I’m sitting on the bus and watching as two couples get onboard: an elderly Welsh couple and a slightly younger couple who sound like they are American or possibly Canadian but almost certainly tourists.
A couple of minutes later the driver arrives. He gets onboard, and then addresses the five of us in a manner that is far too formal for such an undersubscribed outing.
‘Hello and welcome to Day Trippers Buses. We’ll shortly be leaving Abergavenny and taking the scenic route through the Black Mountains to the historic town of Hay-on-Wye. You will then have two hours to enjoy the sights and foods before we return.’
As an afterthought as if answering a question yet to be asked, he adds: ‘Unfortunately there is no toilet on board this bus today.’
Then he squeezes himself into his seat, starts the engine, lets it tick over for a moment and pulls out of the station.
They keep sending you back to Germany.
They tell you that after the UK and the US it is ‘the biggest market share’.
They tell you that to ‘crack’ Germany is ‘to gain a foothold in Europe’.
And so like good little servants you do what you’re told.
You’re actually glad of the distraction from yourself. You’re glad of the three or four weeks of daily routine.
And so you fly back into Germany for a more comprehensive assault.
On places like Frankfurt.
Stuttgart.
Munich.
In an attempt to banish the recent bouts of self-pity you give yourself tasks to make each day more bearable and to get the best out of the experience that has been afforded you.
So you shop for mementoes of each town that you visit because you know you will never remember them otherwise.
In towns like Karlsruhe.
Tier.
Bremen.
You read only German authors for the entire trip.
People like Goethe.
Schopenhauer.
Hesse.
You punctuate your heavyweight bunk-bed reading sessions with trashy gossip magazines and European pornography, of which there is an abundance in all the service stations.
Porn mags like Busen.
Busen-Extra.
Busen Lesben.
You continue your regime of sit-ups and press-ups -what you call your ‘jail cell’ workout – and take swims and saunas to ease the hangovers. You veer from one extreme to another within hours: from exercise to oblivion.
In towns like Essen.
Sollinge.
Hameln.
You eat a lot of fruit during the day and drink a lot of vodka at night. You even grow to quite like the stiff malt breads and cold meats that you hated so much on the last tour. You exchange pleasantries with the American bands you find yourselves sharing cramped graffitied dressing rooms with.
Bands like Afghan Whigs.
Babes In Toyland.
Jawbreaker.
And by the time you fly back into Gatwick your suitcase is rattling with tacky trinkets.
Key-rings.
Bavarian beer mats.
Jars of unidentifiable pickled vegetables.
You dump them all in the bin outside the Duty Free shop before you’ve even left the terminal.
We leave Newport and are soon heading north, up towards the mountains.
The Welsh couple have a flask of tea out and the American couple are excitedly taking photos of the passing landscape from the window – photos that will almost certainly contain, at best, nothing but a washed-out, indistinguishable blur of sky and landscape, which I am sure is not their intention. Also their flash keeps going off so they’ll be lucky to see anything other than the reflection of the white flash. But I don’t tell them this. It is their business. It is their mistake to make.
Just as this is mine.
I have my forehead against the window to cool the beginnings of another nagging headache and I watch the sky slide overhead. From here it does not look real; it’s an impression of a sky, like a painter’s attempt to evoke quiet foreboding and its rolling, swirling potential.
The bus judders over a pothole and my head bangs against the glass with a deep thud.
It looks like rain.
Autumn comes and Sinead O’Connor tears up a picture of the Pope on live television and inspires a wave of death-threats. You are all immediately jealous that you didn’t think of it first, especially Nick, who excels in these matters.
Elsewhere the Church of England finally allows women to become priests.
America gets a new head of state, Bill Clinton. They call him ‘the first black president’ and ‘the rock ’n’ roll president’, even though he is neither. Such a country would never vote a black man or anyone deemed remotely ‘rock ’n’ roll’ as their leader. Not in your lifetime.
Windsor Castle is ablaze.
And you. You spend each night in a different British city.
From Glasgow to Exeter, Newcastle to Bournemouth you make a final assault on the UK for the year.
More than half of the shows are sold out, ticket prices have increased, the dressing rooms become cleaner and roomier, the rider more elaborate. Finally it feels like you are playing to your people.
Gone are those who came to hate you and abuse you. Instead, familiar pale faces fill the front rows.
Each of you has your own following now, identifiable in different section of the crowds. To stage left are the girls who think they have a chance of getting on Wire’s big penis and those who smile and laugh at his increasingly ridiculous onstage declarations and rants.
In the centre are those – boys mainly – who crush themselves up against the barrier to study James’s guitar parts up close so they can go home and replicate them later in their bedroom – a blatant substitution for masturbation -and the girls who sing each and every word back at him, their eyes closed, heads tilted back to the ceiling, their delicate white throats exposed.
Over to your side, stage right, are the clones. The thinnest, quietest and fiercest girls, usually dressed in clothes similar to those you wore on the last tour or, for those particularly fastidious fans, replicas of whatever it was you were wearing in the last NME shoot. Flowers fall upon the stage. Faces press against the tour-bus window. Their attention to detail and willingness to hang on your every move is unnerving. Flattering.
