Bit of a Blur (20 page)

Damien’s star was rising. He’d completely charmed the entire staff of the Groucho by buying them drinks, telling them jokes and doing drawings for them. They vied for his attention and the place was never closed to him. He could delight and attract people in a way that opened doors and arms, like Tabitha’s face did. Even when he was wearing Prada he had a faintly agricultural mien. His main talent, and he had many, was that he was good at getting the best out of people. He raised everyone’s game.

Damien was the undisputed king of the art set. The artists in his circle were like a huge band. Their work was all highly individual, but his ambition, charisma and acumen drew them all together. He was a true catalyst, he stimulated everybody and as they all tried to outsmart each other, the range and content of their work blossomed. The art crowd’s appetite for each other and for everything raged and they decorated the dives of Dean Street with their presence. Soho was fizzing. It meant staying up all night could lead to interesting encounters. There was a big mad family of extraordinary people who didn’t want to go to bed yet. I was drawn into the crowd by a cocktail of sexual chemistry and intellectual magnetism. Minds raced all through the night. It was inspiring. I found new reference points, my horizons broadened.

Damien’s discourse was a combination of gags, poetry, repartee and swearing and his mind raced to the top and bottom of things and made strange connections. He loved making people change their minds and was good at it. Famous faces might turn heads, but he was someone who could turn minds inside out. He was part goblin and almost insane and could so easily have been in prison; but then you could say that about most of the Groucho’s cast.

The Groucho led inevitably to other glitzy places. All great artists are great cooks and maybe great cooks are all great artists. Charles Fontaine, the fourth member of the gang, was partial to tripe and prone to huge fits of temper. He had been the chef at Le Caprice.

Damien was a big fan of swanky restaurants, the swankier and more expensive, exclusive and elitist, the better. The posh restaurant is part of the natural environment of the artist. The best restaurants are the ones with the best people in. Unless you’re really hungry, people are far more interesting than food. A great restaurant makes the rest of the world seem very ordinary and that sensation of glamour is a hard thing to achieve. Very few places have glamour. Glamour makes hearts beat a bit faster, luxury makes hearts beat slower and, when the balance is right, you float away. Le Caprice is so discreet that you could walk right past it without realising it was there. You wouldn’t ever walk past it because it’s tucked at the bottom of a dead-end street behind Piccadilly.

To eat there is to leave a clamouring world behind and spend a couple of hours in the clouds. It’s the best restaurant in the world. America is great for pizza and anything you can eat with your fingers, but they can’t do the fiddly, classy stuff. There are restaurants in France where the food is better and the rooms are grander, but they are often full of ghastly rich non-French people boasting to each other in loud voices. Le Caprice is chic. From the moment I walked in for the first time and caught the mellow hum of hot gossip, until the brandies arrived, nothing could have been finer.

It was a long summer Sunday evening the first time I went there. We strolled up Piccadilly. I was wearing shorts from Deptford Market. It was easy to see why Keith and Damien irritated people. Damien was going through a phase of shouting exquisite obscenities whenever it went quiet and you just never knew what Keith was going to do next. I sometimes found it excruciatingly funny and begged them to stop, and sometimes I just begged them to stop. Their girlfriends were with us, and Jay Jopling, Damien’s Old Etonian art dealer. The maître d’ greeted Damien warmly and professionally. Then Damien whispered something in his ear that made him practically bend in two. No matter how drunk Damien was, he never lost the ability to make people split their sides, even sometimes people he’d really been annoying. He’d go to great lengths to win people over or exasperate them further. The jokes flowed continuously. I had tears streaming down my face, and pains in my sides.

There was slapstick, wit, wordplay, anecdote, funny faces and rude noises. Because he could deliver a joke so perfectly the punchline spent most of the time waiting in the distance as he elaborated and extemporised. A regular customer on the next table made a complaint about Damien’s language, and having discovered who he was complaining about, came over to say hello. I think Jay managed to sell him a painting. Ideas flew out of Damien, like they fly out of everybody, but he was a man of action. He made his dreams come true.

