could sing; that would stir the hearts of wayward teenagers; that would scare goalkeepers. It was going to be tricky. I was sucking the olive when I realised the song had already been written by William Blake. We’d do ‘Jerusalem’, and we’d do it big.
Three weeks later we were in Air Studios with a one-hundred-and-twenty-piece orchestra. Air is the biggest studio in London and that’s about the biggest orchestra it can house. Keith wanted to conduct. He didn’t know the difference between a French horn and a cor anglais, but he did have winning vivacity and bags of confidence. Confidence is the most important ingredient on the songwriter’s shopping list. Nothing else is half so important.
There were harps and percussionists, a long line of double basses. There were violins everywhere you looked. We had cannons. We had five massed choirs: a big gay choir, a children’s choir, gospel choir, close-harmony barbershop choir and a chorus. It was immense. There were cameras. There was Michael Barrymore. George Martin was wandering about the place. We didn’t leave anything out. Everyone had learned their parts and I stood in the control room and took a deep breath. The next three minutes were costing a lot of money, more than any other record ever has, and there was a good chance we’d built an aeroplane that wouldn’t fly.
I was in tears by halfway through the first chorus. It was immense. I didn’t care if it sold five copies. It was a record that needed to be made. It’s such a beautiful tune, rousing, but noble, a prayer for the weak and a battle cry for the strong, a poem, a patriotic paean and a perfect pop song. Well, you’d hope so for two hundred grand.
Football was very fashionable. It seemed to be easier to get a table at the Ivy than it did to get tickets for the Arsenal. There was an almighty brouhaha about the tournament, Euro 2000. The song was a news item and I went to Wembley to have my photograph taken with the players. There were about a thousand photographers there. The squad were having a kickaround in the new England strip. Someone blew a whistle somewhere and they all ran to the centre circle and stood in a line with the goalkeepers at one end and the forwards at the other. I could hardly believe it. They were so well drilled. Peep, peep and there they all were in a neat little row. I was asked to stand on the end, next to the goalies. My heart sank as I took my place. I looked along my right shoulder down the line. I was head and shoulders taller than the back four. We didn’t stand a chance. Keith and I figured we’d get back the money we’d spent if the team got to the semi-finals. Any further and we’d be in the clover. It was a gamble. Keith said we were going to win. Good football records never go away, though. EMI shareholders should have their money back by the World Cup tournament in 2018, as long as England do well. In the meantime they’ve got that song.
Decadence
I’d graduated from the Groucho to the Colony Room, a couple of doors down. The Colony was the drinking club that had made Jeffrey Bernard’s legs fall off. It has a greasy spoon kind of feel and to enter is to be overwhelmed by an awareness of green. It’s like a front room, but it’s green, and there is a lot of art on the walls, given by the people who have spent time there over the years. The value of the art is probably worth more than the entire Groucho Club, a roll-call of the great British artists since the Second World War. There was also a piano, which I often played, and Michael, the current heir to the establishment, was always there. Sometimes it was jam-packed and everyone seemed to be mad; sometimes it was peaceful and a supermodel would walk in. I could never tell what was going to happen next there. That was what was good about it.
I was drinking more and more and it took me further into the night.
I liked Trade, a big, gay bonanza in what seemed to be a huge network of underground sewers in Clerkenwell. Parties cost a lot of money and they usually happen to promote someone or something. Trade was different. It was just a party. I started going to Trade because it was open all night and it was mental. It made any party that was ever thrown by a band look like kids’ stuff. There was shagging in the bogs, fellatio on the dance floor and people queuing up to buy drugs like it was the end of the world. Somehow it was quite civilised and it never felt as sleazy there as it did in other places that were open after three a.m. People would really lose it in there, though. There was even a kind of casualty ward on site. I know because I woke up there once, covered in blood, being attended to by paramedics.
There was a boat at Blackfriars Bridge, where scary people played cards, basements in Chinatown full of transvestites, stained attics along Berwick Street full of crackheads and prostitutes, mansions in Holland Park full of crackheads and prostitutes. At night the city belonged to all the people who didn’t have to get up in the morning - musicians, artists, actors, models, criminals, the aristocracy, the insane, drug dealers, wheelerdealers, comedians, drug addicts, the fabulously rich, writers, a random bag of all ages, creeds and classes. I never knew whether I was going to meet a murderer next or the most beautiful woman in the world. People only stay up all night for three reasons: sex, drugs and rock and roll. It’s not the best time for getting things done.
