Afternoons With the Blinds Drawn Read online

  Whatever your views of the merits and opinions of that particular article I don’t think that you can deny its chutzpah. For me it marked the apex of inflammatory weekly music-press journalism. This was a time when picking up the papers on a Tuesday morning would mean taking your life into your hands. Reviews and comments could be savage and the invective vicious and personal and crushing and as a key figure in the eye of the storm I tasted both sides. Sometimes within the same edition I was dragged cruelly and savagely through the mud or cast equally ridiculously as some sort of demi-god. As a young man it was sometimes almost impossible to see myself as a point between these extremes as I oscillated between morbid self-reflection and vainglorious narcissism. Personally speaking I don’t know how it’s possible to ignore things that are being written about you and your work. Of course there are artists who claim that they ‘never read their own press’ and perhaps there are a few who don’t but probably less than you would imagine. It’s one of those musician clichés like ‘we just make music for ourselves and if anyone else is interested that’s a bonus’, intimating blithe insouciance and a romantic suggestion that the artist is some sort of seer above such petty concerns as caring what others might think of them and more often than not it’s a complete fiction. The truth is that the very act of ushering your work into the public arena is a plea for some sort of validation and response from the media; although often denigrated by a certain sort of artist many will secretly seek this, gorging on it when it is positive and writhing in discomfort when it isn’t. You might assume that when press is bad you could just ignore it but I find that I need to ‘work through it’ in a way that almost parallels the assimilation of grief. It’s difficult to know the effect it has had on me psychologically – which traits it has exaggerated and which it has suppressed – and what kind of a person I would be now without the experience. I don’t think anyone escapes from that kind of distortion of truth without mental scars, but again it’s part of the pact you sign when you embark on this whole merry little jaunt. Given that the rewards are so great I think what amounted to a form of abuse was seen as being acceptable – that like a modern-day gladiatorial contest the value of the prize justified its bloody pursuit. Even though people around you tell you to ‘not take it personally’ there’s never really a moment when you can separate yourself from your persona and see the whole thing happening to someone else and as the years roll on, like dating or something, what you would assume would get easier doesn’t.

  Yet despite all of this, despite having been put through the wringer more times than I can remember and having been damaged on what was probably a deep, personal level by the experience, I still believe we have lost something culturally valuable now that we no longer have that kind of ‘Punch and Judy’ weekly music press. It probably seems easy for me to say because I wasn’t on the receiving end of that particular tirade – and my point has nothing to do with the relative merits of the bands in question – but with the benefit of over twenty-five years of hindsight I think that the piece was ultimately a creative act. Sutherland knew that he was doing something more important than pissing a few people off when he wrote it. He knew he was being outrageous, unpopular, unpleasant and unnecessarily vitriolic but he also knew that his goading would ultimately inspire bands to strive to improve. He understood his role in it all and he knew the broader value of the ‘press kicking’, and he understood the axiomatic truth that any artist who enters into the arena of public assessment waives their right to be upset if someone doesn’t like their work and that raging critiques are, in a kind of Darwinian way, part of the complex system of checks and balances that crush some bands and motivate others to go on and achieve something extraordinary. They are a disagreeable but necessary element of the ecosystem. The music press of the seventies, eighties and nineties was a charged battleground of polarisation and opinion that generated scenes. Some of these were laughable, short-lived cultural jokes but some, like punk, went on to change the world and redefine how the public saw music and in a broader sense how they saw art. When we eventually started travelling abroad we were at first viewed suspiciously by much of the foreign media, many of whom chose to see us as a product of the British music press. We would get a barrage of gruff accusations about ‘the hype’ and an unfair focus away from the music that we had created and were so proud of. I always thought they were kind of missing the point. For a start, hype will only take you so far. Without any substance people will soon see through its flimsy artifice and wander off towards the next shiny thing. More ironically though it seemed that the machinery of which they were so suspicious had probably been partly responsible for much of the music that they loved. Nowadays, despite a few notable exceptions, most publications seem too afraid of offending their demographic to have any worthwhile opinion, apparently supporting whatever is in their best interest regardless of its artistic worth, blandly approving of marketing campaigns and fearful of their shareholders.

