Afternoons With the Blinds Drawn Read online

During those lovely, fizzy summer days of 1992 it felt like our lives were at a tipping point. As we lay on the grass together outside the sound check at the Windsor Old Trout chewing on our salad kebabs and staring up at the rippling sky I remember feeling a tingle of affection for everyone, a strange fusing of calm and impatient anticipation, a thrilling sense of purpose made sweeter by the periods of frustration and stasis and a strong urge of wanting to pry prematurely into the next chapter. It was during those shows that it felt like a real hysteria was building and during one of my many forays into the bosom of the front row one evening a couple of fans grabbed tightly to my shirt and in the good-humoured tussle ended up ripping it so that I emerged from the mosh pit tattered and ragged and barely clothed. It was a beautiful, spontaneous moment that started to become a bit of a ritual at our gigs. Before it became predictable I secretly enjoyed this joyous, tactile ceremony, and so night after night I would be grabbed and semi-willingly stripped and forced the next day to go out and buy something to replace the lost garment. It seemed easiest to buy some cheap bit of tat that I wouldn’t mind being shredded so after the sound checks I would trawl the local junk shops and buy crappy old nylon shirts and flimsy blouses – ridiculous chiffony second-hand clothes whose only purpose was to last the first few songs. It fleetingly became a style and many of the photographers who were beginning to swarm around us focused on it as a deliberate ‘look’ and I suppose it was but in a less preconceived way than it might have appeared. I would be lying if I pretended that I wasn’t aware of a sexual thread to the persona that was beginning to be woven around me. It sounds faintly comical to me now sitting here writing as a middle-aged, married father but I did definitely toy with themes of androgyny, playing on those confusing margins of interpretation to which we are all sometimes open. Again, my adoption of any ‘femininity’ in my style was partly a twisted, misjudged expression of grief but also an assimilation of the image of myself that was being projected back to me by the media. At some point in that year I did an interview with a long-forgotten alternative music mag called Lime Lizard in which I talked about how when songwriting I had inhabited personas like housewives and gay men and switched from the first person to the third in order to shift perspectives and keep the writing fresh for myself. To make a point I blithely mentioned that during these moments I viewed myself as a kind of ‘bisexual man who’s never had a homosexual experience’. It was to become one of the stupidest and most over-quoted things I have ever said and will probably appear on my gravestone. I deeply regret the naivety of the young man who said it not because he was lying or fictionalising at all but because he failed to realise that there is zero space for subtlety and shades of meaning in the modern media when it comes to salacious subjects. If you speak to large groups of people through the press you have to use quite simplistic terms or your intended meaning will be smothered in a tide of misinterpretation, hence the proliferation of so many uninspired dullards blathering on about how they are going to ‘save rock and roll’ or possibly how they are going to ‘destroy rock and roll’ etc. etc. Of course the famous quote resonated with the idea of me that was circulating and maybe I’m being disingenuous in suggesting that I wasn’t aware of that and that I didn’t use it to my own ends but I can’t help hating that for some people it placed me neatly in a box labelled ‘bisexual’ when in fact I was trying to express in my desire not to be categorised something of the exact opposite. If anything interested me about the broader subject of androgyny and the margins of sexuality it was Nietzschean ideas about art combining the masculine and feminine which was something that had been introduced to me via the work of the artist Allen Jones and his Hermaphrodite series; a brave and intriguing expression of his integration of the male and female elements of his nature. It wasn’t intended as crass sexual tourism or a dreary homage to seventies glam rock or certainly not as any witless attempt to be controversial. To be honest I think it was a mark of the essentially laddish, conservative nature of the alternative music industry back then that it was given any airtime and seen as in any way shocking or provocative. A bit like Coco Chanel’s famous utterance about there being no ugly women, only lazy ones, it was one of those kind of quotes that registered powerfully with how the public were beginning to see me and playing within those narrow boundaries of definition it became all the more impossible to shrug off. Within the band it became looming and ubiquitous and for a while inescapable and then eventually amusing and finally just boring. Sometimes the only way to deal with things is to deflect them with humour so as it took on a kind of life of its own we began to refer to it as the ‘bicycle that’s never had a puncture’ quote. Well, it seemed funny at the time.

