Bit of a Blur

by Alex James

  The weather cleared, eventually, and the hangovers, and I said I’d take my parents to the Isle of Wight for lunch. My mum is quite a nervous flyer and it was the first time I’d been able to persuade her to come on the aeroplane. At the airport, as I went to complete the pre-flight checks on the Bonanza, I noticed the Red Arrows parked in formation on the apron. When I was happy with the aircraft, I signalled to Kelly and Jason in the terminal to make their way over. As they were getting in I noticed the Red Arrows starting to taxi. It was a stirring sight. They all moved as one. I called the tower.

  ‘Golf Sierra Tango request taxi.’

  ‘Golf Sierra Tango, roger. Follow the Red Arrows, please.’

  Kelly was sitting next to me and her mouth was gaping wide open as they flowed past and we pulled out behind them. She kept looking from me to Jason and back again. She grabbed my hand and it was pretty spectacular as they reached the runway and rocketed off as one. If you ever meet my mother, you will know her because she is the one telling that story. She tells everyone about that.

  I went back to Cannes with Mariella. It took four hours in the Bonanza, due south all the way and not a cloud in the sky. We stayed at the Hôtel du Cap. The film festival had popped like a bubble and disappeared. In high season the clientele comprised bored billionaires’ wives, presidents and royalty. It is said to be the finest hotel in the world. They only accept cash as payment, and there are stories of people taking suites for the entire summer and settling up with briefcases full of bundles. You couldn’t make anything more luxurious. It was so luxurious it had a tranquillising effect. Everyone was in bed by ten, exhausted by the utter tedium of complete perfection. We got drunk on Bellinis and went for a swim in the pools at midnight and it felt like we’d done everything there was to do there.

  We left in the morning to find Damien in Provence. He was playing volleyball. His host was slaughtering a lamb. We went for dinner in the world’s most expensive restaurant. From the moment the junior waiter unfolded your napkin for you until the nice lady lit your cigar, things could not have been more tippetytop. Leaving the best hotel with my exalted consort, to arrive at the most expensive restaurant in my own aeroplane, to meet the world’s richest living artist. The next day we flew to Mick Jagger’s chateau in the Loire.

  It was going to be downhill all the way from here, surely? This was the top of the hill. What else could life hold? It’s funny, but when I look back I think that period of my life was the bottom of a pit, rather than the summit of Mount Fantasticus. I was a morally bankrupt, pissed fatso with a stupid grin and a girlfriend with a murdered heart.

  11

  rounded and grounded

  Keep Fit

  Will Ricker had a knack with restaurants. He knew where to put them and what fashionable people would want to eat next. He’s nothing like the gentlemen behind the Ivy and Le Caprice who always suggest a saintly otherworldliness, as if they’ve astrally projected down from heaven to keep an eye on how things are going here on earth. Those fellows glide around the tables of their establishments, slightly beyond and above the hubblebubble of lunch and dinner. Will, though, was one of the boys, and gave the impression more of being en route to or from an unmade bed; but every time he opened a new restaurant it filled up with the famous and the fabulous. People tend to get much more excited about seeing Johnny Depp than they do about food, even dessert. The kind of women who get excited about sticky toffee pudding go completely la-la when confronted with a munching movie star. It’s a different order of excitement. Will had some kind of celebrity-invoking juju powers and everybody wanted to be his friend.

  ‘Alex, buddy.’ He said, he’s Australian, as you can see. ‘Alex, I was watchin’ one of your Blur videos yistidy. Mate, it’s a cryin’ shame. You’ve gotta lose some weight, mate. I’m sindin’ my man round.’

  Resistance was futile. A spritely Australian appeared on the doorstep the very next day and brought in dumb-bells, boxing gloves, a bicycle, chest expanders and other instruments of torture. Then he told me to put my running shoes on. I didn’t have any running shoes. I had quite an anti-exercise outlook. I believed that people in bands should concentrate on other, less realistic things, like being decadent and fantastic. But here he was, and it was true that I was starting to look rather frog-like, bulging at the eyes and the neck and the belly. Girls didn’t seem to mind, so I’d been ignoring it. I’d rather been hoping things would sort themselves out, which was the strategy I applied to most crises.

