There is a tour manager, too. He has to stop fights, get everyone on the bus and look after the money. Tour management is acknowledged to be the toughest job in all showbusiness. We seemed to get through a lot of tour managers.
New York
After the first American show in Boston, Damon and I flew down to New York for promo, just the two of us. We were a four-piece band and I was always slightly piqued when I was left out of things. We were all constantly jockeying for position - that’s what gave the group its dynamism - but lately the other two were unbroadcastable, so they were happy to stay in bed.
There was a white stretch limo waiting for us at the airport. It was full of booze and televisions and phones. I called my mum. I said, ‘It’s all fine, I’ve moved out of the squat. I’m in New York, in a limousine.’
Two of my mother’s aunts were hoofers, and my father’s uncle was a jazz pianist. There were showbusiness genes on both sides of the family, but as far as my parents were concerned I might as well have told them I was joining the circus when I left college. They were always supportive, but the music industry was quite beyond their experience - theirs and almost everyone in Bournemouth. It would have been impudent to tell the careers officer at school that I wanted to be in a band. For a start I hadn’t studied music. But it was just there in my blood and in my racing heart.
We sailed over Brooklyn Bridge and landed at The Paramount Hotel in Times Square. There aren’t many places that overwhelm quite like New York. It was hard for someone who’d been living in a squat until a week before to accept just quite how wonderful The Paramount was. It was the first great hotel of the nineties, the monumental vision of Ian Schrager, one of the people behind Studio 54, the most legendary nightclub in history. Studio 54 was where Andy Warhol and Truman Capote danced with Liz Taylor and Audrey Hepburn, while Chic and Debbie Harry drank cocktails.
The Paramount was almost as glamorous. The staff were all hired from modelling agencies and wore designer costume; the cavernous reception area was a kind of ark in which all the best things in the world had been tastefully assembled.
I opened the door to my room. It was dark apart from a single spot-lit rose in a ceramic phial. I’ve never seen a rose look that good, not in an English country garden. It was exhilarating just to be in that hotel. The rooms were exceptionally small but, from the pencil on the bedside bureau to the power plumbing, exquisitely starched bedding and huge fluffy towels, absolutely perfect. Everything that’s good eventually finds its way to New York. It has such immense gravity that nothing that is truly wonderful can avoid it for long. All the super-models have homes in New York; all the great artists have shows there; film stars; rock stars; writers and the cavalry of wannabes, hangers-on and shagnasties that pursues the moving member’s club of the successful, the beautiful and the fabulous. You name it. It’s there. It’s the best place in the world to go for a drink.
There is always one place that’s the one cool place in New York, and that’s where all the famous people who are in the city that night want to go. They all want to meet each other. It’s difficult to get in to the one cool place, but once you’re in you’re in, and you can’t actually get out. By then it’s impossible not to meet these people. A brief residence in Manhattan is a clamouring, yammering public appearance from the moment you arrive. I’ve stayed under a false name. The phone still didn’t stop ringing. I didn’t answer the phone. Famous people came and banged on the door. It’s full on and non-stop and there’s nowhere to hide. To be in New York is to be on display.
Still, at this stage we weren’t very well known in America, but the gig was quite a hot ticket. The guest list was a roll-call of all the English people in bands in New York on that day. There are always plenty of those, a remarkable number. It would be hard to avoid spotting one in the street or in the hotel. It was quite creepy, the number of times the singer from Del Amitri kept appearing, never at our shows, just randomly around the world. ‘Graham! I saw him again! I saw him again!’ Soon, we started to look out for him.
It was packed at the Marquee. I went out to the bar in the front of house with Damon. We quickly got thrashed to bits on vodkas and limes; told everyone to fuck off; snogged each other and then had a fight on the floor. We destroyed the venue in the course of the show. All the record company cheeses were sitting at tables on the balcony, staring. Damon got on the balcony and danced on the tables and spilled their sparkling mineral waters. Graham had a fight with his guitar. I tried to high-jump the drumkit and had a fight with Dave, quite a bad one. I felt we’d given a pretty good account of ourselves, but the record company weren’t impressed. No one from the label came backstage, but a message was sent requesting a breakfast meeting at the hotel.
