The streets outside bristled with ferocious morning birdsong. My neighbours were yet to rise: I had NW6 to myself. I sat down at the kitchen table, removed a pinch of Golden Virginia, dropped it into a Rizla paper, rolled, lit and exhaled. Coughing, I started to write.
Saturday, 17 February 2001
The whisper tears out of central Havana, through the police roadblocks around the Karl Marx Theatre, and smashes into the teenage throng outside the venue. It goes: ‘Castro is coming, Castro is coming! Fidel Castro is coming to see the Manic Street Preachers!’
It soon sets the backstage car park alight, too. The Manic Street Preachers’ management start ushering the group’s immediate entourage inside, into the warren of stageside hallways, keen that nobody from the inner circle should miss any possible meeting with the iconic Cuban leader. Back outside in the car park, burly men wearing white suits and earpieces arrive and peer beneath parked cars. It is 8.15 p.m.; fifteen minutes to show time.
Suddenly, a delegation of Cubans sweep into the Manics’ dressing room. ‘Good evening,’ booms the Minister of Culture. ‘Would you like to meet someone very, very important?’ Nicky Wire raises his eyebrows: ‘Of course.’
‘OK, just the band and management,’ nods the Minister, clapping his hands together with finality. ‘Follow me, please.’
And they’re off, walking at pace down a corridor that runs parallel to the stage and into a small, brightly lit antechamber. Those not in the band or management are left on the other side of the stage looking desperately across into the room, aware that history is being etched close by.
‘Bugger that,’ says Rob Stringer, Epic Records’ UK chairman. ‘I’m not missing this.’
He bolts across the stage. Those remaining – fellow label bigwigs, a Channel 4 film crew and me – take one look at each other and run in his slipstream. The first door is slowly but firmly being closed as Stringer arrives, so we chase around to the side door where a security man stands guard. He looks at us, looks across at the tour manager, who nods urgently, and then beckons us inside.
The Manics sit on the edge of one side of a square couch, grinning hysterically. On the other side, behind his famous long beard and wearing his trademark green military uniform, sits Fidel Castro.
The atmosphere crackles as the revolutionary dictator waves his arms expansively, talking to the band in Spanish. Fidel Castro is the face of Cuba. He is also one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable and enigmatic figures. In January 1959, after a brutal guerrilla war against a corrupt, right-wing government, he led his army down through the Cuban mountains into Havana, where he seized power to the delight of the masses – and to the horror of the Cuban ruling classes and their allies, the United States. He has been in power ever since. He has survived many attempts on his life, several reportedly masterminded by the CIA, presiding over a communist state only ninety miles from the US for over forty years.
He is a seventy-four-year-old mass of living history with thick, grey hair. Right at this moment, though, he’s apologising to the Manic Street Preachers.
‘I wanted to come early to be able to meet you,’ he says through an interpreter. ‘Because I’m afraid that at 10 p.m. I will have to leave for an unavoidable engagement. But if you start at 8.30 I will be able to listen to your performance.’
‘It might be a bit noisy,’ says Nicky Wire.
‘I will try to adapt my ears to the noise,’ Castro replies. ‘It cannot be more noisy than war, can it?’
‘Maybe,’ laughs Wire, blushing.
Like the Manic Street Preachers, I was pleased that Fidel Castro had decided to come to their gig. I needed an intro to the NME piece I was writing and they needed a reason to be there. Until Castro rocked up, we were both struggling.
Though we were operating at slightly different levels of commercial success and expectation, both our careers had entered choppy new waters.
