by Alex James
We still had to make a video. Balfe wanted to do something weird. He said, ‘Lets build a really mental flashing doughnut and wobble it around in the dark. It’ll be brilliant.’
When we got to Pinewood Film Studios, the light wasn’t quite as mental as we’d been led to believe it would be. It was a bunch of neon hoops. There were problems with wobbling it, too. It flashed quite nicely, though. There were dozens of people running around, speaking into walkie-talkies, smoking and sipping coffee out of plastic cups. It was very cold on the hangar-sized set, but glamorous women strutted around saying ‘OK, darling?’ and kissing everybody, even the scary looking light wobblers and grumpy focus pullers. There was make-up, there was hair, there was wardrobe, there was catering, cameras, playback, riggers, grips, lampies, sparkies, producers, commissioners, runners and drivers. No wonder film stars have trouble with the real world. This seemed like a much nicer place. All that fuss over the song we’d written before we went home for the Christmas holidays a year ago, the chords I’d sat up in bed playing when I should have been reading eighteenth-century French literature.
Daytime radio would have trouble with the word ‘high’, they said at the label. Really it was just too slow and too indie and not quite brilliant enough for daytime radio. It got played a bit in the evenings, on Mark Goodier’s show, and the BBC offered us a session at Maida Vale.
Graham wasn’t phased about going to the BBC. He’d been on Blue Peter, twice, playing his clarinet. Dave’s dad had worked at Maida Vale and Damon took everything in his stride. The BBC reminded me a bit of college. They do things properly at the BBC and Maida Vale was even more impressive than Battery, a titanic complex of sound studios, from huge rooms for recording orchestras to little voiceover cubicles. It’s steeped in history, and you couldn’t move for sitting somewhere Jimi Hendrix had sat, or standing where a Beatle had farted. It’s quite serious at the Beeb. I suppose it has to be. Everyone there knew exactly what they were doing. The staff are all cherry-picked from the best of the best, and it was all so illustrious it made me want to scream. It’s hard to rebel against. You can’t really have a career in music unless you can interface successfully with the BBC, and you sort of have to do it on the BBC’s terms, which are reasonable enough. You’ve just got to do what you do; if enough people like it, pretty soon they’re knocking on your door.
Food really liked ‘There’s No Other Way’, one of the new songs we recorded on that session. We all thought it was a B-side but were pleased they were nice about something. Most radio is broadcast live. It’s more exciting to do things live, but it does take a while to get the hang of talking on the radio. There are only really two rules in broadcasting: no swearing and no silence. Silence does not broadcast well. People who haven’t been on the radio very much tend to think that the few words they are about to say are what they’re going to be remembered for, and they tie themselves up in knots trying to say too much. In my experience no one can remember much about what I’ve said on the radio, just odd lines here and there. It’s like trying to recall what someone on the bus was talking about. It is quite scary, though, to start with. It’s a knack, like swimming. When you relax, there’s nothing to it. You can do it all day.
Images
Being in a band embraces a lot of things. There are your thoughts, which you are constantly expressing in your music, and being probed about by journalists and presenters. There are your clothes, which have to say who you are, too. Hair is cheap but hard to get right. You have to be able to think of things to say that are worth repeating, or at least repeat things that are worth repeating. You’ve got to be able to play an instrument, or sing, if you want to get any satisfaction out of it. You need to enjoy travelling, because there’s a lot of it. Stage design, record sleeve design, videos, photo shoots . . . There is always an expert to hand, but you need to know what you want or it all just looks like everyone else’s.
It takes a while to get the hang of everything. None of the early photo shoots were that spectacular. We didn’t look like a band. We still weren’t really, yet. We had written some songs and hung around together, but we hadn’t played more than a couple of dozen shows. Some touring was planned around the first single.
