Booky Wook 2: This time it’s personal

You could try something from the bible for wantaway onanists, The Game by Neil Strauss, but “negging” – the practice of saying something mildly negative to your “target” – seems disrespectful, and if you “ignore her”, the void you leave will be filled in an instant by a dozen willing suitors.

Somehow amidst the clanging of my mind, the overtures of her beauty and the accompanying social impact, I manage to be vaguely funny. “I’ll just treat her like a normal girl,” I think. But before I can impose any sort of control over the situation she suggests we go back to Sadie’s. Matt and, of course, given the venue, Sadie come too. The cab is pursued by paparazzi on mopeds. Maybe ten of them, an unwelcome convoy, trail the cab like a dangling haemorrhoid. That was the first time I’d been followed by photographers and it’s not annoying at first but kind of exciting, it heightens the idea that what you’re doing is important, that you yourself are important. After a while it becomes bloody awful, relentless and, typically, attached to a tabloid perspective of yourself with which you whole-heartedly disagree, but for now it adds to the romance.

When we arrive at Sadie’s house in Belsize Park – a real-life Stella Street where David Walliams also lives as well as Bob Hoskins and Derek Jacobi – it is decided that Matt should walk Kate into the house so that there is no photo of me and her together. This gives me hope that we do have something to hide, but also makes me jealous of Matt as he gets to walk up the driveway with her. Within the beautiful house we flirt for a while, then under some mutual pretence of looking at hung photographs of Sadie’s deplorably gorgeous children we wander off. We are alone.

The rest of the evening was like a beautiful road accident. I passed in and out of consciousness, scored by sirens, sporadically lit by flashing blue and red light, time bending. On a sofa in a world made only of Kate Moss’s face. I cannot recall a single word of the conversation that took place; for all I know we communicated in whale song.

Drifting closer and closer together, my heart pounding, of course, but also my liver and lungs and feet. Things that don’t have pulses join the unwelcome percussion. Paul Simon thinks my vital organs may be a lost African tribe and considers recording a follow-up to Graceland in my colon. Eventually there is no more universe between our lips and so we kiss, and yes, on one level I’m enjoying the kiss, but my mind is screaming, screeching, body-popping, lambada-ing, every dance-craze-there’s-ever-been-ing. Playground fads are revisited: yo-yos, hula hoops, pogs, the works, every exciting moment from childhood condensed into a single kiss. “Kiss properly, stop thinking about pogs, you idiot, get on with this kiss, stop thinking how this is going to sound in a book and get on with the kiss.”

So I get on with the kiss, and I think it’s a good kiss, but of course there’s all this analysis going on simultaneously. I’ve got to get her out the house. Ludicrously I say to her, “Do you want to come back to mine … Kate Moss?”

We get a minicab – from a number I had in my phone. Some bloke comes round in a beat-up car that stinks of fags, there’s a blanket on the back seat. Kate Moss gets in, I get in, we sit in the back seat and drive the short journey geographically but a long journey in terms of interior design style and property value from Sadie Frost’s in Belsize Park to mine in Gospel Oak – what Matt calls “not quite Hampstead”. A garret, digs. Mismatched pans and a duvet that was there when I moved in.

I make her tea. There’s a bit where she’s in my garden, there’s a bit where she’s sitting with my cat and he doesn’t care that she’s all mysterious and wonderful. I know he’s a cat but he should recognise that she has transcended the everyday. To be in her presence in my house doesn’t make sense, it is a baffling fusion of the real and the imagined. It’s like looking into the garden and seeing Vegas Elvis mowing the lawn, or going into the kitchen and finding Elvis in the Elvis Comeback Special ’68 suit cooking up beans, or going into the bedroom and there’s golden jacket Elvis from ’54 before he cut his hair, before the army cut off his balls. Elvis, lying on my bed looking into my eyes. Elvis Presley has entered the building.

Of course my mind will not shut up and let me enjoy the moment, there is an endless incessant narrative throughout it. Which is a shame because what I enjoy most about encounters with women is relief from the endless buzzing of needless thought, the neurological chaos, the Tokyo of neurons smashing into each other, the fizz, the buzz, the clatter abating, the hive of my mind quietening, but not that night.

The next day, ludicrously, I had to get up and live my normal life. Filming sketches with Matt and dopey Gareth Roy for our MTV chat show, 1 Leicester Square, dressing up as an old Michael Winner-type man and Matt as a Nosferatu baby.

Life begins again each day anew, and when you awake you could be anybody. During the hiatus that each new day brings, I think firstly “Who am I?” and secondly “What was I doing yesterday?” My mind begins its programme and it seems more preposterous than ever – “Well, Russell, yesterday you went to bed with Kate Moss.”

