by Alex James
Dave and Tony returned and said they were ready. I asked how long it was going to take. Tony said, ‘We’re taking the Ruschmeyer. It’s brand new and it’s quick. Shouldn’t be more than forty minutes.’
It was autumn and night had fallen completely since we’d arrived at Elstree. The darkness was complementary to the sense of adventure and I was quite excited as we boarded. The aeroplane was the same size inside as a very small car. I sat in the back with Diana. Diana was the band’s current keyboard player. She was a scholar of Debussy and she floated around in the stratosphere of a parallel classical universe. Somehow, she had never heard of Blur when she joined the band, just after ‘Country House’ came out. She was from a deposed Russian royal family background and she also had a lot of cats. Actually, come to think of it, she only had two cats, but it always seemed like there were a lot more. One of them was called Schnibbles, sometimes, I believe.
Dave pushed a button and the engine burst into life. It made the whole aircraft shake and throb. Diana grabbed my hand and held it very tight as we wobbled towards the runway. I grabbed her other hand. I couldn’t hear a thing. Tony passed some headsets to us and indicated where to plug them in. That calmed things down a bit. I could hear Dave talking in a strange language, the only words of which I understood were ‘Clear Take Off’. He turned and offered us both cigarettes and pulled on to the runway. He pushed the big lever forward. The engine screamed. Diana’s eyes were very large in the light of the burning match as I lit her cigarette. ‘Let’s rock, motherfuckers!’ said Dave and took his feet off the brakes.
We were thrown back into our seats. The runway lights rushed by and the rattling aeroplane swept right into the sky. There was nothing to compare to it. The ground, the world and all of its trivial concerns fell away beneath us in strange accelerations and suddenly all was calm and we were apparently still again. Towns floated by beneath us like magical sets of fairy lights, Watford, Milton Keynes, Birmingham. Birmingham already! It all looked so benign and magical. I was enchanted, rapt with a new perspective of a wonderful world.
We landed behind a 737. I didn’t want to go anywhere by car any more. The next day I bought Dave’s spare aeroplane.
Oxford Union
I had just set my hair on fire, somehow, at the Q Awards. Then I had my photo taken with New Order. Then the phone rang and it was someone asking me if I would address the Oxford Union the next day. I said definitely. I was still a bit miffed about not getting into Oxford. I knew they would need me one day, and that day was tomorrow. Keith was at the Q Awards, too. He was at everything. I asked him what the Oxford University Union was. He explained in so many words that it was a debating chamber where the future leaders of the country sharpen their claws by arguing the toss about any old bollocks. Then his phone rang, just like that, and it was someone asking him if he wanted to address the Oxford Union the next day. He said he’d do it, for five hundred quid, cash, and some cake.
The party moved to the Groucho and Magnea was there. She’d moved to London, she said. I went home with her and woke up in the wrong bed at midday. I called Justine and said I’d be home in a minute, but she’d had it. Then I remembered I had to go to Oxford and called her back but she didn’t answer. The thought of going to Oxford tomorrow had been quite a nice thought yesterday. The idea of going to Oxford today, in the clothes I’d slept in, was nowhere near as appealing.
I called Keith. I don’t think he’d been to bed, which made me feel better. He said we had to pick up Mariella Frostrup on our way to Oxford as she was opposing the motion. I liked Mariella. To describe her as a writer and broadcaster, which is what she is known for, would be selling her short. She is a linchpin of London high society. She knew absolutely everybody, from company directors and executives to broadsheet, tabloid and magazine editors, film stars, rock stars, photographers, writers, artists, moguls and billionaires and they all seemed to have a special affection for her. I certainly did. She seemed to be able to call anyone, anytime.
She had about a hundred pages of notes and her speech all prepared. It had even been neatly typed out by her PA. I had a PA by this time, but she couldn’t read my writing.
Keith and I were both the worse for wear and we didn’t know what we were supposed to be talking about; Mariella was looking fabulous and she’d done her homework. The title of the motion was ‘This house believes that music is the highest form of art’. I didn’t need notes to talk about that. I believe it and breathe it.
