Afternoons With the Blinds Drawn Read online

  Richard is the most naturally gifted musician I have ever worked with. He has an eerie ability to hear things and pick things out in music of which I’m simply not aware, let alone able to play. Over the years his uncanny ability has often made me ponder Schopenhauer’s famous maxim ‘talent hits the target that no one else can hit, genius hits the target that no one else can see’ as his understanding of music has always been bordering on the abnormal, so different from the stumbling, haltered journey that I had to personally undertake. In many ways I think he was possibly too technically proficient, the fluidity of his playing coming too easily to him and denying him the struggle and the lessons therein that most of us have to wade through. Music for me is a very instinctive thing – I try to let my ears do the work and let my brain sit back and rest – so hearing Richard playing with us that first time I knew that we had found the right person. Of course we knew we would be faced with years of meticulous work during his assimilation as we tried to bridge the gaps presented by the age difference alone and all of the myriad complications that it might throw up, but in Richard I saw a raw talent, a seed that given the right conditions could grow and eventually bloom and flourish so we decided to take a gamble. It’s possible that by appointing Richard I was unwittingly orchestrating a power play of my own: wresting further influence over the band by replacing a dissenting, challenging voice with one that I saw as being acquiescent and compliant and easy to mould into a convenient shape. I’m sure it probably came across like that to some people. Honestly I have no recollection of that being a conscious train of thought but the machinations of one’s own mind can be veiled even, and sometimes especially, to oneself. The seemingly untold months of unbearable friction with Bernard had definitely snapped something in me and so a desire, conscious or otherwise, to steer things differently was certainly lurking.

  Having no real choice but to shove Richard roughly and heedlessly into the deep end we organised a couple of shows. The first of these was at a grubby little club in Paris and then another at The YMCA just off Tottenham Court Road. Both were desperately riotous affairs, sweaty and deafening with the throbbing energy of a band emerging at last from stasis and self-doubt. In my excitement I probably over-compensated for his inexperience but he accounted for himself well, carrying himself with an assurance that has been his hallmark ever since, seemingly oblivious to the pressure that everyone else thinks he should be feeling. When I asked him about this he told me that it was just that he had such poor eyesight that he couldn’t even see the front row, let alone what was going on beyond that, so the whole visual experience for him just passed by as a strange, unintimidating abstract blur. Years later when he eventually bothered getting himself contact lenses he told us that the first gig he played wearing them was truly terrifying, confronted at last by the sea of animated faces to which for years he’d been oblivious. We moved him to London into a shared house with amongst others our good friend Mike Christie. We’d met Mike when he was working with Derek Jarman after we had approached him to direct a promo video for ‘So Young’ back in the spring of 1993. Tragically by then Derek was dying of AIDS and had moved into the latter stages of that awful, fatal illness so simply couldn’t commit but Mike had steered us towards working with two of Derek’s students, David Lewis and Andy Crabb, who had also ended up directing a series of films we had commissioned for the Dog Man Star tour to be projected behind us as back-drops and which Mike had produced. Over the years Mike has become a dear and trusted friend – loyal, perceptive and often unnervingly intelligent and always great fun to be with – and he has worked with us and become part of our family, following our vicissitudes and living them alongside us. He promoted the fiery, charged show at Blackpool Tower Ballroom just before Bernard left and would end up wasting much of his young life making incredibly strong coffee and listening to us moaning on tour as well as of course going on to direct 2018’s The Insatiable Ones documentary. Richard then callow, inexperienced and provincial was plucked from the cosy safety of his family and thrust into the bubbling metropolitan cauldron not only of the capital’s rock demi-monde but also of the gregarious London gay community, almost like Pip in some updated, highly modernised version of Great Expectations. Again his quiet calm, his refusal to be seen as being bothered, steered him through as we accelerated him unnaturally and possibly slightly recklessly through the gears of life.

