Coal Black Mornings

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Coal Black Mornings Page 13

by Brett Anderson


  It was around this time that we were starting to need help driving and shifting our gear around, so John introduced us to someone who could help out. His name was Charlie Charlton, a warm, lovable Teessider, who at the time had bizarre, early nineties Back to the Planet-style dreadlocks that made him look like a cartoon ant. Charlie was the sort of tirelessly helpful and capable person that everyone secretly wants to be their dad and, indeed, we came to trust him and rely on him so much that we would later appoint him our manager, and he would guide us through the first flush of real success and towards the heights of the first two albums and beyond.

  Looking back we must have been developing some sort of nascent, stuttering momentum, but it still felt like we were locked firmly outside the sweet-shop. Then, late in the winter of 1991, something surprising happened – we were invited to play at the NME’s ‘On For ’92’ event, a showcase for emerging bands. The ‘On For …’ gigs were a bit of an institution at a time when the influence and reach of the NME was paramount and their approval utterly essential for virtually any success within alternative circles. We tumbled into the fantasy that this could be the chance we had been waiting for: the fabled ‘big break’, exposure for the songs we were becoming so proud of, and maybe an escape hatch into something other than dole queues and dreary poverty. We trudged over to The Venue in New Cross one bleak January afternoon to take our sound-check slot and then shuffled off to some cheap nearby cafe to drink tea and eat salad kebabs and anxiously await the evening. We were sandwiched in third place on a four-band bill between Adorable, Midway Still and a band called Fabulous. The show was fairly unremarkable other than that unusually for us there were more people in the audience than on the stage. We played most of the new jewels in our growing repertoire: ‘Pantomime Horse’, ‘The Drowners’, ‘Metal Mickey’, ‘Moving’ and probably closing with ‘To The Birds’. In those early days and indeed until much later, when people had actually paid to specifically come to see us we only ever played about six or seven songs, mainly because we simply didn’t have more, but also as a kind of manifesto of arrogance, always favouring the thrilling punch of brevity over the workmanlike, over the dull, over the dutiful. After the last song we would throw down our instruments in a kind of petulant rage and storm off, never returning for an encore, considering them fake and ‘showbizzy’. Most of the column inches in the NME the following week were devoted to Fabulous, whose journalist singer knew much better how to work the cameras. Our mention was really a footnote, but it was positive and contained an undertone of intrigue. The tide of record company offers didn’t arrive, but we were approached by one man who had seen us that evening and heard our demo. His name was Saul Galpern: a shrewd and passionate Scotsman, who looked a little like the footballer Andy Gray, and who was just beginning to establish a small independent label called Nude Records. Later, he would become a mentor and a friend and a key part of the tale but for now he was just another bloke to be suspicious of. He called me at my flat and we had a slightly odd, prickly conversation, but despite the awkwardness I could tell that he really got the songs and that he could see in them what the rest of the business still couldn’t, and I suppose you could say he began to court us.

  It’s interesting for me to see how the momentum of the story shifts at this point. Reading back I can see how my early life was in a state of stasis almost, and so I was forced to confront the microscopic detail of my odd little world simply because that’s all that I had. The beautiful curiosity one has as a child inevitably and sadly dissolves as the paths open up and you succumb to the pace of adult life. Whereas my early life was a broad tapestry of detailed close-ups, all I remember about these mid-stages is a series of early career milestones, so it’s hard not to make the story run away with itself as it moves from a descriptive piece to something more plot-driven. ‘Real’ life had somehow become irrelevant: I wasn’t reading newspapers or watching TV or doing anything that wasn’t connected to the band at this juncture. It had become utterly, utterly all-consuming, and to be honest that’s the only way to approach it; to dive into it head first and drown in its savage tide. Even my private life by this point was starting to feel like a mere vehicle to generate songs as I willingly exposed myself to increasingly bizarre and frictional personal dramas and extreme situations, knowing that somehow the prize seemed worth the sacrifice. It was almost as if my life was starting to belong to someone else as I began to see it as some curious experiment in song writing. Slowly a persona was taking grip of me, and it would only be many years later that I would be able to begin the quiet, private process of redressing that. But one’s twenties are a magical time; they have a habit of defining you and I have few regrets.

  The modest seeds of rumour sown by our presence at the show in New Cross must have created gentle ripples amongst the London music-biz taste-makers because almost imperceptibly things began to shift: the planets began to align and people started to mutter and heads finally, finally started to turn. Here was the gear change heralding the first thrilling breath of success that had previously seemed so beyond us. The not fitting in that had always been so frustrating and caused so many people to pass us over or ignore us had finally become our strength, and there was a real sense that we were doing something completely on our own, something special, something unique: fresh and unfamiliar and tinged with the shock of the new. The overt Englishness, the quirky realism and the fumbling, scruffy sexuality which had previously put people off was now delivered with élan and confidence, wonderfully against the grain and thrillingly exciting. I’d always wanted the band to inhabit its own universe, a ‘Suede World’, and as our skill as performers and song-writers evolved this world began to resonate and speak to people and reveal itself to them. And as the song-writing began to embrace a lustful, lurching tone so in parallel we as a band started to throw off our self-consciousness, becoming grinding and aggressive and primal, flaunting ourselves and the immense passion we felt for the music we were making. Simon’s powerful angry drumming, and Bernard and Mat’s increasingly uninhibited playing became a sort of throbbing motor that unlocked the dark heart of the songs. And suddenly there were people in the audience who we actually didn’t know: people who had begun to seek us out and, shockingly, who had actually paid for the privilege. The dreaded D-shaped space in front of me began to fill with sweaty, human form, magically unfamiliar, and clammy with passion and curiosity. Gradually, it all became more fevered, and though by this point we certainly hadn’t yet achieved full scale ‘Suede-mania’, there was still a sense that, to again borrow one of Lydon’s excellent phrases, they might, just possibly, ‘lovingly tear me apart’. We played another show at the Underworld in Camden, and the following Tuesday, when I made my usual trip down to Tottenham Court Road tube station to buy the inkies, a glowing review leapt out of the Melody Maker describing us as a ‘snarling, prowling rock beast’. It seemed that a wonderful tipping point had been reached. Our next show was yet another at the Falcon, but a country mile away from the cruel pantomime we had endured there in December. This time, the palpable frisson and murmur of excitement in the crowd wasn’t just because Morrissey, Suggs and Kirsty MacColl had turned up to see us, it was because at last we had something that people seemed to want. John Mulvey’s breathless, excitable review that appeared in the NME the following week was our first real taste of press approval, and after years of struggle against indifference and disinterest it was so, so sweet. And this thing that people started to want, as they suddenly massed and swarmed like flying ants, if I could be allowed a brief moment of flowery indulgence, seemed like something special. It was ours and ours alone – our ragged hymn, our howl of frustration – a poem to failure and loss and a paean to the cheapened, indifferent Britain that we saw before us. And as we stabbed and kicked against the dreary mediocrity of the time we did it with a style, a spirit and a force that ended up breaking down doors and laying the foundations for the music that defined a decade.

  Saul continued to court and flat
ter, and I think we all secretly loved his rambunctious passion, so one day in February we found ourselves marching up to his offices on Langham Street and finally putting pen to paper. I don’t remember much about actually signing – I was probably late and everyone else was probably anxious – but we finally did it, and when at last we tumbled back down the stairs and on to the pavements of Fitzrovia, our future was set, and London stretched out before us, beautiful and plain in the weak winter sun.

 

 

 


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