For any drinker the entire pattern of existence changes when alcohol is off the menu. New routines emerge, things get done and good things do inevitably develop, although at a slower pace than the whizz, bang, wallop, wa-hey, whoops-a-daisy of the boozy escapade. Eventually, I started to feel I might be star-ring in a different kind of film altogether.
Pro Flight Aviation, the flying school at Bournemouth airport, was one of only three in the country that offered airborne training for the instrument rating. I’d already completed a correspondence course that involved many weeks of fiddling around with a slide rule and memorising acronyms, followed by a week of intensive residential study and three days of exams at Gatwick airport. An instrument rating is the ultimate pilot’s licence. An instrument-rated pilot is licensed to fly not just in cloud, but also in controlled airspace, with the airliners.
Airliners never fly direct to their destination. Air traffic would be unmanageable if that were the case. To keep things organised, there is a global network of airways, which are like motorways. The jets join the airways system after the takeoff procedure, and leave the network only to descend at the destination aerodrome. This means that all the world’s serious air traffic is funnelled very close together. The separation margin between me on the way home in my Bonanza and you eating nuts on a 747 coming in the opposite direction at a relative speed greater than a Kalashnikov bullet might be as little as five hundred feet. That’s just a bit longer than a football pitch. It’s not much when you consider a 747 is just a bit wider than a football pitch and we might both be in cloud. This is why the instrument rating is so difficult. The CAA, the governing body, make it difficult on purpose. Fifty feet is the tolerated margin of error. No autopilot, no GPS, and screens over the windows so you can’t see out.
The flying school was in a different time zone from everywhere else in Bournemouth. I called them and a voice told me to report for training at ‘zair-o nine-ah hundred ars Zulu’. I knew what Zulu meant; it’s Greenwich Mean Time, but I can never remember if it’s an hour ahead or an hour behind the normal kind of time. Sometimes it’s the same, particularly in France. I asked, ‘Eight a.m?’ The voice said, ‘Affirmative. Eight local currency’, but from his tone I gathered the local currency wasn’t accepted.
Zulu time is the only one that counts for pilots. Instrument clocks in aeroplanes are all set to Zulu. A pilot departing Kuala Lumpur has to say what time it will be in Greenwich when he wants to take off, rather than what time it will be in Kuala Lumpur.
To climb into one of the flying school aircraft was to step out of local time and out of recognisable space into a new scheme of references. The outside world was obscured by screens and represented solely by six wobbling needles. To start with it was terrifying, but after a few weeks I could take off without looking out of the window, fly to Southampton, make an approach, get within fifty feet of the runway, have an engine failure, execute a missed approach on the remaining engine, fly back to Bournemouth, wait in the hold, descend and cross the runway threshold without taking my eyes off those six needles.
It was the most difficult thing I’d ever done. Every waking moment I was consumed by it. I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. There wasn’t room. Towards the end of the training, taking a day off would be enough to take the edge off my flying skills and set me back two or three days. Not everyone was up to it. The pressure reduced grown men to tears daily, as their dreams of becoming commercial pilots proved to be beyond them. There was a handsome RAF Tornado pilot, on leave from active duty in a war zone; he briefly became my hero, but he just couldn’t get the hang of flying holds. He’d definitely get there, though. There was a cheeky kid who’d been left some money by his granny. He was never going to make it. A flying instructor who had more knowledge than most of us to start with, and been a little bit of a know-all, steadily and surely became overwhelmed and ran out of money. He’d taken out a bank loan to finance his training and over the weeks he changed beyond recognition. It broke him completely. I was changing, too. I wasn’t thinking about drinking or shagging or anything except instruments.
Claire
I got my stripes and returned to London in April, on the day that spring arrived. It was a Thursday. I went to the Groucho to meet Bernard Sumner from New Order and, to quote Bernard, it was as if the whole city was feeling ‘a sudden sense of liberty’. The calm sunny evening had drawn people into it and as I strolled from Covent Garden into Soho, crowds were lingering outside pubs, suddenly able to dream and do nothing in particular again. When I arrived at the Groucho, the whole world was there. In the upstairs bar, Moby was playing ‘London Calling’ on the piano, Joe Strummer was singing and Wayne Sleep, the ballet dancer, was turning pirouettes on the bar. Keith was in full swing as impromptu ringmaster, leading the jolly gathering to join in with the ‘and I . . . live by the river-uuh’ bits.