We dined with the president of the Union in an oak-panelled dining room. The cream of the student body of all the combined colleges of the university was assembled in that room. You could have blasted the whole thing to another planet and there would have been enough knowledge to start a new civilisation from scratch, with no outside assistance.
It was very formal, with prayers, a loyal toast and port that passed to the left. Fair to say, there was definitely a better chance of forming a decent band at Goldsmiths than there, but it was fantastic. We’d lived on pasta sandwiches at Goldsmiths and we rarely bothered with glasses, let alone decanters or grace.
The debating chamber looked just like the House of Commons does on the television. It was a hallowed hall and many great minds had spoken their sensible thoughts there. I had the benefit of speaking last. So far, Keith had stripped to get everyone on our side. Mariella had countered with a suggestion that it was nonsense to compare art forms; a saucy writer of bestselling romantic fiction had told her to get stuffed; a boring DJ type said that music only existed to make money. Then I had the floor. The chairman whispered that he would wave at me once I’d been talking for fifteen minutes and that suddenly seemed like a very long time.
It was silent. All eyes were on me. I hadn’t done my homework, again, a familiar stumbling block with this institution.
I do believe music is the highest form of art. It’s the ultimate condition and the highest form of anything. Music is an absolutely fundamental quality of the universe. Films are not fundamental entities, nor are paintings, or sculptures. They represent things and have functions. Music actually is something. Music is omniscient, a quality that echoes across space and time: from the concord and balance of galactic superclusters down to the vibrating ten dimensional filaments of superstring theory. The entire cosmos is a musical situation and all artistic and scientific endeavours tend towards music. All life aspires to the state of music. Music is a mystery, pure abstraction, calling from deep to deep. Voices raised in song are louder when you’re in love, when you’re happy, when you’re sad. Music can make hearts beat faster and cause tears to flow. Melody is a universal language. Harmony is the resting place of consciousness. Rhythm hammers the mind into the right shape. Rock stars are the only real deities. We are the music makers. We are the dreamers of dreams.
I said. We lost, but only just. There were drinks and commiserations. The president of the Union joined Fat Les and it was time to go back to London.
Le Touquet
It wasn’t obvious whether the Colony Room was one step further towards the gutter or the stars. I was being pulled in two directions. The straight and narrow and the highway to hell were both calling. The spaceship was being built in Milton Keynes and we’d made our best record yet, but I was drinking a lot. I’d take a few weeks off to sort myself out, and then I’d be back with renewed vigour, nailing my pants to the wall of the Groucho between a Damien Hirst and a Peter Blake and climbing into the Colony through the window.
Learning how to fly was exactly what I needed. Playing the bass isn’t a position of high responsibility. Lives are not at risk when you plug in a Fender Precision. There are no huge mistakes to be made, or tragic consequences of irresponsible basslines. It suited me. I’m light-hearted, I was young and I didn’t want to be weighed down by anything remotely realistic.
I needed a challenge. A pilot is taking his own life, and the lives of his passengers, into his hands. It’s the same when you’re driving a car, I suppose. There is no one thing a
bout flying an aeroplane that is any more difficult than reversing a car round a corner. Flying is a lot of simple things happening at the same time, often quite fast. It’s like reversing round an uphill corner while talking on the telephone, reading a map and looking at the rev counter. At two hundred miles an hour. It’s crucial never to run out of petrol either. There’s the radio, the navigation systems, the weather, the handling of the aircraft, the emergency procedures to master. I loved every minute of it.
To begin with, I wanted to fly because I thought it was a good way to get around, but I soon realised that it was flying I loved.
