Afternoons With the Blinds Drawn Read online

  Throughout this whole early phase of when we first became popular we were continually hounded by accusations of ‘hype’. It was a predictable knee-jerk reaction by those who felt that our seemingly rapid ascent was undeserved. When ‘Stay Together’ smashed its way, unformatted, to number three in February of 1994 I’m afraid for the first time I was inclined to agree that the haters had a point. I remember thinking it sounded lumpen and inelegant and for me it has grown no less unsightly with age. Yet again the B-sides were where the real jewels were hidden: the delicate, understated melodic drama of ‘The Living Dead’ and the possibly even stronger ‘My Dark Star’, a deceptive and in many ways seemingly unremarkable, mid-paced piece which somehow on repeated listens manages to continually reveal deeper layers and has gone on to deservedly reap minor adoration. Lyrically the latter was a strange song, an attempt to stretch myself as a writer beyond the arena of personal emotional drama and to start to sketch on a broader, more political canvas. Trying to make sense of it will probably make it sound somewhat ‘New Age’ and unfocused and possibly a bit sixth form but it was a song about the power of the feminine – an odd vision in which a strong messianic female leader, who I based loosely around the artist Frida Kahlo, emerges from the shadows of the Third World to take over the reins and steer us all away from the brink of disaster. There was a vague thread running through my writing at the time that hinted at a naive suspicion of authority which you can hear in the lines about ‘the lies of the government’s singular history’ and I suppose the references to India and Argentina were deliberate in that they pointed at countries that had at some time been crushed under the heel of Britain’s imperial jackboot. Occasionally songs have a magic that is more than a sum of their parts. There’s a popular perception amongst a certain sort of member of the public that pop and rock lyrics are ‘childish’ and ‘immature’ and ‘vacuous’ and they offer as proof the fact that when intoned just as words away from the context of the music they sound hollow: ‘baby, baby, yeah, yeah, yeah – what a load of rubbish’ etc., etc. The whole point about rock and pop lyrics however is that, unlike poetry or prose, they are sung not spoken and as such their musical context is everything. I can’t count the number of times when I’ve been sitting in the back of a cab over the years and been genuinely surprised and moved by a pop song as it has come on the radio, by some trite anodyne platitude that when delivered with feeling and melody assumes a state of genuinely Keatsian truth and beauty, transcending its ordinary components to reach beyond itself. Now, as the writer of ‘My Dark Star’, it’s not my place to say whether the song achieves this or not, but my point is that isolating lyrics is not a fair way to judge the piece, merely a convenient one, because they seem to speak the same language as the medium which is describing them. Therein lies the whole ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture’ paradox – the inability of one medium to in any way accurately express the other.

  By this point Alan and I had left the flat in Moorhouse Road and were now residing on the ground floor of a large Victorian Gothic house on Shepherd’s Hill in Highgate. It was a move that tied in with my growing fascination with the number sixteen as every flat and house I had lived in since relocating to Kensington had had that number and it was very much a desire to temporarily retreat from what I saw as the urban scurry of west London into a leafier, more secluded environ, a refuge from the shrill chatter and the cackle of rumour and the constant procession of hangers-on. From the street the house seemed dank and crepuscular with cantilevered bay windows and mock-medieval pillars, set back from the road and veiled by privet and plane trees: sober, solemn and imposing. But at the back of the house the double-height French windows in the living room opened on to a beautiful, long, south-east-facing garden that stretched away from the house and was dotted with apple trees and bordered by low yew hedges. It was owned by a Christian Anabaptist group called the Mennonites and the whole place was somehow imbued with a strange ecclesiastical ambience and thus wonderfully odd and completely removed from the commonplace bohemian bustle of Notting Hill. My and Alan’s reckless lifestyle hadn’t changed much though and we would often be slumped on the sofa in the debris of the night before, lost in the babbling labyrinths of excess when suddenly the strains of pious singing would bleed through the walls as the Mennonites went about their hymns or recited their prayers creating a bizarre clash of worlds: the dissolute and the devout meeting at last in a garden flat in N6. Previously the places where I had lived had very much informed the songs I had written but with the flat in Highgate it was more than that; I think it began to inform a new persona I was subconsciously drawing for myself. The ‘cheeky Cockernee chappie’ role that had at first been offered to me by the press, and that I had obviously rejected, was now being happily inhabited by groups of witless, opportunist Mockneys – middle-class ‘media geezers’ who had learned to drop their aitches and flatten their vowels – so I was keen to distance myself from what, in our wake, was now starting to become a movement. The interpretation of British life that we had initially sketched and that I saw as being more akin to a Mike Leigh film was now being twisted into a Carry On film, with all of the fragility, poetry and pain removed: an ugly vehicle for latent nationalism and sly misogyny, a cheap, beery, graceless cartoon bereft of passion or rage which cravenly hid feeling behind a brittle mask of irony. Despite having nearly destroyed us, our exhausting touring schedule had presented me with marvellous world experience and access to places that were way beyond the reach of most kids brought up in council houses in Haywards Heath and I was keen to embrace this rather than retreating back inside the cosy, parochial Dad’s Army world that was becoming the central cultural reference point. I started to read about witchcraft and became obsessed with figures like Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Anger and Aldous Huxley and with classic Hollywood icons and their macabre, tragic lives. I began to gravitate towards a certain sort of creative mind – odd, idiosyncratic seers like William Blake and Aleister Crowley whose muse was harder to label and define – delving into their muttering, veiled world of symbolism and incantation. Lost to a vinous blend of chemical experimentation and lurid, ego-driven derangement I would pad around the flat dressed in nothing but a kind of long, black, gold-braided Moroccan robe, scribbling down phrases and gathering ideas, throwing things into the cauldron and watching them boil.

