It took them a long time to get to us. They were knackered by the time they got to the top and really pissed off. One of them started ranting in Spanish and then spat out a big wad of phlegm with a nod of his head as a full stop. The DJ from the nightclub, a handsome, upmarket American, was able to translate. ‘He said we’re charged with desecrating a holy relic and that we’re in deep shit. Then he spat on the holy relic, just to show he’s in charge. We’d better do what he says.’ We were marched down the side of the man-made mountain and confronted with their superior, who was standing by the van smoking and spitting. I wondered what would happen. I knew one of our gang was carrying a very large amount of drugs somewhere about his person. He seemed to be the least flustered of all of us. He started to negotiate with the boss man who was demanding we get in the van. They argued for ages. We stole glances at each other but it was impossible to tell what was happening. The DJ kept raising his eyebrows and shaking his head. Then it was settled. We could walk away for five hundred dollars. I’d have given five hundred thousand.
It was a long, long drive back to the hotel through the rush-hour traffic. An endless journey in the thick pollution with a cheap tequila hangover. I’ve never felt so bad and so good at the same time.
The gig was in a stadium and there were fans at the hotel, fans at the radio stations, fans at the TV studios. They waved, screamed and gave us letters. It was another vast continent, another green world.
Brazil, Argentina
Rio is such an evocative place. It’s been mythologised by music to such an extent that it hardly seemed real at all. I walked for miles without ever leaving a song, from Ipanema to Copacabana, along the beaches among the palm trees. It was like Mexico with the contrast turned right up, the strikingly beautiful rubbing shoulders with the grotesque, the diseased, the toothless and the insane. Somehow, the insane seemed to be madder, the further I got from home. There was more of a sense of peril on the streets, but they were all the more enticing for it. We live in a climate of fear, but the world is a safe place as long as you know how to behave like everybody else does. If you stand around holding a map waving a video camera with your shirt tucked into your waist-high trousers, you’re in trouble wherever you go. Millions of people live in Rio, after all, and they eat salad and have ice in their drinks and they don’t get murdered very often.
We were playing in a bar in Rio. It was a bit of a jolt after the mass adulation of Mexico. I thought there were some fans at the hotel - they kept smiling at me - but they were prostitutes. I was exhausted from my Mexican antics and kept out of trouble in Rio. My birthday fell on a Sunday, the day of the show in São Paulo. São Paulo is like Rio without the songs or the beach. It’s big, bigger than most countries, a city with a population greater than Ireland, New Zealand, Costa Rica and Portugal combined. No wonder Brazil are always winning the football. I’d never heard of this São Paulo and it was fair to say most of São Paulo had never heard of Blur, but it was a bigger gig than in Rio.
On my birthday, most of all I like to play the blues, with Graham. It’s a tradition that started at college. Playing the blues involves the thumbs a lot, more than any other kind of guitar music. You strum with the thumb of the right hand and curl the left thumb over the top of the guitar so that it can hold down the bottom string. Then you just need some whisky and you’re all set. We’d go on for hours.
It was hard to know how to take things up a notch on my birthday. I was permanently living in the rock and roll fast lane. The year before I’d had a party that all kinds of nice people had shown up at. I did actually throw a television out of the window, just to see what happened, but I had checked that there was no one coming beforehand and it was my television to do what I liked with, which I explained to the police when they arrived. They were very understanding. Overall, it was quite disappointing. It didn’t explode, particularly; it just went thud on Shaftesbury Avenue.
Somehow the tour manager managed to find me a Balthazar of champagne. I think a Nebuchadnezzar is bigger - you need a couple of footmen for the Nebuchadnezzar - but the Balthazar is big, the biggest bottle that one person can carry. You really need to put it over your shoulder to pour from it properly and even then it’s tricky. There’s enough for a party in there, though. It was quite late when I got back to the hotel with my big bottle, but there were quite a few fans there. I invited the five prettiest ones to come up to my rooms. You need five girlfriends when your bottle of champagne is that big. I collapsed on the bed and they jumped on me and covered me in champagne and kisses. It was a good birthday party. I stopped having sex occasionally, but only so that I could have some more drugs. That image of myself soused in champagne being devoured by lusting women in a luxury hotel suite in a vast and unknown city was the pinnacle of my rock and roll excesses.
