Afternoons With the Blinds Drawn Page 15

  Looking back at my life I have noticed an unusual dynamic that accompanies my work. It seems that I am always at my best when I have a point to prove or a challenge to overcome. The first album emerged from my struggle as a poor, timorous, suburban wannabe, Dog Man Star was born from the white-hot crucible of madness and conflict and success that the debut had propagated and Coming Up had been an album snatched against the odds from the savage jaws of failure. By the time we reached the fourth album however we had acquired a certain career stability, finding ourselves at a point where we felt less at odds and possibly more welcomed by the industry than ever. It was to be an illusion though and one which I think I subconsciously reacted to with an attitude of anti-careerist self-sabotage, finding in it instead of warmth and satisfaction a feeling of unpleasant smugness and of not belonging. I’ve always hated the self-serving, self-congratulatory closed circle of the industry and I have always strongly believed that the most interesting, vital voices are those on its outskirts away from the neutering forces of the red carpets and the awards ceremonies. Perhaps I’m just trying to intellectualise and justify my own weaknesses but as I felt us becoming ever more invited and accepted I think I subconsciously baulked and looked around for a spanner to plunge into the gears. And boy did I find one.

  THE LITTLE OLD BEETLE

  GOES ROUND AND ROUND

  UNTIL HE ENDS UP RIGHT

  UP TIGHT TO THE NAIL

  The flat, endless summer sky stretched across London as little wispy white clouds gathered above the gardens behind Westbourne Park Villas. The whole enclave south of the railway line was ringing to the juddering, jarring rhythms of my inexpertly programmed Alesis SR16, the bass drum in the ‘wrong’ place, the tom where the kick should be, no hi-hat and always the only simple, childish grooveless patterns I could manage of beat/double beat. I twisted angrily at the controls of my Juno 106, looking for some sort of string sound and played a simple, one-fingered part against the pulse of the rhythm track, turning up the volume dial of the amplifier until the sound began to fracture. As I fumbled away frowning faces would peer quizzically out of windows wondering what could be making this unpleasant cacophony but, seeing nothing much beyond apart from the apple trees and the brambles, would disappear back into their homes grumbling and disturbed, unable to address their disquiet. If they had been able to glimpse beyond the rambling flora and into the flimsy wood and plate-glass summer house at the bottom of my untidy garden they would have witnessed a ravaged-looking spectre of a man, unwashed and unshaven and hollow-eyed crouched over the controls of his eight-track portastudio jamming in DATS and stabbing at buttons in a blind, frustrated, pointlessly aggressive attempt to master its mysteries. Summer houses being what they are there was very little in the way of either sound or heat insulation and so the occasional silences were smeared with the soft whoosh of a fan convection heater which when working would make the room too stuffy and when not would leave it gripped with a perishing chill. Apart from a bank of audio equipment and a few acoustic guitars and keyboards the place was still strewn with debris and paraphernalia, my notebooks jostling symbolically for space with torn Rizla packets and broken lighters and bits of burnt tin foil, and equally symbolically often finding no room and being abandoned to the cold-tiled floor, their sorry pages fluttering in the artificial breeze from the fan heater. I had developed a fairly quixotic vision of myself as the sort of musician who could write modern-sounding rock-based electronica. I think it was very much Justine’s continuing influence due to her re-emergence into my life; she was introducing me to things like ESG and Faust, giving me a new direction in which I could see Suede travelling – somewhere starker and more contemporary and less oblique – a less poetic, veiled vision and I suppose one which frankly involved fewer guitars. This would of course inevitably lead to issues but let’s sup with that problem later.

  By this point in my career I think that my ego was, to say the least, burgeoning. The success of Coming Up and the circumstances in which we had beaten the odds had allowed me to weave a mythical web of indestructibility around myself. I had developed an illusion that there was very little I could do to avoid success and therefore a sudden veering off into addiction or teaching myself to write music in a completely alien way just seemed like diverting points on a path to continued good fortune. Also by this point in my life I had earned rather a lot of money, an obscene amount to be honest – an eye-watering figure from having resigned a publishing deal after the success of Coming Up and its consequential tide of industry goodwill. I would normally shy away from brandishing showy facts like this but it seems to me that this windfall was one of the factors that led to my disintegration and so is an important step on the path of this tale. After a childhood roaming the tatty fringes of penury and years of privation and threadbare insolvency as a young man I suddenly found myself not having to worry about money. If you have the good fortune to be used to that state then I’m sure it doesn’t present too many problems but to someone like me, still with the faint waft of a Haywards Heath council estate on their person, it caused an imbalance, the strange, unsettling sense of invincibility that ironically fed into a period of deeply self-destructive behaviour. I think I was just unused to having that kind of security and it made me reckless and prone to ignoring the nagging, questioning voices within myself that might have otherwise kept me in check and guided me towards safer shores.

