Bit of a Blur

by Alex James

  The day I got my exam results was the day I got on a tour bus for the first time.

  There was no going back.

  3

  food ltd

  Contracts

  We were living in squalor with the slugs and Mad Paul creeping around with his candle upstairs, but I had the thing I wanted, a record deal. It was an incredibly mean record deal and once we’d paid the lawyers there was just enough to buy a new bass.

  A recording contract is a hefty, confusing document. In the past, as one of the many formalities of business law, all contracts had to be written in Latin. It’s quite hard to say what language they’re written in now. There’s still quite a lot of Latin in there. There wasn’t a single paragraph that made sense to any of us, apart from the bit about if the drummer performed in pyjamas he was in breach. They put that in for a joke. We didn’t mind him wearing pyjamas, but we agreed to it because we understood it. We had to go to the lawyer’s three evenings in a row to have it all explained to us. It was very dull. The lawyer said it was the worst fucking deal he’d ever seen. He swore quite a lot. They do that, lawyers. We thought we were going to be catapulted into a new stratosphere and live happily ever after since we were about to become professional recording artists, and that we wouldn’t have to worry about anything. All there was to start with was hours and hours of things to think about. In fact, the more successful we became the more we had to deal with lawyers and accountants and management. That is the stratosphere of success. How I wish we’d listened. I’m still in that same recording contract now.

  Eventually we signed the deal, the only one going, and chinked champagne glasses with our new record company at their lawyer’s office. The two lawyers, ours, and the record company’s, had a good old ho-ho-ho about the pyjama clause and said things like ‘Whatever happened to old Dickie?’ They all know the same people, music lawyers.

  Throughout contract negotiations, which weren’t negotiations so much as ‘take-it-or-leave-it’s, the record company was referred to as ‘Food Ltd’. The Ltd bit wasn’t very sexy. On the radio they never said, ‘Now, on Food Ltd here’s Jesus Jones with “Info Freako”,’ they just said Food, or Food Records. It said ‘Food Ltd’ on the buzzer of their offices in Soho, too. As a business entity, Food was an independently owned company, but it was plugged into the marketing, sales and international distribution mechanism of EMI Records.

  Food was two people and a cute receptionist in an office on Brewer Street. It was a tiny label. They only had three other acts, but one of them, Jesus Jones, had the number one song in America. Being number one in America is the ultimate goal of all record companies on the planet and morale was high. In the mornings Andy Ross was usually working hard on The Times crossword. Dave Balfe was always cross about something on the phone in the other room.

  Food wanted to change our minds about some things. They particularly hated the name Seymour and insisted we come up with a list of ten other suggestions. They made a list of ten suggestions too. Blur was on both lists, so we changed our name to Blur.

  It was actually really valuable to have somebody at the record company going to great lengths to point out precisely how crap he thought we were at all times. All artists need someone to argue with. In the initial meetings, Balfe ripped everything to shreds, like a college don with a bad essay. It was devastating. He flew into rants, made taunts and offered delicate torments. This was art-wank; that was dull; this was stupid; that was commercial suicide! ‘YOU’RE SHIT! You wankers’ was his vital message and he really enjoyed himself. He had worked with a lot of bands and had great skill in the art of disabusing cocky layabouts who thought they were the Second Coming. He was a total bully. I really liked him, and hero-worshipped him a bit because he’d been in the Teardrop Explodes. He wasn’t always right, but it was all quite necessary. We had to learn to fight our corner. He was just toughening us up a bit before we got thrown to the press.

  Andy liked to do business in the pub. There was never anyone more at home in a pub. He could empty the quiz machine every time, because he could get all the sport questions. He was also an expert at darts, pool, the Racing Post and crosswords. He always had a new joke to tell me, and he had a huge appetite for new music, forever brimming with a brilliant band he’d seen last night or how crap something everybody said was great was. He was somehow a man of leisure, or he’d managed to incorporate everything he liked into his job.