Disturbing.
But you enjoy these shows.
You enjoy these shows because you understand your role now.
You enjoy them because you just have to turn up and let the noise of the crowd and the band spur you on. You’re living on adrenaline alone.
The only downside to this tour is the perpetual cold.
— Why do we only ever tour in the British bloody winter? you ask, backstage at the National on Kilburn High Road, before your ninety-fourth and final show of 1992.
— It’s your fault, Edwards, smiles James. They think we like pain.
— Yeah, Edwards, says Nicky, one long leg crossed over the other as he picks at his bare feet. They think we actually enjoy suffering. I tell you something, though -coo – they’ve obviously never experienced the pain of chilblains.
You laugh and pour the second of your required three pre-show drinks, your breath hanging there in the air.
And then we’re out into Wales – the real Wales. The Wales of the Thomases – Dylan and R. S. I remember reading both at school for my O-levels where I learnt that in no other medium but poetry has my country been so successfully portrayed for what it really is: a beautiful country made ugly by the burden of the past, and by the brutality imposed upon – and perpetrated by – its people. A land of pride and pity.
R. S. Thomas said it best: ‘There is no present in Wales / And no future / There is only the past / Brittle with relics / Wind-bitten towers and castles / With sham ghosts / Mouldering quarries and mines; / And an impotent people / Sick with in-breeding / Worrying the carcase of an old song.’
And this is where I differ from my average fellow Welshman: I can recognize that this mess of a life is all my fault, and my fault alone. I refuse to blame God, Wales, the English, my heritage, my history or this bold and brutal and brutally beautiful landscape. I blame no one but myself.
No. We all must be accountable for our actions; without culpability we are inhumane and though I am many things, inhumane is not one of them.
It must be the idea of someone at the record company because it sure as hell isn’t yours: stick them in the priciest studio around and they’re bound to strike gold. Throw enough money at them and something will happen.
It has to.
So here you are, wandering around the gardens of a fourteen-bedroom Elizabethan house in deepest, grandest Oxfordshire, the place that belongs to that producer guy from Buggles. The one with the glasses. You’ve not met him.
It is bedecked with Tudor panelling and ornate fireplaces and has stone-floor rooms for better ‘resonance’.
James bloody loves it here; he’s like a kid let loose. With his cut-off sleeves and pumped-up pecs he’s even starting to look like The Boss. He’s letting his hair grow out.
When you leave them, James and Sean – who is wearing a furry Russian hat and tracksuit – are huddled in the corner, conspiring about multi-tracking, middle eights and other things you have no concept of. Wire meanwhile is practising and perfecting his trick shots over and over, the click-clack of balls emanating from the games room; his tall frame folded double, legs spread, tongue hanging from his mouth. He doesn’t even need to be here. In fact, tomorrow he’ll be gone – back to Rachel, back to the house for the week, back to his hoovering, his videos, his crisps, his domestic bliss.
You leave them to walk through the gardens where you stop to smell a flower, check to see no one is watching and then pluck it.
From the studio you hear the sound of cheering. Nick has just done something remarkable with the cue-ball, the black and a pint pot.
There follows a burst of feedback. A strangulated guitar riff. More cheering.
It’s probably time for a drink. You walk back across the lawn.
The bus is climbing now. The driver works down through the gears in order to tackle the curves of the road that keeps cutting back upon itself as it rises from the valley floor.
It’s nice out here. There’s room to gain a wider perspective on your surroundings that the city just does not offer. In London – or New York, Paris or Berlin for that matter – you can never see beyond the immediate street or two. Here though a complete recalibration of the senses is needed to fully appreciate the space that surrounds you so comprehensively. Large boulders that would dominate a city street lose their proportions in this broad landscape. Hills higher than any building in Wales look insignificant next to their older, taller siblings.
Perhaps this is where I need to be. Perhaps perspective is what I seek. Perspective and silence and solitude.
Perhaps I need to fully appreciate my own complete and utter insignificance – to feel lost amongst these ancient sleeping giants – and acknowledge that life is short and pointless and everything I have ever said or done is worthless.
You already know that.
I don’t know. It’s worth a look.
You won’t find anything out here but rain and rocks and grass.
Maybe that’s all I need. For what?
I said, for what?
Now it’s my turn to stay silent.
Strange dreams.
Dreams of a barren rocky outpost, like how you imagine Iceland to be. Nothing but rocks and water. No trees, no grass, no people, no birds. Just rocks and water; the sky pressing down on you. Dreams about Brad Pitt naked at the end of your bed, tugging at his cock, which turns into a swan’s neck in his hands. Dreams about Flavor Flav giving birth to a hundred little Flavs, all of them running around with miniature clocks around their neck, squeaking, ‘Yeah, bwoy-ee!’
Dreams about Snoopy. Dreams about being buried alive.
Dreams about home.
Anxiety breeds compulsive behaviour and you become increasingly obsessed with your appearance. No, not your appearance – your physiology. Appearance is cosmetic; you can hide it beneath clothes. It is your naked physical shape that bothers you.
