Coal Black Mornings

by Brett Anderson

  I knew Alan from years earlier and had always loved his fidgety, mischievous charm and his spirit of almost ruthless hedonism. We became extremely close as we fumbled around the edges of west London together dressed in fake fur coats and unwashed trousers. A year or so later he would inspire me to write the lyrics to both ‘High Rising’ and ‘The Big Time’ and would play a huge role within my idealised sketches of the London demi-monde on half the songs from Coming Up. In different ways ‘The Big Time’ and ‘High Rising’ were both intended as sad farewells to him. The former was a slightly ruthless dissection of the schisms created by success and ambition, but ‘High Rising’ was meant to be more tender; a song born of the countless mornings when I would have to rise early and catch planes, and as I took off from Heathrow and soared over London I would look down from my window seat and imagine him waking and waving up at me from the mess and chaos of our little flat. Withnail and I was inevitably a touchstone for us, and the moving and beautiful final scene in Regent’s Park Zoo was an inspiration point for both of these songs. The endless smoky nights sat around glass-topped tables together in the mid-nineties, and the parade of bizarre and unusual friends we began to acquire would directly inform the lyrics to ‘Beautiful Ones’ as I tried to capture the madness and the scatty, unhinged fun of those days. The endless mornings-after and their sense of isolated camaraderie and refusal to engage became the bedrock of songs like ‘Lazy’ as we both flopped and floundered in the debris of the night before. To quote Ariel Levy: ‘We had brutal hangovers – but we had them together’. We started smoking sweet clove cigarettes called Caravan. They were dark brown and crackled as they burned, filling the flat with their delicious, cloying smell. We would crave them and trek at all hours down to the only outlet that sold them, a little tobacconist’s just off the Tottenham Court Road; yet another regular stop for me as I shuttled back and forth along the Central Line. Alan worked in a chip-shop down in Surrey and would lever himself out of bed at around midday, struggle down to Victoria and then on to a train, and spend most of the day and night huddled over an industrial deep-fat fryer returning to the flat around midnight stinking of fried cod. After he’d covered himself in aftershave we would go out, either traipsing round All Saints Road trying to score pot or sometimes to a bizarre late-night Austrian cellar bar called The Tiroler Hut on Westbourne Grove that served cheese fondues and Jägermeister until two in the morning. Alan had worked hard and made a bit of money so he bought himself an old gun-metal-grey nineteen sixties vintage Daimler and we would rattle around in it feeling like the Krays. Unfortunately, he was an unbelievably bad driver. He would never tell me whether he had actually passed his test or was just using his twin brother’s licence. Anyway, stepping into a car with Alan could be perilous. At one point he managed to write off three cars in three weeks before he finally gave up and we started taking the tube everywhere again. Motorway journeys with him could be terrifying. I remember sitting in the passenger’s seat one chilly misty morning, both of us a little worse for wear after having played a student ball at Cambridge. Juggernauts thundered and sprayed past us sounding their horns like klaxons as we weaved and doddered near the hard shoulder; Alan shaking and chattering and gurning as he chain-smoked endless Caravan cigarettes, and I desperately tried to keep him focused and us both alive. A sucker for punishment and obviously possessing a short memory, when I’d made some money in the late nineties I bought a nice car and as I had no licence needed a driver so I gave Alan the job. I think he lasted a day before I hired a professional.

  There was always a bizarre menagerie of characters hanging around the flat who would tag along or who we would invite back: Antipodean drifters or Swedish twentysomething nannies or sometimes the slightly damaged, fragile occupants of the social housing flats at the end of the road. We would sit around chatting and smoking, listening to ‘The Bewlay Brothers’ late into the night, and sometimes I’d get out my old Aria Elecord and make them sit through renditions of ‘That’s Entertainment’ or ‘A Day In The Life’. Our friend Tamzin Drew, who had coincidentally also gone to Oathall, would often waft by and would sit around the flat like a quiet Victorian ghost talking to the cat or sketching us for one of her beautiful, surreal illustrations. Or our friend Laurie, a sweet hippy who had possibly taken far too much acid in his life, would drop by shoeless and wild-eyed and brimming with stories and extraordinary theories. It was all still fairly soft and innocent; the sweet, light, unhinged madness helping to numb the twin pains of separation and bereavement until everyone went home and the bleak nights would close in around me again.