I was no longer the lord of all I commissioned, able to fill NME with whatever I fancied while landing myself with all the plum jobs, ideally in Los Angeles on a major label dime, staying at a fancy Hollywood hotel with a nice pool. Now I was at the mercy of whatever my more skilled, scrupulous replacement from The Face Alex Needham needed to plug the features well with each week. I had to fulfil my word quota, after all. So I became the semi-reliable, jobbing NME writer once more, accepting every commission thrown my way and consequently interviewing some artists about whom I was ambivalent at best. I did not want to sleep on a tour bus between Glasgow and Newcastle with earnest hardcore punks Amen, nor listen to Lostprophets’ future sex criminal Ian Watkins intensely detail his philosophies over lunch, but I knew the rules of the game. As long as that £2,000 after tax hit my bank account every month, then I would churn out 1,500 serviceable words about Incubus’ needy pop-rock if asked to. My reward for this ego readjustment was a juicy cover story from time to time, such as this trip to Havana with Manic Street Preachers.
The Manics, meanwhile, were also enduring their own status turbulence. They had evolved from the situationist punks who’d sprung out of the unfancied Valleys town of Blackwood in South Wales in the early nineties into a chart-topping anthem-rock band by the decade’s second half. Now, though, they were searching for a purpose and meaning beyond being a band whose albums went platinum. This was unusual in an arena-sized band. Normally, the purpose of a big group was to continue being successful. The Manics’ quest had an existential element too. What was it all for?
In the beginning, it was to deliver lyrical messages and a world view generally unrepresented in rock music with a commercial purpose, etched in the most starkly poetic terms by lyricists Richey Edwards and bassist Nicky Wire. Songs critical of global capitalism, the monarchy, detailing anorexia and mental illness. About child prostitution, the Holocaust, capital punishment, totalitarianism. Not the usual bye bye baby, baby goodbye schtick.
Then, after Edwards had disappeared from his London hotel never to be seen again in February 1995, the mission became to claw their way free from the unresolved grief, to endure. They hit upon a less abrasive sound in Edwards’ absence, something more melancholically epic for two huge albums.
By 2001, though, they knew they needed to break the pattern. They were looking for a reason to be. A way to be, too. Now in their thirties, they were entering a period of existence that they hadn’t mapped out together when teenagers dreaming up their band’s trajectory: middle age. They wanted to stand apart again and what better way to differentiate yourselves from every other big group than by launching your album in Havana with a historic concert, the first Western band to play in communist Cuba? It was mould-breaking.
And yet, once we arrived in Havana, it became clear that the mission had grown far beyond the group’s control. This was state business. The country had opened up for tourists in the late nineties and the city of Havana was being rebuilt significantly with that influx of foreign currency. It appeared unrecognisable from my previous trip there with Black Grape in 1995. Chunks of apartment buildings were no longer falling off unannounced into the streets. Beggars had been swept under the paving.
This time, Cuban officials were keen to deliver as much exposure for Havana as possible. Dozens of media organisations from around the world were flown in and put up at the lavishly revamped Hotel Nacional, where arriving guests were greeted with warm towels, cold mojitos, a mariachi band in full garb playing ‘Guantanamera’ and a printed itinerary detailing the multiple organised visits to cultural centres we’d be expected to join. Mine also included an invitation aboard the band’s sightseeing tour of Havana the next morning.
I hopped on the coach alongside seasoned NME photographer Tom Sheehan, a dozen record label people, a two-man HTV camera crew and the band. Sheehan, a widely loved anecdote machine with his own bespoke range of Cockney rhyming slang, was charming the Manics with some tale of yore when the band’s security Steven Head jumped on board.
‘What are you doing on here?’ asked Head, an outwardly gentle giant who also took care of Oasis among other vulnerable mega-acts. ‘Band are in that convertible.’
We looked out the window. Beside us sat a 1959 red Cadillac with its top down and a cameraman sitting in the passenger seat.
‘I’m in the Jeep with the rest of the Channel 4 crew,’ continued Head. ‘Everyone else is following in this coach.’
