Bit of a Blur (26 page)

I’m not a huge fan of remixes. A pop record is a distilled, definitive work of art, so changing it in any way is unnecessary. Record companies saw remixes as a way of winning over new audiences, but the results were often less than the sum of the parts. Food commissioned some remixes of tracks on the
Blur
album, mainly because we were short on B-sides. The band had a prolific output and there was usually plenty of unused material around, but releasing three or four singles from an album eats up a lot of extra tracks. Each single came out in three formats and each format needed two or three B-sides. The biggest fans buy everything, so if the B-sides were crap, we were ripping off the people who loved the band the most.

Most of the remixes would have only interested people who knew when Graham’s birthday was, or which drama college Damon had been to, but William Orbit’s adaptations were astonishing. His
Strange Cargo
album had long been a tour-bus favourite and he was on a roll. He’d just helped Madonna make
Ray of Light
, her best record, and he was the most sought-after producer in the world. He was keen to produce Blur’s new album and we went to see him. He lived in a huge rented house in St John’s Wood with dozens of assistants who worked through the night polishing drum loops, programming digital sequencers and editing guitar parts on computers. It wasn’t so much a home studio. It was more a studio that he lived in.

I had a little studio at home, and I’d looked at buying a bigger one with Damien, Keith and Joe Strummer, but big studios are like jumbo jets. In order for it to be worthwhile owning one, it has to be used all the time otherwise it just sits there costing a fortune. I was too happy-go-lucky to want to go to a recording studio every day of my life but my set-up at home was good for songwriting, and when I’d written some tunes I’d take them to a bigger studio and record them.

It pained me a little bit that the band didn’t get a studio we could all have shared, but nobody else wanted to. Damon had a studio in a rented building in Ladbroke Grove, west London. It was to studios what the Good Mixer was to pubs. Its beauty was purely in its functionality. At the arse end of a back street, in a slightly rank-smelling building full of shady characters, it was tiny but it worked very well for Damon.

Working in that studio was a bit like making a record in a lift. There was very little space. In the control room there wasn’t enough room to turn round with a guitar on without bashing an award-nominated engineer in the face or knocking over a vintage microphone. Having secured the world’s most expensive producer, most bands would probably have taken the logical step of going to the world’s most expensive studio, but we wrote
13
in one of west London’s best-value, rent-by-the-foot industrial units. There was a window, but it looked through a metal grille on to an uninspiring derelict concrete courtyard, which there was no access to. It was high summer and stinking hot. William, fresh from Madonna’s record, crouched, I think rather shocked, in a corner. There was no room for chairs. Damon picked up his acoustic guitar and started singing a melody. Graham and I joined in; Dave, who was wearing headphones behind a drumkit in the other room, joined in. I looked up and saw William’s jaw drop. He is quite meticulous and contemplative in his approach. He told me much later that the way we were able instantly to conjure an arrangement without talking about it had completely knocked him out. It had taken us a long time to be able to do that. We’d played together nearly every day for ten years and had a keen sense of each other. We could turn it on pretty much instantly. All the recordings were taken to William’s laboratory and tweaked and digitally twiddled by his night assistants.

Things did happen very quickly in the studio. After a couple of weeks we moved back into Mayfair, because it had a good drum room. One morning, Graham and Damon were working on a new song called ‘Tender’. It occurred to me that what it really needed was a double bass. I went home in a taxi to get mine and came straight back with it, but they’d got bored with working on the song by then and gone for ciabattas. The bass was miked up and I tuned it and told William to play the track back to me. He said, ‘I think I’ve got what I need there.’ He just sampled me tuning up and his boffins used their computer technology to turn it into a bassline. It sounded good too, so I was happy. The strange thing was that when we launched the record there were more photos of that double bass than anything else and I hadn’t even played it, really. Cameras just love double basses. ‘Tender’ was a spiritual and we booked the London Community Gospel Choir to sing on the choruses. Gospel choirs come from a different place than rock and roll bands. They are good and godly people. We received a fax requesting that we did not smoke or swear, with particular reference to blasphemies, while they were in the studio.

