Afternoons With the Blinds Drawn Page 11

  For a while Richard and I had been evolving a working dialogue – we had written a couple of things together which had turned out well and been good enough to use as B-sides but now we had found ourselves faced with the Herculean task of writing an album that would be the follow-up to Dog Man Star. The only way to confront the scale of the challenge was to ignore it and go in the opposite direction. It was vital to me, given that Suede was effectively now a new band, that we harnessed something of that vitality and irreverent freshness, that the new record took on the feeling almost of another debut because in a sense it would be exactly that. I realised it would be utterly futile trying to make Dog Man Star 2; that the white-hot chemistry which had created that album was born of a unique clash of forces, the shimmering apex reached through circumstances and experiences beyond the ordinary that could never be copied and that to try to do so would come across as utterly ridiculous and parodic and bound to be a bitter, inevitable failure. What I tried to tease out of Richard was a different treasure, something that I saw glittering within him: a simpler, less stuffy version of Suede, still both joyous and pained but rich with melody and instinctive, raw and jagged. Richard’s musical loves were very different from Bernard’s. He was a huge fan of the off-kilter, post-punk art rock of people like Keith Levene and John McGeoch and loved the wiry surrealism of the Fall but was still well versed in the classic sixties rock canon. I remember feeling absolutely certain that the record should have the crackle of energy that can only be made by a band playing together – that simple alchemy that four people with some bits of wood and some wires can create – the sort of thing that you might have heard before a million times but which always sounds fresh. The spectral, atomised way in which we had made Dog Man Star created something extraordinary, the broken shards and the splinters combining magically, but with this album I wanted it to sound like a band who enjoyed playing together, not the product of dislocation and estrangement. Writing with Richard was always going to be different from writing with Bernard. Obviously he was far less experienced and so I was very aware of my role as both mentor and co-writer, conscious of a disparity in experience but determined not to let that become something that inhibited him. Also I was keen to make him part of my little world, to usher him in and make him feel connected, aware that despite his self-contained manner he was still a young man who had been uprooted from the familiarity of his life and thrust into a strange new one. Alan and I used to often invite him over to the flat just to hang out and play the guitar and listen to music. When I mention it now Richard often reminds me that as an afterthought I’d often tack on a small shopping list of things for him to pick up on the way (usually cigarettes, cat litter and chewing gum) but the intention was always decent. I think he probably viewed us and our unusual life on the thresholds of propriety as secretly amusing but in his naturally unfazed way would come over and just kind of slot in around the chaos and the cigarette ash and the half-empty bottles, thrilling us with his guitar playing and doing hilarious impressions as he has an uncanny ability for mimicking people. He will sit back and observe you and tease out a tiny detail of your bearing or a verbal tic that you were unaware of and then project it back to you with a hilarious deadpan delivery. Even those people who seem somehow characterless aren’t immune. I often think that what was music’s gain was comedy’s loss.