I left the venue with a model, and went back to her warehouse in SoHo. She was on the cover of
Vogue
. It was on the coffee table.
Another one-night stand. It wasn’t like I pursued these women. It was suddenly as simple as not resisting. Still, I was more than willing and it was the same act of betrayal. There were so many reasons to say yes and only one reason to say no, and she was an ocean away.
When I woke up it was gone breakfast time and I scarpered back to the hotel. The manager was waiting outside the door. He was red. He said, ‘Where the hell have you been?’ I said, ‘I’ve been to the top!’ He said, ‘Go and clean your teeth and get back down here, to the bottom. The record company want to have words.’
The man from the record company obviously had something difficult to say. I don’t think he had encountered drunkenness on the scale that he had seen last night, and he was disappointed. His job was probably on the line. He said we needed to ‘seize a golden ring of opportunity’, and other half-baked motivational hocus-pocus. We stayed very quiet.
I wanted to buy a guitar. Graham came with me. We walked out of the meeting into the lobby. Sitting on one of the architectural sofas, like a holy apparition, was Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine. They were one of five bands that we name-checked in interviews. The other four bands had either split up or died. He nodded to us, so we walked over, nudging each other. He said he’d been to the show and it was great. He told me where to go to get a good acoustic guitar. Any psychiatrist will tell you that the respect of your peers is more valuable than any amount of record company bollocks.
Then we went to New Jersey.
London
We got back from that tour the day before my twenty-third birthday, back to a new life in the West End. There is rumoured to be treasure buried beneath Trafalgar Square. I’m sure there is. Even if it’s just a rumour, a big proportion of all the wealth in the country is within about half an hour’s walk of Nelson’s Column and every day I woke up in the middle of it and felt it all around me.
I picked my way around town, never happier than when I had nothing in particular to do apart from maybe buy some rope and a piece of cheese. The very first flush of success was the most enjoyable, the initial paradigm shift from wanting something to actually getting it, but by then it was already too late. Success is the most addictive commodity in the cosmos.
My heroes were an old bastard called Jeffrey Bernard, a reprobate drunkard and writer of columns of great wit, and a fictional prostitute called Aunt Augusta from Graham Greene’s
Travels with my Aunt
. I decided to concentrate on being an alcoholic genius.
I’d seen how the record company arranged things while we were in America. They’d call wherever it was they wanted to take us and say something like, ‘Hiii, this is SPUD FENSTER from EMI RECORDS, I’ve got the GUYS FROM BLUR in town, they’d love to come around. CAN YOU PUT THEM ON THE LIST?’ It never failed in America. It’s an expensive business, being a man-about-town. I thought I’d try my luck, and got the phone book out. Justine called and said the magic words EMI, Blur and guest list. It worked nearly everywhere. Ronnie Scott’s, the jazz club in Frith Street, was about the only place where it wouldn’t wash. I got through to Ronnie. He said, ‘Blur? Never heard of ’em. They’ll have to pay like everyone else.’ It was towards the end of the evening, and I started arguing with him. The last thing I remember saying was ‘wanker’ and the next thing I heard, a couple of weeks later, was that he was dead. I felt bad about that.
I was systematically working my way through all places of revelry in the whole of the West End, but what I really needed to set myself up in business as a practising alcoholic genius was an HQ.
Freud’s was a subterranean cocktail bar on Shaftesbury Avenue. I’d been there once, as it was near the house. The barman had mad dreadlocks, and I saw him at a party after a Jesus Jones gig a couple of weeks later. His name was Mark, and he said, ‘Come down, I’ll make you a cocktail.’ I went there the next night. It was a tasteful room, all slate and plaster with mood lighting around the tables and tracklights on the bar, which was very well appointed. There were hundreds of bottles of different spirits and liqueurs on shelves, sticks of celery, bowls of lemons and limes, whizzers, twizzlers, whirlers and shakers, juicers, a coffee machine and a sandwich toaster. You could buy the art on the walls if you got drunk enough. There were pretty girls there, too.
