Bit of a Blur (10 page)

Andrea, the singer from the Darling Buds, was a pin-up platinum blonde and that was the third time.

The world had started to open up to us and it appeared there was no town that didn’t have beautiful women I could have married or interesting people I could have quite happily spent my life with.

I loved staying in hotels, and going everywhere, but I wanted to live in Soho. It’s an enticing place. I found it surprising that more people didn’t want to live there. Soho is a constant carnival. It’s where people go to enjoy themselves and there is something there to please everybody. It has glitz and it has grime. Immeasurable wealth and absolute destitution rub along side by side. The overwhelming rush of chic sophistication, theatres, restaurants, neon, and the crude sexiness of people drunk en masse made my heart beat faster. Soho has a fairy-tale history and a future that’s open wide. The present moment always holds more possibilities in Soho than anywhere else in the kingdom, thousands of faces behind thousands of open doors, countless things about to happen. It’s alive and you never know what it’s going to do next.

I loved it. It seemed infinite and I just wanted to hurl myself into the chaos. After much searching and disappointment, viewings of dingy bedsits that shared bathrooms with prostitutes, and portered blocks that smelled of gravy, Justine and I discovered an unfurnished one-bedroom flat above a shop in Covent Garden on the corner of Endell Street and Shaftesbury Avenue. It had a tiny loo, a lounge with an open fire, and people thronging past in the street below. The bedroom was sunny, the kitchen was slug-free and there was hot water in the bathroom. It was being refurbished; it was still a building site but it was perfect.

I’ve never wanted to live anywhere quite as much as I wanted to live there, the moment that I walked in. It was on the first floor of a four-storey building between a church and an enormous hostel for the homeless and the entrance to the flat was down a little alley where the drunk ones staggered to urinate and vomit. It’s rare that you get to choose exactly where you live. There’s usually some practicality or other to consider, but once we’d tiptoed through the puddles, that was the perfect spot.

I paid the support band’s roadie to help move all our crap up from New Cross. Everything we owned fitted into his van quite easily and it all looked revoltingly dirty in the pristine new flat. There was an old tapestry screen that had seemed quite exotic in the borough of Lewisham; it looked like junk in Covent Garden. We didn’t have a fridge and there was no furniture, but it didn’t matter. I quite liked not having anything. Having nothing is quite relaxing. Being alive and in the middle of the chase was all that mattered. You can live without chairs, but you can’t live without dreams.

Dreams were all I had when I met Justine. I was a romantic at heart, full of indefinable yearning and impossible schemes. I didn’t have ruthless ambition, but I’d stumbled into something that was beginning to find a momentum of its own.

She loved me when I was a write-off, an unqualified supermarket no-hoper. As the band started to become successful the new friends that I started to make liked me partly just because I was a part of something successful. It became a part of me. But Justine and I always had a natural, easy-going magnetism for each other. We had no television. We played board games and walked the streets together, read to each other. We both loved music. I expressed myself through it and she expressed herself to it. She was effortlessly elegant, a natural dancer. She listened and she laughed and she was always surprising me. She understood me in ways that I couldn’t. I loved her.

The tragedy of getting what you want is that when you do actually get it, you always lose what you had.

The practicalities of the big time started to take over. The band’s growing popularity meant that I could afford to live in the flat in Covent Garden, but when we weren’t in Maison Rouge finishing the album we were on the road touring or doing promotion. Despite mediocre album sales, the success of ‘There’s No Other Way’ catapulted the band into the international arena. The day after we moved to Covent Garden, the first North American tour kicked off. The first date was in Toronto. For some reason there was no direct flight, and we had to keep getting on smaller planes. It was quite all right to fly back then; planes were like flying pubs. You could smoke and you didn’t have to pay for anything. I was happy getting drunk with Graham, wherever it was. You have to get used to being on planes if you want to sell records, anyway.

None of us had crossed the Atlantic before. I don’t know what I was expecting. I imagined the mustard in America would be hotter than it is at home, that America would be somehow more intense than England. It’s quite nice, American mustard, but it’s rather mild. Japan has got the really hot stuff.

My passport came under close scrutiny at immigration control. I’d jumped in a fountain after a show in Lille a couple of weeks earlier, and it had been in my pocket. The official was quite appalled by this. The Canadians, particularly, like to have a really good look at everyone before they let them come into the country. We were taken into little booths and questioned. They want to make sure that you’re not going to try and overthrow the established order. I ticked a box on the immigration form that said this was not the purpose of my visit, but the official was suspicious. And I suppose she was right. As I stood outside the airport, waiting for the next thing to happen, I started to feel that travel is the great adventure. I was glimpsing the world beyond the one that I knew and getting a sense of how big it might be.

A sense of vastness looms in Canada. We mainly have towns in the British Isles. Even London gives the impression of being a town. It’s built on the human scale. In North America they mainly have cities. Even places that could really be quite small are built along supergalactic dimensions; skyscrapers and ten-lane road networks with flyover systems that look like scribble. I’d never thought of Toronto, particularly, and here it was, enormous, in an enormous country.

I went down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast, alone. I was trying to work out what an English muffin was, and whether to have that, or an omelette. It was nice to be ordering breakfast in Canada. I was quite content there, alone, studying the menu. Someone was looking at me. He came over and said he was from the record company and hi there. I said oh, hello, I was thinking I might just have a look around the city today, and wouldn’t that be nice? He straightened up and said, ‘Well, sure thing. Perhaps we could do that after dinner and before the show.’ And gave me a list and said, ‘Here’s your promo.’ It said something like:

It was only 0900 so I went back to my room and called Cousin Dick, who lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a couple of hundred miles away. I hadn’t spoken to him since I’d sat on his knee and watched
Tom and Jerry
. I said, ‘Dick, it’s Alex James, Jason’s son. I’m in Toronto!’ He said, ‘I know, it’s in the paper.’ We were evidently quite famous in Canada. That didn’t make any sense at all. We’d never been there or anything. I went upstairs to be hot-wired to the media main.

