Bit of a Blur

by Alex James

  In a sea of onlookers, beyond a moat of international media, the whole of Alexandra Palace was bedecked, bejewelled and lit up like a Christmas tree. Inside there was a full-sized fairground with carousels, bumper cars and a big wheel. Hundreds of waiters tended to acres of white tablecloth. Champagne flowed, cocaine snowed and a steady rain of superstars took a bow.

  I invited Justine but she was too busy dancing with the bass player from Pulp and I ended up on a park bench with Keith Allen. He’d just kind of appeared and he just kept appearing from then on.

  When I woke up in the morning, I knew my life had changed forever. We’d won everything going; it was a record-breaking haul. Blur had become a household name over the course of the evening. I went out to get The Times for the crossword. A young girl walking along the street with her mother went into hysterics and there was a picture of me on page three of The Times. It’s always a jolt to be confronted by your own image when you’re not expecting it, especially the first few times it happens. There is no image more shocking or scary than your own. I can see why some of those people who lived in the jungle thought their souls were being stolen when they had their photograph taken. It was like there was a bit of me that had gone beyond my reach. I’m sure the jungle-dwellers didn’t think it was their souls being stolen anyway. It was just a bit of media vertigo as far as they were concerned, too.

  We were in all the newspapers. Until the night before we’d been strictly music magazine fodder. I’d always found it slightly depressing when taxi drivers, having established that I was a musician, would ask the name of the band and then say, ‘Nah, mate.’ A lot of time was spent in taxis. They’re one of the perks of being in a band. If you’re a TV presenter, you get free clothes. If you work in a hotel, you get fed. As soon as we signed our record deal there seemed to be a taxi waiting constantly. Record companies don’t perform miracles, but they do make sure bands turn up to things.

  Suddenly taxi drivers had heard of us. It was much worse. Being grilled by a thrilled taxi driver trapped inside a hangover trapped inside a taxi trapped in thick traffic, first thing in the morning, was harder to bear than being obscure. I do like talking to taxi drivers, just not about those kinds of things. It’s too repetitive. I started to say I was an accountant, which was usually good enough to kill it. I thought accountants probably needed to pretend they were rock stars occasionally, but I had no idea people in bands sometimes had to pretend they were accountants.

  The Great Escape

  Our lives were changing. Graham split up with his girlfriend and Dave married his. Dave’s new wife’s ex-flatmate was going out with a singer-songwriter person called Stephen Duffy. He’d been the original singer in Duran Duran and had written some good songs, mainly about girls. I met him at the wedding and we talked for a long time, mainly about girls. We decided to make a record together. I wrote some songs about girls and a month later we were on Top of the Pops. Damien Hirst liked one of the songs, ‘Hanging Around’, and used it in a film he was making. I was seeing a lot of Damien by this time. He’d moved back from Berlin to London where he was making quite a noise. He was intrigued by success and by Blur as we’d been at Goldsmiths together.

  He and Keith Allen were a double act. They could really make each other laugh and the euphoria of their humour created a strong bond between them. I saw a lot of Keith, too. He was a permanent fixture in London’s nightscape. He knew absolutely everybody and everybody either loved him or hated him. His younger brother is a Hollywood film director; his ex-wife is an Oscar-winning film producer; his daughter is a pop star. I can see a small part of his essence in all of them, but he was the devastating big bang from which they all evolved, a free spirit; that’s what Damien really liked about him. There was always a danger that Keith might set the house on fire or be absolutely disgraceful in some way. He must have been nearly fifty. He’d just lost his hair and started wearing bad jumpers.

  The final member of the Groucho squad was a chef, a Frenchman named Charles Fontaine. He was credited with inventing the fishcake, but that wasn’t why I liked him. He just liked cooking and enjoying himself. He wasn’t part of the fame rat race. I made records with Duffy and I made merry with Keith and Damien and Charles.

  During the making of The Great Escape there were people outside the studio, outside all our houses. The recording process was interrupted by TV appearances, awards shows and late nights. There were journalists in the studio control room, observing the band at work, photographers taking pictures of us recording our parts and picking our noses. We all had our own circles of friends - it would have been weird if we hadn’t - but we still spent more time together than with anybody else.

