Afternoons With the Blinds Drawn Page 9

  As well as directing criticism at me Bernard was becoming increasingly vociferous about what he perceived to be Ed’s shortcomings. At this juncture I should point out that it seemed very much that Bernard was increasingly isolating himself and rather than the fissures being just between him and me, the camp seemed to split into two distinct groups: Bernard on one side and everyone else on the other. I think that whenever people can be bothered to look back at this episode it can often conveniently be seen as a simplistic clash between him and me; the tragic, romantic narrative of the two warring writers being sometimes too seductive to resist – a neat embodiment of how they sometimes choose to interpret the polarity of creativity and its inherent contradictions. The truth however is that as time wore on it felt that in his frustration he was picking fights with everyone, kicking against the entirety of the band itself, but that as its leader I was somehow representative of its ‘evils’ and so bore the brunt of his disquiet. To be honest I’m finding it hard to remember the sequence of events, and I might be wrong, but it seems unlikely given the fracturing of our relationship that Bernard and I sat down and sensibly discussed his production issues. Instead his discontentment bled through to me via a series of barbed asides until it reached a crisis point where in an acceleration of events he delivered an ultimatum forcing us to choose between firing Ed and losing him. In the dying afternoon light of a bleak north London day Mat, Simon, Ed, Saul, Charlie and I gathered sombrely in a flat in Belsize Park to try to make some sense of this vertiginous turn of events and after a solemn few hours of discussion the phone was passed to me and down a crackly line I told Bernard that our decision was to keep Ed. It wasn’t that when I made that fateful choice that I was actually choosing Ed over Bernard, merely that I was refusing to be bullied in what came across to me as a childish power struggle, a way for Bernard to wrestle back some influence as he drifted further away from the band. I don’t know what he thought my response would be but it has struck me that it was possibly his subconscious way of allowing himself to exit or at the very least his way of forcing me to make that choice for him. By this point I honestly don’t think there was anything anyone could have done to convince him to stay long-term – giving in to his demands would have merely been delaying the inevitable as he was obviously extremely unhappy and deep down I think he just wanted out. This struck me as the only real option: a damage limitation exercise that might at least allow us to complete the album rather than the violent, destructive collision that it felt like we were plummeting towards. It seemed that responding to his ultimatum was in a way like responding to an act of terrorism in that if you cave in to it you create a precedent that will lead to a complete relinquishment of control. Could Ed’s technical handing of the album have been better? Probably, yes, and I think he would be the first to admit that but surely it was something that didn’t require such a confrontational, binary approach. The decision that I took that day in calling Bernard’s bluff was, for better or for worse, a truly life-changing moment and one that will continue to haunt me for the rest of my days.

  ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN IN

  LIFE, ESPECIALLY NOTHING

  The live room of studio one in Master Rock was bathed in the shadowy glow of dull red forty-watt bulbs and as the drifting coils of incense smoke snaked through the air we three remaining members of Suede sat at our instruments and began to play. I fumbled inexpertly around the first few jazzy piano chords and Simon skipped along breezily on his kit while Mat’s playful bass part held down the bottom end. After the end of the instrumental verse I began to sing, my reedy unamplified voice lost in the cavernous room, thin against the thump of the instruments: ‘Tall and tanned and young and lovely.’ We were playing ‘The Girl From Ipanema’.