After the mayhem of Mexico and Brazil, Buenos Aires, Argentina, was a stately and sophisticated city of wide boulevards, grand statuary and chic endroits. It’s posher than Paris, in fact, which was all quite surprising. It didn’t look like the lettuce would cause any harm in that fair city. More surprising was that the Argentinians adore the English, and more surprising still that I at once felt completely at home there. The other mammoth metropolitan centres of South America had thrilled and tickled. I could never quite get enough of anything, but just to see those places had almost been enough. Here I felt I could live and be happy. I just never knew when I was going to get that feeling. Even though there are an infinite number of ways to live a life and be happy, it didn’t actually come out and grab me often that I would instantly and obviously be very at home somewhere.
Justine sent her friend Walter to show me around and keep an eye on me. He was handsome, aristocratic and gay and a fan of the Smiths. Walter took me to gay bars, to lounges, to cafés, to a candle-lit walled garden where they served tea and coffee all night. I met his friends and their friends and it was all benign and agreeable.
Gay bars are the most decadent of all. I found it relaxing to go out and take sex out of the equation. The music is always really good, too, in gay bars.
Trying to Build Jerusalem
‘Vindaloo’ had made quite a lot of money, so we set up an office. One of the barmen from the Groucho seemed really keen on running a record company, so we let him do it. Then we had to think about our next move. We had a meeting in our office. Where to go next? What should we tackle? I wanted to make gay disco records. Keith wanted to sign his daughter. I was always seeing her out and about, but she was only twelve and twelve’s a bit young for showbusiness. Damien said he wanted to do a Christmas record and it seemed like quite a good idea. It seemed the perfect follow-up to a football record and it’s the best time to have a hit record as you sell about ten times as many.
I went into a studio with Keith and Roland Rivron, Rod, the piano player from the Groucho, and Joe Strummer, to write something. It was a combination of personalities with a lot of seasonal promise. Christmas had started early that year and it was hard to keep things under control. By the second day there was a gospel choir hanging out as well. By the time it was finished, more or less the whole of the Groucho Club and Browns were in the studio. Lisa from Browns sang the song with Keith, who dressed up as a goblin in the video.
It went top twenty, but we manufactured too many copies of the record, about a quarter of a million too many. It was hard to compete with the major labels at Christmas time. We lost all the money from ‘Vindaloo’ and a bit more. Keith also lost the taxi, in Rotterdam, which was a shame.
It took a while to recover our pride, and we thought we’d better stick to football records. The singer was, after all, a fifty-year-old baldy man. We were ready by the time the next football tournament came along. I wanted to do something spectacular. The way forward came to me over a martini in Peg’s, a member’s club I’d just discovered that I lived next door to. It was so exclusive and discreet that it was invisible to passers-by and even livers-next-door-to.
George was usually there. I like George’s company. He’s an upper-class pixie of some vintage, gay and fabulous. He’s from another world that involves things like cufflinks, bone china and ballet. Sometimes it was just George and myself there for lunch, other days there’d be a minor royal or a mega-dega film director, lunching his stars. It was ludicrous. A bar that was empty apart from people who were so famous that they had to hide there between meetings in town. It was a good place to go and have ideas. The barman never spoke. He just made fantastic martinis.
It was behind one of those martinis, my second of the day, that I conceived the most expensive record ever made. Our last football song had been a loutish, one-note wonder. The only way forward now was to go way upmarket. We needed a new national anthem, a song you could take anywhere, that your granny could sing; that would stir the hearts of wayward teenagers; that would scare goalkeepers. It was going to be tricky. I was sucking the olive when I realised the song had already been written by William Blake. We’d do ‘Jerusalem’, and we’d do it big.