  One morning I was lying in my room drifting between sleep and consciousness when a simple, childish melody began to rattle around in my head, almost like a playground chant, circling and looping, niggling and insistent: ‘Filmstar, propping up the bar, driving in a car it looks so easy’. I picked up my Dictaphone from the side of my bed where it usually lived and muttered the idea into it but it kept gnawing away at me and wouldn’t let me get back to sleep. The only option was to see it through so I called Richard and hurried over to his basement flat in Kensington Garden Square just off the wrong end of Westbourne Grove. The morning had taken on an urgency so dispensing with tea and pleasantries I sat on his borrowed landlord’s sofa and sang him my part slapping my palms against my knees to suggest the simple tribal rhythm I was hearing as an accompaniment. It was one of those rare, fluid moments in songwriting when everything seemed to fall into place easily, with an odd sense that the song almost already existed and it was our job just to capture it, like a photographer chasing the perfect image. Richard got it straightaway and began working on a gnarly, wiry, descending guitar piece that lent the whole thing a depth and complexity that previously hadn’t been there. We needed a B-part, something that lifted the song away from its inherent chugging repetition so I started singing, ‘What to believe in, it’s impossible to say,’ and Richard fitted some deceptively simple but effective chords around it and suddenly we had written ‘Filmstar’. I liked the face-value, unveiled nature of the lyric: devoid of shades of meaning, simple and direct and forthright, somehow resonating with the superficiality of the subject matter. Later I wove in a little detail that suggested that the protagonist was more likely to be Alan Bates than Tom Cruise but the song remained essentially the same as the one we wrote together that day in Richard’s basement flat as west London scurried and squeaked outside. It felt like this was a real watershed: suddenly I could see that there was a path ahead into the next record and that this song was leading the way. When we eventually recorded it I remember Boy George being in the studio next door and us press-ganging him and his band into participating in our ‘handclap party’, an event that Ed would often orchestrate to accompany the outros of many songs from that period. Without wishing to turn this book into a predictable avalanche of dropped names I’ve always liked George. He was sweet and generous to us when we skittishly and nervously pranced around on our first ever Top of the Pops in 1992 and you always remember little kindnesses like that. Bristling with a nascent confidence Richard and I tried the same approach as we had with ‘Filmstar’ with another half-idea that I had muttered into my Dictaphone one day. It was a sort of brutal, tribal chant based around the only drum beat I can play – a kind of simplistic Glitter Band beat/double beat thing. Again the idea only had one looping part when I leant on Richard’s doorbell one grimy, sunless afternoon but lyrically it was slightly more developed. Even though she was unnamed in the song it featured another of my fictional characters, an extrapolation of the Terry idea from the early days. This character was called Sadie and she featured in a few of the songs from around this period but ‘She’ is easily the best. In this track I trailed her around the shitty backstreets of London as she made her way from bed to bed: predatory, heedless and beautiful as the night. I suppose it was another romanticised portrait of feminine power in the same sort of vein as ‘My Dark Star’ but with a grittier, jagged, cynical edge describing a high-heeled, highly stylised flaneuse, strange and ‘terrible as the dawn’. In a repetition of our writing of ‘Filmstar’ I tapped out the childish beat on my knees and sang the words and Richard started threading a similarly knotty guitar line around the melody but this one for me was in a different league: a churning, plummeting motif with an almost Egyptian feel, not that I particularly know what Egyptian music sounds like to be honest but the part had an unusual exotic harmonic that somehow sat beautifully against the portrait I was sketching of disaffection and mutinous sexuality. Again it felt that, instead of a proper chorus, we just needed a simple B-part that shifted into a new gear so Richard suggested some chords which led to the ‘nowhere places’ section which then looped back round again unfussily to the verse. I finished it off by adding a falsetto whoo-hoo hook, an idea that was inspired by Howlin’ Wolf’s classic ‘Smokestack Lightning’ which I think may have been rattling around my head as it was being used in an advert at the time. Sometimes when these moments happen you are tricked into thinking that it will always be so but for better or for worse our writing has never been as carefree and simple again as during those leaden, grey afternoons in 1995 when we wrote ‘Filmstar’ and ‘She’.

  Every evening around this time tended to descen
d into a blizzard of narcotics and boozing, the flat a shifting stage through which a procession of misfits would wander. One such night a friend of mine Gary France and I had managed to get ourselves into a particularly ragged state and as the dawn broke over west London I grabbed a guitar and we sat looking out towards Shepherd’s Bush drunkenly lurching into some tuneless singing. By the time the sun had come up we had written a batch of suitably comical songs with titles like ‘Kisses For My Missus’ and ‘Santa Ain’t A Wanker’, but more than that a whole persona for the band that would perform them and even its name – Bruiser: an overtly laddish, almost Hogarthian caricature of a ‘blokes’ band, full of beery football chants and barely concealed misogyny. Although at the time it seemed hilarious it now of course just comes across like a silly drunken moment. The only reason it might be worthy of any mention is because I suppose it was my private way of ridiculing the scene that was becoming known as Britpop, a movement which we had propagated but with which we always had a very uncomfortable relationship ever since Select magazine had superimposed a Union Jack behind my image for a cover piece back in early 1993. While Richard and I were writing songs for the successor to Dog Man Star the scene was reaching ugly new heights of ubiquity and jingoism and cultural parody which I began to privately despise and possibly secretly feel responsible for and I suppose Bruiser, ridiculous though it was, was my way of venting and not allowing any of that bile to spill out and infect my work, ring-fencing the anger as the scene grew into the misshapen creature that we all remember.