  It was great to spend an afternoon in the pub with Andy after Balfe had kicked us all around the office. We spent happy hours dreaming and scheming. They hadn’t given us much money, but they did give us all their attention. Balfe was a megalomaniac and wanted us to be the biggest band in the world. Andy just loved pop music and emptying the quiz machine.

  London Shows

  We thought we were ready for everything, but maybe everything wasn’t quite ready for us. The few shows that we had done had been very chaotic. Taking to the stage was an opportunity to make as much noise and mess as possible. There were long pauses as drums were reassembled, guitars came off their straps and we decided what song to do next. It seemed important to react to situations with as much creative spontaneity as we could muster.

  ‘No, no, no. Decide what it is you’re going to do and deliver it,’ said Balfe. He got so angry about one onstage bundle that he had saliva in his beard after the show. He made us go and watch Jesus Jones. Jesus Jones did everything he told them to do. They appeared to go mental, but no leads came unplugged, nothing broke and there were no long gaps while the guitarist tried to find the plectrum he’d dropped. They had spare guitars, too, and someone who passed them the spare guitars. A roadie. We couldn’t fit any more in the drummer’s car. There was just enough room for drums, amps and two guitars. The practicalities of being a drummer in an unfamous band are harsh. Drummers always have estate cars, so they usually get lumbered with all the other gear as well. Singers don’t have any gear to think about at all, so they tend to fixate on their hair and clothes. I used to like carrying my guitar around. It made me feel cool.

  There aren’t many nice places to play in London. Even when I lived in a condemned building, venues seemed sticky, unpleasant places. Andy was at home in these dives; he always knew which beer to get and which was the best pool cue. Anything threatening about those places was removed by his sense of belonging there and being at home. They were nasty, but we were able to make them our own. London is highly civilised. There was always a slight risk of being beaten up in central Bournemouth pubs and clubs, which were all a lot smarter looking. Places that have live music tend to attract pretty nice people, so after the initial shock of sticky floors and niffiness, the rock music venue became our natural habitat.

  We played all over London, dragging our faithful entourage of freakouts and crazies around town with us. Some people lost interest now that we’d sold out and signed to a label, but we picked up more people as we went. We played twelfth on the bill at all-day marathons and headlined in empty pubs. The Alice Owen, a spit-and-sawdust joint in Islington, had a light in the ceiling that came on if the music got too loud. If it stayed on for more than five seconds, it automatically cut the power. In a bar in a shopping centre in Shepherd’s Bush, Damon climbed up the PA and hid in the ceiling. A booking agent came to see us and took us on. Then we started getting support slots at proper concert halls. The first one was opening for the Cramps at Brixton Academy.

  I think Brixton Academy is probably the perfect venue for loud music. It’s all standing downstairs and it’s pretty big, about eight thousand people. The balcony rocks up and down when things get going. You can put a proper show on there with explosions and a full choir. It seemed like a scary, horrible place that night, though. Backstage areas were all new to us. Most of the places that we’d played didn’t have dressing rooms. Here there were long corridors of them with names on the doors: dozens of rough-looking people loitered around, farting and swearing. It was like being in a hospital, only everyone looked a bit iller t
han they do in hospitals. There was food, too, a buffet, a hot food menu, free drinks and bowls of sweets everywhere. We sat in the strange restaurant eating sweets and staring. Someone came over to our table and said, ‘Don’t talk to the band, guys, OK? And when you’ve eaten go to your dressing room. Right?’

  You wouldn’t want to lose your plectrum on a stage that big. We didn’t have a soundcheck because it would have interfered with the Cramps’ vibes. We went on as the doors opened and eight thousand goths arrived. I was very pleased to be holding on to a bass guitar. It’s hard to wear a bass and not look cool. It’s like sitting in an Aston Martin. You can be sure you look good and that people will stare. Damon fiddled with his hair. Graham turned his amp right up but it still sounded too small for that room. Even kicking over the drums would have been quite a futile gesture. We ripped through the set. A Cramps crowd has really come to see the Cramps, and not four twerps in secondhand clothes. It wasn’t easy. At that stage we were fragile. Our future was riding precariously on every gig. It could have been disastrous. We grew up in half an hour on that stage. When we came off we went to the Cramps’ dressing room and said hi.

