by Alex James
Damon was keen to work at his studio in Ladbroke Grove. I was a bit dubious. When you get down to the nitty-gritty chemistry that drives great bands, it’s really just a power struggle. I thought working in Damon’s studio might be giving him too much ground. It was soon obvious that it was the best place to work, though. Damon was always going to be in charge, but it wasn’t really my job to agree with him about anything. I think we all always thought we knew best.
The studio was very near to Claire’s house, and agreeing to work there turned out to be another monumental decision I had no idea I was making. I saw her again at a party that Dan Macmillan threw to launch his lifestyle emporium. Sometimes, when I’m in a contemplative mood, I still ponder over how we might never have met. For years we’d been missing each other. She knew people that I knew and we went to the same places. I would have been as likely to meet Claire in New York as London. The affair got serious when she fell off her horse and mangled her arm. She had a month off work then, and as her house was next to the studio I’d pop in and see her in the mornings. Soon I was going round after the studio as well.
I loved Justine. We’d shared so much, but it was all over by then. We clung on to each other, trying to make it work. She was uniquely beautiful and still more important to me than anything else that had happened in my life. I wanted her to be happy, but I was making her sad. We’d become flatmates, best friends rather than husband and wife. She was practically the only woman I knew who I wasn’t having sex with. I told her I was going and she cried and I cried and we held each other for the last time. I hope I never have to do anything that difficult again. It’s the benchmark that I measure all other pain against.
I moved into Claridge’s. Claridge’s is regal. When Buckingham Palace is full, the Queen sends her spare guests to stay there. It’s the Brook Street annexe of the royal household and it’s quite simply the best hotel in the world. I’d been making a careful, close and continuous study of luxury. It was a kind of hobby. For Mr Claridge it was evidently more of a mission. I can’t think of anything about the whole of Claridge’s that could be any better. It takes thirty seconds to run a bath and an hour to have breakfast. Everything about the place, from its Mayfair location to its pastry chefs, is the stuff of special occasions. I’m pretty sure that if, as an experiment, somebody was made to stay there and given nothing in particular to do, pretty soon they’d have made a huge success of themselves. The whole place is brimming with infectious achievement and to wake up there is to wake up invincible.
I swooned for Claire. I hung on her half-finished sentences, reading meanings into pauses and glances, searching for signs that she was feeling what I was feeling. I mooned around while she was at work. It was bugging the hell out of Damon and Dave. Damien became quite distant, too. A few months earlier my distraught mother had said that if I didn’t stop drinking, pretty soon I’d have no friends at all. It was well meant, but in fact the opposite thing happened. I had far fewer friends now that I’d been sober for six months.
You can know a lot of people, be very popular, enjoy yourself with a host of chums and buddies, but you can’t ever have a lot of really close friends. Intimacy doesn’t spread thinly. My closest friends were fine about me being sober, but the ones who love you the most and know you the best are the ones who find it hardest to cope with you falling in love.
Morocco
It’s probably possible to make good records without ever leaving a recording studio. Some bands do it like that. They lock themselves away from the world to craft their gypsy trick masterpieces. We flourished only with stimulation. The stimulants changed as we grew up and changed as people. Drink had been reliable to start with. Drugs are always good for one album, but no more than one. Love is always there to fall back on, love lost or love won. We thought we might feel more alive if we took ourselves out of our usual situation and went somewhere we’d never been before. That’s why we went to North Africa to finish Think Tank. The plan was to rent a riad, a Moroccan house, near Marrakesh, build a makeshift studio and see what happened.
Three lorries full of gear trundled across Europe towards the Strait of Gibraltar. One of the lorries just had leads in it: bantam leads, jack leads, balanced XLR leads, MIDI leads, looms, speaker cables, computer cables, optical connectors, power lines, strings, wires and rope, that kind of thing.