We went to meet with a design company in a mews in Paddington. It was the sort of place at which everyone who did art at school would have dreamed about working. They’d designed the covers of all the greatest records ever made, by the looks of things, and there were gold discs all over the walls in reception. The offices were bright and sunny, and hip-looking people were ‘just working on ideas’ at big draughtsman’s boards. The idea they’d had for ‘She’s So High’ was a naked bubblegum queen astride a hippopotamus. It was a painting by a San Franciscan artist called Mel Ramos. We all agreed it was brilliant, even Balfe, who said it was important to break minor taboos. It was just a good picture, I thought.
Andy Ross thought it would be a good idea for Damon and me to go and be nice to everyone at the EMI annual sales conference, which was taking place in a hotel near Gatwick airport.
It was the start of the nineties. It was a glittering affair and things got interesting after dinner. It was the tail end of the good old days in the record business. Record companies were still expanding and setting up film divisions. They’d made a fortune from rereleasing everything on CD. Record sales were higher than ever. British artists outsold American stars and it was a good time to be in the music business. It must have been quite an expensive event. There were hundreds of people there, including some proper pop stars. The boss of the company, Rupert Perry, made a speech on a little stage and said he wanted to introduce some special guests. Iron Maiden drove on to the stage in a bubble car and started swearing at everybody. Damon had a funny turn and ran outside. I was having an excellent time. There was a party in every room in the hotel. Nigel Kennedy, a strange kind of violin-playing arch-yobbo and the biggest-selling artist in the world at the time, was trying to throw a television out of the window of the first room I went into. A lot of men in suits were laughing. He fell in a heap on top of the telly before he got to the window. It was good in that room. I sat on the bed sharing a bottle of Scotch with a guy with a silvery beard who seemed quite interested in everything I had to say. We shot the breeze for ages. He knew all kinds of things. I liked that guy. We drank all the whisky. Eventually I said I’d better go and find Damon, who had last been spotted in a field trying to talk to some horses. Andy Ross said, ‘What the hell were you talking to Andrew Prior about for an hour?’ I said, ‘Who the hell is Andrew Prior? I’ve been drinking whisky with my mate over there!’ He said, ‘That’s Andrew Prior, you berk. He’s the head of the label. I’m lucky if I get thirty seconds!’
I suddenly had a feeling that I might be able to do all right in the music industry.
I enlisted my next new friend, who was spectacularly pissed, to help me find Damon. We got into his car and put on Marianne Faithfull, really loud. It had never sounded so good, her voice. My new friend just wanted to drive his car over the golf course; it was good fun, but I was a bit worried about Damon. I found him in Balfe’s room having an argument with the singer from Jesus Jones. Singers never agree with each other about anything. I was really drunk by that point and I went down to the bar to have a fight. Bruce Dickinson was at the bar. I hate Iron Maiden. They’re devil-worshipping ponces. I said, ‘The devil can suck my cock and you can kiss his arse, you fucking poodle.’ He got me in a headlock and sucked the end of my nose really hard. I was laughing quite a lot, not really resisting. We left it at that.
In the morning, the pretty girl who was organising everything asked me if I would mind sharing a car back to London with Adam Ant. There is always a pretty girl who organises everything at record companies. ‘Kings of the Wild Frontier’, by Adam and the Ants, was the first album I’d bought. I said, ‘That would be great, actually’, and she winked at me. He was really nice and we talked about music all the way, just like I had done on the bus to school. He sent
me Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake by the Small Faces a few days later.
I got home, back to the squat, and Justine said, ‘Has anyone seen you this morning?’ I said, ‘Only Adam Ant.’ She said, ‘Aren’t you clever! Did he mention your nose, darling?’ I looked in the mirror and it was bright red on the end. It took days to go back to being the right colour.
The record was finally released and the video was on Juke Box Jury. Jonathan Ross, quite an important voice, said it was crap and I swore to hate him forever. A soul singer called Kym Mazelle, who had stayed in a hotel Damon had been working in, The Portobello, gave it the raspberry too. He said it was because she’d put the moves on him when he took her up a sandwich in the middle of the night and he’d shunned her advances, which may or may not have been true. It was voted a miss, but it went into the charts at number forty-eight, which we thought was massive.