It wasn’t torturous being sober in the Groucho. I’d been absolutely rigorous about not drinking for one day every week, so it wasn’t like it was the first time. I still liked it there, with the right company.
I was introduced to the bass player from Coldplay, who was at the bar. He was a very serious young man. He was observing the chaos with some hauteur. He explained carefully that his band’s reinvigorated North American promotional strategies would boost sales in key secondary markets, coast to coast, album on album. Fair to say it did.
I went and sat with Bernard. He said he didn’t care how long I stopped drinking for; there was still no way he was ever going to get into an aeroplane with me driving. We were talking about boats when Dan Macmillan arrived. He said he was going to Cabaret and asked if I wanted to come with him. A girl had been winking at me and, if I’d have had a few drinks, I would probably have stayed in the Groucho and surrendered. I didn’t and the random caprice of Dan’s soaring wanderlust led me unwittingly to an almighty turning point.
It took ages to get to Cabaret, even though it was only round the corner. Dan wanted to fight the parked cars. Then we had some trouble getting past the doormen. As we dawdled on the threshold, two girls pushed past us. One was laughing and beautiful, and the other one I vaguely recognised. The lady in charge arrived and started kissing Dan. All his friends were there and we danced. The beautiful laughing girl was dancing, too. I didn’t get her name until we were in the taxi.
It was Claire, she told me on the Edgware Road. We were nearly at her house when she asked if I had a girlfriend. I said of course I had a girlfriend. I had loads of girlfriends. Girlfriends everywhere. I was a fucking rock star, for Christ’s sake. She made the taxi stop and told me to get out. We were in Kilburn and it was barren of taxis, so I said I’d drop her off and take the one that we were in back to my house. And then we were kissing again.
She had very long legs and a business card, which said that she was an executive producer. I didn’t know what that was, or who she was. I just had lots of scratches down my back and a big smile on my face.
Think Tank
We’d started recording a new Blur record before I went to Bournemouth. Graham hadn’t turned up. Maybe we should have waited, but we started it without him, hoping he’d come back. We’d all developed as musicians and songwriters. Since we’d last made a record, Damon’s
Gorillaz
album had outsold any of Blur’s albums and ‘Vindaloo’ had outsold any of Blur’s singles. Still, it’s a delicate equilibrium that makes a band really thrive and it wasn’t clear how it would work without Graham.
A good simple melody is an unfathomable work of genius, and an acute sense of melody was Damon’s gift. Melodies are probably the trickiest thing of all. Having said that, Graham is definitely the best guitar player in the world. It’s absolutely true. Graham can also write good melodies, but I think his greatest capacity is for harmony. His mind thrives in the expressiveness of harmonic forms. He added sixths, he diminished sevenths and he adjusted fifths with a natural flair, adding exquisite depth and colour to Damon’s effortless top lines.
Damon was keen to work at his studio in Ladbroke Grove. I was a bit dubious. When you get down to the nitty-gritty chemistry that drives great bands, it’s really just a power struggle. I thought working in Damon’s studio might be giving him too much ground. It was soon obvious that it was the best place to work, though. Damon was always going to be in charge, but it wasn’t really my job to agree with him about anything. I think we all always thought we knew best.
The studio was very near to Claire’s house, and agreeing to work there turned out to be another monumental decision I had no idea I was making. I saw her again at a party that Dan Macmillan threw to launch his lifestyle emporium. Sometimes, when I’m in a contemplative mood, I still ponder over how we might never have met. For years we’d been missing each other. She knew people that I knew and we went to the same places. I would have been as likely to meet Claire in New York as London. The affair got serious when she fell off her horse and mangled her arm. She had a month off work then, and as her house was next to the studio I’d pop in and see her in the mornings. Soon I was going round after the studio as well.
I loved Justine. We’d shared so much, but it was all over by then. We clung on to each other, trying to make it work. She was uniquely beautiful and still more important to me than anything else that had happened in my life. I wanted her to be happy, but I was making her sad. We’d become flatmates, best friends rather than husband and wife. She was practically the only woman I knew who I wasn’t having sex with. I told her I was going and she cried and I cried and we held each other for the last time. I hope I never have to do anything that difficult again. It’s the benchmark that I measure all other pain against.
