Bit of a Blur (8 page)

In the morning, the pretty girl who was organising everything asked me if I would mind sharing a car back to London with Adam Ant. There is always a pretty girl who organises everything at record companies. ‘Kings of the Wild Frontier’, by Adam and the Ants, was the first album I’d bought. I said, ‘That would be great, actually’, and she winked at me. He was really nice and we talked about music all the way, just like I had done on the bus to school. He sent me
Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake
by the Small Faces a few days later.

I got home, back to the squat, and Justine said, ‘Has anyone seen you this morning?’ I said, ‘Only Adam Ant.’ She said, ‘Aren’t you clever! Did he mention your nose, darling?’ I looked in the mirror and it was bright red on the end. It took days to go back to being the right colour.

The record was finally released and the video was on
Juke Box Jury
. Jonathan Ross, quite an important voice, said it was crap and I swore to hate him forever. A soul singer called Kym Mazelle, who had stayed in a hotel Damon had been working in, The Portobello, gave it the raspberry too. He said it was because she’d put the moves on him when he took her up a sandwich in the middle of the night and he’d shunned her advances, which may or may not have been true. It was voted a miss, but it went into the charts at number forty-eight, which we thought was massive.

Existence was still hand to mouth. We didn’t have much money, but a cheque for three hundred and twenty-five pounds from the musicians’ union came through the door, quite unexpectedly. I went straight out and bought the thing I wanted the most, a telescope. Along with the notion that I might be able to do what I’d always wanted came an all-pervading rush of optimism. I started to feel more and more alive. The more alive I felt, the more interested I became in absolutely everything. My natural curiosity burned like a bonfire. All of a sudden, the sky was the limit, and that too seemed limitlessly beautiful and benign.

I also bought a book,
Foundations of Astronomy
by Michael A. Seeds. I spent the next five years reading that book, over and over again. I took it everywhere with me. Even through binoculars, the moon is a staggering sight. I’d never looked through a telescope before, but soon I was lugging it all over the place on tour. I gazed at Jupiter, Saturn and Venus and wondered what they were doing there.

We still didn’t have a manager and we needed one. A good manager understands how record companies work. He knows a good sync licence fee from a bad one and he is always on the phone bollocking someone about mechanical royalties in the minor territories. That’s what a manager should be doing. Fighting battles you don’t understand so that you can float around getting drunk and shagging. A management company is similar to a record company. They work alongside each other. They generally get along great and help each other. The rub is always with someone in ‘Business affairs’ at the label. That’s the record company’s legal department. No one in the world cares about business affairs departments, except for managers. Managers care about them all day. As an artist you would hope never to meet anyone from business affairs. Life is too short. That’s why you pay your manager 20 per cent of everything, to deal with them. Most people who work in record companies are pretty cool. They all love music. You’d have to.

Even the largest record company is quite a simple organisation. A relationship with a label starts with the department called ‘Artiste and Repertoire’. An A&R man is a fancy name for someone who was desperate to be in a band, but couldn’t get his hair right. A junior member of the A&R department will see three or four bands a night, every night, more if he can. He loves it. Very occasionally he’ll see a band that he really likes and tell his boss, who will sign them and take all the credit. The senior guys don’t want to be drinking cider at the Falcon in Camden every night, but occasionally, they’ll check out a band because they’ve been sent an outstandingly good demo. It really would have to be brilliant, though.

A&R departments often get nervous about acting alone. They’re much happier about going to see bands that there is ‘a real buzz’ on. ‘A real buzz’ means whatever their mate who is an A&R man at another company was talking about last night, or something that has been mentioned in the
NME
. Then they all go down together and make a group decision about whether a band are any good or not. Usually every label wants them or no label wants them. Everybody passed on Blur apart from Andy ‘Magic Ears’ Ross. Even Balfe didn’t want to sign us.