  The flat in Moorhouse Road became in a way a key element in the formation of the debut album. Everything was broken and grimy and second-hand but magical and charming, and slowly this fascinating duality of faded elegance and harsh, stark poverty began to seep into what I was writing about and the vision that was forming for the band. It became a sort of microcosm of our outer world, a tatty, wonderful stage on which many of the sticky, gaudy dramas that inspired those early songs were played out. All the bizarre drunken trysts and unlikely moments, the still, dead-eyed hours watching the slow hands of the clock: they all fed into the world I was writing about and became just as important as any band or album that the press would later latch on to. It’s funny how these huge personal influences almost always escape mention by the media, albeit understandably so, as they are outside its sphere of reference. But it’s important to recognise how friends or lovers or towns or streets or a flat I once lived in have been just as influential to my songs as whole movements in rock.

  While Alan was at work frying chips I began to spend more and more time with Bernard and we became close. I’ve never really liked being with big gangs of people – I find it confusing and intimidating and diminishing, and I’m somehow unable to be myself – but faced with one person I open up and relax. I think both Bernard and I are actually the kind of people who find it easier to communicate like this, so away from the spotlight of the band’s social hierarchies and now that I was single there was more space and we became freer and easier together. Behind the prickly mask he sometimes wore there was revealed a sweet, thoughtful boy who kindly helped me glue together the pieces of my fractured world. To be honest, I find it hard to talk about my and Bernard’s ‘relationship’. It became such an irritating and intrusive issue to us years later when we re-formed with The Tears, and seemed to dominate any interview with its looming, distracting presence, so that I don’t feel like I can add anything to the mountain of contradiction and misinformation. While we just wanted to talk about the songs we had written and the album that we were proud of, everyone else was just obsessed with the soap opera of our personal history, like some sort of dull, gossipy, indie Hello!, powder-puff cover story. As with any two people forced together into the crucible of work and success, there are tensions and frustrations, but there needs to be love and respect and real warmth too. In fact, there’s a good argument that friction in a decent writing team is essential for it to work; that the push and pull and the needling and the goading and the inherent sense of challenge are an essential part of its chemistry, and that each of you needs to accept that as part of the pact and learn to deal with it. Even now, nearly thirty years later, and as a relatively successful writer with decades of experience, I still find the process of making albums an ordeal that stretches the boundaries of the interpersonal relationships between me and the people with whom I make them. You can find yourself projecting frustrations on to others or childishly blaming them for failures and inertia, until you gently tap yourself on the shoulder and remind yourself that failure and inertia are points on the path, and that the challenge is always, always actually a challenge within yourself. My relationship with Bernard wasn’t any different in that respect – it’s just that the media spotlight on us became so intense at one point that it became magnified, and the schisms became mutated and distorted in its unforgiving glare. We were just too young to realise that the frictions weren’t ‘per
sonal’ at all, but merely a by-product of the creative process that we were too naive to know how to deal with. Sadly, this would eventually lead to implosion and collapse as the media worried the wounds in that blithe and unaccountable way that they do, but I only have sunny, fond memories of our time together during the early years. Yes, there were the usual silences and sulks that litter any creative path, but at this point, before the distorting prisms of success and money coloured us for ever, I’d like to think that we were friends. Obviously, we have always been quite different people, but maybe not quite as different as people might think. In my experience, if there is any rumour of drama between members of a band, those outside the inner circle will automatically project what they think they know about these frictions on to the meanings of the songs and interpret the words through that lens. Countless times I’ve read that this song or that song is ‘about’ Bernard because it ‘might’ contain an element that ‘might’ relate to the dynamics of our relationship, when in fact the song almost always has a completely different, much more veiled origin. I saw the same sort of thing happening in the next decade with The Libertines when everything you read about them fed into the turbulent romance of their interlocking personalities, and I’m sure, as was the case with us, most of it was complete fiction. But I totally understand how important the back story is for many people; that the intrigue and the rumour imbues the music with substance and heft, and clothes it in a tantalising veil. It’s just important to remember that it’s all subjective and that there are no absolute truths, even for the writer.