You worry constantly that your drinking will physically manifest itself in that enemy of the rock god: the beer gut. You’d rather never have your picture taken again than be seen as fat and past it. You can’t play guitar, but the very best you can do is deliver the lyrics and look good.
So you do your sit-ups, ten at a time. You count them out. Then you do them again. And again.
Ten crunching cycles of ten.
Your head to your knees, morning noon and night.
You become addicted to the numbers, addicted to the dull throb in your abdominals. You lift weights too. Nothing heavy, just dumb-bell reps to gain a little definition.
Morning.
Noon.
Night.
You eat out only for practical reasons. You eat to gain energy to do your sit-ups, your weights and to stay alive.
You get it down to one late-afternoon meal per day. An omelette, or a baked potato, maybe a salad. A banana as a treat.
Then after that you consume nothing but vodka and water and cigarettes until the same time tomorrow, a regime that you continue for the duration of the making of the album.
Morning.
Noon.
Night.
Then drunk in the darkness of your room at the studio you lie back listening to mixes of the album on the huge and indecently expensive headphones you bought in Japan.
You lie there, your stomach cold and tight as if a rock is sitting in it.
What you hear on your headphones is a grungy sounding rock record with half-finished lyrics.
No, no, no, you think.
This is all wrong, you think.
There still might be time to change it.
To change it all.
To burn the tapes and start again. To start over. Right from scratch.
You throw off the headphones and leap off your bed but a head full of Absolut throws you lurching to one side. You bounce your head off something solid – the wall – and a dull pain clangs around your skull. Nausea fills your mouth and you have to squat down and catch your breath. Your ears ring and your temples throb.
Standing again, you feel your way along the wall to the light-switch. You turn it on and though your panic subsides, the pain in your temples does not. You put your fingers to your scalp and feel the beginnings of a bump. A big cartoon bump.
In your boxer shorts, T-shirt and unlaced boots you leave the residential annex and cross the gravel forecourt to the studio in the main house.
It is a cold, clear night.
The stars are out.
Beyond the building you can see the silhouette of distant woodlands scratching at the sky. A monkey-puzzle tree looms out of the darkness – tall, alien and foreboding.
You reach the house but the side door is locked. All the lights are out.
You bang on the door. You shout James’s name, but your voice sounds disembodied, stupid, lost in the night.
Small.
You walk around to the front of the house, your feet sinking on the soft lawn now.
The studio is a dead entity. There is no life in there.
The house is asleep.
The world is asleep.
Only you are awake.
As you stand there shivering in the moonlight it’s as if you have just woken up, as if you have been sleepwalking. The anger you felt only moments before has passed and you are suddenly woefully, sorrowfully sober.
Your head aches and you are shivering.
You wonder what you are doing here. Then, as if on cue, a cloud passes over the moon.
You are all alone.
We leave the dual-carriageway behind and it doesn’t take long before the B-road begins to take a steeper incline. I see the hills and peaks of the Black Mountains ahead of me. They don’t look real. They look like a film set.
It occurs to me that I now no longer have anything on me other than the hat on my head and what remains in the pockets of my anorak; everything else has been shed. In hotels, in woodlands, in the car. I conduct an impromptu inventory: water, cigs, lighter, gloves, money. A Mars bar.
This is little by which to identify me, other than my tattoos and my many, many scars, some of which have long since healed into barely discernible silver lines, while others – the more recent ones – are pink, keloid and swollen, fat like earthworms after a rainstorm.
Though I’m sure my paper trail of possessions means I could probably be tracked quite easily, I know by the time they find me it will be too late.
By the time they find me all that will be left will be bones in the dust. I will make sure of it.
The album is finished.
You don’t know how you feel about it, but you know it is not the pride that a father feels for his newborn child.
It is called Gold Against The Soul and it feels like it’s neither one thing nor the other. Maybe time will demonstrate otherwise, but to your ears it sounds like a rock record. A bit punk, a bit metal. A bit poetic, a bit vexed.
But mainly just a rock record.
Or maybe even an unintentional parody of a rock record.
Only it is not a parody, it is the new album by the Manic Street Preachers and it is your job now to go out there and talk it up, when all you want to do is start over. Or just scrap it. To get drunk and forget about it.
The sad thing is, you’re not angry, just deflated. Disappointed in the band. Disappointed in yourself.
Because you have done what all the bands who have ever let you down did before you, and which you said you never would: you have compromised what you had. Already.
You have tried to appease those clueless fuckers in Soho Square, in LA and in New York. In giving them what they want, rather than what they need, you have committed a cardinal sin. You have diluted your bile, dampened your fire.
You have delivered the clichéd difficult second album.
You are clinging to your careers like City brokers as a recession hits.
And that’s the worst thing of all – you have become careerists. Game-players.
Hit-chasers.
Cocksuckers.
Just as I’m nodding off, my head still against the cool glass, the twists and turns of the climbing road making me feel nauseous again, the driver slips a tape into his cassette player. There’s a few seconds of crackling before the sound of a male-voice choir emanates from the speakers. It is slow and quiet at first – nebulous, almost. But then the voices commingle to create something powerful and mellifluous, something so irrevocably Welsh, that when combined with the stark landscape around me and the bruising of the sky overhead, it causes tears to swell in my eyes.