  We got a lot of fan mail. Ninety per cent of fan mail says the same thing. The majority of letters are written by a small number of people who write lots of fan mail. They didn’t just write to us, they wrote to everybody, asking for photographs, autographs, tickets, favours and so on. Then there’s the other 10 per cent, from people who had something particular to say to all of us, or one of us, because we’d moved them in some peculiar way. Some of it was beautiful and lifted my heart. Some of it was very, very scary. Graham seemed to get the hairiest stuff; he showed me photographs of people maiming themselves and threatening the worst if he wouldn’t help them. My weird ones tended to veer towards pornography, which I was much more comfortable with.

  One of the first things we recorded for The Great Escape was ‘Stereotypes’, which we were all very excited about at the time. We thought that it would be the first single. The demo version of ‘The Universal’ had a calypso feel. It was a tune and a half, using Mozart-style chord suspensions and Bacharach-flavour modulation, but we couldn’t get the arrangement quite right. We battled with it for two days, on and off, and were just about to give up when Damon hit upon the string figure that ultimately became the intro. After that, everything clicked into place at once. That was two good ones in the bag. There was a baroque oompah song about Balfe selling Food Ltd and running away to live in a big house in the country, but that was just a joke.

  We were halfway through recording The Great Escape when we played a one-off gig at Mile End Stadium in east London. It was a huge outdoor show. We’d broken out of the usual circuit of arenas into the big time. I don’t know how many people it held, maybe twenty-five thousand. It was a stadium. We were used to playing to large audiences at festivals, but this was a home crowd. It was a rainy day in a part of town not normally associated with rock and roll, but it was a hot ticket and it wouldn’t have mattered if it had snowed.

  We played ‘Country House’. We’d just finished recording it and although it was an odd one, Streetie suggested it might go down well live. I had to concentrate harder than usual on what I was doing as it was the first time we’d played it. I remember looking up after making a mistake halfway through the first chorus to see if anyone had noticed and the whole crowd was bouncing as one, waving their arms in time and smiling as they squashed each other senseless. By the last chorus they were all singing it. When that happens that means it’s a single.

  It was a strange day overall. I was expecting it to feel like a crowning moment, but I remember being surrounded by a lot of people I didn’t particularly want to see. Blur had become public property.

  Battle of the Bands

  The day after the show at Mile End we flew to America, where we were still playing in bars. It was a blessed relief to be incognito, free again to have random adventures with girls in red cars without it turning up in the Sunday newspapers.

  We’d all suffered a bit from tabloid shame. Graham was going through a phase of getting run over by cars. Damon’s ex-girlfriend, who he’d once written a sickly, sentimental ballad about, sold her story to one of the more ghastly newspapers. She looked small and plain in the photograph, not like in the song.

  The stories came thick and fast. One tabloid had me dating Helena Christensen. According to the front page of the Daily Sport I was involved in a lesbo-slut tri
angle. Another tabloid had me down for a make-up artist who was servicing the whole of Browns. The Star printed a photo of me with a music journalist called Sylvia Patterson. None of it was true. Sylvia sued the Daily Star and got five hundred quid. She was thrilled about that and bought me a drink.

  I discovered another bar in Endell Street: the Mars Bar. It was open for an hour longer than Freud’s. I went there with the bar-maids from Freud’s after that shut. All the girls who worked in Freud’s were pretty. It was that kind of a place. I was very at home in the Mars. It was a good building, a five-storey town house with a restaurant on the ground and first, and a mad chef in the cellar. Freddy, the Dutch owner, offered jobs to the bar-maids I brought with me. He was grateful to me for bringing them round there and gave me a set of keys to say thank you. He asked me to replace what booze my friends and I drank, but we could help ourselves. It was a happy arrangement and I tried not to abuse it.

