Our future depends on the future of the man in the gorilla mask
October–November 2001. Not so great apes, The New Avengers, and life in the last months of Planet Earth.
Post Everything. Pulp release their final album, We Love Life. 7 October Allied air strikes against Afghanistan. Anthrax attacks across USA. Richard Madeley quite possibly regretting dismantling of ‘Millennium cupboard’. George Bush signs executive order allowing military tribunals for foreigners suspected of terrorist acts against the US. Kathleen Soliah, one-time member of Patty Hearst-bothering Symbionese Liberation Army, withdraws her previous guilty plea. Timing is everything. Spice Girls announce an ‘indefinite hiatus’. Once again, timing …
In the aftermath to the 11 September attacks people are jumpy, more so than ever before. Low-flying planes making their final descent into Heathrow are viewed with reborn terror eyes by the traffic below on the M4; other forms of attack are imminent: chemical, nerve gas, germ warfare … anthrax. October becomes international anthrax month: traces of the stuff – hideously inconvenient white powder – are turning up everywhere, from Delaware to Tinytown. Cocaine consumption hits rock bottom at the Groucho Club and Soho House – no one wants to snort up a nosebag of sheep death. There is just a teensy-weensy bit of hysteria in the air. Then there is the ritualistic rooting out of the new boogie man, Osama someone or other, ah what the fuck, that name will never catch on. A brief moment of levity is achieved when tabloid newspapers learn that this Osama fucker spends most of his time crawling through a network of caves, has a kindly face, and is apparently quite a hit with ladies of a certain age. The levity is followed by war. In Afghanistan. No one has won a war in Afghanistan before, no one will win this war. In fact there are two unwinnable wars going on simultaneously (soon there will be a third), the aforementioned one and a new one: the War on Terror. Now the Britpop Prime Minister and his reluctantly Britpopping War Cabinet can really puff up and show us what they’re made of, which is unfortunately exactly what they do. In the months (and years) after the Twin Towers, to see the newly appointed Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, strutting around thinking he is the Duke of Wellington is the chance to see a man for whom the words has no self-awareness were surely invented. You see, this shower aren’t fit to be leaders of men, they don’t have the necessary militaristic chops. They are university-educated baby boomers, wondering whether that oh so longed for toke on a damp and floppy J will ever jump back to bite them on the long and winding path of ambition. It’s a long way from uni, all of this. A long way from Ugly Rumours and bad covers of ‘Brown Sugar’ (‘Gimme Shelter’ may have been preferable). Did this Prime Minister really think he was going to have to turn into such a shit-kicker when, in what seems like a lifetime ago, he was taking tea with Alan McGee? Does N. Gallagher still believe himself and aforementioned McGee to be, alongside the gurning, then incoming PM, ‘One of the five most important people in the country?’ With great power comes responsibility, and on the question of military matters, what exactly is the guy’s track record? Christ, this weasel doesn’t look like he could take responsibility for a battalion of Action Men. Luckily, he won’t have to. In the coming weeks that lead to air strikes against Afghanistan, our man – no, make that your man, or their man, certainly not my man – realises that he won’t need to do much shit-kicking. In fact all he will need to do is say yes, and that really suits him; for the one absolute that this PM knows better than anyone else is there is only ever one top dog, and in this case the unassailable top dawg is the President of the United States of America. ‘Yes, Mr President.’ So once the Britpop PM realises that all he has to do is invoke God and stand tall alongside Mr President, he gets a new look in his eye. It’s the same look that Martin McGuinness gets as his brain freezes over in banality whenever the IRA gets a mention. But the IRA have long gone, and this is a very different cell of morons they would have you believe. Terrorists are now everywhere, in the attic, in the cupboards, in the B & B down the road (they would have you believe), and this is nothing like the ‘halcyon’ days of the 70s and 80s when the Irish dunces held regular bombing campaigns on mainland Britain. Nothing like it. That’s what they would have you believe. They walk the walk, this lot, sort of ‘Oi, Straw, do I have to tell you again, stop fucking mincing, now drop and give me 50 press-ups’, and they give some sort of talk – Islam this, Islam that, cities that we’ve never heard of before become household names: Islamabad? I should cocoa. So there is all of this, and probably so much more, in the aftermath. But I don’t take much notice – not because I am still trying to finish a demo of ‘Girl’s Guide for the Modern Diva’, but because I am happier than I have ever been.