  There’s always a kind of blind zeal that is needed when you first approach making an album and despite the increasingly splintered nature of my home life and my vaunted, unrealistic ambitions I threw myself into writing what I was seeing as being a brave musical departure for Suede. The first song I wrote possibly ended up being the best thing on the record and set a hugely inflated precedent for the writing to come. It was a gentle acoustic guitar-based piece that meandered and trilled around D minor and A minor, a bitter tale of betrayal and of the revealing of truth which was possibly how, in my more desolate moments, I was beginning to view my odder, less defined new relationship with Justine. One of the premises I had for the album was for the music to speak more and so I inserted some instrumental passages and played a simple keyboard string motif over them with an eastern flavour which in the spirit of delivering a less flowery poetic record also suggested its name – ‘Indian Strings’. I remember Neil and Richard coming over one day and politely ignoring the carpet of debris on the floor and sitting amongst the ash and the litter and listening to the primitive demo I had made and it providing a truly inspiring entry point for us all, and so the momentum continued for a while.

  I was out in the summer house one bleary, black afternoon banging around on the keys of an old Hammond organ that I had had dragged through the garden, enjoying its reedy churchy sounds and how with an interesting, off-kilter lyric they could take on a kind of subversive edge. I started playing a descending riff that dropped in semitones from C to A and began wailing ‘I can’t get enough’ over the top of it. As I fumbled around I found some verse chords I liked and threw the whole thing together and wrote a song that was supposed to have a kind of ‘Lust For Life’ sentiment, a joyous, greedy rush, unashamedly bullish and grabbing and brash. I think with the benefit of hindsight I would interpret it more as a comment on substance abuse but nevertheless it contained a kind of truth and when Neil heard it he cleverly suggested we turn it into a primal guitar piece and went about demoing it so it had more of a sort of Stooges feel that was in keeping with the original idea rather than the weird vocal and Hammond demo that I had first made. Another time Neil dropped off a cassette through my letterbox. Probably by this point my increasingly unpleasant, marginal life and personal slide into addiction was making spending time with me or in my house understandably uncomfortable to anyone not part of my muttering, dead-eyed clique – a small gaggle of gruff dealers and frazzled users and random drifters who congregated at my flat for one ugly reason. The rest of the band have always had more sense than me in that respect and Neil probably decided it
was just easier to deliver it that way. The cassette had the words ‘Gloopy Strings’ scrawled across the top and it was a strange, gluey-sounding, pitch-bending string loop rotating around just two chords. I loved the brave simplicity and the disingenuous melodiousness of the piece and went about writing a rising vocal part which built to a falsetto chorus with something meaningless like ‘she is special’ sung over it. Later I changed it to something equally meaningless and it became ‘She’s In Fashion’ and the urbane, glossy ode to vacuity was born. Once we had recorded the track it took on a poppy sheen which turned it from an odd, arty Krautrock sort of thing into a mainstream radio hit and it would eventually penetrate to an audience way beyond our fan base. It has always amused me that what became known as our lightest, most carefree musical moment was born from the ravages of utter despair and wanton abandon, a squalid, desolate baptism of degeneracy and depravity set against a back-drop of blackened cutlery and crumpled beds of burnt kitchen foil. The musical landscapes of this and other things we were exploring were suiting Neil’s musicianship of course but as we wandered deeper into the writing process and the path we were taking became increasingly keyboard-led, naturally Richard started to feel somewhat marginalised and confused as to his role as the guitar player in what seemed to be becoming our electronic album. I think it was a hard time for him as apart from anything he was still very young and struggled to place himself within the shifting tectonic plates of our new world order. Added to this of course was my continued slide away from all of the band personally as our lives became polarised and our relationships began to drift and unravel. I simply didn’t spend as much time hanging out with them any more and it must have been especially tough for Richard trying to express his frustrations at what must have seemed to him like a worryingly precarious situation, but nevertheless he still continued to deliver some great ideas. Brilliantly ignoring my suffocating, artificial premise for the album he turned up one day with a piece called ‘Repugnant’, based around a spidery arpeggio guitar part, flowing and natural and organic and everything that we said we didn’t want to do but too good to ignore. As with ‘Beautiful Ones’ and ‘Saturday Night’ I wasn’t happy with the chorus and so we went about writing a new one that felt more strident and direct and eventually it became a kind of karmic, agnostic hymn, where if ‘God’ existed it was just as part of the coiled rhythms of the everyday: prosaic, uncelestial and ordinary but nevertheless special. I called it ‘Everything Will Flow’ and it remains one of my favourite ever Suede songs. There were darker, more mechanical pieces too. Justine had been playing me snippets of her new album including a song I loved called ‘Human’. In my deeply unmusical way I was sitting at the keyboard one day trying to rip it off but forgetting how the bass riff went and coming up with something that hinted at its dark, menacing feel but getting the notes completely wrong. I called it ‘Hi Fi’ and the threatening, prowling riff would later come alive when we took it into the studio, morphing into a crackling, modern pulse.

