But there are often many cul-de-sacs and wrong turns on the path. Sometimes finding out where you don’t want to go is as important as finding out where you do want to and, without wishing to sound like something printed inside a Hallmark card, it’s how you overcome the mistakes and the failures that ends up defining you just as much as the successes, but ultimately it’s those flaws that are so fascinating. In the same way that everyone’s childhood is slightly embarrassing, so too is everyone’s first stab at music. I’d love to sit here and write that we arrived fully formed, violent and dynamic, purposeful and richly eloquent, but it simply wouldn’t be true. The weak, derivative, misshapen songs and the scruffy inglorious details are just as much part of the story, however, and so something of which I am strangely just as proud. Looking at other bands and their seemingly steady, untroubled ascent of the ladder makes me feel that somehow they missed something – that it’s the struggle and the imperfections just as much as the finished product that gives the whole thing any heft. As the years march on it feels like the machinery that drives success is becoming more sophisticated and churns out increasingly formulaic bands via a menu of checklists and media milestones. That type of formula was very far from being established in 1990, let alone fine-tuned, as we cast around for some sort of identity.
Probably because they were cheaper we used to attend lots of gigs at London University venues – places like University of London Union or Queen Mary College – where we would sip beer in plastic pint glasses and watch now forgotten, marginal bands like Five Thirty or That Petrol Emotion, not so much for artistic inspiration, but just to drench ourselves in the giddy world of dry ice and the squeal of feedback, the press of bodies and the thrill of noise. One evening during the break between the support and the headliners, Bernard, Justine and I were sitting on the stairs smoking. We had reached the stage that we were searching around for a name and I can’t honestly remember the story behind it, but I just remember turning to them both and saying, ‘What about Suede?’
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It’s interesting how being in a band I’ve often found I am asked to justify and explain and intellectualise things that in retrospect seem simply instinctive. I don’t remember there being an especially strong logic about our choice of name beyond the simple fact that it just sounded right. Later journalists would force me to pin some story on to the moniker, and I would try to nicely do as I was asked and blabber on about concepts of ‘beauty through cruelty’ and references to Elvis or Morrissey songs. But the truth is, I liked the way it sounded and I liked the way it looked and sometimes, in music and in life, that’s all that really counts. So we were called Suede and armed with this new impetus and identity we marched gamely on.
The next step, of course, was to summon up the courage to take to the stage and play our songs live. I was yet to learn how crystallising and focusing this experience is in how you view your own work; that playing exactly the same song even to the most modest audience makes you view the song completely differently. When suddenly bereft of your own solipsistic perception you start to hear the song through the ears of others, its artifice peeled away and its strengths and weaknesses exposed and revealed. This we were yet to learn as we hustled for a support slot on the dreary, unforgiving, early nineties London indie circuit. We knew a boy called Andy Holland, brother of an old school friend, an art college graduate who did a bit of lighting for a band called The Prudes. He pulled some favours and used a little leverage, and we ended up being offered third on the bill at a gig they were playing at The White Horse pub on Fleet Road in Hampstead near the Royal Free Hospital. If I remember rightly the gig was in a kind of cellar below the pub. A handful of people were milling around as we gingerly stepped on stage and politely ran through our set. All I can say about the experience is that it seemed to swim by in a dream-like way. We were so nervous and out of control that some sort of autopilot instinct took over, and my memory of it is so strange and vague as to almost be repressed. I know we played ‘Justice’ and ‘So Liberated’, and possibly our newest song ‘Natural Born Servant’, a sort of horrible, baggy mess that we even demoed and touted hopefully and fruitlessly around a few record companies. Mat was in charge of operating the drum machine so there would probably have been sticky episodes of silence and embarrassed shuffling between the songs as he located the next programme. I’m sure it was a masterclass in ineptitude, but once the final song had been played and we had shifted our amps back off the stage, we gathered together at the bar wreathed in a rosy glow of achievement and probably relief. My most vivid memory of playing gigs during those early days was of the D-shaped space in front of the stage, a kind of no-man’s land where none of the crowd would dare to venture. You almost got the sense that people didn’t want to come too close to the band in case they became infected by their failure. It’s funny that once a band does become successful exactly the same area is prime territory and viciously fought over and defended by hardcore fans. I also remember, way before we could even think of affording roadies, the utter bathos when after the crescendo had been reached, the final chord played and we had stormed off wrapped in what we thought was a shroud of arrogance and mystery we would have to gingerly step back on to the stage, our personas discarded, and hurry about the practicalities of shifting the gear. A year or so later when we were closing with ‘To The Birds’, this ridiculous disparity would be heightened even further.
