Afternoons With the Blinds Drawn Page 12

  Back to 1995 though and one day Richard had wandered over to the frenetic chaos of my flat, braving the throngs of swaying, chattering gurners who still hadn’t realised it was time to go home and clutching a new demo cassette in his hands. It was something he had called ‘Dead Leg’, part of a series of tracks with working titles including one called ‘Chinese Burn’ that had comically mined the theme of playground bullying. When approaching a new song I like to try to hurriedly write down my very first responses to it as sometimes these can be the most powerful, often containing something direct and instinctive, before it becomes too familiar and you begin to overthink it. Bearing this in mind I like to listen to it completely alone when I’m prepared and ready to respond and feeling that my synapses are firing. So Richard just stayed and we chatted a bit and drank tea with sour milk and once he’d shuffled off back through the scattering leaves and the dirty pavements of Notting Hill I finally found the time to retreat into my studio, close the eight-inch-thick sound-proofed door and slot the cassette into my Tascam. I was greeted with a brilliantly wiry riff, cyclical and nagging and querulous, a line that bored like a parasite into your head and refused to leave. Around it I began to weave a kind of stream-of-consciousness rant, a cut-and-paste shot-gun tirade that threw around almost random images torn from the pages of my notebooks: ‘high on diesel and gasoline / psycho for drum machine / shaking their tits to the hits’. I felt that frisson of uncontrollable excitement when you know there’s something really great almost within your grasp, thrilling to the complex blend of danger and melody which in the right proportions have always been the hall-mark of a good Suede song. As I worked on it the simple, dislocated narrative began to reveal itself: a fragmented sketch of the chaos of my and Alan’s dissolute world set amongst the heaving ash-trays and the broken glass and the endless drifting days; an exploration of the squalor and the fractured half-lives but with a celebratory, joyous tone that somehow glorified our unhinged carnival of madness. It was I suppose partly born of my constant need to try to romanticise the grubby edges of my world, to resist the stuffy conventions of acceptability, throwing away the furtive vestiges of paranoia and fear and proudly saying, ‘This is my life – deal with it’. In a move that paralleled the writing of ‘Saturday Night’ I found Richard’s original chorus chords too complex so I rewrote them as a very simple C/Em/F/G sequence and sang over it: ‘Here they come, the beautiful scum, the beautiful scum’. I liked the idea of a twisted anthem for the anti-hero that the words suggested but on further reflection it seemed a little wayward and marginal so I changed the title to ‘Beautiful Ones’ and the song was born. Alan’s party was still going on upstairs so after a few hours’ work I wandered up to rejoin it, slotting in on the black L-shaped sofa and amongst the debris covering the glass-top table and we carried on into the next day and when everyone had finally left I excitedly played him the half-ideas on the messy, sketchy demo. Alan has always been such a passionate, supportive friend when it comes to my work and he immediately loved the song and in his rapacious, relentless way kept wanting to hear it again and again. Unfortunately my mediocre guitar-playing wasn’t improved by my now completely frazzled state so we called Richard up and he trudged back over to North Kensington and stepped gingerly back into our scattered world, trying to readjust to the odd temporal shift – the displacement and chaos that must have seemed like a frozen moment from the previous day – and all crammed like sardines into my tiny, airless, orange studio he and I ran through the track, the sweat beading on our foreheads as Alan squatted on the floor smoking, a huge contented grin spreading across his handsome, ravaged face. Well, at least that’s how I remember the genesis of the song. If you asked Richard to supply a version of the events his more sober memories might be less pithy and probably more accurate but as Mark Twain once so brilliantly said: ‘Never let the truth get in the way of a good story’. The song was hard to get right in the studio as Richard went through endless guitar variations before he finally nailed the right sound for the all-important riff but eventually it would become possibly our most successful ever, a jagged, ragged anthem for the disaffected; one of those ‘entry-level’ tracks that many people who don’t know much about the band are vaguely familiar with. I wouldn’t say it’s my personal favourite – it’s almost too popular to deserve too much of my affection – but it’s a song that has connected in such a way that it always makes the floor heave when we play it live and as such has become one of a small handful that we now simply don’t have a choice but to perform at shows.