It was such a relief to be on a plane to Iceland again and leaving all the madness behind. Thor sent a hundred and fifty Hell’s Angels to escort us from the airport into Reykjavik. I went straight to Magnea’s house and they all revved their engines outside the window.

Graham and Dave weren’t interested in going to Iceland. All their parts were done, so they didn’t really need to be there. There’s no way I wouldn’t have been there, even if I’d hated the place. But it really was the top of the world.

Magnea liked going to all the bad places, bars in the docks where the fishermen had fights and the place by the bus station where the bad alcoholics and mad people drank. She had the quality of glamour and those dives emphasised her beauty. She conjured a plain, everyday situation into a vivid, whirling world of wonder.

‘Bastard.’

‘Well, you’ve got three boyfriends, you’re worse than I am.’

‘Wanker.’

‘Do you want a drink?’

‘Fucker.’

I think we probably loved each other.

To start with there were quite a lot of girls outside her flat, waiting for me. By the end of the week, there were loads of boys outside. It was her three boyfriends and all their mates. I had to leave via the bathroom window to get to the studio.

Civilisation was no longer safe anywhere and so we went on an expedition to the interior. In the magazine on the aeroplane it said that the Icelandic interior was uninhabitable. I’d been intrigued by the thought of an inhospitable landscape. Surely you could live anywhere, if you were determined?

I was wrong. No one could live there. The otherworldliness starts with an eggy smell. It’s not a smell that I could ever get used to. It’s constantly updating itself with new overtones and flavours of the day, a multifaceted huge and invisible smellscape. When the wind changed, it seemed to present a new view of the smell, one that I couldn’t have considered from the other side, or the back of it. It lurked and it thrusted and it wouldn’t leave us alone.

Once we got through the stench, we were on to the ice. The ice goes on forever. I never managed to grasp the idea of ‘forever’ quite so clearly as on the Vatnajökull Glacier, Europe’s largest. It’s not just the scale of the thing. It’s the timelessness and the immeasurable silence of the place. It goes beyond geography into the realms of planetary science with its astronomical proportion, a pure, elemental realm. We zoomed around on skidoos, unaffected by the passage of time in the perpetual sunlight, mountains in the distance and the sky blue and constant.

When we emerged, I went with Magnea to visit a poet called Buppi, who lived in a cottage by a lake at the bottom of a valley, which is only right. He was a mad-eyed sprite, bald as a baby and bright and playful as a stream. He was very engaging and I couldn’t help myself from getting involved with his thoughts, which were quite complicated. We walked up a big hill, which is always a good thing to do with a poet. Magnea picked camomile flowers and we sat on the prow. ‘Everyone in Iceland is a poet,’ he declared. ‘Wherever you look, there’s a distant horizon. Everyone’s standing at the centre of a very big circle.’ It was true. The Icelandic people are a race apart. It’s a very modern society. They’re exceptionally well travelled, and resilient. The women are beautiful and the men are quite fearless. There is a Viking streak in all of them. A popular sport was driving bangers at full speed up the sides of U-shaped glacial valleys to see how far up the vertical face they could get. Sometimes the cars just fell off. The great unknown was all around and all-prevailing. They flung themselves into it with bravado. Buppi was a genuine wise man and my brain was starting to overrev.

So much ice and water. Steaming out of the ground, falling from the sky and sitting in huge lakes, streams that tasted so sweet and cool. Iceland. The Vikings called it Iceland so that no one would bother invading it, and stashed all their beautiful women there.

We stopped at a frozen lake that had thawed at the edges. A small wooden hut stood alongside. The hut was built on top of a geothermic spring. There are geysers all over the place. This was quite a steady, calm one; some of them were explosively violent and drew crowds when they were erupting, but there was no one around for miles. We stripped naked and sat in the hut, feeling the supercolossal thrum of the molten core of the earth. It was a great sauna, the very best. When we could bear the heat no longer, we took a running plunge into the frozen lake. Then we needed to get back in the hut. It made our skin prickle.

Things were pretty mental everywhere. The band were booked in for a short tour of North America. I thought I’d have a couple of weeks off the booze for the duration and take stock of everything that was going on in my life.

