Coal Black Mornings

by Brett Anderson

  Mat was studying at the LSE and living in a flat in a handsome mansion block in Ridgmount Gardens just by Goodge Street station. There was a spare bed there, so using the money I’d scraped together temping in dull offices in Haywards Heath I moved in for a few weeks while I decided what to do with my life. It was only really a one-bedroom flat but there were six of us: three girls in the bedroom, and Mat, his friend Ade and me in separate, narrow, single beds in the living room. In the day I’d waft around the capital, eating salad kebabs, sitting for hours on the Circle Line or window-shopping in the maze of electronics shops along Tottenham Court Road, and in the evening we would drift off into pot-babble and listen to music and chatter and giggle into the small hours of the morning. It became a sort of ritual for us boys to fall asleep to The Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Rent’, a clever, beautiful poem of nineteen eighties city life that I still adore and which never fails to remind me of those first wonderful days when I began to fall in love with London.

  During this whole period I’d carried on writing songs, and while I had been in Manchester had recorded them on my primitive Fostex 4-Track and sent cassette tapes to Mat in London. We would play this hilarious game where I was the ‘artist’ and he assumed the role of ‘journalist’, and would send me back in-depth critiques framed as NME reviews complete with marks out of ten. I still own one of them, and the sweet, callow tone of the accompanying letter always makes me feel wistful for a time when we were still young men, when our relationship was still uncoloured by the endless dead hours spent in airports and dressing rooms, and by the stresses and frictions of career and money and the chase for success. He was always unrealistically positive. The songs, with titles like ‘Empty House’ and ‘Somewhere Along The Way’, which I hoped sounded a bit like Felt or The Loft, actually sounded weak and tuneless, but he would receive them in the spirit of friendship as minor masterpieces, and in my self-mythologising way I would be happy to almost believe him. So we continued to dabble and potter. I’m not sure if either of us knew where we thought it was going to lead.

  I began to coast around, staying with different people in different parts of the country. My old friend Alan was living with his sister down in Mitcham in south London. They had some space on their sofa so I ended up staying there for a while, living on baguettes and humous from the nearby Safeway supermarket. This was the era of Terence Trent D’Arby and Bros, and as Alan had a twin brother and they were both blonde and handsome they had unwisely begun to ape that awful eighties style, something for which I would savagely take the piss. I’ll always remember that Alan had a shoe-box full of photographs of his life, most of which, bizarrely, seemed to be shots of his exgirlfriends naked and crying. I could never wheedle out of him how he’d managed to regularly orchestrate situations that simultaneously seemed to involve elements of sexuality, voyeurism and grief. I’ve always thought that if he had been slightly more inclined towards an arty sort of intellectualism they would have made the basis of a fascinating exhibition. When Alan wasn’t working we would take the tube up to Hampstead and hang around with a gang of rent boys that we had met through his brother. For some reason we called them The Hampstead Muffins, and they lived like a little family in bleak-looking social housing hidden well away from the quaint and pretty Georgian village. Most of them were runaways from places like rural Wales, and to supplement their dole cheques would dabble in a bit of minor dealing and sell us cheap trips. They were a hilarious and strangely inspiring bunch – flamboyant and funny and utterly inclusive. We spent several afternoons with them parading in altered states around the plush and moneyed streets, giggling uncontrollably and pirouetting on bins and swinging like scruffy Gene Kellys around the lamp-posts while the well-heeled mums gazed quizzically on.

  I went back to Manchester for a while, moving in with a girl I’d met at university called Emily, who was from Middlesbrough. She was a confident, warm, fun girl who loved music and studied chemistry and lived in a flat in Daisybank Road in Longsight. I stayed with her and her flat-mate and made tea and got in the way and listened to Ian Dury and Kate Bush, and wrote a song about her called ‘Just A Girl’. It’s the oldest song I have written ever to be released and it sat around for years until one day I was forced to raid my bottom drawer for a B-side and remembered it. To be honest, it’s a terrible steal of an old country song my parents used to play, but it showed some understanding for storytelling and melody, and still actually moves me in some simple, probably nostalgic way. The line about the ‘ashtray eyes and boot-lace ties’ was a reference to Ian Dury’s ‘Sweet Gene Vincent’, a song we used to play until the grooves wore out, and the picture it paints of two young people fumbling around the beginnings of feeling set against the back-drop of an unfamiliar city’s coal-black winter still manages to stir something in me and takes me back to a sweet forgotten corner of my youth.

