Twenty thousand years later, anyone sitting down at a piano is sitting on top of a huge mountain of accumulated knowledge. When you hold even the cheapest guitar, you’re wielding a very sophisticated tool. The twelve-tone scale is a triumph of scientific understanding. It’s such a perfect structure that it’s rarely questioned or even understood by the people who use it. All musicians know how to tune up their instruments, but very few have any idea what they are actually doing as they tune. Musicians rarely have any more of an inkling of what music is than an electrician knows what electricity is.
All the really tricky business of the evolution of music has taken place, and it’s not important to know everything. It’s just important to know what sounds good. All anyone needs is one little idea. It can even be someone else’s idea. All you’ve got to be able to do is pick the good ones. There are no rules that can’t be broken in music making. Confidence is all-important. Things that are completely wrong can sound new and interesting if they are done with conviction.
Sometimes we struggled with songs and it paid off; sometimes we struggled and got nowhere. Sometimes it was easy. Our most popular song was written in fifteen minutes while we were waiting for a piece of gear to turn up. We just thrashed it out. I hadn’t been to bed. None of us took it very seriously; it wasn’t long enough to be a single and the only words you could hear were ‘Woo-hoo’.
If musicians only talked about writing songs in interviews, they would be very dull to read. It’s an exhilarating process though, songwriting. Writing a new song felt better than anything else that happened with the band. It was better than a hundred thousand people screaming at us, or sex with strangers, or meeting the Queen at Buckingham Palace. It always starts off with the certain feeling that I will never be able to do it. Then something always happens. Making music isn’t something you do by thinking about it or talking about it; it’s something that you do by doing it. The four of us would all play together and usually it was good. You can’t usefully analyse it any further. The equations of music-making chemistry are complex. Turn up to work and turn up the volume.
Astronomers
I was reading the astronomy book for about the fifth time when I joined the British Astronomical Association. They sent me a newsletter telling me where to look for meteorite showers, comets, planetary conjunctions and eclipses. The tone of their correspondence was very friendly and encouraging. I was also welcome to use their library at Burlington House, in Piccadilly. It’s one of London’s finest buildings, Burlington House. It’s the home of the Royal Academy of Arts, as well as a number of learned societies. I love that part of town; ambling around St James’s with nothing in particular to do was about my favourite daytime activity. There are people who still dress like Sherlock Holmes in St James’s, south of Piccadilly.
At the desk at Burlington House I said I was a member of the British Astronomical Association and asked where the library was. I was shown into a vast, galleried, oak-panelled hall with books from floor to ceiling. It had those ladders on wheels attached to rails, to enable you to reach the books on the top shelves. There was one other person in there. He was deep in thought with a book on his lap.
I could hardly believe how brilliant that room was. It was like walking into a dream I’d been having. I wanted to stay there forever and read everything. It had to be the finest collection of books for space heads in the world. There was a huge section on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, none of which sensationalised it in any way. It was all cold and rational and delicious. It was immensely calm in there and sun flooded through the vast windows. The Queen lived at one point in a house not far away, and I felt almost certain that she might pop in to get away from everything and perhaps consider briefly the moons of the outer planets or read the latest published papers. The photocopied monthly newsletter didn’t suggest anything like this. It was an excellent deal for seventeen pounds a year. I took out a dozen books.
I didn’t tell many people about that place. I liked keeping it to myself. No one would have been interested anyway. I’d been going there for quite some time when I mentioned that I hadn’t received my newsletter, as I was returning some books. The librarian said, ‘Newsletter? We don’t publish a newsletter! Are you sure you’ve come to the right place?’ I said, ‘This
is
the Astronomical Association, isn’t it?’ He said, ‘This is the Royal Astronomical Society. Perhaps you’re looking for the British Astronomical Association? That’s upstairs.’ Another gentleman came over. He seemed to be in charge. He said that I was welcome to come here if I could get two other Fellows of the RAS to propose me as a member - as if that wouldn’t be a problem - and they shooed me upstairs. In a tiny room at the top was an old lady sitting in front of a small bookcase. She was typing. She was very friendly and said if I wanted to borrow any of the books I was quite welcome.