Telescope
Existence was still hand to mouth. We didn’t have much money, but a cheque for three hundred and twenty-five pounds from the musicians’ union came through the door, quite unexpectedly. I went straight out and bought the thing I wanted the most, a telescope. Along with the notion that I might be able to do what I’d always wanted came an all-pervading rush of optimism. I started to feel more and more alive. The more alive I felt, the more interested I became in absolutely everything. My natural curiosity burned like a bonfire. All of a sudden, the sky was the limit, and that too seemed limitlessly beautiful and benign.
I also bought a book, Foundations of Astronomy by Michael A. Seeds. I spent the next five years reading that book, over and over again. I took it everywhere with me. Even through binoculars, the moon is a staggering sight. I’d never looked through a telescope before, but soon I was lugging it all over the place on tour. I gazed at Jupiter, Saturn and Venus and wondered what they were doing there.
We still didn’t have a manager and we needed one. A good manager understands how record companies work. He knows a good sync licence fee from a bad one and he is always on the phone bollocking someone about mechanical royalties in the minor territories. That’s what a manager should be doing. Fighting battles you don’t understand so that you can float around getting drunk and shagging. A management company is similar to a record company. They work alongside each other. They generally get along great and help each other. The rub is always with someone in ‘Business affairs’ at the label. That’s the record company’s legal department. No one in the world cares about business affairs departments, except for managers. Managers care about them all day. As an artist you would hope never to meet anyone from business affairs. Life is too short. That’s why you pay your manager 20 per cent of everything, to deal with them. Most people who work in record companies are pretty cool. They all love music. You’d have to.
Even the largest record company is quite a simple organisation. A relationship with a label starts with the department called ‘Artiste and Repertoire’. An A&R man is a fancy name for someone who was desperate to be in a band, but couldn’t get his hair right. A junior member of the A&R department will see three or four bands a night, every night, more if he can. He loves it. Very occasionally he’ll see a band that he really likes and tell his boss, who will sign them and take all the credit. The senior guys don’t want to be drinking cider at the Falcon in Camden every night, but occasionally, they’ll check out a band because they’ve been sent an outstandingly good demo. It really would have to be brilliant, though.
A&R departments often get nervous about acting alone. They’re much happier about going to see bands that there is ‘a real buzz’ on. ‘A real buzz’ means whatever their mate who is an A&R man at another company was talking about last night, or something that has been mentioned in the NME. Then they all go down together and make a group decision about whether a band are any good or not. Usually every label wants them or no label wants them. Everybody passed on Blur apart from Andy ‘Magic Ears’ Ross. Even Balfe didn’t want to sign us.
Managers like to get involved with bands before they sign to record companies; then they can put their 20 per cent commission on the signing advance. It’s easier to get record companies to see you if you’ve got a manager they know. We went to see a lot of managers. Most of them bought us lunch. We went for the one who bought us the nicest lunch. As a rule of thumb, it’s best to sign to the guy who hasn’t got time to take you to lunch. There’s no way you could ever make anyone in a band listen to advice like that, though.
Mike Collins took us to Fred’s, a member’s club in Soho Square. We’d never been to a member’s club before. We hadn’t been out to lunch much before. We stayed there all day drinking brandy, and Mike Collins told us how brilliant we were, and how charming. He liked my telescope. He liked the idea of the telescope. He liked it all. It was special. It was amazing.
The anticipation of success is the sweetest thing of all. It’s never absolute, success, except when you’re dreaming about it. This was success, really, having lunch bought for us in a member’s club, and being flattered in the sunshine. It’s an endless chase, succeeding. It’s never over, but we were enjoying the chase. The brandies and the cigars kept coming. It was a good day.
