Bit of a Blur

by Alex James

  Smash Hits was a blend of sophistication and stupidity that somehow managed to unify the whole of pop music. Its pages held the evidence that bored children needed that everything was, in fact, brilliant. Sometimes Wham! were on the cover and sometimes it was Morrissey and Pete Burns. At its peak the magazine was selling nearly a million copies a fortnight and the music industry flourished. The most popular bands made videos that cost a million pounds, while tiny independent labels thrived at the other end of the scale. That magazine spawned monsters every bit as irritating as today’s celebrities, possibly more irritating, because these people considered themselves ‘Artists’, but Smash Hits made music the focal point of all youth culture and the ‘ver hits’ era was the golden age of the pop song. Music is not the focus of the heat generation. In the early twenty-first century there are more music magazines for people aged over thirty than there are for teenagers, and I wonder whether youth culture has had its fifty years in the sun, whether we’ll ever see another band that absolutely everybody loves or hates. In America there’s never been anything like Smash Hits. Maybe that’s why six out of the all-time top ten records in Rolling Stone magazine are by British bands. In America, it seemed a band could sell a billion records but most people would still have never heard of them. Smash Hits would never have allowed that to happen.

  The Smash Hits office was in Carnaby Street, just around the corner from Food Ltd, and the writers used to spend a fair amount of time in the Old Coffee House, a pub on the corner of Beak Street, one of our haunts. They were exceptionally bright, mainly female and mostly younger than us. I liked being in that magazine, but it was actually more enjoyable just getting drunk and being stupid with those girls on Monday afternoons, playing darts, arguing about haircuts and who was fanciable, before they started writing about us. That was actually more like being in the magazine than being featured on its pages.

  Top of the Pops was the other fundamental force. It was more than a TV show, and it’s hard to believe it’s actually gone. Its final broadcast was in July 2006. It’s still probably the most powerful brand name in music broadcasting. There weren’t many things that were exactly as I thought they’d be, but appearing on that show was just like walking inside the television. It was almost magical. Practically everyone there seemed hardly able to believe that they were inside it. There was always a wide-eyed, open-mouthed glee about the studio audience. The acts on TOTP were just a part of the spectacle. Everybody mimed, which made it even more unreal and dream-like, but it was all the bit-part players and extras who made it special: a mammoth blast of bright lights, cameras, smiles and flesh.

  The canteen at the studio in Borehamwood was completely surreal. It was jam-packed with the casts of Grange Hill, EastEnders and whatever top bands were in the country that week. People on telly do have faces you can just stare and stare at. It’s what they get paid for. When we’d been on it in the past we’d been looking at everybody else and thinking, ‘Wow! It’s them.’ Everybody was looking at us this time. It was a good line-up. Vic Reeves, the comedian, was performing his version of ‘Born Free’ with a couple of long-leggedy backing dancers and Mark and Robbie from Take That were presenting the show. The crowd were panting, hysterically screaming and throwing themselves around. All the other bands came out to watch us mime ‘Girls & Boys’ and the audience went berserk at four grown men pretending to play their instruments. It was brilliant.

  I had a very small suitcase with a clean pair of pants and socks, the collected writings of Colette, a large bottle of gin and as many small bottles of tonic that would fit in. We’d just come back from Belgium. We seemed to go to Belgium a lot in those days. There was never a moment to sit back and enjoy the fact that we were actually going to be on Top of the Pops. We were too busy enjoying Belgium.

  I went to drink my gin in the bar and Vic Reeves was there with his friend Jonathan Ross, who had given our first single the raspberry on Juke Box Jury. I changed my mind about hating him forever when he offered to buy me a drink. Then they took me to a place called the Groucho Club.

