Coal Black Mornings

by Brett Anderson

  Now I really can’t be bothered to get the order of events right here because that isn’t the point of this book, but at some juncture a guy Mat and I knew from Haywards Heath Sixth Form College appeared on the scene. He obviously had a bit of money and wanted to dabble in the music business a bit by starting a record label, so he said he’d pay for us to record a couple of things. Even though it probably technically was, it didn’t feel like a proper record deal. It was much too low key and low end to have any of that sense of glamour or privilege. For one thing his homemade ‘label’ had no history or identity or roster: just three anonymous-sounding letters and a modest promise. I don’t remember actually signing anything, and I certainly don’t remember it feeling pivotal or particularly exciting, but it did mean that we got to spend a bit of time in a proper studio – some place he’d found for us down in Sussex, ironically not a million miles from Haywards Heath. For anyone who grows up on a diet of rock biographies and rainy afternoons scouring the NME, the iconography of recording studios assumes a thrillingly familiar lustre, so much of our time there amongst the maze of control rooms and baffled sound booths was spent wandering around like wide-eyed children who have found the keys to a secret garden, running our fingers along the faders and keyboards, lost in our own private rock fantasies. The business of actually recording something seemed somehow secondary but eventually we gathered our composure and took our first faltering steps to properly committing our ideas. Often the song that a band is most excited about is the latest one that’s been written. At that time ours was called ‘Be My God’ – a pulsing, hypnotic, almost celestial groove that started with Bernard’s guitar washing and growing through a volume pedal, but which was let down by my weak singing and nothing lyrics. We stumbled on with the process, however, enjoying its novel thrill, and after a couple of days within the enclave of rec rooms and mixing desks we had finished the track and drove back up the M23 to London with the tapes, wired and breathless with plans and possibility.

  Our links with him were fairly casual, so in that insouciant, bondless way that young people often have, Justin drifted off to play for Spitfire or one of his many other bands sometime after we returned and we were forced to search for a new drummer and so decided to place another music press advert. I can’t remember the exact wording but I know we namechecked The Smiths as an influence. One of the few people who answered was a Mancunian called Mike. What we didn’t know until he marched into the rehearsal room at the Premises was that it was Mike Joyce. We were all slightly in awe, but Mike was a real gentleman. He politely listened to our average songs and jammed along with us and offered advice, but never monologued or lectured or played the seasoned pro. Over the next few weeks he would take us under his wing and in his kind, avuncular way try to nurture and encourage us. I’d like to think he must have seen some potential, but maybe he just felt sorry for us or liked hanging out. Anyway, Bernard and I travelled up on the train to Manchester one time to stay with him and his wife. We jammed in his cellar and wrote a funny song there called ‘We Believe In Showbiz’ and drank tea and chatted and smoked into the night. He told us some old war stories and in the morning he dropped us off at Piccadilly Station and we went back to London feeling cared for and somehow less excluded. A few weeks later we booked some time at Battery Studios in London to record another new song on which Mike was to play drums: ‘Art’, appropriately a driving, powerful beast with a guitar part that was reminiscent of the rockier moments of Meat Is Murder. Sadly, my vocal line again let it down and the song struggled to come across as anything other than bluster and empty fury. I simply hadn’t yet learned how to deliver melody properly; the lyrics were too crammed and hurried, and I was trying to say too much but ended up saying nothing. Still, things would change and we were beginning to learn the art of patience.

  The promised release of the tracks never materialised – the ‘record company’ obviously realising that it didn’t actually have much to hang anything on. Unfortunately, our mistake in committing too early would come back to haunt us once we had achieved success, as we had to buy back the recordings to prevent an embarrassing release of substandard material at a time when every single moment of what we were doing was being microscopically scrutinised. Our time with Mike ended on very good terms, however, both parties realising that there would be an unfair disparity and imbalance if he actually joined the band, so we stayed friends and he drifted off to play with PIL, and we began looking for yet another drummer. I still see Mike from time to time and am always cheered by the fact that his warmth and passion never seem to burn less brightly.

