Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (56 page)

Eventually, I had to knock the whole thing on the head. It was difficult, because Martin had asked to play live keyboards, and he wasn’t up to that, not by any stretch. Martin was great to
work with in the studio, but not to play live – he couldn’t cope with the pressure, having to remember the sequences and the patterns. The flaws don’t bother me, or mistakes, but
acting inadequate does. You must never show fear onstage – that’s pointless. Never back down – never,
never
! No matter what mistakes are being made, go with it, keep going,
find yourselves, and don’t any one of you suddenly decide, ‘I don’t know what’s happening, so I’ll end the song.’ Wrong move.

Finally, I really did think, enough was enough. I thought of just retiring from music for ever. That’s happened quite a few times. When it gets
down to the malarkey of false accusations and career-hoppers and users and abusers, they really do leave their mark on me, unfortunately. They take away my joy and love of my fellow human beings.
They smear and tar everybody else with that same brush, by that activity. I know it’s wrong of me to view it that way but I take it very deep. I don’t understand them.

I certainly don’t consider the release of any record I’ve made as a mistake. I’ve always been proud of what I’ve done. I’ve tried to make the best of knowing I was
stuck in these bloody record deals. All I kept hearing were the words ‘recoupment, recoupment, recoupment’, but I always kept my independence, never allowed them to dictate the content
of any record, and I suffered accordingly.

At this point in 1997–8, the power brokerage at the top at Virgin Records had shifted, and in came a particular duo who were from that ’70s flower generation, but were businessmen to
the hilt while still wearing the Grateful Dead tie-dyes. I remember one particular absurdity: one of them had a Victorian toilet imported from England to the LA offices, one of the ones with floral
designs on, very elegant, in the shape of a seashell. Hundreds of dollars for a loo to pee in? Oh, come on! I liked them fellas, oddly enough, although the Grateful Dead tinge was in there. A lot
of them Grateful Dead followers are really all rather selfish lawyers and accountants, of the mind frame, ‘I’ve got mine, fuck you.’ And it’s very frustrating when
you’re struggling to keep your career together and all of that, and expensive items like that are being shifted about into office spaces. That’s a waste of money.

I don’t like flamboyance, I don’t like people with over-elaborate flashy cars and jewellery, because I think deep down inside they’re a bit of a cunt. It’s all about an
audience they’re looking for. Hello. I don’t even drive but one of the first cars I ever bought was for Nora, and it’s a Volvo. We love it, and we still drive it. It’s
falling to bits, but it’s damn fast and it’s relentless – a T5R turbo, yellow,
with a go-fast wing on the back. I watched it in all the rallies around that
time, ’93/’94 /’95/’96, when Volvo were really doing well in world racing. I just loved the shape of it, it looked like a pram! No sleek curved lines, this thing was right
angles, boxy, built round a steel cage for safety. Fantastic. Two major accidents that car’s had, and neither of them our fault – the last one Nora got hit by a concrete mixer truck.
That would probably kill you in most other cars. All we needed to do was replace some panelling. Wonderful. These are the kind of things in life that impress me, the practicality of it.

If I want to drive a Ferrari – and I love the idea of those cars, too – well, I’ve got
Real Racing 3
on my iPad. Somebody’s got to buy ’em, I suppose.
Myself, I can’t drive at all. I know! I keep putting it off. My dad set me up for a driving test once, but I turned up for the first lesson like a complete arsehole, drank eight very large
Heinekens before I got in and drove straight under a lorry on Gunter Grove. So that was my driving experience. God, was that instructor furious! It was quite a bill I racked up on that one! That
was a lesson, a serious bad lesson.

The shame of it was that it didn’t end there; he thought that I might’ve still been capable of making it round the corner, and indeed I did, and drove down towards the gas works in
Chelsea, and there was a huge empty acreage back out there in them days. He was trying to teach me how to manoeuvre, and it was hopeless. I was so
not interested
. It all seemed really
pointless. The hand and leg coordination wasn’t in me at that time. There’s a great many problems I have with learning in these kinds of situations. I’m really slow. I get there
in the end if it’s at my own pace, but I can’t be pushed into it, it doesn’t work. I have an auto-resist button, I don’t know what triggers it; it’s one of the few
things I’m learning to try and control – you know, an auto-rebel.