  Fortunately, the press office darlings of Adidas, Puma, Gola, Lacoste, Converse, Reebok and Nike had been bombarding me with trainers and I grabbed a pair from a big stack of unopened boxes, put my cigarette out and took a deep breath. By the time we’d run as far as Trafalgar Square, I was taking much deeper ones. I was in a different world of pain from my accustomed hungover malaise. Chest on fire; heart beating like a machine gun; legs, arms, back aching and needling me with intense agonies. I stumped around the pond in St James’s Park and traipsed back up St Martin’s Lane groaning and bellowing so loudly that heads turned. Jason, my tormentor, didn’t break into a sweat. I was wearing a heart rate monitor. He said he’d never seen it go that high, which seemed to please him immensely. Then he said, cheerfully, ‘Roight, boxin’ toime.’ The gloves that he gave me had seen plenty of active service and gave forth an unforgettable series of stinks as they warmed up. Having destroyed my legs, he set to work on my arms, teasing me exquisitely with phantom punches if I let my guard drop. After a couple of minutes I decided to try and kill him, but I couldn’t get near him. He finished me off with some sit-ups and said he’d see me next week. Next week sounded awfully soon. I asked him if it was really necessary to go through all that every week and he said that, to start with, daily would be the best way to make a difference.

  I phoned Will and told him he was a bastard, took a cool shower and sipped some orange juice. Then, quite slowly, I started to feel excellent. My hangover had evaporated. I felt energetic and nimble. I felt weightless, fearless and calm. I was in a genuine altered state, but it was the exact opposite of drinking, which feels great while you’re doing it and horrendous afterwards. I felt so good that I went to the café and had a fry-up.

  Jason’s visits became regular. His clientele were the chieftains and queen bees of the city jungle. He knew more famous people than me and he had them all grunting and groaning. Most of them had swimming pools as well, poor souls. He came to me early in the morning, at six-thirty, having already given a fashion magazine editor the works. She followed her fitness training with an hour of yoga, five days a week. I couldn’t tell if that was right or wrong. Directly after me he went to Chelsea and bossed Bryan Adams up and down his swimming pool for a bit, before going to fight with Will Ricker. Will was getting quite fanatical about boxing. I was starting to enjoy the excursions around the park in the peace of the early morning sun. Gradually, we extended the run around Buckingham Palace and Green Park. There were times when I hadn’t slept, but I knew my hangover wouldn’t be as bad if I ran around the parks. That still wasn’t sufficient motivation to get me out of bed, but Jason saw to that. Pretty soon, I started to run on my own as well.

  I’d spent about a million pounds on champagne and cocaine. It sounds ridiculous but, looking back, I don’t regret it. It was definitely the right thing to do. It was completely decadent, but I was a rock star, after all, a proper one, with a public duty to perform. The smorgasbord of life’s exquisite delights was my raison d’être. I wanted to live life in the moment as fully as possible, and stocks and shares weren’t the ticket. I don’t think I could have enjoyed the full twelve courses of the menu gastronomique with any less of a capital investment. Oddly, if I’d been more conservative, and spent the odd hundred grand, which was probably about par for a successful musician, the rest probably would have just disappeared, but my excesses were so well documented, and ‘key to the image value of the Blur brand’, that the cash I spent formed a kind of advertising campaign and I’m pret
ty sure I recouped the whole lot, one way or another. Certainly, the accountants managed to claim back the VAT on most of the champagne. If you spend enough money on something, it starts coming back eventually.

  Still, I was at a watershed. There is a natural elegance in youthful excess, which gradually turns uglier as one gets older. Uglier and uglier and uglier. Did I want to be chasing women when I was sixty-five, or, worse still, drunk, legless and lonely like Jeffrey Bernard?

  No.

  The Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom.