  Completing a kind of trinity of misfortune by coinciding with my substance abuse and Richard’s marginalisation was Neil’s illness. The back-breaking world tour we had embarked on to promote the continuingly successful Coming Up had definitely left its scars. There’s something utterly exhausting about touring: the endless repetition, the never-ending cycle of Dionysian excess and daily catharsis and the numbing stretched hours shuffling around airports and sitting on tour buses in a strange kind of heightened state waiting for something to happen. Charlie Watts’ famous quote summing up his career as being ‘five years’ work and twenty years’ hanging around’ is brilliantly pithy but belies the truth that the dead time is equally if not more exhausting than the time you spend performing as you are harried like livestock from bleak blank space to bleak blank space with a permanent feeling of ‘hurry up and wait’ hanging over you. At some point against this back-drop of an endless, grinding tour Neil caught glandular fever and was eventually diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. It’s a strange condition, often an umbrella term that covers a myriad of symptoms, but it leaves the person affected just too tired to perform the simplest of tasks. I don’t know the full extent of what happened really, but from my perspective Neil became increasingly fragile and housebound, a development which only further atomised the ever-splintering nature of the band’s interpersonal relationships and allowed me to slide further away from them in my search for oblivion, cravenly hiding my fears and frustrations under a flimsy shroud of excess.

  IT DIES IN THE WHITE HOURS

  OF YOUNG-LEAFED JUNE

  The cones of the giant black wall-mounted speakers fluttered and the room shuddered to the overdriven stabs of the out-of-tune Fernandes guitar making the water that sat in discarded plastic beakers around the studio ripple and churn. As the distorted music thumped, tinny and broken-sounding but massively amplified by the volume level a heavily delayed vocal broke through the noise: ‘Give me head / Give me head / Give me head music instead’. I nodded along, my face a mask of concentration, my eyes cast to the floor, oddly oblivious to the ridiculous lyric and occasionally glancing at the back of the producer’s neck as he sat facing the other way, trying to gauge his reaction to the demo that I was presenting to him. As the last notes died there was a sticky pause as he swivelled his seat towards me, took a drag of his ever-present cigarette and finally met my gaze with his pale, tired-looking eyes. ‘I don’t like it,’ he stated baldly, ‘I’m not working on that.’