“That’s an interesting notion, brain, and I’m going to humour you and open my eyes, but if it proves false I won’t trust you again and may go back on drugs.”

I open just one eye at first, because my brain’s broadcast seems so unlikely, but one eye is sufficient because, brighter than the daylight flooding through the curtains that I should have replaced because they were too short, is the raging dawn of a sleeping Kate Moss, the illumination warring with the daybreak – intimidated by her radiance, the sun disappears behind a cloud. Her hair fans over the pillow like a peacock’s tail.

I open the other eye. Kate Moss is indeed in the bed, and for a minute I feel like I’ve murdered her. “Oh my god, what have I done, don’t panic, don’t panic.” I get up and back away like a butler on his first day with the Queen, not daring to turn from her for a moment. Like a cartoon drunk, I rub my eyes and peer at my bottle – it’s only mouthwash. It is definitely Kate Moss. Not the Listerine. It’s getting late. I’m going to have to leave for work, where I must do pop video reviews with Matt. What a stupid life.

I leave the house, the cat, the plants, the angel sleeping in my bed and walk out into a different London. I have been given patronage by Kate Moss and I can hear the gossip columns being typed, the photos from the previous night being processed and printed. Before I’ve seen a newspaper I know that I’ll be in them. With a kiss she has issued what decades of hard work could not – fame. Bigger, though, than the realisation of a lifetime’s ambition is the chaos she has left in my belly. I am unable to distinguish between this feeling of insane joy, this blissful disarray and love. It feels like love.

On my way home from a day of elation and delirium I chat to Nik Linnen, my partner, my manager, my outsourced rationale. I tell him what I’ve just told you, that I think I’m in love. With Kate Moss, or the idea of Kate Moss – which to my brain is indistinguishable from actual Kate Moss. A conveniently reductive device for dividing women who spend the night in your house is those who make the bed and those who don’t. If a woman makes the bed, the insinuation is that she cares for you, that she wants to take care of you. If she doesn’t, it doesn’t make her a bad person, it just means she’s busy and has to get out and on with her life and has no time for sweet, domestic ritual.

“If she’s made the bed, Nik, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“Don’t get yer hopes up, mate,” he replies in his Manc twang. “It ain’t important, you’re already investing too much in it – saying you love her an’ that – you don’t even know her.”

I open the dark blue front door of No. 7 Courthope Road. Lucky seven. I am courting hope.

“I do know her – she’s Kate Moss,” I argue, entering the dingy communal hall with yellow walls and obligatory gas meter cupboard where I hide the spare key.

“Yeah. That’s what you’re in love with, you idiot – the idea of Kate Moss – not an actual woman. You’re being daft.”

I open the door of the flat. Morrissey my beautiful cat weaves about my feet, still unconcerned by last night’s visit.

“Look, you weren’t there. We really connected. If she’s made the bed it’s a sign.” I step into my empty flat and it has never been so empty. I make my way towards the bedroom.

“Don’t be stupid,” says Nik, “it don’t make no difference – she probably would’ve left in a hurry. Don’t build it up in yer head.”

“I’m not building it up. I’m just curious.” I close my eyes, inhale and open the bedroom door. I turn on the light and Morrissey bounds in, leaps up and lies down on the perfectly made bed. And I know that I’ll never sleep again.

†

Chapter 2

New Musical Expletive

Being sanctioned by the Princess Diana of counterculture made an immediate impact on my career. The relationship itself went nowhere as I was ill-equipped to cope with the protocols of having a globally worshipped paramour. (To be honest, I struggled to maintain the marriage to my cat – I stoke the romance by taking him up west once a week to the Ivy, plus I keep things spicy in the bedroom by putting dead birds down my pants, so that relationship pretty much takes up all my time.)

What no one realised, not Kate nor the red-top tabloid press, was that far from viewing her as a conquest, I was absolutely smitten. When I clumsily ballsed it up by flatly telling journalists who I’d not yet learned to ignore that I was “just larking around”, she wisely withdrew and I had enough sense to stop calling her. I didn’t delete her number from my phone though. I left it stored under “Grimy Tyke”, which is what I called her in an attempt to punctuate the endless flattery and awe. She’s probably had about five different numbers since then, but I keep it as a digital memento, just to assure myself that it did really happen, that it wasn’t a dream.