While we were in Africa, Dave and I were planning to fly down to Timbuktu. When you tell people that you’re a pilot, they usually want to know where’s the furthest you’ve been. Timbuktu, we both agreed, was the best possible answer to that question and a good enough reason to go there. Even taking the Bonanza to North Africa was quite a serious undertaking. We’d bought a lot of charts, a desert survival kit and a life raft. If the plane had any technical problems, we’d probably be best fixing it ourselves, so we also took spare tyres, engine parts and a tool kit. We had the aeroplane serviced before we left and when we arrived at the airfield it was sitting on the tarmac next to the Queen’s helicopter. There had been big problems with Dave’s Cessna. We’d been merrily flying around in a machine that had such bad corrosion that the wings could have fallen off at any time. That’s got to be one of worst things that can happen to an aeroplane. When we found out, we decided that in future we’d have the best engineers we could find to keep an eye on things under the cowlings. It was reassuring to see the royal chopper as we set out on our maiden inter-continental voyage.
We wanted to have lunch and refuel at La Rochelle. We didn’t really need to land and pick up more avgas until we reached the southern coast of France, but were in agreement that the baguettes fromages at that airport were the best cheese sandwiches we’d ever tasted, and it was worth a detour. Those sandwiches are a sensational case study in beautiful simplicity. Just French bread and Camembert, no butter, no nothing. We almost always had cheese sandwiches for lunch when we were working, and the La Rochelle special was the benchmark standard that all were compared to. The Primrose Hill delicatessen offered notably good high-end, custom-built ciabattas, but the proprietor inclined towards the over-elaborate. It’s the way things are going. In order to compete with each other to give people what they want, the sandwich makers of the world feel they have to create more and more fanciful-sounding fillings, trying to cram three courses of contemporary fusion cuisine between ever-increasing varieties of bread. The marketing gurus would tell us we’re not just buying lunch any more, but that we’re making a statement about who we are. If you can swallow that, you can probably swallow one of their cold cling-filmed sandwiches.
I became suspicious of marketing when I was working on a feature film score. The film was all finished and there was a screening at a shopping centre in Essex - composing film scores is plainly not as glamorous as being a rock star. The film was being shown to a special audience, who’d been recruited from outside McDonald’s, from park benches and street corners. It was being targeted at a young audience and the financiers had tried to assemble a representative crowd. In return for seeing the film for nothing the group had to answer some questions about it afterwards. They were all having a lovely day, but the director, the man who’d spent the last six months ordering Ray Winstone around, was terrified.
Every time the audience laughed, a lot of clipboards rustled. If they chattered or showed signs of confusion, there was more rustling. At the end a nice jolly man stood at the front and went through gruelling lists of questions about how everyone had enjoyed all aspects of the film; the characters in turn, the music, the plot, the sub-plots, the whole picture. By this time, the director and the producers were on the edge of their seats with their feet in their mouths. A particularly smart-arsed twelve-year-old boy didn’t like the way the story ended. He was encouraged to say why. An involuntary moan escaped from somewhere deep inside the director as the child rallied his allies and led a revolt against the film’s denouement. Would it be better if the film ended, completely differently, maybe like this, with the old lady dying, said the nice jolly man.
‘Dass miles maw betta,’ said the boy, and his friends agreed. Then a little girl piped up, said that she liked the old lady and she was pleased it had all worked for her in the end. The director and producer were exchanging open-mouthed glances. The finale of the film that they had spent the last three years of their lives living and breathing - its whole meaning and purpose, all their expertise - was in the hands of two gobby twelve-year-olds. It went back and forth for some while and in the end the old lady was granted a stay of execution by the jury. If the focus group doesn’t like the ending, the studio will reshoot it. No question at all. There’s too much money at stake. It was harrowing. The ending survived intact. It put me right off films, though.
Focus groups, wielding the almighty authority of the witless pleb, rule the world, but there in La Rochelle, like a beacon in the void, was a grumpy old lady with the best cheese sandwiches in the world.