  When I cast my mind back to those days and to the person that I was I’m certain that there was another layer of motivation tied up within the whole thing. Strangely I think that I was trying to articulate that I was an emotional being rather than a sexual one. I realise that it sounds like a contradiction but it was on some level an innocent attempt to almost neutralise my sexuality, to blur the lines and to dispense with gender boundaries and present my work as primarily that of a person rather than that of a man or a woman or a straight person or a gay person or even a bisexual person. Certainly the more reflective pieces like ‘The Next Life’ or ‘Sleeping Pills’ or ‘Pantomime Horse’ were intended to be – to steal a phrase from the modern vernacular – ‘gender neutral’. It feels though that the more I try to explain my motivations the more disingenuous I sound and the deeper a hole I dig for myself. However you look at it my aspirations were at best naive and at worst clunky – a failure to understand the media and its lack of nuance.

  THE ONLY THING WORSE

  THAN BEING TALKED ABOUT

  IS NOT BEING TALKED ABOUT

  The music throbbed around the smoky back room of the pub and I pushed my way to the bar, wriggling between the press of bodies, the rubber soles of my shoes sticky against the stale spilt beer that had dried on the ash-laden floor. I gestured hopefully towards the barman and held out my crumpled five-pound note and noticed a girl darting sideways glances my way from the other end of the counter, her eyebrows arched quizzically, her chin raised slightly in a gesture of mild defiance and the hint of a smile flickering across her pretty face. As I paid for my drink and the throng between us cleared slightly I realised that she had sidled up to me. I turned to meet her stare and as I looked into her pale blue eyes she spoke at last. ‘You’re the singer from Suede, aren’t you?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied smugly, my gaze wandering over the light spray of freckles that dusted the skin around her cheekbones, my mind already imagining what her mouth might feel like pressed against mine. ‘I thought you were,’ she answered. ‘I think your band are shit.’

  A group must always be writing, always be recording or always be touring. These are their only acceptable states of being and they comprise the Holy Trinity of its self-definition. It’s the way in which, shark-like, it swims ever forward, always moving, always in a state of stealth and readiness and industry. And so in quiet acquiescence to this principle our next single was scheduled to be ‘Metal Mickey’ and flushed with the illusion of success and armed with plectrums and Dictaphones we were packed off to Protocol Studios with Ed Buller again as producer. This time however we were to learn that a formulaic approach doesn’t always work. The first version we recorded of the song was I think an attempt to follow the template of ‘The Drowners’. It was light, it was poppy, it was bitterly disappointing. For some reason either Ed or Bernard had decided to layer the main rhythm guitar with a series of overdubs which made the whole thing sound like Status Quo, utterly alien to the spirit of the raw, primal, almost lascivious throb of the live version. Sometimes when making music there is an inverse law for the relationship between the power of the part and the number of things playing it. Sometimes what has become known as the ‘Phil Spector’ approach to creating size through repeated overdubs just results in a weak, underwhelming mesh of sounds. Sometimes less really is more.


  Listening to the mix through the NS-10s on one of those ubiquitous, black-leather, studio control-room sofas was the first time that I’d felt the old sour disappointment in what we were doing for a long while. In a rare moment of clarity and honesty we realised that what we had produced simply wasn’t good enough. We reconvened at Maison Rouge Studios in Fulham and approached the whole thing differently, choosing to record it in a style that was much more akin to the simpler, grittier way we had been it playing on stage. With hindsight I think if anything we should have followed that instinct even further. Secretly I was slightly nervous that the single wasn’t as good as ‘The Drowners’ and that the recorded version never really matched the live version in terms of visceral energy. I don’t think it was helped by the somewhat self-conscious key change at the end, which still makes me wince a little. It made it all sound a bit ‘Mickey Most’, taking the track into a safe retro-pop territory rather than the brutish sonic threat that it should have been but overall we pretended we were happy with the results and let the tide of events buoy us along. For me however the highlight of the record was the B-side ‘He’s Dead’, a relatively overlooked gem in the Suede canon of overlooked gems.

