by Alex James
Keith got a taxi home. The taxi was for sale and he had the five thousand in his pocket, so he bought it. Damien painted spots on it, which made it quite valuable. Damien couldn’t paint enough spots. People loved those spots.
There was a homeless man who begged in the doorway of the Groucho. His name was Outside Dave and Keith used to let him have a bath and cook him a hot meal occasionally at his home. They came to an arrangement with the taxi where Outside Dave lived in it, but he had to keep it as close to the Groucho as possible so that if Keith needed to go anywhere he had a driver.
It worked quite well, although it broke down quite often and it could smell a bit ripe. He seemed all right, Dave did. He claimed that there were a couple of women who went to the club who used to take him home for sex occasionally, but he also said he didn’t drink, and I think he did sometimes. He was a man of mystery.
I went with Keith and Outside Dave in the taxi to Reading Festival. We didn’t have tickets, but Keith was performing with New Order on Saturday night. I was sure that between us we could talk our way in. We didn’t have to. The taxi had a Jedi effect on security: all the gates just opened for it and we were waved through the crowds. Dave the tramp drove it right into the backstage area and parked it next to Jay Kay’s Ferrari without having to do any talking. Then he disappeared into the hospitality area and was never seen again.
New Order were my favourite band. They wrote modern pop symphonies. I’d learned more about music from listening to their records than I would have done from any amount of music lessons. I had listened to those songs again and again. I studied their compositions without realising what I was doing. I learned the drums, the guitar parts, the keyboard lines. I suppose it was like Patrick Moore looking at the moon through his telescope. The music intrigued me and I scrutinised it and drew my own conclusions.
I went out into the crowd and watched my friend take the stage with my favourite band for the finale. As they finished, the crowd started to chant for ‘Vindaloo’. It felt better than standing on that stage ever had.
Mexico
Blur were supposed to go to Chile, as part of a South American tour. I was reading The Times, which I still mainly bought for the crossword, and there was an article with the headline ‘Blur To Play Santiago, Despite Warnings’. I hadn’t had any warnings. It said the Home Office was advising against travel to Chile in the current political climate. I wondered where Chile was and what politics could be happening there. I’m sure my dad had been; that meant it had to be OK. I called Chris Morrison, our manager, and asked him if he’d be joining us on the Chile leg of the tour. He’d seen the paper, too. He said we’d have to pull the show in Santiago, which was a shame, because, looking at the record sales figures, we were about the most popular band in the country’s history. Then he did his big laugh.
It’s always surprising how popularity waxes and wanes from place to place on a world tour. Even in Europe. For some reason Blur have never managed to make the slightest impression on the Dutch. They didn’t like baggy, weren’t interested in Britpop, the ‘Woo-hoo’ thing passed them by completely and going there to promote the new record had been merely a polite formality. The articulated lorries full of super troupers, mega woofers and special effects would drive right through the Netherlands on a European tour. Most of the convoy would go straight to Denmark to wait at the stadium for us while we performed in the back room of a bar in Amsterdam.
They blew hot and cold in Belgium. At one point we were going to Belgium so often it hardly seemed to make sense and then we didn’t go back for years.
Throughout Asia, our popularity rode a similarly random rollercoaster from nation to nation. In Korea, the venue was the same kind of size as most places we played in Europe. In Singapore I wasn’t allowed into the venue for being too wayward looking. I had to call the tour manager and tell him I was outside.
The next day, when we landed in Bangkok, we were each appointed four security guards, airside, and bundled through the terminal where there were thousands of massed, hysterical fans. A police escort zipped us to our penthouse suites. It was quite bizarre. A throne was erected at the venue and we were briefed by a member of the royal household on how to conduct ourselves in the presence of the princesses.