  We were constantly shuttling back and forth on the Central Line to Bernard’s place in Leyton, or he’d come over to Notting Hill and we would listen to music and plot and plan, and it would all feed into the songs we had begun to write. At the time, when he was still terminally unfashionable, I was having an early Bowie rediscovery period and became obsessed with the lyrics to ‘Quicksand’, especially his mention of ‘the power’ which started to be something that I interpreted as the elusive key to song-writing, and I remember sitting on the floor in front of the three-bar fire in Bernard’s flat one chilly afternoon blathering on about it. I’m not sure if Bernard was as well versed in Bowie’s oeuvre as I was but he fell in love with it, and it became the music, and later the strait jacket, that along with The Smiths we would use to reference and initially define ourselves.

  It was, of course, a complex tapestry of events but possibly the single most potent engine for change in me, apart from the growing chemistry of the band and our development as writers, was my becoming single. Had I remained within my soft, jolly little bubble it’s likely that Suede would never have happened, certainly not in any meaningful way. As a young man I had a tendency towards a state of cosy lassitude, and I needed to experience those seismic changes to overcome that and to express the sense of loss and rage that I was feeling and to step up and start to match the quality of what Bernard had been doing for a while. I’ve always performed best as an artist when faced with adversity; when forced to kick against something or overcome a hurdle. Whenever I’ve found things too easy I’ve tended to switch off and produce anodyne work. Boringly, I am probably circumscribed within the clichéd parameters of the ‘tortured artist’ archetype; needing to seek out tensions and frictions as a catalyst to create. The body blows of bereavement and lost love created the perfect environment in me, and like bacteria in a Petri dish it all began to grow into something fascinating. The truth was that before that event my writing had yet to acquire any form or tone, or real personality. I had vague sensibilities towards documenting a kind of romanticised ‘beautiful loser’ sort of lifestyle – weak songs like ‘She’s A Layabout’ and ‘Natural Born Servant’ idealised dole life and inaction and afternoons wasted sat watching Australian soap operas – but without the poetry or skill or wit to yet paint it as anything other than stereotype. Looking back, I think I was trying to infuse my family’s humble origins with some sense of grace and dignity. I always felt sad that my parents and their parents before them had lived and died within the four grey walls of poverty, and I was desperate to give meaning to our shabby world of second-hand clothes and free school meals and meaningless dead-end jobs. It was born from a kind of inverted snobbery, an elitism probably inherited from my father whereby I saw the social parameters into which I was born as something to be celebrated. Well, what other choice did I have? It seemed unlikely that I would escape them anytime soon. Unfortunately, the writing just came across as vague and slightly bitter, and without any proper command of melody it lacked any real presence or thrust. Tempered with the agonies of loss and the chaos of displacement, however, all these notions suddenly began to crystallise into something pertinent, and became imbued with a passion and a sense of drama. Suddenly, wonderfully, the songs started to appear. Another giant leap for us was also, for want of a better phrase, the emergence of sex in our writing. I don’t necessarily mean titillating, salacious references in the lyrics, I mean something at the core of the music: the pounding rhythms, the primal guitar parts and in my increasingly unruly delivery as a singer. When I listen to the demos of those early songs like ‘Natural Born Servant’ or ‘So Liberated’, the most accurate way I can describe them is ‘sexless’. It sounds like music made by virgins – there’s nothing carnal or troubling about it, there’s no passion and no guts and it all feels self-consciously wordy and limp. The moment that Bernard and I started to dig deep inside ourselves and tap into those primal urges like anger and hatred and lust was the moment that we really grew as writers. One day I went over to Bernard’s in Leyton, and he ushered me into his flat and excitedly played me a demo. It started with a pounding, tribal, drum-machine pattern followed by slabs of stabbing, almost glammy guitar. We looked at each other and I think we both knew something had changed. I hurried home with the cassette and spent all day and all night writing, and by the morning we had ‘The Drowners’: the song that was, in a way, destined to change all of our lives. I remember sitting outside on the balcony in Moorhouse Road smoking and hammering away on my old, portable typewriter and when Alan came back, pouncing on him in a frenzy of excitement and thrusting the lyrics proudly in his face, knowing that we were on to something special. ‘The Drowners’ was never actually ‘about’ the split, whatever that means, but ‘Pantomime Horse’ and ‘To The Birds’ and ‘He’s Dead’ and ‘Moving’ and a host of others were torn from those lonely coal black mornings, born from those pools of reflection and regret. And looking back it was all so, so worth it as the wisdom of Michael J. Fox’s famous quote about pain being temporary slowly revealed itself. These weren’t weak, tuneless songs about nothing; they were towering and passionate, and brimming with grace and drama and violence. Suddenly it was all beginning to make sense; the failure and the bitter gnawing jealousy was pouring itself into the songs that I was writing and feeding them with narrative and purpose. It felt like at last we had found ‘the power’.