It was a clear day in early October and we tootled on, flying south with the birds and the butterflies, zooming low over the rising backbone of continental Europe and landing in the dark at Avignon. That was when I really realised I’d left Claire behind. I called her and she was out with a group of film directors. Film directors think they’re cooler than rock stars, but I knew the truth about them, and their run-ins with twelve-year-olds in Essex precincts. I wondered if she did, too. We were going to Morocco for six weeks and it suddenly felt like a long time.
Down the rocky coast of Spain, the sea far below: mountains large and close in the right-hand windows. We passed over miles and miles of polytunnels, endless ugly greenhouses in appalling contrast to the green fields of home. When Africa came it was like a surprise snog from a superstar. It loomed unexpectedly green and soft beyond the harsh desert of southern Spain, dissolving into distant mist. We stopped for fuel at Tangier and followed the gently meandering beach towards the distant and fabled city of Marrakesh. It was an untouched, subtle and wonderful wilderness. There was nothing except nature and nothing was ever so beautiful.
‘Vous avez fait un infraction, monsieur. Il faut payer,’ said the man in uniform. He was saying we had committed an aviation crime and that we were in big trouble and we would have to give him some money. It was dusky, we’d made Marrakesh and we were unloading the aeroplane and stretching our legs. ‘Tell him to piss off,’ said Dave. Dave knows his rights.
‘I’m terribly sorry, I don’t speak Moroccan,’ I said, and smiled and nodded. The man flapped his arms around and kept on about ‘infractions’. He followed us to the tower where we paid the landing fee, but he’d scuttled off wagging his finger by the time we’d got to the terminal. Corruption was rife. A lot of the equipment was bound over in customs, said Damon, who’d come to pick us up from the airport in an ancient, knackered, tiny Peugeot. It wouldn’t have passed an MOT in Europe, but here it was a status symbol.
The traffic was very scary. There were pedestrians, fully loaded donkeys, bicycles carrying passengers, whole families wobbling along on phut-phuts, cars with no lights, impatient taxis, crank buses and very big lorries all competing for not very much road. It was a swarming, smoky, brightly lit circus. Unusual smells and strange musics assaulted us as we crawled around the colossal biblical scene in the main square. There was a man with a snake; a man selling teeth: individual human teeth; two men were bare-knuckle fighting and a crowd was watching; there were people eating goats’ heads with spoons; there were bonfires, and everybody was very smartly dressed.
The riad, ten miles outside the city, sat among olive groves roamed at night by packs of wild dogs. There were strange creatures everywhere. Jason, the sound engineer, was the finder and keeper of a particularly menacing translucent insect as big as a hen’s egg that curled its tail and spat goo when he poked it, which he did for the benefit of all new arrivals.
It was a vast, sprawling kasbah and everything about it had either just been patched up or was just about to break. The gear was set up in a derelict annexe; a young man lived there with no running water or worldly goods apart from the clothes he stood up in. He was always smartly dressed and eager to help.
There was a place where mobiles worked, high on one of the roofs, and a freezing swimming pool. The mosaic-tiled interior had once been magnificent and the bedrooms formed an open courtyard around a fountain. I took over the west wing, sprinkling rose petals and lavender from the market everywhere and lighting it with candles. There was a flat roof, which looked beyond the orchards towards an uncultivated lunar landscape with splashes of green oases and the Atlas Mountains towering in the distance.
Everyone developed body-rocking diarrhoea immediately. There was no escape. Dave’s bicycle was kept in the control room and at any time without warning one of the party might suddenly take flight towards the nearest loo in the house a couple of hundred yards away. We shaved our heads and plugged in our guitars. The illnesses ebbed and flowed, the food was awful, the place was practically a ruin, but the music sounded better than anything we’d ever done. I was the happiest man in the world. Claire was coming.
Into the Light
I picked her up from the airport in the Peugeot and took her straight for hammam. Hammam is the most intense spa-type experience in the world. It eclipses the shiatsu beatings of the Japanese, sees off the Icelandic birch-whipping ceremonies, casts Swedish super-muscle mashings into the shade and even outshines the Russian baths on Avenue A in New York City - and they’re something special.
