Afternoons With the Blinds Drawn Read online

  Back to the story though and by this juncture in our careers a legal dispute with an American lounge singer called Suede had forced us to change our name in that country. It was a rather sorry episode and happened at a point when our lives had accelerated to such a strange place that our judgement was utterly skewed by the carnival of madness and we somehow allowed ourselves to become known in that country as The London Suede – Suede, London being what was stencilled all over our flight cases. The clunky ugliness of the moniker was possibly the defining reason why beyond that event we tended to avoid playing in the States, unable to face the ignominy of touring under such a humiliatingly silly name. The British media would often go on to frame our relative failure in America as due to our overt ‘Englishness’, choosing to portray us as a reaction to grunge and assuming that the idiosyncrasies of my character in particular were diametrically opposed to those values and couldn’t possibly fit within that market. In reality I had no problem with grunge – at least it seemed to possess a rage and an energy and I think in many ways its best moments still resonate – and I loved playing shows in the States, many of which were riotous and exciting. Sadly it wasn’t to be but it was a course of events that led us to embrace touring in parts of the world that we might never have bothered with and focusing instead on working Europe and Asia with an energy that might have been otherwise unavailable to us. We played huge, rowdy, passionate shows everywhere from Copenhagen to Singapore as the seemingly endless procession rolled on and on. It’s a strange, dislocating experience returning from lengthy tours. The regular, bestial rituals that you undergo every night and the forced intimacy of life on the road are suddenly replaced with relative calm and stasis and propriety. The complex tapestry of in-jokes and shared private references, despite being the only language that you become able to communicate in, is suddenly bereft of context leaving you sometimes with a feeling of being stranded and unheard: unable to fit back in, squirming and restless and disconnected. It was in this state that I would shakily make my way back to Chesterton Road every few months often to find that the unsettled disorder in which I had left the flat was completely unchanged, like a finger had pressed pause on some celestial tape deck. Alan was still locked within the same scurrying, hedonistic ceremonies, the same bluish smoke filled the same rooms, the same thin patina of cigarette ash was everywhere, the dead flowers were browner, the matted floors more scattered, the LPs more scratched and the same heaving bins were still waiting to be taken out. The mainstream success of the record had begun to attract a regular smattering of fans who would sometimes congregate in sorry huddled groups on the pavement below. Despite making me a little uncomfortable I would always try to be polite and dispose myself to their small litany of requests but once I remember sitting upstairs in the flat with Alan and Sam after a particularly gruelling session and being bombarded throughout the mid-morning by a relentless nagging barrage of intercom buzzes so that Sam, her patience having finally deserted her and bristling with an uncharacteristic irritation, marched angrily to the kitchen and filled a pan with cold water, tipping it over the balcony on to the pavement below like a knight throwing oil over the battlements of a castle during a medieval siege. The resulting incredulous shrieks from four floors below made us all feel rather guilty but at least we were left in peace for a while. Another time I was trotting along Chesterton Road on my way back to the flat when I bumped into a couple of European fans and in my uncomfortable, inelegant rush to get away from them stupidly said something like, ‘But I’ll be back in a couple of days – come back then,’ not realising of course that what I had intended as a polite wriggle out of the situation would be interpreted as a formal invitation. It was a misunderstanding born of my social anxiety and increasing inability to deal with the customs and conventions of the real world, something that was being finely tuned by still growing levels of success and excess. Unfortunately I believe that it led to an unpleasant campaign of abuse against me when those in question returned at the appointed time to be confronted with my inevitable absence and in their impotent rage took it upon themselves to graffiti the pavements and parts of the surrounding streets with my name and address and deeply disturbing threats. It inspired a song at the time called ‘Graffiti Women’ and it was a glimpse into the shadowy margins of fandom, the tenebrous hinterland where attractions become obsessions which in turn become nefarious compulsions. In a way I think it’s tied up with the person versus persona question – how when meeting their heroes fans are in a strange situation of meeting both the person and the persona at the same time and that sometimes this disparity can throw up confusions and incongruities for them as they struggle between the perfect image that they have and the real person with whom they are confronted who in many ways is always bound to disappoint. Somehow this all felt far more threatening and darker than it probably was; possibly my growing paranoia and increasingly neurotic disposition exaggerated the whole thing but it marked the end of a chapter for me, providing a turning point and an impetus to move on.

