I Blame Morrissey

by Jamie Jones

  Lou: ‘That’s brilliant he’s taking you to Paris. He knows how much you want to go there and how unhappy you are in this house, he’s trying at least.”

  Amy – laughing: “Oh yeah, a 30 hour coach trip, with him moaning about the cost of everything at service stations, on the ferry and in Paris, I can’t wait! Why does he have to make everything a bloody war of attrition? We both know he will spoil this trip before we even get off the coach.’

  She knew me far too well. She did, however, still look a little surprised to find me in our rancid, slug infested kitchen the evening before we left, making sandwiches. She looked over at my festival rucksack which was filled with cans of Apple Tango and Mini Cheddars before gruffly enquiring:

  ‘So, just so I’m clear on this – we’re going all the way to Paris, the culinary capital of the world, to drink Apple Tango and eat cheddar cheese sandwiches?”’

  Me: ‘No, don’t be silly. I made the sarnies with Red Leicester as I know it’s your favourite.’

  I diligently went back to making the sandwiches and only just heard her singing the Pet Shop Boys tune, “What Have I Done To Deserve This?” as she walked away.

  On a numbingly cold Cardiff early morning, we boarded the coach and headed to Dover. With a choppy ferry crossing and a further 3 hour coach journey negotiated, we arrived in Paris at midday with strict instructions to meet the coach at midnight back at the Place De La Concorde.

  Eager to get started, we speed walked to the Champs-Élysées and gazed in wonder at the wide street and the Arc De Triomphe proudly standing at the top of the hill. I would happily have stayed at the majestic Arc all day but, as with Nelsons Column, the fact that it was surrounded by heaving, smoking traffic spoilt the serenity of the scene a little. The adrenaline rush of being in Paris and fulfilling a dream, meant that Amy shook off her tiredness and apprehension and was wandering around with a permanent smile. I knew I had to ride this particular wave for all it was worth. She was giddy with childlike excitement as we wandered down the Champs-Élysées. With our lust for life at an all-time high, we decided to go crazy and have coffee and frites in a café. It was a stunning location and, like all cafes that are in such places, their prices were even more stunning than the view. I had pledged to treat Amy to this mini feast so, even when presented with the horror of the bill, I calmly paid with shaking hands and a bundle of francs.

  After that open wallet surgery, my mental arithmetic told me that, aside from the 8 francs needed to gain entry to the Louvre, all my cash had gone. From here on in, unless Amy was paying, we were on the emergency rucksack rations.

  As we walked into The Louvre, Amy was ecstatic and, for the first time in months, I felt like a good boyfriend and a decent human being. We spent 5 hours in the museum and I found the first couple of those fascinating. By the end of the 4th hour, as Amy was still finding wonder in every painting or statue, I just wanted a beer and a sit down. After going a little crazy in the souvenir shop and indulging her love of Monet postcards, she finally took pity on me and said; ‘C’mon, let’s find a bar. I’ll treat you to a beer for bringing me to this amazing place and not moaning all day.’

  We made our way to a tiny hostelry overlooking the Seine and, as Amy looked through her book on Monet, I sat and enjoyed every mouthful of my ice cold beer. I took some mental photos of the scene, silently storing them as credit against future arguments. I was having a drink with my girlfriend in the middle of Paris, only an idiot wouldn’t enjoy that and, despite my multiple personality defects, I wasn’t an idiot.

  Amy left me sat at the table, gazing at the river and daydreaming, and went to pay the bill. It was when she came back and proudly announced, “Well that’s the last of my money spent”, it dawned on me that the remaining 6 hours we had in Paris were not going to be as much fun as the first 6. Here we were, in one of the most expensive cities in the world, with less than a franc between us.

  Rather than act like the mature, urbane 20 year old man that had been on display so far that day, I went into grumpy toddler mode. We left the bar and moved to a bench in the vast municipal park next to The Louvre. I didn’t say a word for an hour. Instead I twisted my darkest thoughts into a knot and forensically examined the contrast between sitting in a park now and when we used to do so during our first year together. Then it had been excited chatter, with arms and legs wrapped around each other. Now here we were in Paris, the city of love, sitting in silence.