We were sprayed all over with scalding water, as we lay naked, prone and side-by-side on the hot stone floor of a tiled room full of steam. It wasn’t a steam room, though. Steam rooms are chilly by comparison. This was more like the inside of a pressure cooker. Girls dressed in light towelling shorts and bikini tops got busy with loofahs and scrubbed us pink. Then there was a bone-creaking kneading involving knee-in-the-back half-nelsons and leg-bending body presses. We floated all the way home to Riad Nadjma.
I didn’t lose the floating sensation. I was feeling the sway of the secret and limitless feminine. When you start feeling like that, it’s time to say, ‘I love you’, so I took Claire into the desert.
There are different kinds of desert. Some are rocky; some are made out of gravel, like massive untidy car parks. You have to get your wildernesses in perspective. They’re no good those ones, they’re a waste of gravity. All rocky planets have them. We were heading for the dunes. Ahmed, the local fixer, sorted us out with a 4×4 and driver, we loaded up with water and set off for the Sahara.
Through the snow-capped Atlas Mountains with their precipices and nestling fortresses, we trundled, on and on through night and day, through new geography. We saw goats up trees, the ruins of crumbling palaces, the magic trails of rivers and the mud houses that populated them. When we stopped, people invited us to stay with them, people with no shoes, people with no teeth. It was a benign kingdom. I never felt any apprehension of violence or danger.
And the dunes rose in the distance, cartoon-like, surreal, fantastic.
A 4×4 is no good in the sandbanks. The only thing that will do for the dunes is a camel. There was a Berber, immaculately turned out in an electric-blue kaftan, who had some camels and agreed to be our guide. He was highly intelligent, a comedian with a quiet smile and an acute sense of comic timing. Things are never like you expect. Deserts, I’d imagined, were populated by more serious types full of wistful melancholy. He packed up the camels with blankets and provisions, nimbly lashing a cooking pot here, a lantern there, having a conversation with himself that consisted only of the words, ‘Comme ça’. He was able to express a wide range of emotions, and extract a good deal of comedy from those two words. He flipped ropes into elaborate knots, muttering ‘Comme ça, comme ça, comme ça’, every time the ends crossed, with a final definitive ‘Comme ça’ as he yanked them tight. As he moved around to the other side, I could hear him quietly musically murmuring ‘ça-ça-ça’, and the final triumphant ‘ça’. Then the ‘ça’s became interspersed with the odd ‘Ah!?’ followe
d by a pause, when things went awry. It was a brilliant routine. He knew he was making me laugh. ‘Camel are smelly,’ he said and smiled.
We rode into the sands, perched high on camel humps. There were no discernible landmarks, just undulating dunes that rose to great heights like a calcified stormy sea. The most complete silence fell. There was no birdsong or rustle of leaves. The sand soaked up the sounds of our voices as if to suggest not to compete with the hush. The abstract peaks and troughs rose and fell with cartoon-like simplicity and everything suggested infinity: the endless blue sky, the evenness and constancy of the sand, the celestial silence. And Claire.
We’d been trekking for many hours, but our guide didn’t have a map or a compass. There are no maps of these shifting seas.
‘How do you know where we are?’ I asked him.
‘I came here yesterday,’ he said.
Then an unusual thing happened. The sky went grey and then black and it started to rain; heavy rain in heavy drops. It hadn’t rained for five years. The camels bellowed as it lashed down. Maybe it was all as new to them as it was to me.
After an hour it stopped and, an hour after that, it might never have happened. There was no trace of moisture or a cloud.
The oasis, too, when we arrived at dusk, was still dry on the surface. The only clue to its existence was a cluster of Bedouin tents. There was a tent for Claire and me, and nothing was ever cosier. It was dressed with soft rugs and blankets. Candles flickered and incense burned. Mohammed, our guide, set about making dinner. He unwrapped packets of provisions, unscrewed flasks and made gunpowder tea. ‘Berber whisky!’ he said. It’s powerful stuff, loaded with caffeine, sugar and scented herbs. Somewhere someone was banging a drum and having a wail.