Afternoons With the Blinds Drawn Page 2

  We started to play small iconic London venues, always ensuring that they were dangerously oversold, heaving with steaming, sweating bodies and almost impossible to get into. This manufactured hysteria seemed in keeping with a core ethos of the band – that desire to transcend the everyday, to reach for the heightened state. I’ve always loved artists that seemed untouchable and otherworldly. Even a band like the Pistols despite their rags and their Highbury chants seemed cut from a different cloth to the rest of us: cartoonish and Day-Glo and somehow alien. Without wishing to come across as pompous, the whole ‘we’re just the same as our fans’ attitude just reminds me of dads who believe themselves to be their kids’ ‘best friends’: false, patronising and ultimately hollow. Regardless of how unfashionable a viewpoint it is, it has always struck me that any performance is essentially an elitist act and that the stage is there for a very clear purpose – to separate and elevate a band from its audience – and that the power differential therein is an essential ingredient in the drama. A gig at The Africa Centre in Covent Garden that preceded the single release was the first of these raucous, enervating little shows and I think the first time that we began to recognise that people really might want something that we possessed. I remember feeling utterly shocked by the fact that four hundred people had actually paid hard-earned money to see us. The gig itself I recall as being vaguely underwhelming as we had yet to learn to channel our nerves and feed them into our performance resulting in a slightly skittish display that lacked command and authority. By that point however it felt that the odd pratfall didn’t really matter, that we were acquiring a ground-swell of goodwill that was beginning to carry us along like a friendly tide.

  TOMORROW’S FISH

  AND CHIP PAPER

  The dissonant jarring rumble of a clutch of separate groups playing completely different songs bled through into the corridor of the Premises rehearsal rooms on Hackney Road. The place smelled of the stale sweat and cigarette butts of a thousand unsigned bands and as the kick drums thudded and the bass guitars meshed and pounded along a thin mist of dust drifted from the cracked Victorian plasterboard ceiling and settled imperceptibly on the counter of the little booth which stocked spare guitar strings and biscuits and crisps. Behind it the brusque, shuffling owner plonked two cups of milky tea on the worktop and looked at me. ‘That’ll be two quid,’ he said. I dug into the tangled mess of my jeans pocket and fished out a few coins and gave them to him. He took the money and held my gaze. ‘I saw your piece in the Melody Maker,’ he offered with an uncharacteristic smile. ‘Oh yes,’ I replied brightly, half expecting to be met with a tiny nod of grudging approval. ‘Best new band in Britain?’ he muttered, scowling again. ‘You’re not even the best band in this building.’

  Sometime in April that year the gathering chatter about us had provoked the weekly music paper Melody Maker to commission an interview to coincide with the release of the record. We’d dipped our toes into the media pond previously with a couple of insignificant new band mini-pieces but this was to be a major feature conducted by the editor Steve Sutherland who had heard the EP and felt suitably galvanised. Steve was an interesting character, obviously unnervingly bright but possessing too a steely thread of ambition and a professional journalist’s rapacious pursuit of a story. In him I sensed a ruthlessly unsentimental streak and looking beyond us and into the future I think he saw in Suede not just a band but the beginnings of a movement. I had yet to acquire any real skills as an interviewee so I remember feeling slightly out of my depth and in fact Mat was more quotable, but then again he always has been.

