Afternoons With the Blinds Drawn Page 5

  During those sober snatched moments away from the tyranny of touring and the bizarre cavalcade that was starting to swirl around us we retreated to the shelter of doing what we really loved – working on the songs that would make up the rest of the debut album. Like most debuts, it would be mainly comprised of live favourites but as we had recklessly discarded three or four great pieces as B-sides we needed more material. This was the kind of arena where Bernard was at his best – he instilled in all of us a zealous drive, a restless, puritanical sense that unless we were creating new work then we were essentially worthless. It’s an ethos that has been part of the band from those very early days and if we have any vitality and relevance today it’s very much thanks to that and, yes, very much thanks to him. One day I drifted over to his flat in West Hampstead and we made tea and chatted and he picked up his red 335 and started playing a winding arpeggio piece he’d written that was punctuated by delicate trills and melted into a stormy, stirring chorus. I started singing a falsetto line over the verse and hurriedly went about recording it on one of the many Dictaphones into which I would warble squeaky half-ideas much to the band’s general piss-taking. The song eventually became ‘She’s Not Dead’ and the lyric I wrote to it was a vignette about the death in the early eighties of my Auntie Jean. That sober autumn afternoon however listening to the click of the radiators and watching the leaves scatter outside the window as Bernard played has always stayed in my head as a wonderful, misty, probably sentimental memory somehow symbolising an often overlooked unity that we enjoyed a lot in the early days. I remember the feeling of respect as we worked together, a sense of mutual purpose and the notion that something special was again magically at our fingertips. On my birthday that year I’d been predictably up all night partying at Moorhouse Road with Alan and the kind of random group of odd people who at the time seemed to always gravitate towards us. After they had all eventually staggered off home Alan and I had collapsed on to the tatty sofa, smoking and listening to music when suddenly there was a knock at the door and Bernard and Saul were on the doorstep bearing gifts. I probably wasn’t making much sense by that point but I ushered them upstairs and offered them tea and they sat and chatted as I stood there swaying and trying to focus my eyes. Around that time I had bought myself a cheap old upright piano and taken off the front panel to expose the machinery to give it a kind of pre-war pianola effect. After a while Bernard sat at it and began to play a beautiful, delicate, lilting waltz-time piece that he’d written. There was something so special about the way he played it – naive and charming and somehow circumspect – like he was still courting the instrument. It had a marvellous unlearned quality that seemed to almost lend it the feel of a child’s piano exercise. Later he told me that it was inspired by Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata and once I had sobered up I started writing the words that became the song ‘The Next Life’. For a while now, influenced by the understated finale of Neil Young’s After The Gold Rush, we had been talking about ending the album with a smaller, more intimate track, something that stepped away from the rock guitar format and left the listener able to catch their breath. In this new song we thought we had at last found it.

  The album sessions had started at Angel Studios in Islington earlier that year but it wasn’t until we got to Master Rock Studios just off Kilburn High Road that it felt like the record was starting to come together. I have wonderful memories of those days: the heady sense of anticipation as I jumped on to the 31 bus from Chepstow Road with sharpened pencils in my pockets and holes in my shoes and little things like the novelty of there actually being soap in the toilet when I got there and sitting in the control room as endless cups of tea cooled and the winding, labyrinthine guitar intro to ‘Pantomime Horse’ curled like smoke in the air. It was an exciting time to be in Suede. There was a genuine sense among us that despite there being nothing approaching a scene yet we were at the cusp of an event that was more than just another band making another album. Of course looking at the debut in a historical context it’s easy to see now how it led on to a guitar music movement during that decade but I honestly remember while we were working on it there being a frisson, a strange almost deranged zeal, a feeling that what we were doing was worthwhile and bigger than us and our petty little private dramas. Personally I also remember feeling like I had been snatched wonderfully away from something unpleasant, like one of those lucky, rescued boys in a Dickens novel: Oliver Twist waking up at Mr Brownlow’s house with the sunlight streaming in through the windows, the memory of Bill Sykes just a distant shadow. I think all of us felt somehow grateful, to what or whom I don’t know but as we chipped away at the record we did so with the flicker of a smile playing across our faces and a breathless sense of purpose.

