Bit of a Blur Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1 - dreams come true

  Chapter 2 - goldsmiths college

  Chapter 3 - food ltd

  Chapter 4 - the beginnings of success

  Chapter 5 - the genesis of britpop

  Chapter 6 - triumph

  Chapter 7 - regroup

  Chapter 8 - rocket science

  Chapter 9 - how I made them sing

  Chapter 10 - flying!

  Chapter 11 - rounded and grounded

  Chapter 12 - beginnings and endings

  Alex James is the bass player with Blur. He is also a Visiting Scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Europe’s largest space research facility. He lives with his wife and children in the Cotswolds.

  Bit of a Blur

  ALEX JAMES

  Hachette Digital

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  Published by Hachette Digital 2010

  Copyright © Alex James 2007

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

  retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without

  the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated

  in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published

  and without a similar condition including this condition being

  imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  eISBN : 978 0 7481 2329 2

  Hachette Digital

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DY

  An Hachette UK Company

  For Claire

  Thanks to Simon Kelner, Tom Hodgkinson, Cat Ledger, Antonia Hodgson, Sarah Rustin, Tamsin Kitson and Linda Silverman.

  And the cast. Darlings, you were marvellous.

  prologue

  It’s bang in the middle of the bay, the Showbar, at the end of Bournemouth Pier above the very mouth of the Bourne Stream, which gives the town its name.

  Despite the supreme location, sandwiched between the perfect geometry of sea and sky, the Showbar has never been popular. But I always liked it and I often sat there, dreaming. The proprietor booked my first band. He did us a favour. We were crap. Seven years later I’m returning the favour. Blur are playing here tonight on a tour to celebrate ‘Country House’ getting to number one, a number one with more commotion than any, since records began.

  Blur are the biggest band in the land, at once renowned and reviled, sleazy and glamorous, larger than life and louder than allowed. Wherever we stop the tour bus, within moments it’s swamped with people. Pretty soon they’re shouting. More arrive, forgetting their concerns and flocking to the bus. Then they’re screaming, literally screaming, banging and pulling strange faces. Traffic comes to a standstill, but nobody seems to mind.

  Tonight is more unusual than most because Oasis, the other band involved in the record rumpus, are also playing, about a hundred yards away in the Bournemouth International Centre.

  We’re under police escort but people are still throwing themselves at us, trying to get a piece of hair or trousers. Legions of grinning ticket holders are massing through the thronged constabulary at Pier Approach. It’s mayhem. I’ve turned the town upside down. Somehow, I’d actually done what I’d dreamed of doing on empty, confused teenage afternoons, as I gazed out at that immaculate horizon.

  1

  dreams come true

  Ross Killed on Doorstep

  Bournemouth is nice. It doesn’t overwhelm, like St Tropez, or even Blackpool, but it’s good and it’s growing. The poet Shelley, who lived in Boscombe, where I was born, might have said the view from the clifftops was sublime: a sublime seascape. But however you say it, it’s nice.

  The beaches start way back from the cliffs in the wooded chines - steep valleys full of pine trees and rhododendron bushes. Cool in the summer and calm, a world away from the crowded seashore. The rhododendrons grew dense, as tall as houses. We’d climb to the top of the highest bush and fling ourselves off to be caught somewhere on the way down by a mass of giving boughs.

  We jumped off more or less everything. We jumped off the piers and the cliffs without a care. There was always something there to catch us. At Fisherman’s Walk in Southbourne the soft, sandy overhangs are high and sheer and we’d just run and jump right off. Arms flailing we’d fly over the edge after school. If you can jump off a cliff, you can do anything.

  We lived, to start with, in suburbia. I went to Peter Robinson’s house after school on Tuesdays. His dad had the stamp shop in Pokesdown; it’s still there, Philately. There were more stairs than usual in that house, as it was above a shop. We had some good stair games. The best one was called ‘Ross killed on doorstep’. Ross McWhirter was on our favourite programme, Record Breakers, with his twin brother Norris. The McWhirters seemed to know everything: all the important things, like who was the tallest man ever, which was the fastest car ever, what the rarest stamp ever was called - Peter knew that, already. Limits were important to us, as our imaginations raced around. Ross McWhirter knew far too much and was assassinated coming home one night. The event and the newspaper headline stayed with us, and we’d take it in turns to play Ross, who lived under the stairs.

  It was in that house that I first started to watch Top of the Pops. Peter had some good records. The ones we played the most were ‘Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines’, by the singing piglets Pinky and Perky and ‘The Entertainer’, the piano rag from The Sting. Our favourite song was a television theme, ‘Eye Level’, from a detective series called Van Der Valk. Neither of us had a copy of that one, but I remember it well. I was playing it on the guitar yesterday. There aren’t many things you can take from childhood into adult life, but I still love that melody, thirty years later.