  One day Neil wandered over to my house. At the time he was still living in his flat in Crouch End and had been beavering away on a demo for me. Because he didn’t have any paper at home he had written the chords on the back of a Haringey Council Public Works notice which he’d torn from a lamp-post outside and wrapped around the cassette. Neil had titled the demo ‘Tiswas’ and it was a slippery, spidery, wriggling sort of neurotic guitar beast, punchy and direct but strangely complex and meandering too. I immediately loved it and one afternoon while Alan slumbered next door, recovering from our usual nightly carnival of excess, I went about writing a paean to the guileless beauty of pop fandom, a song detailing a young girl’s nascent obsessions, her wild-eyed love for the mercurial wonders of the charts, and I called it ‘Starcrazy’. Despite its capricious, often inane nature I’ve always had a fascination with the uncomplicated appeal of pop, how in an almost quasi-religious way it can fulfill and enlighten and complete people’s lives and provide them with a strange kind of empowerment. I love its inherently democratic nature, its accessibility, the fact that unlike fine art or ballet it speaks to real people about their lives and is within everyone’s grasp. I love that my copy of The White Album is exactly the same as Bill Gates’. It’s a discipline that especially interested me while making this album: that chase for unembellished directness, that pursuit of the mot juste, that feeling that the simplest of lyrics could unlock something timeless and powerful and universal and that ultimate sense that it might be just within your grasp to whisper down through the generations.

  IT SOUNDS LIKE THE

  FUCKING SMURFS

  As I stood on the up escalator at Holborn tube station the tired huddle of rush-hour commuters being carried downwards stared blankly at us from across the divide, any mild curiosity they might have felt as the cameramen jostled into position around me negated by a long day at work and by the numbing ubiquity of such sights all over the streets of the capital. The director slapped the hinged clap-stick on to the clapperboard and shouted, ‘Action!’ and a swirl of distorted, tinkling music flooded out of the portable monitors at my feet like the demented accompaniment to a broken fairground carousel. In order to chase a visual effect he had insisted that the music be played at double time and my cheeks stung with a creeping kind of humiliation as I mimed along to the comical volley of sped-up words realising with a writhing embarrassment that I was sounding like I’d swallowed the contents of a helium balloon. Those on the down escalator swivelled their faces towards me, gazing in silent incredulity as I underwent my ordeal, their eyes locked on the spectacle, their brows knitted in amusement and mild confusion. Finally, thankfully, the music finished and all I could hear beyond the blood singing in my ears was the rumble of the escalators and the shuffle of feet. Suddenly, to my eternal shame, from within the anonymous throng a clear, mocking voice rang out against the mutter and hubbub: ‘He sounds even more like the fucking Smurfs!’

  We started work on the album at Townhouse Studios in Shepherd’s Bush in autumn 1995. Even though we’d met with a couple of other producers to see what they had to say as soon as we got in a room with Ed again it just felt right. I think in many ways Ed was even more driven than the band at this point to make this album work; he had developed a burning zeal, a wild-eyed personal quest which meant that he had drifted beyond the normal boundaries of his job description into a kind of rapt obsession. Possibly his biggest motivation was that even though I don’t think it
had been mentioned in interviews at that point there were industry mutterings about Bernard having left the band through a dissatisfaction with Ed’s work. Of course Chinese whispers like that could never reveal the rich complexity of the situation but they planted a malign seed that Ed understandably felt he must try to root out. This is one of the reasons that our relationship with him over the years has drifted beyond the limits of his remit with a wonderful almost familial sense of shared history which means that for him working with Suede is never just another job, and it was this hunger that drove through him and in turn bled into us and laid the bed-rock for the album sessions.