Managers like to get involved with bands before they sign to record companies; then they can put their 20 per cent commission on the signing advance. It’s easier to get record companies to see you if you’ve got a manager they know. We went to see a lot of managers. Most of them bought us lunch. We went for the one who bought us the nicest lunch. As a rule of thumb, it’s best to sign to the guy who hasn’t got time to take you to lunch. There’s no way you could ever make anyone in a band listen to advice like that, though.

Mike Collins took us to Fred’s, a member’s club in Soho Square. We’d never been to a member’s club before. We hadn’t been out to lunch much before. We stayed there all day drinking brandy, and Mike Collins told us how brilliant we were, and how charming. He liked my telescope. He liked the idea of the telescope. He liked it all. It was special. It was amazing.

The anticipation of success is the sweetest thing of all. It’s never absolute, success, except when you’re dreaming about it. This was success, really, having lunch bought for us in a member’s club, and being flattered in the sunshine. It’s an endless chase, succeeding. It’s never over, but we were enjoying the chase. The brandies and the cigars kept coming. It was a good day.

The flat was behind a vegetarian wholefood paradise called Cross Currants. I’d tiptoe around there in my socks to get a pint of milk in the mornings. It was Dezzie’s business. He was a fresh-looking Asian with infinite calm in his eyes. I liked old Dezzie. He was interested in the band. He was always talking about Barbara Gaskin, who somehow he knew. She’d had a number one record, a Motown cover. It was tantalising, not to have had any hits. I wondered whether one day he’d be telling people he knew me, and we joked about it. He was a good egg. He bought the burned-out house next door, which I thought was an impressive gamble. New Cross was another place that was right on the brink of chaos. The bank down the road took the cash machine away because too many people were getting mugged using it. Des had to put up with all kinds of loonies and whackos as he plied his Fairtrade coffee, organic vegetables and Sosmix. He was spreading his message of goodness and hope to the people of SE14. That flat was the worst place anyone could possibly live in the late twentieth century in the Western world, a polluted, condemned inner-city slum, and yet I was surrounded by kinder hearts there than anywhere else since. Justine was finding her feet, but I worried about leaving her alone in that flat. Des kept an eye on things when we went out on the road.

It was hard to know what was going to happen when we got in the van in the early days. Big gigs are all the same, but the small ones are all very different. As support act, we might be playing in quite a big venue or a tiny little place. We didn’t know until we arrived. Maybe they’d love us or they might throw pints of body fluids at us; we wouldn’t find out until we walked onstage. We hired a van and drove to Birmingham to support the Railway Children. They had a huge sleeper coach, and they were rather pleased with themselves. There weren’t many people there, though. It seemed ridiculous to be in Birmingham on a Sunday evening. We went down quite well. The next time we went to Birmingham was to play at the University Ball, in Aston. There were half a dozen other bands playing, including Voice of the Beehive, who were managed by our record label. They were nice, those Voice of the Beehive girls. They invited us to their dressing room. No one had ever done that before. A dressing room is a member’s club and a party and a home from home all rolled into one. We had some port with them and watched their show.

It was a huge end-of-term celebration party. There were thousands of kids our age there. In some rooms there were bands playing, in others there were people getting friendly. There were bars everywhere, and a huge buffet, a bouncy castle and a bleep-bleep zone with mad lights, full of people I’d never seen before and would never see again, all having the best time of their lives. Just to be there for one night made everything very simple. We were free agents.

I didn’t need any encouragement to go on tour. When the record came out we were booked for three shows over a weekend - Birmingham, Cambridge and Keele University. Jason, the kid from the rehearsal studios, had been sacked for spending too much time with us. He refused to give them their van back straightaway and we got him to drive us. We were playing in Dudley, Birmingham, at a venue called JB’s. It was our first out-of-town headline slot. It was dark when we arrived because we’d got lost, as usual. We soundchecked and a friendly guy, who seemed too scruffy and nice to be in charge of anything, gave us a crate of Newcastle Brown Ale and showed us the dressing room. It was one of those ones with scrawling all over the walls and a couple of knackered but comfy sofas. We left the door open and sat in there necking the Newcastle Browns. Miraculously, the place started to fill up. Soon it was heaving. The guy came back with another crate of beer. We took it onstage with us. There was a huge cheer. These people had come to enjoy themselves. So had we.

