The first album went gold the same week the second got to number one. The songs on All Wine... were credited to me. Dave and Christine shared a twenty per cent arrangement fee. That had led to some tension, but I felt I was in a position of power; nobody else in the band had written anything worth recording on anything other than a cassette machine. If what I said didn't go, I would. Take it or I'll leave.
Dear God, such arrogance shames me now.
UK tour; breaking in the States so over there for a two-week whistle-stop promo tour, answering the same questions and waking in Holiday or Ramada Inns and staring at the ceiling and wondering, Where the hell is this?, then back into the studio to record Gauche, and then, thank God, a rest.
Why do I remember these pastorals?
We'd recorded Gauche at Manorfield Studios, in Herefordshire; Lord Bodenham, socialite and photographer, had put us up at his little place while we were working. This wasn't just sixties style Hey-look-how-hip-I-am; he was a major shareholder in ARC. Took the snap on the back of the first album, even though everybody remembers the photo on the front; a solid tear of 24-carat gold caught with very fast film as it smashed into blue-stained water with a thin covering of ice (publicity made a lot of the fact that it was real gold and the tear-shaped blob weighed sixty pounds and there were three security guards in the studio when the shot was taken... all my idea, I am half-ashamed and half-proud to admit).
October again already, my goodness. Lord Bod had pissed off to Antibes, but he'd encouraged us to stay, so we did. We'd used backing singers on the UK tour, and kept them on for Gauche. One of the three girls was a lady called Inez Rose Walker. Tall, raven and ravishing, statuesque and stately, always well-spoken and occasionally foul-mouthed, Inez had impressed me no end. I suspected she'd impressed the good lord rather a lot as well, but nothing seemed to come of that.
Set the scene. The Sex Pistols were still in captivity, a year away from bringing the language of every street corner to a single television studio. Malcolm McClaren was presumably still fine-tuning the neat concept of turning the turntables on the big record companies; instead of a band selling lots of records and them not getting any money, he had the Sex Pistols act so unpleasantly that although they didn't sell any records the companies gave them lots and lots of money just to go away. Springsteen had just released 'Born To Run' in the States; the shock waves had yet to rock Britain. And Led Zeppelin were still selling very well indeed, thank you.
Mind you, so was James Last. Oh, and Disco was big.
Party time. ARC were saying 'Thank you' because Gauche had entered the album charts at number one, on advance orders alone. The fact that we had now completed our three album deal and could now go wherever the hell we wanted for as much money as possible had, of course, absolutely nothing to do with such conspicuous extravagance.
ARC brought a small circus to Lord Bod's. Lions and tigers and elephants too. Fire eaters and jugglers and trapeze artistes, multitudinous chimps and a human cannonball, not to mention three alcoholic clowns with real red noses.
I'd never seen a lady trapeze artiste in the flesh before, and immediately fell in love with the one that turned up. God, those muscles. It was only thanks to Inez that I got over her; I fell for Inez instead. As well. Both. Oh, Christ, I don't know. There was no safety net, I'll tell you that.
'You don't know what you want to do, do you?'
I looked aghast at her. We were walking up a narrow road in the place called Golden Valley, between a village called Vowchurch and another village called Turnastone. It was a bright autumn day, blue sky and fresh wind. The leaves were just starting to fall off the trees and we were walking up a clefted road between the two villages, high banks of earth and trees to either side, red, brown and yellow leaves beneath our feet.
'What?' I said. 'Of course I do. I know exactly what I want.'
'What then?'
'Well...'
'Ha! See?'
'No; come on... be fair. I'm thinking.'
'Oh, dear; you think that's an excuse?'
'Hey! Stop giving me such a hard t-time here...'
'Oh well, I'm sorry. . ,
'... I know exactly what I want to do. I want to... change the world!'
'Oh, I see. For the better?'
I laughed. 'Of course!' (I never could see when I was having the piss taken out of me.)
'Oh, well, good. That'll make a change.' Inez nodded, stared ahead up the slope of the steeply banked road.
'I'm not just in it for the mmm-money, you know. I know what it's like to be p-poor. I mean... "European" and "No Lesson For Us";' — she'd sung on both — 'they've both got mmmmessages. I don't know if you could call them protest songs, but they're...
'Commercial. They're commercial songs. Bits off an album. Don't kid yourself.'
'Jee-zuz! You're really so cynical, aren't you?' I was amazed. Inez walked beside me, arms crossed, marching up that slope through the scattering of golden leaves.
'I'm cynical!' She laughed.
The sun broke through the clouds then, and at the same time a wind blew up from behind us, stirring and swirling the goldenbrown leaves around our feet, lifting her hair and mine and combing our faces with it, and belling out her long dress. The wind settled and strengthened, the leaves started to move, and as we walked up that short hill between the dry banks, the breeze filled, and it shifted the tumbling leaves along with us, moving them slowly uphill like a strange stream backing up against the pull of gravity, spreading them and rolling them slowly up the slope at the same speed as we were walking, so that for a long and dizzying moment we seemed to walk and stand quite still together, travelling islands caught within that bright, chaotic flow, our ankles tickled by the brittle flood, our eyes tricked by the relative movement of those charging, rolling, whispering leaves.
The effect lasted for only a few seconds before the wind blew stronger and the leaves outdistanced us, but for that brief time it was magical, and something so powerful and odd I could never express it. It remained something we shared, alone. Never could give it to anybody else, no matter how hard I tried.
I remember taking rather a lot of drugs that autumn, staying in that grand, impressive house. Once I climbed a tree and reclined on a long oak bough, quite at my ease, head buzzing, while watching a juggler on the gravel path beneath me. I lay there, elbow on branch, head in hand, looking down at the circus juggler, and watched the Indian clubs whirling up towards me and then back down, and thought that there was something quite profound and remarkable about watching juggling from above, especially when the juggler was too intent on his skill to notice the observer. It was one of those perfect metaphors one only ever experiences under the simplicities of a drug; at the time it is both obviously unique and impregnably apt, and — afterwards — utterly unfathomable .
And several times, in those balmy autumn days, I thought, This is the life.
Do you blame me?
By Gauche I was no longer trying to prove anything about what a wonderful song writer I was. My own name wasn't actually mentioned once on the writing credits on that album; instead I used a variety of rather silly aliases. The songs were variously credited to O'More, Sutton, Sundry, Thistle and Hlasgow; only I knew these were Justin O'More, Oliver Sutton, Alan Sundry, Patrick Thistle and Gerald Hlasgow (the Scotsman). Ah, good Lord preserve us from our own in-jokes.