Journalists are all quite clever, often cleverer than I am, I find. When they don’t like me it really annoys them that they are clever and they are getting fifty pence a word and I’m an idiot with a fancy haircut and getting all the money and all the girls. It’s best not to talk to those ones. Generally the cleverest ones work for the papers with the stupidest readers. These papers have the biggest circulations, so they can afford to pay the most. That’s how it works.

There is a knack to doing interviews. It’s mainly a knack thing, the interview, like playing the bass is. We didn’t quite have the knack, yet. It takes a while to come. For addressing the press there was a big suite on the top floor of the hotel, The Plaza on Bloor Street. I like that hotel. It’s a tall building and the sun screeches in. The first interview was with a music journalist, and we talked about the Undertones for ages. He loved the album, and couldn’t believe he was being paid to talk to me. I ordered some Bloody Marys for us. It was nice.

The man from the
Toronto Sun
was interested in our controversial artwork. I said it wasn’t controversial, it was a pair of tits. He wrote that down. I ordered six Bloody Marys and he wrote that down as well. I knew he would. It seemed easy, being in the paper. I launched into a kind of acceptance speech, thanking the Canadian people for everything and said a big hello to my relations, the Vines, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. That didn’t seem to get to him, though. He was getting bored. He was probably off to talk to the Prime Minister next. It seemed to be quite a serious newspaper. I was on my fourth Bloody Mary and showing him my handstand when the
Glitz n Bitz
lady came in. Graham and I had been doing a lot of handstands.

Justine was in another world a long, long way away. The
Glitz n Bitz
lady was attractive and intelligent. We lay on the bed. She had a Bloody Mary, and reached inside my trousers and gave me a handjob. My moral cloth was degenerating further. That definitely was my biggest crime so far. But, good God, I was enjoying myself.

There was a jam of people clamouring outside the radio station when we arrived, and at the gig for soundcheck. They were much more enthusiastic than people had been at home. They were crazy about the record, and some of them started to get hysterical. Things were already well past weird when Glenn Tilbrook from the band Squeeze appeared in the dressing room. He was quite drunk, and very happy. Graham was beside himself. Some men with natty suits appeared and said hi they were from our American record company and that they’d flown up from New York wasn’t everything
in
-credible and grinned and gave pumping handshakes. One of them had a penetrating stare and a breath-freshener atomiser that he kept dosing himself with. Graham and Glenn were drinking a bottle of brandy and doing handstands and knocking everything over. Squirt-squirt went the atomiser. The
Glitz n Bitz
lady came in and started snogging me. Squirt. No one could find Dave or the lighting guy. Squirt-stare-squirt.

Dave finally arrived in great spirits. The show was raucous and the man from the American record company’s eyes were popping by the time we’d finished. He shook his head and said it was too loud.

We drove around the shores of Lake Ontario, stopping at Niagara Falls for lunch on our way to the USA. On the road the same things repeat themselves every day - the travelling, service stations, interviews, soundchecks and shows. We launched ourselves at everything with missionary zeal, but there is a steady rhythm beneath the apparent total chaos, although the barometer was still rising all the time. Things were getting more spectacular and happening faster.

Touring had changed a bit from the days of playing to thirty people in York and driving back in the middle of the night in Jason’s VW, taking it in turns to sit next to him and pinch him when he looked sleepy. Being on tour is a hard feeling to explain or even remember, a gale of constant accelerations and stimulations and no time to dwell on anything.

All our petty wishes were granted - sex on tap, bars that never closed and where we didn’t have to worry too much about the bill. It was a constantly unfolding escapade. I loved it, but I felt crap the majority of the time. The part of my brain that makes sense of everything was having a great time, but the part of me on the ground was having trouble functioning on not enough sleep, excess alcohol intake and travel fatigue.

There was more friction on tour than in the studio, naturally. We couldn’t escape each other’s irritating behaviour. Damon and his stupid love beads, Graham and his stupid skateboard collection, Dave’s overall lack of panache and my own annoying habit of pointing these things out to them; but disputes were short-lived. We were brought back together nightly, in the rapture of playing loud music.

By now we had a road crew and these were the people we spent our days with. The road crew live on a bus and wear free T-shirts and smelly jeans. They are men of vast experience. They do tend to be quite nice people, despite appearances and reputations. The front-of-house sound man is usually the most sophisticated member of the crew; he’s generally a bit less sticky looking than everyone else. Sound men are always fiddling about with soldering irons. You know you’ve got a good one when he shows you a strange-looking box he’s made for making guitars louder.

The front-of-house sound man is the senior member of the sound crew. The backline guys deal with the stuff that’s on the stage, the instruments and amplifiers. They are the rock gentleman’s gentlemen. I inherited my roadie from Motorhead. He’d given many years’ service and knew every bassline, hotel, service station and rock venue in the Western world. He was always polishing my guitar and twiddling screws on it and asking me to stop throwing it in the drums. He loved guitars. He really cared about them. I used them a bit like biros, chewing them up and losing them.

You can’t have a show without lights so there has to be a lighting crew. Lampies are often maniacs so they have an affinity with drummers. They are feral creatures, modern-day pirates. They sail the land seeking only drugs, women and free T-shirts.