  ‘The Drowners’ was deliberately oblique but toying with some of the themes of ambiguity I was developing and set within a very familiar world of suffocating, failing relationships. It was based loosely around my time spent with a Canadian girl I had met called Laura. She lived in a squat just opposite Victoria Park in Hackney in a huge crumbling house that today is probably worth millions but in the early nineties smelled of cat food and patchouli, and was infested by tribes of speeding, Doc Marten-booted Goth girls in stripy tights and shambling crusties with nose-rings. She was fascinating, if sometimes saturnine, company and I enjoyed the endless hours in her mysterious, occasionally witchy presence; her lacy, shadowy world of tarot cards and incense and Hole records. The ‘taking me over’ refrain of the song was the first time I ever really mastered the power of the vocal ‘hook’; that childishly simple sounding mot juste that can be so elusive but so worth the chase.

  This was London in the early nineties, hugely different from the popular ‘Cool Britannia’ revisionist myth that media hindsight has over-simplistically proj
ected on to that whole decade. It’s a popular theory that decades only ‘get going’ halfway through and the nineties was no exception. It felt like the first few years at least were a hangover of the eighties: John Major’s irrelevant, dreary, Tory world of unemployment and cut-price lager and crap boy bands. The sparkle and promise of the eighties had long passed – the macabre ‘champagne and skyscrapers’ fantasy twisted into a bleak no-man’s land of flimsy phone boxes and ugly logos and desperate men in cheap suits. Nothing seemed to work properly and everywhere was painted in the same landlord magnolia. Even the more salubrious parts of London looked tired and worn and dusted with a fine patina of grime, and the rest of the capital felt like a car park or a waiting room. And culturally the outlook was just as barren; the generation-defining bands were temporarily extinct creating a vacuum into which was sucked a landfill of faceless, anodyne dance music and charisma-less pop. Even the alternative scene had run out of ideas as the weekly music press scrabbled around for some sort of purchase after the baggy and shoegazing movements had spluttered out and aborted in such a spectacularly meaningless manner. This was the world that I was both reacting against and documenting. There was always a strange dance between those two poles, and any ‘glamour’ that our songs contained was intended to be an escapist one, certainly not some dull, ironic nineteen seventies homage, but positioned firmly within the place from which their inhabitants were escaping: the rented rooms, the littered pavements and the dull throb of last night’s hangover.