Bit of a Blur by Alex James Page A

promotion, and maybe a car, I said, and started to quite enjoy myself. I said I had to go now, though, because I had to work on Christmas Day.
    A couple of years in London had given me a whole new outlook. It was something of a reunion in the pub on Christmas Eve, but you could already tell which people had spent time in London. Poor old Jackie hadn’t made it.
    Despite going home and showing off, the band were actually sliding right down slippery shitstrasse. The first record, despite reaching number forty-eight and being featured on Juke Box Jury , did not seem to impress EMI as much as it impressed our friends, and the abortive session before Christmas hung heavy. We needed a hit. Very early in the New Year, out of the blue, Balfe got a phone call asking if Blur needed a producer. It was Stephen Street.
    We all got the next train back to London and met him at Food in Soho. It was good to get back to London. It was home, now. I knew it was home as the train rolled into Waterloo and it all rose up around my ears and I thrilled in my stomach. I felt it that day, more than ever. Stephen Street needed no introduction. He’s about the only record producer whose name I knew. He produced the Smiths.
    He’s a handsome devil, Streetie. He’d actually been a teen mag cover star, on the back of his role as the Artful Dodger, in a stage production of Oliver! . We only found that out later, though, when his mum brought all her scrapbooks to his fortieth birthday party. We all instantly liked him. He said he’d never chased a band before - bands usually called him - but he had a good feeling about this one. He had a few days free the following week and suggested we try something. He liked to work at Maison Rouge, a proper eighties ocean liner of a studio, tucked in a little mews in Fulham. The eighties were just starting to founder, but it was still immaculate in there. I arrived one morning and Debbie Harry was standing in the brasserie having a coffee at the bar. I ordered a crème de menthe as I knew it was all they had left, and she laughed at me. It all seemed quite normal.
    Streetie is good with drums. He once said to me that a hit record is nearly all about the drums and a bit about the vocal. He said everyone else could do whatever they liked, really, if you got the drums and the voice right. Some producers would say that in a way that would make a bass player feel a bit redundant. He said it in a way that made me feel I had total freedom to groove my pants off. He’s a great diplomat, a statesman. I can say without any hesitation or doubt that he is the nicest man in pop. He’s one of the nicest men in the world and I still always get a birthday card from him.
    He really liked a song we had called ‘There’s No Other Way’, but we’d stopped playing it live. He said it was too fast, and that it would sound better at this speed. He pushed some buttons, which played a drum loop he’d made at home, in his shed. It was true about drums. It sounded like a hit already. I put the bass down in about ten minutes, and Graham had done the guitar before lunch. No one had said ‘tempo’ once. We came back after lunch and listened to it on the big speakers, as Damon sang the melody into my ear. It was heart-stopping. It made me shiver. Damon put a new keyboard line at the beginning. Dave added some drum fills. We turned the tape over so that the track played backwards and Graham played a guitar solo, so that when the tape was back up the right way, the solo played backwards. Balfe came down and went mental. He said ‘Top ten! Top ten!’ and dribbled all over his beard, and then he played the keyboard line from ‘Reward’ on our synth.
    There was a club called Syndrome in a basement in Oxford Street. All the indie bands used to go there on Thursdays. I think we started it, but everybody else thinks they did too. I first went there with Terry Bickers; he played guitar in the House of Love and he was a proper mad-eyed genius.