Three weeks later we were in Air Studios with a one-hundred-and-twenty-piece orchestra. Air is the biggest studio in London and that’s about the biggest orchestra it can house. Keith wanted to conduct. He didn’t know the difference between a French horn and a cor anglais, but he did have winning vivacity and bags of confidence. Confidence is the most important ingredient on the songwriter’s shopping list. Nothing else is half so important.
There were harps and percussionists, a long line of double basses. There were violins everywhere you looked. We had cannons. We had five massed choirs: a big gay choir, a children’s choir, gospel choir, close-harmony barbershop choir and a chorus. It was immense. There were cameras. There was Michael Barrymore. George Martin was wandering about the place. We didn’t leave anything out. Everyone had learned their parts and I stood in the control room and took a deep breath. The next three minutes were costing a lot of money, more than any other record ever has, and there was a good chance we’d built an aeroplane that wouldn’t fly.
I was in tears by halfway through the first chorus. It was immense. I didn’t care if it sold five copies. It was a record that needed to be made. It’s such a beautiful tune, rousing, but noble, a prayer for the weak and a battle cry for the strong, a poem, a patriotic paean and a perfect pop song. Well, you’d hope so for two hundred grand.
Football was very fashionable. It seemed to be easier to get a table at the Ivy than it did to get tickets for the Arsenal. There was an almighty brouhaha about the tournament, Euro 2000. The song was a news item and I went to Wembley to have my photograph taken with the players. There were about a thousand photographers there. The squad were having a kickaround in the new England strip. Someone blew a whistle somewhere and they all ran to the centre circle and stood in a line with the goalkeepers at one end and the forwards at the other. I could hardly believe it. They were so well drilled. Peep, peep and there they all were in a neat little row. I was asked to stand on the end, next to the goalies. My heart sank as I took my place. I looked along my right shoulder down the line. I was head and shoulders taller than the back four. We didn’t stand a chance. Keith and I figured we’d get back the money we’d spent if the team got to the semi-finals. Any further and we’d be in the clover. It was a gamble. Keith said we were going to win. Good football records never go away, though. EMI shareholders should have their money back by the World Cup tournament in 2018, as long as England do well. In the meantime they’ve got that song.
Decadence
I’d graduated from the Groucho to the Colony Room, a couple of doors down. The Colony was the drinking club that had made Jeffrey Bernard’s legs fall off. It has a greasy spoon kind of feel and to enter is to be overwhelmed by an awareness of green. It’s like a front room, but it’s green, and there is a lot of art on the walls, given by the people who have spent time there over the years. The value of the art is probably worth more than the entire Groucho Club, a roll-call of the great British artists since the Second World War. There was also a piano, which I often played, and Michael, the current heir to the establishment, was always there. Sometimes it was jam-packed and everyone seemed to be mad; sometimes it was peaceful and a supermodel would walk in. I could never tell what was going to happen next there. That was what was good about it.
I was drinking more and more and it took me further into the night.
I liked Trade, a big, gay bonanza in what seemed to be a huge network of underground sewers in Clerkenwell. Parties cost a lot of money and they usually happen to promote someone or something. Trade was different. It was just a party. I started going to Trade because it was open all night and it was mental. It made any party that was ever thrown by a band look like kids’ stuff. There was shagging in the bogs, fellatio on the dance floor and people queuing up to buy drugs like it was the end of the world. Somehow it was quite civilised and it never felt as sleazy there as it did in other places that were open after three a.m. People would really lose it in there, though. There was even a kind of casualty ward on site. I know because I woke up there once, covered in blood, being attended to by paramedics.
There was a boat at Blackfriars Bridge, where scary people played cards, basements in Chinatown full of transvestites, stained attics along Berwick Street full of crackheads and prostitutes, mansions in Holland Park full of crackheads and prostitutes. At night the city belonged to all the people who didn’t have to get up in the morning - musicians, artists, actors, models, criminals, the aristocracy, the insane, drug dealers, wheelerdealers, comedians, drug addicts, the fabulously rich, writers, a random bag of all ages, creeds and classes. I never knew whether I was going to meet a murderer next or the most beautiful woman in the world. People only stay up all night for three reasons: sex, drugs and rock and roll. It’s not the best time for getting things done.