Afternoons With the Blinds Drawn Page 6

  In that time-honoured way the single had launched the album and the album had hastened to number one and sold rather well and all of those things that we had longed for had come true. I’ll always remember the moment I told Simon the news. It was a Sunday afternoon and we were on tour in the UK staying at a hotel in Leeds or somewhere. I banged on his door to tell him we had a number one album to find him hunched over the little sink in his bathroom wringing out his smalls like Widow Twankey. It was a hilarious moment, an odd clash of glamour and drudgery, somehow bathetic and funny at the same time and strangely symbolic of an inherent contradiction at the heart of the band’s character. We were soon to learn though that achieving your goals is never the end point that it might seem before you embark on the journey, and with an unslakeable thirst you begin to believe that there are always more units you can shift, more territories you can tame. With the hunger of an addict you find yourselves unwittingly set on a treadmill of repetitive behaviour, continuously chasing increasingly bigger fixes to satisfy the need for success, better chart positions, more effusive reviews. Our personal greed was always for that elusive next song, chasing them around the room like silvery, mercurial butterflies, but when not achieving what the industry expects somehow amounted to a sort of public shame we became forced to become complicit cogs in the huge tired machine. And the machine ground on. We were packed off on endless jaunts around the country which fed into European tours and then eventually American ones and that, as boringly predicted by many a self-satisfied observer, is where things began to unravel.

  We only had a two-single deal with Nude and so we’d been to the States a few times as guests of record companies trying to sign us for an album deal and had spent hilarious stoned afternoons being rocked by pony-tailed man-baby record execs in hammocks in Malibu beach mansions or being picked up in ridiculous stretch limos in Manhattan, dazzled by promises and offered obscene amounts of money. In LA we were staying at the Mondrian Hotel on Sunset Boulevard when in the small hours we were awoken by an earthquake. For anyone who has never experienced anything like that it really is the oddest sensation which I can only describe as a kind of confusing terror. At a very primal level you know there’s something you should be scared of but at first, before your brain has processed the feeling, you’re simply not sure why. My abiding memory is of waking up to the room rattling and rushing down the emergency exit to the lobby in my T-shirt and pants to find Simon already there fully dressed and packed. Apparently Bernard had been so confused and panicked that he had called up our manager’s room to tell him to ‘make it stop’. During this period the chase for our signatures had become so frenzied that at one point an A&R man followed us to New York like a B-movie spy and checked himself into the same hotel in the hope of ‘bumping into us’ and bonding, eventually debasing himself by offering to sell T-shirts for us at one of our gigs as a desperate means to gain some sort of access. It all became a bit silly, a little like the Artie Fufkin scene in Spinal Tap, but we managed to preserve a healthy disrespect for it all despite the novelty, seeing the whole thing for what it really was – a frothy, ephemeral hysteria that was more to do with hard business than any flattering interpretation of our work. The only member of this increasingly bizarre cast with whom we felt any real kinship was a softly spoken intelligent New Yorker with a kind manner and enormous eyelashes called Kevin Patrick who at the time worked for Warner in the States, the sort of man who had a genuine wild-eyed passion for music but who would insist on finding stray cats to which he would feed the scraps of his lunch. Kevin has stayed a close friend of the band over the years and when we bump into him his is always still a trusted voice.