  So this was who I was becoming – the person with whom Bernard and the rest of the band were now confronted – a damaged, paranoid figure, wired and isolated, edgy and obsessed and lost within a strange fantasy landscape, a simulacrum of life. When I look back at press photos from those days I can’t help but feel the palpable sense of enmity between us all, the current of discord, the feeling that something had permanently snapped. Something unfixable. It’s most apparent in our body language in the inner gatefold ‘Stay Together’ single-sleeve photo of us all in the car, the shoot for which I remember being a particularly tetchy affair: fraught and prickly and unpleasant. Bernard and I never really recovered any sense of unity and despite a perfunctory muddling through of promotional duties it was performed through gritted teeth, the unspoken bitterness always on the point of resurfacing. I have a strong memory of feeling like I had to tip-toe around him very carefully, fearful of reawakening a simmering, bilious persona and plunging us all back into a strange, dark theatre of tension. Had I possessed the maturity and clarity to just sit down with him and clear the air ‘man to man’ things might have been very different but it had moved beyond that point and I stupidly didn’t because I simply wasn’t able to and so the wound festered and spoiled and grew. It’s possible that I was projecting my childhood experience of those anxious years spent dealing with my father’s brooding moods on to this situation, that the increasingly charged, irascible atmosphere between Bernard and myself was echoing those uncomfortable moments I had spent as a young man walking on egg-shells around my dad and that consequently I was starting to view Bernard in a similar light – as someone for whom I cared a
great deal but with whom I shared a complex often contradictory relationship that at any minute had the capacity to flare up. To promote the ‘Stay Together’ single we had organised a small string of dates which culminated in Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall. Although we didn’t know it at the time it was to be Bernard’s final concert with Suede; fittingly a fractious, bad-humoured affair which was peppered with silences and uncomfortable pauses as tempers frayed and cables malfunctioned. By this point it was quite clear to me that Bernard’s time in the band was effectively drawing to a close and that, sadly, it was just a matter of when not if.

  THE ONLY THING THAT’S

  SPECIAL ABOUT US IS

  WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND

  Young men plunged into the crucible of success are by their very nature immature and instinctive and impetuous. These are the fiery ingredients that also spark drama and creativity and the thrilling imbalance and sense of potential disaster that make the spectacle so exciting to witness. Without this essential ‘flaw’ in their characters the whole thing would be far less interesting but of course it’s a precarious house of cards, always teetering on the point of collapse. Sellotaping over the cracks and disregarding the damage we spluttered on regardless. Blithely I lost myself in the comfort of writing, secretly praying that somehow, magically, given space the wounds would heal on their own. Looking back this seems more than a little hopeful but I lacked the life experience to understand that a passive approach like this was unlikely to do any good and I was finding it increasingly hard to accept the wise counsel of anyone around me who had my ear. I think I had personally arrived at a unique point in my life that in many ways mirrored the position in which we found ourselves as a band. The enormous success of the debut album had exaggerated my sense of self-confidence, distorting it into a kind of brittle hubris, making me at times unapproachable and seemingly self-contained but often actually vulnerable and confused. The appearance of confidence was of course just a mask I wore, another element of the persona that was being constructed around me, partly by myself and partly by others. It’s an essential tool that any and every performer needs but sometimes it can interfere with things, distorting your perception, forcing you to make bad judgement calls, making you think you are above and beyond advice. Again it’s all part of the myth of the artist in which people need to believe. The role of the assured, confident seer ‘leading his children, Moses-like, to the promised land’ was a trope that flushed with the arrogance of youth I naively felt I needed to emulate. Indeed when it eventually came to deciding upon the first single for the new album I vividly remember the head of Sony, our international record company at the time, almost begging us to let them release ‘New Generation’, seeing it as the ‘radio-friendly unit-shifter’ of legend. The poor man wheedled and reasoned and pleaded while I just sat there in the boardroom with a face like a clenched fist and told him that the single was going to be ‘We Are The Pigs’, an uncompromising, jarring epic that was completely out of step with the shifting zeitgeist and which was eventually welcomed by the media like a letter from the taxman.