I could never have anticipated the instant elevation that this liaison would afford me, it was like being awarded a celebrity Victoria Cross. The word “approved” was stamped on my forehead and I was now to appear in the Sun newspaper as regularly as the horoscopes and as spuriously as page 3. My mate Mark Lucey, with whom I worked on Big Brother’s Big Mouth, remarked that in the paparazzi photos from the night I met her I looked like a shifty, greased rat as I peered out all blinking and apologetic from the back of the rain-spattered cab. “You look like you don’t belong there,” he said. “But here,” he continued, regarding a shot several days later where I dashed from her house, “you look like a dandy lifeguard sprinting up the beach all cocky.”

Due to my friendships with funny colleagues like Mark Lucey and Matt Morgan and strategists like Nik, the ol’ work was going in the right direction. The Big Brother show was a cult hit, my stand-up was improving and we were deluged with further opportunities. I was even offered the chance to host the NME Awards, a notoriously difficult gig where the baddest, drunkest musicians of the year nonchalantly RSVP, then indifferently attend a debauched, yet carefully staged, indie rock and roll award show.

This was a month before I’d appeared on Jonathan Ross’s show or been kissed into the mainstream, which was unfortunate because I could’ve used any extra status available to control a very difficult room. The NME Awards were challenging because, like all the awards ceremonies I’ve hosted, I was not quite famous enough to do it. If Jonathan Ross is hosting an awards show, everyone there accepts his authority, we all respect him and sit down and shut up. But when I hosted the NME Awards, around half the people there didn’t know who I was. Bob Geldof, for example, began the evening not knowing who I was and concluded it deciding I was a cunt. I know this because he said so when he collected his award.

Matt, in spite of spending much of his life skulking about like a menstrual Hell’s Angel, frequently says things that are apposite and profound. Once, when we discussed negativity towards others, he said that we ought imagine that we each have an individual connection with a God or higher power through “a Doc Brown from Back to the Future-style metal helmet” (bear with me) that has an electric tendril that reaches up through the sky, puncturing the ozone layer, into the heavens, past the Milky Way, right into the mind of God. Like them hairdrying plastic mushroom contraptions beneath which elderly ladies sit in hairdressers, but instead of being attached to a plug socket, they are attached to God. When someone, a critic, a teacher or an enemy attacks you, it’s as if they are petulantly disgruntled and dissatisfied with their own connection to the universe and like snitchy little berks, reach over and yank your tendril. We are all connected to an objective higher mind and through that to each other, so why bother jerking around with other people’s connection? It’s a senseless interference. We all do it, but really what’s the point of sniping at our fellows? You may as well go into your garden and holler abuse at a nasturtium. In the end it’s between you and God.

The NMEs were my first high-profile job and a significant breakthrough. Handled correctly these risky gigs can propel you into ever more exciting yet futile stratospheres of success. My career has certainly been expedited by three notably tricky industry galas; first the NMEs, then the Brits the following year, and more recently the MTV Video Music Awards. All three events were just beyond my reach, so were bloody difficult and combative. Good televised award shows need an element of chaos, you need to feel that at any point they could descend into a food fight or gratuitous nudity. Think of your favourite moments from ceremonies gone by – Liam Gallagher spitting, Madonna and Britney kissing, Jarvis Cocker getting his bum out at Michael Jackson, and possibly when Bob Geldof called Russell Brand a cunt.

The NME Awards were held at the Hammersmith Palais, which was also the venue for those ridiculous “School Discos” in which grown women cavort in schoolgirl uniforms and baffled paedophiles puzzle over boundaries. “Is it all a big sexy laugh or am I a demon?” they must think.

Do we humans yet properly understand the notion of the future? It doesn’t seem that we do. I’ll agree to almost anything as long as it’s in the way-off yonder – secretly believing the allotted time will never actually arrive.

“Russell, will you castrate this pig with your molars?”

“When?”

“In February.”

“February? The existence of Februaries has never been categorically proven – I’ll do it!” Of course when February comes, as February must, I regret my blithe agreement and sneak off behind my vegetarianism.

My excitement on learning that Nik and I had secured the NMEs duly ripened into horror as the day drew near – it became an ordeal. The room would be chock-a-block with alcoholics and alcohol and eccentricity and egos, and everyone would be trying so hard to be so cool that our common humanity would be as relevant to the assembly as a recipe for a damn good moussaka. On an inexplicable whim the editor of New Musical Express (the magazine behind the ceremony), the boyish Conor McNicholas, decided the set should resemble the inside of Dr Who’s Tardis. So at one end of this flat, dank booze hall was a sci-fi set that to me seemed non sequitous and pointless and looked like it wanted the attendees to love it. The nerdy set that would be providing my backdrop made me more nervous. Staring at it with impending dread, I reflected. Life is not a postcard of life, life is essential and about detail, minutiae and trivia. Tiny anxious pangs, heartburn and stubbed toes. “There’s something in my eye. My mouth tastes funny. Have I chipped my tooth?” Titchy, Prufrock facts. Not a broad sweep of a Rothko brush, but pop art dots, like Liechtenstein’s.