Back in LA, without a music career to attend to, what I learned to do instead was boat driving. Nora and I really learned that through necessity. Living on the ocean, the draw was overwhelming.
Initially we rented big yachts and filled them with friends, and went off for a couple of days to the islands, to Catalina, just as a party of friends would. Instead of
going to a nightclub, we’d do it on a boat with bunks. And that was great fun, and Nora and me really got into it. Loved it.

Aaah
, I’ve always loved the sea. It all started with rowing out to catch herring with my granddad – my mother’s father in Ireland. He always had row-boats in the yard,
all rotting and God knows whatever. He hardly spoke to me, barely even sentences, but we’d row out into the Irish Sea – actually no, it was the bloody Atlantic, because they were in
Cork – and throw out some breadcrumbs and wait for the herring to come. You’d throw out a huge net and there’d be your dinner.

The sea clears your head. If you look at the ocean, when there’s nothing but ocean all around you, it just wipes your mind of all the rubbish. When I was very young, when the TV stations
would close down, I’d just stare at the screen, the static, even though my mum and dad would belt me across the back of my head going, ‘Ye’ll mayke yerself go bloind’
– but that’s what the ocean feels like to me. That wonderful static. Brainwashing, in the most delightful positive way.

We eventually bought a boat called
Fantasia
. It’s small, 32 foot, and goes really, really
fast
! And we love it, we go deep, deep, deep out at sea, and the whole joy of me
using the GPS, and knowing where we are, is
fantastisch für meine Pussy-Frau
. Nora’s incredibly brave with all of this, she’s utterly fearless. I’m the one trying to
give her my tuppence worth of knowledge about, ‘That’s a big wave we’re heading into, I think if we went in the other direction it might help!’ She ploughs on through, but
the bounce on the back side of that wave – oh, that’s earth-shattering and painful. It will hop out the water and –
bang!
– that’s ten and a half tonnes
slapping the water – it feels like it’s gonna crack in half. For a boat, that’s not heavy.

We had an instructor when we first bought the boat, but he was
eighty-eight years old – Captain Something-or-the-Other. He was as dithery as they come, and we found
out halfway out at sea – in very rough waters, in 12-foot swells – that he wasn’t too used to motor boats. He was a canvas man, himself. Yes, so it was sink or swim. In fact he
ground the gears once: he was standing up on the helm leaning out pointing where we should go, and he accidentally knocked the gears out and the boat ground to a halt and a
huge
wash of
water came over the back. We could’ve drowned at that very point – the boat would have just bubbled down to the bottom. From that you actually learn. You learn: that ain’t going
to happen again.

As soon as we moved to the coast, I loved LA. I didn’t like it up in Pasadena because it’s desert – baking hot, no breeze, and carbon monoxide. It’s very much like
Beijing, but obviously not as bad. As soon as we moved down to the ocean, that was it. I realized – seriously for the first time in my life – how much I loved the sun. It’s a
beautiful thing to wake up at five, six in the morning – sunrise! It does wonders for me. I love being alert in the daytime, and well tired and exhausted and ready for sleep at around 10 p.m.
That’s the way I like it. I’m really not one for staying up and watching the late-night chat-shows. I don’t see any joy in them things, I see them as formats and incredibly
dull.

LA became the perfect place, because if you look at it on paper, you’d think, ‘Oh my God, there’s no reason to be in that environment at all. It could never work, it’s
the last bastion of hippiedom and mellowed-outness and sensible “new-age food”.’ And I found it great, refreshing – the idea that you don’t need to stay up all night!
It’s equally if not more entertaining, to get up very early in the morning. For instance, that’s when all the best CNN reporting goes on, before they censor it. That’s an absolute
truth, to this day. If you catch the CNN news reporting early in the morning, it’s far more open and detailed than by the time it reaches the afternoon, because the censors have come in,
clipping and editing so there’s less information in it. That’s equally as rewarding to me as noshing it up in a nightclub.

Mainly, living here is all about the ocean. I just love the sound of the sea, and being near it, and also being wary of its terrifying power. Ocean-bound changed
everything. We got into boats, from those short little cruise trips to Catalina. There’s nothing more glorious than, when everything just seems to be grinding you down, getting in your damn
boat, going out, losing sight of land, and working your GPS all the way back to shore.

