She said, ‘Come to Browns.’ There was a driver waiting and Damon and I got in the car with her and Michael Hutchence.
Browns was very glitzy, gaudier than a wedding cake. It was built on different foundations from the Groucho. It was a house made of the very finest straw. Despite most of the people in the Groucho being off their faces, it was quite an intellectual, brainy kind of a place. Huge minds set free in drink and exploring each other, quipping
bons mots
and scheming. Browns was more the bodies exploring each other kind of place and it was best to check your brain in at the door. Soap stars, boxers, footballers, princes, models and gangsters traded money, fame and sex. It was quite dark for somewhere that was made entirely from lights and mirrors. On the whole, Browns attracted a worse kind of person than anywhere else in the universe and at that point I was the worst person in the universe. Arrogant, drunk and indomitable, and yet everybody was saying come on in.
I went out every night. Film extravaganzas, magazine launches, parties in shops and bashes in museums and big houses in Chelsea and Notting Hill, gigs at the Astoria, gay discos, the Groucho, Browns, an endless circle of red carpet.
Graham had now moved to Camden and sometimes I went to see him there in the Good Mixer public house. He shunned the garish drama of the party circuit but he couldn’t escape from the circus either. He had become the mad king of a strange people who all looked like him, and he held his court at the Mixer. Dave never went out. He bought an aeroplane as a means of escape and occupied himself with that. Damon moved to Notting Hill. He was starting to get pursued by paparazzi, and there were often fans and photographers outside his house. He kept on working. We all got on well with one another but nobody really liked each other’s friends. We weren’t so much of a gang any more. We all had our own gangs.
I was sitting at the bar in the Groucho on my own. It was pretty empty in there as it was a Saturday. I didn’t recognise anybody. I was just sitting at the bar drinking a Brandy Alexander: brandy, cream and nutmeg in a martini glass. It was nice to have a quiet drink, and a think. I was smoking a Camel filter, checking myself out in the mirror and wondering who to call and where to go next. A silly voice said ‘Alex! Alex from Blur!’ I ignored it. Then it said, ‘I love you, Alex!’ I looked up and at the end of the bar someone was pulling the funniest face I’d ever seen, puckering his lips and batting his eyelids. I laughed and said, ‘I love you too, darling.’ And went back to my thoughts. The voice said, ‘Don’t you remember me? From college? We played pool together! I’m Damien! Damien fuckin’ ’irst!’ I said, ‘Wow, I was wondering what you looked like.’ He brought his wine over. He lived in Germany and he loved the Beatles. He swore a lot. He seemed very interested in everything I said. It was unusual to meet someone so forthright and curious. He was fascinated, more fascinated than anyone had ever been by exactly what had happened with the band. He quizzed and queried, prodded and probed. It’s usually dull to answer questions. People ask you questions all the time if you’re in the papers and on the telly. I was beginning to recognise that celebrity status was like living a kind of perpetual interview. It’s like you just sprouted another weird head in place of your old one and everybody wants to stare at it and ask it questions all of a sudden. After a while, it’s too late and your old head will never grow back and you’re left with the one that people point at. It’s your own fault, too.
I liked Damien’s questions. They were unusual. Soon I was trying to explain where Jupiter was. Damien liked the fact that it didn’t have a surface. Something without a surface was very exciting to him. It was to me, too. I was drawing him a map of the solar system and he was making me laugh.
I’d done a fair bit of hobnobbing with famous people by this time. They didn’t seem to have anything in common, particularly. Famous people generally seemed like everybody else, only a bit more famous. Rich people aren’t particularly different from anyone else either. They’ve just got more money. Fame is just another kind of money. It can do things that money can’t, but it’s just a currency. No one ever loved anyone because they were rich. No one ever really loved anyone because they were famous, but it’s an attractive quality.
Over the course of our conversation, I gradually became aware that I was talking to somebody quite exceptional. He was very, very funny. That was the first thing about him. He was an irresistible combination of rudeness and wit. The two qualities set each other off. He drew everybody in: the barman; people on either side of us; the piano player. He bought drinks for everybody. It was the kind of place where that happened. A lot of comedians drank there, too, so there was no shortage of funny people buying drinks. It was a good place to be. Damien was intensely engaging, though. He was trying to tell me something that I realised I really needed to know, and he was illustrating it with farts and stupid facial expressions.