We would rehearse at a place called the Premises, a shabby, old townhouse rehearsal room on Hackney Road. I think it’s still there. It was draughty and scruffy and naturally noisy but kind of cosy. There was sweet tea and paraffin heaters, and the smell of stale smoke and sweat and the cigarette butts of a thousand unsigned bands. We would thrash away until late in the evening as east London muttered and screeched a couple of floors below. At some point, after inheriting a little money from my lovely old Uncle Harry, I had bought a beautiful Rickenbacker six-string electric which Justine would faithfully strum as Bernard leapt around the frets of his Epiphone and the drum machine pattered on. Mat would rumble away on his old Fender bass, and sometimes during fag breaks would jokingly conduct mock interviews or challenge me into showing him how I intended to move on stage. Mat is without doubt one of the cleverest and sharpest people you are ever likely to meet. He has the ability to make amusing off-the-cuff quips that most people would take weeks to come up with. Today, he has aged into a kind and happy man, and his acerbic bone-dry wit is still always funny, but when he was younger this ruthless mockery could sometimes feel probing and teasing. Fortunately, having spent so much time together I knew how to bat him off, and would just mumble something inaudible in my nasal estuary drawl and wander off to make tea. From quite early on, though, once the existing hierarchy had been deconstructed, Bernard would be leading the proceedings, constantly turning up with new pieces to rehearse on to which I would try to weld lyrics and melodies. Even in those very early days when we were still inept and unloved, his industry was inspiring. It was one of the many things that over the years I really admired about him: that relentless, restless zeal, that mission to create. Slowly, I think Bernard began to feel more comfortable with us. Our close dynamic must have felt intimidating at first and, of course, he was from a very different background to Justine, but then again we all were. He was always a step apart from us, though, and I got the sense that rather than there being an immediate empathy, he began to trust us as he learned to blend. I suppose the seeds of discord were sown within us many years before they actually ended up growing and tearing us apart, but for the moment we learned to repress any slight uneasiness as we gamely pressed on and papered over our differences. Whereas the rest of us would blather on constantly about anything and everything, Bernard was more introspective and intense. They say that the quietest people have the loudest minds, and I got the impression that he internalised things and expressed them through the music he was writing rather than through any conversations that I had with him at the time. But who really knows? We
were only just beginning to understand each other and our period of real bonding was still a year or so away.
We managed to convince another small-time promoter to put us on – a guy called Chris who ran the Cube Club, an indie venue in a decent-sized room with a high stage at the back of the Bull and Gate on Kentish Town Road, just down from the far more prestigious Town and Country Club where proper bands with fans and actual record deals played. All I remember from that night was the feeling of complete horror as the drum machine decided to break down a couple of times, and with a deathly finality stop mid-song. We froze like four frightened rabbits, confused and panicked, the foundations wrenched from under us as Mat scrambled for the controls in an ecstasy of fumbling, and I probably tried in vain to mumble something witty or charismatic to cover the embarrassed shuffling silence and muffled sniggers. Incredibly, in spite of this comedy of errors, Chris managed to see something in us and booked us for another show. He was the first person outside our little circle to ever have faith in us and I don’t think I’ve ever really thanked him for that.
The next gig was a support slot with Clare Grogan from Altered Images as the headliner. It’s a mark of our lowly position on the slippery ladder of success that such an opportunity seemed glamorous to us; like we were somehow within tantalising touching distance of fame, no matter how minor or how vicarious. It’s ironic that once we had eventually got somewhere our popular image for many was as members of some closed circle of the urbane metropolitan elite: the cool and connected Londoners who saw success as their birthright, rubbing shoulders with the great and the good. Nothing could have been further from the truth as we timidly climbed on to the stage at the Bull and Gate and unconvincingly ran through our set to a smattering of vaguely distracted Altered Images fans. The truth is that all of us felt utterly excluded by the media and its power brokers because we were. We were like grubby-cheeked urchins with our faces pressed up against the window of a sweet shop: unlikely, unconnected and adrift. Apart from Justine who had looked privilege in the face, I think the rest of us had grown up with the notion that success was something that happened to other people. None of us knew anyone who had ever penetrated the inner circles of the media’s hushed and moneyed playgrounds; our parents were taxi drivers and factory workers and unskilled labourers who were only likely to have met a celebrity or journalist or an A&R man if they had given them a lift home in their cab. It was this distance that’s always given me the feeling that, even when successful, the band were somehow always outsiders. Years later, when we appeared on the Brits, I remember the Green Room being full of puffed-up, self-important celebrities like Cher and Peter Gabriel mincing around in their ridiculous costumes while we just smoked and laughed with the make-up girls at the utter naffness of it all. I’ve always cherished that sense of outsiderdom to be honest – that healthy disrespect – and always believed that the voices that come from the margins have a truthfulness and that as an artist as soon as you are fully accepted and part of an elite you are somehow neutered.