13
I’m not a huge fan of remixes. A pop record is a distilled, definitive work of art, so chan
ging it in any way is unnecessary. Record companies saw remixes as a way of winning over new audiences, but the results were often less than the sum of the parts. Food commissioned some remixes of tracks on the Blur album, mainly because we were short on B-sides. The band had a prolific output and there was usually plenty of unused material around, but releasing three or four singles from an album eats up a lot of extra tracks. Each single came out in three formats and each format needed two or three B-sides. The biggest fans buy everything, so if the B-sides were crap, we were ripping off the people who loved the band the most.
Most of the remixes would have only interested people who knew when Graham’s birthday was, or which drama college Damon had been to, but William Orbit’s adaptations were astonishing. His Strange Cargo album had long been a tour-bus favourite and he was on a roll. He’d just helped Madonna make Ray of Light, her best record, and he was the most sought-after producer in the world. He was keen to produce Blur’s new album and we went to see him. He lived in a huge rented house in St John’s Wood with dozens of assistants who worked through the night polishing drum loops, programming digital sequencers and editing guitar parts on computers. It wasn’t so much a home studio. It was more a studio that he lived in.
I had a little studio at home, and I’d looked at buying a bigger one with Damien, Keith and Joe Strummer, but big studios are like jumbo jets. In order for it to be worthwhile owning one, it has to be used all the time otherwise it just sits there costing a fortune. I was too happy-go-lucky to want to go to a recording studio every day of my life but my set-up at home was good for songwriting, and when I’d written some tunes I’d take them to a bigger studio and record them.
It pained me a little bit that the band didn’t get a studio we could all have shared, but nobody else wanted to. Damon had a studio in a rented building in Ladbroke Grove, west London. It was to studios what the Good Mixer was to pubs. Its beauty was purely in its functionality. At the arse end of a back street, in a slightly rank-smelling building full of shady characters, it was tiny but it worked very well for Damon.
Working in that studio was a bit like making a record in a lift. There was very little space. In the control room there wasn’t enough room to turn round with a guitar on without bashing an award-nominated engineer in the face or knocking over a vintage microphone. Having secured the world’s most expensive producer, most bands would probably have taken the logical step of going to the world’s most expensive studio, but we wrote 13 in one of west London’s best-value, rent-by-the-foot industrial units. There was a window, but it looked through a metal grille on to an uninspiring derelict concrete courtyard, which there was no access to. It was high summer and stinking hot. William, fresh from Madonna’s record, crouched, I think rather shocked, in a corner. There was no room for chairs. Damon picked up his acoustic guitar and started singing a melody. Graham and I joined in; Dave, who was wearing headphones behind a drumkit in the other room, joined in. I looked up and saw William’s jaw drop. He is quite meticulous and contemplative in his approach. He told me much later that the way we were able instantly to conjure an arrangement without talking about it had completely knocked him out. It had taken us a long time to be able to do that. We’d played together nearly every day for ten years and had a keen sense of each other. We could turn it on pretty much instantly. All the recordings were taken to William’s laboratory and tweaked and digitally twiddled by his night assistants.
Things did happen very quickly in the studio. After a couple of weeks we moved back into Mayfair, because it had a good drum room. One morning, Graham and Damon were working on a new song called ‘Tender’. It occurred to me that what it really needed was a double bass. I went home in a taxi to get mine and came straight back with it, but they’d got bored with working on the song by then and gone for ciabattas. The bass was miked up and I tuned it and told William to play the track back to me. He said, ‘I think I’ve got what I need there.’ He just sampled me tuning up and his boffins used their computer technology to turn it into a bassline. It sounded good too, so I was happy. The strange thing was that when we launched the record there were more photos of that double bass than anything else and I hadn’t even played it, really. Cameras just love double basses. ‘Tender’ was a spiritual and we booked the London Community Gospel Choir to sing on the choruses. Gospel choirs come from a different place than rock and roll bands. They are good and godly people. We received a fax requesting that we did not smoke or swear, with particular reference to blasphemies, while they were in the studio.
