Bit of a Blur (15 page)

I hadn’t sung a lead vocal before. When we got back from Sweden I’d written a song about the stars and moons that had been preoccupying me. That was one of the hardest things to get right. The rest of the album flew on to tape. ‘Girls & Boys’ was recorded very quickly because we’d been playing it live, and the other singles came together almost effortlessly. The demo of ‘To the End’ had a good feel so we worked from that, rather than starting again.

‘Parklife’ was quite a complete song from the first time Damon had played it to us. We’d been watching
Quadrophenia
on the tour bus and we sent the track to Phil Daniels, the lead actor, and asked if he wanted to sing the verses. He said yes, simple as that.

The only song that was a great effort was ‘This Is a Low’. The backing track was recorded and sounded musically more emotive than anything we’d ever done, but Damon was struggling with the words. For Christmas I bought him a handkerchief with a map of the shipping forecast regions on it. I can’t take all the credit, but maybe he was blowing his nose when the inspiration came to him. You can never tell when the muse is going to appear. It went on to become Blur’s most popular song.

The company that owned Maison Rouge sold it. The brasserie shut down and there were never any balls for the table football. The toilets were horrible. Yet somehow it was easier to make music in a more realistic working environment, without the comforts, and the album was finished in no time. We’d developed a way of working, and we had a team of people that we knew and trusted around us.

We thought we’d made a great record, but we had no idea what was about to happen. Guitar bands that made great records sold maybe a hundred thousand copies. The Stone Roses had been the biggest selling guitar band of the decade so far - their album had gone platinum - but that was a couple of years earlier. Everybody was listening to rave music and celebrating. Balfe was pleased with the record too, but he obviously had no idea either. He sold Food to EMI and moved to a big house in the country. He could have got a much bigger one if he’d waited six months.

We were at a photo shoot in a garage kind of place on King’s Road, Chelsea, the same place we’d had our photo taken with Sherman, the big dog. There weren’t that many photographic studios, just like there weren’t that many recording studios, and we’d seen most of them by now. Andy Ross arrived with champagne because he’d just got the midweek chart position for ‘Girls & Boys’. It was number five, which was good whichever way we thought about it, and we thought about it a lot. That was the start of the champagne and a long, long sunny day that dissolved into bubbles.

Success at home was a completely different thing from being big in Sweden, or Japan. That was like going on a strange holiday. I still came back to my old life at the end of it. Even though we were away a lot, and loving it, London was home. The more I travelled, the more I felt that. Our lives had been changing a lot, but actually the pattern of our lives changed very little when we started to sell lots of records. We played gigs, had our photos taken, did interviews, just like we did before.

The two most important things in the world when I was growing up were
Smash Hits
magazine and
Top of the Pops
.

Smash Hits
was a blend of sophistication and stupidity that somehow managed to unify the whole of pop music. Its pages held the evidence that bored children needed that everything was, in fact, brilliant. Sometimes Wham! were on the cover and sometimes it was Morrissey and Pete Burns. At its peak the magazine was selling nearly a million copies a fortnight and the music industry flourished. The most popular bands made videos that cost a million pounds, while tiny independent labels thrived at the other end of the scale. That magazine spawned monsters every bit as irritating as today’s celebrities, possibly more irritating, because these people considered themselves ‘Artists’, but
Smash Hits
made music the focal point of all youth culture and the ‘ver hits’ era was the golden age of the pop song. Music is not the focus of the
heat
generation. In the early twenty-first century there are more music magazines for people aged over thirty than there are for teenagers, and I wonder whether youth culture has had its fifty years in the sun, whether we’ll ever see another band that absolutely everybody loves or hates. In America there’s never been anything like
Smash Hits
. Maybe that’s why six out of the all-time top ten records in
Rolling Stone
magazine are by British bands. In America, it seemed a band could sell a billion records but most people would still have never heard of them.
Smash Hits
would never have allowed that to happen.