  Instrument Rating

  Nothing terribly bad happened when I wasn’t drinking, but the worry was that nothing terribly fantastic happened either. I’d always adhered to Storm Thorgerson’s advice to take a rest from drinking for one day every week. It wasn’t ever easy, but it served me well. Sometimes I’d take a week off, and I’d even gone sober for a whole month here and there. By now, hangovers were unsupportable five-day epics with special effects and I thought I might try to abstain for a whole year. It was quite a big step to take. Being elegantly wasted was kind of my job, and my social life, too, revolved around hedonistic abandon. When I’d stopped drinking in the past, it had been a matter of just hanging on until the time was up, but to spend a whole year in temperance meant that my life would have to change.

  For any drinker the entire pattern of existence changes when alcohol is off the menu. New routines emerge, things get done and good things do inevitably develop, although at a slower pace than the whizz, bang, wallop, wa-hey, whoops-a-daisy of the boozy escapade. Eventually, I started to feel I might be star-ring in a different kind of film altogether.

  Pro Flight Aviation, the flying school at Bournemouth airport, was one of only three in the country that offered airborne training for the instrument rating. I’d already completed a correspondence course that involved many weeks of fiddling around with a slide rule and memorising acronyms, followed by a week of intensive residential study and three days of exams at Gatwick airport. An instrument rating is the ultimate pilot’s licence. An instrument-rated pilot is licensed to fly not just in cloud, but also in controlled airspace, with the airliners.

  Airliners never fly direct to their destination. Air traffic would be unmanageable if that were the case. To keep things organised, there is a global network of airways, which are like motorways. The jets join the airways system after the takeoff procedure, and leave the network only to descend at the destination aerodrome. This means that all the world’s serious air traffic is funnelled very close together. The separation margin between me on the way home in my Bonanza and you eating nuts on a 747 coming in the opposite direction at a relative speed greater than a Kalashnikov bullet might be as little as five hundred feet. That’s just a bit longer than a football pitch. It’s not much when you consider a 747 is just a bit wider than a football pitch and we might both be in cloud. This is why the instrument rating is so difficult. The CAA, the governing body, make it difficult on purpose. Fifty feet is the tolerated margin of error. No autopilot, no GPS, and screens over the windows so you can’t see out.

  The flying school was in a different time zone from everywhere else in Bournemouth. I called them and a voice told me to report for training at ‘zair-o nine-ah hundred ars Zulu’. I knew what Zulu meant; it’s Greenwich Mean Time, but I can never remember if it’s an hour ahead or an hour behind the normal kind of time. Sometimes it’s the same, particularly in France. I asked, ‘Eight a.m?’ The voice said, ‘Affirmative. Eight local currency’, but from his tone I gathered the local currency wasn’t accepted.

  Zulu time is the only one that counts for pilots. Instrument clocks in aeroplanes are all set to Zulu. A pilot departing Kuala Lumpur has to say what time it will be in Greenwich when he wants to take off, rather than what time it will be in Kuala Lumpur.

  To climb into one of the flying school aircraft was to step out of local time and out of recognisable space into a new scheme of references. The outside world was obscured by screens and represented solely by six wobbling needles. To start with it was terrifying, but after a few weeks I could take off without looking out of the window, fly to Southampton, make an approach, get within fifty feet of the runway, have an engine failure, execute a missed approach on the remaining engine, fly back to Bournemouth, wait in the hold, descend and cross the runway threshold without taking my eyes off those six needles.

  It was the most difficult thing I’d ever done. Every waking moment I was consumed by it. I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. There wasn’t room. Towards the end of the training, taking a day off would be enough to take the edge off my flying skills and set me back two or three days. Not everyone was up to it. The pressure reduced grown men to tears daily, as their dreams of becoming commercial pilots proved to be beyond them. There was a handsome RAF Tornado pilot, on leave from active duty in a war zone; he briefly became my hero, but he just couldn’t get the hang of flying holds. He’d definitely get there, though. There was a cheeky kid who’d been left some money by his granny. He was never going to make it. A flying instructor who had more knowledge than most of us to start with, and been a little bit of a know-all, steadily and surely became overwhelmed and ran out of money. He’d taken out a bank loan to finance his training and over the weeks he changed beyond recognition. It broke him completely. I was changing, too. I wasn’t thinking about drinking or shagging or anything except instruments.