It was a biggish choir, about thirty strong. They’d learned the backing vocal and harmony parts and rehearsed them beforehand. They arrived en masse and assembled in the live room. We sat behind the window in the control room and William selected the large loudspeakers, turned up the volume and hit play and record. It was shattering. They nailed it first take. As soon as they started singing, it was instantly and obviously a number one record. I’d never been so certain of anything. It was the best thing we’d ever done. The song was a great collaborative effort between Damon and Graham, too, at a time when their relationship was quite edgy. The harmony of those massed voices and the resting consonance of Damon and Graham’s solidarity overwhelmed me to tears. William was in a state of shock again. It was the best we’d all felt for a long, long time. As the song ended, William pushed the talkback button so the choir could hear him. ‘Jesus H motherfucking Christ!’ he said. ‘Ooh shit! Sorry!’
William had another studio on the go in a hotel, where he was building a U2 album. Damon was working on a film score in the mornings at his studio and coming to Mayfair in the afternoons. Maybe that was one of the things that was frustrating to Graham. It was to me. They were finding it hard to talk to each other. Damon is very domineering and maybe Graham had just had enough, but I do think Damon went to great lengths to make Graham feel like 13 was his record as well. Damon gave him one of the strongest melodies, which Graham wrote a good lyric for, but Graham wasn’t happy and he didn’t always turn up. It was frustrating because, when he did, everything he did was brilliant. He never played a bum note. His hearing was the most astute of anybody’s and he could pick things up in mixes that would never occur to me, or mixmaster William for that matter.
Madonna came to the studio and said it was all great, but I’d rather Graham had shown up and said it was all shit, or something at least.
The record was as highly acclaimed as it was difficult to make. ‘Tender’ was released on the same day as a record by a girl doing backflips in school uniform and missed out on the number one spot, but I heard Brad Pitt played it at his wedding.
10
flying!
Up, Up and Away
On drums, David Alexander De Horne Rowntree had quietly become a high achiever. He seemed to have time for all kinds of things. He was learning karate, building computers, improving his bridge play, publishing scientific papers and learning how to fly. I only knew these things because I read them in the newspapers. Apart from spaceships, we didn’t have much to say to each other, even though we went all over the place together.
It’s the best thing about being in a band, travelling. Travelling is about the best thing there is, at all. I can’t think of anything more worthwhile, more enlightening or more full of promise. There is so much to discover, so many encounters to be had, so many sunsets to see, so many ways of cooking eggs.
Travelling is also incredibly tedious. There was so much travelling. It was like spending half my time in the presence of a crucifying bore who didn’t give me space to think and wouldn’t release me. Every time I got on an aeroplane, there he was. A big invisible companion. Graham was the only person who could make him go away. We were, all four of us, tormented by our travel bores. I loved going on tour more than anything, but we spent so much time in airports, on motorways, on aeroplanes, in cars, trains, boats and buses. Life was one long steeplechase and there was no easy way round it.
At the start of the 13 album camp
aign we had to go to Manchester to play some songs for a popular radio show on the BBC. It’s about as good as it gets. BBC radio is the best in the world. It’s the best-run business, has the biggest audiences, the best microphones, and has no advertising agenda or ulterior motives for existing other than to serve the people three-and-a-half-minute slices of heaven all day. I suppose it was all marvellous, but it was starting to feel like I’d done this kind of thing already and that, pleasant as it would be to play some new songs to millions of people, why did it have to be in Manchester and why was Manchester so far away? Couldn’t they just play the record? The record always sounds better on the radio anyway. The thought of sitting on the M1 and the M6 for the best part of the day was looming large on my mind like a bad weather forecast at sea. I called Dave.
‘Dave! It’s Alex.’
‘Hello, Alex.’
‘Why have they moved this Radio One business to Manchester? It’s supposed to be in London.’
‘They’re promoting the regions. It’s part of the director general’s new agenda.’ Dave always knew things like that.
‘Oh, I see. Look, have you really got an aeroplane, Dave?’
‘Yes, actually, I’ve got two.’
‘Great. Excellent. Can we fly to Manchester, then?’
‘Yeah, definitely.’
Good old Dave. I remembered how much I’d always liked him.
I hadn’t been to Dave’s house before. We rarely even visited each other’s hotel rooms. He likes to have his own space. He was living in the woods in Hampstead with his wife and a large number of cats and he drove us up to Elstree aerodrome in his little sports car. The airfield was an exciting kind of place. There was a tiny runway, a large number of small aircraft parked on the grass, and a café. I had a fry-up while he checked the aeroplane over with a man called Tony. The café was busy. There were little groups of people huddled together conspiratorially; they all seemed to have a lot to say to each other.