It’s what’s needed, because the pressures of what my life has become can be overwhelming sometimes. Soul-shattering. Physical exhaustion is one thing, but mental stress and
exhaustion, that’s something else. You just need to be reminded that you’re here to live. Not to work, to
live
. Work is a pleasant intrusion – keep it that way.

It’s kind of like the weather’s too nice to be walking around pretending to be angry all the time. Let’s face it, aggressive clothing really is for colder climates. It’s
really hard to go round being angry in flip-flops and beach shorts. Though I hate bloody flip-flops! And then: speedboats and sunshine – you show me a working-class kid who would say no.

It was here in California that I got into my nature side, the love of the wildlife. If you just sit still and calm down and stop having to rush around the whole time, you’ll find that the
bunny rabbits will come up to you! And that’s quite nice, because you don’t have to kill them, you know, because you don’t resent them.

Then there’s all my little nature jaunts. I mean, I still love TV watching. I’m not out there admiring the dandelions all day long! You should never overdo any one stretch.
Don’t make your life a prison, and don’t get locked up in a routine, or else it can get like ‘Oh, I’m off for my nature walk again!’ Again and again, it can become a
drudgery, when it should be an excitement.

I learned to ski, because Nora could ski already, and she said, ‘Oh, you should learn it.’ For years I put it off, then finally one weekend we just drove up to Squaw Valley in
Nevada, and I loved it. I learned to fall down a mountain at various different speeds. There’s no sense of losing your dignity just because you fall over a
lot. In
fact, you’re making people laugh, and what’s wrong with that? I love it, because everybody, I don’t care who they are – they could be an expert all their life –
they’re gonna end up on their arse at some point. We’ve been going for years now, and there’s no sense of improvement, and indeed no care for it either.

With all these outdoors-y things, when you just leave the pressures of living in a town behind you, and all those daily business dealings that seem so overwhelmingly important, you become less
anxiety-ridden, and you find the answers. In fact, you find a great deal of clarity just being an isolated nobody out there in the wilderness. It does work. I can well understand, for instance, not
the weather aspect of it, but why people move to, say, the craziness of Alaska and live hundreds of miles away from anybody. I
can
understand that. I know what it is that makes them feel so
content. But at the same time, too much of that would drive me crazy. Nora and I? We’re three days of isolation together, not three weeks. We quickly get that out of our system and then come
back to the drudge, which doesn’t seem like a drudge any more, it seems exhilarating and exciting.

I can’t seem to get a suntan to save my life, though. I’ll just burn. Two days, I’ll think, ‘Aw, that’s looking great,’ then it’ll start to peel off,
and then I have to deal with freckles. I’m just naturally too pale for life. I suppose that may be why they liked me in Japan originally, just because I was so dead white. That’s their
vision of beauty, isn’t it? Death white, with the blood drained out of you. I don’t suppose amphetamine stopped the pallor any. My only problem with amphetamines is, I never got around
to doing enough of them. That’s been a terrible waste in my life. It leaves a sense of longing. He said laughingly. There’ll be some fool who’ll read that and take it literally.
That’s the world we live in. Humourless fucks. Quite frankly I wish they would take it literally, it’d give me endless hours of entertainment. Much better than a line of speed
itself.

But, oh God, I still keep getting these colds. My next-door neighbour has just cut the grass, which has added to my agony. I
get up very early and I’m straight on
the bloody over-the-counter medicines. Because here in LA, if the wind blows, there goes pollen season right up my nostrils. There are times when I’ve got rips around my eyes, because
they’re so teary and itchy, I just have to get my fingernails in there. I literally want to tear my eyes out.

I tried all the usual nasal sprays, but what I use these days is mostly saline solution, salt water, just up your nostrils. That or a highly chlorinated swimming pool, that seems to work, it
just burns it out. Dying my hair actually is a good way out of it, because you can’t help but breathe in the fumes of the bleach and that seems to be useful. So my nostrils are a lighter
shade of pale on the inside! Prescription stuff never works, and it just makes me really down and tired and lazy, and I hate that because I’m naturally run down and lazy anyway.