As was my custom at that time I was with Sharon (cockney boxer, Babs Windsor laugh, Kathy Burke warmth), my stylist, Nicola (flirty young mum, everyone’s nan, lickable skin, loves indiscriminately), who does my make-up, and Matt (same twerp from Chapter 1). It was necessary then as now to ensconce myself in familiarity, estuary accents, working-class values, because after all, it’s all just a bit of a fuckin’ laugh, all this, innit? You don’t wanna take life too seriously. If you don’t laugh you’ll fuckin’ cry. I need that kind of attitude around me as I approach the stage, because within it’s all Mozart’s Requiem for Death and livid Francis Bacon pinks. I lay charred birds at Tiresias’s feet as I stare down at the beast. I need ritual. Theatre was born of ritual, religion was born of ritual. If I should die think only this of me, “I thought it would be funny.”

The yips, the condition that afflicts darts players and golfers, is the inability to let go of the dart or to take the final putt. Darts players before throwing the dart see a line leading from the tip of their arrow to the treble twenty or the bullseye. (As a child I always thought of the bullseye as more important, as it’s got a better name. When I discovered treble twenty’s superiority I thought, “The dog out of Oliver is not called treble twenty, it’s called Bullseye.” It’s a good name and an evocative image, the eye of the bull. Treble twenty is just arithmetic.) The perfect visualisation of that line sometimes makes it difficult for them to relinquish the dart and I understand that. It’s acknowledging the point at which you interface with reality. Most sports are reactive, interactive, a giddy blur of controlled chaos like football or boxing, you against a swirl of oppositional energy. But the dartboard is never going to come hurtling towards you and slap you round the chops, so unless you seduce it, unless you part the thighs of the oche and make that move, nothing’s going to happen. Ritual is necessary to cope with that obligation.

At the time of the NMEs I began to accumulate the people, the things and ideas that I need to succeed. Sometimes I have cause to reflect, as I walk out in front of 5,000 people or host a big event, “Fucking hell, it is still just me in a toilet,” the same as it was the first time I went on to a stage at Grays Comprehensive School to chubbily inhabit Fat Sam in Bugsy Malone. Then as now, my bowel having loosened, my heart palpitates faster until eventually my mind moves into alignment and focus.

Now I’ve conducted that ceremony in thousands of toilets to ever-growing numbers of people, but ultimately it’s for the same purpose of motivating myself into a position where I can legitimately ask things to go well because I’m in tune with something higher.

Often when I’m nervous before a show people will say, “Why are you worried? What’s the worst that can happen?” The reason I’m nervous is that I think something unlikely, implausible but utterly awful will happen. The sort of thing that happens to me quite often. Sufficiently often for me to accept the necessity of rigorous preparation. Something, in fact, like this.

It was a good script that me and Matt knocked up, funny, with good jokes. The New York band the Strokes were there: “Oh, my nan had a stroke, I think that’s what killed her – what was Julian Casablancas thinking? She was ninety years old! And she was a lesbian!” Actually my nan did have a stroke and it was that that killed her. She wasn’t a lesbian though.

Jokes of that calibre kept the room entertained, and one must always remember to play to the millions of TV viewers in addition to those present. Even if the musicians are chatting among themselves and wheezing merry pepper up their hooters, the people at home are probably watching politely. I was already mates with the impeccably English and mindlessly attractive Carl Barât, formerly of the Libertines and at that time with Dirty Pretty Things, so I wasn’t totally adrift socially. What’s more, I had spent the previous ten years taking enough drugs to put most of those present into nappies, so I could connect on that level. I was no stranger, either, to live acts of reckless self-destruction, so was unperturbed when the lead singer of the band Cribs sharded himself up, real horrorshow, on a table full of glasses he’d Iggy Popped himself on to. I was prepared for almost anything. Including being dubbed a cunt by a saint.

When Bob Geldof calls you a cunt, speaking from experience, it is difficult because Bob Geldof comes with cultural baggage, mostly favourable. We’re all aware of Bob Geldof and all the wonderful things he’s done. Bob Geldof had been ever present in my own life as a benevolent, indignant narrator of the story of the possibility for positive change. So as he strolled to the pulpit, beckoned by Bono on VT, in my mind a different film played.