  Looking for work one day in the local job centre, I saw advertised amongst the sea of vacancies at call centres and thinly disguised positions as sex workers a job as a DJ in a local nightspot. It was a place called the Cyprus Tavern, a sticky-floored, subterranean cellar bar on Princess Street, which was at the time home to frightening packs of football fans and herds of belligerent single young men pointedly looking for trouble. It smelled of stale smoke and bleach and spilled beer, and was the sort of place where no one planned to end the evening. I pretended that I’d had experience and was thrown in the deep end one Saturday night armed with a clutch of Freda Payne and Roxy Music records. The bouncers had told me that if I spotted a fight on the dance-floor I should stop the music as a sign for them to march down and break up the tussle. My inexperience and ineptitude meant that my ‘set’ was always peppered with gaps as I fiddled away inexpertly and frantically with the equipment. Hearing the silences and taking them as their cue the bouncers would rush down to the dance-floor, their eyes darting around looking for the phantom trouble-makers, while the meagre crowd would sigh and mutter. I gradually gained a little competence and confidence, and started to arrogantly replace the Phyllis Nelson records with more left-field stuff, much to the chagrin of some of the punters. One night, after ignoring a request to play some reggae record, I was followed home and chased down Plymouth Grove by a gang of lads of who had taken offence, forcing me to sprint into the grounds of a nearby school and hide cowering in one of the industrial bins while they stormed around drunkenly baying for satisfaction. My Slumdog Millionaire-style twenty minutes in a vat of banana skins and old yoghurt pots probably saved me from a week in hospital, and years later the experience would inform the lyrics to ‘Killing Of A Flash Boy’; a song inspired by the random small-town violence I saw on every street, the threats of brutish thuggery and the terrifying near misses like this and countless others. The eponymous ‘flash boy’ was myself – the eternal prey, the fated quarry, hair gelled and coiffed, marked and targeted and ‘asking for it’.

  As the year ebbed away and September rolled around again, I parted on good terms with Manchester, a hard, beautiful city full of proud people for which I still have so much fondness, but its damp, wind-blown streets never really felt like home and I drifted back to the dazzle and spin of London.

  6

  My time wafting around Bloomsbury had rekindled my love for the capital. It all started many years before in childhood when during the odd weekend or half-term my family would jump on the train up to Victoria and then on to the Circle Line to South Kensington in order to ‘visit the museums’. The rattle and drone of tube stations, and that peculiar dusty, diesel smell still gives me a slight frisson, and when I felt trapped in the cage of my dreary town as a kid I would often just walk to Haywards Heath railway station to stand on the platform and wistfully look northwards up the tracks trying to glimpse some of the lustre and promise beyond. There’s something about the size of London I find comforting: the sense of anonymity, the wealth, the power, the possibility. All the love and poison indeed.

  I was accepted on a Town Planning course at UCL, and with Mat and
a motley collection of other students moved into a large, crumbling Victorian house on Wilberforce Road in Finsbury Park. In order to minimise rent the whole house was crammed with beds, so the only communal space was the mildewy, laminated MDF kitchen where we would gather and stand around chatting and chomping on toast. It opened out on to a small, scruffy, weed-strewn garden where no one ever went, not even in summer. It was basically a dumping ground crowded with old fridges and pots of dried-up paint and a tangle of broken furniture. The only warmth in the house came from those rattly old Calor-gas heating units with heavy orange cylinders which we would have to haul up and down the stairs. Their cosy, gassy smell still reminds me of those days. Mat’s, Ade’s and my rooms were right at the top of the house, so we effectively lived in our own separate little enclave away from the other sub-tribes that had inevitably sprung up through the forces of the house geopolitics. Below us, in the master bedroom, there was a kind of alpha-male Goth called Colin and his henchman Dan, who were both also at LSE but who didn’t really bother climbing up the stairs very often, so Mat, Ade and I would often spend the evening together in the same giggly, fuddled haze of dope and chatter and music that we had in Ridgmount Gardens. I remember we would sit on the beds in our coats, huddled around the heater, smoking and cracking pistachio nuts while we listened to records like Felt’s ‘Space Blues’ or ‘Solid State Soul’ by Raymonde, the carpet of shells scattering and spreading across the lino.