  ‘Country House’ was pencilled in for high-summer release. It seemed like more than just another record. It felt like the world was changing. The band’s influence had become so noteworthy that even the Labour Party had their eye on us. Damon went to the Houses of Parliament to see Tony Blair and came to the flat with a couple of bottles of House of Commons gin afterwards. I could imagine Damon looking the future Prime Minister right in the eyes and saying, ‘What?’ and Tony Blair saying, ‘Excuse me?’ and Damon saying, ‘WHAT MATE?’ and making him feel uncomfortable. This was one of the times when Damon had the gun and the other guy had the little stick. People were shouting, ‘Je-sus, Je-sus’ at Damon, quite a lot at gigs. He didn’t need a pat on the back from anybody. Mike Smith had a big new office all of a sudden. He had been trying to sign a band called Oasis. They were from Manchester. Their first album was doing well and their girlfriends were always in Browns. They were signed to Creation Records where Dave’s wife worked. She called me when their single went to number one and asked if I knew where they could have a party. I was the party guy. She booked the Mars Bar and we all went along. It was just another night in the Mars Bar. I went to the Groucho and they went to Browns and I thought no more about it.

  Their album was selling fast and the music press started to draw comparisons between the two acts. I didn’t really have any strong feelings about them. The singer had a good voice, but the music was honky. They were quite a different thing from Blur. They seemed to have a lot to say about us. I always sniggered when they slung their muck in our direction. Both bands were in the papers quite a lot and journalists would ask us what we thought about them and no doubt they had to answer lots of questions about us. They worked themselves up into quite a froth. I always dodged questions about other bands.

  Oasis kept rising to the bait, like dogs barking at cats. We seemed to be the main thing they talked about. The NME particularly liked to stir things up and antagonise them. They definitely wanted to see a fight. Record companies usually cooperate with each other with big releases. Not this time. Both bands were pencilled in to release the lead singles from their new albums on the same day and nobody wanted to budge.

  Damien Hirst directed the video for ‘Country House’. It used the language of breasts and bottoms. Graham’s new girlfriend was on a crusade against that kind of thing. She had a real zeal for it. She hated the video, and us. Particularly me, I think. Graham became quite despondent. He was the only person in the whole country who wasn’t interested in the record war. As the release date drew nearer, everything escalated to a full-on frenzy. Everything.

  I suppose if I was trying to explain to a very old lady what I did for a living, which I do have to from time to time, I would have said, ‘I’m a musician, I make records and behave appallingly. It’s great.’ If the old lady said, ‘Do you mean like Oasis?’ I would have to say, ‘Yes, exactly.’ There wasn’t that much difference between the two bands and, when viewed from a little old lady’s point of view, they were pretty much the same thing. That said, I think on the whole old ladies prefer Blur to Oasis. Oasis probably had the edge with ‘geezers’ and ‘lads’. As the insults flew and grew, what might have been a page three, five or seven story became a matter of national interest and a front-page news item. The week the records came out I went to stay with Damien in Devon. He had bought a farmhouse on Exmoor. Phones didn’t work there, but I kept up with what was happening. It was impossible to avoid. There was something in the papers every day. It was on the television news, on the radio. It was on the breeze, even. I found out we were number one in a car on the way back to London, listening to the top forty countdown like everyone else. There was a party in Soho and Graham surprised everyone by trying to jump out of the window.

  Here it was, the great national success story, but I think we were all confused. Damon was trapped inside the most famous face in the country and he couldn’t buy a bottle of beetroot juice without causing a sensation. Graham felt he’d gained the world and lost his soul, that the juggernaut of attainment had compromised his principles. I think he felt he’d lost control of what he wanted the band to be, and that we’d made a terrible mistake. I didn’t think we’d compromised, but I had lost the thing I loved the most. Justine was still the only woman I’d had anything approaching a sophisticated emotional connection with. Everything else had been skin-deep and selfish.

  Apart from Belgium, where things had inexplicably cooled off, there was hysteria across the whole of Europe. In Italy we were mobbed, we had police escorts in Portugal. Shops were closed for us. Roads were closed. We were trapped inside a radio station in Madrid and our private jet had to wait with its engines running while the Guardia Civil extricated us. Even they all wanted our autographs. There were thousands of screaming people outside. The screaming at gigs was deafening. From the end of summer to the start of Christmas, the screaming never stopped. It’s really bad for your ears. Graham didn’t like it at all. He wanted to play his guitar out of tune and draw monsters.