  With the biting cold of the evening descending, I decided that we may as well go and wait for the coach at the Place De La Concorde. So, we sat, not saying a word, watching the traffic hurtle around us. I turned my ever darkening thoughts inward and pondered how I had managed to turn a trip to Paris into such a disaster. The contrast between the heartbroken look on Amys face, as we sat there waiting, compared to when I first told her about our trip was not lost on me.

  I’ll Just Consult Moz

  BACK in Cardiff, it was now clear to everyone, including us, that our relationship was becoming a shitty, spiteful mess. We had created a monster which initially had been full of love, lust and life but had now found its black hearted alter ego and we had long since lost control of it. We would go from being riotously in love to desperately unhappy in the midst of a single argument. I would retreat to my room and my stereo, Amy would pack her rucksack and run back to Cambridge. Neither of us had any clue how to heal our relationship’s wounds so, rather than talk to each other, she sought advice from her mum and I consulted Moz. Then on one glorious spring evening, for one night only, everything seemed to change.

  Everyone in our house had fallen under the spell cast by Tony Blair. It wasn’t so much that we believed in him, more that he could offer us something different, something that wasn’t the Conservatives. We knew that, as D: Ream sang, “Things Can Only Get Better”. As the election results came in during the night of 1st/2nd May, we danced around our front room, ecstatic that, for the first time since we were toddlers, we wouldn’t be ruled by a Tory government. As Michael Portillo got the news of his seat being lost live on the TV, we glugged from our specially purchased bottle of Asti Spumante. I don’t think I’d have been any happier if England had won the World Cup. I felt full of hope for the future of my beloved country and our relationship. The joy of an election win inspired Amy and I to clamber into the same bed for the first time in weeks and all seemed well with the world.

  The next morning she got up and asked me to look away whilst she got dressed, before kissing me on the cheek and heading to her lecture. It appeared we weren’t in the midst of a new beginning after all.

  With Amy away from Cardiff for long periods and my degree seemingly not needing any assignments from me in the 2nd year, I needed something to fill my days. It was the age of the music fanzine so I decided to write my own. I dragged in Neil, Lou and Amy (when she deigned us with her presence) and “The Blue” indie music fanzine was born. It sold for a very reasonable 45p plus 25p postage and packing. It was a lot of hard work just to sell 67 copies, hence why it only ran for two editions. I also ended up managing a band from the West Midlands called ‘Solo 70’ for a few months. Well, I say managed, I didn’t really do much other than interview them for the fanzine and get them a couple of interviews with other ‘zines but it made me feel important. I had stumbled across them when they played a gig in Cardiff at our local pub and noticed that Jon Baker was their guitarist. Jon had been the original guitarist in The Charlatans, played on their debut album and had a writing credit on “Sproston Green”. In my eyes, that made him indie royalty. I talked to him after the gig with wild eyed enthusiasm, he mentioned they needed a manager and that was it, job secured. I left my illustrious position a couple of months later when the band decided that, in order to generate much needed publicity, they were going to change their name to ‘Universal’, in the hope that the record company of the same name would sue them. I couldn’t be a part of such behaviour, I was all about the music, so I resigned. I had been such an ineffective m
anager I doubt they even noticed.

  For Amy and I, our best times together during this period, were at gigs. She would regularly tell me that us going to gigs was the only time she could be sure that I would be in a good mood. I even peeled off the clingfilm that encased my wallet and paid for Amy to get into plenty of them, in an attempt to make her happy. The best of those gigs was when Beck played at our SU in March. Riding high on the back of the success of the triumphant ‘Odelay’, he came in and forced everyone in the crowd to dance, gyrate and fall under his spell. As we jumped around to the likes of ‘Where It’s At’ and ‘Devils Haircut’, we were a couple smack bang in love again. The music and alcohol combination stripped the bitter times away and we transported back to being the couple locked in her room, desperate to hold each other. I even missed the joyous crowd-led rendition of “Loser” to get her a pint from the bar. If that wasn’t a demonstration of true love then I didn’t know what was.