After the Pop Strike, Siân and I spend most of our time in Brighton, where in the town of lazybones we spend our weekdays lolling around on the beach in the September sun. I have become a character in a Ray Davies song – a rich idle rock star, with two houses, a sports car, and no prospects. (I also have a fairly acute case of writer’s block.) I figure that the best thing to do is enjoy my aimlessness, enjoy the fulfilment of End Times prophecy. I am in love and love beats everything – even Armageddon – hands down.
Black Box Recorder, meanwhile, are busy – busy putting the finishing touches to our third album. It’s not exactly a record that bears any sign of being informed by the onset of Judgement Day, quite the opposite. In the months and years after the World Trade Center attacks, broadsheet newspapers will dribble on in earnest prose (pages damp with clammy sweat wrung out from itchy nervous palms), wondering what the ‘artistic response’ to 11 September will be: not much, is the answer, a couple of plays and, you’d never guess, an Oliver Stone movie.35 For all their faults, and they are many, there is a perfectly good reason why artists are artists and critics are critics: artists don’t always take the bait. Critics do. With. Out. Fail – and without exception. It’s still a jaw dropper. BBR hand in our work to the record company and sit and wait. Actually, we’re pretty pleased with ourselves.
Not without reason. The album, eventually to be titled Passionoia, is pretty good. OK, ‘pretty good’ sounds like faint praise, but, on completion, if the ten tracks are not exactly watertight as a complete statement, then they do work a lot better together than on their own, with at least two killer songs amongst their number: ‘British Racing Green’, mainly written by John, and slightly taking the piss out of my newfound sports car ownership, and ‘The New Diana’, mainly written by me, and which for some reason was a struggle to get past ‘The Other Two’. The rest of the album exists in its own world of turbo-ironic supercharged ‘pop’. Electronic chimes crackle and a toy beat box purchased from Argos emits tiny-horse drums and silly cuddly toy squeaks as Sarah Nixey slays the populace like Purdey from The New Avengers. Even the loathed (by me at least) ‘Girl’s Guide …’ sounds feasible in this context. Hell, if the New Avengers had made a record then that record would be Passionoia. The label like the album as well, and think it an ideal follow-up to The Facts of Life. In strange days such as these, pop music is often given to the escapist knee-jerk reflex, and by the end of 2001 the flow is towards the ultra-ironic: electro-clash, apparently a nanosecond genre that refers to bands who, shall we say, have a strong Giorgio Moroder element to their music. Fischerspooner, a New York duo, are the perhaps unwilling pioneers of this nebulous movement.36 The poor sods have been signed for an amount somewhere between 46 pence and 72 gazillion bucks, depending on who you speak to, and one of them dresses up as an ape (this is a good thing). According to those who know about such things (this is nobody), the ’Spooner are going to do the business like no one has ever done the business before. I have a strong feeling of déjà vu. Anyway, this is all supposed to be good news for Black Box Recorder, because according to our record label we fit right in with this new ‘scene’. It is great at the age of 34 to be told that you are at the cutting edge of something that you’ve previously not heard of, especially when you have a strong instinct that this particular something might be about as cutting edge as a pair of child-friendly scissors, and is as secure in its place in the pop firmament as the string on a birthday balloon on a windy day in the light clasp of a toddler’s fingers. With all this in mind it is decided that the new BBR album should come out as soon as possible in the New Year. Why not, I think to myself, go with it? You feared the worst for this album and now you are quite fond of it, perhaps it is entirely appropriate that the future of this record rests in the luckless hands (paws) of two men dressed as apes. We are living in strange times indeed.
Then comes November. The planes over the M4 seem to get lower, the drivers of the cars below seem more nervous, and the fog of war gets denser. The world’s first light entertainment PM is now coming across as a weird Kim Jong-Il/Lionel Blair hybrid who seems to think he has a direct line to King Arthur; unfortunately we all know who he has a direct line to. And despite all the posturing, and give or take a few of the old guard of MPs who are currently being kept very busy in their constituencies, there is not a single member of this bloody Cabinet who can do a convincing line in macho. Throughout this dreadful and interesting time of human misery/history, we three Black Box Recorders are sitting pretty, three dysfunctional shamen of irony perched on a magic carpet. We are pleased (enough) with our work, and when Nude Records pays us the remainder of the advance, we are once again affluent. Siân and I whizz up and down the motorway in our fabulous sports car between our two pop star homes in London and Brighton. These are the days of expensive clothes, champagne, and parties – this must be what it felt like being Bryan Ferry in 1973. Except this is better – this is like being Bryan Ferry (in 1973) and the world is about to end. Hahaha. This really is the best of times and the worst of times … it’s Vile Bodies, it’s Goodbye to Berlin … and it lasts for about a couple of weeks, then the magic carpet is pulled from beneath our irrelevant little tootsies.
