Bit of a Blur

by Alex James

  Infinite Returns

  It was such a relief to be on a plane to Iceland again and leaving all the madness behind. Thor sent a hundred and fifty Hell’s Angels to escort us from the airport into Reykjavik. I went straight to Magnea’s house and they all revved their engines outside the window.

  Graham and Dave weren’t interested in going to Iceland. All their parts were done, so they didn’t really need to be there. There’s no way I wouldn’t have been there, even if I’d hated the place. But it really was the top of the world.

  Magnea liked going to all the bad places, bars in the docks where the fishermen had fights and the place by the bus station where the bad alcoholics and mad people drank. She had the quality of glamour and those dives emphasised her beauty. She conjured a plain, everyday situation into a vivid, whirling world of wonder.

  ‘Bastard.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got three boyfriends, you’re worse than I am.’

  ‘Wanker.’

  ‘Do you want a drink?’

  ‘Fucker.’

  I think we probably loved each other.

  To start with there were quite a lot of girls outside her flat, waiting for me. By the end of the week, there were loads of boys outside. It was her three boyfriends and all their mates. I had to leave via the bathroom window to get to the studio.

  Civilisation was no longer safe anywhere and so we went on an expedition to the interior. In the magazine on the aeroplane it said that the Icelandic interior was uninhabitable. I’d been intrigued by the thought of an inhospitable landscape. Surely you could live anywhere, if you were determined?

  I was wrong. No one could live there. The otherworldliness starts with an eggy smell. It’s not a smell that I could ever get used to. It’s constantly updating itself with new overtones and flavours of the day, a multifaceted huge and invisible smellscape. When the wind changed, it seemed to present a new view of the smell, one that I couldn’t have considered from the other side, or the back of it. It lurked and it thrusted and it wouldn’t leave us alone.

  Once we got through the stench, we were on to the ice. The ice goes on forever. I never managed to grasp the idea of ‘forever’ quite so clearly as on the Vatnajökull Glacier, Europe’s largest. It’s not just the scale of the thing. It’s the timelessness and the immeasurable silence of the place. It goes beyond geography into the realms of planetary science with its astronomical proportion, a pure, elemental realm. We zoomed around on skidoos, unaffected by the passage of time in the perpetual sunlight, mountains in the distance and the sky blue and constant.

  When we emerged, I went with Magnea to visit a poet called Buppi, who lived in a cottage by a lake at the bottom of a valley, which is only right. He was a mad-eyed sprite, bald as a baby and bright and playful as a stream. He was very engaging and I couldn’t help myself from getting involved with his thoughts, which were quite complicated. We walked up a big hill, which is always a good thing to do with a poet. Magnea picked camomile flowers and we sat on the prow. ‘Everyone in Iceland is a poet,’ he declared. ‘Wherever you look, there’s a distant horizon. Everyone’s standing at the centre of a very big circle.’ It was true. The Icelandic people are a race apart. It’s a very modern society. They’re exceptionally well travelled, and resilient. The women are beautiful and the men are quite fearless. There is a Viking streak in all of them. A popular sport was driving bangers at full speed up the sides of U-shaped glacial valleys to see how far up the vertical face they could get. Sometimes the cars just fell off. The great unknown was all around and all-prevailing. They flung themselves into it with bravado. Buppi was a genuine wise man and my brain was starting to overrev.

  So much ice and water. Steaming out of the ground, falling from the sky and sitting in huge lakes, streams that tasted so sweet and cool. Iceland. The Vikings called it Iceland so that no one would bother invading it, and stashed all their beautiful women there.

  We stopped at a frozen lake that had thawed at the edges. A small wooden hut stood alongside. The hut was built on top of a geothermic spring. There are geysers all over the place. This was quite a steady, calm one; some of them were explosively violent and drew crowds when they were erupting, but there was no one around for miles. We stripped naked and sat in the hut, feeling the supercolossal thrum of the molten core of the earth. It was a great sauna, the very best. When we could bear the heat no longer, we took a running plunge into the frozen lake. Then we needed to get back in the hut. It made our skin prickle.

