Bit of a Blur Read online

  He was listening to the Pixies a lot and he had their lyrics pinned up on his walls. He was really good at guitar. He could play anything, even the Smiths. I still find those guitar parts tricky. He was in a few bands. One was called Idle Vice. The songs were mainly about beer, but some were about vodka. He played the drums as well, but there were no drums around so he played on his knees, with air cymbals. There was a piano in the hall and we used to sing ‘Blue Moon’ a lot. Graham only knew how to play ‘October’ by U2 on the piano, so we sang that a lot as well. We were friends. We were interested in each other’s record collections and we both had guitars; we connected through music, but it went beyond that. We were happy in each other’s company just waiting for a bus or sharing a packet of cigarettes and making up words. I liked him because he was instantly brilliantly artistic, but vulnerable; strikingly stylish, but quite awkwardly shy. Why he liked me, I don’t know. Maybe it was mainly because I liked him. Still, when you do know exactly why someone likes you, that’s not really a friend. That’s a fan.

  We didn’t often go anywhere apart from college and places that sold breakfast. We didn’t have any money so we just sat in each other’s rooms listening to each other’s records, me, Graham and often Paul as well. Jason got involved with Jo from English and drama and disappeared.

  One of Graham’s proudest possessions was a half-drunk bottle of tequila in a sealed plastic bag with a ‘police evidence’ sticker on it. He was planning on keeping it forever, but that was patently never going to happen. We did get drunk and run out of booze quite a few times before it went, though, and we’d try and persuade him to open it. Then one morning the bottle was empty and Paul and I were quite disappointed he’d drunk it without us.

  Paul loved the Beatles, but not as much as Graham. Graham’s dad, who was a clarinet teacher, had brought him up on the Beatles and Beethoven. Paul’s sister was friends with Captain Sensible, the singer, so he had the final say in all conversations about punk rock, but Graham was the authority on the Beatles. I had some quite odd records. Papa’s, mainly: he was a big-band man. I worked my way through them all keeping the ones I liked and selling the ones I didn’t to Ray’s Jazz in Covent Garden.

  Occasionally Graham would disappear to a studio in Euston, where he was recording with a band. I was insanely jealous. I’d messed around with four-track recorders a lot, but I’d never been inside a studio.

  Goldsmiths

  Goldsmiths College is a wonderful place. It’s taken over most of New Cross. It’s spilled out of the original building into the surrounding Victorian terraces and municipal buildings. There are new additions too, the latest in library chic and all sorts of departments, faculties and facilities. It’s really thriving. The university buildings are bisected by the flooding A2, but to turn into one of the little side streets is to enter a world of studious calm. Most of the French department was in a neat little antique cul-de-sac called Laurie Grove. London SE14 doesn’t have the grandeur of Oxford: more screaming tyres than dreaming spires. It’s very much a feet-on-the-ground part of town. It’s quite bewildering how many things are happening at once around there. New Cross manages to be part campus, part ghetto, part middle-class suburb and part motorway, with a lot of pubs. There are always all kinds of people striding around. It is easy to spot the students, especially in October. It doesn’t conform to the traditional image of a hallowed seat of learning but you’d learn more about the world in a couple of terms at Goldsmiths than you would in ten years of eating crumpets and punting around Cambridge.

  I do like Oxford and Cambridge; Goldsmiths just happened to be the best place to be in the world at that time. I’d underachieved my way into the right place and dallied on my way to arrive at the perfect time. The cataclysmic big bang that kick-started the ultimate decade of the last millennium can be traced back to a small area of the bar at the Student Union at Goldsmiths College in 1988. Somehow or other the drunkest people in that bar went on to instigate a British cultural revolution that reverberated in everything from football to rocket science. There were music students, too, and drama courses, but the art department was where the nineties started.

  I had trouble getting up on Wednesdays and kept missing language laboratory, which was at nine o’clock. I took a 36 bus from Camberwell to New Cross. It is not a glamour run that route, through Peckham and the cheap end of the Old Kent Road, but it never felt like I was in the wrong place, like it did at the supermarket.

  I didn’t miss lingo lab on purpose, but it did gall me a little bit that Brownlee was free to ingest yet more of Wittgenstein’s axioms in the bath when he rose at midday, that Graham would go on skip trawls with Paul, while I listened carefully and repeated, but I enjoyed French. There wasn’t one of the lecturers that I didn’t like. They were all terribly clever. It was a very thorough course. It got reality right up on the jacks and had a good look at the underneath. In cosy classrooms we learned about the birth of language, the dawn of civilisation and the first stories, civilisation’s collapse and the onset of the Dark Ages, architecture, art, and archaic and extant forms of music and verse through the ages. The staff all wrote books with long titles: analyses of the principles of linguistic transference; guides to the medieval romances and the works of the great authors of antiquity.