  There were still a couple of gaps though; one piece that had a working title of ‘Stonesy’ due to its simple, bluesy feel was proving particularly elusive to me but in the same way that ‘Animal Nitrate’ had taken some time to get right we were all convinced it was worth the pursuit. I’d met an artist, a volatile, tempestuous young woman with whom I was conducting a frenetic, exhausting and often fiery relationship. We had just been to Paris together and had returned to the twenty-four-hour party that was life in Moorhouse Road to be confronted with the sharp end of Alan’s ruthless hedonism. Inevitably we all overdid it and in the death throes of the evening she had ended up fainting and tumbling on to the floor like a sack of potatoes. In those desperate, breathless few moments of panic and fear as we tried to revive her the jagged edge of our heedless lives seemed to be revealed to us and as the sweat beaded on my forehead I felt starkly confronted by the fragility of existence itself. The artist thankfully recovered but the episode left a deep chill in me and a few days later I would use the experience and weld it into what became ‘So Young’ – a song about hedonism and mortality and hope and the devil-may-care abandon of youth. Once my vocal was recorded we all stepped back to assess it. It was missing something to act as an antidote to the simple rocky core so Ed stepped in and delivered a beautiful, lyrical piano part, which I suppose if I’m honest was a little in debt to Mike Garson’s untethered, wandering solo on ‘Aladdin Sane’. In fact, when I met the unnervingly charming writer of that song for a piece organised by the NME around that time I excitedly played it to him, introducing it with the words ‘there’s quite a lot of you in this one’. Ed is the son of a composer and a cultured keyboard player in his own right and rock scholars will know that he used to play with The Psychedelic Furs back in the eighties. His part brought out a real poetry in the music that the track had been missing and in our excitement we earmarked it as the opener on the album. During my vocal take I had been shrieking unintelligible words before the main body of the song to create a kind of unruly atmosphere of anticipation, a sense of rowdy excitement. The more I thought about it the more I liked the bloody-minded idea of leaving them in the mix. It appealed to me that what was looking like possibly becoming a hugely talked-about record would start with words that no one could understand. I pictured scribbling, rewinding journalists scratching their heads and hunching over their speakers and chuckled to myself.

  To be frank I don’t think the debut was as strong as it could have been. It would have been a better record if we had had the long-term vision to replace lightweight fillers like ‘Animal Lover’ with virtually any of the recent B-sides and with the wonder of hindsight I find it sonically a little thin and over-dubbed and missing some of the thump and raw edge of the live versions. The phenomenon known jokingly as ‘coke ear’ was probably partly to blame for the record’s lack of bass heft but nonetheless I think Ed saw in us a band that could transcend the usual boundaries of the rock format and potentially mirror his own more ambitious visions. With songs like ‘Sleeping Pills’ and ‘So Young’ this approach worked but more indelicate tracks like ‘Moving’ were ruined by naive attempts at studio trickery and basic misunderstandings of their merits and strengths. I don’t mean for this to come across as disparaging towar
ds Ed because we certainly weren’t forced into these production decisions but I suppose when you review your life’s work it’s important to be honest about how you see it, perceived successes meaning nothing without the recognition of failure. The album has a feel though which I still love: it rages and it screams, it yelps and it whispers and in a strange sort of way captures some truth of who we were at that moment in our lives – youthful, impertinent, ambitious and flawed. In my more self-important moments I sometimes allow myself to see it as a record that held up a cracked mirror to John Major’s Britain, capturing something of its dreariness and reflecting an image of a broken, indifferent world and a sense of what it was like to be poor and marginal and powerless within it.

  When looking back it’s tempting to wonder what might have been and I often think that the choice of the next single can be seen as an interesting ‘sliding doors’ moment in Suede’s career. Originally Bernard and I especially had been desperate to release ‘Sleeping Pills’, seeing in it something of the depth of our ambition, the sweep and the scale that we wanted to eventually head towards. As soon as the ragged terrace chant of ‘Animal Nitrate’ was written however and it became a kind of sonic juggernaut those plans changed. Saul sidled up to me purposefully one day by the pool table in Master Rock and laid out his case. From a record company perspective and in a short-term sense it was obviously the right thing to do; the song was dark yet anthemic, troubling yet catchy and in terms of its chart performance and accrued radio play releasing it was absolutely the right decision. I can’t help but speculate on how the future would have unfolded if the other more delicate side of our work had been exposed to the public instead. Suede has always both suffered and benefited from a polarity at its core. As writers we have always been able to oscillate between simple pop hooks and widescreen landscapes and in a way even though it has made us what we are I think it’s something that has confused people whose attention has never wandered beyond our fringes. What I mean is that there were two routes the band could have taken and I think we took the most obvious one. Whether the other route would have been better for us no one will ever really know but it’s something I often quietly ponder. It’s fascinating how decisions like these although not actually art themselves have a kind of creativity of their own. In the same way that in journalism an editor’s choices of inclusion or omission can change the message of a piece, so a record company’s actions can have a hugely creative element, shaping and defining the very essence of what a band is perceived to be.