  Back in the real world Richard would busy himself writing ideas that were his own inception. One of the early ones he prosaically called ‘Ballad Idea’. It was a beautiful, wandering, slow-burning piece, highly melodic and evocative and stirring but the chorus seemed to be too wilfully obscure. The rich, complex detail of music is something that I have always had to rely on others to provide but I’m quite good with the simple hook so I took his idea and replaced his meandering chorus with a basic D/E/A/F sharp minor chord sequence. It unlocked the song for me and suggested the tale of an everyday office girl looking forward to the weekend when her boyfriend would take her out. I called it ‘Saturday Night’. I suppose it was very much inspired by those wonderful, alcoholic winter London evenings that I had spent with Sam nursing pints in pubs and standing in foyers of cinemas and the tone was intended to be warm and embracing: a celebration of the simple pleasures of life. A couple of ideas of mine were solo pieces I had written way back in 1993 almost as a security against the seemingly not unlikely event of Bernard leaving the band. I had bought myself an old Stanton and Sons upright pre-war piano and somehow hauled it up the stairs to the flat in Moorhouse Road where I had tinkered and meddled, playing around learning chord shapes and melodic parts to things like ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Lady Stardust’ as the cat slept curled up on the top and candle wax dripped over the keys. Not having the ability to go much further beyond them I tended to stick to simple, childish progressions one of which was the ‘Puff The Magic Dragon’ A/C sharp minor/D/E pattern. When I’ve written something I’m pleased with I’ll often use it as a starting point for a new song and sometimes those starting points stick. It was around the time I was recording ‘So Young’ and the garbled intro shriek of that bled into the first line of the one I was writing at the piano: ‘She can walk out anytime, anytime she wants to walk out that’s fine’. I called it ‘By The Sea’ and it was conceived as a tender, wistful love song, a soft, yearning anthem detailing escape from the city to some fictionalised coastal idyll. If I’m honest I was thinking a bit about Justine when I wrote this and a similar little escape fantasy that we would occasionally allow to spool within our ragged, murmured late-night conversations but I was also very aware that the opening of the second line could have been interpreted as a reference to Bernard’s departure. However, as I have said before, trying to pin absolute meanings to songs is in my mind futile – they breathe and live through different shades of shifting interpretations. Another childish ditty that I had written years ago back in the Moorhouse Road days was called ‘Lazy’. It was a song about Alan and me and it painted a familiar picture of us flopped within the chaos of the night before, two perfectly happily isolated people bonded by their refusal to join the real world, watching in a furtive, circumspect way from behind the blinds as life jostled and scurried on the streets below. It certainly has a callow charm but it’s hardly one of our best, rescued only by the brilliant melodic guitar part that Richard threaded through it, chiming and cascading like the line that Roger McGuinn never wrote.

