Afternoons With the Blinds Drawn Page 8

  During endless drifting afternoons in the house I sat for many hours reading about Brando and Dean and Monroe, and staring at those beautiful, old, silver-gelatin fifties Hollywood prints I found myself lost so deeply in their superficial sheen that it became almost impossible to really see them just as it’s hard to be in any way objective about such iconic images, their familiarity somehow overwhelming and blinding. It struck me that, clichéd and overused and over-familiar though they were, they had become almost a synecdoche that represented society’s obsession with stardom, and so referencing this whole Hollywood machine and the stars that it creates seemed a further extension of my central thrust of alienation through idolatry. The song that delved most specifically into this was something Bernard and I came up with towards the end of the writing period called ‘Daddy’s Speeding’, an odd, creepy little piece, part song, part sound collage that detailed a dream I had had about James Dean and which touched on themes of tragedy and immortality. Another track we had also been road-testing was initially called ‘Trashy’. A thrilling, pulsing, riff-based beast in 6/8 time it was brilliant to play live: visceral and urgent, brimming with a gnarly, powerful violence. Although the working title was strangely apposite I renamed it ‘This Hollywood Life’ and into it wove a story set in the tawdry world of the casting couch, a garish tale of ambition and sexual exploitation that I suppose mirrored what I had glimpsed happening in some of the murkier corners of the music industry. For me though the song that sat like a jewel in amongst the others was something that began life with the prosaic title of ‘Ken’, jokingly so named by Bernard after the only other person who had answered the NME advert through which we had met him. Working titles became a light-hearted dialogue between us sometimes and he would deliberately give things names like ‘Unusual Sex’ just so we could have silly conversations like ‘I really like “Unusual Sex”.’ ‘Yes, so do I.’ etc. etc. ‘Ken’ was a rootsy, mid-paced, initially quite conventional-sounding track with an easy, fluid, almost Gene Clark or Jimmy Webb sort of feel, which I first remember Bernard playing in a sound check in Phoenix or somewhere on one of the early American tours. Its unpretentious, stirring power seemed to be something I should go with and not try to subvert so I wrote a part very much inspired by Jaques Brel’s ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’ and of course more specifically Scott Walker’s English translation which I was learning to love. Throughout this whole period I was starting to listen to the ‘big’ singers from the past like Sinatra and Brel and Piaf – performers who could transform a song into a drama – and I tried to take something from them and stretch myself as a musician. I was keen to evolve beyond the scraping, nasal drawl that had covered most of the debut and find a different voice, still my own of course but one which would resonate better with broader, less parochial themes. It was this new approach that I brought to what (obviously referencing Marlon Brando) I had called ‘The Wild Ones’, the song that I would still choose if I was forced to nominate just one single moment in my entire career as a writer that says: ‘This is what I have done with my life.’ I have a vivid recollection of writing my parts to it and realising that something very special had happened and then stumbling out on to the wintry rain-lashed streets of Highgate and striding around coatless in a kind of deranged, euphoric daze, oblivious to the weather, lost in a delicious solipsism and probably risking pleurisy. The sad thing is that the great songs are rarely the successful ones, certainly at least in the narrow band of experience that has defined my career. It was to become a bitter illustration of the meaninglessness of chart ‘success’ given that the vacuous Suede-by-numbers chug-through ‘Stay Together’ had reached number three on a wave of hype while ‘The Wild Ones’ limped in and out, barely scraping the top twenty and coinciding unfortunately with the moment when our star began to wane.