  At some point Bernard had written a piece of music that he called ‘Dixon’ as the wobbling, wandering guitar part reminded him of the theme tune to an old TV show called Dixon of Dock Green. Try as I might I simply couldn’t find the right melody and lyric to turn it into a song. The band would run through it in rehearsal, thrilling to its churning momentum while I sat sulking in the corner, mute and impotent and frustrated with myself. Bernard became increasingly irritated that I couldn’t respond, knowing that there was potentially a great song in there somewhere if I could just find the right parts to unlock it. The record company had hired me a little writing room in Nomis Studios in Olympia so I could spend the idle hours of my days off hunched over my four-track portastudio drinking stewed tea and warbling half-ideas into my microphone. One day I shuffled down there on the number 28 bus and started to work yet again on the track. I’d been out somewhere the night before and during a clamorous, drunken conversation at the back of a noisy venue had misheard someone saying what sounded like the words ‘animal nitrate’. Loving the playful blend of childishness and dark suggestion I had scurried off to the toilets and under the flickering fluorescent lights I had scribbled the phrase down in one of the many notebooks I used to keep in my pockets before the invention of the iPhone, and then forgot all about it until the next day when I opened my book and saw it staring back at me. Sometimes a title can be enough to unlock a song and suggest a theme which as a writer you just need to follow, stumbling blindly after it like Theseus following Ariadne’s thread. I saw in it a louring landscape of sink estates and broken homes and twisted, sexual power play, and when married to the music I thrilled to its strange blend of murky insinuation and gnarled pop hooks. I’d always had a desire to pollute the mainstream with something poisonous, something that it doesn’t realise is harmful until it’s too late and saw in ‘Animal Nitrate’ the perfect vehicle for that. The song would become in many ways if not our most successful then possibly our most defining moment, the lyrics allowing it to become a kind of manifesto of intent, an unofficial national anthem for the land of Suede.

  During the autumn of 1992 ‘Metal Mickey’ was released and we marched relentlessly onwards through our tour of the toilets of Great Britain with ripped shirts and tinnitus playing bonkers, sweaty London shows at iconic, rammed little venues like the 100 Club on Oxford Street and the SW1 in Victoria. The single had gone top twenty and so we had predictably pranced like puppets around the studios of Top of the Pops and appeared on the cover of the NME and tilted with an unfamiliar breed: the mainstream media who as yet didn’t seem to know what to make of us and were probably expecting not to have to care. Within a year we would be parodied on TV by Spitting Image and by David Baddiel and by Matt Lucas. Appearing on Top of the Pops was for bands of our era one of those hugely memorable career milestones. Like most people of my age I had whiled away many a rainy Thursday evening after school gazing at its glitzy parade of hairdos and hysteria and so being invited to play ourselves felt like we had penetrated some hushed and privileged inner sanctum. The reality of course, like most of these things, was very different as we were herded into a bleak little dressing room in Boreham Wood one morning and made to wait for hours, hunched over cold cups of tea and a plate of biscuits while various chart poppets minced around perfecting their dance routines during camera rehearsals. My abiding memory of the experience wasn’t so much the gestural pantomime of the performance but instead the amusing lunch that we ate in a canteen that was shared by the EastEnders cast and crew, all of us suppressing giggles as we sat at a table chewing on our baked potatoes next to Arthur Fowler. Despite the odd moment of bathos it definitely felt like we had moved up to the next stage but this, I think, was the point when the cracks started to appear. Throughout this early period when the press started to snap around our heels it seemed that one issue was obsessing them all: how we were dealing with ‘the pressure’. There has always been a kind of stubbornness in Suede, a sense that we simply won’t give people what they want if we feel it’s just on their terms and so we would deflect the question with a carefree nonchalance muttering stock answers like ‘the only pressure is the one we feel from ourselves’ or something similarly formulaic. Looking back though the reality was very different and like water finding its way through the cracks it began to seep its way into our world in ways that I didn’t expect. I remember a period around this time when before gigs I would childishly develop phantom ‘illnesses’, sitting there in the dressing rooms coughing and spluttering like a caricature of a consumptive poet only to emerge minutes before showtime when the adrenaline kicked in to prance nimbly on to the stage. The rest of the band seemed fairly unopinionated on the matter – they probably thought I was attention-seeking – but maybe they realised it was part of my complex self-defence mechanism that helped me deal with the smothering weight of expectation that was being placed upon us to which deep down I desperately wanted to respond, using it as a kind of built-in excuse should I fail to perform.