  This will probably get me into trouble and I’d love to be proved wrong and maybe I’m too out of touch to be able to see it clearly but unfortunately I just can’t see where the game-changing scenes and the movements of the digital age are likely to come from. I feel that the defining cultural event of our times – social media – has cast such a huge shadow and even though people still passionately love music it has become more of a lifestyle accessory rather than a central, defining core of their being and because of that its impact and its generational resonance has waned. And while I’m up on my soap-box I may as well take the opportunity to blather on a little about some other broader issues. I think it should worry everyone deeply that since the decimation of the music business at first by internet piracy and then by the proliferation of streaming services it is increasingly hard for artists who make left-field marginal music to make a living. Of course there are always anomalies but I’ve noticed that the sort of new bands who would have had healthy lucrative careers back in the seventies and eighties and nineties making interesting, non-commercial music are struggling to survive. Clearly this raises class issues. Are we to assume that working-class voices will be virtually unheard in alternative music in a few years’ time because it’s just no longer seen as a viable career and the only way left-field bands can survive is if they are bank-rolled by well-off parents? However there are wider and even more troubling implications beyond this. Right now it’s a phenomenon that probably doesn’t unduly worry those denizens of the upper echelons of the music industry who are still earning big money making mainstream pop music but it really should. The strata of the creative world are all linked and in many ways co-dependent rather like an ecosystem. Not wishing to sound over-simplistic it seems to me that the more creative marginal musicians have always been the creatures that the commercial artists have fed off, diluting and sanitising and popularising their ideas. In the same way that if plant life were to die out it would create a chain of events that would lead to the extinction of carnivores, so I believe that the work done at the margins of the music industry is utterly essential to the health of the music world as a whole. Without this motor that generates ideas we can envisage a sort of bleak cultural vacuum whereby the only starting points that commercial artists have are increasingly based on copies of previous historic successes leading to a horribly nostalgic, ersatz musical landscape that is meaningless and devoid of any traction or worth or vitality. Some might argue that we arrived at that point many years ago; the success of The X Factor and Faux-town amongst other pop movements would seem to support their case and mainstream music has always had a proclivity towards sentimentalism, but at least there are glimmers of interesting work still appearing. It worries me though that taken to its logical point we will be seeing more than just a dearth of ideas and possibly the beginnings of an end game.

  Back to my little story however. Years later when I reconnected with Justine I would get to know Loz quite well as he lived in a room in her house in Notting Hill. By that time his band had disintegrated a
long with his ambitions of success and he was living life at a drifting, melancholy pace. He was always a gentle soul but I fear he had had something thrust upon him he wasn’t ready for and so fell prey to the savage jaws of the music machine, damaged by the same wheels that create success in some and grind others into the dirt. The thin line between success and failure in bands has always fascinated me – the mechanics that dictate that some will go on to become a world-beating phenomenon while others will politely pale away into an elephants’ graveyard of cultural insignificance. Obviously raw talent and hard work and resilience play huge roles in these outcomes but beyond that it does often seem, even from an insiders’ point of view, almost a random process. I think everyone has listened to a band sometimes and wondered how on earth they became successful and I’m sure there are swathes of people who feel exactly this with regard to Suede. Often I think there is just an element of their character that resonates with a whole tribe of people. This can be an unusual or exciting way of doing things, a musical gimmick, an unpredictability or an attitude or even just the fickle hand of fate. I’ve always had an idealistic and probably woefully naive belief that it is the quality of your work that will steer you towards success but when I see a band like Echo and the Bunnymen for example propping up festival bills and playing support slots to paltry, disinterested audiences after having made some of the most celestial, life-affirming music of the eighties while some of their contemporaries fill the arenas of the world I have to admit that the whole process is beyond any sort of formula and obviously reflects the absolute subjectivity of music and art in general. Sadly for Loz his band would join the legions of the unsung, the indifferent machine spitting him out on to the pile while others around him continued their giddying ascent.

  EFFETE SOUTHERN WANKERS

  The four of us stood on the tiny smoky back-room stage of the Gourock Bay Hotel as the final guitar phrase of ‘Pantomime Horse’ coiled slowly to an end. Our eyes were cast to the floor, our faces shadowed by the wash of red coming from the single-gelled floodlight fixed to a baton in the ceiling. The paltry scattered crowd glowered at us balefully through a light smattering of dutiful applause and as the sound of shuffling feet on the sticky floor filled the room the last few solitary claps died away and there was a stark moment of sullen silence as we looked at the handwritten set lists and readied ourselves for the next song. Suddenly from somewhere out of the shadows, loud and clear against the tense hush a gruff Glaswegian voice bellowed out, ‘You effete Southern wankers!’