I was usually the only person in that library. It was a shame.
I prefer playing music to listening to recordings of it. Maybe the Victorians had the right idea. Where there is now a plasma screen, there might once have been a piano. I’d rather sit with a guitar or at a piano with a songbook and let it all flow through me. It’s like being able to get inside a painting or a dream or the mind of the person who wrote it. Graham was forever right inside some musical landscape; he always had lots of CDs with him on tour. Dave always took a computer wherever we went. Damon usually took an acoustic guitar, herbs for making tea and a selection of magic hats. I always took a guitar, too. I worked my way through the great pop writers: Roy Orbison, who the Beatles learned a thing or two from; Holland-Dozier-Holland, who wrote a lot of the Motown classics; Jimmy Webb, for ‘Up, Up and Away’ and ‘Wichita Lineman’; the Gibb brothers - the Bee Gees-Imarvelled at their sophisticated key changes, wonderful harmonies and the best grooves of anybody; the melodies of The Mamas & the Papas written by John Phillips, and countless others besides.
A guitar is a good companion on the road. When I felt wretched, broken, guilty and disgusted with myself, it was a source of comfort. When I was feeling cheeky I dived into its mysteries. It’s a good piece of furniture and every home should have one to go with the piano. Houses without musical instruments are slightly barren places.
As well as a guitar I had my trusty book,
Foundations of Astronomy
. I’d been reading it from cover to cover for years by then. As I learned more about astronomy, the less I realised I knew. The ordinary, everyday part of life is so overwhelming it’s easy to forget that we’re floating on a pure and beautiful blue sphere in space and that the greatest adventure is about to begin. We’re on the cusp of new paradigms; shifts in our understanding of everything and things are changing fast. The astronomy book had had two revisions since I had started reading it. In the 1990 edition, no planets had been positively identified outside the solar system. Since then, they’ve started turning up everywhere.
My favourite place is called the Oort cloud. It’s a big jumble of icy rocks way, way beyond Pluto. They float gently around the sun in endless silence. Occasionally one of them falls out of its orbit and starts hurtling towards our star, which heats it to an incandescent fireball before slinging it back where it came from. Most comets come from the Oort cloud.
The Oort cloud is too far away to get to at the moment, but Mars seemed like a reasonable place to be aiming for.
The
Idler
magazine sent me to interview Patrick Moore, the astronomer. He’s also a musician and there were quite a lot of things I wanted to ask him about. His house was full of books and silence. It was a good place for thinking. He interviewed me, really, to start with. Patrick Moore is a mighty scholar; he’d written at least fifty books about astronomy. True expertise is a rare thing, a combination of flair and an almost involuntary awareness of detail. I saw it in Damien and in Graham. It’s what drew me to them. Patrick Moore was self-taught, an autodidact. His tenacious, rational mind had just dragged him along with it. He had the experts’ gift of making things that are complicated sound simple.
I’d been wondering what shape the universe was. I’d kind of got to thinking it was hyperspherical and I’d been drawing hyperspheres a lot, and staring at them. I asked him what sort of shape he thought it all was. He said he’d asked Einstein the same thing, and Einstein didn’t know either. Personally he wouldn’t be drawn to conjecture. He wasn’t really a magnet man, either. Even the hot topic of magnetic monopoles didn’t really stir him up. We thought about the Oort cloud for a bit before we got round to Mars. He probably knows that planet better than anybody. He’s been studying it for decades and knows its geography, its geology, its weather and seasons, its chemistry and its history. He’d studied it with telescopes and spectrometers, he’d been in continuous conversation with other leading Mars authorities for decades and he was of the same opinion as me on one thing in particular. One day soon we’ll live on Mars. No doubt about it. He said the first man to walk on Mars has probably already been born, which hadn’t occurred to me, but it could well be true.