By this time we had our own security. Graham and I had particularly random behaviour, and quite often, especially if we all went out together, we were mobbed in the street. There’d be a giggle and I’d turn around to see a couple of girls following me. The next time I’d turn around there’d be a dozen of them. Then one or two would start to run ahead and take photos. It’s the flashbulbs popping that makes everyone else take notice. Pretty soon after the cameras started the situation would get out of control and I’d be surrounded by people smiling and asking questions. It was rarely unpleasant or dangerous. It just meant everything took ages.
It can get hairy at night, though. Anyone attracting a lot of attention is always going to annoy someone. It’s hard and churlish not to go out at night. The lure of wine, women and song is almost irresistible. Nightclub owners fight each other to get bands to come to their establishments in the big cities. Adventures could end almost anywhere, but they often started in nightclubs. Normally we were made a big fuss of and shown to the best table. Drinks were usually free. Girls appeared and, if there was anything else we needed, someone would take care of it. People did take exception sometimes. It’s hardly surprising; it must have been like being invaded by a longboat of drunken Vikings with weapons that there was no defence against. Most of the time, though, the security guys just had to make sure we didn’t get run over crossing the road. Graham particularly suffered from getting hit by cars.
None of us had been to South America, but we were told we’d be needing armed security, and that we shouldn’t fuck about under any circumstances. On the way to Mexico City at Heathrow was a guy called Rowan, who I’d been running into quite a bit recently. He was part of the glamorous crowd that had put on the goat party where Keith bought the taxi. He said that he was going to Mexico City, too. His brother had a nightclub there and we should all come that evening because there was a big film festival in town and there would be loads of people.
Mexico is one of those places where you sit on a plane for ten hours and when you arrive it’s still the same time it was when you left. En route there was quite a lot of speculation about what to expect. Dave said you couldn’t have a bath, because things swim up your bottom and lay their eggs. The tour manager warned us about getting kidnapped or arrested, which amounted to the same thing. There was talk of feral children living in sewers and bandits who’d shoot you for your shoes. I thought maybe I’d take it easy in South America.
As soon as we stepped off the plane, it was all instantly and obviously brilliant. It was hot as hell and as green as Eden. It was a kind of a green that was new to me, somewhere between a lime and a lemon. There were about a million people at the airport and there was more bundling going on than queuing. Just getting through immigration and customs was a caper, like an old black and white movie where everything happens too fast. It was a big lovely slap in the face from the unknown. I really thought I knew everything by now and suddenly there was all this as well. Mexico City makes New York look bijou. Miles and miles of jam-packed everything, people living in the central reservations of the carriageways, shanty towns, suburbs, skyscrapers and smog. On and on it went and it was hard to remember anything else existed.
The hotel was of the super-modern business resort variety with ninety-nine floors and glass lifts. There were strange keys for doors that opened automatically like on spaceships. In the suite there was a bottle of Dom Perignon on ice from the record company, an enormous basket of fruit from the promoter and flowers and a thoughtful selection of nibbles to complement the champagne from the hotel manager. The Bang & Olufsen stereo went quite loud. They usually have limiters on them in hotels, but the suite was so enormous it wasn’t going to bother anybody. The triple-aspect windows looked o
ut from on high over a roof terrace to the brightly-lit metropolis. I called Graham and told him to bring his champagne.
He was still a bit worried about worms going up his bottom, but you could tell it wasn’t that kind of place. The dude from the record company wanted to take us out for dinner. It’s important to break free from luxury’s subtle suffocation. It would have been easy to stay in the hotel having huge bubble baths and massages, but luxury is more or less the same everywhere and I wanted a big slice of Mexico.
The record company dude said it was all a big load of bollocks about worms, but it was true about getting kidnapped and people living in the sewers. Dinner was ridiculously good. I hadn’t quite put Mexico together with Mexican restaurants. There were enchiladas and burritos galore, but dinner mainly involved drinking shots of tequila and slapping each other on the back.
I remembered the nightclub and we went there. It was all happening at once, as usual. After a few tequilas we’d given up on the idea of not having ice in our drinks and started on margaritas. On the plane, someone had said that ice was poisonous. The ones we were drinking now, caipirinhas, seemed to have some kind of salad in them as well, which was another no-no.