I was in a band. Good. I was drinking too much, but I’d stopped. Good. I was shagging too much. Hmmm. Good. Writing songs for people whose music I’d always loved. Good. It was all good, but it didn’t have Justine in it anywhere. I called her and invited her out to San Francisco. She said, ‘Yes.’

Even when I went to bed early, all those miles and miles and miles and never knowing where the toilet was and having a new address every day, and new friends, just took it out of me. I wouldn’t have swapped places with anyone, but it was still physically exhausting.

It wasn’t as much fun without the bad things, but hangovers had become ordeals that hung around for days, like bad weather, dealing out every kind of pain, psychological torment, ache and torpor.

I thought as a rock star I owed it to people to enjoy myself to the absolute limit. It was a missed opportunity for everybody if I didn’t. Turpitude, extreme immorality, is the privilege of the rock star. No one else would get away with it. Even film stars and footballers have to conduct themselves with some degree of common decency. They’re all answerable to somebody. Making music is a self-indulgent business and success is just more wood for the bonfire. Absolutely every proper rock star in history has gone through a phase of self-indulgence of proportions inconceivable to the rest of the population. That’s kind of what a rock star is. It would be dull to just turn up and play some songs and leave. It’s not what everybody wants. There’s nothing profoundly evil about what goes on backstage. It’s just mucky.

Damien won the Turner Prize and put it behind the bar at the Groucho, twenty grand. It was a good time to have left the country. I wondered if I knew anyone normal any more. I unwittingly came across an article about Charles Fontaine’s culinary genius in the first bookshop I went into when we arrived in Toronto. He was supposed to be my most normal friend and even he seemed to be big in Canada.

It was hard to say what was going to turn up in the loo at the Groucho. One night in those toilets I got talking to a guy who said he had a twenty-thousand-year-old flute, so I gave him my number. Rarely for the Groucho, he called me in the morning and asked if I wanted to see it. We met at a warehouse in King’s Cross. There are lots of warehouses around there, but this must have been the strangest. The entrance was nondescript. A steel gate on a grubby street gave on to a loading bay with the usual pallets and forklifts. We walked through more heavy doors into great rooms full of incalculable amounts of treasure of all kinds. There were Egyptian artefacts, sculptures from ancient Greece, manuscripts, icons and jewellery in endless, neat rows - all of them priceless. It was the property of the British Museum. The museum only displays a fraction of all its assets at any particular time, and this was one of several places where the nation’s surplus hoard was stored, a holding bay. Some of the pieces would be loaned to other museums, some were being studied, some were just waiting there to come back into fashion. It would have made any vulgar New York billionaire art collector weep to peek in there. The warehouse setting was a good environment to see wonders like that. I had no desire to possess any of it. It was all too precious to have a private owner. The abundance of rarities was devastating. Some of the things were in glass cases, some were packed in boxes with labels stating their contents. They were free from any kind of marketing or presentation hocus-pocus, but everything there had some historical significance, and hundreds and thousands of years after it was made still had the power to take my breath away. It made Damien’s stuff look piffling and flimsy by comparison.

The ancient musical artefacts section was on the third floor. There was an expert in these matters in attendance. I recognised a flute-type thing, a clay pipe with finger holes, but she said that was relatively recent, only a few thousand years old. The oldest musical instruments do date back twenty thousand years. Archaeological findings show that there was almost nothing in the way of art until twenty thousand years ago and then suddenly there was an almost instant gush of cave paintings, tools and musical instruments. The first instruments were drums, probably mammoths’ skulls, bashed with mammoths’ bones. Not much has changed in the drum world.

The earliest tonal instruments were made from reindeer toe bones. They’re closer to a whistle than a flute to look at, but they are technically flutes because you blow across the hole, rather than down it. You get different notes in the harmonic series depending on how hard you blow. Of all the things in that warehouse, they were among the least obviously beautiful. If one turned up in the kitchen the morning after a big night, I wouldn’t have said, ‘Wow, someone’s left this amazing thing here.’ I’d probably have thrown it away before realising what it was. It didn’t look like much, I must be honest. It didn’t sound great either but those little crusty bones were where it all started. A primitive musical instrument made by a primitive scientist.