  The Groucho was quite a small place. There were comfy chesterfields and good-looking staff. It reminded me of an airport lounge and most people there were probably in between flights. There were bowls of Twiglets and someone was playing the piano. That was the furniture, same as anywhere else, with Twiglets thrown in. What set it apart from everywhere else were the people who went there. All towns have one place where everybody wants to go more than everywhere else. Les Bains Douches was the top spot in Paris; in New York it was Spy; Shocking in Milan and so on, all the places I was most likely to run into Einar from the Sugarcubes again. In London, the Groucho was the place, the place where anybody at all might walk through the door. In fact, everybody always looked up when the door opened, to see who it was. Everyone was very friendly. They are when you’re number five.

  It was a long evening that ended up at Dave Stewart’s house in Covent Garden: Dave, myself, a Pet Shop Boy, Vic Reeves, a billionaire and a transvestite. Dave was explaining his art collection, like a proper grown-up rich person. I spilt a drink on the fibre optic carpet. I’d been pretty well behaved up until then. I was living just around the corner, but I still didn’t own much more than I had in the suitcase. Dave Stewart had lots of toys. It was a house for impressing other rich people with, a cross between an old-fashioned imperial castle and a spaceship. I wandered home as day was breaking. Jus wasn’t there. I didn’t have any keys so I scaled the front of the building and climbed in through the window. There was a message on the answerphone from Justine. She was calling from Charing Cross police station to say she’d been arrested for some kind of altercation with a police officer in St James’s Park and was having a night in the cells. She’d been with a booze head from another band who were also signed to Food. When the limo came in the morning, I took it round to the police station and tried to get her out, but they hauled her up before the magistrate. I had to go to Belgium. It was going crazy in Belgium, they said.

  Young, Free, Single, Rich, Famous, Unbearable

  Since I’d got back from Japan to an empty flat a few months before things had not been so sweet at home. Justine moved out as I became more selfish, drunk and unfaithful. It’s hard for a relationship to survive one person becoming successful all of a sudden. Apart from that one arrest, she handled it very well, but I didn’t. I missed her when she was gone and there was no peace.

  To start with, I’d go away on tour and, basically, riot, but I always came home to her calm, stabilising influence. As Parklife gathered more and more momentum I slipped anchor and blew adrift on the shallow sea of a permanent backstage party. There was always one more place to go and I leapt into London’s deep and dark night.

  I decided to stick mostly to champagne. I’d always liked that stuff. I think it started on aeroplanes. They threw champagne at people on aeroplanes in those days, little quarter bottles. Leaving behind a grey Saturday morning at Heathrow they brought the champagne round as soon as the sunshine started crashing through the little windows. It lit up the bubbles as they rose to the top of the glass. Cheap aeroplane champagne: it was a wonderful colour in the brilliant sun. I contemplated the bubbles and measured the gold against the blue sky behind and was happy. In motion, travelling somewhere at great speed, completely serene and still as those bubbles whizzed and fizzed.

  I started on the monopoles. Monopole is one-year-old plonk and good for mixing but I soon developed a taste for Taittinger. That’s quite crispy and biscuit-flavoured. I found Bollinger and Moët a bit yeasty. Taittinger was just a phase and I settled on Cordon Rouge. I got three bottles of that on the rider every day for about five years, but I supplemented it with a systematic tour of all the great champagne houses, Krug, Dom Perignon, La Veuve, all colours, all sizes, all years. On special occasions, or given the choice, I went for Cristal. That was my favourite. It’s in a clear bottle and has a very delicate flavour; a liquid gold that transmogrified into sizzling suds on my tongue and left
me thinking about violets.

  They’re all marvellous. I got quite good at opening a bottle with just a gentle hiss, with one hand. It was important to get all the foil off, to avoid lacerations, and hold it at forty-five degrees, to stop it going everywhere, but the most important thing of all about champagne is that you have to eat a fresh carrot for every bottle that you drink. It’s very acidic and if you guzzle it it makes your breath stink.

  I was quite happy with my three bottles of Cordon Rouge and my three large carrots.