The convoy set off, the convertible leading the way. The trio of Manics sat in a row in the back seat, their hair blown erratically in the sea breeze as they were filmed both from the passenger seat and by the Jeep behind. The artifice of the set-up typified the jaunt to Cuba for the Manics. What had started off as wheezy blue-sky thinking from the band had grown into a huge banquet of opportunity for all. So, instead of the band quietly sightseeing a new city, it had become a three-vehicle, thirty-person, two-film-crew caravan.
It was not the fault of the band that everything had grown so overblown. It was the era they were trapped in, the spirit of the age.
Music culture was clogged. The clogging had started towards the end of Britpop, around 1997, when British groups a little way into their careers felt compelled to deliver Big and Important statement albums: OK Computer, Urban Hymns, Mezzanine, Be Here Now. These huge sellers set the tone. Everything had to be Big and Important: albums, tour production, string arrangements, videos, coats. Soon, Big and Important morphed into Dark and Heavy, an affliction that affected British rock music in particular. This was very bad news for a magazine like NME, whose stock in trade was the British youth culture associated with kids making zippy, chaotic alternative guitar and rhythmic music. That kind of carry-on didn’t really exist in the late nineties. Everyone, even new groups like Starsailor or Embrace, were playing acoustic guitars, recording at Abbey Road and hiring string ensembles.
NME was always at its best when the writers, bands and readers were roughly the same age. In 2000, the writers were old, the bands were often older and the readers were retreating. Historically, the paper could shake off any such cultural lethargy by engineering scenes around new acts. All they ever needed was two or three bands in vague geographic, sonic and sartorial proximity to each other. Baggy, Shoegazers, Grebo, the New Wave of New Wave … each made-up movement provided weeks of copy and momentum, delivered by the youthful exuberance of new bands overjoyed to be recognised in print, until that thrill wore thin and we moved on to a new made-up scene. The nuclear blanket bomb of Britpop had pretty much killed all that off, though. The earth was scorched.
I was sent to report on one scene cooked up in desperation by the paper in 2001: the New Acoustic Movement. Not everything had to have the impact of punk but NAM was never going to catch alight. Shaggy-looking blokes in woolly hats sitting on stools mumbling about break-ups to an acoustic guitar in a cellar filled with friends and family members. Nobody was changing their hair or wardrobe for that. (Eventually James Blunt and then Ed Sheeran a decade later did manage to jazz the concept up successfully for the mass market.)
Meanwhile, there was a steady flow of dynamically brilliant rap and R&B drifting across the Atlantic, but our interest was always a one-way street. England was just another boring stop on the deathly European promo schedule for the bigger American stars. I set off to interview many rappers while in a state of nervous devotion and left their company disillusioned, fearful of trying to turn our disastrous meeting into a cover story. The Fugees turned up nine hours late and gave me ten minutes each in a hallway backstage in Wolverhampton. Eminem greeted me on his tour bus in Dallas before pulling his hat over his eyes and shrugging disdainfully through our conversation. Puff Daddy invited me into his five-star Park Lane lair and spent our allotted thirty minutes picking out photos of himself with his entourage. I flew to Seattle for a fifteen-minute audience with 50 Cent squeezed between his TV commitments. Two star rappers actually went the whole hog and fell fast asleep in the midst of our hard-hitting summits: Warren G, recently arrived from LA, drifted off in an armchair in the moodily lit bar of his Kensington hotel, while Ja Rule greeted me with the words ‘I was at the club last night’, then lay down on the sofa of his West End hotel suite, pulled a cover around his shoulders, rolled over and fell soundly asleep. I let myself out.
Maybe it was me. It probably was, though few if any of my contemporaries fared much better. We were just variously skilled at covering our tracks. Only the eloquent, ferociously engaged Chuck D of Public Enemy lived up to expectations.
And yet I kept putting myself in the firing line because I loved hip-hop. I wanted it to be covered on an equal footing in NME. Did our core readership want to read it though? The dismal truth that nagged at successive NME editors about hip-hop was provided by the sales figures. No matter how many cutting-edge or hit rap stars made the cover, the only news-stand spikes were provided by young men holding guitars. Nothing else pushed the needle. In eras of solid sales, NME could withstand a few dips for the greater good of musical breadth and diversity. In a time when the figures were generally on a determined decline, those sudden plunges were disastrous.