  As the tyres of the off-white Ford Transit span against the dark rubberised asphalt of the M8 we sped past slip roads and fly-overs eating up the broken white lines, patchy scrub-land verges and sober, monolithic road signs disappearing in our rear-view mirror. Charlie sat up front clutching the wheel, speeding us ever onwards while the rest of us in the back of the lightless van lolled and floundered on the mattress, rolling in acquiescence as the vehicle gently listed against the buffeting wind. And so, lost to a drifting, strip-lit world of motorway service-station breakfasts and fraught sound checks and a hinterland of cheap, vinegary wine and dressing-room cheese platters, the 1992 Drowners tour rumbled on. Endless afternoons were spent fiddling with sticks of celery and cling film backstage in low-level venues while we waited as the scant crew set up and our evenings were lost in the throes of charged performance and crazed Dionysian excess; the days and nights a strange dissonant blend of the mundane and the extraordinary. Our ephemeral deification by the music press provoked mixed reactions around the country. The hostile, stony-faced audience to whom we played in Gourock was obviously suspicious of what it probably saw as a group of pampered, privileged, metropolitan-elite press darlings. If the situation hadn’t felt so genuinely intimidating I would have collapsed laughing at the brilliant absurdity of the insult that had been hurled at us: a genius blend of eloquence, invective and irony. The other memory I have from that show was of Mat emerging from the urinals after the gig and telling us he’d just been asked threateningly by some swaying, hulking thug whether he’d ‘fuckin’ seen where Suede have gone?’ and been forced to affect his bad version of a Scots accent for some sort of muffled, uncommitted reply – a bit like Withnail when confronted in the toilets by a bellicose Irishman in one of the film’s many famous scenes. Not all the little regional shows during this period had that kind of truculent tone however. One of my fondest memories was playing the Southampton Joiners Arms where it seemed like something quite wonderful was happening. Despite the modest surroundings, the shabby flock-wallpapered room and the stacks of plastic pint glasses, as I looked out over the small sea of faces it felt like a ‘moment’, like everyone there knew something special was happening and that it was beyond anyone’s control. If I had one personal memory that seems to define the point when Suede really ‘happened’ it would actually be that show. I remember a surge of euphoria as for the first time I felt that the band and the audience were united towards the same ends; that crazed, unstoppable rush of power that you sometimes get as a performer when you realise that there’s almost nothing that you can do wrong – a kind of dizzying illusion of perfection created by a willing conspiracy between us and the crowd and the right conditions. It was the first time that I was really aware of that flow of energy, the first time it had dawned on me that playing live was about so much more than just dutifully presenting your songs and that the difference between a good gig and a great gig was the complicity of the punters and the loop of response and counter-response between them and those on the stage. Occasionally it can feel like an audience doesn’t understand that it has a role too, that unlike attending the cinema the manner in which we play is hugely influenced by its reaction. Over the years it’s something that has quietly obsessed me as it becomes increasingly clearer that Suede, possibly more than most bands, needs that feedback for it to work and sometimes making the evening successful means striving to manufacture that.

  Another special memory I have from the gigs around this time is of one at a little pub in Belfast. The show was spirited, but it wasn’t until an odd moment of serendipity when Bernard’s guitar cut out and the song broke down halfway through only to be rescued by the mass singing of the crowd all crooning along to the chorus that it really took off. There was something so humbling and lovely about it, a glorious sense of unity that made us all break out into huge, shit-eating grins; one of those extraordinary and unpredictable moments that sparks and lights the touch paper. The rest of the show descended into a wonderfully sticky sort of riot and finally after it had juddered to its deafening denouement we made our shaky, sweaty way back to the Europa Hotel, which incidentally we had been almost proudly informed was the most frequently bombed hotel in Europe. I remember all of us gathering in the bar and while we were chatting and sipping at our bottles of Beck’s suddenly becoming aware of a ragged, lurching choir of voices outside. After a few moments we realised that they were singing ‘The Drowners’ and that half the audience had followed us to the hotel to serenade us from the street. It was both a heartwarming and hilarious moment as beaming and giggling we gathered on the balcony and waved mock-pompously like the Windsors after a Royal Wedding while the little crowd cheered and the evening traffic bustled by. Slowly then we became aware that a small but passionate throng of devotees was beginning to follow us around – a tight little knot of fans from places like Tring and Lyme Regis and Hebden Bridge who would turn up at the sound checks and with whom we would sit and chat after the shows, huddled in the stuffy, littered dressing rooms smoking Benson and Hedges and juggling oranges and chattering wildly about music until the small hours when we would stagger back into the Transit and make our way blearily home to London or to collapse in the twin rooms of some cheap local bed and breakfast. This was back when everything still felt wonderfully guileless, before any sort of band/fan divide had been established, when we were all still genuinely grateful and slightly surprised that people had invested their time and money to come and see us. Of course all four o
f us had been fans ourselves and so to see others similarly inspired felt somehow strangely satisfying, like we were passing on a baton or closing a circle, or repaying some sort of cosmic debt, and even though our egos were obviously burgeoning due to the attention this was still at a stage when it was all small-scale enough for us to see this wonderful carnival of people that we were encountering as new friends. We loved meeting these wild-eyed boys and girls and would sit there in the smoky backstage areas signing T-shirts and jabbering excitedly about music as the raucousness grew and the cans scattered and the ash-trays heaved. Touring was so novel to us that the whole day would somehow merge – the gigs themselves and the parties afterwards and even the dead hours spent travelling and eating service-station sandwiches all melding into the same joyful experience. Over the years as we became more professional with our approach we would learn to delineate these things, ring-fencing our performances and separating them from the chaos that surrounded us to deal with the hard grind of touring, and I think sadly we ended up losing something precious, but those early playful hours spent hanging out with that growing throng of lovely people were special and in many ways essential to the nature of the band we would become. It was the beginnings of the loyal and passionate Suede community that I am happy to say still mills around us today, an assemblage of wonderful zealots who never cease to amaze me with their stamina and their loyalty and their dedication.