The song ‘He’s Dead’ especially reminds me of those desperate, hungry years. Whereas virtually everything else came about in the same way, with me writing top lines to Bernard’s incipient musical ideas, this song was unusually something that I initiated, sliding a sort of F sharp-shaped chord up and down the frets but leaving the top E and B strings open and droning. It was simple but effective, and suggested something reflective and murky, so I wrote a lyric about depression set within a hostile, friendless world of roundabouts and squats. After leaving college I’d just started signing on and every week would take the tube to Edgware Road and trudge down to the Lisson Grove dole office, and stand in a queue in my second-hand clothes and be lectured and harangued by officials in exchange for a few quid a week. ‘He’s Dead’ was very much set within that dreary landscape: the drizzle, the traffic islands, the feeling of the wet pavement against my socks. The music was over-simplistic until Bernard wrote a breath-taking guitar part – gnarled, twisted, winding and almost Eastern in flavour, it utterly transformed the song and turned it into a slinky, prowling beast that melted into a terrifying maelstrom of raging noise. I seem to remember Bernard and I writing ‘Moving’ and ‘Pantomime Horse’ on the same day, or certainly very close together. ‘Moving’ was a fantastic live song that was eventually ruined in the studio by horrible production, but at its heart is a pulsing, pounding rant inspired by being wrenched out of one life and stuffed into a new one. I’ve always enjoyed playing around with homophones and loved the double meaning of the title. The word ‘lassoing’ in the lyrics comes from a moment when, flushed with a burgeoning confidence in my writing, I jokingly challenged Alan one evening to come up with an odd word for me to try to shoe-horn into the song, and that was it. You can sense Bernard’s growing confidence too from the dynamics of the track: how he cleverly inverted the standard quiet/loud contemporary grunge dynamic into the opposite, making the verse frenetic, and the chorus open and spacious. It’s a bitter regret for me that we were too naive in the studio to resist the temptation of adding horrible phasing to the track at that point, thereby rendering the album version weak and gimmicky. ‘Pantomime Horse’ is still one of the greatest ever Suede songs. When Bernard first played me the music it was in a different time signature, and I think my suggestion that we put it in 6/8 waltz time was inspired by The Smiths’ ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’. Anyway, it worked, and I set about writing a slightly self-piteous lyric that built to a wild, passionate denouement. The final scream of ‘Have you ever tried it that way?’ is born from the torment of sexual jealousy but it’s also intended as a probing, haranguing question about class and poverty and privilege.
I love ‘To The Birds’ – its looping, driving, almost Philip Glass-like guitar and bass intro, and the way it shifts and rises to its towering coda. It’s a song about overcoming loss and loneliness with a sort of ‘I Will Survive’ motif, and is very much set against the backdrop of the break up, with me cast somewhat melodramatically as the abandoned troubadour perched on a balcony with just the pigeons as an audience. The colloquial connotation of the word ‘birds’ wasn’t lost on me, but I have always loved juggling shades of meaning. For me so much of the lifeblood of a song is about subjective interpretation, without which it would be just dead, like a specimen under glass – a butterfly in a dusty case. I’m aware of the paradox as I sit here and share my memories of these tracks, but my own interpretation isn’t absolute, merely a starting point. This may sound contradictory given my earlier tirade but, when it’s intended in the right spirit, one of my favourite things is hearing other people’s readings of them. So long as it doesn’t feel gossipy or absolutist, it can be fun and creative and keeps the music breathing, and I never feel qualified enough to contradict it.
The strange thing is, while we were writing all these new songs, Justine was still in the band and performing them with us. It should have felt like some sort of twisted victory, but it didn’t. The whole situation was becoming increasingly untenable; a strange blend of growing excitement but palpable tension as I tried to reconcile and balance the thrill of a creative awakening with the awkward, shuffling banalities of still working together. There was a period of about six months where we were still playing depressing pub gigs with her to a handful of uninterested people. The difference was that the material was now becoming incendiary even if the response wasn’t. Often there would still be more people on stage than in the audience. At one particular show at The Amersham Arms, New Cross, we played to a single person: Simon’s cousin Paul. Looking back it seems ludicrous, as by that point the set was boasting ‘The Drowners’, ‘To The Birds’, ‘He’s Dead’ and ‘Moving’. Any A&R men who did happen upon us, and who hadn’t already seen us when we were shit and passed, were probably looking for the new Ride or Chapterhouse and couldn’t see how our increasingly dramatic, edgy energy sat comfortably with the flavour of the month. We made a demo at a cheap East London studio called Rocking Horse; simple, exciting versions of ‘The Drowners’, ‘He’s Dead’, ‘Moving’ and ‘To The Birds’. The same music industry that would greet those same songs with flowery, lavish plaudits a year or so later gave a collective disinterested shrug and turned away to look for the new Slowdive. By this point, even though we were seething with frustration, our self-belief was becoming hardened by a flinty sense of determination, and so we gritted our teeth knowing that one day, one day, the moment would come.