It was at the nightclub that someone started talking about the pyramids. There were huge pyramids, they said, better than the ones in Egypt. All aligned with the bright stars and inexplicably engineered. I wanted to see those pyramids. I ordered a taxi immediately and we were on our way. It was two a.m. and we drove for a couple of hours through the city. It was built up in every direction and the roads were heavy with traffic all through the night. We cruised through the bright lights, skyscrapers and matrices of traffic lights, all new and enticing.
Then the buildings became shacks and we were in a desert. The walled sanctum of the pyramids rose in the distance. It was strangely still and peaceful at the entrance after the constant whizz of the city. We gave the guards fifty dollars to let us in. It was simple. The ancient citadel was built on a biblical scale. It was ginormous. Maybe these people had been giants. As the morning light began to break, the features of the kingdom became more apparent. There were a number of whacking great pyramids dissected by avenues, gateways, temples and stairs. It was more humbling than Mexico City itself, vast, crumbling and beautiful in the breaking twilight. We walked a couple of miles to the foot of the Pyramid of the Sun, the big one. From the bottom you couldn’t see the top without craning your neck uncomfortably.
It was just sitting there, the enigmatic remnants of a completely lost civilisation. It was all the more powerful because I had been completely unaware of its existence until a couple of hours before. We grow up knowing about the pyramids in Egypt. Even though they are miraculous, they are familiar to us. That familiarity takes away some of their power to enchant. Suddenly, here I was in a strange desert, which is enough to make anyone come over a bit different at the best of times, but this huge and magical city with its dense aura of mystery sent me spinning. We spend so much of our lives underwhelmed by the ordinary. It is hard to remember that life is a constant miracle in a vast, unexplored universe full of secrets.
It was a long, long way to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun and we wanted to make the summit before the sun rose. The sky was getting bluer and bluer and our faces redder and redder. There were half a dozen of us, the girls in their film festival frocks, the boys doing a tequila relay. Up and up we went, thousands of steps, big steps, perfectly regular. Dizzy, exhausted and freaked out, I collapsed on the top. The sun was coming. The hazy vista was immense, a big long brown turd of pollution sitting on top of Mexico City. That was when the police van arrived. You could tell it was a police van because it had a flashing light. It was very small and it stopped at the foot of the giant staircase. There was no escape, so we sat there trying to enjoy the spectacle of nature on a large scale at dawn as two policemen began to mount the stairs.
It took them a long time to get to us. They were knackered by the time they got to the top and really pissed off. One of them started ranting in Spanish and then spat out a big wad of phlegm with a nod of his head as a full stop. The DJ from the nightclub, a handsome, upmarket American, was able to translate. ‘He said we’re charged with desecrating a holy relic and that we’re in deep shit. Then he spat on the holy relic, just to show he’s in charge. We’d better do what he says.’ We were marched down the side of the man-made mountain and confronted with their superior, who was standing by the van smoking and spitting. I wondered what would happen. I knew one of our gang was carrying a very large amount of drugs somewhere about his person. He seemed to be the least flustered of all of us. He started to negotiate with the boss man who was demanding we get in the van. They argued for ages. We stole glances at each other but it was impossible to tell what was happening. The DJ kept raising his eyebrows and shaking his head. Then it was settled. We could walk away for five hundred dollars. I’d have given five hundred thousand.
It was a long, long drive back to the hotel through the rush-hour traffic. An endless journey in the thick pollution with a cheap tequila hangover. I’ve never felt so bad and so good at the same time.
The gig was in a stadium and there were fans at the hotel, fans at the radio stations, fans at the TV studios. They waved, screamed and gave us letters. It was another vast continent, another green world.