  CROUCHENDERS

  The huge vaulted ceilings of The Church Studios in Crouch End echoed with the crack of Simon’s snare drum as the guitar part to ‘She’ rattled around the room and the bass throbbed and droned. Endless, neglected cups of tea had cooled on the amps and sat there like sad little wallflowers, the stewed, cold liquid within them rippling as the room vibrated and shivered. The four of us were running through the track having been offered free time by Dave Stewart who owned the place back then and who must have taken a shine to us and been feeling philanthropic. We took a break and shuffled back into the control room grabbing our cigarettes and slumping heavily into the black leather studio sofas to listen to what we had recorded. Simon had brought a suit in with him on a hanger and had hung it on a coat hook on the door, vaguely muttering something about his cousin coming over to pick it up as he was borrowing it for an interview. As the menacing, grinding rhythms lurched through the NS-10s the door opened and a slight, winsome young man wandered in smiling a communal greeting above the din. His name was Neil Codling, the cousin who needed the suit, and the job he was to end up getting would be a very different one. Once the music had stopped and we started chatting it was clear that beyond the handsome face and the coltish fold of limbs there lurked a sensitive boy, inquisitive and well-read and possessing an easy kind of charm. Simon had neglected to mention that he was also a fine musician, an especially adept pianist, so as one of the songs we were working on at the time was ‘By The Sea’ I suggested casually that he jam along with us freeing Richard up to try out some guitar ideas. It was the first time that Suede had ever played like this as a five piece and the shift in dynamic from a quartet to a quintet felt wonderfully fresh and exciting and somehow in keeping with my desire for us to feel more like a new band that happened to share a name than just the same one with a line-up change. I don’t really remember the point at which Neil actually joined the band – he just sort of hung around and became part of us. It was a wonderfully natural, almost serendipitous thing, unplanned and unpredicted and utterly right. As you climb your way up into the business end of the music industry your life takes on a repetitive, quotidian sort of feel, your days filled with events and rehearsals and appearances and shows, imprisoned within the narrow, biroed pages of your manager’s diary. The chance occurrence of meeting Neil felt wonderfully free from that suffocating rigidity, like it was somehow preordained; an inevitable page in the script of our lives. And so we carried on with what felt right. Mat would pick us up in his tatty old bronze seventies Merc and we would putter up through Maida Vale and St John’s Wood and Camden, chattering and smoking endless packs of Benson and Hedges, carelessly dropping ash over Mat’s faded leather interior as Never Mind the Bollocks or Revolver or Tanx played on the cassette deck and north-west London disappeared behind us in the rear-view mirror until eventually we would arrive in Crouch End and begin work again.

  One day Mat was tinkering around on the piano with a sweet minor-key chord sequence. There’s something knowingly mechanical about the way he plays the keyboards, probably born from simple lack of practice but it’s like he refuses to entertain the idea of being florid or overexpressive so his parts often have a kind of comically robotic, almost Florian Schneider-like charm. In his unassuming manner he was just playing in a quiet, almost meditative way to himself but I could hear something in the icy grandeur of the chords, something that suggested a sultry Berlin-perio
d ballad so we played along and worked the song into a demo and jokingly called it ‘Sombre Bongos’. I took it home and wrote a piece called ‘Europe Is Our Playground’, a simple love song that used the metaphor of travel to parallel the phases of feeling in a relationship, its flux and its change. It was loosely based around a trip that Sam and I had taken to Barcelona around that time, a wonderful few days prancing around the sun-kissed esplanades and piazzas, dipping in and out of the shaded side streets eating gazpacho and drinking cold beer together. When asked about the song I have often jokingly said that I intended it as an advert for Interrailing but my flippancy belies the fact that it’s incredibly dear to me and I feel it grows in stature with each passing year, another in a long list of criminally underrated tracks that were consigned to the no man’s land of the B-side. I distinctly remember a phone discussion with Saul about whether it should go on the album and for some reason at the time we both thought its surging, wintry elegance didn’t fit with the fizzy upbeat nature of the record, something of a shame for me now when I reflect on the fact that it possibly became my single favourite moment from that whole period.