  During his time at Queen Mary College Bernard had met a chap called Nadir who began to manage us. He was part of a team of low-level university events managers that included a person who worked at the ULU ticket office called Ricky. He introduced us to a drummer who he worked with there and we set up an audition with him at the Premises. His name was Simon Gilbert. I remember Simon walking in and being shy and polite and extremely charming, and to this day even though he seems less shy and has over the years revealed depths of warmth and kindness, my perception of him hasn’t changed much. He was dressed in his ubiquitous DMs, tight trousers and spiked-up, bottle-blond hair, and looked a bit like a missing member of The Clash – not that different from how he looks today really. We played through a couple of numbers and it was clear quite early on that he was the missing element. I’ve always loved Simon’s style of drumming: never too fussy, always primal and powerful and obviously hugely influenced by Paul Cook and Budgie and Topper Headon and all the rough, angry music I first fell in love with. Simon’s input was such a key, often overlooked, factor in the kind of band we went on to be. I think he made us veer away from any ill-advised excursions into ‘groove’, and teased out all of the punk and post-punk elements that were lying dormant in the band. The tribal tom pattern of ‘The Drowners’, the frenetic chaos of songs like ‘Moving’ and ‘Dolly’, and the vicious edge of our early music would have evolved very differently in the hands of another drummer. The rest of us were so sure that he fitted in that we didn’t actually bother telling Simon himself, and even after weeks of increasingly exciting rehearsals, I remember him timidly calling me up one day and politely asking whether he’d passed the audition, something for which sometimes we still affectionately pull his leg.

  The band finally complete, we set about furiously writing and rehearsing. With Simon in place we started to develop a harder edge and wrote nastier, punkier songs like ‘Going Blonde’ and ‘Painted People’, and at last I was beginning to come up with parts that don’t now embarrass me. ‘Going Blonde’ was a kind of frenetic, stream-of-consciousness rant, inspired a little by the scattered, crammed metre of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and featuring a fictional character called Terry that Justine and I had invented. He inhabited a slightly idealised, working-class, fantasy world of pool halls and cheap lager and fake-diamond ear studs, and his character was very much inspired by Martin Amis’s London Fields, a book with which I became a little obsessed way back in 1990. Justine always loved the lyrics, and Elastica would later cover it and retitle it ‘See That Animal’ (as it started off with me shouting ‘See that animal/Get some heavy metal!’). ‘Painted People’, a sardonic, high-life, mocking tirade was one of the oldest songs that eventually saw the light of day and we sometimes still play it; its short, unpleasant, hectoring diatribe always provides a neat rush of adrenalised anger. And as Simon provided the jigsaw’s missing piece so Mat started to evolve in parallel, writing ever more ambitious basslines that meshed with the thump of the live drums and added another layer of identity to the music; never happy to simply occupy a frequency or plod along, but often complex and rich with melody. Mat had previously always been much more conceptual about music. I think he’d be the first to agree that he was never a ‘musician’s musician’ and never really wanted to be; his strengths, hugely important to the band as they were, lay more in his vision and his taste. He was always the one who had the
most finely developed consciousness about the kind of band that we were and the kind of band that we wanted to be, and to this day his is still such a vital voice. Without him, songs with the self-awareness of something like ‘Trash’ might never have come about, and certainly my own sense of a band having a ‘world’ and a specific landscape that it operated within would have lain underdeveloped. Simon’s presence, however, unlocked something very musical in him and he started coming up with fantastic parts: ‘He’s Dead’, ‘Pantomime Horse’, ‘To The Birds’ and later stuff like ‘She’s Not Dead’ and ‘The Wild Ones’ had beautiful, moving basslines in their own right and Mat’s playing was utterly essential to the sound and feel of those early songs.