I moved into Claridge’s. Claridge’s is regal. When Buckingham Palace is full, the Queen sends her spare guests to stay there. It’s the Brook Street annexe of the royal household and it’s quite simply the best hotel in the world. I’d been making a careful, close and continuous study of luxury. It was a kind of hobby. For Mr Claridge it was evidently more of a mission. I can’t think of anything about the whole of Claridge’s that could be any better. It takes thirty seconds to run a bath and an hour to have breakfast. Everything about the place, from its Mayfair location to its pastry chefs, is the stuff of special occasions. I’m pretty sure that if, as an experiment, somebody was made to stay there and given nothing in particular to do, pretty soon they’d have made a huge success of themselves. The whole place is brimming with infectious achievement and to wake up there is to wake up invincible.
I swooned for Claire. I hung on her half-finished sentences, reading meanings into pauses and glances, searching for signs that she was feeling what I was feeling. I mooned around while she was at work. It was bugging the hell out of Damon and Dave. Damien became quite distant, too. A few months earlier my distraught mother had said that if I didn’t stop drinking, pretty soon I’d have no friends at all. It was well meant, but in fact the opposite thing happened. I had far fewer friends now that I’d been sober for six months.
You can know a lot of people, be very popular, enjoy yourself with a host of chums and buddies, but you can’t ever have a lot of really close friends. Intimacy doesn’t spread thinly. My closest friends were fine about me being sober, but the ones who love you the most and know you the best are the ones who find it hardest to cope with you falling in love.
Morocco
It’s probably possible to make good records without ever leaving a recording studio. Some bands do it like that. They lock themselves away from the world to craft their gypsy trick masterpieces. We flourished only with stimulation. The stimulants changed as we grew up and changed as people. Drink had been reliable to start with. Drugs are always good for one album, but no more than one. Love is always there to fall back on, love lost or love won. We thought we might feel more alive if we took ourselves out of our usual situation and went somewhere we’d never been before. That’s why we went to North Africa to finish
Think Tank
. The plan was to rent a riad, a Moroccan house, near Marrakesh, build a makeshift studio and see what happened.
Three lorries full of gear trundled across Europe towards the Strait of Gibraltar. One of the lorries just had leads in it: bantam leads, jack leads, balanced XLR leads, MIDI leads, looms, speaker cables, computer cables, optical connectors, power lines, strings, wires and rope, that kind of thing.
While we were in Africa, Dave and I were planning to fly down to Timbuktu. When you tell people that you’re a pilot, they usually want to know where’s the furthest you’ve been. Timbuktu, we both agreed, was the best possible answer to that question and a good enough reason to go there. Even taking the Bonanza to North Africa was quite a serious undertaking. We’d bought a lot of charts, a desert survival kit and a life raft. If the plane had any technical problems, we’d probably be best fixing it ourselves, so we also took spare tyres, engine parts and a tool kit. We had the aeroplane serviced before we left and when we arrived at the airfield it was sitting on the tarmac next to the Queen’s helicopter. There had been big problems with Dave’s Cessna. We’d been merrily flying around in a machine that had such bad corrosion that the wings could have fallen off at any time. That’s got to be one of worst things that can happen to an aeroplane. When we found out, we decided that in future we’d have the best engineers we could find to keep an eye on things under the cowlings. It was reassuring to see the royal chopper as we set out on our maiden inter-continental voyage.
We wanted to have lunch and refuel at La Rochelle. We didn’t really need to land and pick up more avgas until we reached the southern coast of France, but were in agreement that the
baguettes fromages
at that airport were the best cheese sandwiches we’d ever tasted, and it was worth a detour. Those sandwiches are a sensational case study in beautiful simplicity. Just French bread and Camembert, no butter, no nothing. We almost always had cheese sandwiches for lunch when we were working, and the La Rochelle special was the benchmark standard that all were compared to. The Primrose Hill delicatessen offered notably good high-end, custom-built ciabattas, but the proprietor inclined towards the over-elaborate. It’s the way things are going. In order to compete with each other to give people what they want, the sandwich makers of the world feel they have to create more and more fanciful-sounding fillings, trying to cram three courses of contemporary fusion cuisine between ever-increasing varieties of bread. The marketing gurus would tell us we’re not just buying lunch any more, but that we’re making a statement about who we are. If you can swallow that, you can probably swallow one of their cold cling-filmed sandwiches.