  1997 isn’t remembered as a classic year for indie music, but for us it was an illustrious period with some sublime albums being released that year:

  Spiritualized – Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space

  Teenage Fanclub – Songs From Northern Britain

  Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – The Boatman’s Call

  Radiohead – OK Computer

  Super Furry Animals – Radiator

  The Charlatans – Tellin’ Stories

  Primal Scream – Vanishing Point

  Morrissey – Maladjusted

  Spritualized’s – “Ladies & Gentlemen….” was a fascinating album, full of huge songs in a pill box style cover, with the CD held in a blister pack as if it was an extra large paracetamol. I’d liked the odd track on each of their previous releases but on “Ladies & Gentlemen….”, Jason Pierce had created a scene of love, loss and getting trashed. The music press couldn’t help but reiterate at every opportunity that the album was Pierce’s broken hearted love letter to his ex-partner and keyboard player in the band, Kate Radley, who had left him and then married Richard Ashcroft from The Verve. Pierce denied that was the meaning but, to be honest, it just made the maudlin, increasingly lovelorn loser in me adore “Ladies & Gentlemen…” even more.

  I got into the habit of getting a few bottles of beer, lighting twenty or so tea lights, lying on the floor of my room and listening to “Ladies & Gentlemen…” on repeat. Sometimes Amy came in and, without saying a word, would lay on my bed, take a bottle of beer and we’d listen to the album in contented silence. Once or twice she even came in, silently undressed and we would act like normal students. In the background, this soundtrack of drugs and heartbreak would prickle against our naked skin, seeping into every desperate attempt we made to satisfy each other. At other times, if she was annoyed with me or trying to study, she would bang on the floor of her bedroom and urge me to “turn that bloody Spiritualized album down”. For about 6 months, “Ladies & Gentlemen..” was one of those extra special albums that seemed to fit my every mood.

  Morrissey’s “Maladjusted” got a battering by the music critics upon its release but I loved it. Songs like “Wide To Receive” and “Satan Rejected My Soul” were classic Moz and I spent many hours in my room, learning the words and throwing myself around as Amy tried to revise next to me.

  Teenage Fanclub’s “Songs From Northern Britain” was my album of the year. It was this glorious band at their melodic, harmony driven pop best. The first bars of songs like “Aint That Enough”, would bring a grin to my face and make me feel happy to be alive. Amy didn’t really fall under their spell but that didn’t stop me playing that album to her on a daily basis. I would tell her that it contained a song that fitted any situation that our relationship stumbled into. When she moaned at me for only wanting to drink in ‘old man’s pubs’, or for refusing to go to ‘The Astoria’ nightclub, I would play her “I Don’t Want Control of You”. When we argued in her room, shouting increasingly hurtful things to each other and ending up collapsing into her bed in a red-eyed ball of fear and regret, I would play “Your Love Is The Place Where I Come From”, in a ham-fisted attempt to show her how much I still cared. I truly believed that continually playing those songs would help solve the ever multiplying problems that our relationship had acquired.

  TFC had always been an immaculate live band. From the first time I’d seen them at Glastonbury in 1993, I’d always made a point of going to their gigs whenever possible. My favourite Teenage Fanclub pilgramage took place in October 1997 at the Anson Room in Bristol. As we were both big fans, Lou and I decided to make the short train journey from Cardiff to take in the gig.

  Lou was an English Literature student with a prodigious appetite for alcohol. Lager, cider or meths, she would guzzle it down then tell you how magnificent London, Spurs and The Manics were. On the afternoon of the gig she had been in the pub for a few hours, debating with her course mates the merits of some 200 year old book or other, so was half-cut by the time we boarded the train.

  Upon arrival in Bristol, even after a quick nap on the train, it was obvious that Lou was struggling to stand up straight but she insisted on ploughing on to the pub for a ‘livener’ then onto the Anson Rooms. Undeterred by her limbs not working in conjunction with her brain, she carried on drinking until Teenage Fanclub hit the stage. They were on stunning form with tight harmonies and perfect song choices. It was one of the best gigs that I’d ever been to. I was bouncing around the place, loving every second of their set but kept catching a glimpse of Lou, who was stood shaking her head and muttering to herself.