  The sheer pace of life alone at this point was becoming enervating: my days were backed up with endless interviews and the dressing rooms were a constant procession of make-up artists and French journalists and big-shot American A&R men who wanted to come backstage and ‘touch base’. At first of course the surreal novelty of this mad carnival was great fun; we kept them all at arm’s-length and gave them unflattering nicknames and did silly impressions but after a while it began to feel that we were being dragged along from holding pen to holding pen like livestock. It’s remarkable how literally anything, no matter how seemingly beguiling, can become everyday and even unpleasant but I’ve always hated it when pop stars moan about their lives – it seems like a brattish, churlish and ultimately patronising response to what is of course a charmed life, an unrealistic position of fortune and privilege. Our continued exposure to the media and the vague whiff of notoriety that was wafting around us was making me if not ‘famous’ then certainly recognisable. I often still reflect on the strange levels of celebrity to which I have been exposed as they seem to say something pertinent about the band itself. I think it’s almost impossible for anyone in the public eye to really know exactly how famous or otherwise they really are. It’s one of those unquantifiable things that is made even more impossible to gauge because the experience itself skews your judgement. Over time the band has slowly drifted into a position very much left of the mainstream so thankfully these days I’m perfectly able to walk down busy streets and only occasionally get the odd intense stare but there was a point in 1993 when something as simple as that was almost impossible. There seems to be a peculiar duality in people’s response to me. Generally these days it is characterised by indifference, but occasionally it will provoke gushing, emotional encounters which hopefully I have acquired the know-how to nego
tiate politely. Well, most of the time anyway. At first when the experience is still a novelty it feels refreshing and amusing. The very act of jumping up on to a stage and playing music is an act of vanity. It’s saying: ‘Look at me, aren’t I great!’ so ‘fame’ is just a natural extrapolation of that first innocent venture. Again artists who have a sort of ‘I never wanted to be famous, I’m just a simple musician’ attitude I think are misunderstanding an instinct at the very centre of themselves and being disingenuous to the point of duplicity. If that were so then why bother ever stepping outside your bedroom? What they actually mean is: ‘I secretly wanted to be famous but only exactly on my terms and for the consequences of my fame and success not to have any bad sides’. Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that. Success, fame, whatever you want to call it, is a prickly mistress: unpredictable, mercurial, disloyal and ultimately poisonous. Like some wicked fairy-tale queen she is alluring and veiled and tantalising at first but soon reveals a venomous, malignant core when the clothes are strewn. Surely we all know this – it’s woven into the fabric of contemporary folklore and it’s one of those axiomatic truths that litter the landscape of talk shows and magazine articles and TV dramas. It’s part of the great karmic law which states that for every up there is a down. We might all know it deep inside but acting on that knowledge is a different matter. My own dalliance with her resulted in my becoming a baseball-capped caricature of paranoia as I predictably descended into collapse and personal disintegration and addiction, but you’ll have to wait to hear about that jolly little episode.

  STYLE IS THE ART

  OF OMISSION

  On those dark, drizzly winter mornings when I was first pondering the idea of writing this book I was constantly wrestling with the question of whether I would be able to describe what is an essentially somewhat graceless struggle with any poetry or charm especially when, to be frank, the poetry and charm in your life seem to ebb away with the more success you achieve – ‘the richer we are, the poorer we become’ to misquote Martin Luther King. In many ways in order to succeed you have to sacrifice a tiny bit of yourself. I suppose it’s that famous ‘pact with the devil’ trope and although the image might be melodramatic I think that it contains a grain of truth. When I can be bothered to reflect on the person that I was in the early years of my life he seems very different from the one that I was slowly becoming as the band began their eventual ascent. Although I’m trying to not be unnecessarily nostalgic there are always things that you can learn about yourself from yourself and sometimes it’s important to reflect on the callow, diffident boy that was once me and wonder how much of him is still there. As we fought our way through, scrabbling and scrambling up the long, hard slope I willingly surrendered part of myself and my view of the world became increasingly myopic and specialist, narrowing down to the cramped limits of the London indie demi-monde, no longer able to drift and wallow, an ambitious steeliness supplanting any winsome innocence. At this moment I think it’s important to mention how all-consuming being in a band is. There is absolutely no such thing as being able to do it part-time. Even in the nascent stages when you are clambering up the slippery pole your life takes on an incredibly monotheistic hue shrinking to a chase to reach the check-points on your list of career milestones. When you’re not working on it you’re talking about it and when you’re not talking about it you’re thinking about it. Even when you’re asleep you’re dreaming about it. Sometimes when life accelerates the only way to survive the raw speed is to step away and catch your breath. Bands who forget the reasons why they first became a band are those that are destined to crash and burn but during those first dizzy days of early success it can be so hard to remember that as you stumble like a tottering toddler from shiny bauble to shiny bauble. The simple joys of creating music together become supplanted by different, less wholesome ambitions as you learn to become someone else – someone you end up liking less.