Flicking through the first four months of 2001’s NME covers is chastening. The editorial team were trying to readjust the age ratio, but the poverty of the run clearly demonstrates what the paper and the labels were up against, and why the Manics playing Cuba demanded such a feeding frenzy: the story provided nourishment in a desert. There was nothing going on. They were living on vapours.
OK. If you insist. Let’s inspect the damage.
6 Jan: 32 New Stars for 2001
13 Jan: 100 Events That Will Happen in 2001
20 Jan: JJ72 (who?)
27 Jan: Sex, Drugs & Rock Journalism: The Outrageous True Confessions of NME’s Greatest Writers! (£6.26 on eBay, to inspect the full horror)
3 Feb: NME Awards Tour: Amen/Starsailor/JJ72 (who?)/Alfie (I wrote this, but have no memory of JJ72)
10 Feb: Hip-Hop Special (a drawing of a young man in a baseball cap next to the graffitied legend How Hip-Hop Stole the Show. Newsstand apocalypse)
17 Feb: NME Awards Special: Bono and the Gallaghers
24 Feb: Popstars (a cover about a TV talent show to unearth the future members of pop band Hear’Say)
3 March: Manic Street Preachers in Cuba (hello)
10 March: Stereophonics
17 March: Gorillaz & Daft Punk, an illustrated cover
24 March: (I will simply relay the cover exactly as it appears, yellow and white text on black background): BRTN’S YTH: 2FCKD 2CARE
FEATURING: OXIDE & NEUTRINO, SUGABABES, THE GOVERNMENT, IRISH SPEEDFREAKS, GLASGOW METALLERS, LONDON GAYBOYS & DRUGS
31 March: Missy Elliott
7 April: Miami Dance Conference (the word MIAMI spelled out in cocaine on cleavage in a pink bikini)
14 April: Starsailor
21 April: We Love NY: Your Guide to the Most Rock ’n’ Roll City on Earth
28 April: Destiny’s Child
The culture was unmoored. It appeared as if the Manic Street Preachers were holding the first four months of the year on their back.
By coming to communist Cuba to launch their album with an unprecedented gig, the Manics were at least trying to kick against the flatness of the age, to create a new angle for big-band rock music to operate from. But as an A&R man at Universal Music was fond of saying at that time when discussing potential signings: the shit was bigger than the cat. The era couldn’t be so easily fixed.
‘Next time,’ suggested the Manics’ MD at Sony Rob Stringer dreamily, as he watched the band’s NME photoshoot be filmed by both UK TV crews in Plaza de la Revolución, beneath a massive iron mural of Che Guevara, ‘why don’t we have the album launch in Monaco?’
Singer James Dean Bradfield shrugged. ‘It would be no more uncomfortable personally, Rob,’ he replied.
‘Or how about Barbados?’ continued Stringer, enthused. ‘We could say that it is ideologically imperative that we stay at Sandy Lane Beach Resort. What do you think?’
After the concert at the Karl Marx Theatre, there was a bash in a grand hall in the gardens of the Nacional. As we gathered awaiting the band, a small-talk rumour quickly swept the party that the hall was the same location as used in The Godfather Part II scene when Michael Corleone tells his brother Fredo that he knew he’d betrayed him. ‘You broke my heart, Fredo!’ Then the army arrive. The revolution had begun. In fact, though the scenes were set in the Nacional, filming had taken place in the Dominican Republic, not here. It became an incidental fact to strike with disappointment from reporters’ notebooks upon our homecoming embrace of Google. Looked similar, though.