This music – goodwill songs to be sung to the Welsh communities during the harshest and most impoverished post-war years – is utterly celestial. Cutting straight to my emotional core, it’s music that is beyond analysis and approximately one million times more powerful and meaningful than any song I have ever had a hand in writing.
Through it I hear Wales for the first time.
I see Wales for the first time too and it is enough to convince me that I am doing the right thing, because this is the music I want ringing in my ears for all of eternity.
You go to see Mike Leigh’s new film Naked at the Curzon – alone, back in London fulfilling pre-publicity obligations.
And there he is – twelve feet tall in a trench coat. ‘Johnny’. The perfect personification of the modern young man with too much on his mind. The lost boy. The vulnerable one.
He’s Mark E. Smith, he’s Jimmy Porter – and he’s you too, if you were Manc, acerbic and brassy. If you were motivated by anger and hatred rather than riddled with anxiety, possessed by doubt.
‘What if God just put us here for his own entertainment?’
David Thewlis’ Johnny leaves you dumbstruck; Johnny as moralist, Johnny as rapist, Johnny as Christ figure, Johnny as victim, Johnny as plague, Johnny as parasite. Johnny as the only living soul in the city capable of screaming.
Have you ever thought, right, that you may have already lived the happiest day in your whole fucking life and all you have left to look forward to is fucking sickness and purgatory?’
The film is so fucking perfect it makes you want to give up writing immediately. It makes you want to curl into a ball and roll off the roof of the nearest high rise. Because you know nothing you could ever say, do or write could come close to capturing this bleak era – this empty pit of a life – like Naked does.
You don’t want to fuck me. You’ll catch something cruel.’
Later: you know you are drunk and it’s too late yet still you’re dialling.
You’re dialling because your head is humming and you’re drunk and you’re alone and that film – that character – has got under your skin.
You’re in the Columbia again. The one they always put you up in when you’re in town because the bar stays open and they don’t mind if you spill ash on the crappy carpet. Because it’s the done thing, the industry way, to put their mid-level rock bands here. Because the music business is big on tradition and fearful of change.
You call the first number that comes to mind. The Wire.
It rings for a long time before you hear a muffled voice.
— Hello?
— It’s me.
— Rich? Is everything all right?
— Have you ever thought that you may have already lived the happiest day in your whole life and all you have left to look forward to is sickness and purgatory?
A sigh comes down the line.
— So you’ve seen Naked too, then?
— Yes. How did you know?
— I saw it last week.
— Oh, right. What did you think of it?
— It was great. What time is it?
— I don’t know. About three?
— Where are you?
— The Columbia.
— Are you pissed?
— A bit pissed, yeah.
— Right.
— Where are you?
— You know where I am: at home. You just called me here.
— In Wales?
— Yes, of course in Wales.
— Why aren’t you here in London?
You hear a muffled noise, a hand over the receiver, a voice in the background. Tones of reassurance from Nick.
— Because I don’t need to be. It’s you and James doing the interviews for the tour, remember?
— Oh yeah.
You remember your day: repeating yourself in a room in the Hall Or Nothing offices to journalists who laugh at all the wrong parts and take the funny bits seriously. James was there too, chain-smoking anxiously.
— Nick
— Yeah?
— I love you.
— I know you do, you daft sod. But you’re only saying that because you’re pissed. Is James there?
— Remember when we used to share a bed at Philip at Terri’s?
— How could I forget?
— Well, there’s something I never told you about that time.
— Go on . . .
You take another sip of vodka. It tastes like paint stripper. You wish you had some ice.
— Well. It’s a bit awkward, actually.
— Go on . . .
— Well
— What is it, Rich?
— Well, it’s just that your feet used to really fucking stink.
— Gee, thanks.
— Yeah. It was a sort of horrible sweetness, like rotting meat. I think it was that pair of Green Flash that you always wore.
— Oh yeah. They gave me athlete’s foot, they did. We burnt them in the end, didn’t we?
— Yeah. The thing is, Nick, I never minded. After a while I almost found it comforting, in a strange sort of way. The amount of nights I fell asleep with that stench in my nostrils.
Nicky laughs at this. Says nothing. You take a sip of your drink and carry on.
— It was a good time then, wasn’t it?
— Fucking hell, Edwards. Don’t get all nostalgic on me.
Your eyelids are getting heavy, your head lolling. The brown carpet of the Columbia is a swirl of colours like looking into a tub of Neapolitan ice cream on a turntable. The curtains swirl as if they’re billowing, but you know they’re not. The mattress sags in the middle from all the bodies that have lain there.
— It was, though, wasn’t it?
— It still is. It still can be.
— I don’t know.
— You’re drunk, that’s all. You always get like this when you’re drunk – you did back then too. Don’t you remember? We had the same conversation then as we’re having now. You used to sit there, all pissed and sloppy, pining for our bedroom days in Blackwood. And before that, before you even started drinking, you’d sit in James’ bedroom, saying how you wished you were a child again, how it all turned to shit when puberty hit. You were probably saying the same thing in your Mum’s womb: ‘Oh, woe is me, life used to be so much better . . .’