  As the snowball of anticipation grew the New Year greeted us with an invitation from the Brits to play at their forthcoming event in February. It seemed to coincide in a timely way with the scheduled release of ‘Animal Nitrate’ and so as we were still ravenous for success and exposure and had yet to understand the maxim of style being the art of omission we accepted. I’ve never liked the Brits and I never will and I think the feeling is mutual. It seems to reward sales over art, scale over content: a glitzy parade of shallow facades and bottomless egos, a room full of overfed men and overdressed women making underwhelming conversation. We stumbled unwashed into the party with faded second-hand clothes and badly dyed hair and went about conducting an unruly insurrection of a performance, throwing down our instruments at the end and storming off in a kind of frothy, arrogant tantrum. The sea of shocked faces that stared back at us was just grist to the mill. We felt so wonderfully out of place, revelling in the glorious incongruity: the flies in the ointment, the worms in the apple. The whole thing felt laughably silly at the time but now looking back it has a genuine air of danger, like it captured something important concerning our eternally uncomfortable relationship with the music industry itself.

  BREAKFAST AT HEATHROW

  The fusty, rattling carriage of the Piccadilly Line tube train slowly heaved into the station at Heathrow Terminal 3, the spectral reflection of my wan, candle-coloured skin replaced by the flickering sodium strip-lighting of the artificially illuminated platform and the familiar, iconic heraldry of the London Underground logo. My fingers brushed against the coarse pelt of the nylon seat cover as I located my blue plastic shopping bag. This was my ‘luggage’ for my first ever trip to America and contained nothing much more than some clean underwear, a dog-eared copy of The Diary of a Drug Fiend, my notebooks and a cheese and pickle sandwich I had made for the flight. As I was always running late I hadn’t had time to wash my hair and so had covered it in Batiste dry shampoo, all patchy and cobwebby against my badly done home-dye job making me look like a cross between Edward Scissorhands and Miss Havisham. Even though we were being chased by every major record company in the world I still hadn’t enough money to buy myself any proper shoes and so my socks were wet where the holes in the soles had let through the rainwater that had pooled in puddles on the pavements on that damp summer day. I don’t think I was in any particular hurry as I ambled towards the airline desk where we had all arranged to meet but when I realised that I was the only one there I casually glanced at the clock for the first time that afternoon. I had missed the flight by two hours.

  The winds of fate were seemingly lifting us ever upwards and by the time the album had come out and we were making our first transatlantic forays ‘Animal Nitrate’ had become a proper top ten hit. My sly ambition of firing a poisonous missive into the heartland of the mainstream had happened as the song reached heavy saturation levels on Radio 1, the DJs seemingly strangely oblivious to the meaning of the words which were murky and twisted to say the least and to the obvious reference to narcotics in the title which perhaps was so blatant that it managed somehow to ‘hide in plain sight’. It’s amazing what you can get away with singing when you have a pop hook and so slowly it wormed its way into the public consciousness: parasitical, malign and very hummable. I’d once heard some probably apocryphal rumour that Kate Bush’s ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ was about masturbation, which seemed inherently artful given the lush sonic context and that idea had sparked a train of thought in me. For me though again the real treasure was on the B-side in the form of a song called ‘The Big Time’, my attempt at a dissection of the consequences of fame, a kind of sober tale of those left behind in its wake. I was beginning to see this happen in my life and writing it resonated strongly with how I saw things unfolding around me. Becoming vaguely successful myself didn’t mean that I started making friends with other successful people. In a way the opposite happened as I buried myself in the comforting blanket of old, familiar faces like Alan and Tamzin Drew, feeling that they represented something I could trust – something that wasn’t capricious and unpredictable and always shifting. My close friends were on the dole or worked in chip shops or as menial office factotums so of course the whole change in dynamic occasionally began to create if not an uncomfortable differential then definitely an odd imbalance and it was this that I was exploring in the song and later in a way with ‘High Rising’. ‘The Big Time’ was received by the press as our homage to Scott Walker but it’s interesting that neither Bernard nor I had at that point any real knowledge of his work. J. G. Ballard references also kept cropping up as comparisons to my lyrics when again at that point I have to ashamedly admit that I had never read him. Maybe these influences had bled through to us in other ways but maybe sometimes artists aren’t always ‘referencing’ other art even though in the wilderness of mirrors that is our post-modern world it’s probably more convenient to file it that way. There’s a phenomenon in zoology called convergent evolution, a situation whereby two different species will evolve independently of each other into a very similar animal but by following different routes, and I think this can be paralleled in art.