  We left the flat in a chaotic flurry one night, the bemused removal men trying to pick their way around the madness of the permanent party which our lives had become, packing and carrying out boxes while we sat like lords in our ash-scattered kingdom of debris, lost in a hedonistic solipsism, oblivious to the scurrying world beyond ourselves. We were carried aloft and bundled into vans, our tatty, unmended possessions thrown roughly into cardboard boxes and the cargo dumped unceremoniously at what was to become our new home – a ground-floor flat on the corner of Ledbury and Artesian Road. It was an elegantly corniced, high-ceilinged Victorian conversion with a spacious, bright, west-facing lounge that looked out on to the bustling street. What I didn’t know until I moved there was how much I had missed that little enclave. The flat was two streets away from Moorhouse Road and our old flat which had been the charmed and tatty stage that had spewed forth so many ideas for the debut album. I’ve always had an affinity for that part of town – its unassuming, quiet elegance, its antidote to the wedding-cake showiness of those grander houses further west. I filled the flat with lilies and found shadowy, fabric pop-art portraits to hang above the mantelpiece, enjoying again living within a more ornamental, less characterless space. Looking back, this was a golden time for me. Sometimes these periods only reveal themselves with hindsight, the jostle of the day-to-day obscuring their true worth, but if there is a real state called happiness then it was around this time that I was again finally feeling my way back towards its fleeting, shifting borders with a sense of having weathered a leaden storm and of having emerged on calmer, brighter seas.

  One day though I was pottering around arranging ornaments and humming to myself when the phone rang. ‘Hi Brett,’ drawled a familiar voice, ‘it’s Justine’.

  PART FOUR

  QUIET RUIN

  A scruffy, shuffling man made his way down the street, his sickle-bent body hunched against the bitter slap of the wind, the threadbare, black Oakland Raiders baseball cap pulled tightly over his unwashed hair shadowing his deadened, downcast petrol-blue eyes as they flickered over the dirty pavement tracking the ballet of the scattering litter and hiding his ashen face and waxy skin from anyone who might chance to glance his way. Clutching one hand against his neck to gather his tatty black coat further in against the cold, he held in his other a blue plastic corner-shop bag containing his usual small list of seemingly random purchases – Blu-Tack, straws, kitchen foil, elastic bands, household ammonia and a small bottle of Mars Bar drink – a collection of apparently perfectly innocent everyday objects but which to those in the know combine to take on an unwholesome, troubling, very specific meaning. Fishing into the jumbled mess of his pockets he found his keys and with a trembling hand fitted them into the Yale lock and pushed open the front door of his home. Even though it was midday the curtains were still pulled together, screening the flat from the street and obscuring the view of the old Victorian red-brick wall opposite which hid the houses of Westbourne Park Villas
from the high-speed trains which clattered and rumbled and whooshed as they pulled away from Paddington Station. The door opened on to a large basement lounge area, its polished wooden floors a sea of scattered CDs and chipped wine-stained glasses and unemptied ash-trays, broken lighters and empty cat-food tins and Rizlas and empty cigarette packets; an untidy tangle of disorder, a small wasteland of cluttered domestic chaos. In the corner of the room the television rambled on quietly to itself, usually a daytime talk show that no one was listening to or muted images of saucer-eyed nubile dancers gyrating to MTV hits. Gathered around the glass-top table was a small collection of random, derelict, spent-looking people all lost in their own private shame as they tried to hide their greed behind fragments of fractured half-conversation, their darting eyes awaiting the hit that would send them back to their world of temporary calm. The days would melt into nights and the nights back into days again and the same sorry cast would still be sat in the same spots performing the same degrading ritual in a hellish circling loop until eventually the source of their mania would run out and they would be forced to leave or navigate a path that slalomed the sharp corners of the real world in order to seek out more of the stuff. And then it would begin again.

  This was the awful trough into which my and Alan and Sam’s lives had slumped, the pit of turpitude, the slithering bowels of shame. In one of the grand, empty, high-ceilinged master bedrooms upstairs the bare floorboards were painted black and the ornate windows gazed south beyond the wrought-iron balcony and over an increasingly riotous untended eighty-foot garden which was slowly reclaiming the soil so carefully tilled by the previous owner. At the foot of the garden there sat a gorgeous little summer house, probably once loved and looked after and filled with laughing children and frolicking pets but now just a bleak extension to our barren world of barely functioning addiction, a litter of empty bottles and cigarette ash and the debris of used paraphernalia. When it finally grabs hold of you like that there’s no longer anything vaguely fun or sociable about the experience. Your goals in life become narrowed down to one simple quest: a base, animalistic drive to chase the one thing that will make you feel normal again, the one thing that makes you feel anything. Our lives had slowly slipped into this sorry slurry in a boringly predictable, invidious, incremental march: the substances becoming slowly harder, the evenings becoming slowly more humourless, the chances of escape from it all slowly less likely. Of course I will now often reflect on the reasons that I seemed happy to be so blasé with my life and career. It’s easy to want to blame some sort of shortcoming in your childhood, some perceived emotional injustice or lack of parental love or something else of which you think you may have been deprived but the truth was that despite the usual shadows and spectres that lurk on the fringes of any kid’s psyche my childhood was remarkably content. Sure I developed neurosis and paranoia and anxieties but nothing happened that I would describe as trauma, nothing that I could point to accusingly and say, ‘That’s the reason!’ No, looking back, my entry point into the whole pitiful arena I think I have to shamefully but honestly admit was just a simple quest for romantic escape, a longing to wander the same strange transgressive paths as Aldous Huxley or John Lennon, to walk hand in hand with Aleister Crowley or Thomas De Quincy; a frustrated suburban boy’s search for the glamour of the outré, a reality beyond the grey, twee, suffocating lives that I saw being lived all around me as a young man. Of course I think I viewed my continuing success as a musician as something that gave me a licence to keep experimenting, to keep pushing the boundaries of respectability and when the little voices would whisper their disquiet into my ears during the cold, friendless hours just before dawn I would silence them by justifying my journey of abuse as a moral imperative of my position as an artist, as a kind of requirement of the job. While making Coming Up I had managed the balance successfully, keeping enough distance from the grubby clutches of that world to be able to retreat and observe and portray it. It was an immersion but one over which I still had control. As 1997 melted into 1998 though I was introduced to new, increasingly dangerous playmates who would command a different more consuming fealty and I began to be dragged into its sordid pit, a place from which no one gets out unscathed. The fun and levity that used to surround my and Alan’s evenings had blown away like the white smoke that we pushed out of our lungs as we took on a dulled, functional approach to the proceedings; ours a mechanised need, a hungry graceless chase void of humour or love or even of any real enjoyment.

