Afternoons With the Blinds Drawn Page 17

  Rather like Orwell when he was researching Down and Out in Paris and London, after a couple of weeks of isolation and ever-darkening thought in my rural bolt-hole I would eventually run out of food and having had enough called John and got him to pick me up and take me back to London. John was a wonderful discovery. I’d met him through Saul as he had worked for him for a while when Nude was bustling with too many employees. When I’d decided I needed a driver and couldn’t face more untold hours making small talk with random cabbies I’d bought a car and met John and we had got on like the proverbial blazing house. He is the perfect person with whom to spend long journeys; he is kind and respectful and very funny, possessing a bone-dry, self-deprecating Tottenham fan’s wit and the flattened, drawling vowels of a broad Estuary accent. He’s the sort of person about whom no one has a bad word despite the fact that in public on more than one occasion he’s been mistaken for Ronnie Wood. He has such an air of peaceful serenity that if it were suddenly announced on the news that Jesus had returned to earth in the form of a Spurs fan from Luton I wouldn’t be in the least surprised. We became great friends during those strange, in-between years of the early noughties and I’m happy to say that we still are today. He would pick me up at the cottage and I would throw my bags in the back and we would wind our way up through the tarmacked streets and the ring roads of south London chattering easily about music or football while half listening as The Sophtware Slump or Deserter’s Songs played on the car stereo. Eventually the car would putter into the familiar magnolia-lined street and he would drop me back at my new home, a white stucco-fronted townhouse in Northumberland Place, two streets parallel to Moorhouse Road where I had lived through the gaudy dramas that had inspired the songs on the debut album a decade earlier. It was a classic, elegant London townhouse with a mansard roof and beautiful wrought-iron Juliet balconies, all high-corniced ceilings and period details: an estate agent’s dream. Fortunately I had managed to buy it before the whole area turned into Knightsbridge and became ruined by the hedge-funders building double basements and cynically viewing the houses as ‘investment opportunities’ rather than homes, when there was still a wonderful, welcoming community bustling with artists and actors and charming old-school diplomats and the strange, fun conversations you had were about film and theatre rather than dry discussions about ‘pounds per square foot’ and ‘maximising dead space’. I saw buying the house as very symbolic of my attempt to escape from the horrors of substance dependency and despite there being a short period of bleed-over tried to use the change in address as a way to shift into a cleaner phase in our lives. The house was bright and welcoming and beautiful, somehow the sort of place where kids have happy childhoods, and I so wanted to not let the whole atmosphere slide into the slurry of dirt and addiction and ugliness that had characterised Westbourne Park Villas. There were also spare rooms and we heard that a good friend of ours, my sometime make-up artist Tania Rodney, needed to move out of her flat so we offered her one. Tania is a bright and shrewd girl from Yorkshire, bluff and blunt at times but sharp and funny with it and always lovely and perhaps, most important of all, not in any way a part of the smeary, dissolute demi-monde of London users which I was so desperate to escape. Over the years she became a dear friend and through those early years when we all lived in Northumberland Place, in a very passive, subtle way, kept us all in check and less likely to veer off the path and back into some ruinously messy state. I suppose it’s not very interesting to read about how someone might strive towards a state of abstinence; it doesn’t fit with the mythical Jungian archetype of the wayward artist – the bullshit, theme-park ‘guitar hero’ rock and roll lie. The irony is that I’ve just spent a whole part of this book charting my own spiralling decline into a parody of an addicted rock star but I have always hated those trite clichés that so many people secretly love, hoping that true artistry has less to do with JD and Harleys and more to do with having the bravery to document a truth in your life. If that truth happens to involve burnt foil and psychosis then so be it but if it happens to be something smaller and less salacious then there is equally valuable material therein. I believe that there are always fascinating songs hiding even in the least likely places; sometimes they are just lurking in small domestic frictions and misunderstandings and it’s only a lazy writer who can’t be bothered to look for them there.

  Inevitably I have profound regrets about my dalliances with addiction and substance abuse. Although at the time I justified my wayward recklessness as an almost essential part of a career making interesting music now I can’t help but think that that approach is just an excuse; a feeble apology for my weak, bestial gluttony. When I think of all the wasted, drifting days and the bleary, numb morning-afters it frightens me slightly and I ponder how I could have put all that dead time to use. And what had I really been doing? Just pursuing some tired, romanticised vision of the decadent, rakish libertine. There is often a confusion in people’s minds that links hedonism with creativity and at some level I was probably stupidly guilty of this. The assumption that addiction and intemperance are somehow essentially creative states seems to arise from the fact that historically so many creative people have led dissolute lifestyles. In fact I would propose that the link is more likely due to creative people having the kind of inquisitive minds that lead them to explore the landscape of altered states but once they have arrived there their creativity is rarely heightened or enhanced. Of course there are anomalies which seem to disprove this as there always are but looking back at my career and using my own experiences as a sounding board I have a sinking feeling that had I abstained it simply would have improved my work. I can often hear the weakness and the lack of focus in our early records and am sometimes tortured by a need to revisit them and correct the ‘mistakes’. But as Heraclitus’ famous aphorism reminds us, ‘No man steps in the same river twice for it is not the same river and he is not the same man’, and I realise that going back would be ultimately futile, an exercise in addressing some vanity that would mean little to anyone else. Once these moments have passed they have passed. Also I remind myself that, as with people, it’s often the flaws and blemishes which make music more real and imbue it with a beauty. ‘To err is human’ as someone much cleverer than me once said, and surely an exploration of the state of humanity, beautiful despite and sometimes because of its flaws, is what art ultimately strives to achieve.