  As the new line-up began to gel musically so in concert we started to develop a ‘look’. It’s interesting how what is often perceived as a conscious, studied, even manipulative image almost always has an innocent, often haphazard starting point. The ‘Oxfam chic’ thing that we had developed during those early years was purely an accident born of desperate dolelife penury but later seized upon by the editors of fashion magazines as some sort of style manifesto. Rather than it being a conscious decision, bands tend to dress similarly simply because they spend so much time with each other. Records are swapped and jackets are borrowed and minds become tuned to the same frequency and the flow of clothes like the flow of ideas is all part of that process. Of course this can be faked and manufactured by a Svengali-like manager and a clever stylist but I think you can always tell. A look often becomes an unwitting creation of both the band and the media and is tied up within the fabric of its persona in that it is something that is reflected back by journalists and incrementally and subconsciously fine-tuned. The Coming Up look was one of the few times that personally I think we got it right. When I come across press shots from other points in our career I cringe at how either we look like we’ve found the keys to our grandmother’s dressing-up box or alternatively like we’ve been dressed by our mums to go to a wedding. For a band that is for some reason seen as being stylish I think we have sometimes had an embarrassing visual sense. I have often thought that the louche, vaguely sophisticated style that we found ourselves eventually inhabiting was actually paradoxically a factor of our working-class roots. Of course there will be many examples that seem to disprove this but within the demi-monde of alternative music I’ve noticed that there seems to be an inverse relationship between class and scruffiness, that it’s those people who were born into comfortable homes, the children of middle-class professionals, who tend to dress down, probably to distance themselves from their backgrounds and to suggest a manufactured edge rather than one that is present. At the risk of coming across like an inverted snob myself I think those from working-class backgrounds who have been brought up wearing cheap supermarket clothes or stitched together hand-me-downs often feel the need to escape from the trappings of their humble origins, choosing, probably completely subconsciously, to suggest success in the clothes that they wear in the same way that the poorest families will often burden themselves with the cost of the most lavish weddings. To put it simply, poor people want to look rich and rich people want to look poor. This phenomenon has meant that often we have lurched between looking like we are trying too hard or looking like we haven’t tried hard enough. The clothes we were wearing in 1996 seemed to sit on the right point along that spectrum. During an Asian tour I had managed to get a Portobello market seventies leather jacket copied by one of the many excellent Hong Kong tailors. In that carefree, easy way that bands have, as we began to spend more time together the style began to be borrowed by everyone and became a sort of unofficial uniform, like an embodiment of the music we were trying to make: something that was more an expression of the street, less precious and haughty and esoteric, something torn from the dirty pulse of the city, still romantic and passionate but tactile and very real. And as we all began to dress in a similar way so our lives became intertwined and we developed that secret language of camaraderie, an idiomatic landscape of in-jokes and impressions and shared understanding that only groups of people who have spent too much time together can acquire. There has always been a twisted, wry, dead-pan sense of humour in the Suede camp that has often gone unnoticed by the rest of the world, hidden as it is beneath a public veneer of perceived humourlessness. Mat and Richard especially are, in their own separate ways, two of the driest, wittiest people you are likely to meet and it was this shared lexicon that we began to develop as a band when Neil joined, filling the gaps I didn’t know needed filling, realigning us and rebalancing us when I didn’t realise we needed rebalancing. Although at first Neil very much politely slotted into the existing hierarchy, gradually as he revealed his strengths and gained confidence his role grew. I think for some people Neil’s position in Suede, his purpose if you will, is still unclear. Even those who love the band will see an on-stage persona and assume that the studied laconic detachment that he projects somehow suggests that his role in the band is peripheral. Nothing could be further from the truth. As the years roll on and now we are faced with working on what will be our seventh album together Neil’s role has never been more central, more vital. He is always challenging, always pushing me, always making me reach in and find the best in myself and without his presence Suede possibly might not have made it this far. The calumnious, now faintly hilarious, accusations of his being just ‘indie eye candy’ couldn’t be more wrong as he increasingly reveals himself to be an artist of ever-growing stature. It’s interesting to see how he has changed over the years. At first I think he was very conscious of fitting in around the existing power structure, sensitive to the dynamics of what made a guitar band function, realising of course that his position as a keyboard player was always going to be a somewhat fringe role and careful to not undermine or challenge that order. Incrementally and quite naturally though his role evolved and as he slowly gained confidence and experience the nuances and expertise of his musicianship became essential to us. These days his input in the studio especially is an absolutely key ingredient and without him we would be a completely different band, if we were indeed still a band at all. That might sound a little dramatic but it’s his vision and sophisticated touch and tireless attention to detail that has allowed us to grow beyond the simplistic rock format as all bands must in order to survive, but in a manner that mirrors Richard’s his public presence is almost demure, preferring as he does to just quietly and brilliantly get on with his work and leave all of the shouting and vulgar attention grabbing to me.