  There was a carol concert, every year, at the Winter Gardens. All the junior schools combined their choirs and all the mums went along and cried their eyes out. Our teacher said that the first eight people who learned the words to the carols could represent the school. I loved singing carols; I still do. I learned all the words. I was the only boy in the class who did. I couldn’t sing in tune but my teacher had to admit that I knew the words. By the time the concert came around, I was singing harmonies. I loved Clodie, who sang harmonies, too, but I couldn’t tell her. My dad gave her a lift on the last night of the concert and took us for chips afterwards. Music had brought me closer to this girl. We stood next to each other onstage and sang the high notes. On the last day of junior school I kissed her, but then she disappeared forever. I glimpsed her one more time. She was walking her dog with her mum. I didn’t know what to do and ran away.

  Glen View

  I was eleven and we were all on our way to London to see Annie, the musical. It was my mum’s birthday. Mum and Deborah, my younger sister, were very excited about it. Dad was going with the flow, which is quite a rare quality he really excels at. He can sense a flow and empathise with it. It’s the best thing there is, having your flow enhanced and encouraged by someone you love. He knew he was in charge, but he always steered from the back, like in a small boat. An ability to join in is the most important thing you can have if you want to play bass and I guess that comes from my dad.

  While we were in London, Sparky, the dog, was to spend the night with Papa, my granddad on my dad’s side, but when we got to Papa’s he was dead.

  Our lives cha
nged then. We moved into Glen View House, Papa’s place. It was a mansion near the beach and the centre of town, built in Bournemouth’s first heyday in the 1890s. Debs and I didn’t want to live there and we cried all the way from Strouden Park. Papa had been a chef, first in the army and then in Bournemouth’s best hotel, The Royal Bath. We were all proud that he had been the chef there and we told everybody about it. He ran Glen View as a hotel, but it was our home. There were rooms that we didn’t go in very often. It had thirteen bedrooms and the dining room seated thirty. There were lounges in all directions; a smoky television room; a commercial kitchen with a huge larder full of catering tins of ratatouille that had been there so long they were becoming spherical. There was a ghost in room four and steps from the back garden led to pleasure gardens with tennis courts and bowling greens, dog turds, tramps and prostitutes. My sister and I lived in the cellar to start with. It had been full of creepy furniture and there was slime growing on the walls. There was a light well, though, and once it was damp-proofed and painted magnolia it was a cosy little burrow.

  I started secondary school around the time we moved. Because I’d dropped out of recorder and violin lessons at junior school, I was always a bit behind with music at Bournemouth School. The kids who were having lessons on trombone, saxophone, flute and other ill-advised apparatus were always a few steps ahead in music lessons. Mum had begged me to have violin lessons when I was younger, but I didn’t get very far. It is very hard to play a tune on a violin. They smelled quite nice, those violins, of old things, but even symphony orchestras need about twenty of them to make a half-decent sound. A solo fiddle played by an eight-year-old boy is one of civilisation’s most objectionable sounds.

  I’ve still got the recorder that I had at junior school. It’s not a nice noise that comes out of one of those either, but the worst thing about recorders is what they smell like. We spent more time daring one another to smell each other’s than actually blowing down them. I got really stuck on ‘Loch Lomond’, and gave up. From then on I was relegated to the rhythm section of the primary school orchestra, with all the naughty kids. It was really good fun messing around at the back, pulling funny faces and banging triangles. I was thirteen when the piano arrived. It was a surprise. Dad bought it for a hundred quid. That’s still how much a piano like that costs. Every home should have a hundred-pound piano.

  Dad opened the lid and raised his eyebrows. There was a slight but deliberate dramatic pause. Then he slammed into the keys and rattled out some rock and roll. It was amazing. I’d never heard him play. I had no idea that he could. I hugged him, pushed my sister out of the way and demanded to be shown how to make a noise like that. It was much easier to listen and repeat than to read the blobs on the page. He taught me ‘Blue Moon’ first. His party piece was called ‘Nutrocker’ by B. Bumble and the Stingers. It has a skiffle beat and lots of heavy loud accents and he’d wooed my mother with it.

  I liked school. I took a 17 bus every morning, a yellow double-decker. It zigzagged all around the houses, picking up those who lived off-piste and got us to school fifteen minutes before everybody else. It ran against the flow, away from town in the morning rush and practically no one got on or off. Peter Arnold also got on at my stop. He was in my class, a bad dribbler but a good talker. We talked all the way. He had an older brother with records, and we talked about those, mainly. His brother got the bus, too, but he sat at the back hugging his bag.

  Danny Collier and his brother Duncan also got on the empty bus, at Beechy Road. They were the coolest boys in school. After he’d completed his education, Duncan, the older one, was in a band called Mulberry Phut. They were famous for having seventeen guitar players. Danny, the younger one, was the bass player in Readers’ Wives. They were famous for all kinds of reasons. For a start, their drummer had ten A grade ‘O’ levels. They were brilliant. I sat next to the guitar player’s brother in chemistry.

  I liked chemistry. I’d had a few chemistry sets. I was drawn by the neat test tubes, the flames from the burner, the little vials of chemicals with unstable and toxic qualities. Jimmy Stubbs was my best friend, then. We put our chemistry sets together and tried to make them explode, and we joined the Sea Scouts.

