As the lead singer of Sleeper, Louise Wener lived the Britpop fantasy. A decade on, she reveals the reality and excesses of life on the road
We’re on tour with Blur and if I’m going to be bigger than Damon Albarn, and I definitely am, it might be a good idea to start taking notes.
Note one: [Blur guitarist] Graham Coxon has asked me to marry him. He is drunk. He asks everyone to marry him. Graham Coxon is great company at the start of the evening, funny and gentle and sharp. But you have to tread carefully when Mr Spectacles is on the sauce; there’s a moment when he tips over to splenetic. He has a tendency to insult people to their face. Strangers. Passers-by. Couples quietly drinking in the hotel bar. He is a harsh critic. It is sometimes uncomfortable.
Note two: the way to get groupies, should you require the attention of such, is to ask your tour manager to go out into the crowd, select the best-looking girls and give them passes to your after-show party. In this case they’re called Blurjob passes. Mostly the tour manager is spot-on with his choices but every so often a lesser specimen gets through. No matter. Alex James is magnanimous in these cases. He walks up to one girl with glasses and cheerfully informs her: you’re ugly but I’m going to f*** you anyway. She looks grateful.
Note three: all manner of rock-star excess is to be encouraged on this tour but you must never, under any circumstance, mess with Blur’s sweaty plate of foreign cheeses.
“Come on, they’ll never notice. I’m sick of Twiglets and besides, they’ve got loads.”
“I dunno, they’re much more observant than… ooh, look at that, they’ve got Jarlsberg!”
We only meant to eat a Dairylea triangle-sized amount. We didn’t mean to decimate the entire plate. I’m hoping that by rearranging the grapes and organising the crackers into an elaborate fan-shape we might have gone some way to covering our tracks, but I don’t think we have. Dave the drummer has been sent to find us. He looks like a dog chewing a wasp at the best of times but he really looks like one now that he’s chewing us out. The band are properly angry, he barks. They may have to drop us from the tour. We scuff our feet like we’re in front of the headmaster, but honestly, I don’t know what their beef is: it’s not like we touched their champagne buckets, it’s not like we messed with their fruit. Even so, it’s a major transgression. The fab four lock down. For 48 hours, Graham stops asking me to marry him.
We’re all drunk and merry at an after-show party.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I won’t, then.”
“It’s forgotten about.”
“Good.”
“But don’t ever do it again.”
With customary generosity, now the Jarlsberg episode has been safely put behind us, Damon hangs his arms around me, and gives it to me straight.
“Course, the way to be successful in this game,” Damon slurs, “is to make all the boys wanna be you and all the girls wanna sleep with you. In your case… that’d work in reverse.”
“I see.”
They are, I can’t help thinking, an odd and annoying and intermittently disarming bunch. Damon bossy and arrogant; Graham shy and sweet with the black dog inside of him; Alex louche and pompous. And Dave, the straight man who doesn’t seem as mannered as the rest. You don’t catch him with his arms wrapped around his bandmate’s girlfriends; he doesn’t raise his glass and clink it, salute you with his floppy fringe, and purr “chin chin”.
On some nights it’s just us and the band and various groupies and hangers-on at the after-show parties. The fab four disappear off into the shadows, with big-busted blonde girls, and skinny eager brown-haired ones. On other nights they relax with their entourage, shipped out to the provinces from the trendier climes of Notting Hill. Damon’s squeeze, Justine Frischmann, Alex’s squeeze, Justine something else, who looks just like her, and various other confident, diffident types that gather round the bar drinking and smoking and getting high on whatever it is they’re high on at this point.
It’s quite a crowd. I imagine them back in their hotel rooms: the girls on their backs channelling Marianne Faithfull, the boys on their elbows doing pelvic press-ups, Mick Jagger by way of Ray Davies. There’s a cliquey, incestuous scent to it all; an easy, bohemian, moneyed odour. The mood is ruthlessly ambitious and, pose or not, they seem unquestioning in their acceptance of all that is coming their way.