  When making records it often feels that Suede is caught in a cycle of opposition against itself. Sometimes it feels that there is a pendulum that swings between creative poles defining the nature of the next album by inverting the qualities of the last. For many reasons, the swing between Dog Man Star and its successor felt like it had to be a bold, confident statement of intent, that the character of the new work should diametrically oppose that of the last. The fiery forge in which Dog Man Star had been birthed had been so uncomfortable and at times so unpleasant that we had all decided that we simply couldn’t go back there and so we decided to make a pop album: ‘just ten hits’ was the wry mantra that we often used to describe the intention. We wanted the record to be everything that Dog Man Star wasn’t – punchy, direct and bristling with hooks – something that reflected the language of the street, not some distant, aloof, esoteric, fantasy netherworld. Sometimes in a crazed desire to stick to this self-imposed dogma I think we pushed the songs too far along that spectrum, but when making an album I often find that you need, at least initially, rules and structures and guidelines to give the record form and consistency or it can be in danger of becoming a random murky soup of disconnected songs. And so with our mantra ringing in our ears we became slightly obsessed with trying to make almost every track sound like a single whether that suited their inherent feel or not. This was back in the days when there was still the media infrastructure for bands like ours to penetrate the mainstream as during the mid-nineties the mainstream had seemed to shift even further left field which, apart from its rejection of American cultural imperialism, was possibly the only other good thing about the guitar-based scene that was burgeoning so clamorously around us. We would attempt radically different versions of the songs, sometimes dressing them up in clothes that simply didn’t suit them. Ed often supplied models of chart hits into which he thought he could twist our music, and he would hustle and harry us into rehearsing with this kind of style or that kind of attitude. One of these bonkers moments happened with ‘She’, which he thought he could make sound more like Edwyn Collins’ ‘A Girl Like You’ and thus I suppose unlock more of its mainstream potential. This whole episode became rather a sticking point and though the friction it created between us now seems comical at the time I remember throbbing with passive aggression as we sourly and reluctantly ran through a sped-up version of the song while Ed overdubbed some vibraphone ideas to try to drag it away from its grinding, rocky core and force it uncomfortably into some lighter, groovier, Faux-town black hole. Another of these bizarre ambitions that he had was for ‘Filmstar’ to sound more akin to the Babylon Zoo hit ‘Spaceman’ and so we spent many wasted, unenthusiastic hours trying to stretch the song and speed it up and give it a pop sheen that it simply didn’t suit. To be fair Ed was just experimenting and when it became blindingly obvious that the songs worked much better as dark, prowling rock beasts he held up his hands and we went back to the original ideas. With the beauty of hindsight it’s easy to laugh at the mistakes you make and the cul-de-sacs you go down but sometimes this kind of lateral thinking when making music can pay off, taking a song to places that no one knew it could go, stretching it and releasing something within it that you didn’t know was there. ‘Beautiful Ones’ was less contentious in that it was already a catchy pop number but Ed and Richard spent countless days throwing different guitar sounds at the riff, trying to find the sound that suited the knotty, nagging infectious hook. During the course of this Odyssey they even recorded a steel-bodied Dobro resonator guitar used more in traditional blues music and at some point the riff was even heavily phased giving the whole intro a horrible gimmicky sixties feel. Eventually the part was comprised of an amalgam of sounds, a blend of Jaguars and 335s and Telecasters, but the journey to reach that point was onerous and winding and inevitably cyclical. I think Ed saw that with Bernard now gone his role within the power structure of the band had changed. He realised that he had much more creative freedom to experiment and mould. Previously Bernard’s musical direction had been visionary and commanding and bordering on dictatorial and I don’t mean that as a criticism. It’s incredibly important that there is a single strong voice or sometimes a pair of voices when making records. Albums that are made by committee are doomed to sound like a grey mesh of disconnected ideas; a band needs a leader and a focal point just as much as any connected group of people and Bernard’s voice was always the strongest and most heard when it came to these matters. I have always needed a musical foil to bounce my scruffy, sketchy half-ideas against and have technically never been a good enough musician to completely take control of the reins in the studio, so sensing that the role was now vacated I think Ed began to fill a different, less passive space, not in any sinister autocratic sort of way but simply because the dynamics had changed and with Neil and Richard still as yet vastly inexperienced the whole project needed a firm, guiding hand.