  Simon’s first gig with us was probably at the Rock Garden. I think it might have been one of those ‘pay-to-play’ venues where desperate young bands were exploited into stumping up cash for their own performances in order to provide themselves with a thin patina of exposure. I don’t remember a great deal about the show itself. I’m assuming we were received with the same general indifferent shrug by the audience, but it felt to us that we were now at last heading somewhere. Somewhere of our own.

  Incidentally, the Ricky who worked with Simon at ULU was Ricky Gervais. You’ll be sorry to hear I didn’t have a huge amount to do with him at the time. Simon is actually the best source for those old war stories. I’ve probably met him more times since we’ve both achieved success than beforehand, and he has always been generous and charming to a fault, and naturally very droll, often remarking that he was pleased for me that I ‘never got fat’. The only time our paths really crossed in the dark ages of the early nineties was when we supported his band – Son Of Bleeper – at some scantily attended university do. I hope he wouldn’t think it unfair of me to say that looking back he came across as a less funny version of David Brent with some truly wince-inducing songs. One in particular contained lyrics that stuck in my head for years. It was something along the lines of ‘What Johnny wants to do is make his guitar sing the blues’ sung in this sort of throaty, neo-American, blue-collar, bar-room voice. I think Ricky’s genius moment came when he realised that the richest source of comedy available to him was actually himself.

  9

  At some point during early 1991 while all this was happening, Justine had met someone else. The magic and the thrill had become tarnished by the grind of familiarity and routine and the frustrations of failure. We were young and without the ties of family, and I suppose she had glimpsed what she thought was a better life for herself. Possibly, like my father before me, I had drifted into a comfortable indolence; my ridiculous idealisation of the romance of idling and my rejection of ambition must have made life with me become slightly dull. If people want to cackle and crow and hear that I was crushed then, yes, I willingly concede that I was. The only thing that was really holding me together after the death of my mum was the glue of our relationship, and to have that suddenly wrenched away from me exposed the raw wound of bereavement still further, and left me toppling and spinning with the push and the stab of it all. It might seem odd to people that a young man in his early twenties could allow himself to become so damaged by something as predictable as a lovers’ break-up. I wonder myself sometimes. I suppose I was still an emotionally frail person, but fiercely loyal to those I considered worthy of my loyalty. In times of betrayal these fictions crumble like sand-castles, and again like my father before me I am left lying broken on the floor clutching desperately at the thin air of my fantasies. I was young and I was in love for the first time, and when that dizzying high is over it’s a long, long way down. The break-up was nasty, horrible even, full of endless fraught phone calls and long tearful evenings that melted into lonely coal black mornings as I floundered and clung. I should have just calmly walked away but our lives had become so entwined it seemed impossible. So we struggled along messily for a while, bound together in a bitter cloud of recrimination and frustration and betrayal, all of the joy and harmony of our former life horribly inverted, until one evening I couldn’t take it any more, collected my things, called a minicab and left, leaving behind a few shirts and some old Popscene annuals I’d picked up in a junk shop.