  Between dates and during sound checks we had been slowly chipping away at new songs; Bernard’s wonderful, restless drive being, as ever, the motor that drove us on, stretching us ever beyond the limits of what we thought we could do and on to new roads, always reaching up, always finding another gear. The broken relationship was too delicate to risk a face-to-face encounter, the powder keg too close to the sparks that might fly, so we began the slightly strange, dislocated process of writing by post. Every week or so a yellow Jiffy bag containing a cassette tape would be pushed through my letterbox and flop on to the door-mat, laconically biroed with a series of working titles like ‘Trashy’ or ‘A Man’s Song ‘ or ‘EAG’ or ‘Ken’, and I would pick it up and wander over to the small writing room which I’d made on the north side of the house and slot it into my blue Tascam portastudio and sit there, my SM58 poised, to listen and ponder and sing. There’s occasionally something wonderfully meditative about writing; the sense of being confronted with yourself and your own thresholds can be in many ways enlightening – that thrilling chase, that breathless pursuit, the feeling that the solution to the puzzle is almost, almost within your grasp. I suppose writing songs was the way that Bernard and I had always communicated; spurring, goading, inspiring, challenging and when all the other channels had shut down there was an odd feeling that despite the unconventional way in which we were doing it there was something pure and unfettered in the simplicity of having stripped our relationship back to its central purpose. Within the beautiful, fraught music he was sending me I was sensing pain and sadness and frustration and drama and I knew it was my job to match and mirror those feelings, to reflect the kaleidoscope of his emotions but to do it within the context of its own narrative. Both of us knew the next record had to be very special – it felt like the success of the first demanded it – and so we steeled ourselves to push beyond the outskirts of our ability, to take all of the rage and paranoia and fear and love and pour it into the songs, to make the highs giddy and vertiginous and the lows desperate and chilling. If this was to be a swan-song then what a way it would be to end it all.

  The first track that we had written was one that had been knocking around for a while, since at least the tail-end of when we were writing the debut but we simply couldn’t fit it into the rock format of the band, choosing instead to perform it on a couple of occasions on TV and at Glastonbury as a simple acoustic vocal and guitar piece. The definitive arrangement still eluded us but we knew the song was strong enough and that if we could get it right it would be a powerful closing piece. It was called ‘Still Life’ and it was the second chapter in my ‘housewives saga’, the first being ‘Sleeping Pills’ on the debut. It was a tale in which the abandoned, yearning protagonist waits at the window for their errant lover, lost in pools of melancholy reflection, partly inspired by my mishandling of my split with Justine but also of course conceived as an attempt to inhabit the mind of my mother during my childhood: isolated, trapped and desperate. Those sentiments of dislocation and alienation became one of the main themes on the album and were to bleed poisonously into many of the songs including notably the other big, blousy ballad ‘The 2 Of Us’. One of my most vivid memories of Bernard as a musician was watching him play the stirring, plaintive piano part through the control-room glass at Master Rock Studios. As I sat there spellbound while he poured his pain into the keys I felt one of those rare, searingly beautiful, life-marking moments, something that I will never forget: a strange humbling blend of pride for our work together and of sadness for what might all be soon to end. The track became another anthem to alienation – the story of two people in the world of high finance joined together but unable to connect, their empty, loveless lives ironically spotlit against the steel and glass back-drop of their apparent success: ‘alone but not lonely, alone but loaded’. The parallel with my and Bernard’s position, even though not at the time consciously intended, has over the years revealed itself to me as possibly its true meaning, but like I have said before, songs will often slowly and mysteriously uncover themselves, even sometimes to the writers.

  Another of the early tracks that we had been road-testing on the ‘Stay Together’ mini-tour was ‘Heroine’. As soon as Bernard sent me the pounding, pushing arpeggio piece it stirred me enough to want to write something straightaway. I loved the dark, winding minor chords and the almost Gothic motifs that intertwined and swirled and surged. Sitting working on it in the house in Shepherd’s Hill one winter day while the rain washed in waves against the window pane I remember a strange sensation of its dank, serpentine phrases reflecting the very nature of the place, the masonry and the cement somehow coiling within the fabric of the music, sinuous and malevolent. The obviously homophonic lyric was one of which I am most proud and which for me has resonated quite neatly as we move further into the virtual landscapes of this century. It is a vignette of a porn-addicted adolescent lost within the lurid pages of
his magazines, unable to reach out into the real world, shamed and impotent and isolated – a state with which most young men, if they are honest, are somewhat familiar, the lewd promise of feminine flesh tormenting them from within the processed colour pages of Penthouse or Mayfair, or these days from within the soft luminescence of their laptop screen. This idea initiated an extension of the alienation theme: real people bonding to fictional characters and fantasy figures. I saw it happening in my life and in the world around me where friends were being replaced by characters in soap operas, lovers with pornographic models and patriarchal role models with film stars. It wasn’t a particularly new phenomenon – young men had been borrowing the body language of matinee idols for decades – but as the twentieth century heralded the coming of the twenty-first it seemed to be increasingly relevant and thus insinuated itself to a greater or lesser degree into many of the other songs. The opening line of ‘Heroine’, which I borrowed from Lord Byron, was one of those kinds of ‘cut and paste’ moments where I would sometimes throw random ideas plundered from the pages of my notebooks at a song to see whether they scanned. The resulting jarring mix between the ancient and the modern worked for me, somehow suggesting a sense of continuum, an intimation of the timelessness of the challenges that we all face.