Tony, who had flown with us to Manchester, was my teacher. He was fanatical about flying. He considered time spent on the ground as time wasted. He had the keys to nearly every aeroplane at Elstree and in his day job he was a British Airways pilot. We’d go to Leicester for lunch and practise taking off and landing. Then we’d fly to Wales for tea. They had really good cake in Cardiff. Then we’d come back to London, low level over the Cotswolds, practising engine failures, stalls and steep turns. Nothing looks ugly from the sky, but the Cotswolds surprised me. I’d never been there, but that part of the country looked the most beautiful from above. The grass was the greenest. The gently rolling landscape with its neat farms, honey-coloured villages and grand piles nestling secretly in their formal gardens was as beautiful and otherworldly as an underwater tableau.
Once I had my licence I went to France most weekends. The ‘glamour run’, from Elstree to Le Touquet, took about forty minutes in my new aeroplane, a Beechcraft Bonanza. It was like a flying Bentley with big ashtrays for fat cigars. It was the same kind of aeroplane that Buddy Holly had died in. I never told anyone that until we got home safely, though.
Le Touquet is a seaside resort about ten minutes’ flying time west of Calais. After takeoff at Elstree it was usually possible to get clearance from air traffic control to fly over London beneath the airliners. I’d fly low down the Lee Valley to Canary Wharf, with Tower Bridge and the West End to the right and Greenwich on the nose. London is miraculous and passengers were always still reeling from it all as we turned right at the Thames Barrier to cross the Kent marshes for Dover. As the white cliffs slid behind, France looked like you could reach out and touch it. The Dover Strait is surprisingly narrow. Coasting in at France, Le Touquet, Paris Plage, is the second town on the right. In days gone by it was the exclusive playground of the rich and famous. More recently they huddle together at the southern end of France on its grisly private beaches and within its gated communities. It’s all the same people you see in New York and London down there. Northern France, and particularly Le Touquet, are a well-kept secret. The expansive beaches are deserted and the whole place has a natural glamour. The French are a sophisticated race. Whereas Bournemouth tends to die at the end of summer, Le Touquet becomes cosier and more romantic.
It’s just a ten-minute walk through the pine forests from the airport into town, or you can rent bicycles. There are chocolate shops, a casino and silly things to rent and do. There are restaurants galore and hotels from the grand to the grounded. After a while, I began to like the cheap hotels. They had the most character. Luxury looks the same in Le Touquet as it does in Leeds. You lose all sense of luxury if you never step outside of it. We all need a bit of rough with our smooth.
Airborne Cruising
Flying turned everything around. Where I had dreaded the daily schlep to the next place, now it was the thing that I looked forward to the most. Dave had graduated to a multi-engine, six-seater Cessna. It was a real heap, but it got us around. We took a pilot with us on tour. His name was Bob. He prepared the aeroplane, fuelled it, filed flight plans, checked the weather and paid the landing fees so that Dave and I just had to jump in and take off. Bob was a test pilot for Lockheed Martin. Previously he had made many millions from running a successful aerobatic display team, but he had spent all his money on jet fighters and helicopters. They are the aviation equivalent of crack cocaine and heroin. He told me never to get into jets. He was on top of it now, he said; he still had one jet trainer but he only used it at weekends. Then he said I had to try it. It did Mach 0.8, was fully aerobatic, and he’d just bought new ejector seats for it.
Damon said there was no way he was ever going to get into an aeroplane with me, or Dave, let alone both of us. Then we were in Germany on a Monday. We left the stage and I told the tour manager to call a taxi. Damon asked where I was going and I said I was going home and toodle-oo. There was no scheduled flight until the morning and by the time we’d done the encore Damon had completely changed his mind about which people he got into aeroplanes with. He was quite nervous and drank a lot of vodka on the way to the airport. It was a large international airport, all the runway and taxi lights were on, but there was very little traffic as it was so late at night. The terminal buildings were empty. We had the place to ourselves. It was ethereal. There was a café for the freight pilots and we ate chips and mayonnaise with a cosmopolitan assembly of flight crews while Bob activated the flight plan and made a final check of the weather.