  I think for vast swathes of a young man’s life he feels a bit like George Bone from Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square: excluded and rejected, forever on the fringe of acceptance, the soft, gossamer world of the feminine cruelly denied him, its pleasures dangling tantalisingly out of reach. It was back to this cold, hard, friendless landscape I felt I had returned as I wrestled with my ignominious demotion and trudged back on to the familiar, dog shit-strewn pavements of my single life. If I were forced to use clinical language, I would describe myself at my core as a co-dependant person; a romantic who seeks completion through others and through fantasy, strangely never quite whole just as myself. It’s possible that this flaw in me, this imbalance, is the motor which generally drives my need to constantly write songs; fulfilling the old cliché about seeking to create perfection in art when it doesn’t exist in life. Certainly, these massive shifts in my life started to be subtly expressed in the person I was becoming, and once the pain had faded I eventually assimilated the loss in the form of an overt femininity that I explored as a style during those first early flushes of success. People would interpret it as some sort of fake gay thing or a nod to seventies glam, or something similarly dreary, but looking back I’m convinced I was trying to replace the feminine absence in my life with an ersatz one of my own making. It sounds bizarre and deluded, and naturally it came across as gaudy and more than faintly ridiculous, but at its heart, as was the case with so many things to do with the Suede sensibility, it was an expression of grief. Together I had felt complete, but faced with that chasm of emptiness that death and loss deliver I felt utterly imbalanced and in need of redressing that. Looking at it now, it sounds weak and mawkish and faintly pathetic. I’m not proud of the way I dealt with this, but it was a confusing time and I was still emotionally very raw, and in many ways very much unformed as a person. This idea of replacing people with gestures and things fed into some of those early songs. Something like ‘Dolly’ was very much about projecting emotions on to an object, in this case a mannequin, partly inspired by the famous, twisted story of Phil Spector insisting his wife drive around with a dummy resembling him. Many years later the film Lars and the Real Girl dealt with this subject so brilliantly and wittily, and its provenance in pop music is probably that early Roxy Music song, but at the time I wasn’t consciously aware of it despite what people might assume.

  I moved into a crumbling, stucco-fronted, first-floor flat in Moorhouse Road in the little enclave between Notting Hill and Bayswater that the estate agents now call Artesian Village, a part of London I would stay in for the next twenty-five years. Now the area is plush and well-heeled, lined with the whispered hush of money and privilege. In the early nineties, many years before Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts would turn its fortunes, the rows of faded, once prosperous Victorian terraces were full of deserted, boarded-up houses that sat dark and empty like missing teeth, and instead of boutiques Westbourne Grove was full of charity shops like Sue Ryder and Cancer Research, and the only coffee you could buy was instant. My old friend Alan Fisher had become bored with life in Brighton, and as the little flat had enough space for two beds he moved in and paid half the paltry rent. Despite its cheap metal sink and peeling walls I loved that flat and went about decorating it with bric-à-brac that I picked up at the scruffy end of Portobello Market up by Goldborne Road. I covered the place in images and ephemera: random ironic pictures of seventies pop stars and old album sleeves, and I hung antique glass beads from above the doorway lintels and put a surreal, gimpy-looking, black-plastic donkey on the balcony. We found most of our furniture on the street as people used to dump their stuff down by the bins at the church on the corner and Alan had a terrapin which lived in the bath. The flat was bathed in the warm glow of red light bulbs and there were odd, cheap objets and mounds of
mildewy, second-hand books and piles of old albums everywhere. We found a stray black cat and called him Meisk. He came complete with fleas that so infested the place that if you put your hand on the floor-boards it would slowly turn black with their massing army of tiny bodies. A couple of years later while I was on tour in America he would be lost. I called Alan from some diner in Wisconsin one day to ask him how everything was only to be told that things were fine except that the cat had disappeared for a couple of days and had eventually come back home ‘a bit fluffier’. I frowned but thought nothing of it until I eventually returned to London, unwashed and tour weary, to find a completely different cat sitting on the bed. Alan had panicked and replaced Meisk with the first cat he had seen on the street that looked vaguely similar. I eventually found out where he had been kidnapped from and returned him, but Meisk had slipped away, his tiny sleek, black body and mask of intense indifference lost for ever to the friendless London streets.

  Alan and I became obsessed with early Mike Leigh films and things like Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane and especially Nic Roeg’s Performance, which was shot in Powis Square down the road, watching it on a loop and learning all the dialogue, enjoying the parallels with the film’s odd, marginal characters living in another strange, decaying house in Notting Hill. In the flat upstairs lived an artist, the pre-success Anish Kapoor, and the flat above him was occupied by a wiry gay skinhead called Kevin; hard as nails, but sweet and kind and fiercely loyal to his friends. He and his boyfriend both died of AIDS later in the decade and I wrote the lyrics to ‘The Living Dead’ about them, trying to tease out some poetry from the struggle of their narcotic pact.