  The books that we read in the first couple of terms of French were carefully selected to blow our tiny minds. Many of them attacked the core of the cosy existence we led. We loved that. We embarked upon an intellectual cruise; took a tour through the twisted, terrifying thoughtscapes of André Gide. We took a ramble through Rabelais’ ribaldry. We dabbled in Dadaism, supped on surrealism, ripped through Romanticism and embraced existentialism. There was plenty to talk about.

  The college library had very tight security. There must have been millions of pounds’ worth of books in there. They could probably have left the door open, though. Books are the most unlikely things to get stolen in New Cross. Street lamps and traffic lights are more at risk of theft than academic treatises. I didn’t go to the library. I made a point of not going to France and not going to the library while I was there. I think I had an attitude problem. The head of the first year said she wanted to see me about my essays. She seemed quite well connected and I assumed she had found a publisher. I was quite excited when I arrived at her study. Maybe she wanted to discuss some of my new ideas. She was, in fact, appalled, she said, at the standard of my French, and how, she wanted to know, could I hope to express ideas, however original I thought they were, without a grasp of a language? I still thought she was wrong. Conceit is vital.

  While working at Safeway I’d got quite good at copying the illustrations out of Winnie the Pooh and brushing on the watercolour, but my sister Debs has always had much more in the way of visual acuity than me. She can do jigsaws faster than anyone. We knew that she was destined for greatness when she won the Regatta Week pavement drawing competition in Bournemouth when she was five.

  Art was bound to take on a new importance in the environment at Goldsmiths. I’d aligned my on-board compasses with the books and records that I liked, but I didn’t know much about art. There was art going on everywhere - on the upper floors of the main building, in an old car showroom opposite. People were talking about abstract expressionism in the canteen, Fluxus in the bar. There was sculpture, film, installation, photography, painting and drawing but absolutely no one was doing watercolours.

  There were loads of big ideas flying around. Everyone was reading books, listening to records, going to Cork Street and gatecrashing first-night art openings. There were theatre trips, museum visits and gigs in the union. Paul really liked football, too.

  I went to Paul’s space in M.B. Motors one day, the converted garage opposite the main college building. He was working on a huge grey and black abstraction. I was very impressed. He said, ‘I like this bit in the ker-corner.’ The corner was a good bit, you had to admit. It had pleasing asymmetry, it had dimensionality, I said. I was way out of my depth, but s
o was he, probably. Paint was all over his space like engine oil in a garage. Everyone had a space, a white cubicle. The spaces were all crammed together, so that everyone interacted. The space opposite Graham’s on the first floor had spots painted all over it, a pleasing array of dots. We all liked those spot paintings. They were easy on the eye. They were nice to look at. Graham said they were the work of a madman called Damien. Damien Hirst.

  Minds were racing everywhere. Opposite Paul, a right geezer called Jim who had been a plumber for some years was doing something with maps. He’d pasted a London A-Z together and was subverting its reality in some way that I was embarrassed not to be able to grasp. He said ‘Luvly-juvly’ quite often. By the end of the second year, he was saying ‘lubbly-bubbly’ and going out with an upper-middle-class girl from French and drama.

  Next door to Paul the space was vacant, though. I asked him what had happened and he said that the guy came in one day, didn’t paint anything, just stared at the wall and was never seen again. ‘He dried up,’ said Paul, with great foreboding. It was like a horror story: like someone had died. I could tell Paul was terrified, as if they were infantrymen and the next guy in the line had bought it. For some sad reason, the unknown artist had given up. I don’t think anyone ever stops having ideas. It’s impossible to stop having ideas. He must have lost his bottle, or realised he wasn’t good enough. It’s a struggle to make art. It was a forlorn sight, that empty space, but it soon filled up with Paul’s debris and spare ideas. Boundaries were being tested. It was a very competitive environment. A lot of discussion went into trying to say exactly what Fine Art is. It’s a hard thing to define, art. If you can say exactly what art is, then you probably are an artist.

  We went to the Tate to see the de Koonings. Paul marvelled at ‘Willem’s’ sexy pink swirly-girly abstractions. My favourite place was the British Museum, a huge castle full of treasure. They’ve got everything there from Beatles’ lyrics on the back of an envelope to mouldering pharaohs. I spent days in there, giggling at the clocks. The early clocks were mesmerising. I thought about those a lot.

  Damon

  Damon’s dad is an art man. He ran the art foundation course in Colchester that Graham had attended, and he ran the art department at Essex University. I knew all this before I met him, because Graham told me. Graham had talked quite a lot about Damon. Damon is someone people talk about.

  Graham and Paul and I went to the Beat Factory, a bijou, pristine studio near King’s Cross. We were going to listen to what this band of Graham’s had been doing. They’d just finished recording some new songs. We didn’t hit it off straight away, Damon and I. He was wearing a necklace and he still had ‘up’ hair. No one at college was doing the ‘up’ hair thing any more. Hair spent most of the eighties going in the wrong direction, but things were getting back to normal again.