  At the end of the triumphant gig, with the elated crowd howling for more, all Lou would say to me was; “That was amazing and shit, amazing and shit, amazing and shit”. I decided to take inspiration from Neil when faced with a friend appearing to have a crisis and went to the bar to get her another pint whilst waiting for her sanity to return. As we sat and supped in silence, the band wandered out from the backstage area to get a well earned drink. They had been so fantastic that I couldn’t resist going over to congratulate them and get my new “Songs From Northern Britain” t-shirt signed. As I chatted my fan-boy gibberish to the band, Lou got up from her chair, holding the sides for support and shouted across the bar:

  ‘Don’t talk to them wankers Jay, they mimed their way through that gig. No band can sing like that, I know they mimed. Everyone else fell for it but not me.’

  Cue nervous laughter from the band and me.

  ‘Don’t laugh, I know you were miming and I want my money back.’

  With a quick, mumbled apology to everyone present, I bundled a still shouting Lou out into the sobering October air and into a taxi. The next day, she had just about rehydrated her senses by teatime and over a hair of the dog pint she insisted to Amy and Neil that; ‘No band could be that good, they had to be miming.’

  Teenage Fanclub really were that good.

  Amy and I knew by the spring of 1997 that our relationship was in the kind of trouble that alcohol and sex could now only prolong rather than save. We were still in love but our arguments were getting feistier and the silences lasting ever longer. Deep down, we knew that the blissful future that we’d planned in the early days of our relationship was now never going to become a reality. So, we just didn’t talk about our future anymore, not even vague discussions about what either of us would do when university finished for us in 12 months’ time. We just pretended that the future didn’t exist. As usual I looked to music to help. I would play her Teenage Fanclub’s “Start Again” and she would chuckle and whisper loving asides like: “If I start again Jay, it won’t be with you” and “Why can’t I split up with you? I really want to but I can’t seem to do it. I wish sometimes that I didn’t love you, it would be easy then.”

  To take our minds off our relationship we both threw ourselves into our work. With no love or social life to distract me, I became engrossed in my course, mainly thanks to the inspirational teaching of my Course Director, Paul Lodge. I would sit engrossed in his lectur
es and then head off alone for long, warm afternoons in the Humanities library reading about Scargill, the NHS and Nye Bevan. I was still going to gigs but Amy had decided, in an ironic twist, that I was now better off going to them on my own. I even bought her a ticket for Paul Weller’s outdoor gig in Cardiff Bay but she flatly refused to come along as she had studying to do. I went on my own, got plastered, thought Weller and Gene were both superb and didn’t speak a word to anyone (other than the bar staff) all day.

  That summer was going to be a busy one as I had somehow persuaded Amy to come to accompany me to two festivals. For my 4th Glastonbury and Amy’s 1st, we went as a foursome with Jacko and his girlfriend, Claire. My previous Glastonbury’s had been played out on a festival site bathed in sunshine and smiles but that year was to prove very different. The heavens opened on the Thursday evening as we pitched our tents and it didn’t stop raining for a minute of the next 48 hours. The site was transformed from an idyllic, baked earth scene to a quagmire in a matter of hours. I’d thought that I’d got wet and cold at Reading in 1992 but that was a week on the beach in Ibiza compared to this. On the Friday morning we saw people still so smashed from the night before that they hadn’t even noticed that the tent they had gone to sleep in had blown away in the night. By Saturday morning the festival authorities were using canoes to rescue people from the worst affected areas of the site. A lad in the tent next to ours was diagnosed with trench foot by the medical staff and loaded into a muddy ambulance for treatment.

  The only thing we could do was get drunk and make the best of it. We pulled on our DM boots, took a swig from the bottle of port I had brought with me and headed out into the mud. It was bloody hard work getting about the site, wanting to see bands but being unable to slog through the mud in time to see their set was a frequent and annoying occurrence. The four of us used all our reserves of English spirit and pluck to determinedly enjoy ourselves. As always for me, Glasto was first and foremost about the music. One of the highlights was an afternoon Ray Davies set where he set out to cheer up the shivering masses with some Kinks singalongs. As the crowd cheered and attempted to prise their feet from the glue pot, Amy and I crooned our way through the glorious “Waterloo Sunset”.