  I’m not sure whether the rest of the band was aware of what was happening to me. My understanding of the world was ever narrowing to the epicentre of the glass-topped table around which my friends and I permanently perched as we conducted our obsessive new duties like devout acolytes attending to a shrine. After having finally all staggered off the bus for the last time at the end of the crushing eighteen-month world tour I think all the members of the band desperately needed space from each other away from the cloying, smothering intimacy that life on the road forces upon you. And so we had become consciously atomised, pottering around the meandering paths of our private lives, knowing that at some point the need to work would resurface, but for now content to let the beast stay slumbering in the murky depths. Justine had ambled back into my life. The years of estrangement and distance had muted the jagged, raw edges of my feelings towards her and I was able to welcome her back more as a long-lost friend than an errant lover and we began to get to know each other all over again but in a different, more decorous way. I think our mutual success had shifted the dynamic between us and forced us to communicate as different people cast in different roles, the former tensions and memories and betrayals somehow seeming to have happened to somebody else. She was in the lonely death throes of a dying relationship and I felt like I had personally evolved beyond the need to be sour or recriminating and so we wandered around the sun-kissed streets of Notting Hill together in the pulsing summer of 1997, buying bric-a brac and drinking coffee in the same sort of easy, untethered way that we had when we first met at university back in the eighties. The summer had culminated in a very public reconciliation when she had jumped on stage with Suede during our headline slot at Reading Festival and we had squawked along together excitedly to a scrappy version of an old song we had once jokingly written as a Fall parody called ‘Implement, Yeah’. I was looking for somewhere new to live as the flat in Ledbury Road was just too small so we had browsed a few estate agents’ windows and eventually found what seemed through the flattering lens of summer to be a beautiful maisonette in Westbourne Park Villas. In my studiedly insouciant way I had pretty much agreed to buy it there and then without paying much attention to, amongst other things, the mainline railway that rumbled a few metres away, but once I had moved in and the summer had browned into autumn and then the autumn had scattered into winter the flat had become darkened and stained by the increasingly poisonous routines of addiction as it slowly evolved into a kind of joyless, unloved stage upon which Alan and Sam and myself played out our shameful drama. There was something isolated about the place which perhaps allowed us the freedom to drift further away from the fringes of restraint. As it was on the edge of a train line there were no houses facing the entrance and the south side of the property backed on to the long garden which bordered someone else’s equally long garden meaning that the next houses along on Westbourne Park Road stretched so far away from us as to be distant and inconsequential lending the whole maisonette a dislocated, unobserved kind of air – very unusual in London – like you were somehow removed from the normal rules of social cohesion that cheek-by-jowl city living requires. This rare peripheral quality meant that our routines felt completely unpoliced and unjudged and as by this point I had allowed myself to merge into another strange persona I managed to justify my ever more slanted, off-kilter life as an extension of my work. I suppose I’d always had this approach to my life; for years I’d seen my own personal happiness as secondary to the importance of the songs I was writing and I wo
uld often view it as just a vehicle that provided the raw fuel of subject matter, allowing myself to become exposed to increasingly bizarre and unlikely situations and fleeting, odd relationships in order that my songs breathed with a kind of truth. But that was when I was still in control. By the time I had moved into Westbourne Park Villas my priorities were shifting and my work was slowly becoming cuckolded as I began a passionate, doomed affair with the prickly mistress of my addiction.