  The first thing I can remember Damon asking me was whether I’d been in a recording studio before. I had to admit I hadn’t. They played the songs, which were a bit cheesy. I was very relieved about that. We went off to Eddy’s house to drink poitin, Irish moonshine made from potatoes. It’s really nasty stuff. Eddy was Damon’s friend. They had been to drama college together. Eddy was a huge personality squeezed into a fairly large body. He played the guitar in the band and his little mate played bass; it was a nasty Paul McCartney Beatles bass. There were quite a few people at Eddy’s house. The people who ran the studio and managed Damon, Eddy’s girlfriend, some other drama types and poitin sniffers. It was pretty dull and we had to listen to the songs again. They really weren’t that great. They were too drama college; they needed to be more art college.

  Damon asked me what I thought of them, what they sounded like to me, just, you know, as someone who had never been in a recording studio before. Damon was an instantly provocative person. I’d gone along to meet Graham’s friend assuming Graham’s friend would be similar to Graham, I suppose. They couldn’t really have been more different. Damon had buckets of confidence and gumption and he wore sandals.

  If I’d liked the songs, I would probably have burst into tears, but I told him I thought they weren’t quite right, which they weren’t. He kind of knew it, really, but he was obviously shocked. I didn’t mince my words. It was the only stick I could possibly have bashed him with. In the Robin Hood stories, Robin likes to have a fight with everyone he meets before he becomes their friend. Damon loves Robin Hood and he loves a tussle. We said, cheerio then.

  The week before the end of the first term at college, December 1988, Graham came to my room, where I was playing chess with Paul. We’d decided that chess was a fine pastime and that it would sound good in later life to be able to say, ‘Well, I played a bit of chess when I was at college.’ We only ever played each other, though. We were both scared of losing to anyone else. Graham said, ‘Been to the Beat Fac. We’ve sacked the other guitarist and the bass player!’ Then, after a long pause, ‘And we want you to play bass.’

  I was definitely up for playing in a band with Graham, and Damon, if he had the keys to a recording studio, and the other guy on drums. Dave, he was called - Dave the drummer. I went down to the payphone with Graham and we called Damon. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, there’s a bass at the studio, come down on Friday.’

  So Graham and Damon and I met in the studio on the last day of the first term. Damon had the keys, as he was sort of an assistant there. There were a couple of things that Damon and Graham had been working on together that we bashed around for a while. I showed them some chords that I’d been strumming in my room. Graham started to play them on the guitar, there was a drum machine going boom whack and I started grooving along on the bass that was lying around. Damon started jumping up and down and saying, ‘Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant! You’re a natural!’ He got his lyrics book out and started singing, ‘She is so high, she is so high.’

  It all happened there and then. It was instantaneous, shockingly so. Graham wrote the lyrics for the verse, over the same chords, and sang a backing vocal on the choruses. I’d never been in a band with backing vocals. The two of them sang really well together, they’d been doing it for years. We made a tape and I went home for Christmas thinking, ‘I’m in the best band in the world.’

  Justine was renting a room in a house in Charminster and working at The Body Shop. I’d been in London for ten weeks, but most weeks either she came to London or I went back to see her.

  Graham and I went back to London a week before college started, to write some more songs with Damon. We tried one of my mates from Bournemouth on drums, but he wasn’t as good as the guy who wore pyjamas and worked for Colchester council that they had already, so we stuck with him.

  Damon had a job, so he had a little bit more money than we did. It was an awful job, some fast croissant hellhole at Euston Station. He was a tiny bit older than Graham and me, a fact he never let us forget. Once we were allies he was incredibly generous. He was very liberal with his hard-earned cash. I was terrified of money. Damon knew how to use it to get what he wanted. He splashed it around, gave it to tramps. We went to the Town and Country Club to see the Pixies. He bought tickets for the three of us from a tout outside for sixty quid, which was more than I got a week to live on. It was a brilliant gig. We went to see quite a few gigs, the Happy Mondays, mainly bands that were on the cover of the NME. Damon nearly always paid.

  He was very at home in London. He’d grown up there, but he didn’t come across as a cockney. He was hard to place, actually. I liked him a lot by this time - we were becoming brothers-in-arms - but I never knew what he was thinking, not like Graham. I found Graham was often thinking what I was thinking; that’s one of the reasons Graham was my best friend. We went out drinking, the two of us, Damon and me, in New Cross, to get to know each other a bit better. He liked the theatre. He liked Hermann Hesse. He loved Spain, wore sandals and he followed the cycles of the moon very closely. He said his mum could do magic.

  We talked about music, but not about bands, really, more about what it w
as and how it worked. We both wanted to be in the best band ever shaped on earth, but all boys with guitars do. I always thought it might just happen to me. He was much more direct, full of plans, schemes and determination to make things happen. He had so much energy. That’s what creativity is, really, that vigour.