  As part of Richard’s continuing baptism of fire we embarked on an endless, gruelling programme of touring, our limits narrowing to the relentlessly rain-washed windows of the tour bus and to the strange daily rhythms of catharsis and clock-work order, release and routine. On his first visit to Tokyo he was confronted at the hotel by a throng of obsessive fans and a brace of tiny, very chaste-looking Japanese girls holding an enormous banner hilariously emblazoned with the words FUCK US RICHARD, possibly the result of a translation miscommunication. In Hamburg while the rest of us cavorted drunkenly and embarrassingly around the flesh-pots of the Reeperbahn we locked him in his hotel room with an acoustic guitar and jokingly told him that he wasn’t allowed out ‘until he had written a hit’. Amazingly, instead of just telling us to fuck off he responded with the music that was later to become the song ‘Together’, the first sign that there might be a creative life beyond Bernard. As the tour rumbled along the motorways of Europe we were forced into the intimacy of each other’s lives and became close-knit and mutually purposeful, smoking together, listening together, laughing together, planning together: a tight little team made tighter by an ever-growing siege mentality. We were very much aware of a louring storm that was gathering, a building rumble of discontentment in the press which, given other options, was choosing to see us as increasingly irrelevant: a ‘dead band walking’, a group who couldn’t possibly survive in any meaningful way after Bernard’s departure. This was made all the more frustrating for us due to our inability to respond, trapped as we were within our mundane promotional duties, forced to tour an album that seemed no longer relevant to us and desperate to redefine ourselves as a creative force. Like any trial it was onerous and at times unpleasant but ultimately necessary. Richard wasn’t yet ready to speak as a writer and his time marinading in our influence was an essential ingredient in what would become the next album. When I think about the demands that were made on him at such a young age it seems extraordinary to me that he didn’t buckle and collapse. Apart from the technical feat of playing Bernard’s parts he had to suffer the indignity of always being in his shadow, of always being compared and often not favourably. This was partly of course a natural consequence of his new role in the band but I think as well it had very much to do with his reserved nature: always understated, never showy, keen to reject the florid rock clichés that the press so secretly love. I think he realised very early on that there would be no point in competing with Bernard’s enormous persona and so instead chose to quietly go about his job, something that he is still doing today. I think over the years that there have been consequences from the initial disparity in our relationship. It was always going to be an extremely tricky balancing act finding the right levels of encouragement needed to bring him up to speed when he was so much younger than us. His extraordinary technical ability went some way to bridging the gap but I worry that sometimes over the years I may have allowed my frustrations with peripheral matters to boil over and bleed into the dynamic of our relationship and I’m sure at times he may have started to see me as a kind of authoritarian ‘teacher’ figure rather than the friend and bandmate that I always wanted to be. I ponder a lot the question of whether I have allowed him the space to grow out of the shadow of Bernard and become an artist in his own right while at the same time being doomed to subtly try to guide him and shape him into someone who has some of Bernard’s undeniably fine qualities. Richard once brilliantly described joining Suede as ‘the best thing that ever happened to me – and the worst’. The wry aphorism perfectly sums up the conundrum of his predicament: it was a role that he could never refuse but
simultaneously one in which it would be almost, almost impossible to succeed.

  When Dog Man Star was released it was to rapturous acclaim, the press recognising in it the work of a band that had dared to leap beyond its limits and stretch into new, unknown places, but everywhere there was a niggling undertone, a querulous subtext which of course wondered how we could continue when what was seen as our creative force had been wrenched away so savagely. The mutterings of disquiet continued and the public confidence in Suede began to wane, coinciding not coincidentally with the new wave of bands who waved flags and dropped their aitches and painted a social tourist’s cartoon of British life: patronising, jingoistic and crass. The press’s heads were turned and they followed like a child chasing a ball into the road.