  My work out in the wilds of Surrey was feeding back into writing with Richard and Neil in London and as often happens in those first flushes of a new session we hit on some early gems. I’d converted the top floor of the house in Northumberland Place into a writing room and had my baby grand hoisted in one day much to the consternation of the agog neighbours who anxiously gathered out on the pavement to crane their necks and watch, probably slightly horrified that a musician was moving into the street and possibly some of them being aware of my reputation as one of the less savoury ones. It was a beautiful room with a tiled west-facing balcony that provided a panorama of church spires and sixties tower blocks stretching out over west London and when I was at a creative dead end I would just sit out there on an old creosoted garden bench and smoke and gaze at the majesty of the city laid out before me. One day I was flopped there mulling over my and Sam’s drifting, fraying lives and I started finding words for a song that used the endlessness of the sea to describe the distance between two people and I named it ‘Oceans’. It was a simple track with a slightly skittering, rising verse and a lifting chorus but it spoke a truth to me. It was about the slow, incremental death of a relationship, one which doesn’t crash and burn with a glamorous, tragic fire but one which ends noiselessly in lonely, tiny pieces. I was trying to express something of the quiet ruin of long-term estrangement – difficult to do when music itself needs the motor of drama and fire to work, but I like that it contains this meaning and it still moves me today. It was an understated but important piece of writing for me that made me again very conscious of there being just as mu
ch, if not more, power and beauty in the quiet little moments of life’s theatre as in the big showy ones and that’s a tenet that still informs much of my writing today.

  One of the tracks I was working on down in Surrey was something Richard had given me with the working title of ‘Plucky’, a spidery, intricate guitar piece that I immediately loved. I wrote around it a song about my friend Alan, teasing out the detail of his charming gaucherie and celebrating it as an essential part of his wonderful, unique character. I called it ‘Cheap’. Alan has been an evergreen presence in my life as anyone who has been kind enough to invest time in these two books will realise, dipping in and out, flicking his ash, colouring everything with his bizarre clash of old-school charm and ruthless, maniacal hedonism. He’s one of those people who never fails to fascinate me, the complex, intertwined tendrils of his life always threatening to spill over and never failing to deliver an almost script-written theatre which is often nail-biting and hilarious in equal measures. I assume like all relationships that work on some level we offer each other elements that we don’t ourselves possess. As a writer and an artist I can only wonder at his genuine charisma and odd, off-kilter magnetism – qualities which I have tried to emulate through my work but secretly I suspect that personally I don’t actually possess. In many ways he has been the most constant in my series of muses and as such has a unique position in the pantheon of my work – a friend who has seen the best and the worst of me and all the points in between and who to this day never fails to inspire.

  The brink of disaster that we had teetered over while making Head Music was clearly something we were keen to not return to and so we were determined for this new album to be more of an organic rock record, light and pastoral in places but eschewing the murky, synthetic urban dead ends that we had blindly marched down while making the previous one. As always there was the feeling that when making Suede records we were swinging between polarities: that we would start to make the new one with the premise that it should in some way oppose the last. The swing away from Head Music to this new album was something that I wanted to make the most dramatic of all as I began to build up an idea that the new record should be everything that Head Music wasn’t: quiet, gentle, intricate and sensitive. I think by this point in our career the persona of Suede was in many ways beyond our control; the image of the band that had been projected back to us over the last decade had inevitably become distorted and still seemed very different from the one that we believed to be true. It began to feel suffocating and uncomfortable, imprisoned as we were within the narrow definition of how many people saw us, which was as this fey, furtive, urban, slightly vacuous band. Of course these were stereotypes that we had been at various points guilty of propagating but like many bands we found ourselves limited and frustrated by the confining expectations of our label. There was a feeling in the camp that we wanted to subvert the perceptions of who we were and go about making an album that the fans wouldn’t expect and which many of them might not like. Unfortunately we succeeded rather too well. They were all fine starting points that initiated the record and if they had been followed through with urgency and stamina and determination might have produced something wonderful but unfortunately events would conspire against us and what were good intentions would slide into the muddy puddle of lackadaisical confusion.