So our free time began to be filled by the soul-crushing experience of trying to enter the sweet shop. Bernard and I would spend whole afternoons licking stamps and sending out demo tapes in yellow Jiffy bags and being put on hold by record companies and low-level promoters and venue owners who were always ‘away from their desks’. Calls were not taken and doors were shut in our faces. So we thought we’d use Justine’s obvious charms as bait in our desperate, depressing crusade. A couple of times she went into places like East West or Chrysalis Records dressed in a leather skirt to try to press one of our cassettes into the hands of someone who might make a difference. It sounds terrible now, but it was nothing sordid – we all just thought with her looks and her allure she would probably have more chance of getting noticed than us skinny, wan-looking boys. But the record companies never called us back, and thank god they didn’t – we still desperately needed to improve.
After hustling and jostling and persevering, however, we managed to get our song ‘Wonderful, Sometimes’ played on Gary Crowley’s Demo Clash one Sunday afternoon on GLR. It was a part of the show where Gary would play two unsigned bands’ tracks back to back, the public would vote for the best and the winner would go through to the following week’s contest. Of course, in reality all this indicated was how many friends each band could muster up to bother to phone in, and as we knew quite a few people we ended up winning a couple of times. The minor ripple of attention from this provoked a Melody Maker journalist to come to the Bull and Gate to review the gig but it was way too early for us, and the ensuing vicious, waspish critique stung horribly. I think we were likened to children’s TV presenters, and if you ever see any early photos from those shows the description isn’t unjustified. Dressed hilariously in awful, stripy, post-Madchester, Day-Glo T-shirts and loose jeans we must have thought were fashionable, we had all the charisma and presence of toilet-roll holders. It was our first bitter slap of harsh public censure but I guess it became part of the tapestry of events that ended up making us improve. And god knows we needed to. Even though in the early nineties the word ‘career’ was certainly never bandied about when talking about music, there was still a strong sense that our struggle was much more than some vague whim. In the predigital age it seemed perfectly feasible to expect that putting food on the table and making interesting, marginal music weren’t mutually exclusive. Nowadays I know of even relatively successful, creative and inspiring alternative bands – seasoned, professional and hard-working outfits – whose members need to supplement their incomes with part-time jobs. The implications for the future of creativity in music are bleak indeed.
So we soldiered clumsily on for a few months, playing along to the drum machine’s capricious, clockwork tyranny at a string of semi-deserted, depressing gigs in the back rooms of pubs and in now closed-down, low-level venues, but it slowly began to dawn on us that if we wanted the songs to breathe in any way, if we wanted them to grow and evolve and provoke a response that wasn’t just muttering and silence and a smattering of dutiful applause, then we needed to find a real drummer.
Somehow or other we got in contact with a boy called Justin Welch. He turned up at the Premises one evening with his drums in the back of his Mini, a shocking little rocker with shoulder-length, ash-blond hair, a thick Midlands accent and a ring through his nose. I’ve always really liked Justin and we still hang out with him to this day. He’s always lovely and great fun to have around, but when he was young he had this tireless, whirlwind energy that left behind a trail of chaos. We ran through some songs with him, and he smashed and crashed and rolled along like a cross between Keith Moon and Animal from The Muppets. But it sounded great: breathing with life and space, and free at last from the drum machine’s skittish, rigid punch. He was the sort of guy who played with loads of bands, however, and I’m not sure if our polite, still slightly sexless songs really spoke to him. We vaguely decided to meet up again, but I sensed that he was prevaricating. Afterwards we all decided to go for a drink, and I ended up squashed into his Mini, pressed up against the kit. He drove like he played the drums, and as we raced along Hackney Road he took a corner too fast, lost control and span the car. We ended up skidding around in a perfect circle like we were stunt men in a cop-show car chase. When we finally screeched to a halt, the first thing we saw in front of us was a police van and a row of three frowning, angry cops, who had witnessed the whole episode, staring back at us through the windscreen. Justin spent the next couple of hours at the police station, and the rest of us went home thirsty.
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