  Lengthy tours are truly challenging experiences – they will stretch the limits of your patience and endurance and they will test the boundaries of the relationships between you and the rest of the band. It’s a strange blend of insanity and routine, the releasing of bestial urges and the need to rigidly obey timetables. Partly because of its sheer scale, but mainly due to the cultural disparities, for a certain sort of band touring the States has always been seen historically as a particular ordeal. The Sex Pistols famously imploded in San Francisco in the seventies and I think many observers correctly drew parallels between us and them, wondering how the hysteria both bands were used to in the fiery crucible of the incestuous British music scene would translate to the larger, more disconnected ambivalence of the American one. To be honest though most of the shows we played there were wonderful, not just those on ‘the coasts’, which of course always have a special cachet, but also those further inland. There was a fervent throng of followers who would trail us from show to show and the whole procession took on a kind of carnival feel and, just to put the record straight despite the popular misconception, we always enjoyed playing America and the debut sold remarkably well there. However the more time we spent there the more Bernard especially seemed to become increasingly homesick and unhappy. Maybe somehow America distorted the reality of who we were to him and presented us as a cartoon of ourselves: greedy, fame-hungry and insensitive as we discarded the vestiges of sobriety and jumped through the industry hoops not particularly because that was who we were but because that’s who we needed to pretend to be as a kind of means to survive the whole grinding, harrowing ride. As Samuel Johnson once said: ‘he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man’. Interestingly I don’t think it was until we released the album and the band had the lyric sheet in their hands that they really knew the details of what I was singing about and what kind of band they were actually in. Of course I was never evasive about disclosing the lyrics if they wanted to know but they rarely did and seemed to trust me and allow that side of the work to be exclusively my business. General themes must have bled though to them I’m sure and occasionally they might say, ‘Oh, I like that bit’ or Simon might jokingly paraphrase something but we weren’t the sort of band who sat down together and talked about ‘the meaning of our lyrics’ in a self-conscious way – we just let things happen and didn’t bother questioning them especially if everything seemed to be going well. As soon as the album was released however, as well as all the themes being revealed, a whole other layer of reinterpretation was presented to them via the response of the press and the fans. In a funny sort of way you yourselves are to a certain extent told what kind of band you are at this point in your career and occasionally it can be a bit of a surprise. I think Bernard was becoming particularly uncomfortable with some of the darker, less wholesome themes that were being exaggerated by the media’s thirst for prurience. Added to this an increasingly ‘foppish’ – for want of a better word – element of our band and I suppose especially my character was being teased out and reflected back at us. It didn’t help that I’d naively done a couple of ill-advised, lighthearted press pieces in which I’d stupidly played up to that: the dandy, the overtly English popinjay. Mistakes like this I deeply regret as these archetypes are so powerful that they can take on a life of their own and end up becoming overwhelming and extremely unwelcome strands of your image – inescapable, almost Jungian embodiments.

  Perhaps now is the moment to talk about person versus persona.

  PERSON VERSUS PERSONA

  In pop music everyone becomes a cartoon: a fictionalised version of themselves partly constructed from truth but partly something that complies with a simplistic archetype. This is a phenomenon that has fascinated me over the years, that chasm between the real you and the projections of others. I realise that like anyone in my kind of work over time I have had built up around me an image, a nebulous carapace made up from sub-editors’ headlines and half-truths and rumours and so some might choose to see me as distant and aloof, arrogant and vain. I think that to be honest I have been partly complicit in its manufacture – ‘the devil has the best tunes’ they say – and so the furtive whiff of danger that it projects seems to blend with something inherently dark in the songs and I realise that of course in order for it to exist it must contain elem
ents of truth. This simplification is part of the system that allows the public to file overwhelming amounts of information, to see things without the distracting shades of grey that reality requires. Sometimes though the persona develops a life beyond you and your control and like some sort of haunted ventriloquist’s dummy in a bad horror film it will feel like the real you is being smothered and suppressed by the imposter. If this sounds melodramatic and whinging it’s not supposed to – the contract that you sign when you first choose to wield a guitar or jump on to the stage is very clear and anyone who fails to read the small print waives the right to complain about it. I’m not going to bother pleading a case for myself as some sort of wholesome, square-jawed, misunderstood hero because that would be inherently reductive too but I do think it’s important to note that real people are by definition more complex than their accompanying personas might lead you to believe. In literature I’ve always been drawn to those protagonists, like Stephen Wraysford in Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong, who sit somewhere within the myriad shades of grey, somewhere between the binary simplicity of cosy polar certainty. In pop music, however, it can be a difficult territory to occupy. The whole subject of the persona in pop is a compelling one. No one who steps foot on a stage or gives an interview or even sings a song is free from its manufacture on some level. It’s a necessary device to allow the individual behind the mask to somehow be free to be more themselves than if they weren’t wearing it, and in order to have the bravery to face the crowd. The artist Gillian Wearing did some interesting work on the subject whereby she encouraged strangers to confess their fears and terrors but from behind the protective anonymity of a costume mask. It allowed the participants to be free to express themselves without there being consequences for the ‘real’ person. There are parallels with what happens to the pop star: whether it’s conscious or subconscious the persona is a way for the vulnerable human being that is always hiding behind the brittle shell to protect themselves from the storm of perversity and distortion of reality that they will inevitably encounter and again for the consequences of their frankness to not affect the ‘real’ person. People might condemn the whole process as ‘fake’ but it’s as fake as the act of stepping on stage or singing a song which is of course both a kind of fiction and a kind of truth. In the same way that many bands who believe that they are consciously rejecting the notion of ‘image’ by not ‘dressing up’ are unwittingly therefore projecting an image of ‘anti-image’ so the manufacture of a persona is unfortunately inescapable and is something that the artist willingly embraces and accepts or will struggle with for the rest of their career.

