Afternoons With the Blinds Drawn Read online

  Also by this author

  Coal Black Mornings

  Copyright

  Published by Little, Brown

  ISBN: 978-1-4087-1185-9

  Copyright © Brett Anderson 2019

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Little, Brown

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  For my family

  CONTENTS

  Also by this author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  The Book I Said I Wouldn’t Write

  Tomorrow’s Fish and Chip Paper

  Dogshit and Diamonds

  Effete Southern Wankers

  The Only Thing Worse than Being Talked About is Not Being Talked About

  Style is the Art of Omission

  Breakfast at Heathrow

  Person versus Persona

  PART TWO

  The Poison Tree

  The Only Thing that’s Special About Us is What We Leave Behind

  We Love, We Tire, We Move On

  Anything Can Happen in Life, Especially Nothing

  PART THREE

  Everyone Who Has Ever Loved Me Has Been at Some Time Disappointed

  Crouchenders

  It Sounds Like the Fucking Smurfs

  Go to His House and Kill His Cat

  PART FOUR

  Quiet Ruin

  The Little Old Beetle Goes Round and Round until He Ends Up Right Up Tight to the Nail

  It Dies in the White Hours of Young-leafed June

  We Don’t Have to Live Like This

  PART FIVE

  I Drown in the Drumming Ploughland

  Five Get into a Fix

  What Will Survive of Us is Love

  Credits

  PART ONE

  THE BOOK I SAID I

  WOULDN’T WRITE

  The peeling walls of the tiny bathroom were crumbling and flaking from the damp eating into the plasterwork and a small patch of mildew was spreading its delicate filigree of greying fungus across the coving like a little hand-painted forest. A mean-looking slatted window peered out on to the black sealant roof of the side return, and beyond that it was possible to glimpse the rows of brick houses that backed on to the scruffy weed-strewn gardens; dumping grounds for rusted old bicycles and rotary dryers and abandoned bits of furniture. Between the patches of mould dampened badly scissored random images were stuck to the crumbling paintwork with little discs of Blu-Tack and inside the cracked shallow bath a terrapin skittered and scurried around the parabolic enamel walls of his prison in a sorry circling dance. The bathroom door opened on to a tiny lightless corridor which in turn led into a high-ceilinged corniced room, its walls merging and shimmering as the flickering shadows made by the candles twirled and the flames guttered. The rattling loosely fitted floor-to-ceiling windows gazed out over a wrought-iron balcony and on to the stucco facades of Moorhouse Road in Notting Hill, the occasional twinkling glimmer of a kitchen light betraying the presence of the odd night owl adrift in their own private nocturnal rituals. Strange-looking glass beads hung from the door lintels and drying, browning artichokes sat forgotten in a cracked china bowl on a small side table next to the scruffy slate-grey sofa, and scattered all around us were half-empty bottles and torn Rizla packets and ash-trays heaving with butts. The night had been a long one. My old friend Alan and I had spent most of it smoking and chattering excitedly and listening to a cassette demo of ‘To The Birds’, rewinding and rewinding until the ceremony became a frenzy of looping indulgence as we sat lost in our own private meandering thoughts and the neighbours groaned and thumped and covered their ears with their pillows. The world was slowly shifting, our lives were realigning and beyond the dreary mundanity we could glimpse a different future, something that sparkled with promise and possibility, and sensing this we would sit for hours, listening and nattering and plotting and planning and hoping, feeling the knot of anticipation coil tightly within us.

  So here I sit writing the book I said I wouldn’t write, talking about the things I said I didn’t want to talk about. I suppose it was inevitable. I wonder what dragged me to this place beyond a childish need to be heard, a somewhat garish impulse to tell the world my story. On the countless early mornings I spent lying staring at the ceiling thinking about this the one thing I promised myself was that I would again try not to write the same book that we’ve all read so many times before. Most rock bands tend to follow the same predictable trudge along the same predictable roads through the same predictable check-points, as preordained as the life cycle of a frog or something and so the tale is always going to have an air of inevitability, especially when everyone knows what happens in the last chapter. So instead what I’m going to try to do in these pages is to use elements of my own story as a way to reach out and reveal the broader picture, to look at my journey from struggle to success and to self-destruction and back again and use that narrative to talk about some of the forces that acted on me and to maybe uncover some sort of truth about the machinery that whirrs away, often unseen, especially by those on whom it is working, to create the bands that people hear on the radio. This might seem a little ambitious but it’s my way of trying to claim some sort of ownership over the second part of my story, a story that was so assiduously documented by the media and which certainly doesn’t need another retelling in that conventional form. It’s remarkable how hindsight can lend a clarity that at the time was beyond you. Now I am able to look at what happened to me during the crazed rollercoaster of those salad days and almost see it all happening to someone else, whereas back then it felt so incredibly personal, so utterly immersive, my face pressed up against the glass as it were, far too close to it to be able to see any truth. This, then, is not so much an extension of the scruffy, dog-eared Bildungsroman of the first part of my story but instead a different kind of tale, something that pokes and prods at the cogs and gears that have ground around me over the years and hopefully answers a few questions, as much for myself as anyone, as to what exactly happened and why.