  Studioland

  We were getting the hang of playing live, but we’d yet to try making a record. Recording studios are complex. We’d never really used any of the equipment in the Beat Factory, apart from the fridge. We used it as a place to rehearse, mainly, and just recorded everything on cassette, so we didn’t forget it. We left the Beat Factory when we signed to Food. It had been a luxury having a place to hang out and play. In Bournemouth, too, band practices had been enjoyable semi-social events, but there’s nowhere a band can play for free in central London. It’s pay by the hour. Cheap rehearsal rooms are depressing places. They have all the grime and sleaze of a gig, but no girls and no beer. There was a bunch of sad hopefuls making a suffocating din behind every door. We tried a few places before we found somewhere we could bear to be at all. The Premises, behind a café on Hackney Road in Shoreditch, was clean and bright and pleasant. The café was really quite nice. It was more of a jazzy scene there. The clientele tended to be workaday jobbing musicians, rather than hopefuls with day jobs. There was no one trying to be cool or intimidating. We were quite focused when we were there, and it worked well. It was good to be surrounded by other kinds of music. There were photos of famous accordion players and tin whistle men on the walls in the café. There was a seventeen-year-old, called Jason, who worked there. He was cool. He drove a VW van that belonged to the Premises and offered to take our gear to gigs and help set up. The label thought it was important to create a bit of a stir about Blur before we released any records, so it was a while before we got into a recording studio. When we finally did, it was like dying and going to heaven. In the sixties, studios were like laboratories, utilitarian and staffed by men in white coats. In the seventies bands made records in converted castles and manor houses. During the eighties studios began to look like custom-built luxury yachts inside. They competed for trade by outswanking each other. They could do this because the cost of making a record is quite small compared to the cost of making videos and marketing budgets. The expense of a posh studio doesn’t make much difference when it comes to the bottom line. Where venues were grotty, studios were smart. They boasted brasseries, bars, video games, nice pool tables, magazines and expense accounts. There was always an appealing girl on reception. There is no grime or stickiness in the studio environment. Record producers are all quite particular about washing their hands.

  We went to Battery in Willesden, to record two songs, ‘She’s So High’ and ‘I Know’, with a production duo from Liverpool called Steven Lovell and Steve Power. It is hard to say what a producer does. He’s sort of in charge, like an architect on a building site, but he’s your architect and you have to make sure he’s building your castle and not his.

  In a recording studio, there is also someone called an engineer. He is always asking the producer about microphones and levels. Then there is an assistant who sits quietly in the corner trying not to look bored, and who asks you if you would like anything every half an hour.

  Battery was huge. There was loads of complicated gear in racks in the control room and a colossal mixing desk. There must have been hundreds of buttons and thousands of knobs in that room, a sea of switches and little lights. A long, tall, wide window in the wall behind the mix console looked over a church-like live room, a vast space with pine floors and carpet going up the walls; a grand piano as long as a barge sat in the middle. There were anterooms with tape machines; soundproof booths for guitar amps; echo chambers; cupboards full of looms and wires and huge fridges containing power supplies. All the rooms had double doors. The restaurant and leisure facilities were down a long corridor.

  It was intimidating to start with, but all studios are pretty much the same. Once you’re at home in one, you’re at home in them all.

  We didn’t have much gear. Jason, the kid from the rehearsal studio, brought it all down in the van. I was playing a Fender Jazz copy through an amplifier that cost sixty quid. It was good, that amp. I showed it to the producers and they looked at each other and I could tell they didn’t like it. Graham kept breaking his guitars, and he was down to his last one, an Aria, but there was an affiliated hire company next door to the studio.