The
Smash Hits
office was in Carnaby Street, just around the corner from Food Ltd, and the writers used to spend a fair amount of time in the Old Coffee House, a pub on the corner of Beak Street, one of our haunts. They were exceptionally bright, mainly female and mostly younger than us. I liked being in that magazine, but it was actually more enjoyable just getting drunk and being stupid with those girls on Monday afternoons, playing darts, arguing about haircuts and who was fanciable, before they started writing about us. That was actually more like being in the magazine than being featured on its pages.

Top of the Pops
was the other fundamental force. It was more than a TV show, and it’s hard to believe it’s actually gone. Its final broadcast was in July 2006. It’s still probably the most powerful brand name in music broadcasting. There weren’t many things that were exactly as I thought they’d be, but appearing on that show was just like walking inside the television. It was almost magical. Practically everyone there seemed hardly able to believe that they were inside it. There was always a wide-eyed, open-mouthed glee about the studio audience. The acts on
TOTP
were just a part of the spectacle. Everybody mimed, which made it even more unreal and dream-like, but it was all the bit-part players and extras who made it special: a mammoth blast of bright lights, cameras, smiles and flesh.

The canteen at the studio in Borehamwood was completely surreal. It was jam-packed with the casts of
Grange Hill
,
EastEnders
and whatever top bands were in the country that week. People on telly do have faces you can just stare and stare at. It’s what they get paid for. When we’d been on it in the past we’d been looking at everybody else and thinking, ‘Wow! It’s them.’ Everybody was looking at us this time. It was a good line-up. Vic Reeves, the comedian, was performing his version of ‘Born Free’ with a couple of long-leggedy backing dancers and Mark and Robbie from Take That were presenting the show. The crowd were panting, hysterically screaming and throwing themselves around. All the other bands came out to watch us mime ‘Girls & Boys’ and the audience went berserk at four grown men pretending to play their instruments. It was brilliant.

I had a very small suitcase with a clean pair of pants and socks, the collected writings of Colette, a large bottle of gin and as many small bottles of tonic that would fit in. We’d just come back from Belgium. We seemed to go to Belgium a lot in those days. There was never a moment to sit back and enjoy the fact that we were actually going to be on
Top of the Pops
. We were too busy enjoying Belgium.

I went to drink my gin in the bar and Vic Reeves was there with his friend Jonathan Ross, who had given our first single the raspberry on
Juke Box Jury
. I changed my mind about hating him forever when he offered to buy me a drink. Then they took me to a place called the Groucho Club.

The Groucho was quite a small place. There were comfy chesterfields and good-looking staff. It reminded me of an airport lounge and most people there were probably in between flights. There were bowls of Twiglets and someone was playing the piano. That was the furniture, same as anywhere else, with Twiglets thrown in. What set it apart from everywhere else were the people who went there. All towns have one place where everybody wants to go more than everywhere else. Les Bains Douches was the top spot in Paris; in New York it was Spy; Shocking in Milan and so on, all the places I was most likely to run into Einar from the Sugarcubes again. In London, the Groucho was
the
place, the place where anybody at all might walk through the door. In fact, everybody always looked up when the door opened, to see who it was. Everyone was very friendly. They are when you’re number five.

It was a long evening that ended up at Dave Stewart’s house in Covent Garden: Dave, myself, a Pet Shop Boy, Vic Reeves, a billionaire and a transvestite. Dave was explaining his art collection, like a proper grown-up rich person. I spilt a drink on the fibre optic carpet. I’d been pretty well behaved up until then. I was living just around the corner, but I still didn’t own much more than I had in the suitcase. Dave Stewart had lots of toys. It was a house for impressing other rich people with, a cross between an old-fashioned imperial castle and a spaceship. I wandered home as day was breaking. Jus wasn’t there. I didn’t have any keys so I scaled the front of the building and climbed in through the window. There was a message on the answerphone from Justine. She was calling from Charing Cross police station to say she’d been arrested for some kind of altercation with a police officer in St James’s Park and was having a night in the cells. She’d been with a booze head from another band who were also signed to Food. When the limo came in the morning, I took it round to the police station and tried to get her out, but they hauled her up before the magistrate. I had to go to Belgium. It was going crazy in Belgium, they said.