I’d never drunk cocktails really properly. We were still Newcastle Brown men at heart. To start with, Mark made me one called a Long Island Iced Tea. It’s all the clear spirits shaken with ice in a large tumbler and topped to the brim with orange juice. It tasted like lollipops. It was very good indeed. He was an expert. We had some B52s next. They’re on fire and you have to drink them through a straw. Then he made margaritas, very dry, with the glass dipped in salt so that you tasted it on the rim. I said that I was going to come here every day. He said, ‘You should, you’ve got your own entrance!’ There was an iron staircase at the back of the room behind the piano. It went straight into our alleyway. It was true. It was my own entrance. He said we’d better have a beer. He said you needed to drink a fizzy one after every three cocktails. The bubbles help your body absorb the spirits, otherwise they build up in your stomach and you drink more than you can manage. I love the nuggets of advice shared by seasoned booze guzzlers. The best one ever was to have one day off drinking every week. That’s the vital one. Then bills got paid, I phoned my mum and I learned how to say no. A door that I’d lived next to for three months had suddenly opened on to what became an extra room of the flat. A city is just a whole lot of doors, and if you walk through the right ones anything can happen.
It didn’t seem to matter which direction I walked from Covent Garden; there was a lot to see and I did a lot of wandering. It was part of my broader research. The Inns of Court and the eerie shanty town of mad, masturbating down and outs at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The river: Cleopatra’s Needle with its inexplicable consort of sphinx and unthinkable Second World War blast damage. There were few overt reminders of the ravages of war in London. It was fundamentally a city at peace. I wandered through the parks, the alleys and thoroughfares feeling a part of it all and gradually finding myself at home.
Justine left The Body Shop and started doing make-up for photo shoots; she usually got a couple of jobs a week, but it meant we were poor again. Despite my infidelity, we were closer then than ever. We’d been together for four years by that time. She was the first woman I’d ever been able to be myself with. She gave me confidence and banished doubt.
Until then the band had all lived within walking distance of each other. But around the time
Leisure
came out we balkanised. Graham moved to Marylebone, which was still in walking distance, but he went to the pubs there mainly. We’d always gone to the same places before. Damon went west, to Kensington, where the pubs weren’t very nice, and Dave went north to Archway, where they were really horrible.
Trouble
There are all kinds of deals to be done when people start to like your music. A record deal is the obvious one; that’s for the records. Publishing is for the songs. They’re different things, records and songs, so if Blur recorded a song written by someone else, Blur would get a recording royalty and whoever wrote the song would get a publishing royalty. It’s called publishing because it goes back to the days of sheet music, when songwriters had their music physically published. We did a publishing deal, which should have put some money in our pockets, but Balfe had persuaded us to spend the money on some more mental crazy amazing lights for the live shows. But they were a flop and he bought them back from us, cheaply. Come to think of it, I never saw the ‘She’s So High’ lights again, either.
Mike Smith was Blur’s publisher and he moved into a bachelor bedsit on Rupert Street. Rupert Street was about the sleaziest, nastiest, low-downest corner of Soho. I went round to see him with Justine. It wasn’t the sort of flat that you could entertain in, or even really stay in for very long. It just had a bed in it and approximately a million records. We went to the Crown, Brewer Street, and played darts even though he wasn’t drinking and I was having a day off. He was one of the best people to go out for a few drinks with, or go without a few drinks with. At that particular moment he was trying to sign Teenage Fan Club. He was always trying to sign someone. That was his job: deciding which bunch of drunk idiots he should give a big slice of corporate cash to next. We were the first ones he’d signed.
I always liked listening to the demos Mike got sent. We were both big fans of the Keatons. They were a twelve-piece sonic terrorism outfit. One of them didn’t play an instrument. Instead he did things with honey. It got sticky at Keatons’ gigs. He wasn’t sure whether to sign them or not. For me, the Keatons were a no-brainer. He played a song called ‘Creep’ by a new band called Radiohead. We quite liked it. It was a bit depressing though. He said that they hardly drank at all. I passed on them. He couldn’t afford them. The Cranberries took us all by surprise. He was really miffed about not spotting the Cranberries, they were a bargain.