  Neil had been contributing some pieces but he was obviously still very frail, valiantly trying to resist the ongoing ruin of his condition but slowly becoming less and less able to work. I think we had all hoped that given time away from the ravages of touring he would have had the space and peace to recuperate and that now we had moved into the more genteel climes of the writing phase he would softly improve and wander back into the fold and everything would be lovely again. One day though I was sitting listening to ‘Feeling Yourself Disintegrate’ and the phone rang. It was Charlie asking if he and Neil could come over. I could tell from his deadened, flattened tone that it was something serious. My stomach lurched with a sickening feeling and ten minutes later there was a bang at the door. Charlie and Neil shuffled furtively into the lounge and Neil stood there, his eyes cast down on the floor, as he quietly told me that he was leaving the band. I knew that by this point it wasn’t something that was up for discussion, that it was a tortuous decision that he would have arrived at after months of deliberation and internal debate, that by now there was nothing that could change his mind, that he saw this as the only way in which he could grasp back some semblance of health. I remember the meeting being brief as I nodded and blankly accepted his decision, my mask of cold indifference hiding the conflicting, broiling feelings of fear and sadness and dread that were surging inside me. When these pivotal moments in my career have happened I have often reacted to them in a seemingly very unemotional way, burying my hurt and my panic behind a carapace of professionalism probably as some sort of self-defence mechanism that allows me to avoid tides of overwhelming feeling, but with both Bernard’s and Neil’s departure what I felt beyond the gnawing feeling of abandonment was the sad loss of a friend. What Neil probably saw as I let him out of my house and gruffly said goodbye was a downcast, vaguely embittered man trying to bluff his way through the situation with a veneer of practicality. In reality my world was reeling and I knew that at some level the band had been dealt a blow from which it might never recover.

  FIVE GET INTO A FIX

  The starlings soared high above the Wealdland clay, criss-crossing over the cars that puttered along the A2100, wheeling against the currents of the high wind that blew eastwards across the South Downs. Far below in a darkened, fetid, baffled drum booth in the live room of a studio the atmosphere was close. The perfumed smoke from the Nag Champa incense stick coiled in the air and mingled the scent of sandalwood with the heavy fug of cigarette fumes as the rack-tom thumped and the cymbals splashed. His brow knitted, Simon sat at his kit and resentfully played along to the drum machine’s skittish, loping, hip-hop groove, his face a mask of passive aggression, his discomfort palpable. ‘That sounds phat, man,’ said the producer in his light Tennessee drawl, finally ending the ordeal by turning off the beat-box and wandering back to the control room leaving us alone staring sullenly at the floor, our ears ringing in the sudden, cloying silence. ‘Well, what do you think?’ I asked hopefully. Simon took a drag of his B&H and as he raised his head our eyes finally locked. ‘Brett, this sounds like shit and we shouldn’t be working with him.’

  As the tyres of the gun-metal grey Mercedes SEC crunched against the gravel John and I pulled into the car park and took in the sight of a row of single-storey, red-brick dwellings which arched round and formed a courtyard with the main building, a large pitch-roofed wood and brick structure with gabled windows. This was Parkgate Studios, a residential complex in Battle down in Sussex not a million miles from the dreary suburban scrub-lands where Mat and I grew up and somewhere we had chosen as a place to record the new album. The ever-shifting cast now included Alex Lee as a full-time member of the band, replacing Neil and temporarily adding a thrust to our spluttering momentum with his talent and artistry. We had appointed someone fairly unknown to produce the album – a slight-looking red-headed American called Tony Hoffer who bore more than a passing resemblance to a young Woody Allen. Saul especially was always very keen that we were seen to be reinventing ourselves, knowing that fickle public attention will wander unless it is permanently presented with something that it believes is shiny and new, and with the fervour of an A&R man exploring the thresholds of one of the only ways in which they are allowed to be creative had presented us with a flurry of unusual names in an attempt to steer the whole project away from the narrow borders of predictability. It’s certainly true that by this point we were confused about the kind of record we wanted to make. We should have had the strength of vision to follow our original idea through and make an intricate, delicate acoustic album that the best moments of the demos like ‘Cheap’ and ‘Oceans’ had been hinting at. But for a band like Suede that had tasted t
he bubble and fizz of chart success such a record was never going to be permitted, caught up as we were in an inelegant, downward-spiralling scrabble to still be part of the mainstream, our position in which had become inevitably more precarious as the fissures and fault lines had begun to reveal themselves. To be fair there was a creeping, burning feeling within the whole camp that we desperately needed some new ideas, that the Suede clichés had become smothering and uninspiring and that to progress at all we needed to subvert them and destroy our own myth. Unfortunately though we had been too unsteadied by Neil’s departure, the relative critical failure of Head Music and the legacy of my substance abuse to really be able to see through any successful reinvention as we desperately bandied around ridiculous, unwieldy phrases like ‘electronic folk’ to suggest an unlikely new direction. Personally my long period of addiction and dependency during the making of Head Music had bled into a fraught struggle for abstinence and then a period of relative sobriety but the whole experience had created a fresh kind of psychic imbalance in me, leaving me with a kind of artificial zeal and a strange delusion of strength and health which resulted in a phase where I frantically tried to prove to myself and to the world that I had moved on. The result was some very bad musical judgements and for a while a brief, ill-considered affair with an ugly blonde hairstyle which I thought at the time implied some sort of protean energy but which really, as my wife quite rightly now laughingly points out, made me look like a plasterer.