  As well as widescreen ballads we were still writing wiry pop, the best of which was probably what became known as ‘New Generation’. It had been another track that had been working well live for obvious reasons; its driving, almost motoric groove and two-part soaring chorus giving it a classic pop/rock feel in the same sonic world as someone like The Pretenders or the rockier bits of Blondie. As is often the way with good pop songs the lyrics were a little throwaway to be honest. I recall that it was vaguely inspired by my watching from the sidelines what was happening to Justine and her new band Elastica, seeing them begin to break through with their brilliant, spiky, off-kilter art pop. It was meant as a song of love and encouragement for her, the bitterness forgotten, the scar tissue healed. During a sulky, bad-tempered few days of pre-production at a tatty rehearsal room in Dollis Hill we had also been chipping away at a track that had a kind of straight rock feel akin to something like Neil Young’s ‘Ohio’. It was called ‘10 Minutes’, a working title which referred to its length. Back in Highgate I had written some lyrics and melody to Bernard’s primitive demo but as yet the song hadn’t come alive for me. Somehow a little clunky and ordinary, it felt good but not yet great, and Bernard’s insistence that it be a long and meandering piece that shifted through different tonal gears seemed incommensurate with its seemingly underwhelming character. How wrong I was. The lyric I wrote has become one of which I am most proud – a tale of three-way sexual jealousy inspired by my relationship with the previously mentioned artist who during the fractured chaos of our loosely tethered time together had begun an affair with another woman. The song was a meandering journey that followed her, stalker-like along the leaf-scattered pavements and through the overcast day, prying into the complexities of her life and her loves, myself cast more as an observer than a player in the drama. I love the way the meaning holds back and takes its time, eventually revealing itself with the lines ‘she’s got a friend, they share mascara I pretend’ and suddenly the story is upon you. I called it ‘The Asphalt World’ and it was to become one of the most loved songs in the Suede canon, but before it became the track that people hear today it underwent huge shifts and within the band turned into a controversial touchstone that seemed to somehow embody the growing schism between Bernard and the rest of us. Now there is some difference of opinion about the specifics here and I’m trying to remember the truth rather than what has assumed the shape of the truth in my head, but I do remember bad-natured tussles in the studio about the song’s length where Bernard insisted it be deliberately overlong and the rest of us baulked, worrying that it would come across as grandiose pretension. Looking back, he quite rightly knew that the drama would only be unlocked by a bold, almost reckless musical gesture and had complex plans to fill the spaces with intricate guitar parts and stormy, dramatic mood shifts. He was totally justified in pursuing his vision of course but as always the problems lay in the delivery and interpretation, in my reaction and in his counter-reaction, a consequence of the erosion of trust and respect between us. We pushed and pulled and the song nearly broke us but eventually we had something we could all work with – a brooding, simmering leviathan, a dark hymn to suspicion and sexual jealousy.

  This artist also featured heavily in the track ‘Black Or Blue’ that was to precede ‘The Asphalt World’ on the album. She was a colourful character to say the least, fitful and wild and unpredictable, her turbulent moods inevitably hiding a sensitivity at her core. Sometimes she would come to my house and just sit around quietly drawing on her sketch pad while on other occasions she would do deranged things like put bricks through my window to wake me up. One summer evening she came to the house in Shepherd’s Hill in an unhinged state and ran on to the south-facing lawn and proceeded to roll around on the grass screaming. A neighbour must have called 999 because suddenly uniformed police were at the door obviously concerned that she was being attacked. Once they had begun their questioning however she decided to shift the focus of her rage on to them and it was all I could do to try to calm her down so she didn’t end up spending the night in the cells. I didn’t have the maturity at the time to do anything more than dismiss her behaviour as perverse but looking back there may have bee
n some troubling forces at work. The relationship was highly unconventional; fraught and sometimes passionate and fragmented by my increasingly skewed lifestyle. Certainly in no way was I a candidate for standard boyfriend material, my kinetic, shifting world far too unsettled for the relationship to become anything other than transitory. Somehow though the inherent dissonance at the heart of it formed a strange kind of bond between us, both of us covertly accepting the perversity as part of the deal, and there must have been something between us to have yielded songs with the quality of ‘So Young’ and ‘The Asphalt World’ and ‘The Wild Ones’. I remember feeling at the time that my relationship with her was beginning to echo both that with Bernard and that with my father in so far as all of them had become in some way highly confrontational. It’s probably true that this was just as much a reflection on the prickly, unpredictable person I was becoming as I ricocheted around the fringes of stardom, pinballing between the ‘real’ me and the strange, fragile persona I was beginning to inhabit. Oddly for me ‘Black Or Blue’ is a vaguely underwhelming piece that seemed to step over into the unwelcome fringes of pretension. It was intended as a kind of Romeo and Juliet-style vignette set in a modern context of racial intolerance; the lovers melodramatically torn asunder by the narrow minds of those around them etc. etc. The artist’s family were from an island in the Indian Ocean and ambling around the streets of Gypsy Hill together we would occasionally encounter witless racists directing moronic comments at her and at us but rather than letting them eat into me I allowed the poisonous asides to grow into tendrils that inspired the lyric to the song. Despite coming from an interesting place I don’t think the sentiment really rescued the track as it struggled to come across as anything more than an amuse-bouche before the main course of ‘The Asphalt World’ and would have rendered the album much stronger had it done the decent thing and stood aside for the brutish thug anthem that was ‘Killing Of A Flashboy’, another in a long line of rather decent squandered B-sides.