  Things were pretty mental everywhere. The band were booked in for a short tour of North America. I thought I’d have a couple of weeks off the booze for the duration and take stock of everything that was going on in my life.

  I was in a band. Good. I was drinking too much, but I’d stopped. Good. I was shagging too much. Hmmm. Good. Writing songs for people whose music I’d always loved. Good. It was all good, but it didn’t have Justine in it anywhere. I called her and invited her out to San Francisco. She said, ‘Yes.’

  Even when I went to bed early, all those miles and miles and miles and never knowing where the toilet was and having a new address every day, and new friends, just took it out of me. I wouldn’t have swapped places with anyone, but it was still physically exhausting.

  It wasn’t as much fun without the bad things, but hangovers had become ordeals that hung around for days, like bad weather, dealing out every kind of pain, psychological torment, ache and torpor.

  I thought as a rock star I owed it to people to enjoy myself to the absolute limit. It was a missed opportunity for everybody if I didn’t. Turpitude, extreme immorality, is the privilege of the rock star. No one else would get away with it. Even film stars and footballers have to conduct themselves with some degree of common decency. They’re all answerable to somebody. Making music is a self-indulgent business and success is just more wood for the bonfire. Absolutely every proper rock star in history has gone through a phase of self-indulgence of proportions inconceivable to the rest of the population. That’s kind of what a rock star is. It would be dull to just turn up and play some songs and leave. It’s not what everybody wants. There’s nothing profoundly evil about what goes on backstage. It’s just mucky.

  Damien won the Turner Prize and put it behind the bar at the Groucho, twenty grand. It was a good time to have left the country. I wondered if I knew anyone normal any more. I unwittingly came across an article about Charles Fontaine’s culinary genius in the first bookshop I went into when we arrived in Toronto. He was supposed to be my most normal friend and even he seemed to be big in Canada.

  8

  rocket science

  Cavemen

  It was hard to say what was going to turn up in the loo at the Groucho. One night in those toilets I got talking to a guy who said he had a twenty-thousand-year-old flute, so I gave him my number. Rarely for the Groucho, he called me in the morning and asked if I wanted to see it. We met at a warehouse in King’s Cross. There are lots of warehouses around there, but this must have been the strangest. The entrance was nondescript. A steel gate on a grubby street gave on to a loading bay with the usual pallets and forklifts. We walked through more heavy doors into great rooms full of incalculable amounts of treasure of all kinds. There were Egyptian artefacts, sculptures from ancient Greece, manuscripts, icons and jewellery in endless, neat rows - all of them priceless. It was the property of the British Museum. The museum only displays a fraction of all its assets at any particular time, and this was one of several places where the nation’s surplus hoard was stored, a holding bay. Some of the pieces would be loaned to other museums, some were being studied, some were just waiting there to come back into fashion. It would have made any vulgar New York billionaire art collector weep to peek in there. The warehouse setting was a good environment to see wonders like that. I had no desire to possess any of it. It was all too precious to have a private owner. The abundance of rarities was devastating. Some of the things were in glass cases, some were packed in boxes with labels stating
their contents. They were free from any kind of marketing or presentation hocus-pocus, but everything there had some historical significance, and hundreds and thousands of years after it was made still had the power to take my breath away. It made Damien’s stuff look piffling and flimsy by comparison.

  The ancient musical artefacts section was on the third floor. There was an expert in these matters in attendance. I recognised a flute-type thing, a clay pipe with finger holes, but she said that was relatively recent, only a few thousand years old. The oldest musical instruments do date back twenty thousand years. Archaeological findings show that there was almost nothing in the way of art until twenty thousand years ago and then suddenly there was an almost instant gush of cave paintings, tools and musical instruments. The first instruments were drums, probably mammoths’ skulls, bashed with mammoths’ bones. Not much has changed in the drum world.