  Champagne was the perfect toast to a time of hope and new beginnings in London. Whole swathes of the city were in a redevelopment boom. Social and cultural interest was rejuvenating; something was stirring in the art world; a new government was looking increasingly likely; Parklife knocked Pink Floyd’s new album off the number one slot, to everyone at EMI’s surprise. Blur weren’t part of a movement; we were right out on our own musically, but we were a part of London’s almost instantaneous rebirth as the world’s hippest city. There were two faces on the covers of all the music magazines. One was Damon’s and the other was Kurt Cobain’s. And suddenly one of them was dead.

  New Friends

  It was the premiere of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Damon and I had been for a couple of Long Island Iced Teas and were in no mood to sit down for an hour and a half. We shouted at the screen for a while and left. We decided to go to the Groucho. I’d been telling him about it. It’s a member’s club, but we got in by saying we were meeting Dave Stewart. We figured he wouldn’t mind.

  Damon went off to argue with a guy with a ponytail and I sat at the bar staring at myself. This was a good club. There was no way of knowing what would happen next. Damon came back twenty minutes later with Helena Christensen. She was the most beautiful woman in the world. I was very interested in her face. I suppose everybody was. It was a face that made suggestions that great things might be true and pictures of it always made me feel better. I wondered how else I might have come to meet this woman. Appearing on Top of the Pops and being in Smash Hits was very satisfying, but it wasn’t my ultimate aim in life. Being face to face with, in my considered opinion, the most beautiful woman in the world was an absolutely concrete result. I suddenly felt I’d arrived somewhere new. It was completely ridiculous that all I did was put my fingers on strings. I said, ‘God, I think you’re beautiful. Do you like cheese?’ She seemed to know a fair bit about cheeses. There was one you could get in Denmark that had worms inside it. It was a lot to take on board all of a sudden.

  She said, ‘Come to Browns.’ There was a driver waiting and Damon and I got in the car with her and Michael Hutchence.

  Browns was very glitzy, gaudier than a wedding cake. It was built on different foundations from the Groucho. It was a house made of the very finest straw. Despite most of the people in the Groucho being off their faces, it was quite an intellectual, brainy kind of a place. Huge minds set free in drink and exploring each other, quipping bons mots and scheming. Browns was more the bodies exploring each other kind of place and it was best to check your brain in at the door. Soap stars, boxers, footballers, princes, models and gangsters traded money, fame and sex. It was quite dark for somewhere that was made entirely from lights and mirrors. On the whole, Browns attracted a worse kind of person than anywhere else in the universe and at that point I was the worst person in the universe. Arrogant, drunk and indomitable, and yet everybody was saying come on in.

  I went out every night. Film extravaganzas, magazine launches, parties in shops and bashes in museums and big houses in Chelsea and Notting Hill, gigs at the Astoria, gay discos, the Groucho, Browns, an endless circle of red carpet.

  Graham had now moved to Camden and sometimes I went to see him there in the Good Mixer public house. He shunned the garish drama of the party circuit but he couldn’t escape from the circus either. He had become the mad king of a strange people who all looked like him, and he held his court at the Mixer. Dave never went out. He bought an aeroplane as a means of escape and occupied himself with that. Damon moved to Notting Hill. He was starting to get pursued by paparazzi, and there were often fans and photographers outside his house. He kept on working. We all got on well with one another but nobody really liked each other’s friends. We weren’t so much of a gang any more. We all had our own gangs.

  I was sitting at the bar in the Groucho on my own. It was pretty empty in there as it was a Saturday. I didn’t recognise anybody. I was just sitting at the bar drinking a Brandy Alexander: brandy, cream and nutmeg in a martini glass. It was nice to have a quiet drink, and a think. I was smoking a Camel filter, checking myself out in the mirror and wondering who to call and where to go next. A silly voice said ‘Alex! Alex from Blur!’ I ignored it. Then it said, ‘I love you, Alex!’ I looked up and at the end of the bar someone was pulling the funniest face I’d ever seen, puckering his lips and batting his eyelids. I laughed and said, ‘I love you too, darling.’ And went back to my thoughts. The voice said, ‘Don’t you remember me? From college? We played pool together! I’m Damien! Damien fuckin’ ’irst!’ I said, ‘Wow, I was wondering what you looked like.’ He brought his wine over. He lived in Germany and he loved the Beatles. He swore a lot. He seemed very interested in everything I said. It was unusual to meet someone so forthright and curious. He was fascinated, more fascinated than anyone had ever been by exactly what had happened with the band. He quizzed and queried, prodded and probed. It’s usually dull to answer questions. People ask you questions all the time if you’re in the papers and on the telly. I was beginning to recognise that celebrity status was like living a kind of perpetual interview. It’s like you just sprouted another weird head in place of your old one and everybody wants to stare at it and ask it questions all of a sudden. After a while, it’s too late and your old head will never grow back and you’re left with the one that people point at. It’s your own fault, too.