  PART THREE

  EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER

  LOVED ME HAS BEEN AT

  SOME TIME DISAPPOINTED

  The walls of the tiny box room were littered with Blu-Tack and random pin-pricked images of sixties pop stars and pages roughly ripped from magazines. On the white wooden painted frames that separated the orange-fabric sound insulation, sheets of lined A4 paper crammed with forests of manually typed words billowed gently in the artificial breeze from the electric fan. Outside it was a sultry summer day and inside the cramped, insulated, hermetically sealed writing room that I had had built in my new flat the air was unbearably close and oppressive. My shoes squeaked against the rubber floor and the sweat beaded on my forehead as I slotted a cassette tape into my portastudio and leaned into my SM58 to continue the seemingly Sisyphean task that is writing an album. Alan and I had moved into a bright top-floor maisonette in Chesterton Road, a scruffy, dog shit-littered street in North Kensington where rows of peeling, lower-middle-class Victorian houses had been badly hacked into flat conversions. It was just a few streets away from where I had first met Bernard on that fateful October evening in the late eighties and the flat was everything Shepherd’s Hill wasn’t: light, urban and charged with a breezy, bustling energy. It was a two-storey maisonette, so after struggling up the communal stairs you would first be greeted with the darkened, cramped floor that housed the bedrooms and the small studio. A further climb would reveal a large space dominated by a big, black L-shaped sofa which opened out on to a small, cheaply tiled concrete balcony facing westwards towards Shepherd’s Bush and the Heathrow flight path. It was a lighter, more modern-looking apartment than the Highgate one which I always thought had the vague feeling of one of Hockney’s deliberately unfussy seventies LA spaces, but still everywhere there were ash-trays laden with butts and Murano glass lighters and objets loosely arranged on the simple steel and glass coffee table around which we would gather and wile away our youth.

  Most afternoons I would mutter and shout into my microphone and hammer away in a clammy, clattering frenzy on my typewriter interrupted only by the occasional member of Alan’s burgeoning harem who confused and hungover and clutching their clothes would burst into the wrong room on their way to work while Alan lay comatose, still dead to the world, sleeping off the previous night’s regular vinous cocktail of alcohol, narcotics and downers. The dank, labyrinthine opulence of Dog Man Star had been embodied by the house in Highgate and I had begun to strongly associate its looming Gothic arches and gloomy calm with the fraught dramas of my and Bernard’s last few months working together so it had felt like it was time to escape its oppressive presence and scurry back to the cheery embrace of west London. Alan and I had picked up the same sort of dissolute rhythm we had developed in Moorhouse Road and the same sort of odd menagerie of drifters and dealers and misfits and girlfriends and the nights would often melt into mornings and the mornings into days and the days back into nights again while oblivious to the temporal shifts we would babble and smoke and chatter and shriek, the CDs and records scattering like a strange, shifting carpet across the sea-grass matting and then when everyone else had finally had enough and staggered back home, Alan and I would start all over again. Even though it might sound decadent and debauched it was all conducted fairly respectfully, still within a spirit of light, sociable hedonism, Alan’s rakish charm firmly intact and always ensuring that the festivities never assumed a darker edge. In many ways Alan was the real ‘rock star’ in that house. He had the charisma and the looks and the leather trousers whereas I just sat sweating in my studio in my faded needlecords trying to write songs. The problem was he just happened to work in a chip-shop. I always used to feel sorry for his procession of lovers many of whom I would have to entertain while he was emerging from the depths of his hangover. Often they would bustle excitedly into the flat telling me about how they and Alan had plans to ‘take a picnic to Kew Gardens’ or ‘go for a walk on Hampstead Heath’, their pretty faces flushed with a brittle kind of gaiety that I knew would soon be shattered. These I used to call Alan’s ‘coke promises’ as they were rarely, if ever, honoured and were one of the things that used to make me think that there weren’t many situations worse than being reincarnated as one of his unfortunate girlfriends. Somehow though his lovable picaresque roguery always saw him through. Cat-like he continually managed to land on his feet, his transgressions forgiven as endearing peccadilloes, the disappointment forgotten as soon as the smile spread across his crumpled, handsome face.