  Claire

  I got my stripes and returned to London in April, on the day that spring arrived. It was a Thursday. I went to the Groucho to meet Bernard Sumner from New Order and, to quote Bernard, it was as if the whole city was feeling ‘a sudden sense of liberty’. The calm sunny evening had drawn people into it and as I strolled from Covent Garden into Soho, crowds were lingering outside pubs, suddenly able to dream and do nothing in particular again. When I arrived at the Groucho, the whole world was there. In the upstairs bar, Moby was playing ‘London Calling’ on the piano, Joe Strummer was singing and Wayne Sleep, the ballet dancer, was turning pirouettes on the bar. Keith was in full swing as impromptu ringmaster, leading the jolly gathering to join in with the ‘and I . . . live by the river-uuh’ bits.

  It wasn’t torturous being sober in the Groucho. I’d been absolutely rigorous about not drinking for one day every week, so it wasn’t like it was the first time. I still liked it there, with the right company.

  I was introduced to the bass player from Coldplay, who was at the bar. He was a very serious young man. He was observing the chaos with some hauteur. He explained carefully that his band’s reinvigorated North American promotional strategies would boost sales in key secondary markets, coast to coast, album on album. Fair to say it did.

  I went and sat with Bernard. He said he didn’t care how long I stopped drinking for; there was still no way he was ever going to get into an aeroplane with me driving. We were talking about boats when Dan Macmillan arrived. He said he was going to Cabaret and asked if I wanted to come with him. A girl had been winking at me and, if I’d have had a few drinks, I would probably have stayed in the Groucho and surrendered. I didn’t and the random caprice of Dan’s soaring wanderlust led me unwittingly to an almighty turning point.

  It took ages to get to Cabaret, even though it was only round the corner. Dan wanted to fight the parked cars. Then we had some trouble getting past the doormen. As we dawdled on the threshold, two girls pushed past us. One was laughing and beautiful, and the other one I vaguely recognised. The lady in charge arrived and started kissing Dan. All his friends were there and we danced. The beautiful laughing girl was dancing, too. I didn’t get her name until we were in the taxi.

  It was Claire, she told me on the Edgware Road. We were nearly at her house when she asked if I had a girlfriend. I said of course I had a girlfriend. I had loads of girlfriends. Girlfriends everywhere. I was a fucking rock star, for Christ’s sake. She made the taxi stop and told me to get out. We were in Kilburn and it was barren of taxis, so I said I’d drop her off and take the
one that we were in back to my house. And then we were kissing again.

  She had very long legs and a business card, which said that she was an executive producer. I didn’t know what that was, or who she was. I just had lots of scratches down my back and a big smile on my face.

  Think Tank

  We’d started recording a new Blur record before I went to Bournemouth. Graham hadn’t turned up. Maybe we should have waited, but we started it without him, hoping he’d come back. We’d all developed as musicians and songwriters. Since we’d last made a record, Damon’s Gorillaz album had outsold any of Blur’s albums and ‘Vindaloo’ had outsold any of Blur’s singles. Still, it’s a delicate equilibrium that makes a band really thrive and it wasn’t clear how it would work without Graham.

  A good simple melody is an unfathomable work of genius, and an acute sense of melody was Damon’s gift. Melodies are probably the trickiest thing of all. Having said that, Graham is definitely the best guitar player in the world. It’s absolutely true. Graham can also write good melodies, but I think his greatest capacity is for harmony. His mind thrives in the expressiveness of harmonic forms. He added sixths, he diminished sevenths and he adjusted fifths with a natural flair, adding exquisite depth and colour to Damon’s effortless top lines.