Playing this clutch of new songs with Justine still hammering away on her rhythm guitar was becoming increasingly wrong. Apart from the obvious strain related to being in a band fronted by her ex-boyfriend, she was also becoming much more opinionated and itching with questions about where we were going artistically, creating real friction and schisms between her and the rest of us. She loved the punchier, punkier stuff but began to despise ‘To The Birds’ and ‘Pantomime Horse’ and all the grander, more epic material, partly because she had a different vision for the band but also, I think, because she sensed that they contained bitter, barbed stabs at her. And so the tension mounted. It came to a head finally; in a heated exchange after rehearsal one night she told me she didn’t like those songs, and I replied that ‘Pantomime Horse’ and ‘To The Birds’ were exactly the kind of things that I wanted to write and if she didn’t like them then she was in the wrong band. A few days later, after yet another empty, loveless show – this time at ULU in Malet Street – she finally decided that she’d had enough, putting her Rickenbacker in the back of the Renault and disappearing into the night for the last time; driving off to a new life and exiting mine for many years.
10
With Justine gone, the band got better. I don’t mean to sound harsh or cruel but suddenly there was a clarity that we hadn’t had before, as purely sonically her rough rhythm guitar-playing had cluttered and muddied the sound. Free of this, Bernard was forced to play fuller, chunkier parts in a heavier style that suited the violent, belligerent edge that the band was developing live. I think she would be the first to agree that her exit played a huge role in our later success and, of course, in hers. Personally, her absence allowed me to let go of her in a way I just hadn’t been able to before, and now I had left college her once consuming, looming ubiquity was reduced to a memory; painful, yes, but without the confusion and hesitation and tension of her presence. Now Bernard and I were free to write how we wrote best – instinctively – and the next couple of years would yield our best ever work. The feeling in the band was much more one of unity as we went about our business, the four of us able to bond and gel in a way that we never could previously. And like any half-decent band we became a little gang: fiercely loyal and protective of each other, borrowing each other’s clothes and finishing each other’s sentences. We cancelled all of our upcoming gigs and withdrew from our non-existent audience, spending months just writing and rehearsing. Holed up on Hackney Road, wreathed in cigarette smoke and with endless cups of tea cooling on the window ledges and on the amps, we slowly became the band that
the public would first know as Suede, emerging from our cocoon, blinking in the daylight. We had a rehearsal booked at the Premises one evening, and both Mat and Simon were ill or couldn’t make it or something. Bernard and I didn’t cancel it, and turned up to try to write something. He was jamming away with a spidery arpeggio piece and I just started singing, and magically, almost like the ‘Light My Fire’ scene in The Doors film, by the end of the evening we had written ‘My Insatiable One’. Like everything I was writing at that time it was massively coloured by heartbreak, but this time I was writing about myself in the third person and from Justine’s point of view; fictionalising a situation where she was regretting her choices and where the ‘he’ in the lyrics was actually me. I found this shift in perspective really thrilling as a writer and it suddenly opened up enormous vistas, which I began to explore through other songs in that early period, looking at the world through the eyes of housewives and gay men and lonely dads. Dylan had done it in my favourite ever song of his, ‘North Country Blues’, where he inhabited the persona of a nineteenth-century miner’s wife, and I thought it was a fascinating, exciting device. Sadly, a year or so later, when we had become shrouded in notoriety and success, some would choose to see it as social tourism. Given the levels of real, cynical, social tourism during that decade, when groups of patronising middle-class boys were making money by aping the accents and culture of the working classes, the irony would be exquisite. But the songs kept flowing. Now that he was the sole guitarist Bernard began to fill the songs with more primal parts. He once told me that, bizarrely, he was inspired by the rhythm of Cher’s ‘The Shoop Shoop Song’ after hearing it on the radio and came up with the thrilling, primitive, pounding groove of what was to become ‘Metal Mickey’. I don’t really remember writing my part to this – it probably came together in the rehearsal room where I would invent melodies and sketch rough lyrics, screened by the squeal of feedback and blankets of noise as the band thrashed away. I bought myself a cheap Sony voice recorder that I would constantly be whispering ideas into. Mat once called me ‘the worst traffic hazard in west London’ as I’d stumble