Since I’d got back from Japan to an empty flat a few months before things had not been so sweet at home. Justine moved out as I became more selfish, drunk and unfaithful. It’s hard for a relationship to survive one person becoming successful all of a sudden. Apart from that one arrest, she handled it very well, but I didn’t. I missed her when she was gone and there was no peace.

To start with, I’d go away on tour and, basically, riot, but I always came home to her calm, stabilising influence. As
Parklife
gathered more and more momentum I slipped anchor and blew adrift on the shallow sea of a permanent backstage party. There was always one more place to go and I leapt into London’s deep and dark night.

I decided to stick mostly to champagne. I’d always liked that stuff. I think it started on aeroplanes. They threw champagne at people on aeroplanes in those days, little quarter bottles. Leaving behind a grey Saturday morning at Heathrow they brought the champagne round as soon as the sunshine started crashing through the little windows. It lit up the bubbles as they rose to the top of the glass. Cheap aeroplane champagne: it was a wonderful colour in the brilliant sun. I contemplated the bubbles and measured the gold against the blue sky behind and was happy. In motion, travelling somewhere at great speed, completely serene and still as those bubbles whizzed and fizzed.

I started on the monopoles. Monopole is one-year-old plonk and good for mixing but I soon developed a taste for Taittinger. That’s quite crispy and biscuit-flavoured. I found Bollinger and Moët a bit yeasty. Taittinger was just a phase and I settled on Cordon Rouge. I got three bottles of that on the rider every day for about five years, but I supplemented it with a systematic tour of all the great champagne houses, Krug, Dom Perignon, La Veuve, all colours, all sizes, all years. On special occasions, or given the choice, I went for Cristal. That was my favourite. It’s in a clear bottle and has a very delicate flavour; a liquid gold that transmogrified into sizzling suds on my tongue and left me thinking about violets.

They’re all marvellous. I got quite good at opening a bottle with just a gentle hiss, with one hand. It was important to get all the foil off, to avoid lacerations, and hold it at forty-five degrees, to stop it going everywhere, but the most important thing of all about champagne is that you have to eat a fresh carrot for every bottle that you drink. It’s very acidic and if you guzzle it it makes your breath stink.

I was quite happy with my three bottles of Cordon Rouge and my three large carrots.

Champagne was the perfect toast to a time of hope and new beginnings in London. Whole swathes of the city were in a redevelopment boom. Social and cultural interest was rejuvenating; something was stirring in the art world; a new government was looking increasingly likely;
Parklife
knocked Pink Floyd’s new album off the number one slot, to everyone at EMI’s surprise. Blur weren’t part of a movement; we were right out on our own musically, but we were a part of London’s almost instantaneous rebirth as the world’s hippest city. There were two faces on the covers of all the music magazines. One was Damon’s and the other was Kurt Cobain’s. And suddenly one of them was dead.

It was the premiere of Quentin Tarantino’s
Pulp Fiction
. Damon and I had been for a couple of Long Island Iced Teas and were in no mood to sit down for an hour and a half. We shouted at the screen for a while and left. We decided to go to the Groucho. I’d been telling him about it. It’s a member’s club, but we got in by saying we were meeting Dave Stewart. We figured he wouldn’t mind.

Damon went off to argue with a guy with a ponytail and I sat at the bar staring at myself. This was a good club. There was no way of knowing what would happen next. Damon came back twenty minutes later with Helena Christensen. She was the most beautiful woman in the world. I was very interested in her face. I suppose everybody was. It was a face that made suggestions that great things might be true and pictures of it always made me feel better. I wondered how else I might have come to meet this woman. Appearing on
Top of the Pops
and being in
Smash Hits
was very satisfying, but it wasn’t my ultimate aim in life. Being face to face with, in my considered opinion, the most beautiful woman in the world was an absolutely concrete result. I suddenly felt I’d arrived somewhere new. It was completely ridiculous that all I did was put my fingers on strings. I said, ‘God, I think you’re beautiful. Do you like cheese?’ She seemed to know a fair bit about cheeses. There was one you could get in Denmark that had worms inside it. It was a lot to take on board all of a sudden.