  I think in my case I was very much guilty of a naive complicity during that early period when my persona was still being lovingly woven and adjusted by the media. Of course it seems ill-judged now but if I’m honest I probably chose to view the whole process as titillating, secretly deeply flattered that people seemed to care about who I was or seemed to be, regardless of whether their vision was a misrepresentation or not. Years of poverty and struggle and failure had made me hungry for any scraps of success that were thrown my way and in my frenzy to feed I think I was often far too willing to indulge their silly fantasies and wear the costume that was being so carefully stitched for me despite the fact that it increasingly seemed ill-fitting. Unlike artists from the past – the Dylans, the Lydons, the Bowies – I don’t think I was ever particularly in control of the manufacture of my persona. Unlike them I wasn’t smart or aware enough at the time to be able to see what was happening and so it seemed to be something I was perpetually either embracing or distancing myself from, caught in a cycle of assent and rejection. I think that very few artists can be consciously in control of it without it coming across as unscrupulous and somehow fraudulent. One of the tenets of nineties alternative music was to portray yourself as ‘authentic’ so that bands within that genre were distanced from the gaudy, artificial sensibilities of the seventies and eighties. Whether this actually was the case or not was beside the point but like so much about pop music the issue is how things appear to be rather than actually how they are. I realise that discussing it now with this kind of clarity implies that personally I had some sort of manipulative ability but if I did it was deeply subconscious, the young man that I was blindly stumbling around just letting things passively happen to him. These strange forces that were exerting their pull on me and the almost violent sense of flux that I was experiencing were undoubtedly having an effect on my private life. Everything was far too unsettled and exciting for me to even think about stable relationships as I staggered between bizarre dalliances and sticky, gaudy dramas, my private life becoming increasingly odd and rootless. For a while it felt like I was trapped inside a Futurist painting, restless and kinetic as I ricocheted around locked within a strange new dissonant version of reality.

  Once these early mistakes with the media had been made we learned the cast-iron rule of never having fun with the press; what seems like a laugh at the time will always come back to haunt you and be used against you – but by this point the damage had been done. Really we should have had the wisdom to realise that not all exposure is good exposure but we didn’t and while we were still riding the crest of a wave it seemed somehow churlish to bother questioning it as it buoyed us along. To be fair all of us hated this severely mutated interpretation of who we were; it was probably responsible for a subsequent two decades of overly humourless press photos, but Bernard seemed most bothered and unable to deal with it, seeing it, I think, as a direct contradiction of who he was and of what he believed Suede to be. All of this was feeding into his sense of discontentment and when we started playing America and the rest of the band dived into the temporary bestial release that touring can offer, Bernard preferred to stay in his room on the phone to England, increasingly isolated and removed from us. It didn’t help that my friend Alan flew out to California to join us on the West Coast leg and the natural hedonist in him exaggerated that in me creating an additional disparity and I suppose he occupied the vacancy of ‘my best friend’ on the tour leaving Bernard’s and my relationship further neglected and in need of care.

