I was living the good life, but I wasn’t really making any money. It didn’t bother me. Accumulating wealth wasn’t the purpose of the band. I did start to notice that bills weren’t always paid. Sometimes we couldn’t use a particular hire company any more. Quite often people would ask us how we got on with our manager, and whether it was working out.
Some of the big retailers stock records on a sale or return basis. The album had stopped selling and Woolworths returned quite a lot of copies. Then a really big bill came from the VAT man and we couldn’t afford to pay it. It was serious. I had no idea what VAT was. I was good at playing the bass and showing off. That was my job. We trusted our manager to make sure that those kinds of unpleasantnesses were taken care of. It turned out that quite a lot of bills remained unpaid. We owed everybody money. We brought in new accountants, who told us we were staring bankruptcy in the face and facing prison if we couldn’t come up with the cash to pay the VAT. Whenever this happens it’s time to start looking for a new manager.
We went back to see Chris Morrison, the manager who hadn’t taken us for lunch the first time. He had spent the whole meeting talking about business and Ultravox and Thin Lizzy and laughing like Basil Brush occasionally. He took us on. He said, ‘You’re going to have to go back to America to get some cash.’ He loves doing deals. He did a deal with a T-shirt company and signed us up for a thirteen-week American extravaganza, so that we could sell some T-shirts and posters and pay off our debts. It was the only way to get money. Fortunately Jesus Jones, our label mates at Food, had the number one album there, and the American record company really had no choice but to finance the tour. We’d lose about a quarter of a million dollars on a thirteen-week stint, but we’d just owe that to the record company, which is what record companies are for. The main thing was we’d get some instant cash from selling T-shirts. We were ready for another American odyssey. We thought.
5
the genesis of britpop
Grunge
The music media moved to a weekly rhythm. The seven-day cycle of charts, playlists, the
NME
,
Melody Maker
,
Sounds
and
Record Mirror
meant that scenes and styles came and went quickly. It was around the end of baggy and the start of shoe-gazing when we left London to go and sell our T-shirts.
Thirteen weeks, a quarter of a year, is quite a long time however you look at it. The day we arrived in New York was a noteworthy one in the annals of pop. It was the exact day, in September 1991, that Nirvana released their masterpiece,
Nevermind
. It’s no exaggeration to say that
Nevermind
was the most significant American record of the decade and that the world changed that day.
American rock music had been quite dull for as long as anyone could remember: squeaky-clean and faintly ridiculous. Suddenly here was a sound, a look, an attitude and a record that united all disaffected young white Americans. Right up until then, British music had been selling well in America. A succession of pop acts like EMF and Jesus Jones had number one singles in the
Billboard
charts and a string of Manchester bands, the Stone Roses, the Charlatans, the Happy Mondays, had staged a British invasion of college radio stations.
Until Nirvana there was no subversive American music to compete with the stuff that was being made in England. American radio stations were crying out for bands from Manchester, like you or I might insist on having some cheese from France or chocolate from Belgium. A&R men gave huge sums of money to bands like Northside, and the High on the basis that Manchester was an enchanted place where great music comes from. Of course it is, but it very quickly became yesterday’s news. It shouldn’t have affected us, because we weren’t from there. The trouble was that everyone assumed we were. They said we had that Manchester sound. Manchester was dead and buried by the end of the week. The only place it was reasonable to come from if you wanted to make records at that time was Seattle.
SBK Records was on the forty-second floor of a skyscraper on the Avenue of the Americas, slap in the middle of Manhattan. A peculiarly tidy workplace and more like our accountants’ offices than the EMI building, it had zero glamour, a stiff atmosphere. Nobody laughed or had a hangover or called us darling. The company had already requested we make a different video for ‘There’s No Other Way’ which we had done, and it was soon clear that they were keen for us to make other changes; drink less; smarten up our act generally: don’t stay out late; don’t fool around with women - it was like we’d got married to them.
