Bit of a Blur by Alex James Read Free Book Online Page B

Explodes.
    They took us out for lunch, a pizza, near their office in Soho. A month later we had signed to them, with the proviso that the drummer wouldn’t wear pyjamas and that we changed our name.
    I went to see the head of second-year French. She was a nice lady. She conducted the Old French Literature module. It was all books about knights and witches. I told her I had been offered a record deal. I was supposed to be going to live in France for a year. She was genuinely quite excited. She said she’d been to see Eric Clapton the night before and that I could sit my end-of-year exams the following month, then take a year out and come back if things didn’t work out. I didn’t go back to college after that except to sit the exams, and I missed one of those. My best result was in Eighteenth-Century Literature, which was surprising because I hadn’t read any eighteenth-century literature. Not going to France had been a mistake. I only got 3 per cent in French Language. There was a lot of red pen on the exam paper. I’d really appalled whoever marked it, you could tell. There were lots of crossings out and exclamation marks, question marks and exasperated triple underlinings. The signing off remark was ‘Is the candidate lucid?’
    The day I got my exam results was the day I got on a tour bus for the first time.
    There was no going back.

3
    food ltd

Contracts
    We were living in squalor with the slugs and Mad Paul creeping around with his candle upstairs, but I had the thing I wanted, a record deal. It was an incredibly mean record deal and once we’d paid the lawyers there was just enough to buy a new bass.
    A recording contract is a hefty, confusing document. In the past, as one of the many formalities of business law, all contracts had to be written in Latin. It’s quite hard to say what language they’re written in now. There’s still quite a lot of Latin in there. There wasn’t a single paragraph that made sense to any of us, apart from the bit about if the drummer performed in pyjamas he was in breach. They put that in for a joke. We didn’t mind him wearing pyjamas, but we agreed to it because we understood it. We had to go to the lawyer’s three evenings in a row to have it all explained to us. It was very dull. The lawyer said it was the worst fucking deal he’d ever seen. He swore quite a lot. They do that, lawyers. We thought we were going to be catapulted into a new stratosphere and live happily ever after since we were about to become professional recording artists, and that we wouldn’t have to worry about anything. All there was to start with was hours and hours of things to think about. In fact, the more successful we became the more we had to deal with lawyers and accountants and management. That is the stratosphere of success. How I wish we’d listened. I’m still in that same recording contract now.
    Eventually we signed the deal, the only one going, and chinked champagne glasses with our new record company at their lawyer’s office. The two lawyers, ours, and the record company’s, had a good old ho-ho-ho about the pyjama clause and said things like ‘Whatever happened to old Dickie?’ They all know the same people, music lawyers.
    Throughout contract negotiations, which weren’t negotiations so much as ‘take-it-or-leave-it’s, the record company was referred to as ‘Food Ltd’. The Ltd bit wasn’t very sexy. On the radio they never said, ‘Now, on Food Ltd here’s Jesus Jones with “Info Freako”,’ they just said Food, or Food Records. It said ‘Food Ltd’ on the buzzer of their offices in Soho, too. As a business entity, Food was an independently owned company, but it was plugged into the marketing, sales and international distribution mechanism of EMI Records.
    Food was two people and a cute receptionist in an office on Brewer Street. It was a tiny label. They only had three other acts, but one of them, Jesus Jones, had the number one song in America. Being number one