  Damaged and exhausted but still functioning we eventually flew back to England for a while, but the pressure to ‘break’ America is an overwhelming obsession in the music business and so we were soon blithely packed off on another transatlantic flight. This time tragedy struck. Bernard’s father, who had been ill for some time, died on the eve of the tour. Ashen-faced, we all received the news while in a hotel in New York. For some insane reason instead of cancelling the tour and giving him the time to grieve and the space to try to recover we just truncated it. It was a terrible, terrible mistake as Bernard became understandably more and more withdrawn and distant as the days wore on and I, yet to develop the emotional maturity to be able to reach out and comfort him as a friend, began to cravenly hide within the excesses of life on the road. As we pulled in different directions our relationship began to splinter and we began to demonise each other creating a chain of events from which we would never ever recover.

  PART TWO

  THE POISON TREE

  As the 747 touched down on the tarmac back at Heathrow the familiar sight of damp grey airport concrete greeted me through the tiny porthole window of the plane as little droplets of English summer rain beaded against the glass. There was a gnawing sensation in the pit of my stomach and as I finally approached the trickle of black cabs that beetled its way along the road outside the terminal I felt that quiet dread when you know something is terribly wrong, that sense of unfixable shift, that cold sink of animal fear. The American tour had spiralled into a fractious, unhinged display of passive aggression and latent hostility, separate travel and on-stage sulks. It was a masterclass in how relationships can descend into disorder, the bonds severed, the parties irreconcilable. This is the soap opera that the press and the public find so exciting: to know that there is genuine human emotion behind the artifice of what is essentially manufactured feelin
g, to know that the music has at its core real passions and real fears and real dramas, to know that it’s not all just pretty words. By this point it was almost impossible to just pick up a phone and call Bernard. In my eyes he had mutated into a slightly terrifying figure – angry, irascible and unpredictable – and in that cowardly way that people with those options sometimes choose I communicated with him via the buffer of our manager Charlie whom we saw as a solid, reliable figure within the maelstrom of madness that had become our lives. Bernard himself of course was probably equally confused and intimidated by me as I hovered on the fringes of stardom, self-obsessed and greedy for success and increasingly insensitive to the nuances of anyone else’s feelings. The distorting lens of the tour had painted us to each other as those garish cartoons of our real selves, polarising us as people, exaggerating our differences and turning them into almost unbroachable schisms. The only thing to do was to not do anything and so for a while we all slumped back into the familiar shape of our old everyday lives with that strange sensation that lengthy tours can create when eventually you return; a feeling of both comfort and displacement, an institutionalised state of not quite being able to fit back in but of not having the energy to do anything else.

  Especially when they are young musicians often speak to each other most fluently through music. It provides a conduit that allows them to express themselves in abstract ways, sometimes to vent and to rage but to do so within the safety of a set of codes. So eventually once the dust had settled we rebuilt those scorched bridges by getting back into the studio and working again, by gingerly stepping inside the same space and in a hesitant, circumspect way striving to do what we did best. The next project was planned to be an interim single. We’d written a song called ‘Stay Together’, an unambitious rock-by-numbers chug-through that for some reason seemed to excite us at the time. Looking back, the only thing that lifted it out of the ordinary was its sheer length and the bizarre mainly instrumental second half of the song which shifted through various moods and phases and contained snippets of a ranting spoken-word piece I had written that was loosely based on Patti Smith’s ‘Birdland’. This whole section was I think Bernard’s Expressionist collage, his wild howl of fury and grief and pain and frustration, his violent catharsis, his primal scream, his hymn to alienation. It was an attempt at expressing himself in the medium in which he was most eloquent – sound – and as such I think it was brave and ambitious. But for me the song itself was very much below par for us and lyrically it was anodyne to the point of meaninglessness: a collection of tired Suede-by-numbers urban landscape clichés and second-hand emotional posturing. It’s possible of course that subconsciously the title was a plea to Bernard, an appeal to my friend as I saw him becoming increasingly alienated and estranged from the rest of us. I don’t remember being aware of that at the time but looking back it can’t have been a coincidence and I know many people would wryly chuckle at the irony as events began to unfold. Perhaps if I had really confronted my own anxious feelings and been honest enough to allow myself to explore that theme more fully in the lyrics the narrative wouldn’t have ended up being the unexceptional afterthought that it became.