Of all the shows we’ve ever played, that was the most memorable. They just got it, the audience, right there and then. They got the whole thing. Over the last few shows, we’d tightened everything up, rubbed off the edges and cut out the boring bits, but that was the first time we brought the house down. The audience invaded the stage. They went crazy, every last one of them. The dressing room was packed afterwards, and more crates of Newcastle Brown kept arriving. Someone said that I was the fastest bass player he’d ever seen. Graham was holding court with a couple of girls. They were gazing at him and laughing at everything he said. People wanted plectrums, people wanted photos, people wanted records signing and all of a sudden we were giving our first autographs. It all happened in a flash, right there in Dudley. The friendly guy gave Jason a huge wedge of cash. We split it between us. There was ninety quid each, a fortune. Jason drove through the night to Colchester, where we stayed, at Damon’s folks. Colchester’s not that far from Cambridge, which was the next gig.

We went to bed insensible and woke up invincible. Cambridge was a town completely different in every detail from the one where we’d spent the previous day. It was very odd, perpetually being somewhere new, and with some money in my pocket. The following day we were on a university campus in Staffordshire, playing football with a band called the Family Cat. Jason was our star player. He’d had a trial for West Ham. We were bottom of the bill that night, but there was a bit of a rumpus going on about the picture of the girl on the hippo on the record sleeve. It was degrading to women in the opinion of some of the young ladies at the college, and they mounted a protest and tried to stop us from playing. It seemed ridiculous, but it was in the newspapers the next day. Quite why that was in the news over everything else that was happening in the world that day was hard to fathom. Maybe it was just a good picture.

The really great thing about the band was that it was just that, a band: four people. Together, we were greater than the sum of our parts. Damon was dynamic, an initiator. The whole thing was driven by his energy, but he and Graham were childhood best friends and complemented each other perfectly, musically. Graham was simply the best guitar player of his generation. He was consumed by music; listening to it, playing it, whistling or tapping his fingers the whole time. He was biologically a guitar player in the same way that Damon was a born frontman. The bass guitar was my instrument. Unlike the others, I hadn’t had any formal training. I learned by listening and actually playing in bands. I was in a band from that moment I’d played my first lick in Jay Burt-Smale’s bedroom.

I played in quite an unconventional way with no respect for the boundaries of the instrument. It was more like having someone playing a second lead guitar in the basement. The sparse mechanical precision of Dave’s drumming was well suited to two guitarists both going at it hammer and tongs. It was uncanny how, with very little discussion, whenever we were all in a room together with our instruments, it all usually just seemed to work.

It didn’t always. The second recording session was a disaster. We needed to make another record. Steven Lovell wasn’t around, but we went back to the studio with Steve Power. Nothing went right. He even got Graham to try playing bass, which didn’t work. It was the worst session I’ve ever been on. We chose the wrong songs, and we made them worse than they were already. It all sounded crap. The guys from EMI came down and stroked their chins. Even with more experience a bad session always feels like the end of the world. There aren’t many really bad days, but they’re certain to happen, sometimes. At this embryonic stage it felt catastrophic, spending all that time and money making something that was lifeless and worthless. It was Christmas, so we all went home for a rest.

It was nice going back to Bournemouth and being signed to EMI. I had a sense that I was changing, still growing and leaving Bournemouth behind. In the pub on Christmas Eve I ran into Jackie who I’d had a crush on at an early age that I thought I’d never recover from. She suddenly seemed like quite a small and ordinary person. She was still going out with the drummer with ten A grade ‘O’ levels. Now he was back from college, training to be an accountant. She was standing at the bar, when I went to get a drink. I said, ‘Oooooh, hello.’