He wasn’t yet famous, but he was obviously a genius. When I woke up, my pockets were full of his drawings.
The Brits
On the day of the Brit Awards I had breakfast with Mike Smith, my publisher, as I often did. He was nursing an extra spiky headache and trying to draw me. He always had a sketchbook with him, in his satchel. He was perpetually losing that bag. He left it in Freud’s so many times they had a special place behind the bar for it. You could tell if he’d had a big night by whether he had his bag with him at breakfast time. He always got it back by mid-afternoon, although sometimes it took all morning to locate, when he should really have been trying to sign the Cranberries. Quite often it turned up at the Bull and Gate, Kentish Town. That was always a good place to start looking. He had a black taxi account so he could always trace it when he left it in his cab. It sometimes spent the night in restaurants and it did a whole run at the Astoria, Charing Cross Road. It always came back in the end, apart from once. He completely lost his old bag at the Brit Awards. He went back and checked the whole of Alexandra Palace, but he never found it. Sometimes he would become maudlin, and mourn for that bag. It was still a talking point. He was wondering whether to leave it at home altogether tonight.
The Brits was a no-holds-barred piss-up. It was a night of complete carnage every single time. It’s the music industry’s biggest night of the year. The music business is a succession of big nights: parties, awards and launches, openings anniversaries, presentations, big gigs and festivals, and that’s just work. The Brits is the daddy of all parties. All the big guns line up for the Brit Awards. Madonna, Elton John, all the evergreens, the unsinkable battleships in the business, would be there. I’d never been before. We were probably considered a risk by the organisers, too likely to act up, and, besides that, the band had never been nominated for anything. Every year as the awards came around and we didn’t feature in the line-up, there had always been time to dwell on our disappointment. This time we were up for something in practically every category and there had hardly been a moment to consider what it all meant. We were performing a couple of songs, including ‘Parklife’ with Phil Daniels who’d become a fifth member of the band.
It was a vast glittering spectacle, a multimillion pound trifle. America has the Oscars and we have the Brits. It’s the annual showbiz party that everybody wants to go to, the one that reaches beyond the music and gossip pages and into the headlines.
In a sea of onlookers, beyond a moat of international media, the whole of Alexandra Palace was bedecked, bejewelled and lit up like a Christmas tree. Inside there was a full-sized fairground with carousels, bumper cars and a big wheel. Hundreds of waiters tended to acres of white tablecloth. Champagne flowed, cocaine snowed and a steady rain of superstars took a bow.
I invited Justine but she was too busy dancing with the bass player from Pulp and I ended up on a park bench with Keith Allen. He’d just kind of appeared and he just kept appearing from then on.
When I woke up in the morning, I knew my life had changed forever. We’d won everything going; it was a record-breaking haul. Blur had become a household name over the course of the evening. I went out to get
The Times
for the crossword. A young girl walking along the street with her mother went into hysterics and there was a picture of me on page three of
The Times
. It’s always a jolt to be confronted by your own image when you’re not expecting it, especially the first few times it happens. There is no image more shocking or scary than your own. I can see why some of those people who lived in the jungle thought their souls were being stolen when they had their photograph taken. It was like there was a bit of me that had gone beyond my reach. I’m sure the jungle-dwellers didn’t think it was their souls being stolen anyway. It was just a bit of media vertigo as far as they were concerned, too.
We were in all the newspapers. Until the night before we’d been strictly music magazine fodder. I’d always found it slightly depressing when taxi drivers, having established that I was a musician, would ask the name of the band and then say, ‘Nah, mate.’ A lot of time was spent in taxis. They’re one of the perks of being in a band. If you’re a TV presenter, you get free clothes. If you work in a hotel, you get fed. As soon as we signed our record deal there seemed to be a taxi waiting constantly. Record companies don’t perform miracles, but they do make sure bands turn up to things.