  Anyone who knows London will understand that living in Finsbury Park is very different from living in Fitzrovia, but I loved the scruffy streets and the kebab houses and the shops full of cheap plastic tat that were precursors to the Pound stores. I’ve always been inspired by the arse-end of the city and tried to look for stories and vignettes in the bustle and majesty of the everyday. I would wander around in my ridiculous fantasy paying all of these images into the growing bank of song ideas I kept in my notebooks, scribbling down phrases that I overheard on the Underground or copying graffitied scrawlings that I came across in the toilet cubicles. Songs like ‘She’ and ‘This Time’ and ‘By The Sea’ and ‘My Insatiable One’ and ‘Sound Of The Streets’ and countless, countless others that mention the ‘nowhere places’ and the hinterlands and the cashpoints and the escalators – were born from these outings as I slowly pieced together a kind of Impressionist collage from the flotsam and debris that littered the streets of the capital; a lexicon torn from the dirty pulse of the city.

  As another way to explore London sometimes Mat and I would play something we invented called The Dice Game. Very much influenced by the Luke Rhinehart book, we would go to a tube station and throw dice to choose a line, and then throw again to choose the number of stops and take the train that the roll of chance had determined. At the designated station we would get out and buy something relevant: a little model of Big Ben at Westminster, a West Ham mug at Upton Park etc. etc. Of course, in reality it meant that we came back home laden with an armful of Neasden Gazettes and Perivale Chronicles as most places didn’t have landmarks or stadiums to their names, but the point of the game was really that there was no point beyond the adventure itself. I’d always found names like Dollis Hill and Seven Sisters and Hounslow evocative and intriguing and strangely exotic, and wondered why the romance for place names in music seemed to be reserved exclusively for destinations like Wichita and Chattanooga. Once I had grasped a little of the skill of painting detail I would set songs within very particular areas of London and, even if I didn’t always use the place name in the lyric itself, the technique would help bring the song to life for me and hopefully that sense would be passed on to the listener. ‘Asphalt World’ was a complex tale of three-way sexual jealousy set specifically in Highgate and in the endless cab journeys spent shuttling back and forth along the Archway Road. ‘By The Sea’ was a story of escape from Seven Sisters on the nether reaches of the Victoria Line, and Sadie, the fictional flaneuse of ‘She’ and ‘Sound Of The Streets’ roamed the sun-kissed pavements of North Kensington, wearing out her shoe leather on Chesterton Road and Ladbroke Grove. The use of such minutiae in writing would be something that I would ruminate on often over the years; the way if used right it could locate the narrative so neatly and breathe life into the words. I began to eschew the cliché about writing about universal experiences as I tried to do the exact opposite, convinced that the most powerful resonance was achieved through focusing on the microscopic rather than the macroscopic. I wanted to record the world I saw around me, real, and uncomfortable and up close: the blue plastic bag caught in the branches of the tree, the clatter and rumble of the escalator – London in all of its wonderful, shitty detail.