  During the first few days following Bernard’s departure we were all quite honestly filled with a strange sense of elation, a feeling that a crushing, smothering weight had been lifted from us. The fractious conflicts of the preceding six months or so had been a truly horrible experience – enervating, draining and more than a little unpleasant – and so the visceral surge of relief following the lifting of this weight was in a way intoxicating. Of course, like a cheap high, the sensation was short-lived and essentially artificial, and lurking behind the brittle relief there lay uncertainty and doubt. I suppose I hid my feelings of betrayal and confusion beneath a thin mask of professionalism believing that the only way I could negotiate this daunting hurdle was to be seen to be approaching it as just a minor hiccup but what choice did I have? Bernard clearly was very unhappy and no amount of leaden self-reflection was going to bring him back to the fold and so I ignored my inner dialogue and continued in the only way that I knew how, by throwing myself headlong into my work. Sadly by this point our former friendship was in such tatters as to just be a memory but still within me there lurked a shadow of grief for the loss of someone with whom I had shared so much and with whom I was once so inseparable. I often reflect on the circumstances that led Bernard and me to this point of estrangement especially when we had always been in our own unique sort of way quite close. It’s tempting to see conflict between oneself and someone else as being the ‘fault’ of the other person but hopefully with a quarter of a century’s distance from the event we have both moved beyond that simplistic impulse and can look at the circumstances that directed us both there. It’s more than possible that fame and success and money distorted the natural differences in our personalities. Although it’s a character trait of which I’m not particularly proud it’s certainly true that during those early days especially I was often ruthlessly ambitious. The lean, gruelling years of struggle clambering up the bottom rungs of the ladder had given me a steely kind of resolve and so when we did eventually start turning heads I think I grasped any success that came our way firmly with both hands, anxious that the indifference that had met our career up until that point would resurface; the abject fear of poverty that my penurious childhood had instilled in me making me desperate never to return to that state again. Bernard on the other hand had different concerns and was I think always much more suspicious of the pitfalls and traps that lay in wait, in many ways secretly fearful of becoming too successful, rightly seeing it as a path littered with casualties and peppered with disillusion and bitterness. As time drew on I developed a singer’s propensity for craving the spotlight whereas continuing good fortune seemed to stimulate the opposite response in Bernard who I believe saw us becoming something that he wasn’t comfortable with – a band that was reaching too far into the mainstream and betraying its alternative roots. Looking back there was a lot to admire about his perspective but unfortunately as young men we weren’t really able to rationalise and explain how we felt about these things and so the schisms grew and the misunderstandings simmered and the differences widened. To be fair we were possibly all on some level damaged by the distortion of truth that we were being subjected to but I think that Bernard especially found it harder than the rest of us to let the whole thing wash over him, choosing to view it as pernicious. Unable to resist kicking against it, I suppose on some level he felt a bit isolated when the other members of his band didn’t seem to see it the same way. I think he always had a much more puritanical approach than the rest of us. Whereas we were all willing to let the fickle tide of fame and fate drag us along he was always more circumspect and often mistrustful of those who worked with us. His cautiousness was in hindsight commendable in many ways and emotionally very astute for someone in his position but for Mat and Simon and me the whole procession of madness was perhaps something we just felt we had to dive into almost with a suspension of disbelief, knowing that of course no one emerges unscathed and that the journey will only take you somewhere if you allow it all to engulf you and surrender to its dizzying pace.

  Once Bernard was set adrift from the band our relationship would deteriorate even further as we sniped at each other through the safe haven of the press. Of course we were still too naive to realise that journalists would be hoping for
exactly this and would of course be artfully teasing out and exaggerating the acrimonious drama during interviews, turning the sad truth of our estrangement into a cheap, gaudy soap opera knowing that it made great copy. I regret not having had the grace and restraint during this period to have just maintained a dignified silence as it meant that inevitably we became further embittered about each other and that what was once a friendship that had such a noble purpose and that had created so much beauty had descended into a spiteful, petty, public squabble. It would take almost a decade for us to finally be able to approach each other again with any vestige of civility, the legacy of that long feud compounded by the ugly machinery of media distortion.

  The odd sense of initial release merged into an in-between transitory sort of time when Ed and I were confronted with the task of finishing the record but without one of its chief architects. Apart from issues over the length of ‘The Asphalt World’ which was easily solved with a tape edit (in those days manually performed with a Stanley knife, a chinagraph pencil and some adhesive tape) there were other musical differences that now we were free to address. Bernard had wanted ‘The Wild Ones’ to have a long coda part – a completely new section that appeared unannounced at the end of the song like a kind of deus ex machina – but both Ed and I felt it contradicted the pop heart of the track, dragging it into a more avant-garde territory where it just didn’t feel comfortable. Making the stark executive decision we removed that section and replaced it with a looping, fading reprise which although definitely less challenging seemed to chime with the easy beauty of the song. We added some sound effects to strengthen the sense of journey in the record: a twisted, distorting saxophone part fading into the guitar intro of ‘This Hollywood Life’ and a sinister Lord of the Flies-style chanting children’s choir at the end of ‘We Are The Pigs’. There were some ideas that didn’t work. Ed had this strange obsession about recording a tap-dancer to build up a rhythm track for ‘The 2 Of Us’ and even went to the lengths of hiring someone to perform the part, providing a surreal moment for me as I watched through the control room glass as the poor man desperately, and ultimately fruitlessly, chased Ed’s bizarre vision. It summed up his off-kilter, often eccentric approach to making records, something that was both lovable and infuriating and which provided the ammunition for many years of good-natured leg-pulling.

  The only song that we had written but not recorded was something called ‘Banana Youth’, a big, billowing, rolling, mid-tempo ballad. When asked to pick out the themes of the album in the predictable interview questions that followed its release my stock answer became: ‘It’s an album about ambition and aspiration’. This massively inaccurate slice of personal PR bullshit was a shame as it failed to highlight the truer, darker themes of disintegration, alienation and dislocation in an attempt to put on a brave face and confront the obvious career uncertainties with a brittle, smiling mask of optimism. It was probably only really this track, which I called ‘The Power’, that actually fitted that remit. As is often the case with new songs the recording of ‘The Power’ was carried along on a wave of buoyant enthusiasm, and in an act of trying to embrace a new sense of unity we recorded the drums, bass and acoustic guitar as a three-piece live in the studio and then later hired a session player to mimic Bernard’s electric guitar parts from the demo. Looking back I think the inclusion of this track was a mistake – it contained none of Bernard’s gnarl and grit and always just seems lightweight and incongruous next to the rest of the album, like a child in a restaurant who has accidentally joined the wrong family’s table.