  After the interview we trundled off to one of the maze of draughty, bleak, east London photographers’ studios that peppered that part of the city before the hipsters moved in. The session was with Tom Sheehan, the resident Melody Maker chief ‘smudge’, a likeable jocular Cockney who managed to get us to prance around in front of the lens in our fake-fur coats and Oxfam jackets like urchins who had found someone’s dressing-up box, cajoling us into playing the part that was slowly being written for us. Even though I didn’t realise it at the time I see now that so much of a photographer’s skill lies in their dialogue with the subject, their ability to tease out nuances of facial expressions and attitude, hence the cliché of the Blow-Up David Bailey-esque stereotype lost in a parodic pantomime of desire imploring the kitten-eyed waif to ‘make love to the camera’. I’ve never been the sort of person who can smile on cue, wondering how to do it when I see the act of smiling as a reaction rather than a response I can just willingly command, but Tom was a wily old operator and I think knew that we would want to portray ourselves as something other than the standard throng of glum-looking boys staring at their shoes which was the accepted template of the period. At the time the thought of spending an afternoon being flattered in a studio was infinitely preferable to the dole queues and dead-end jobs that we’d just left behind but with hindsight our naivety in front of the camera was unwise as I think our innocent desire to pander contributed to an early veneer of fame-hungry vacuity which we struggled with for many years. It’s interesting that how one is perceived in those first skirmishes with the media is so potent, that it can continue to define you and become a rigid shell that is in some ways impossible to outgrow. There’s a popular theory that famous people’s emotional development is frozen at the moment they achieve fame as they begin to buffer themselves from the real world but there are parallels with the popular attitude towards them too which sometimes never matures beyond a simplistic entry point.

  One Tuesday in late April Mat and I were walking along Great Marlborough Street and as we approached a newsstand I thought I saw something that looked a bit like my face on the front of Melody Maker. As we got closer and the image became clearer there was a weird moment of mental disconnect as I realised with a shock that the thing that appeared to be my face was exactly that and that we had been placed on the cover. Underneath our four heads and printed in bold capitals was the legend THE BEST NEW BAND IN BRITAIN, a phrase that would become inescapable for us over the next few years and one which at times we would wish we had never set eyes on. It’s difficult for me to know whether the significance of this really translates to anyone brought up in an era after the dominance of the print media. The weekly music press used to be hugely relevant and influential and had the power and the reach and the circulation figures to direct and shape and mould careers. There was a strict hierarchy however, a pecking order that had to be observed, which meant that bands who were on the eve of releasing their debut single simply weren’t chosen as cover stars. Having spent the wasted hours of our teenage years poring over the minutiae of their pages we knew these conventions very well so once we had recovered from the surprise we were confronted with the sheer uniqueness of our position. I think sadly many people who remember that period still see the band as a product of the press, a twisted, unholy media experiment created in the shadowy, Shelley-esque laboratories of IPC, and it was this seminal moment that provided much fuel for that particular fire; the suspicion that we were somehow complicit in the crime and guilty of that most cardinal of indie sins – inauthenticity. Of course at the time we were all far too seduced by the heady rush of something actually happening in our lives to bother caring too much about the consequences or the implications but looking back I can’t help feeling that those who allowed us to be put in that situation were incredibly irresponsible and short-sighted. I simply think we weren’t advised well, that those whose job it was to analyse and dissect these situations never bothered to explain that the prize that we were chasing was ultimately poisonous. We were far too in the moment to stop for even a second but it’s the role of the band to be impetuous and instinctive and wild and quixotic and the role of those around them to be sober and considered and guiding. I can’t help but think that we were failed on that score and were allowed to tumble headlong into the storm and that our pact with the capricious mistress of the press was ill thought-out. Hindsight is a wonderful thing thoug
h and it’s easy for me to pick through these pivotal moments and criticise. I can’t pretend that we weren’t all desperate to succeed and in that ensuing feeding frenzy we blindly clutched at any and every means necessary. It would end up having long-reaching consequences for our career as for many we were forever cast simplistically as ‘overrated’ and ‘overhyped’, deprecations that to this day I feel in many ways still often haunt us, a legacy of our early exaggerated profile.