Brazil, Argentina
Rio is such an evocative place. It’s been mythologised by music to such an extent that it hardly seemed real at all. I walked for miles without ever leaving a song, from Ipanema to Copacabana, along the beaches among the palm trees. It was like Mexico with the contrast turned right up, the strikingly beautiful rubbing shoulders with the grotesque, the diseased, the toothless and the insane. Somehow, the insane seemed to be madder, the further I got from home. There was more of a sense of peril on the streets, but they were all the more enticing for it. We live in a climate of fear, but the world is a safe place as long as you know how to behave like everybody else does. If you stand around holding a map waving a video camera with your shirt tucked into your waist-high trousers, you’re in trouble wherever you go. Millions of people live in Rio, after all, and they eat salad and have ice in their drinks and they don’t get murdered very often.
We were playing in a bar in Rio. It was a bit of a jolt after the mass adulation of Mexico. I thought there were some fans at the hotel - they kept smiling at me - but they were prostitutes. I was exhausted from my Mexican antics and kept out of trouble in Rio. My birthday fell on a Sunday, the day of the show in São Paulo. São Paulo is like Rio without the songs or the beach. It’s big, bigger than most countries, a city with a population greater than Ireland, New Zealand, Costa Rica and Portugal combined. No wonder Brazil are always winning the football. I’d never heard of this São Paulo and it was fair to say most of São Paulo had never heard of Blur, but it was a bigger gig than in Rio.
On my birthday, most of all I like to play the blues, with Graham. It’s a tradition that started at college. Playing the blues involves the thumbs a lot, more than any other kind of guitar music. You strum with the thumb of the right hand and curl the left thumb over the top of the guitar so that it can hold down the bottom string. Then you just need some whisky and you’re all set. We’d go on for hours.
It was hard to know how to take things up a notch on my birthday. I was permanently living in the rock and roll fast lane. The year before I’d had a party that all kinds of nice people had shown up at. I did actually throw a television out of the window, just to see what happened, but I had checked that there was no one coming beforehand and it was my television to do what I liked with, which I explained to the police when they arrived. They were very understanding. Overall, it was quite disappointing. It didn’t explode, particularly; it just went thud on Shaftesbury Avenue.
Somehow the tour manager managed to find me a Balthazar of champagne. I think a Nebuchadnezzar is bigger - you need a couple of footmen for the Nebuchadnezzar - but the Balthazar is big, the biggest bottle that
one person can carry. You really need to put it over your shoulder to pour from it properly and even then it’s tricky. There’s enough for a party in there, though. It was quite late when I got back to the hotel with my big bottle, but there were quite a few fans there. I invited the five prettiest ones to come up to my rooms. You need five girlfriends when your bottle of champagne is that big. I collapsed on the bed and they jumped on me and covered me in champagne and kisses. It was a good birthday party. I stopped having sex occasionally, but only so that I could have some more drugs. That image of myself soused in champagne being devoured by lusting women in a luxury hotel suite in a vast and unknown city was the pinnacle of my rock and roll excesses.
After the mayhem of Mexico and Brazil, Buenos Aires, Argentina, was a stately and sophisticated city of wide boulevards, grand statuary and chic endroits. It’s posher than Paris, in fact, which was all quite surprising. It didn’t look like the lettuce would cause any harm in that fair city. More surprising was that the Argentinians adore the English, and more surprising still that I at once felt completely at home there. The other mammoth metropolitan centres of South America had thrilled and tickled. I could never quite get enough of anything, but just to see those places had almost been enough. Here I felt I could live and be happy. I just never knew when I was going to get that feeling. Even though there are an infinite number of ways to live a life and be happy, it didn’t actually come out and grab me often that I would instantly and obviously be very at home somewhere.
Justine sent her friend Walter to show me around and keep an eye on me. He was handsome, aristocratic and gay and a fan of the Smiths. Walter took me to gay bars, to lounges, to cafés, to a candle-lit walled garden where they served tea and coffee all night. I met his friends and their friends and it was all benign and agreeable.