We considered the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons, and the kind of things that would have to happen to make Mars habitable. The idea of transforming a dead planet into a lush green paradise was such a triumphant notion for humanity. In ancient Greece, man saw himself as an all-conquering hero. I can see that very clearly in the art that survives from the period: the great thinkers, the great athletes, the great species of mankind. For the ancient Greeks, there was no doubt that the human being was the greatest thing that had ever happened. In today’s deforested greenhouse, we all share a burden of guilt that we’re destroying the planet we live on and it’s depressing. While cooking some poached eggs, Patrick Moore said the scariest thing I’ve ever heard. We’d been talking about life on Mars, and it naturally led to the question of life elsewhere. Here was a man of profound learning and vastly superior understanding, I think one of the three cleverest people I’ve ever met. He’d quickly tired of my childish, whimsical wanderings, and really was just being kind by telling me stories. I soon know when I’ve met someone who’s cleverer than me; it’s daunting but alluring. Big minds are irresistible places, but dangerous.
‘I have absolutely no doubt,’ said Patrick Moore, ‘that beings of far greater intelligence than ours exist and know all about us. We are as far from them as King Canute was from television.’
It was scary because I’d been thinking the same thing myself. An intellect as advanced as his would have been quite enough for one day.
‘I think the toast is burning,’ I said.
Hollywood, Mars
After talking to Patrick Moore, I wanted to go to Mars. I thought about it a lot. I talked about it with the others. Damon and Graham thought I was being ridiculous. Dave was my astronomy cohort in the band. He had been a keen astronomer as a boy, and knew the difference between pulsars and quasars. He was enthusiastic. We both wanted to go to Mars, but for the time being we had to go to America a lot, more than usual. Usually they couldn’t wait to get rid of us with our sloppy drinking, unprofessional conduct and irrelevant Britpopping but ‘Song 2’ was taking off in the States. That meant we had to go to Los Angeles a lot and it also started to make me think that nothing was impossible. America was the one place we’d never really had a proper hit. As my ambitions were serendipitously fulfilled, one by one, the thing I needed most of all was a new objective. I kept thinking about Mars.
Los Angeles, where the new record company was based, is like an onion: it has many layers and there is nothing in the middle. Dealing with it was enough to make our eyes water, but it’s an essential ingredient in all recipes for global success. Either nobody wants you in that city or everybody does; nowhere else deals quite so straightforwardly in human currency than the Hollywood celebrity stock market. It’s more hierarchical than Japan, it’s dumber than Disneyland, it’s awful and it’s great.
There are so many ridiculous schemes afoot in that city that a trip to Mars seemed quite a realistic prospect. Although going to another planet was a far-fetched notion, and everyone apart from Dave took it as a kind of madness, my interest in space was actually one of the things that kept me sane. It was really quite grounding. Everything makes sense in space. It’s all knowable and predictable. It makes a lot more sense than Hollywood, that’s for sure.
I had a reasonably thorough knowledge of physics and chemistry. I’d enjoyed science since Jimmy Stubbs and I had tried to make big explosions when we were ten, and I’d never really stopped enjoying it. I am naturally inquisitive. It’s my greatest gift. Science explains how things work, so I embraced it. Music could easily be categorised as a scientific discipline. Under analysis it is a species of pure mathematics. The sound of music is the hum of the harmonic series, the number sequence 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6 . . . You could say it’s just maths with the volume turned up. I just tried to put the notes together so that they exploded.
Hollywood is a small part of a big city. It has the most transient inhabitants of anywhere on earth. People zip in for twenty-four hours, get their faces on the telly and zoom off again to spend their money. Even the people who live there don’t live there. They just work there and have homes elsewhere. It’s one big office, really.
From the rock and roll district of West Hollywood, the distant dolls’ houses of Beverly Hills precariously and clumsily stuck on to the cliff faces give the impression of a world designed by a child, a world teetering permanently on the edge of collapse.
Everyone in Hollywood, it appeared, would have me believe that they were in some way essential to the business of super-stardom, or intimately connected with it. It’s a gold rush town; everyone is a prospector and anyone could get lucky.