  Proper Girls

  We had a fortnight off for Christmas. I went to the House of Commons and got drunk. It was good in there. It was reassuring that there were so many clever people doing their best, behaving responsibly and acting for the greater good. I met Clare Short, MP, on the way out. She’s my favourite politician. I kissed her and said, ‘Happy Christmas, darling.’ I was still enjoying my lack of responsibilities. Being able to have whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, had made me grotesque and self-centred, but there was a huge upside to being cash rich and morally bankrupt.

  I had rather a lot of girlfriends, particularly in London. There were three girls in the flat when I woke up a few days before Christmas Eve. Francesca had appeared all of a sudden a few days before and she was nice. Lisa was usually at Browns, but that had closed for Christmas. Tabitha was a catwalk model. She was astonishingly pretty. That face had catapulted her from Petersfield via Tokyo, where I met her, in the Lexington Queen, to the most exclusive enclaves of New York City and the most fabulous houses in The Hamptons. It was a ticket, her face; a skeleton key for every door there is. There was no room that wouldn’t have been enhanced by her presence. She turned heads and flipped brains over. She was never that famous, but she had everything that famous people have and more. People stared and wanted to talk to her, wanted to follow her. In a way fame would have weighed her down. She didn’t need to be famous. It was kind of beneath her. She had a unique quality of unaffected, lighter than anything, beauty. That was enough for everybody. It’s the most precious and sought-after quality in the universe and she had it. When someone has that, they really don’t need anything else. An endless stream of billionaires, singers and cool daddies sought her company.

  A lorryload of clothes arrived and we all dressed up. I wanted nothing more than to go and play the trivia machine in the Crown at Seven Dials. Doing the washing up with three beautiful women is pretty riveting. Sitting in an empty pub is blissful. We had some cocktails in Freud’s, as it was on the way.

  Lisa was good fun, a shrewd operator. She’d had a fe
w famous boyfriends. The gene pool of the famous is quite tiny. Everyone in the public eye seemed to be shagging the same handful of girls. Even in other countries, girls I met knew everyone I knew, or so it seemed. It was hard to break out of the circle. Lisa was as unavoidable as taxes. Streetwise, half Jamaican. She could sing and had a record deal, but that didn’t come in to why anyone liked her. She just knew what boys were thinking. She always knew something that I didn’t that I really needed to know. I suppose that’s the definition of a beautiful woman. Making records has got nothing to do with it.

  We all stayed up for a few days at my house, dancing to the Bee Gees in the Mars Bar and playing cards. I called my mum on Christmas Eve and said I was coming for Christmas and bringing a girl called Francesca with me. I didn’t think she could handle all three of them. I grabbed a Stilton from the cheese shop and we jumped on the train.

  It was nice to be in Bournemouth. We ran into Danny Collier, the cool kid who used to get the bus every day, and went back to his parents’ house for some whisky. I’d sometimes dreamed of leaving and coming back like this from conquering the world. I did what I said I was going to do. I showed those fuckers.

  Maybe my mum didn’t see the all-conquering hero. She just saw a drunken buffoon, a glittering ponce with a huge grin all over his stupid face of the moment. She knew the neighbours were all dying to come round and see the famous person, and here he was singing songs about red knickers and trying to buy a horse on Christmas Day.

  On Boxing Day I went back to London to get Tabitha and took her to a hotel where I’d always wanted to stay, in Corfe Castle in rural Dorset. Suddenly we were alone and it was very still and quiet. Immaculate. We walked to Kimmeridge, my favourite place, and I built a big bonfire. There’s absolutely nothing to do there, just fossils and shells and rock pools. It’s where you realise if you love someone or not. I felt a bit bored. It was surprising. She was possibly the most beautiful woman in the world. I thought success would be the answer to everything. I’d climbed a hill and seen a mountain in the distance. I climbed the mountain and I saw the moon. I somehow got to the moon and realised I’d left what I loved behind in another world. I missed Justine. I’d come all this way to realise I really was happiest with what I already had. It was a journey that had to be made. I wanted it all. I’d never felt I wanted to escape from Justine. I’d just lost her. I just wanted to sit and be quiet with her, listen to her thoughts and make her laugh.