You drain the glass and suddenly feel really tired. Exhausted.
— Well, I think I’ll go to sleep now.
— OK, Rich. Let me know how the interviews go tomorrow. I’ll see you Thursday, anyway.
— Nicky.
— Yeah?
— Sorry for waking you up.
— That’s OK.
— And sorry for waking Rachel up too.
— That’s all right.
— And Nick?
— Yeah?
— You feet don’t smell any more.
— That’s good to know.
— Night, then.
— Night.
Ahead, where the road levels out, I see a passing point, a circle of gravel worn into the green thatch of grass that slopes down from the valley’s flanks on either side to a brief horizontal. Beyond that the valley forms a perfect uphill U-shape that the road continues to follow while the damp green mountains tower on either side.
I rise from my seat and using the backs of the chairs to steady myself against the rocking of the bus and my own light-headedness, walk down the short aisle to the bus driver. My hood is up.
‘I think I’ll get off here.’
‘What’s that?’
His voice comes over his shoulder, his eyes on the road.
‘I said, I think I’ll get off here. At this next stopping point.’
‘Get off? Why? You’re in the middle of bloody nowhere.’
‘That’s OK. I just fancy a bit of a walk.’
‘I’m not meant to drop people off along the way – this is a round trip to Hay-on-Wye.’
‘I appreciate that. But I think I’ll get off here.’
The driver slows down to pull over and as he does he turns his head to glance at me, even though I know he has been watching me periodically in his rear-view mirror anyway.
‘Going walking are you?’
‘A bit of a wander, yes.’
‘I’m not going to pick you up on the way back, you know.’
‘That’s fine. I know the area well. I’m actually meeting a friend in a little while.’
He lets out an exaggerated sigh of exasperation just to let me know that this twenty-second diversion from his usual protocol is far from desirable.
Behind me I can hear the whispers of the two couples who are also reading me up and down. I can feel their eyes on me.
The bus pulls to a halt and the door opens.
‘Thanks,’ I say. The driver just shakes his head.
I step down onto the tarmac.
The bus drives away.
The door closes. I’m alone.
No way are you ready to tour again. No way.
No fucking way.
You’re in no fit state. Neither physically nor mentally.
No way.
The dead time spent in expensive studios has softened you, distracted you. It’s deceived you into thinking you’re something you’re not.
The Sony people are enthusiastic – too enthusiastic. But only because they want a hit record. They certainly no longer trust your opinions; everything they loved about you – the hyperbole, the cynicism, the grandiose declarations – they now hold against you. It’s like they genuinely believed Generation Terrorists would sell sixteen million copies. A bloody debut record. It’s as if they feel hoodwinked and humiliated, though of course they don’t say that. They say the new one has ‘commercial potential’ and that two or three of the songs have ‘hit written all over them’. Their talk is dull and full of unrealistic expectations about Radio 1 playlists, marketing campaigns – and America. Always America. They’re fucking obsessed by the place.
There’s talk of thirty-, forty-date US tours. Talk of remixing the record for ‘American ears’. Talk of James overdubbing more and more guitar solos; talk of support slots with grunge-lite bands too awful to comprehend.
The information filters down through Philip and Martin who tactfully only provide you with the edited highlights. You all react differently. James is stoic, Nicky sardonic, Sean ambivalent.
And you. You’re filled with horror.
Horror.
But before any of that, Britain still needs to be broken, though deep down you know that it is you who will break first.
You can feel it in your bones.
In your bones.
Your brittle bones.
Still. You get to choose your own supports for the tour. It’s your agent’s one concession to sending you round the darkened grief-holes of Britain for the zillionth time, playing venues that undermine the profile you’ve built in the press.
And therein lies the problem. One of the problems, anyway. The way they write about you and the way you talk about yourselves far outweighs the dull reality of a semi-popular rock band playing to a few hundred people on a dark damp weekday in Northampton or Dundee.
Crawley.
Hull.
You only have yourselves to blame.
— Maybe we’ve shot our load, says Nick, and maybe he’s right, though none of you want to think about that; not when you’re meant to be enthusing about Gold Against The Soul to anyone who asks. And they do ask. That’s one thing you’ve got right. People are still interested.
People are interested because there is nothing that the British – the Welsh – like better than to see the failure of one of their own. They’re interested because they want to be there to watch your downfall.
Schadenfreude.
They want you on the cross and you might just climb up there for them.
But first: tour business. You compile a list of bands and collectively pare it down to two who you think will do the business, without blowing you away. Both have frontmen called Matty. Matty Hanson and Matty Blagger. They are both endearingly enthusiastic about the tour in ways you never could be.
You meet them both for the first time at a London studio for an NME cover shoot. It’s just the three of you, closed in tight.
Matty Hanson is a black kid from the Midlands who raps as Credit to the Nation and is currently riding high-ish off the back of a recent single that unashamedly samples that Nirvana riff. He’s instantly likeable, though smokes way too much weed for your liking. You feel stoned just being around him. Matty Blagger fronts Blaggers ITA, a left-wing anti-fascist/anarchist collective born out of the squat scene. He used to be a fascist until reading Orwell turned him. And now the Blaggers have signed to a major, and face having to do what all us other bands do: run the treadmill. The hamster wheel of touring and promotion.