  Inspired by things like ‘The Hounds Of Love’ and ‘Closer’ and ‘The Spirit Of Eden’ we had always intended the album to be an ambitious sonic journey for which of course we needed a starting point. Bernard had written this odd, mechanical runt of a piece which he called ‘Squidgy Bun’. At first its crushing, metallic drone seemed incongruous to our song-based style but as I sat there at my portastudio and allowed its churning, pulsing waves to wash over me I began to understand its potential role in the record. Instead of being a song in its own right it began to reveal itself as a kind of prelude and I went about writing a simple, layered almost monotonous mantra rather than a conventional piece. It was very much inspired by a visit I had made to a Buddhist temple in Kyoto during a Japanese tour when I had become lost in one of the monks’ cyclical, hypnotic pieces and I saw the potential for it to mirror something like that. Inspired, I went about writing a kind of relentless Orwellian chant that sketched the journey of an imaginary band, a restless marching machine that trampled over continents in its pursuit of power. In the same way that Sergeant Pepper’s fantasy band is a role played by The Beatles so this song contained elements of how I perceived Suede’s journey but hugely exaggerated; extended and distorted out of proportion and made into an almost nightmarish cartoon. When I think about this track I’m always put in mind of O’Brien’s comment to Winston Smith telling him to imagine the future as ‘a boot stamping on a human face – for ever’ as it has something of that relentless, inhuman brutality. I called it ‘Introducing The Band’ and it was to end up being the opening piece on what will always be for some people, admittedly frustratingly, the band’s high-water mark: Dog Man Star.

  WE LOVE, WE TIRE,

  WE MOVE ON

  As the dirty grey canal water lapped gently against the sides of the Feng Shang Princess floating Chinese restaurant the four of us gathered on the tow-path of the Regent’s Canal, murmured a few words of recognition and shuffled into the garishly themed interior to take our places for a drab photo shoot. Inside a few small groups of lunchtime diners were already huddled around their dim sum and large orange oriental lanterns lit up the corners of the room with their lambent glow, illuminating the little warrior figurines and dragon motifs which decorated the space. Although we didn’t know it at the time, this odd gaudy stage would turn out to be the back-drop for our final scene: the last time we were ever all in the same room together. Across London towards the scruffy end of Kilburn High Road between the Chicken Cottages and the shops advertising ‘Cheap International Phone Calls’, and nestled behind the black wheelie bins and the car parks lay Master Rock Studios, the charged arena of tension and invention hosting the fraught, sometimes inspired sessions for Dog Man Star, this line-up’s final album together. The days and nights had taken on a kind of iambic pulse of their own, a natural rhythm whereby like passing trains Bernard and I would occupy slots at different ends of the day, him choosing to work away on the complex maze of guitar overdubs during the mornings and afternoons leaving me to waft in vampirically under the cover of darkness and begin the night shift. Ed was of course thrust into the middle of our fractured dynamic, forced to mediate and absorb the obvious disquiet, charged with the thankless task of attempting to somehow glue the broken pieces back together, or at least to not make things worse.