  At some point while shuffling around under the plane trees I’d met a girl called Sam Cunningham. She lived in a Victorian flat conversion on Lancaster Road just up from the library in a book-crammed room with a large south-facing bay window that looked out on to the street and a bizarrely outsize-panelled bedroom door that stretched almost all the way up to the double-height ceiling. She disguised her sensitive interior with a bright and funny manner and seemed somehow to be part of the very fabric of that part of London – the sort of warm, wonderful person who could and would chat to anyone and everyone in her perfect cut-glass English accent, smiling with her pale blue eyes, familiar and loved by the vast spectrum of people that, before the hedge-funders moved in, used to jostle and weave around the littered streets of Notting Hill. I would gaze on fascinated as chameleon-like she would give both market traders and minor aristocracy exactly the same levels of charm and energy, and of course why wouldn’t she, but her deceptively easy mien came across as wonderfully unjudgemental and classless. I suppose on some level I saw in her an antidote to the intense, angst-ridden theatre that had seemed to characterise all of my relationships of late. We stumbled around the cracked concrete pavements of Ladbroke Grove together, dipping in and out of the pubs and the bedsits, her unpretentious ways bleeding into me and helping me shrug off the icy shroud of my Highgate persona. I wrote ‘Sam’ about her of course, a deliberately understated, very unSuede-like piece that tried to capture some of the eponymous subject’s winsome charm with a similar one of its own. The little details about Lancaster Road and the library and the café where she would sip her tea were all real fragments of our world at the time, part of my attempt to develop, as Ian McEwan once so perfectly put it, a ‘pointillist approach to verisimilitude’, dusting the canvas of the song with little specks of truth. I remember coming up in the bedroom at Chesterton Road one hazy blur of an evening around the time when we first met while clutching a guitar, and the words and the chords and the melody just came pouring out of me in one of those uncanny and frankly untypical moments of songwriting serendipity. Even though in my mind it’s strangely adrift from the Suede canon, too personal and sweet and lacking in drama to compete with the dark theatre of our accepted body of work, the song still speaks to me. It’s probably purely a sentimental reflex but even today when I cycle past the library on the corner of Ladbroke Grove the little couplets of the verses still rattle through my head and I’m taken back to those precious, scruffy, beery days when we first met. ‘Together’ is another track that contains a lot of her presence. It was one of the first things that I wrote with Richard and as such it was an incredibly important tentative step on the path towards a new creative partnership. The song itself is a little snap-shot o
f the time when I first met Sam, playfully sketching the autumn day I bumped into her bouncing along Lancaster Road in a strange checked lumber-jack-style bomber jacket, her unwashed blue-black hair combed back and an impish smile flickering around her pretty face. In many ways Sam was unwittingly a huge influence on the vision for the new batch of songs that I was developing, revealing to me a warmer, sunnier world, less fraught but still charged with its own sort of thrill and romance.

  By the summer of 1995 Suede was beginning to be seen as a spent force, at best an anachronistic punchline or a cautionary tale and at worst an irrelevance. Somewhere, probably in the offices of Loaded or in a conference room in Millbank Tower, a party was going on and we were definitely not invited. As fashions marched forever onwards the taste-makers and the movers and the shakers had wandered away from us, interpreting our wounds as fatal and casting a bleak, cold shadow over our future. It was a hard time for me and it felt that the beginnings of a personal descent were somehow mirroring my band’s as despite my attempt at the opposite I became prickly and irascible at the version of myself that was being projected by the press: that of a bitter, increasingly marginal figure who was never able to forgive the zeitgeist for drifting away from him. I was developing the classic trait that many people who have experienced a taste of fame exhibit: a childish secret desire to be noticed mixed with an instinct to hide away – a strange uncomfortable paradox born from the inherent insecurities that many who strive towards the public eye struggle with. It makes for an unpleasant sort of person: status-obsessed, vainglorious and brittle, always seeking validation for their own self-worth via how they think others perceive them. I tried to resist this suffocating, unlovable spectre but I would often find myself caught up within its noxious clutches unable to judge myself evenly and again oscillating between morbid self-reflection and unattractive narcissism. The only escape from this complex wilderness of self-doubt seemed to be writing songs; the one constant thread in my unsettled life and the only thing in which I have always been able to find sanctuary.