  The scoutmaster lived with his mum. One Saturday, he invited me over to his house. I said, ‘What for?’ He said, ‘Monsters.’ When I arrived for monsters, there were a couple of other boys there. He was wrestling with one of them. It was Brian, from Otters Patrol. They were making monster noises. I must have arrived too late for monsters, as the next thing that happened was that we all dressed up: me, Brian and Tim from Badgers, as girls; with frocks and wigs and lipstick, and the scoutmaster was filming us singing along to his old record player.

  It was him who gave me my first break in showbusiness. Possibly as a result of my performance in drag on camera, although that film never came to light again, I won the role of ‘Big Brownie’ in The Gang Show.

  I’m in a Band

  I joined my first band in Jay Burt-Smale’s bedroom. Jay Burt-Smale lived in Charminster. It would be hard to find a more deliciously normal place than there. The biggest shop in Charminster sold fish. It wasn’t clear if it was a shop or a hobby that had gone haywire. The front of the shop was quite ordinary looking, but it went on and on and the fish got weirder as you went deeper inside, just like the sea. There was definitely someone with a big need for fish behind it, like an alcoholic pub landlord. It was a bit out of anyone’s control, bursting at the seams and brilliant.

  We were fifteen and also bursting at the seams, sitting there in Jay’s bedroom, surrounded by traffic cones and flashing lights from the roadworks outside. Jay’s mum had recently started going out with a bass player. She was pretty cool. She said we could smoke in Jay’s room, but Jay wouldn’t let us. Her new boyfriend had given Jay an electric guitar. Jay plugged it into his stereo and showed me how to play ‘Whole Lotta Love’ by Led Zeppelin; or maybe it was the theme music from Top of the Pops, it was hard to tell which. He could also play the line from the middle of ‘The Chain’ by Fleetwood Mac, which his mum had a copy of. He was working on ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ by U2 as well, but he could only get the first five notes. It didn’t matter. Learning the rest of it was a mere formality. We knew then that we would start a band and be brilliant. It would be easy. He’d only been playing the guitar a week and he could nearly do U2. I’d only just started, and I could already nearly do Top of the Pops and Led Zeppelin, and he was supposed to be one of the best guitarists around.

  We formed the band there and then. I decided I would play keyboards. Synthesizers had arrived from the future. They had the same kind of appeal as spaceships and everybody wanted one. Mark Pepin, my new best friend, was going to play drums and ‘Rutter the Nutter’ was going to play a bass guitar. Nobody was certain at that stage exactly what a bass guitar was, but bands all seemed to have one.

  I had spent a long time listening to ‘Blue Monday’ by New Order. It was so grey and beautiful. I went to a keyboard demonstration at a big hotel down the road with my dad. They had all the latest synthesizers there and they were excited about a new technology called MIDI. Everyone kept saying ‘MIDI’. It was very important, this midi business. I just liked all the buttons and the lights and the noises. They had synchronized all the keyboards together with a MIDI so that they all played ‘Blue Monday’ at the same time. It was too much for me. So was the keyboard: it was six hundred quid. I decided to play bass instead.

  Mark got his drumkit, a Trixon. I got the bass for my sixteenth birthday in November, but I had to wait until Christmas for an amplifier. Then I wasn’t allowed to have it for another week for bad behaviour. I managed to find it, though, in the loft. Jay and Rut the Nut didn’t seem to be taking the band very seriously, but Mark and I played together in the cellar. We were getting pretty good at ‘The Chain’ and ‘Whole Lotta Love’, and ‘Blue Monday’ was coming along quite nicely.

  Mark arrived one Sunday and told me he’d invited Dominic White to com
e round with his guitar. I was furious. Dom White, who I’d known since playschool, was a hippie with no social skills. I couldn’t believe Mark had invited him round to my house. Dom had quite a low opinion of me, too. He thought I was a grinning, middle-class twat. His mum dropped him off in her Mini. It was very full of amplifiers and guitars. We lugged everything downstairs. Dom said, ‘My mum wrremembers your mum.’ He had a bit of trouble with his ‘r’s. ‘Yourww mum says wot, wot, wot, I’m so middle class.’ I offered him a gin and tonic, but he ignored me. He was fiddling around with a soldering iron and a huge box that said ‘Vox’ on it. Mark and I went upstairs. Mum said, ‘Is that Dominic White? You used to be such good little friends at playgroup. He was such a good-looking little boy.’ Suddenly from up the stairs came a very loud ‘FUCK!’, three ‘SHIT’s and a number of quieter, broken, little ‘fuck’s. Mum was straight to the top of the stairs. ‘Dominic, I will not tolerate bad language in this house.’ It was very quiet. We went downstairs. Dom was flat on his back. He’d miscalculated on the soldering and connected himself to two hundred and forty volts. He and my mum made their peace and he decided to use one of his other amps.

  In all the time I have been making music, nothing quite so fantastic as what happened in the next five minutes has ever happened again. Mark and I started playing ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and Dom joined in. He was quite loud, much louder than a stereo, louder than the drums. It was the loudest, best noise I’d ever heard and I was helping to make it. Dom was brilliant. I was just pedalling around the riff, and he was all over the place, high, low, fast, slow, rhythm, melody, harmony, it was shocking. I was in a band, an amazing band. I began to think that maybe Dom was the coolest man in the world.