We Hit the Road
The flat was behind a vegetarian wholefood paradise called Cross Currants. I’d tiptoe around there in my socks to get a pint of milk in the mornings. It was Dezzie’s business. He was a fresh-looking Asian with infinite calm in his eyes. I liked old Dezzie. He was interested in the band. He was always talking about Barbara Gaskin, who somehow he knew. She’d had a number one record, a Motown cover. It was tantalising, not to have had any hits. I wondered whether one day he’d be telling people he knew me, and we joked about it. He was a good egg. He bought the burned-out house next door, which I thought was an impressive gamble. New Cross was another place that was right on the brink of chaos. The bank down the road took the cash machine away because too many people were getting mugged using it. Des had to put up with all kinds of loonies and whackos as he plied his Fairtrade coffee, organic vegetables and Sosmix. He was spreading his message of goodness and hope to the people of SE14. That flat was the worst place anyone could possibly live in the late twentieth century in the Western world, a polluted, condemned inner-city slum, and yet I was surrounded by kinder hearts there than anywhere else since. Justine was finding her feet, but I worried about leaving her alone in that flat. Des kept an eye on things when we went out on the road.
It was hard to know what was going to happen when we got in the van in the early days. Big gigs are all the same, but the small ones are all very different. As support act, we might be playing in quite a big venue or a tiny little place. We didn’t know until we arrived. Maybe they’d love us or they might throw pints of body fluids at us; we wouldn’t find out until we walked onstage. We hired a van and drove to Birmingham to support the Railway Children. They had a huge sleeper coach, and they were rather pleased with themselves. There weren’t many people there, though. It seemed ridiculous to be in Birmingham on a Sunday evening. We went down quite well. The next time we went to Birmingham was to play at the University Ball, in Aston. There were half a dozen other bands playing, including Voice of the Beehive, who were managed by our record label. They were nice, those Voice of the Beehive girls. They invited us to their dressing room. No one had ever done that before. A dressing room is a member’s club and a party and a home from home all rolled into one. We had some port with them and watched their show.
It was a huge end-of-term celebration party. There were thousands of kids our age there. In some rooms there were bands playing, in others there were people getting friendly. There were bars everywhere, and a huge buffet, a bouncy castle and a bleep-bleep zone with mad lights, full of people I’d never seen before and would never see again, all having the best time of their lives. Just to be there for one night made everything very simple. We were free agents.
I didn’t need any encouragement to go on tour. When the record came out we were booked for three shows over
a weekend - Birmingham, Cambridge and Keele University. Jason, the kid from the rehearsal studios, had been sacked for spending too much time with us. He refused to give them their van back straightaway and we got him to drive us. We were playing in Dudley, Birmingham, at a venue called JB’s. It was our first out-of-town headline slot. It was dark when we arrived because we’d got lost, as usual. We soundchecked and a friendly guy, who seemed too scruffy and nice to be in charge of anything, gave us a crate of Newcastle Brown Ale and showed us the dressing room. It was one of those ones with scrawling all over the walls and a couple of knackered but comfy sofas. We left the door open and sat in there necking the Newcastle Browns. Miraculously, the place started to fill up. Soon it was heaving. The guy came back with another crate of beer. We took it onstage with us. There was a huge cheer. These people had come to enjoy themselves. So had we.
Of all the shows we’ve ever played, that was the most memorable. They just got it, the audience, right there and then. They got the whole thing. Over the last few shows, we’d tightened everything up, rubbed off the edges and cut out the boring bits, but that was the first time we brought the house down. The audience invaded the stage. They went crazy, every last one of them. The dressing room was packed afterwards, and more crates of Newcastle Brown kept arriving. Someone said that I was the fastest bass player he’d ever seen. Graham was holding court with a couple of girls. They were gazing at him and laughing at everything he said. People wanted plectrums, people wanted photos, people wanted records signing and all of a sudden we were giving our first autographs. It all happened in a flash, right there in Dudley. The friendly guy gave Jason a huge wedge of cash. We split it between us. There was ninety quid each, a fortune. Jason drove through the night to Colchester, where we stayed, at Damon’s folks. Colchester’s not that far from Cambridge, which was the next gig.