Bit of a Blur Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.