blindly into busy roads muttering and warbling into my Dictaphone, oblivious to the choruses of angry horns and screeching brakes. The lyrics to ‘Metal Mickey’ were a little throwaway to be frank, but it suited the music’s joyous, teenage rush. If I’m honest they were partly an homage to the only contemporary band I had any time for – Daisy Chainsaw – who had a kind of thrilling scruffy glamour of their own. The song was very much set in the grubby, seedy world of the early nineties London indie circuit: the plastic pint glasses, the depressing pub gigs, the furtive shuffling failure. Using my dole money I’d buy cigarettes, cat food, rice and vegetables from Portobello Market, and if there was anything left I’d go to the Oxfam or Sue Ryder charity shops and pick up second-hand clothes. As Mr Lydon once so brilliantly put it ‘clothes are so important in an unimportant way’ and I loved the old seventies shirts and little leather bomber jackets you could get for a few pounds. As well as the fact that they were cheap it appealed to me that these were the kind of clothes that no one wore any more, and soon by a process of osmosis and expedience the rest of the band started borrowing my things or wearing similar stuff. When we eventually achieved success and started penetrating beyond the music press into fashion magazines, those people thought it was a stylised ‘look’ that we had decided upon – some sort of kitsch, ironic comment. I took great pleasure in laughingly telling them it was actually because we were very, very poor. Mat later summed it up nicely by saying that ‘we’d all cleaned toilets for a living’.
Sorry to disappoint anyone who thought otherwise, but I have never felt any particular kinship with any other band, any of our ‘contemporaries’. When people look back on the decade I expect they imagine us skipping merrily down Camden High Street as part of some sort of jolly little clique, but we were never part of the ugly, beery cartoon that defined the latter half of the decade. And thank god for that. I saw our absence as I saw absence from any elite: as a wonderful, freeing thing. But in that nascent state, when we were feeling around for a sense of who we were, it felt like we were completely on our own; like explorers cutting a path through the forest with machetes and pith helmets. The feeling of ‘Britishness’ that we were developing in our words and in our music and in our style was something exciting that we felt we had almost stumbled upon, and as such it felt brave and raw and beautifully out of step. Obviously, it had bled through to us through a procession of acts from the past, but in 1991, when all the other bands who later went on to try to claim it as theirs were still locked into a miserable mess of shoegazing and baggy, it felt like it was utterly ours and ours alone. But there was a huge difference between what I was trying to do with my writing and what those who came later did. I was never celebrating Britishness – I was documenting it. The point was to reflect the world that I saw around me and that world just happened to be Britain: a cheapened, failed world that had nothing to do with the laddish, jingoistic and frankly patronising interpretation that would follow. It had always frustrated me that so many song lyrics were simply what I call ‘rock speak’, clichés borrowed from Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison et al, meaningless drivel about ‘elevating one’s soul’ etc. etc. I wanted to use my own voice and sing in my accent about my world, broken and drab and scruffy and strange though it was, and try to do it with some sense of grace and poetry. Looking back over that decade, it now feels that the thing that we gave birth to in those grimy east London rehearsal rooms in 1990 and 1991 ultimately betrayed us, and like the child that a mother finds stealing from her purse we would never be able to look at it in quite the same way again.
At some point around this time, Simon came out to us. He quietly said it in public while we were having a drink after rehearsal, and heartbreakingly I didn’t hear him at first as Alan had to mention it to me later that evening. I’ve always admired Simon’s quiet dignity, and his shyness and concern about how we would take the news just made him seem even more decent. As soon as I was told, I immediately called him and put him at ease that it didn’t make the slightest bit of difference to anything. Why would it? But even in the liberal nineties the ugly seeds of homophobia were still ripening, and I suppose he was anxious despite the fact that the lyrics to the songs were probably starting to bleed through to him and he was hopefully beginning to feel part of something that was documenting the marginal and the put-upon. Maybe this was my attempt to give a voice to those on the fringes of acceptance, as in a way it articulated how I saw my place in life. It was sad that what was intended as an inclusive approach would be later seen as ‘fake’ and ‘opportunistic’, but I have learned that with some issues it’s almost impossible to adopt a position of any subtlety.