We flit in and out, as observers and guests, wanting what they have, dipping our fingers in and seeing how it tastes, wondering how we will get it. There’s a moment, quite soon after getting signed, when you stop being grateful for the chance and start feeling pathologically envious of everyone who is remotely more successful than you are. We’re off the starting grid now, we have momentum, and I can feel my competitive streak hardening with every passing hour. Which must mean now’s the perfect time to set about f***ing the entire thing up.
Fame is rubbish. My emerging pop persona has taken a detour into the sex-crazed and whorish, and wearing dark glasses isn’t helping. It all started because of a song I wrote called Delicious. From the coverage it received when it came out you’d think I’d purposely written it to be attention-seeking and “controversial”. Why else would a woman write a frank, gorgeous, throwaway, punky pop-gem about the pure lustful joy of having it off with someone they really, really like? I know. It’s nuts, isn’t it? It can’t be because I thought it sounded good. It must be because I enjoy doing the same earth-shatteringly insightful and revelatory interview over and over again.
Something happens after you’ve been on the front cover of a magazine. Overnight, without warning, so long as you don’t have buck teeth, braces and two heads – and even then – you are magically transformed into a sex symbol.
“Hey, look at this. You’ve been voted seventh most sexy indie singer in Camden Town.”
Fair enough.
“Hey, check this out. You’ve been voted 37th most sexy woman in the entire world by FHM. Ahead of Claudia Schiffer and Sharon Stone.”
“Blimey. That’s surprising… but then again, Claudia does have those piggy little eyes…”
How to manage the sex-symbol label: that’s what I’m wrestling. On the one hand it’s nice to have the quandary. I wasn’t sexy in my teens, I was geeky. I wasn’t sexy at college because my idea of an attractive outfit was a borrowed dinner jacket, plimsolls and washed-out black leggings that bagged at the crotch and the knee. I looked like Max Wall.
On the other hand, if you’re a female sex symbol you can’t ever hope to be taken seriously. Perhaps that’s why the handful of women who front guitar bands have all decided it will help if we dress like men. We talk just like them, look just like them, behave exactly like them, this year. We are boy-boot, androgyny central. Denim and leather and loud: rough and tough enough to kick the indie boys’ heads in. We barely own a skirt between us. No dresses. No weakness. No prisoners. We take drugs just like the boys do, we party hard, just like they do. We crave mainstream success, just like they do.
The unwritten rule is that women shouldn’t, at any point, be seen to revel in their genetic good fortune but I’d quite like to revel in mine. It’s been a long time coming, and besides, this is the best I’m ever going to look. I’m having my Olivia Newton-John moment, mentally dressing in the inky black, skin-tight satin pants that delighted me and worried my mother. I am strutting my stuff on that wobbly fairground ride and John Travolta is scraping his tongue off the floor.
I know my looks aren’t classic – the big wonky nose, that bright red birthmark I’m saving up to get lasered off – but, blimey, in the right light, with the right make-up, all sweaty after a gig, giving off steam, hair stuck to my face, limbs shiny and slick, I look pretty f***ing fantastic. There’s a rumour going round that I put ice on my nipples to make them stand out in my T-shirts before I go on stage. I don’t need to do that. I have great breasts as it is. I have wonderfully erect nipples already.
How does it feel to be a sex symbol? How do you think it feels? Bloody great. At least it would if you’d stop asking me how it felt.
There’s something about a tour itinerary that lists Barcelona, Milan and Berlin in its dates that’s making me hysterically resistant to the lowest common denominator, herd mentality of rock-band touring: the endless communal meals where we have to find a café that serves egg and chips because half the crew are vegetarian and egg and chips is all they will eat. The living in each other’s pockets on the tour bus, smelling the tattooed roadie’s farts, listening to each other’s s***ty music and filthy night-time snores.