For the American record company the ideal band would all be sober, constantly grinning, nice about everybody and happy to let the label make the records and videos. We were used to record company pressure from Food. It’s a healthy thing. Ultimately, Food’s idea of what a great rock and roll band sounded like and behaved like was quite similar to our own, that’s partly why we signed to them - that and the fact that nobody else liked us. The rub is always that bands are trying to express themselves, which is satisfying, creative and worthwhile; record companies are trying to please everybody, which is pointless, vacuous and not what art is.
There were piles and piles of Blur promotional CDs around the office, which were in the process of being mailed to radio stations. We didn’t know anything about these records. What were they? The artwork on the cover was weak, a ‘blurred’ image. The colours were not strong either. The title was also bad, ‘Blurti-go’.
The man with the oral hygiene spray called us into his big office and gave us all the thrusting handshake. He said he was ‘
toad
ally pumped’ about the remix. We said, ‘What remix?’
He explained that our record hadn’t been quite right, but they’d managed to fix that. ‘These remixer guys, they’re
reee
lly,
reee
lly haat.’ It took him a long time to say each ‘really’, and ‘hot’ came out with a wallop. It had about five exclamation marks. He put a lot of himself into the statement and we all felt his pain. He played the remix at low volume and tapped his foot and shook his head around. He was burning. He believed in energy.
The mix, which was of ‘Bang’, was exceptionally bad. The band had been removed and replaced by a mixture of the High and Northside with a baggy beat. It was a disaster, an embarrassment, and it was already being sent to radio stations. The worst thing that could happen would be that radio stations played it. He said, ‘Guys! You gotta trust me on this one’, and he showed us his pain again.
I woke up in The Paramount with a girl called Mary, who I met at a Dinosaur Jr gig. We had some strawberries for breakfast and I went to Boston.
Bands always go to Boston after New York. There’s probably nothing wrong with it but leaving New York is a wrench every time and I always arrive in Boston and wonder what the hell I’m doing there. Record companies are terrified of Boston just like indie bands were terrified of Neil at Syndrome. There are so many college kids there that it’s become a sort of test market. If the radio station in Boston starts to play a record, dozens of others across the USA follow the lead.
It’s still about the most important thing for a record, radio play. If the record gets on the radio, then you’re in business. So Boston is important.
The gig in Boston was part of a radio festival spectacular. The station had put a lot of oomph behind the event and the record company saw it as a vital building block. We’d discovered a new drink called Jägermeister. It tasted a lot like cough medicine. I’d spent the previous night at a bar on Lansdowne Street drinking those. There are half a dozen clubs on Lansdowne and if you’re playing at one of them you get a pass for all of them. I left Graham at the one that was playing Dinosaur Jr records and went to the one that was playing Sister Sledge. It had girls dancing in cages. The Sugarcubes were on an American tour as well and I’d seen Einar the night before in New York. He was a poet sort of person. He was having a lot of fun dancing to Sister Sledge with Björk. He was so happy. We had some Jägermeister and he said, ‘I’m gay’, pinched a girl’s bum and fell over laughing.
It’s easy to meet people in America, especially if you’re English. I asked the girls in the cages if they wanted to come back to the hotel for a game of cricket. The hotel lobby was deserted as everyone goes to bed at eleven o’clock in Boston. The cricket got out of control when Graham arrived and insisted on fast bowling. The girls didn’t have a clue what cricket was, anyway.
Riots, Fights, Guns
There were a lot of bands playing at the festival and there was a girl dressed up as a cowboy dobbing out Jägermeister, which we didn’t have to pay for because we had special badges. We went onstage really late and by that time we had drunk all the Jägermeister.
It was one of the times when the band was drunk and better for it. It was a tiny club and it was packed. There were people outside who couldn’t get in. Everybody was drunk. The sound man had been warned not to turn the PA up too loud. I’d heard him scream, ‘FUCK OFF!’ to the man from the record company. Inspired, we all turned everything up to maximum and let it rip.
The crowd went totally berserk: a mob of moshing, surfing, stage diving and screaming. All the crap with the remix and the manager and the people who thought we were from Manchester flew out the window and we played better than we’d ever played before. We could all play really well by then. We knew exactly what we were doing and we were brilliant.