And compromise.
Compromises at every turn.
You don a leather jacket as the flashbulbs flash and you stand there sandwiched between the two Mattys, thinking about the conversation that the four of you – Nicky, James and Sean – had back in James’ bedroom only three or four years ago, about how if any cover shoot were to happen they would only ever feature the four of you.
‘The four of us or nothing.’
Another compromise.
And you feel nauseous just thinking about the tour.
You pass the time thinking up ways to get out of it.
Judging by the litter bins and tyre tracks and the convergence of a number of footpaths, the turning point appears to be a regular stop-off or meeting place, though as it is a soon-to-be wet weekday there’s no one else here but me.
It is not yet raining, but it will. The air has that heavy feeling to it and my head hums, my vision briefly flickering from colour to sepia and back again in such a way that I’m unsure whether it is my eyes or my imagination playing tricks on me.
Or maybe it’s neither.
I light a fag under my hood where there is no breeze.
What now?
Mountains surround me. Ahead the road climbs up the pass beyond my line of vision, but I don’t intend to take the road. In fact, I don’t intend to do anything other than keep moving, so I impulsively opt to take the path that veers off up the left-hand side of the valley; the side of the valley that is not in shadow.
The shadow of the valley of death.
Standing among the mountains, it’s easy to see why man felt the need to create God. Or Gods. And if these mountains are the product of him, then I think I finally believe, and it is only now that I realize the subtext of this journey: to be closer to him.
The others call you Narcissus, the amount of time you spend staring into mirrors. And that’s coming from a bunch of vain bastards.
It has gone beyond merely ‘putting on your face’ and fixing your hair before the show. It’s gone beyond functional purpose and crossed over into self-obsession. One more manifestation of this fixation you have. This endless attempt to understand yourself.
You think of Narcissus as depicted by Caravaggio. The beautiful boy who spurns lover after lover to instead become enraptured by his own reflection. You think of Narcissus, pure and porcelain-skinned, his hair parted and his mouth open just so. Only when he tries to kiss the reflection does he discover that the boy staring back at him doesn’t exist.
Some readings say he took a sword and killed himself. Others had it that, unwilling to disturb the perfection of his reflection, he died from thirst right there on the banks of the spring. This is the interpretation that you prefer.
Sometimes you can look at yourself for minutes at a time. You stare yourself out, but you always blink first.
You always lose.
Other times you scour your face. It is as if you are trying to look beyond the outer cosmetic layer in order to see inside yourself, to get inside the real you, for only the eyes are capable are telling the truth. You stare into mirrors – dirty, cracked mirrors of different sizes, in different dressing rooms and public toilets and in pocket-sized compacts too, in the hope that you will find something more. Something beyond your own sad self; an entity you are already bored with. But you always seem to come up short. All you ever see is an ordinary blank face; a face in need of a shave.
Sometimes you barely recognize the man staring back at you.
It’s like your own lyrics say – and what can be more Narcissistic than quoting your own lyrics? – ‘ I need a reflection / To prove I exist.’
When Narcissus died, his physical form turned into a flower as beautiful and delicate as he was.
You wonder what will become of you.
Rebirth as a flower would be perfect, but you doubt that such a thing is possible.
Walking along the lower side of the valley, I pass stonewalled plots and silage sumps. Dirty water topped by a floating film of the colours of the spectrum sits in a series of old ceramic basins now used as troughs for sheep that are arranged across the hillside above me. Long-limbed pond-skaters break the surface rainbows, only for them to reconfigure again.
After half an hour or so I come across a sign that points to Offa’s Dyke, the pathway separating England from Wales. This was the boundary that ran from north to south to divide the two warring nations. Legend has it that Welshmen found on the English side would have their ears cut off, while lost Englishmen would be hanged.
Today on this stretch there is no one but me, a Welshman wandering the Welsh Marches, alone and definitely lost as I teeter along an invisible frontier of land and sky. A frontier of mind and body.
Life and death.
As I continue along my chosen path I start to murmur ‘Land of my Fathers’, before the rising wind takes my words away.
The hangover has you incapacitated and you want everyone to know about it.
You’re moaning and groaning and whingeing. You’re all on a train leaving Manchester, heading south. Gillian, your new publicist at Hall Or Nothing, is there. So is a label guy, and a journalist. It’s early and you’re scattered around the carriage in that barely awake state that seems to define touring.
You’re all sipping teas and coffees from plastic cups.
Gillian is Scottish and high-spirited. She can out-drink any of you and she won’t tolerate your bullshit. For someone in the music business she’s refreshingly straight-talking. She’s a good person to have around.
— What’s wrong today? she asks, sitting down beside you and prodding you in the ribs.
— Nothing.
— Well, what’s with the face?
— I don’t know. I just feel empty.
— Empty? With the amount you put away last night?
— No, I mean, spiritually empty. Maybe not spiritually . . . I don’t know. I suppose I’m tired and bored and my own worst enemy.
— Aren’t we all, though?