This is my first time touring on a sleeper bus. A glorified caravan with coffin-like compartments to sleep in and everyone huddled up on a banquette at the back, smoking and drinking and watching Spinal Tap for the 53rd time. There are rules on the tour bus. Don’t poo in the toilet; it can’t take it. Sleep with your feet facing forward, in case you crash like they did in Bucks Fizz. Respect each other’s privacy and space. Difficult one, this: save for the sliver of curtain by your bunk there’s no real privacy to be had.
There is nowhere to wash on the bus. Nowhere to hide. No escape. I miss the boarding-house days already. At least there was a bedroom to escape to. At least after gigs you could go out and have a look at the town you’d been dumped in for 24 hours, even if it was Wolverhampton. There are no nights out now. Only nights in. Get off stage in France, get on the bus and drive to Belgium. Get off stage in Belgium, get on the bus and drive back to France. We are a travelling circus. There is no abroad, there is only in here: the confines of the bus and the confines of the gig venue’s walls.
I’m missing female company, but not in the way that the men are. To stack the dice a little, we’ve employed a female sound person but Bob’s been doing this so long now – this touring, s***ters, larky, musical bloke-fest – she is ostensibly a man. She calls herself Bob, for God’s sake.
I think touring is getting to me. Band life is getting to me. All of it. The entire f***ed-up, charmless, shallow, egotistical s***-show thing of it. Grown men acting like babies. Moaning to their tour managers that they feel sick, or feel grumpy, or can’t go on stage without another line of “gack”. This is no life for a grown-up.
This is why people are drunk all the time. This is why they want to get high. Because touring in Europe, which should be a blast, you’d imagine it would be, is the most miserable, execrable, soul-sapping activity I have ever undertaken. On tour with my boyfriend [Andy Maclure, Sleeper’s drummer] and my ex [Jon Stewart, the band’s guitarist]. All the simmering tensions of that madness that we foolishly thought we’d been dealing with are magnified a million times by the claustrophobia of the bus. Jon and I know the exact way to wind each other up. We’ve had more than seven years to practise.
“Where’s my new Hole CD gone?”
“I roofed it.”
“What d’you mean you roofed it?”
Jon points at the open skylight on the ceiling of the bus.
“Right… that’s it, where’s your jacket? I’m roofing your last gram of coke.”
It isn’t healthy: the four of us crammed on board with our crew, stopping every fourth day to spend a few hours in a real bed and grab a shower, and admire the view of another ring road. And for what? So German rock journalists in leather trousers can ask me why all my songs are zo damn zexy! This isn’t rock and roll, it’s a cross between an 18–30 holiday and an escorted old age pensioners’ coach trip.
Something extraordinary is about to happen. Sleeper are going to play a rock stadium. Today – July 30, 1995 – our band will take to the stage in support of rock gods R.E.M. at an open-air concert venue that holds upwards of 70,000 people. No matter that at the time we’re scheduled to go on – four in the afternoon – half of those people will still be queuing up to get in. No matter that we are the first of three support acts, seemingly culled at random to make R.E.M. look like they’re bang up to date with this funky new movement called Britpop. No matter that Thom Yorke from Radiohead is skulking around backstage throwing suspicious sideways glances at everyone he passes, quite possibly because he believes Delores from the Cranberries is a CIA operative in disguise. Tonight I am playing a rock stadium and nothing, not anything, can spoil the moment. Except that it can. I am bothered by something. What’s bothering me, what’s nagging quietly at the back of my mind, is that the stadium in question is in Milton Keynes.
My problem is this. I can’t be certain, but I have the feeling this might be the one and only stadium gig Sleeper will ever get to play. Despite our growing UK success, internationally famous rock acts aren’t in the habit of asking us to support them on sell-out tours in which the preferred mode of transport, in and out of the venue, is helicopter. If I’m only going to play one rock stadium in my life I want it to be one of the good ones: Wembley, say, or Shea, or Budokan. I’ll take any of those ones, I’m not picky; it’s just that when I’m old and grey and my grandkids ask me, “Where was that rock stadium you played back in the day, Nan?”, it would be cool to say New York, Caracas or Tokyo, not “just off the A5 near Furzton, two miles up the road from Newport Pagnell”.