  This lack of sober guidance was quite revealing about the nature of our set-up and the people around us. Saul was arguably the most experienced of our mentors at the time but there was always a sense with him that he was equally, if not even more, thrilled with the commotion that was beginning to swirl around us and he would often be gripped with a maniacal, zealous energy as events began to unfold, passionately cheering on our successes very much as though they were his own, caught up in the wild journey that we found ourselves embarking on. The situation was so new that there was no rule book to consult when it came to negotiating its vicissitudes and we found ourselves unwittingly cast as the proverbial guinea-pigs in a shifting new relationship between the artist and the press that would go on to define the media landscape of the coming decade. The response to Suede was so disproportionate that there seemed to be very few historical parallels, and while it’s not something that I’m particularly proud of it’s something that needs to be addressed as it became an integral element to our story. For those who weren’t there or who have forgotten it might give a sense of the scale of the media reaction to say that even before the debut album was released we would end up gracing nineteen front covers. It was a phenomenon that of course was bound to have pernicious consequences, not least with Bernard’s later rejection and drift away from the band, but while the frothy delirium still seemed like fun we just gripped on to the seat in front of us and enjoyed the ride.

  The EP was pencilled in for release on 11 May 1992 and once it had been recorded and mixed it was left to me to decide on the artwork. I’d always loved how album sleeves could somehow define and refract the music, how the right image could be powerful enough to become completely synonymous with the songs, and had spent endless, drifting teenage hours gazing at the work of Hipgnosis and Jamie Reid and Peter Saville. Having spent many a dreary mid-week afternoon trudging around second-hand shops and flea markets I had built up a small mildewy library of books one of which was the work of Holger Trulzsch and the model Verushka. The surreal, charged images had fascinated me for years especially one which depicted a naked girl body-painted with a man’s suit and holding a gun. It seemed like a perfect expression of some of the oblique themes in the songs – the blend of threat and sexuality, the joyous confusion of androgyny – and so this became our EP artwork. The cheapened, badly made, almost Situationist quality the sleeve eventually possessed was actually a happy accident that was the result of a low budget as the record company told us that we could only afford to print a couple of colours, lending it a wonderfully childish cut-and-paste naivety – an almost homemade quality that became a visual theme in the whole series of those early record sleeves.

  The reception to the release of The Drowners was intriguing in terms of its duality. For the vast majority of the world it passed by without a whisper of recognition making zero impact in the mainstream media and limping in at number 49 in the charts. For a small subculture however I don’t think it would be disproportionate to say that it was greeted as seismic. This probably sounds horribly conceited and I’m trying to distinguish between real memories and those we manufacture after the event and to judge it all beyond my own stifling solipsism but I genuinely recall that within the world of the weekly music press and the London indie demi-monde the record achieved clamorous acclaim and even a note of infamy. I think we had unwittingly become the epicentre of converging forces, partly as raucous, rousing supplanters of the current moribund scene and partly because we had developed a panache and élan of our own – an expression of something startling and new – but mainly, I like to flatter myself, because the songs were good. I’ve always been a wild-eyed believer in the power of the song. I love that it’s achievable with the simplest of equipment and that the keys on a piano or a typewriter simultaneously encourage and mock you with a combination of their limits and their possibilities, the secret so tantalisingly at your fingertips but still out of reach, just as when sitting down sometimes with a cheap guitar, a voice and a little inspiration you are galvanised by the sense that you could be on the threshold of unlocking something magical, of stretching yourself towards some sort of wondrous alchemy boundaried only by your own imagination. That compelling, powerful interplay between words and melody was something that had obsessed me since childhood and together with Bernard it felt like we were really beginning to speak as songwriters, something it seemed that for years had become rather a lost art.