  The earliest tonal instruments were made from reindeer toe bones. They’re closer to a whistle than a flute to look at, but they are technically flutes because you blow across the hole, rather than down it. You get different notes in the harmonic series depending on how hard you blow. Of all the things in that warehouse, they were among the least obviously beautiful. If one turned up in the kitchen the morning after a big night, I wouldn’t have said, ‘Wow, someone’s left this amazing thing here.’ I’d probably have thrown it away before realising what it was. It didn’t look like much, I must be honest. It didn’t sound great either but those little crusty bones were where it all started. A primitive musical instrument made by a primitive scientist.

  Twenty thousand years later, anyone sitting down at a piano is sitting on top of a huge mountain of accumulated knowledge. When you hold even the cheapest guitar, you’re wielding a very sophisticated tool. The twelve-tone scale is a triumph of scientific understanding. It’s such a perfect structure that it’s rarely questioned or even understood by the people who use it. All musicians know how to tune up their instruments, but very few have any idea what they are actually doing as they tune. Musicians rarely have any more of an inkling of what music is than an electrician knows what electricity is.

  All the really tricky business of the evolution of music has taken place, and it’s not important to know everything. It’s just important to know what sounds good. All anyone needs is one little idea. It can even be someone else’s idea. All you’ve got to be able to do is pick the good ones. There are no rules that can’t be broken in music making. Confidence is all-important. Things that are completely wrong can sound new and interesting if they are done with conviction.

  Sometimes we struggled with songs and it paid off; sometimes we struggled and got nowhere. Sometimes it was easy. Our most popular song was written in fifteen minutes while we were waiting for a piece of gear to turn up. We just thrashed it out. I hadn’t been to bed. None of us took it very seriously; it wasn’t long enough to be a single and the only words you could hear were ‘Woo-hoo’.

  If musicians only talked about writing songs in interviews, they would be very dull to read. It’s an exhilarating process though, songwriting. Writing a new song felt better than anything else that happened with the band. It was better than a hundred thousand people screaming at us, or sex with strangers, or meeting the Queen at Buckingham Palace. It always starts off with the certain feeling that I will never be able to do it. Then something always happens. Making music isn’t something you do by thinking about it or talking about it; it’s something that you do by doing it. The four of us would all play together and usually it was good. You can’t usefully analyse it any further. The equations of music-making chemistry are complex. Turn up to work and turn up the volume.

  Astronomers

  I was reading the astronomy book for about the fifth time when I joined the British Astronomical Association. They sent me a newsletter telling me where to look for meteorite showers, comets, planetary conjunctions and eclipses. The tone of their correspondence was very friendly and encouraging. I was also welcome to use their library at Burlington House, in Piccadilly. It’s one of London’s finest buildings, Burlington House. It’s the home of the Royal Academy of Arts, as well as a number of learned societies. I love that part of town; ambling around St James’s with nothing in particular to do was about my favourite daytime activity. There are people who still dress like Sherlock Holmes in St James’s, south of Piccadilly.

  At the desk at Burlington House I said I was a member of the British Astronomical Association and asked where the library was. I was shown into a vast, galleried, oak-panelled hall with books from floor to ceiling. It had those ladders on wheels attached to rails, to enable you to reach the books on the top shelves. There was one other person in there. He was deep in thought with a book on his lap.

  I could hardly believe how brilliant that room was. It was like walking into a dream I’d been having. I wanted to stay there forever and read everything. It had to be the finest collection of books for space heads in the world. There was a huge section on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, none of which sensationalised it in any way. It was all cold and rational and delicious. It was immensely calm in there and sun flooded through the vast windows. The Queen lived at one point in a house not far away, and I felt almost certain that she might pop in to get away from everything and perhaps consider briefly the moons of the outer planets or read the latest published papers. The photocopied monthly newsletter didn’t suggest anything like this. It was an excellent deal for seventeen pounds a year. I took out a dozen books.