Money might not be able to buy you happiness, but a lack of it can make life fucking miserable and London can be particularly brutal if you’re poor. The grinding poverty of bread-line dole life in John Major’s Britain was becoming unbearable so I felt it was time to start to apply for jobs. At first, it would be for lofty positions that I had no experience in or qualifications for, until the tide of snooty rejections made me gradually lower my sights and eventually I ended up looking for work in shops. It felt like I was always either under- or over-qualified, and during a six-month period of constant applications I received one single invitation for an interview at a stationers in Bond Street. The subsequent rejection from them made me finally accept my state of penury and I gave up looking for paid work, but still I needed to do something to fill those endless, empty, drifting afternoons when we weren’t writing or rehearsing. From somewhere or other I’d heard about a community centre in Highgate called Lauderdale House, nestled on the edge of Waterlow Park just off the top of the Archway Road. I marched up there one wintery day and hustled and nagged until they agreed to let me help out and do some voluntary work. I started doing shifts lifting things and making tea and manning the reception desk, directing people to literature workshops and yoga classes
and drop-in centres. I loved the warmth and sense of community, and became very fond of Highgate, an enclave strangely separate from the rest of London and appropriately excluded from my old A–Z. Secluded, mildly eccentric and almost anachronistic, it was an area that I’d return to for a while in 1994 to write my parts for Dog Man Star. Day after day I would deal with young mums and lonely wives whose mascara-streaked faces betrayed a back story of hardship and frustration and broken nights. Their plight somehow resonated with me, and one day during my lunch break I took my cheese and pickle sandwich and my notebook out to a bench on Waterlow Park, and wrote what would become the lyrics to ‘Sleeping Pills’. The song was never the melodramatic plea against suicide that it was often interpreted as. It was just an anthem for the Valium housewives killing time and softly numbing themselves to make it through another day. This was something I strongly identified with – my own days often stretching out before me, vacant and endless and overwhelming, while I stared at the hands of the clock and waited for something to happen. Indeed, I think the only reason that writing from a shifted perspective worked for me was because I felt there was always a strong sense of empathy; it was never as simple and unsophisticated as just straight-forward characterisation because the vignettes contained fragments and emotions from my own life. ‘Write about what you know,’ they say, and I always did. When Bernard played me a graceful, ebbing guitar piece he had written that winded and built to a stormy crescendo, I knew my characters had found their home, and I would return to the theme on two key songs on the next album: ‘Still Life’ and ‘The 2 Of Us’.
Our cocooned period of growth and exile over, we started sniffing around for gigs again. By this point we had been approached by one John Eydmann, a sweet, soft man, now sadly dead, whose cartoon puppy-dog eyes always reminded me of Droopy or a young Tom Hulce. He had worked for Fire records and had come across us on the bottom rungs of the circuit and offered to help out. His position even within the lower reaches of the business gave us some tangible feeling of connection, a glimpse of the possibility of progress and a vague promise of traction, so we accepted his offer to manage us. He was destined to guide us away from long drunken journeys rattling around in the back of smoky, dark Transit vans to meetings with major label moguls in Manhattan skyscrapers and Malibu Beach mansions. But for now we were still firmly earthbound, a band with a steely ambition and a growing arsenal of incendiary songs, and yet without anything approaching even a murmur of success. After a couple of shows that trod the old, familiar, depressing spiral of underachievement, John booked us a gig at The Camden Falcon, in a draughty dark room at the back of a pub that was a mainstay of the London indie circuit in the early nineties; a grubby haunt for low-level emerging bands and inscrutable journalists. We had played there a few months before with Justine to a thin audience that included the singer Momus, a kind of minor hero of mine at the time, who had enthralled me with his cold, detached, sexual imagery and Brel-like paeans to indecency. Justine had met him at a party and he must have become enamoured as the video he shot of the gig that somehow made it back to us was almost exclusively close-ups of her breasts. Anyway, the gig that John organised was billed as our ‘Christmas Show’. The bitter irony of this forced, fake jollity would soon make itself apparent. The audience consisted entirely of two people: John and his girlfriend, Fiona. It was a freezing December night and the lack of any crowd or body heat resulted in a perishing chill. My abiding memory is of each member of the band taking it in turns to press himself up against the wall-mounted radiator at the back of the stage as we bleakly and pointlessly ran through our set.
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