— Maybe. I suppose my problem is I can’t stand myself.
— You have a victim complex. Which is weird because half the girls I know fancy you.
— I’m just continuously addled with self-disgust, Gill.
— Self-disgust? It sounds like self-obsession to me, honey.
You can’t help but smile.
— Maybe you’re right. But that thought just makes me feel even worse. That’s a great quote, by the way. I might have to use it.
— I know I’m right. And you can have that one for free. She jabs you in the ribs again, then turns it into a tickle. I want a writing credit, though.
The path runs alongside a brook for a way. Though it is only about ten feet across, the noise from it is deafening as it winds over and around the smooth rocks. Half of a fallen tree lies prone in the water, its limbs charcoal-black and part-petrified.
I stand and watch it for a while, then pull myself out of the trance that the water put me into, then I follow the stream uphill for a mile or so, carefully stepping from rock to rock like a mountain goat.
The rocks are wet from the spray and swash of the beck and some are covered in a film of algae that becomes more and more and more treacherous, so at some point I veer to the left and onto a path that follows a steeper incline, up towards a sky of increasing portent.
It’s hard work playing the new songs. There are new chords that you have to remember how to play and the guitar hangs around your neck like a dead thing. For half the show you don’t even pretend to play it. It just swings there, bouncing off your hips, bruising them, the strap like a noose of your own making.
You feel no shame, though. No shame whatsoever. You’d prefer it if the guitar wasn’t even plugged in.
In fact, you’d prefer it if you didn’t have a guitar at all. Instead you could just stand there, drinking your drinks and watching the crowd watching the band watching the crowd right back.
You begin to wish you could just do two- or three-song mimed sets, like proper pop stars. They don’t even call them gigs. Public appearances, they call them. Three songs on a stage in the middle of some crappy shopping centre, then into the van and on to the next one. You could cram an entire tour into about four days.
Christ, you wish you were a pop star. The best fun you had recently was when Smash Hits asked you to review the singles. That was fun. Smash Hits pisses on all the other rags who try to intellectualize. Smash Hits understands that it’s all one big joke, so let’s have some fun with it.
Apart from the most ridiculous metal bands who exist to create a sense of escapism, rock music seems like such an outmoded concept today. Verse-chorus-verse-solo-chorus-long-drawn-out-ending-thanks-you-guys-are-the-best.
It’s all fakery. Pop stars don’t even pretend to be musical. They just do what they’re told for a bit, sell three million records then retire.
Kylie doesn’t have to pretend she can actually play an instrument. Give me Duran Duran over Led Zep any day; Andrew Ridgeley was always far cooler than Joe Strummer. It’s just that it has taken you until now to realize this.
Ridgeley had it right, actually: mill around looking pretty. Keep your mouth shut then leave with a girl on each arm. Ridgeley never blew his cool by trying to make solo records. That was beneath him. It should be beneath you too, just like bothering to learn to play a guitar at this stage in the game is beneath you.
Why bother? You’ve got this far.
So that is the new outlook you adopt – you will celebrate your ineptitude. You want to end the fakery.
You even lobby the band about it.
— Let me go out there without that bloody thing, you say to James, nodding at your pristine new black Stratocaster.
It’s ten minutes before you’re due onstage in – where? – Newcastle? Yes, Newcastle. The Toon. You can tell by the accents of the voices in the corridor.
— But what will you do?
— I don’t know. I’ll wing it. I’ll just wander about looking bored, or confrontational. Go on – it’ll be a statement. The last honest statement in rock ’n’ roll.
— You’re off your rocker, Rich.
— But it’ll be brilliant, you counter, warming to your own idea. Everyone knows I can’t play it anyway.
— It’ll mess with the symmetry. How will I be able to concentrate if you’re lolling about the stage, all pissed and sloppy?
— Yeah, Edwards. Do a bloody day’s work for once in your life. Lazy work-shy get.
This from Nick, sitting in his jockeys in the corner.
— How about I don’t go on at all, then?
— How will that work? asks James. Are you going to do a mime or something like that bloke Howard Jones used to have onstage?
Sean snorts at this.
Your pour yourself another drink and twist up your face.
— Hmmm, I don’t know. Maybe I could just mingle in the crowd.
— Doing what?
— I don’t bloody know. Just being myself, I suppose. Shaking hands and that.
— Shaking hands, guffaws Nicky. Get her. Like the Queen or something. Queen Richard of the principality of Fuck-Up. I’m all for it. I’d join you myself but you know how I hate the public . . . so dirty . . . so many germs.
A head appears around the door.
— Two minutes, lads.
You knock back your drink.
— Come on, your majesty, says James fondly grabbing you in a headlock. You’ll be all right. Everyone knows you’re the best worst guitarist of your generation.
— Now that, you manage to say through the choke-hold, that is very true.
I never learnt Cymraeg. Never saw the point, really.
Sometimes you have to accept the modern world and look forward; sometimes you have to follow the consensus and the consensus is that whatever you feel about the country, Welsh is a marginalized language. It’s kept alive by historians and patriots and academics but it serves no real purpose other than to remind us of what went before. Of what we have lost.