  I didn’t tell many people about that place. I liked keeping it to myself. No one would have been interested anyway. I’d been going there for quite some time when I mentioned that I hadn’t received my newsletter, as I was returning some books. The librarian said, ‘Newsletter? We don’t publish a newsletter! Are you sure you’ve come to the right place?’ I said, ‘This is the Astronomical Association, isn’t it?’ He said, ‘This is the Royal Astronomical Society. Perhaps you’re looking for the British Astronomical Association? That’s upstairs.’ Another gentleman came over. He seemed to be in charge. He said that I was welcome to come here if I could get two other Fellows of the RAS to propose me as a member - as if that wouldn’t be a problem - and they shooed me upstairs. In a tiny room at the top was an old lady sitting in front of a small bookcase. She was typing. She was very friendly and said if I wanted to borrow any of the books I was quite welcome.

  I was usually the only person in that library. It was a shame.

  I prefer playing music to listening to recordings of it. Maybe the Victorians had the right idea. Where there is now a plasma screen, there might once have been a piano. I’d rather sit with a guitar or at a piano with a songbook and let it all flow through me. It’s like being able to get inside a painting or a dream or the mind of the person who wrote it. Graham was forever right inside some musical landscape; he always had lots of CDs with him on tour. Dave always took a computer wherever we went. Damon usually took an acoustic guitar, herbs for making tea and a selection of magic hats. I always took a guitar, too. I worked my way through the great pop writers: Roy Orbison, who the Beatles learned a thing or two from; Holland-Dozier-Holland, who wrote a lot of the Motown classics; Jimmy Webb, for ‘Up, Up and Away’ and ‘Wichita Lineman’; the Gibb brothers - the Bee Gees-Imarvelled at their sophisticated key changes, wonderful harmonies and the best grooves of anybody; the melodies of The Mamas & the Papas written by John Phillips, and countless others besides.

  A guitar is a good companion on the road. When I felt wretched, broken, guilty and disgusted with myself, it was a source of comfort. When I was feeling cheeky I dived into its mysteries. It’s a good piece of furniture and every home should have one to go with the piano. Houses without musical instruments are slightly barren places.

  As well as a guitar I had my trusty book, Foundations of Astronomy. I’d been reading it from cover to cover for years by then. As I learned more about astronomy, the less I realised I knew. The ordinary, everyd
ay part of life is so overwhelming it’s easy to forget that we’re floating on a pure and beautiful blue sphere in space and that the greatest adventure is about to begin. We’re on the cusp of new paradigms; shifts in our understanding of everything and things are changing fast. The astronomy book had had two revisions since I had started reading it. In the 1990 edition, no planets had been positively identified outside the solar system. Since then, they’ve started turning up everywhere.

  My favourite place is called the Oort cloud. It’s a big jumble of icy rocks way, way beyond Pluto. They float gently around the sun in endless silence. Occasionally one of them falls out of its orbit and starts hurtling towards our star, which heats it to an incandescent fireball before slinging it back where it came from. Most comets come from the Oort cloud.

  The Oort cloud is too far away to get to at the moment, but Mars seemed like a reasonable place to be aiming for.

  The Idler magazine sent me to interview Patrick Moore, the astronomer. He’s also a musician and there were quite a lot of things I wanted to ask him about. His house was full of books and silence. It was a good place for thinking. He interviewed me, really, to start with. Patrick Moore is a mighty scholar; he’d written at least fifty books about astronomy. True expertise is a rare thing, a combination of flair and an almost involuntary awareness of detail. I saw it in Damien and in Graham. It’s what drew me to them. Patrick Moore was self-taught, an autodidact. His tenacious, rational mind had just dragged him along with it. He had the experts’ gift of making things that are complicated sound simple.