  We had decided to change producers. In a spirit of bullishness and success-fuelled hubris we had blithely deemed that in order to make a different record we needed a different hand steering the ship. Our switch away from Ed wasn’t completely disloyal however as by then he had moved abroad with his family which meant that working together, although of course not impossible, might prove more onerous. Regardless of such logistics his move to the States seemed to be another thing that was telling us to try someone new. Looking back I think that in many ways it was a mistake. Had we worked again with Ed our shared history and his people skills might have provided the glue to hold us all together and dragged us back into some sort of semblance of unity but maybe by that point it was just all too late. Instead we appointed a producer called Steve Osborne, a quiet, intense and softly spoken man with a broad Estuary accent and a severe ‘studio tan’, whom Saul had suggested as being someone who might bring a more modern edge to our sound, someone who might be able to steer us away from the more florid aspects of our back catalogue that we were keen not to revisit. We liked that he had worked on Pills and Thrills and Bellyaches, which had at the time seemed exciting and genre-defining and had been part of the soundtrack of my and Mat’s youth, so we met him in Mayfair Studios in Primrose Hill to try out working together on a couple of tracks. I had written this strange little nursery rhyme of a song about some shadowy, fictional femme fatale figure called ‘Savior Faire’. It was spindly and inept and odd but Steve saw something that he thought he could develop and went about creating this brilliantly strange, off-kilter, electronic rhythm track blending live drums and samples to create a pulsing collage of sounds. It was one of those shifts that suddenly brought the song to life, turning it from a charming, inoffensive curio into a dark, grinding, predatory beast. It was exactly where I thought the album should be heading and in our excitement we decided to carry on working together. Unfortunately the energy that we had mustered for that little session didn’t seem to bleed into subsequent ones. We reconvened at Eastcote Studios just off the top of Ladbroke Grove and in that dark, leaden summer of 1998 proceeded to fall apart. Whenever I think about Steve Osborne I’m always charged with the niggling desire to pick up the phone and apologise to him. I think he saw the band at its absolute nadir – dislocated, uninspired and unwell – and he probably views me as someone very different from the person who I like to flatter myself I really am. By this point my addictions had drifted on to desperate levels and my motivations for making music were completely secondary revealing a
weak and selfish side to my nature which I’m sure Steve saw on too many occasions. As our relationship was still new he had none of the back story or the shared history and was confronted with a barely functioning band but appointed to try to inspire them to make an album – a Herculean task at the best of times. My addictions, Richard’s musical marginalisation and Neil’s absence through illness created a kind of bizarre climate of dysfunction which meant that I think for vast swathes of the sessions Mat was the only band member present in the studio as we left Steve stranded and with little input and forced to try to be creative on his own. In a way this unusual dynamic accounts for the unique feel of Head Music which maybe has an odd kind of merit but I often wonder what that album would have been like if we had been a properly functioning band. I always think of it as half a great record – some of the songs like ‘He’s Gone’ and ‘Indian Strings’ and ‘Everything Will Flow’ are amongst our best – but unfortunately by this point our collective judgement was severely impaired and so we allowed it to be weakened by a motley, ragged little family of runts like ‘Crack In The Union Jack’, ‘Asbestos’ and the risible title track. The obsessive levels of quality control that we had applied over previous albums had disappeared, partly as an element of a new manifesto but mainly through a creeping tide of laziness – a slack ‘it’ll turn out okay in the end’ sort of attitude that drilled a fatal flaw of disrespect into the foundations of our work. Ed’s absence meant that there was no one present who really knew how, or indeed wanted, to make a classic Suede record, and to be fair that was the point of hiring Steve but it meant that the album took on a kind of untethered, patchy character, brilliant in places but weak and embarrassing in others as we fumbled around for a new identity. Inevitably we made the usual serial mistakes in what we chose for B-sides, consigning one of the most sensitive, beautiful moments of that era, a song called ‘Leaving’, to those lonely, tumble-weed terrains. It was supposed to be a kind of message of strength from a friend for Justine who at the time was quite lonely and sad, stalled in the dying embers of a fading relationship but lacking the clarity and courage to move beyond it. I suppose it was intended to have a kind of carpe diem feel, and to contain a thread of hope and a call for change. I’m not sure if I ever even bothered playing her the song, and she would probably hate its vaguely sentimental, cloying feel if she heard it, but sometimes you can write things about people and never intend that they actually listen to it, their role sometimes just being a vehicle to generate an idea. One particularly contentious track that did end up making the cut was something Neil had written on his own called ‘Elephant Man’. When he first played me the demo I thought it was quite a brilliant piece of honest self-deprecating songwriting. I interpreted it as his comment on his illness and thought therefore that it had an integrity and a power and bullishly insisted that it was included on the album, much to Saul’s chagrin, enjoying the novelty that for the first time on a Suede album some of its lyrics would not be written by me. Looking back I think in my twisted, idealism I may have ignored the song’s slightly over-simplistic, chanting, playground-taunt sort of character which now seems to give it a disposable edge but in those gloomy, sunless afternoons of 1998 it spoke to me as a snap-shot of our lives and therefore contained its own kind of truth.