Everyone knows monoglot Welsh speakers are virtually extinct creatures, so it remains a language kept alive by those who speak English too – an irony I have never been able to get my head around.
Besides, I have never looked to the past to learn my lessons, I’ve discovered everything that I need to know through experience. Through going out there and seeing it for myself.
And what a lot of good that did you. All the things you’ve seen and done and here you are, wallowing in your own little self-created cesspit.
Actually, I no longer see it as a predicament.
Oh really? So what do you see these mad wanderings as?
A solution.
A solution.
Yes. It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? It’s you who’s been telling me to stop whingeing. It’s you who’s been telling me that I need to disappear and never come back. And it’s you who’s been torturing me for months and months now.
Fine – but I didn’t expect you to bring us on a fucking hike.
Who cares? Who cares where we’re going? I don’t. I no longer care. I just want to keep walking and walking.
And then what do you plan on doing, exactly? You’re not even dressed properly.
And then nothing. You’re missing the point: I have no plans. Plans hold you back. I’m living in what few moments there are left. And I’ll do that by keeping on walking until I meet the horizon, or the earth falls away, or I drop. The point is, from now on I stop thinking. The intellectualizing is over. The arguing with myself is over. The worry ends. Because guess what? I no longer care. I. No. Longer. Care.
I’m half dead already.
Your second album gets worse reviews than your first, but enters the charts at No. 8, a rise of five places from the debut. So you are officially a ‘Top 10 band’.
As your label are quick to remind you, however, it’s a quiet week, they’ve spent over a hundred thousand on marketing alone – including wallpapering London with the cover image – and some cowboy called Garth Brooks is out-selling you ten to one.
But the band is too busy enjoying this tour to over-analyse things. You’re just glad to be touring during the summer months for once, glad to have the band’s tight circle friends out with you.
For the first time you appear as a five-piece, with Producer Dave playing some keyboards onstage, his long blond hair flowing behind like some sort of ’80s soft-focus/soft-porn AOR dream.
Nick’s brother Patrick joins you to man the merchandise stall. Philip and/or Martin come to most shows and are finally able to relax and enjoy some of the rewards from the three years of work they have put into your band. Gillian, Terri and Caffy come along too and you realize you need these people. You need these people to pull you back from the mirrors, the broken bottles and the shadows. You especially need women around you; women are cotton wool made flesh.
You need them all because onstage, or in interviews, or being mobbed by fans outside the venues, you are someone else. You are the withdrawn rock star. The tortured guy.
That ‘Richey Manic’.
That dickhead.
Not you.
Him.
That dickhead.
I keep thinking of a remote quarry high up in the hills. It’s about a hundred yards across and it’s been a long time since it was active. It’s so remote that even the tracks leading to it are now buried beneath heather that now houses nesting grouse. Scattered all around, composite machinery parts rust like retired fireballs and huge rocks nestle in the dirt and weeds that nestle around them. The whole thing feels like another planet, like no human has ever been here.
I pick up a stone and throw it at an oil drum and the quarry explodes with tiny flashes of white.
Rabbits. Many rabbits scatter in all directions, their white tails bobbing. Across the shale, over rocks, down their burrows. I feel like I have been here before, only I haven’t because the quarry does not exist in physical three-dimensional form, instead I have carved it from my own imagination and allowed myself to wander deep into it.
So deep into it, in fact, that it feels like there is no way out. And one phrase keeps repeating in my mind: a good place to find your God.
Each member of Bon Jovi has their own dressing room; you have a dingy Portakabin to share between the band and crew. Forty-eight bottles of lager, sandwiches and a fruit plate tucked in the corner.
You don’t care, though. When they offer you the support slot you nearly bite your agent’s hand off.
You’re just bemused to be here.
You’re bemused because this is a slice of the big time. Bemused because even your own fans will be confused by this contradiction, this major act of selling out.
And you’re bemused because Bon Jovi represent everything that the Manic Street Preachers hate about rock music.
You hate them because they sing crowd-pleasing songs about girls and cars and cowboys riding steel horses off into the sunset.
You hate them because their singer wears lifts in his shoes and has caps on his teeth.
You hate them because they are still living in an MTV-imagined version of reality.
But mainly you hate them because they have the worldwide success that eludes you.
How shallow you are.
A couple of weeks later, during your first time off in months, in the final days of summer, Nick marries Rachel.
He grins all the way through the service.
This was always going to be the way for Nick, your twin in glamour, the light-hearted yin to your troubled yang, the least rock ’n’ roll man – and therefore the most rock ’n’ roll man – in this sordid game. Nick who enjoys hoovering and dusting, and who doesn’t care who knows it. Nick who likes telly and crisps. Nick who loves domestic bliss. Nick who would rather stay at home than tour. Nick who has found love and happiness. Nick who has a fulcrum to his life, where you only have chaos.
On the day, at the ceremony, you are simultaneously insanely jealous, ecstatic, sad, nostalgic, embittered, enamoured and suddenly, perhaps for the first time, in love with the idea of a life partnership.
Two days later it is business as usual as you’re back on Top of the Pops, your roadie Paul donning a Mickey Mouse mask and taking the honeymooning newlywed’s place stage left.