It was a biggish choir, about thirty strong. They’d learned the backing vocal and harmony parts and rehearsed them beforehand. They arrived en masse and assembled in the live room. We sat behind the window in the control room and William selected the large loudspeakers, turned up the volume and hit play and record. It was shattering. They nailed it first take. As soon as they started singing, it was instantly and obviously a number one record. I’d never been so certain of anything. It was the best thing we’d ever done. The song was a great collaborative effort between Damon and Graham, too, at a time when their relationship was quite edgy. The harmony of those massed voices and the resting consonance of Damon and Graham’s solidarity overwhelmed me to tears. William was in a state of shock again. It was the best we’d all felt for a long, long time. As the song ended, William pushed the talkback button so the choir could hear him. ‘Jesus H motherfucking Christ!’ he said. ‘Ooh shit! Sorry!’

William had another studio on the go in a hotel, where he was building a U2 album. Damon was working on a film score in the mornings at his studio and coming to Mayfair in the afternoons. Maybe that was one of the things that was frustrating to Graham. It was to me. They were finding it hard to talk to each other. Damon is very domineering and maybe Graham had just had enough, but I do think Damon went to great lengths to make Graham feel like
13
was his record as well. Damon gave him one of the strongest melodies, which Graham wrote a good lyric for, but Graham wasn’t happy and he didn’t always turn up. It was frustrating because, when he did, everything he did was brilliant. He never played a bum note. His hearing was the most astute of anybody’s and he could pick things up in mixes that would never occur to me, or mixmaster William for that matter.

Madonna came to the studio and said it was all great, but I’d rather Graham had shown up and said it was all shit, or something at least.

The record was as highly acclaimed as it was difficult to make. ‘Tender’ was released on the same day as a record by a girl doing backflips in school uniform and missed out on the number one spot, but I heard Brad Pitt played it at his wedding.

On drums, David Alexander De Horne Rowntree had quietly become a high achiever. He seemed to have time for all kinds of things. He was learning karate, building computers, improving his bridge play, publishing scientific papers and learning how to fly. I only knew these things because I read them in the newspapers. Apart from spaceships, we didn’t have much to say to each other, even though we went all over the place together.

It’s the best thing about being in a band, travelling. Travelling is about the best thing there is, at all. I can’t think of anything more worthwhile, more enlightening or more full of promise. There is so much to discover, so many encounters to be had, so many sunsets to see, so many ways of cooking eggs.

Travelling is also incredibly tedious. There was so much travelling. It was like spending half my time in the presence of a crucifying bore who didn’t give me space to think and wouldn’t release me. Every time I got on an aeroplane, there he was. A big invisible companion. Graham was the only person who could make him go away. We were, all four of us, tormented by our travel bores. I loved going on tour more than anything, but we spent so much time in airports, on motorways, on aeroplanes, in cars, trains, boats and buses. Life was one long steeplechase and there was no easy way round it.

At the start of the
13
album campaign we had to go to Manchester to play some songs for a popular radio show on the BBC. It’s about as good as it gets. BBC radio is the best in the world. It’s the best-run business, has the biggest audiences, the best microphones, and has no advertising agenda or ulterior motives for existing other than to serve the people three-and-a-half-minute slices of heaven all day. I suppose it was all marvellous, but it was starting to feel like I’d done this kind of thing already and that, pleasant as it would be to play some new songs to millions of people, why did it have to be in Manchester and why was Manchester so far away? Couldn’t they just play the record? The record always sounds better on the radio anyway. The thought of sitting on the M1 and the M6 for the best part of the day was looming large on my mind like a bad weather forecast at sea. I called Dave.

‘Dave! It’s Alex.’

‘Hello, Alex.’

‘Why have they moved this Radio One business to Manchester? It’s supposed to be in London.’

‘They’re promoting the regions. It’s part of the director general’s new agenda.’ Dave always knew things like that.

‘Oh, I see. Look, have you really got an aeroplane, Dave?’

‘Yes, actually, I’ve got two.’

‘Great. Excellent. Can we fly to Manchester, then?’

‘Yeah, definitely.’

Good old Dave. I remembered how much I’d always liked him.