Mid-November 2001. I am lording it up on a Thursday lunchtime in our Brighton swank-pad. I have just booked in for afternoon tea at the Grand Hotel. Within seconds of me replacing the receiver the phone rings again. This is highly unusual, no one rings this number, it’s kind of off limits.
‘Have I got news for you,’ says Manager Charlie. This is a coded phrase: he uses it when there is no good news. Whenever ‘Have I got news for you’ issues forth from the other end of the ear trumpet it means, ‘We do not need to exchange pleasantries, they will only lead us off on a conversational tangent. There is bad shit on the horizon and now is the time to address it.’
‘What’s going on?’ I ask, with all the enthusiasm of a man who knows he is about to have his day/week/month/year ruined.
‘It’s your record label.’
‘Which one?’ I say, savouring my retort perhaps a little too much.
‘Nude,’ says Manager Charlie. ‘They’ve run into problems.’ I make a mental note to cancel afternoon tea at the Grand. I can see we are rapidly heading towards a day-ruined situation, but I still have hope. Sorry, did I just say ‘hope’? Pity the poor naïve fool. We have been here before: it is not untypical for Nude or any record label to run into ‘problems’ – most record labels are not just on first-name terms with chaos, they are in a torrid threesome with incompetence and stupidity. Only 18 months ago, just as ‘The Facts of Life’ single was about to be released, Nude promptly lost its own deal with parent company Sony. For a few awkward days it looked as if our one-hit wonder was never going to be.
‘It’s a bit different from the last time this happened,’ continues Manager Charlie, in a disconcerting manner, having followed my train of thought via telepathy. ‘Nude Records are in administration.’
Yep, we have hurtled through the ‘day ruined’ situation, not even stopping to wave hello to ‘week ruined’, landing bang on starters orders for ‘month ruined’.
‘You better explain it all to me,’ I sigh wearily to Manager Charlie.
‘You better sit down,’ he says.
‘Year ruined’ situation. It transpires that Nude Records owes a lot of money to a lot of people. The people it owes money to are called creditors. One of its creditors is the Inland Revenue. If there is one body that you don’t want to get into debt with it is the Inland Revenue. Actually you can’t get into debt with the Inland Revenue. If you do you will be shut down. It is time for Nude Records to stop trading. The company will go into administration, and all the company’s assets will be in the hands of the receivers. Nude’s assets are everything it owns. The assets will be sold off to pay the creditors what they are owed. That is the theory at least. At first, it looks like the worst thing that could happen to BBR is that we will not be paid the remainder of our advance and we will be free to seek out a new record label to release our album. Scant knowledge. In fact our album will become part of the holding company’s assets: we will have to wait for all the legal loose ends to be tied up before these assets – which would include previously released albums on the label like The Facts of Life, office furniture, promotional items, the master tapes for our new album, Passionoia, and Saul’s dog Marnie37 – can be put up for auction. There is a further complication to all this: because of a clause in our record contract, whoever ends up buying Nude’s assets will not be allowed to release our album (a) without our consent, and (b) without paying us the outstanding advance. The most likely outcome will be that whoever ends up with Nude Records’ old tat is unlikely to want to deal with BBR’s contractual stipulations. In short, Black Box Recorder are not legally allowed to sign a new record deal. We can seek out interested parties but we are not allowed to enter into a contract with any new business suitors until all the asset-stripping has been done. When not a soul alive – our lawyer, the administrators, the administrator’s lawyers – will even hazard a guess as to how long this process could take, you know that you and the devil are in some deep shit together. I’m not entirely confident that electro-clash and the men from New York dressed as apes will still be going strong by the time our ‘new’ album comes out, but against this tangle of red tape, legalese, and foreboding administration addresses of units in industrial estates in Brentwood, I’m not sure even The New Avengers would have stood much chance.
35 And Heathen? Bowie’s last decent album (albeit with relentlessly stupid bass sound).
36 Whenever it is announced that there is a new musical movement/trend/scene you can bet your mother’s liver that the ‘perpetrators’ of said movement/trend/scene consider themselves far removed from that particular albatross which is gleefully being attached to their not so broad shoulders.
37 I am joking of course.