As in The Godfather Part II, Fidel Castro had also crashed our do, entering the balcony of Karl Marx Theatre’s auditorium to the dramatic drone-rock strains of Queens of the Stone Age’s ‘Regular John’, which was coincidentally cued by Manics’ tour DJ Robin Turner at that precise moment. Castro stood on the balcony and waved along to the music, absorbing his three-minute standing ovation before the Manics walked on. Fidel skipped the aftershow, but the party was star-studded with local legends nonetheless.
Waiting to greet the band as they entered the Nacional ballroom were Olympic champion middle-distance runner Alberto Juantorena and three-time gold medallist heavyweight boxer Félix Savón. For full-time sports nut Nicky Wire, this seemed a bigger thrill than meeting Fidel Castro.
‘You’re a legend you are!’ Wire said with a squeal to Savón, as the granite-jawed fighter repeatedly patted diminutive drummer Sean Moore on the shoulders, expressionless. ‘You’re a legend because you always beat the Americans!’
As Savón drifted across the almost-busy dance floor with a salsa shuffle, I stepped out into the gardens to take the air and write a couple of quotes in my pad in case I forgot.
‘Night, Ted.’
I turned round to see Nicky Wire striding up the path to the hotel. Why was he leaving his own bash?
‘Oh, it’s not really my thing, partying,’ he replied, with a smile. ‘Besides, I wouldn’t want to tarnish any of it. It’s been such a lovely evening.’ He gave me a little wave. ‘Good night, then.’
With that Wire headed along the path, back into the lobby towards his room, the reupholstered penthouse with its view of the glistening harbour, to call his wife and tell her all about his evening, the night he played his music for Fidel Castro and threw his arms around Félix Savón.
I finished writing the piece and flicked the kettle on. What now? The crushing silence that stalks a freelance writer between jobs settled upon me once more. I was either rushing to get something finished in time, in panicked mental overload, or I was bereft, blank, staring for hours from the kitchen window at the little pile of cigarette butts my neighbour had forced through the fence, uncertain if I’d ever work again.
I was idly hitting the send and receive button on my email, hoping that it might squeeze out a reply from the Observer Magazine, when the door knocker sounded.
Postman. My little mate Keith who was always happy for a few moments of chat on the doorstep about QPR’s latest calamity. He’d introduced himself as a fellow supporter when delivering my season ticket and usually had plenty of insight to share about the club’s steep slide from London’s top team to the foot of the second tier in less than a decade. Neither of us realised that much worse was soon to follow, as relegation and financial apocalypse in the form of administration awaited that summer.
‘Have you got anything for me?’ I asked eventually.
‘Oh sorry, mate,’ he said, rustling through his sack. ‘Here.’
He handed me a small but heavy brown mailer. It had been sent from New York. I recognised the handwriting. I thanked Keith and walked down the hall, back into the kitchen, where I unpacked the mailer at the table.
It was from my youngest brother, Daniel. Daniel had gone to New York University after high school in DC, then he’d landed jobs at a couple of small indie and electronic record labels in the city. The previous summer he’d come over to London with his girlfriend to visit, a trip to Reading Festival high on their list of attractions. There, we introduced him to Laurence Bell who ran Domino Records. They got on so well that soon after his return Daniel opened the US office of Domino, operating from a desk in his Union Square apartment, with visiting bands often crashing on his floor when touring. I assumed this package was something to do with Domino, a first US signing perhaps. I tipped it out on to the table.
Out fell ten or twenty identical grey CDs in slipcases. In white lettering stamped across each read the word Interpol.
There was a card. It wished me well, sent me love and respect, and wondered if I might want to listen to Daniel’s newest demo EP from his own band Interpol, with whom he played guitar, wrote music. Maybe I could pass a few copies around my circle of music friends?
Flustered, I put the CDs back into the mailer for later and walked down the corridor to the bedroom, where I changed into my running gear. I needed to clear my head. I didn’t have time for this right now, for my brother’s band. I was just too busy.