 

I hadn’t been to Dave’s house before. We rarely even visited each other’s hotel rooms. He likes to have his own space. He was living in the woods in Hampstead with his wife and a large number of cats and he drove us up to Elstree aerodrome in his little sports car. The airfield was an exciting kind of place. There was a tiny runway, a large number of small aircraft parked on the grass, and a café. I had a fry-up while he checked the aeroplane over with a man called Tony. The café was busy. There were little groups of people huddled together conspiratorially; they all seemed to have a lot to say to each other.

Dave and Tony returned and said they were ready. I asked how long it was going to take. Tony said, ‘We’re taking the Ruschmeyer. It’s brand new and it’s quick. Shouldn’t be more than forty minutes.’

It was autumn and night had fallen completely since we’d arrived at Elstree. The darkness was complementary to the sense of adventure and I was quite excited as we boarded. The aeroplane was the same size inside as a very small car. I sat in the back with Diana. Diana was the band’s current keyboard player. She was a scholar of Debussy and she floated around in the stratosphere of a parallel classical universe. Somehow, she had never heard of Blur when she joined the band, just after ‘Country House’ came out. She was from a deposed Russian royal family background and she also had a lot of cats. Actually, come to think of it, she only had two cats, but it always seemed like there were a lot more. One of them was called Schnibbles, sometimes, I believe.

Dave pushed a button and the engine burst into life. It made the whole aircraft shake and throb. Diana grabbed my hand and held it very tight as we wobbled towards the runway. I grabbed her other hand. I couldn’t hear a thing. Tony passed some headsets to us and indicated where to plug them in. That calmed things down a bit. I could hear Dave talking in a strange language, the only words of which I understood were ‘Clear Take Off’. He turned and offered us both cigarettes and pulled on to the runway. He pushed the big lever forward. The engine screamed. Diana’s eyes were very large in the light of the burning match as I lit her cigarette. ‘Let’s rock, motherfuckers!’ said Dave and took his feet off the brakes.

We were thrown back into our seats. The runway lights rushed by and the rattling aeroplane swept right into the sky. There was nothing to compare to it. The ground, the world and all of its trivial concerns fell away beneath us in strange accelerations and suddenly all was calm and we were apparently still again. Towns floated by beneath us like magical sets of fairy lights, Watford, Milton Keynes, Birmingham. Birmingham already! It all looked so benign and magical. I was enchanted, rapt with a new perspective of a wonderful world.

We landed behind a 737. I didn’t want to go anywhere by car any more. The next day I bought Dave’s spare aeroplane.

I had just set my hair on fire, somehow, at the
Q
Awards. Then I had my photo taken with New Order. Then the phone rang and it was someone asking me if I would address the Oxford Union the next day. I said definitely. I was still a bit miffed about not getting into Oxford. I knew they would need me one day, and that day was tomorrow. Keith was at the
Q
Awards, too. He was at everything. I asked him what the Oxford University Union was. He explained in so many words that it was a debating chamber where the future leaders of the country sharpen their claws by arguing the toss about any old bollocks. Then his phone rang, just like that, and it was someone asking him if he wanted to address the Oxford Union the next day. He said he’d do it, for five hundred quid, cash, and some cake.

The party moved to the Groucho and Magnea was there. She’d moved to London, she said. I went home with her and woke up in the wrong bed at midday. I called Justine and said I’d be home in a minute, but she’d had it. Then I remembered I had to go to Oxford and called her back but she didn’t answer. The thought of going to Oxford tomorrow had been quite a nice thought yesterday. The idea of going to Oxford today, in the clothes I’d slept in, was nowhere near as appealing.

I called Keith. I don’t think he’d been to bed, which made me feel better. He said we had to pick up Mariella Frostrup on our way to Oxford as she was opposing the motion. I liked Mariella. To describe her as a writer and broadcaster, which is what she is known for, would be selling her short. She is a linchpin of London high society. She knew absolutely everybody, from company directors and executives to broadsheet, tabloid and magazine editors, film stars, rock stars, photographers, writers, artists, moguls and billionaires and they all seemed to have a special affection for her. I certainly did. She seemed to be able to call anyone, anytime.