Of course, I’m being ridiculous. This is the same venue where I came to see David Bowie play all those years ago. The fact that we are playing here is possibly the very best thing about the gig. But, still. Milton Keynes… It just doesn’t have the right ring to it.
I head to the dressing room one more time. I chew off all of my nails. I’m just dealing with an obstinate bit on my thumb when R.E.M. pop by to say hello.
“Hey,” says Michael Stipe, “I’m Michael Stipe. Thanks for joining us today.”
He’s thanking us for playing. He’s compact and beautiful. He’s genial and friendly but even so, he still wears his fame like a suit. I’m fascinated by it. I want to touch it. I want to know what this level of fame does to a person. If there’s a bubble in my head I feel compelled to pop it these days, so I find myself asking him what’s it like. What’s it like to be Michael Stipe? He’s touchingly unfazed by my sudden attack of social gaucheness. He smiles and says, in a low-key Southern drawl, “You know… today, it’s pretty f***ing cool.”
We are finally ready to go on: our guitars held protectively like weapons across our chests, our hearts palpitating wildly beneath them. At the side of the stage we hear our name announced and we are doing this, we are actually walking out there. For the first ten seconds it’s exactly like that dream when you’re standing at the front in school assembly and you’ve just discovered you’re naked. We don’t deserve to be here. We are indie intruders. Sleeper aren’t stadiums and sunshine, we’re sweaty clubs, fag ends and lager. We are gleeful pop-punk thrashers, and have no songs that would prompt you to hold your lighter aloft and sway, unless you were hell bent on setting fire to the person in front of you’s hair.
But the nerves are short lived, soundly beaten down by the crowd. It’s a party out here and there is only good feeling, and for hundreds of rows, far into the distance, the crowd jump up and down and cheers us on. We turn to each other and shake our heads. Jon picked up his first guitar when he was 12. Andy started playing drums when he was 10. Diid [Sleeper’s bassist] spent his childhood with his cherished Abba and Beatles compilation tapes for company. Now here we all are in the sunshine, doing this, everyone singing along. It’s unimaginably thrilling and because I have a habit of forgetting to enjoy things until they are already over, for once in my life I remember to be happy right now. We leave the stage hardly more than 40 minutes later, sodden with sweat and still vibrating with pleasure.
Much later, as the sun dips, we return to the side of the stage. On top of everything it’s my birthday today. I am 29 years old and there can be no better way to mark entry to the final year of what can usefully be described as my youth than by watching one of the world’s greatest rock acts, R.E.M., perform their greatest hits at close range. The band are wonderful, muscular and lithe but in the middle of the gig, there is an unexpected break in proceedings. Michael Stipe has abandoned his post and is striding off stage, blue eyes twinkling in their rings of black eyeliner.
“Look… he’s heading straight for you.”
“Don’t be stupid. He’s heading for Helena Christensen.”
He’s suddenly in front of me, holding out his small slim hand and, for no good reason I can think of, escorting me onto the stage.
The atmosphere is wilder, so much more intense, and in the midst of all this, as I stand there frozen to the spot wondering what’s about to happen, it becomes clear Michael Stipe plans to serenade me by singing Happy Birthday and getting the crowd to sing along. The whole experience is surreal, at once a delight and mildly mortifying. I am grinning at the implausibility of something like this happening when I sense myself drift for a moment, suddenly transported somewhere else.
What I’m thinking as I stare out at the sea of people singing is that this is exactly how it would have looked on that hot summer night in 1983 when I saw David Bowie here. In my head I am 16 again, hair stiff with lemon juice, high heels splattered in mud, belting out the chorus to Heroes. It’s the moment I discover how it feels, what it looks like, to be a rock star. It happens to me here, in Milton Keynes, just off the A5 near Furzton, two miles up the road from Newport Pagnell. n
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