  I arrived at UCL in 1987, studying at the Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning on Gower Street. I suppose to be honest like many kids at that age I was just still drifting, and I certainly had little interest in my course beyond it allowing me to delay life. There were so few planners that we were thrown in with the architects. One of them started to catch my eye. She was extremely beautiful in an almost Middle Eastern or Mediterranean way with long unwashed dark hair cut in a severe fringe. She would always wear scruffy clothes like faded, vintage Mickey Mouse T-shirts or big clumpy biker’s boots, but somehow they just managed to make her look more elegant and moneyed. There was a student cafe on Gower Street called the Crypt or something, and one day I was sitting with my cup of tea and she came over to me and started talking. The first thing I noticed up close was that she had brown, discoloured teeth and what I thought at first was a speech impediment. Through her nervous, lisping drawl I managed to make out that her name was Justine. Justine Frischmann. We had a field trip the next week to the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum near Chichester and she made me some sandwiches to eat on the coach. It was such a simple, touching gesture, and it was the beginning of one of the two great loves of my life. We started hanging around together, although I’m not quite sure what she saw in a gauche, provincial twig like me. My naive parochial charm must have been novel to her. She, however, was so urbane and worldly that I’m surprised I never found her daunting. For me she somehow exuded London – the wealth, the power and indeed the possibility – but her confidence never stepped over into arrogance as she possessed a clumsy, disarming kind of charm that seduced everyone she met. She was the sort of person in whose presence everyone felt special; completely aware of her obvious lures but at the same time oddly detached from them. She was extremely powerful and I think she knew it. The reason I found her voice unusual at first was because I’d never really come across an accent that was the product of an expensive education before. Her father was an extremely successful engineer and her upbringing had been littered with the kind of luxury and privilege that I could only guess at. In order to spend more time bathing in her light I switched my degree course to Architecture and we began a gentle, hazy and at first fairly innocent relationship, the kind that wears the mask of affectionate friendship but that hides a secret, carnal truth. The first project we were assigned was to design a pergola in Gordon Square. We would wander there from The Bartlett and sit on one of the park benches in the October sunshine, and I would listen to her soft, lilting drawl as the conversation spooled and fragmented, and I tried not to stare at her too much. There were never any limits with Justine – she was always fascinated and fascinating, wise yet humble, intellectual yet earthy, murky and thoughtful, yet silly and joyous and wonderfully playful. I have a photo of one of those days – the first photo ever taken of us together. In it we are being deliberately melodramatic and studied, but the sepia wash and alabaster skin tones somehow accidentally capture an idealised truth of those precious first moments. She taught me how to gain pleasure from being near beautiful things or from simple combinations of colours, she taught me about modernism and how to appreciate spaces, and she introduced me to a host of unfamiliar artists from Ingres to Allen Jones, but she would never lecture and never monologue, and all the while had a slightly lascivious smile playing across what she calle
d her ‘sea monster lips’. One evening after a late night at college she came back to Wilberforce Road and we laid around for hours smoking and talking and eating nuts by the gas fire and eventually fell asleep listening to the rain outside. In the morning when Mat met her for the first time I remember feeling so proud of both of them, in their own different ways such wonderful people that had become so dear to me and that I had brought together. Justine became almost a resident of Wilberforce Road, and would often lean against the Formica worktop in the kitchen in her grey woollen Joseph dress charming everyone and chewing on her salad kebab while talking about Walter Gropius politely between mouthfuls. One December night, however, towards Christmas 1987 when the house had been pretty much emptied of students for the holidays, she turned up on my doorstep and we jabbered and chattered deep into the coal black morning, and by the time we woke up again the next day our relationship had changed for ever.

  She lived with her two cats in a luxury one-bedroom flat in another handsome mansion block, this time on Hornton Street in Kensington just opposite the hulking, Brutalist town hall. I began to stay there so regularly that it seemed like I had virtually moved in, and we would shuttle backwards and forwards from Kensington to Finsbury Park so often that even the route became synonymous with her. Even years later when I drive through Maida Vale and along Abercorn Place and over Abbey Road towards St John’s Wood I’m reminded of those endless hours sat in her little off-white Renault smoking and listening to cassette tapes on the car stereo, and talking about the lyrics to ‘Cygnet Committee’. London became endlessly fascinating to me as I slowly unpeeled its secrets. There was this bit of graffiti on a wall in Marble Arch which I noticed one day and that we both began to love saying simply Modern Life is Rubbish in stark white letters. We drove past it countless times and it never failed to fascinate us; bold and shocking and completely unexpected against the faded grey of the city. Her flat was elegantly corniced, high ceilinged and full of the hallmarks of wealth – gilt mirrors, fine furniture and a hefty television – but in the bedroom next to the futon there stood a little vintage Dansette turntable and a stack of old records; mainly easy listening albums like Stan Getz and Astrid Gilberto, or folk-rock classics like Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell, nothing particularly challenging or contemporary. Justine may have taught me about art but I introduced her to the kind of music that would end up defining her. She’d never heard of the Fall or the Happy Mondays before I met her, but her natural curiosity for the outré and her thirst to soak up interesting left-field culture led her to fall in love with every ragged beat. The pupil/teacher dynamic was reversed, and I loved playing her things like ‘Reel Around the Fountain’ or ‘Primitive Painters’ for the first time and watching her eyes widen as the thrill of discovery washed over her. In a borrowed flush of my father’s arrogance I remember telling her to forget that dusty old seventies vinyl, that from now on this was the only music we were going to be listening to.