  And so as the nineties lurched and spluttered into their fledgling years Suede emerged, blinking, from the debris of our rented rooms, dusting ourselves off from the threadbare chaos of our lives and from the scenes of quiet ruin that inspired those early songs. Ours however was to be the longest ever ‘overnight success’. I once described our career arc as being like ‘a pram that’s been pushed down a hill’ and it still seems like a fitting metaphor. It has always felt somehow precarious and out of control and ever-so-slightly terrifying. I suppose the ‘child’ in the pram was the four of us, screaming against the bitter slap of the wind as we tumbled into the traffic.

  Of course before we picked up speed there were still many awkward evenings standing on stages trying to convince muttering crowds in back rooms of pubs and places like the Camden Underworld and the Islington Powerhaus – confrontations with seas of folded arms and grim, resolute black-jeaned armies wearing ‘impress me’ faces – but once the tipping point had been reached there was a sense that we could almost at last surrender to the thrilling inevitability of the ride that was pulling us along and that it had started to become something that was bigg
er than us. I don’t mean to say that there was anything approaching a ‘scene’ yet because there wasn’t – our momentum was still our own and it felt that if we were in any vanguard then we were in a vanguard of one. Music history has slightly rewritten itself over the years in that heedless way that it sometimes does in order to make the pieces of the past fit the truths of the present. On we staggered from stage to stage with holes in our shoes and a tangle of badly dyed hair smelling of Batiste dry shampoo and the musky, cloying bouquet of dead people’s clothes and slowly we began to piece together the brittle foundations on which all bands must build the edifice of their work – the fan base. This was years before social media when word of mouth meant literally just that, when the only way to ‘make it’ was to get out there and play, pressing your sweating flesh against that of the front row, feeling the oily squirm of clammy palms and the report of the stage against the seat of your worn-out needlecords. Gingerly we started to cast our net outside London, for the first time chugging along the motorways in rented off-white Ford Transits to places like the Tunbridge Wells Rumble Club and the Brighton Zap. In those days travel, no matter how humble or prosaic, was still novel and so the journeys rattling around smoking Silk Cut and eating service-station sandwiches as our friend Charlie Charlton barrelled us along the M23 felt like some sort of wonderful adventure. We used to have a fusty old mattress in the back of the van on which we would sit and jabber excitedly on the way there and drink cheap red wine and collapse on the way back while Mat sat up the front with Charlie lighting cigarettes and trying to keep him awake. For young men in their twenties there’s something thrillingly virile and tribal about being in a band and in that winsome period before the joylessness of repetition set in there was a powerful sense of belonging; it felt by very definition outré, like you were somehow getting away with it. We orbited from sound check to sound check around satellite towns and ring roads living on a diet of Walkers crisps and nicotine as the low frenzy began to build.

  Between shows Saul at Nude Records had booked us in at Protocol Studios in north London with a producer called Ed Buller to record our first proper EP which we’d planned to be a double A-side leading with ‘The Drowners’ and ‘To The Birds’ and backed up by ‘My Insatiable One’. He’d heard some demos and loved them and then had come to see us live and flattered us suitably, choosing to interpret what we were doing as being akin to the beloved pantheon of seventies rock with which he’d grown up. Ed was a producer cast in the old-school mould – a passionate, single-minded, often eccentric figure who would cram himself into tight black suits and stomp around the control room wrapped in scarves and long coats opining wildly like a caricature of a mad composer or the Doctor Who that never was. Over the course of the session he guided us and shaped us and ushered us into the unfamiliar playground of the studio in his warm, avuncular way, peppering the day with hilarious asides and in-jokes that knitted us all together as a team and laid the foundations for a relationship that would end up spanning decades. On the vast spectrum that defines the role of a producer Ed’s special skill lies in dealing with people and especially in inspiring the bands with whom he works. He’s one of those who makes you feel secure and held. I always felt that working with Suede was for him more than just another job, that he understood that we saw him as part of our bizarre little family – the stable dad to our errant sons. He knew how to rally us and goad us into action, understanding the limits of our elasticity and pushing us just within its breaking point, steering us to what would become our defining work. In teasing out the more seventies rock elements to our sound I think he was instrumental in how we came to be perceived by the music press. In the hands of another producer the visceral, belligerent edge that the band were developing live might have been given more weight and we might have been cast in the more ‘alternative’ mould. We were very much party to that decision though as it was our wild-eyed and somewhat lofty mission to create music that pushed beyond the narrow margins of the indie ghetto. Still flushed with the arrogance of youth we desperately wanted to define ourselves as something apart from what was at the time a grey morass of under-achievers.