Suddenly taxi drivers had heard of us. It was much worse. Being grilled by a thrilled taxi driver trapped inside a hangover trapped inside a taxi trapped in thick traffic, first thing in the morning, was harder to bear than being obscure. I do like talking to taxi drivers, just not about those kinds of things. It’s too repetitive. I started to say I was an accountant, which was usually good enough to kill it. I thought accountants probably needed to pretend they were rock stars occasionally, but I had no idea people in bands sometimes had to pretend they were accountants.
The Great Escape
Our lives were changing. Graham split up with his girlfriend and Dave married his. Dave’s new wife’s ex-flatmate was going out with a singer-songwriter person called Stephen Duffy. He’d been the original singer in Duran Duran and had written some good songs, mainly about girls. I met him at the wedding and we talked for a long time, mainly about girls. We decided to make a record together. I wrote some songs about girls and a month later we were on
Top of the Pops
. Damien Hirst liked one of the songs, ‘Hanging Around’, and used it in a film he was making. I was seeing a lot of Damien by this time. He’d moved back from Berlin to London where he was making quite a noise. He was intrigued by success and by Blur as we’d been at Goldsmiths together.
He and Keith Allen were a double act. They could really make each other laugh and the euphoria of their humour created a strong bond between them. I saw a lot of Keith, too. He was a permanent fixture in London’s nightscape. He knew absolutely everybody and everybody either loved him or hated him. His younger brother is a Hollywood film director; his ex-wife is an Oscar-winning film producer; his daughter is a pop star. I can see a small part of his essence in all of them, but he was the devastating big bang from which they all evolved, a free spirit; that’s what Damien really liked about him. There was always a danger that Keith might set the house on fire or be absolutely disgraceful in some way. He must have been nearly fifty. He’d just lost his hair and started wearing bad jumpers.
The final member of the Groucho squad was a chef, a Frenchman named Charles Fontaine. He was credited with inventing the fishcake, but that wasn’t why I liked him. He just liked cooking and enjoying himself. He wasn’t part of the fame rat race. I made records with Duffy and I made merry with Keith and Damien and Charles.
During the making of
The Great Escape
there were people outside the studio, outside all our houses. The recording process was interrupted by TV appearances, awards shows and late nights. There were journalists in the studio control room, observing the band at work, photographers taking pictures of us recording our parts and picking our noses. We all had our own circles of friends - it would have been weird if we hadn’t - but we still spent more time together than with anybody else.
We got a lot of fan mail. Ninety per cent of fan mail says the same thing. The majority of letters are written by a small number of people who write lots of fan mail. They didn’t just write to us, they wrote to everybody, asking for photographs, autographs, tickets, favours and so on. Then there’s the other 10 per cent, from people who had something particular to say to all of us, or one of us, because we’d moved them in some peculiar way. Some of it was beautiful and lifted my heart. Some of it was very, very scary. Graham seemed to get the hairiest stuff; he showed me photographs of people maiming themselves and threatening the worst if he wouldn’t help them. My weird ones tended to veer towards pornography, which I was much more comfortable with.
One of the first things we recorded for
The Great Escape
was ‘Stereotypes’, which we were all very excited about at the time. We thought that it would be the first single. The demo version of ‘The Universal’ had a calypso feel. It was a tune and a half, using Mozart-style chord suspensions and Bacharach-flavour modulation, but we couldn’t get the arrangement quite right. We battled with it for two days, on and off, and were just about to give up when Damon hit upon the string figure that ultimately became the intro. After that, everything clicked into place at once. That was two good ones in the bag. There was a baroque oompah song about Balfe selling Food Ltd and running away to live in a big house in the country, but that was just a joke.
We were halfway through recording
The Great Escape
when we played a one-off gig at Mile End Stadium in east London. It was a huge outdoor show. We’d broken out of the usual circuit of arenas into the big time. I don’t know how many people it held, maybe twenty-five thousand. It was a stadium. We were used to playing to large audiences at festivals, but this was a home crowd. It was a rainy day in a part of town not normally associated with rock and roll, but it was a hot ticket and it wouldn’t have mattered if it had snowed.