  I liked Damien’s questions. They were unusual. Soon I was trying to explain where Jupiter was. Damien liked the fact that it didn’t have a surface. Something without a surface was very exciting to him. It was to me, too. I was drawing him a map of the solar system and he was making me laugh.

  I’d done a fair bit of hobnobbing with famous people by this time. They didn’t seem to have anything in common, particularly. Famous people generally seemed like everybody else, only a bit more famous. Rich people aren’t particularly different from anyone else either. They’ve just got more money. Fame is just another kind of money. It can do things that money can’t, but it’s just a currency. No one ever loved anyone because they were rich. No one ever really loved anyone because they were famous, but it’s an attractive quality.

  Over the course of our conversation, I gradually became aware that I was talking to somebody quite exceptional. He was very, very funny. That was the first thing about him. He was an irresistible combination of rudeness and wit. The two qualities set each other off. He drew everybody in: the barman; people on either side of us; the piano player. He bought drinks for everybody. It was the kind of place where that happened. A lot of comedians drank there, too, so there was no shortage of funny people buying drinks. It was a good place to be. Damien was intensely engaging, though. He was trying to tell me something that I realised I really needed to know, and he was illustrating it with farts and stupid facial expressions.

  He wasn’t yet famous, but he was obviously a genius. When I woke up, my pockets were full of his drawings.

  The Brits

  On the day of the Brit Awards I had breakfast with Mike Smith, my publisher, as I often did. He was nursing an extra spiky headache and trying to draw me. He always had a sketchbook with him, in his satchel. He was perpetually losing that bag. He left it in Freud’s so many times they had a special place behind the bar for it. You could tell if he’d had a big night by whether he had his bag with him at breakfast time. He always got it back by mid-afternoon, although sometimes it took all morning to locate, when he should really have been trying to sign
the Cranberries. Quite often it turned up at the Bull and Gate, Kentish Town. That was always a good place to start looking. He had a black taxi account so he could always trace it when he left it in his cab. It sometimes spent the night in restaurants and it did a whole run at the Astoria, Charing Cross Road. It always came back in the end, apart from once. He completely lost his old bag at the Brit Awards. He went back and checked the whole of Alexandra Palace, but he never found it. Sometimes he would become maudlin, and mourn for that bag. It was still a talking point. He was wondering whether to leave it at home altogether tonight.

  The Brits was a no-holds-barred piss-up. It was a night of complete carnage every single time. It’s the music industry’s biggest night of the year. The music business is a succession of big nights: parties, awards and launches, openings anniversaries, presentations, big gigs and festivals, and that’s just work. The Brits is the daddy of all parties. All the big guns line up for the Brit Awards. Madonna, Elton John, all the evergreens, the unsinkable battleships in the business, would be there. I’d never been before. We were probably considered a risk by the organisers, too likely to act up, and, besides that, the band had never been nominated for anything. Every year as the awards came around and we didn’t feature in the line-up, there had always been time to dwell on our disappointment. This time we were up for something in practically every category and there had hardly been a moment to consider what it all meant. We were performing a couple of songs, including ‘Parklife’ with Phil Daniels who’d become a fifth member of the band.

  It was a vast glittering spectacle, a multimillion pound trifle. America has the Oscars and we have the Brits. It’s the annual showbiz party that everybody wants to go to, the one that reaches beyond the music and gossip pages and into the headlines.