  For those who don’t know or who have forgotten I think it’s important to understand the landscape into which Suede first surfaced. I don’t think it would be unfair to say that alternative music at the time had reached a nadir. The indefinite hiatus of the Stone Roses and the dead end of the shoe-gazing movement had created a vacuum into which was sucked a motley mess of ambitionless long-forgotten bands who dressed in shorts and sounded like students – awful worthy acts who prided themselves on their dull indie credentials and their sixth-form politics. I know I’m probably in danger of coming across as waspish and unpleasant and my feelings are possibly a little disproportionate but it felt like we were honour-bound to supplant them and that they provided us with a sort of model to react against. Every new wave of bands disparages the last and in a way it’s their duty to kill them off in a kind of Oedipal sense. This act of ‘patricide’ is necessary to distance themselves as a form of self-definition, like a microcosm of the generational conflict that pop music used to be so effective at instilling; an ongoing continuum of death and rebirth. We wanted to be everything those bands weren’t – vulnerable, kinetic, ambitious and arch – and we poured the tenets of this manifesto into those three songs on The Drowners EP. The budgets were modest which meant that the sessions were fairly basic. Despite our idealism we were still a young band and Ed knew he had to capture something of that raw pulse so despite a couple of vocal and guitar overdubs and a cello and some bongos ‘The Drowners’ didn’t deviate much from its live incarnation. I think those touches were extremely well judged by Ed though and brought out a lilt and a lift to the song which made it for me one of the best-sounding things we ever recorded. ‘To The Birds’ suffered a little from the classic naivety of a band in the studio for the first time as we were unable to resist adding a kind of sequenced guitar loop which rendered the new version less primal than it should have been. To be honest, ‘My Insatiable One’ was a bit of an afterthought. It wasn’t until the record was released and the song started gathering attention in the press and cover versions by Morrissey that we belatedly realised what a gem it was. I had been aware that he had been to a couple of early shows and someone had even muttered that they thought they had seen him scribbling notes into a jotter at the back of the Camden Palace during our set. Whether he was learning the words to the song or not is debatable but it made it no less of a shock when one day while shuffling my way around Portobello Market one of the stall-holders selling boot-leg cassettes sidled up to me and pressed a tape recording from a Swiss gig of his into my sweaty palm. It was an odd experience listening to his version of the song when I got back to the flat. I seem to remember he’d taken out the swear-words and the band were obviously confused about how to translate our E-flat drop-tuning but to hear the voice that had been part of the very furniture of my youth singing my own words back to me of course cast an undeniable spell. More than anything though I think I perceived my early musical heroes as so much more than mere musicians. They were people who had helped me navigate my way through life, influencing my politics, suggesting how I should dress and even telling me what not to eat and so to hear such an unequivocal validation of my work by one of them was a wonderful but in some ways slightly confusing moment, like when the teacher is finally bested by his pupil, and I remember lying on my fusty purple bedspread in Moorhouse Road listening to it one drizzly afternoon overcome with a strange blend of triumph and melancholy. With hindsight relegating ‘My Insatiable One’ to the status of a B-side was the first in a long line of bad judgements that we made, exiling classics to the wastelands of the flip side, limiting their audience and so rendering the albums weaker by their absence but at the same time this profligacy was conscious and deliberate; we wanted every moment of our output to be notable, even, and in some ways especially the B-sides. I suppose appropriately it was very much something we had
taken from The Smiths whose flip sides for a period were superlative. It made being a fan feel so thrilling, like the band were honouring your devotion with a gift, and it was this sense of breathless discovery that we wanted to continue with our work. Nonetheless if ‘My Insatiable One’ and ‘To The Birds’ and ‘He’s Dead’ and ‘The Big Time’ had been on the debut it simply would have been a better record.

  This was a wonderful time for Bernard and me as friends – we were tight and united and increasingly respectful of each other and of what we were at last producing together. The dank, bitter years of failure had cemented us into a hardened unit and at last it felt like the ears of the world were beginning to open to what we were doing. Our first few winters as a struggling band had been met with the usual mass shrug of indifference that greets most musical wannabes, but as we had pressed ever onwards the battle against apathy seemed if anything to become harder as we had continued to perform edgy shows to disengaged audiences that sat uncomfortably with the required default, early nineties, indie-band setting of blank, spaced-out cool. Often there had been more people on the stage than in the crowd and at one point we had played a deeply humiliating and utterly pointless gig to one single person. Finally though through a combination of bloody-mindedness, accident and evolution we had found our voice and at last people had started to listen. Bernard and I would share clove cigarettes and ride the rattling underground together, chattering excitedly, plotting and planning and borrowing each other’s sentences and in the same way that young people know that death is inevitable but distant our own predictable disintegration as written in the annals of rock lore seemed impossibly irrelevant with just the odd flashes of discord between us providing the occasional memento mori: the skull at the edge of the canvas. The overall stirring of confidence and camaraderie within the band had been growing strongly too and the change in dynamic following Justine’s departure had allowed Simon especially to emerge from the fringes and reveal himself more fully to be the kind, loyal and often hilarious friend that he is, so much more than just the polite punkish cipher we first met.