The weather outlook was quite bad with thunderstorms over Belgium, said Bob. Hopefully we would be able to avoid them or it would be very bumpy. Then he and Dave got into a conversation about de-icing equipment that I couldn’t follow. Dave was some way ahead of me as a pilot. He had an instrument rating, the very top flying qualification. In theory it meant that he had the skills to land at Heathrow, in a thick foggy thunderstorm in the middle of the night while simultaneously handling an engine failure. It was no use telling Damon that. He was looking worried and he’d opened another bottle of vodka at the mention of thunderstorms.
The airport was massive and we spent a good ten minutes navigating the brightly lit taxiways. The moon was up in a cloudless sky and we were cleared to enter controlled airspace at our cruising altitude, as we’d hoped. There was a good tailwind. Then the moon disappeared and it started to get bumpy. Bob was asking air traffic for ‘radar vectors’ around the bad weather. Dave was writing things down. Damon was drinking vodka. I lit a cigarette. Bob screamed, ‘PUT IT OUT! If we get a lightning strike and you’re smoking, we’re toast.’ Poor Damon. The aircraft, which must have weighed five tonnes, was getting tossed around like a feather. I’d never known turbulence like that. I had to tighten my seat belt to stop my head banging the ceiling as hailstones crashed around us. The darkness was complete apart from the warm and comforting glow of the instrument panel. My head was thrown back and I could hardly support it, then I would feel weightless. It was a runaway rollercoaster. The Cessna 310 was being put through its paces. Bob was enjoying himself at last. Our manager had insisted that at no time should the four of us ever fly together in a light aircraft, as it would invalidate our insurance. There were risks, but in less than three minutes we popped out of the storm cell into clear skies as if nothing had happened.
Then Damon needed to go to the toilet. We had a hot-water bottle for that, but it had never been put to the test. The flying magazines all recommended hot-water bottles as being the best receptacles. They don’t work. They’re too floppy, that was clear very quickly, and it was a while before Damon flew with us again.
The Fat Les brigade were all too happy to jump into an aeroplane when we were given some tickets for England vs. Germany in the European Championships. I hired an enormous Piper Navajo from a geezer at Elstree. It was a real old banger, a musty twelve-seater with a loo. The match was in Belgium, but the weather was clement. Michael Barrymore was in the band by that time. I’m not sure exactly what he did in the band, but he was good to have around. He was extravagant, funny, highly intelligent and incredibly famous. I was used to walking around with Damon and seeing heads spin and jaws drop. I got a bit of it myself, but Barrymore was in a different league. Absolutely everybody recognised him and loved him too, from kids in pushchairs to grannies on Zimmer frames. Whenever he came to my house, by the time he left, which sometimes was days later, there was always a crowd of paparazzi
outside. I was a bit nervous about taking a high-profile homo into the lions’ den of an England/Germany clash. He was wearing a baseball cap, in an attempt at anonymity, but he just looked like Michael Barrymore in a baseball cap. The Navajo has turbocharged engines and goes like stink, but somehow the passengers all managed to get completely shit-faced in the back of the aircraft in the twenty-five minutes it took to get to Charleroi. They sang all the way.
The city was a war zone. You could taste the testosterone on the breeze. There were no women or children in the town, or any Belgians. The shops were shut and marauding gangs roamed the streets looking for trouble. It wasn’t Jerusalem. It was horrible. I haven’t been to a football match since. Fortunately, Barrymore was a big hit with the apes, whose mums were all fans, without exception. We saw the tender side of many a football toughie as they politely asked Michael for autographs for their old dears. Inside the stadium it was chaos. The seats were jammed close together like a fairground ride, and all right on top of each other so that if anyone in the top row fell over, everyone would go down like dominoes. There were mountain rescue teams in place in case that happened. People were vomiting, screaming and throwing things. The man I was squashed next to had got so drunk that he’d messed his trousers. He really hummed. He hugged me when England scored and after that I hoped they wouldn’t score again. I just wanted to get back into the aeroplane.
Mick Jagger was at the airport, getting into his Learjet. I heard someone say, ‘Hey, Michael!’ and Mick turned around. Somebody was running towards Michael Barrymore waving a pen and paper.