  It would be disingenuous though not to credit in all this the presence of a murky sexuality in the songs. Some of the oblique, ambiguous lines in ‘The Drowners’ and the shift in perspective of ‘My Insatiable One’ had lent the EP a charged, carnal edge which I’m sure added to the general volume of ambient chatter about the band. I was very conscious of this element of my writing, keen to tease out those threads that had always fascinated me in other people’s work. I had always found most pop music so prissy and anodyne in that respect or that if sex was a subject then it was described with cartoonish vacuity and never seemed to delve beyond cliché. In an early interview I once said that I wanted to talk about ‘the used condom rather than the beautiful bed’ and I think that’s still an accurate way to look at the thrust, ahem, of those early songs. I viewed writing about sex as I viewed writing about life: as an exploration of minutiae, delving under the layers to glance sideways at the failure and the fear, the moments of hesitation and confusion as well as the simplistic binary categories into which the subject is usually confined. Of course some would see this as trying to be deliberately titillating or controversial but at its heart it was my simple attempt to document the world I saw around me. The lens of the media would refract and reflect what I was doing back to me and I would respond to that and feed it into my subsequent writing and it would subconsciously and incrementally add thin layers to the onion of my growing persona, but no one who ushers their work into the public arena can be free from that unholy loop. At the same time though it would be duplicitous of me not to recognise that on some level I was very aware of what I was doing. What inspired me to detail sex in the songs must have been partly a desire to provoke. I’ve always seen it as one of the core purposes of pop music – well, good pop music anyway – to incite strong feelings, to rouse emotion and to instigate blind allegiance, and sometimes a consequence of that extremity of response is dislike and even hatred. Very early on it became obvious to me that Suede was a group that inspired passion and derision in equal measure and very little feeling towards the middle of that spectrum. It’s just one of those characteristics that we have to live with for better or for worse, much like there’s little someone can do about the size of their feet, so in a similar way a band has to accept what kind of band it is and work within those limits and, if they’re clever, use them to their own ends.

  DOGSHIT AND DIAMONDS

  Simon’s clattering, tribal tattoo rattled around the cavernous room and Bernard’s screaming guitar played out the last few frenzied chords as ‘Moving’ charged towards its frantic denouement. I whipped my microphone lead in time with the pulsing, scattering rhythm and stood teetering on the monitors, staring wild-eyed into the void of the crowd, victorious and sweaty as the song crashed to its violent end. In the sudden silence that followed, the rows of bored, glum-looking students in Ned’s Atomic Dustbin T-shirts shifted uncomfortably and stared at their shoes. One or two clapped half-heartedly but above the muted, smoky hubbub all over the venue the same question was being asked: ‘What time are Kingmaker on?’

  As the excitement had mounted following our ascent we wer
e offered a tour support slot with a group called Kingmaker who during the early nineties had become quite popular, building up a loyal following in the medium-sized university venues of the circuit. It’s never much fun playing to other people’s audiences; it’s hard to really penetrate beyond their sense of uncommitted curiosity and mild suspicion and generate any real energy but sometimes it’s a necessary step you must take as an emerging band, gritting your teeth and steeling yourself against their muted response. I don’t remember any of our performances being particularly notable for this reason but the tour was frothy and fun and we got on well with Kingmaker and I shared a few late-night beery conversations and between-sound-check chats with their singer Loz, a shy but bright and sensitive boy who I always liked. The tour’s apogee was a show at the Town and Country Club in Kentish Town, just up the road from the Bull and Gate pub where we had spent many an underwhelming, unimpressive evening cutting our teeth in 1990. At the time the Town and Country was easily the biggest place we had ever played and so for that reason alone it was an occasion for us. Again I don’t remember our show being anything special but it was an evening that would provoke Steve Sutherland at the Melody Maker to write a famously provocative review. Picking up the inkies the following Tuesday we were confronted with the headline ‘PEARLS BEFORE SWINE’ and the caustic phrase ‘dogshit and diamonds’ expressing the perceived disparity between the headliners and ourselves. Even more arch was Steve’s political manipulation of the situation, using it to equate a coterie of ‘dogshit’ bands (Kingmaker et al) with rival publication the NME and associating what he saw as the ‘diamond’ bands (Suede et al) with the Melody Maker. The battle-lines were drawn and war was declared. It was an incendiary and, in a small way, a very influential piece of writing that apparently caused mass resignations when ironically Steve was appointed NME editor a year or so later.