  In an attempt to solve one of the trickiest of the album’s conundrums, that of the arrangement of ‘Still Life’, we took what at the time seemed like a radical decision and decided to orchestrate it, hiring someone who had worked on a couple of Scott Walker records to write a score. I think the basic idea was right but the execution was hugely overblown and in our naivety we managed to lend the song an unwelcome air of neo-classical pomposity when a more understated arrangement would have let the internal drama of the song breathe more. It’s so easy to become seduced by the sheen of professionalism that a large string section can lend a track – somehow you can see it as a kind of validation of your work that lulls you into believing that you’re enhancing it when in fact you’re often doing the opposite. By the time we had got to CTS studios in Watford to hear the forty-piece orchestra play along to our little song though it was all too late and had cost too much money and it seemed kind of churlish to point out what was niggling me then and has grown more apparent ever since. Unfortunately I feel the overpowering orchestration effectively ruined what is such a moving song, and it’s something that I refer to, in a cautionary way, to this day when negotiating similar situations. I wish we had had the bravery to take a simpler, more ‘honest’ approach but we were young and ambitious and maybe these are the kind of mistakes that you just have to learn from. While all this was happening Bernard himself was in a studio in a different part of London quietly laying down some guitar and keyboard overdubs to ‘Black or Blue’ as a fulfillment of his contractual obligations, allowing him at last his longed-for freedom from the band.

  Completing the album gave us something tangible to grasp hold of but still the strange, dark summer of uncertainty lurched on and the novelty of the situation began to slowly mutate into a kind of quiet panic as we were forced to plot our next move. There’s always been something quite bloody-minded about the Suede ethos: if people expect us to do one thing then we will do the opposite and there’s a willingness to reject and confound, a mischievous refusal to comply. So when the world and his wife were telling us that we were finished our reaction was to decide to carry on. The problem was that we had never been one of those bands who really hang out with other bands. The London music scene had very quickly become uninteresting to me after a brief initial dalliance and my mild social anxiety had developed into a fully formed neurosis now that minor fame and major narcotics had wormed their noxious, invidious way into my life and massively distorted my ability to judge the reaction of those around me. I think I possibly possess that classic personality trait where people mistake the distance and removal that I orchestrate through a natural shyness as a haughty arrogance. It was this lack of connection to any network of fellow musicians that made it harder for us to look for a new guitarist as the simple fact was that we didn’t know any. We have never been ‘musician’s musicians’, I think we are possibly too arch and seemingly too ambitious and aloof to be so. It’s an aspect of our group persona which has in a way paralleled my feelings of ‘not belonging’ socially as a child in that I have never felt much sense of kinship with other bands. I also think that there was a desire to do things in an unconventional manner, to eschew the channels through which these processes usually operate, so instead of calling up Gary Moore or holding big, revealing public auditions we ended up asking a completely unknown teenager to be our guitarist.

  One day while chatting with Charlie over some milky tea in his offices in Provost Street I was rifling through some post and I came across a yellow Jiffy bag containing a cassette tape and a short letter. It was from a young man called Richard Oakes who was randomly offering his services as Bernard’s replacement. Admiring his chutzpah I slotted the tape into the stereo expecting to be confronted with a quiet display of underwhelming amateurism. What I heard however as he ran through a version of ‘My Insatiable One’ was a stirring and eloquent performance, lilting and nuanced and obviously technically extremely proficient. Equally excited, Charlie called the number in the letter which turned out to be that of Richard’s family home in Poole. After a lengthy conversation with his mother it transpired that Richard was just seventeen and still at sixth form. Initially this fact worried me, and looking back it was a little rash not to be more worried but the more I thought about it, the more the perversity appealed and trusting my instincts we arranged for him to travel to London for an audition. As he trudged into the rehearsal room in Southwark, despite his
fresh-faced youthfulness and the strange disparity of the situation, Richard seemed confident and friendly but refreshingly unassuming. He was a smallish kid with long, dark straight hair which gathered into a widow’s peak and a handsome, hawkish bone structure that has always reminded me a little of a young Dave Gilmour. We drank tea and exchanged pleasantries but once he’d taken off his coat and plugged in his guitar his obvious talent seemed to transform him, strangely inverting the power differential and making him seem like the master and us the novices.