  It was a painstaking process, making a record. We’d written the songs we were going to record and we could play them fine. It took all day to set up the drums with microphones, so that they sounded good. They just sounded like drums to me. By the evening we were playing through the first song, ‘She’s So High’. We played it so many times it was impossible to tell whether it was good any more. That does happen in studios. You get lost inside things. You often can’t tell if anything is good until you’ve had a cup of tea and listened back to it later. Sometimes getting it right is a joy; sometimes it’s a chore. It depends on the producer, too. Some producers like to do everything a hundred times, some like to use the first take.

  We were all wearing headphones, which had a clicking metronome coming through them that was louder than anything else. It was very offputting. Lovell said we had to get the tempo exactly right. I knew what a tempo was, but I’d never heard anyone say it before. We persevered, trying it slightly faster, then a bit slower, then in between. Then he said, ‘That’s brilliant, guys, we’ll record the drums in the morning’, and I was driven back to my hovel in a limousine.

  We spent the whole of the next morning recording the drums and the whole of the afternoon listening to them, just the drums on their own. Again and again, considering the sound of the hihat, the steadiness of the rhythm itself, whether any bits needed patching up, was the tempo definitely exactly right? It’s the usual procedure these days, to start by recording the drums. When the drums are spot on, all the other instruments are overdubbed one at a time. Sometimes a song sounds better if everything is recorded at once, but it’s usually easier to concentrate on one thing at a time.

  After dinner we checked the drums one last time and started on the bass. ‘I Know’ was a song based on a metronomic groove and the producers thought it would be more mesmerising if we looped the bass. I hadn’t done that before. Looping is used a lot in dance music, rap and hip-hop.

  The fundamental unit of groove is the riff. If the riff is good, the groove is good. A groove is usually the same riff played again and again with subtle variations. With a looped groove, you’re actually hearing exactly the same thing over and over. The bass player jams along with the drums and a small section of the performance, usually eight beats long, is cut and pasted together to make the bassline for the whole track. Computers make this easier to do, but bands had been using tape loops before computers arrived. The Bee Gees used a tape loop for the rock-solid drums on ‘Stayin’ Alive’. I’m pretty sure they used that exact same drum loop for some of their other big hits, too.

  There is something very earcatching about the same thing repeating, a hypnotic perfection. Eight beats is quit
e a small amount of time, but it is actually long enough to change the course of popular history, if you get it exactly right. Making good loops is no easier than playing well through the whole song. In fact, it puts even more emphasis on the ‘feel’. ‘Feel’ is the subtle quality that separates the great players from the ordinary ones. It’s largely innate, like a person’s way of walking or talking. A hundred different guitarists will all play the same riff in exactly one hundred slightly different ways. The subtle pushing and pulling at the rhythm, the exact length of the notes and how hard the strings are hit and bent, mean that no riff is ever quite the same in different hands. Things played with clinical accuracy often sound quite lifeless and mechanical. If it feels good, it is good.

  Knowing what is really good and what isn’t quite so hot is the key to making a good record. I played the riff over and over and listened to it again and again until we found ‘the one’. It had a slightly lazy lilt and, boy, it made the drums sound good. It was a crap guitar but it was a great bassline.

  The record, a double A-side featuring both tracks, sounded amazing. It sounded like a record. It was all shiny and shimmering and it floated. We got the tempo spot on. We got the feel spot on. We listened to it a hundred times and played it to all our friends, and also, and especially, to people we didn’t like. We were In Business. We were best friends. It was very exciting, but we began to separate from the lives we’d lived before. All our friends were either unable to relate to what we were so excited about, or slightly envious. We went up to Manchester Square to meet everyone at EMI. There were a lot of people to meet: a product manager, a press lady, a TV promotions man, a radio plugger, lots of people behind desks and fax machines, the marketing department, the head of the label, the head of international sales, the chairman. It was a five-storey office building full of people who worked for us.