After a gruelling worldwide first-album campaign, we set about writing and recording that difficult second album. I seem to recall desperately wanting it to be called ‘Bushy Hair, Bald Twat’, and I’ll admit it became a real bone of contention for me. Then I remember arguing for the title ‘Frottage’, a French expression referring to passengers on crowded tubes, trains or buses who gratuitously rub themselves up against desirable ladies. In my head, the artwork would have been the interior of a crowded rush-hour London tube train with the assorted passengers all dowdy in black and white except for the four band members highlighted in colour, in the act of committing ‘frottage’ on hapless victims. Sadly, these politically incorrect aspirations were to be dashed as things got correctly political.
During the recording of the album, it became apparent that Justin couldn’t bear to be in the same room as me. What’s more, I hadn’t had any meaningful dialogue with his partner, our manager Sue Whitehouse, in over a year. Then our front man decided he wouldn’t put vocals on my calypso reggae composition, which was a shame, as I was convinced it would make a great comeback single.
We spent months over-deliberating, holed up in the countryside and prey to monumental self-delusion regarding the prospects of our second album. I like to think I was slightly less deluded than the others, but that’s easy to say now. No matter how often our friends warned us that the public had tired of the joke, we all felt that with a mammoth budget and a top producer the sky was the limit.
Unfortunately, the sky’s a big place and once you get up there you realise there are no limits. Only the temptation to rest your head on those lovely clouds. Not for nothing do the Polish say: ‘An empty head is drawn to the sky like a balloon.’ And having all that choice means there’s only more chance of choosing wrongly. We had picked a producer called Roy Thomas Baker who had the humungous claim to fame of producing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, but he hadn’t had a hit now for 20 years and his ‘everything and the kitchen sink’ philosophy was diametrically opposed to what had worked for us on that first album.
Meanwhile, our guitarist Dan had turned into Beethoven. Unfortunately for us, the comparison went only as far as the ‘deaf’ bit, as he doggedly toiled away at his imaginary masterpiece in a world of his own. Then he developed a sudden interest in antiques, running up a 30-grand tab renting a highly sought-after 1950s vintage Les Paul. Alas, the longed-for gold dust was in short supply: only a six-month layer of the house variety on an unopened case. It was apt that the album’s finishing touches involved Elton John’s string arranger turd polishing till even he could turd polish no more.
Often, the trouble with life is, there’s only variety and nothing else. If you’re given a choice of two or three things to choose from, your brain can evaluate and make the choice, fast and efficiently – perhaps even instinctively. If there are a hundred things to choose from, however, a whole lot of time is wasted and indecision creeps in. Afterwards, you can never be sure whether you made the right choice, and a nagging feeling of dissatisfaction invariably creeps in. Less choice is better for creative people, because it forces human spirit and ingenuity to overcome obstacles – and that’s the starting point for invention.
But the budget kept on ballooning and the egos kept on clashing until I decided to test the theory that ‘paranoia is just seeing things the way they really are’. I hired my own accountant – just to check if Sue Whitehouse had made any miscalculations in the band’s finances.
When I rushed to announce the great news that my accountant had uncovered no such miscalculations and that my paranoia was unjustified, Justin announced, ‘It’s me or him.’
Everybody apart from me chose him.