It was the perfect recipe. A pissed-off and pissed-up, passionately anticipated band with a lot to prove playing in a packed venue. We whipped up a frenzy. It was everything you’d hope for if you were in a band or in the audience, but it was absolutely out of control and the venue cut the power after the third song. The crowd started to riot. They were destroying the place and we had to run for it. We got out before the police arrived, but a lot of people were arrested.
The radio station had never seen anything like it and washed their hands of us. The record company were aghast and they sent a bossy lady down to keep an eye on things. They were threatening to pull the finance for the tour, which would have meant no T-shirt money and big trouble. The bossy lady kept putting her hand on my knee and looking into my eyes.
The next show was in Ithaca, New York State, in a small bar. Jim Merlis, our American publicist, had fast become a friend. He was always asking me to say, ‘Cheers.’ He really liked the way I said ‘Cheers’. I really liked the way he said, ‘Coffee.’ ‘Corfee.’
His girlfriend’s parents lived in Ithaca. We were invited to dinner at their home. They are physicists working at Cornell University. Bob Richardson won the Nobel Prize for Physics when he discovered superfluidity. He said he was as surprised as anybody that he’d found it. He stumbled across it when he was cooling some helium down to a very low temperature and the helium started doing weird things. He said that if you stir a superfluid, it spins forever. ‘Forever?’ I said. He smiled and nodded. It was during the asparagus hollandaise that I realised I really liked these people. They were both highly intelligent. I asked them questions all night. We talked about cosmology a bit. I didn’t get to talk about those things very often, and my mind was full of it, from the astronomy book.
We went along to the local radio station in the morning. The DJ instantly identified himself as a buffoon. He had appalling coiffure and perfect teeth. It was a disaster from the moment he opened his mouth and introduced us as ‘the Blur’. From Manschester. He asked Graham what he thought about the new Seattle sound. Graham said he fucking hated it. Our hapless host put a record on straight away and flew into a rage. Radio stations can be fined for broadcasting swearing on the airwaves, but it was Graham’s flat refusal to engage in platitudes that had really riled him. After the adverts we were back on air, but someone accidentally said ‘shit’ again and that was the end of it. We were hauled up before the director of programmes to apologise. He seemed like quite a nice bloke. He said, ‘Just don’t fucking swear on my airwaves.’
The tour staggered slowly along the East Coast. In the taxi on the way to the 9.30 club in Washington, DC, I felt Damon bristling next to me. He must have been pulling faces at the dudes in the next car, because as I looked up one of them had pulled a gun out and was pointing it at him.
By the time we got down to Atlanta for a couple of days off, I was the only man standing. The Beastie Boys were staying at the hotel, which was on Peachtree Street. Everything in Atlanta is on Peachtree Street.
I asked to be put through to a Beastie and said, ‘Hey, I’m Alex from Manschester, what’s up?’ He didn’t want to come drinking. I went to a bar on my own and met a girl called Michelle. She had an Alfa Romeo Spider and she took me on a tour of the city. There are a lot of people who want to have a good time in Atlanta. We went to a gay bar, a lesbian bar, a college bar. We went everywhere. It was a great city and a great car. She drove fast while slugging tequila from a bottle. She said she had another car and the B52s had used it in the video for ‘Love Shack’. They were friends of hers. As I try to recall the weekend we spent together it feels like I spent it inside that video. She personified everything about the song and I wondered at the time if it had been written about her. She was a singularly striking presence. Everywhere we went everyone seemed to know her. She was from Athens, where R.E.M. are from. She told me she had been Michael Stipe’s girlfriend. Much later on, I mentioned her to him and he said, ‘Uh-oh!’
It was unusual to meet anyone beautiful who hadn’t been involved with another musician. I discovered that I’d shared the model from New York with Jesus Jones’ keyboard player, who I’d met in Freud’s a few weeks earlier.
Michelle gave me her address in Athens and the next time the band were in Atlanta I got someone to drive me to Athens to look for her, but I never found her again.