  Diplomatically of course Ed would always soften the blow when relaying anything back but the picture that was bleeding through to me was of Bernard feeling trapped and claustrophobic and extremely unhappy within his role. It was very apparent that he no longer seemed to particularly like the band that he was in. My response was I suppose a mixture of anxiety about what was to come and waves of frustration and sadness and gnawing feelings of betrayal, my emotions oscillating and my moods mutable, but these feelings were sometimes tempered with an odd hubristic charge, a strange sense of welcoming the welling sweep of change that seemed now so inevitable. I suppose it was with this fatalistic veneer that I presented myself to the rest of the band and the management and the record company at the time – an illusion of insouciance and control – but privately I was devastated and scared and without the maturity to be able to admit to that. It’s hard not to let the soap opera of my and Bernard’s splintering relationship overwhelm the story of the album as it seems so consuming, a huge smothering, unignorable element in its genesis. Such dramas frame the work which they generate within a tangible human context, lending the essentially abstract art form of music a more concrete element. They give it a back story, a lens through which people can view and interpret the songs. However looking beyond the ubiquity of the affair there was also quiet, sober work to be done and despite the stormy relations we had a record to make. By this point Ed had I think very much learned to trust us as artists and had reached a more hands-off approach when it came to our songwriting, allowing the quality of the work to steer the record. I suppose this was partly because despite the personal drama we were as writers enjoying what Neil Tennant once called the ‘imperial phase’ – that magical period when a band has mastered itself and can seemingly do no wrong, before it feels the need to question and reinvent, when the work is instinctive and its momentum unstoppable. This was at the core of my frustration: what should have been energy we were expending on creating and improving and growing was wasted on what seemed sometimes like petty, unnecessary infighting and I couldn’t help but feel a kind of churlishness about the fact that having worked so hard to get to this point we seemed to be on the brink of blithely casting it away. There were moments of seeming cohesion of course – Bernard’s bravura piano performance on ‘The 2 Of Us’ and his eternally inspiring musicianship and restless quest for perfection – but it all seemed to be covered in a thin layer of prickliness, a miasma of anxiety, a heightened awareness of shortened fuses and a sinking, sour inevitability.

  I’m finding this chapter particularly hard to write. It isn’t pleasant raking over this episode so hopefully you’ll forgive me if I stray towards any mawkish hand-wringing but it’s so important
for me to understand what went wrong and facing it head-on with as much honesty and clarity as I can muster is the only way I can do that. I am often tormented by moments of reflection in which I plot an alternate version of history where I have the bravery and presence of mind to confront the problems rather than hiding under the brittle shell of my persona and the shifting gossamer layers of mercurial success, but unfortunately I didn’t and untended the wounds continued to fester. One day on my way to Master Rock to put down the vocal for ‘The Asphalt World’ I picked up a copy of the now defunct Vox magazine in which Bernard had been interviewed. I know very well how publications can take words out of context and suggest certain meanings by what they decide to highlight but even seeing through the mechanics of media distortion the piece did come across as the ravings of an especially unhappy man who had chosen me in particular as a target. It was an unpleasant diatribe in which I was cast as unmusical and slow, a slightly inept, shallow inversion of the purity and brilliance of Bernard’s musicianship. To be fair he did personally apologise to me a few days later in a forced, mumbled encounter orchestrated by Charlie but by that point it felt like the damage had been done. He had been naive to allow this very public criticism to be teased out of him and seized on trophy-like by the press and it did feel cruel and shaming. I understood of course that it was a raw, brutally frank expression of frustration but somehow it seemed to step over the boundaries of what should be kept private which deepened the unavoidable sense of betrayal and inevitably acted as a spark that lit the tinder-box. This might come across as ironic given that I am myself so publicly laying bare the private intricacies of the episode here but this is my way of expressing and assimilating some of the hurt and confusion that I still feel from this whole chapter. Having just read the Vox article I delivered my vocal to ‘The Asphalt World’ with the pain still stinging, the bitterness and the rancour swirling around as I sang my troubled tale of jealousy and suspicion. Hopefully I was able to channel that into the song, and I like to think you can hear it in the iciness and the drama, a sour embodiment of the maxim ‘pain is temporary but art is for ever’.