Hotel Amour
“Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. It is only later that they claim remembrance, when they show their scars” Excerpt from La Jetée by Chris Marker
There was a songwriter/producer who someone important at Radio 1 said was singularly going to “save radio” and it wasn’t me. It was a cute guy I met when I was fifteen years old at a cafe in Bondi Beach. He worked at Happy Hockers pawn shop and his long-haired girlfriend was singing folk songs on an acoustic guitar to a handful of barefoot and sandy drifters drinking dandelion tea. I remember thinking how bored I was of that soft, whispery vocal tone with an oddly inflected accent (is it Elvish?) and mundane lyrical content (akin to a still life painting) that became popular over laundry liquid commercials in the noughties and is now considered somewhat mainstream instead of just Sia ‘Breathe Me’/HBO series soundtrack territory. I also remember thinking he was cute and I’d like to date him when I was older.
So, however many years later, after playing in bands at all the same venues, sharing all the same friends but never really speaking, we end up in London at the same time, on the same hustle and yes- I do date him. Only now that I’m older, of course. When I was younger and introverted I liked to think of myself as mythical and mysterious. In fact “something of a myth to behold” (a direct quote from a newspaper at the time) is how the press described me. I didn’t party with the crowd. I took my work very seriously. I was tortured and I wanted the cooler older people (adults) in the scene to know as much, to think ‘she’s special, pure, virginal, untouchable’ -like I had a golden halo of once in a lifetime prodigious talent around me that no one could enter in to and no heartbreaker could dissolve. In reality I probably came across as a moody bitch in person. And I probably was.
So here we are in the big city, with the big music attorneys at the same big firm in London that all the ‘hot new acts’ get sent to. We’ve been shopped around to the same big time managers and publishers. The sharks are circling (or that’s what it feels like in our ego-driven imaginations). It feels like that moment before you get really famous and everyone can taste it in the air. Except 80% of you never really do climb that next mountain, with the same glittery air hovering around you. It’s exciting, and we bond over the shared moment, going home together for what we both assume will be a one night stand. He tells me the following morning he has a girlfriend, to which I respond poe faced -‘I have a boyfriend’, and we admit solemnly that we should probably deal with that situation. We plan to make phone calls to our respective others on the same day so we can move ahead together as a couple. I really don’t know why or how it was so obviously committal so immediately, but it was and we were in love like boiling water on a cup of 50p instant noodles.
Next thing you know, we are living together in a terrace over looking the canals in Angel that belongs to a floppy haired synth musician friend of his/ours who is dating a cumbersome wealthy diplomat who brokers oil deals between countries. They are off on Safari in Africa at the moment and honestly, that’s my idea of the sexiest daddy-complex in a gay relationship I can think of. So we have this luxe-pad, immaculately furnished, stocked with San Pellegrini in the mini fridge by the bed and don’t get me started on the thread count. Radio saviour spends half his time in an abandoned church/studio he’s put together in the middle of a sunflower field in the south of France. He’s recording the debut album he’s signed a big money deal with a trop cool French label for. It has an absurd amount of pressure and expectation placed on it based off one single release that got a lot of “buzz” and “traction” and the hot air that is necessary in London to get such a deal. I notice a sample in the single from a 60s garage girl-band from Chicago called Daughter’s of Eve. The song is called “Help Me Boy” and it’s on a U.S.A Records vinyl comp I would spin during DJ sets. He can’t believe I picked it, asks me not to share my finding and then to re-record the sample for the album version so they don’t come across legal issues. So, it’s me singing the sample for any indie sleuth trivia nerds out there and that’s the reason why.
There’s a thing in the London music scene (I should say industry) that is the antithesis of the culture in Australia. You aren’t “allowed” (by management) to perform a show in London until you have a hit. Which at the time meant a song being played on Radio 1 or BBC6, or a soundcloud/hype machine success (laughing at this one now, as it’s already obsolete but was such a big deal in 2012). You must also perform some shittier shows somewhere like Liverpool or Birmingham (where no one important will see) as a test run before the fated London debut. This is based on the generally held belief that if you do your first show in London and it’s not unanimously agreed upon as the most amazing thing anyone’s ever seen by the room full of every industry who’s who with folded arms (pretending to be serious about their job while they fuck each other and do blow in the bathrooms), if they aren’t subsequently falling over themselves to sign you, then your career is over. Dead. Right there and then. It’s dog eat dog. This is something I was made to understand. Also, it’s expensive to put on a show in England and no one gets paid (because everyone else needs to get paid) if you know what I mean. A support show at The Old Blue Last (when it was just about still acceptable to play there) used to get you 50 quid if you were lucky, but the hipster guitarist in your band would need a retainer contract and £250 for the night, plus £90 p/hr rehearsals. Oh and unless you’re happy to settle for “house lights” (aka, all the lights on), £250 for a lighting engineer.
In Australia, you cut your teeth, so to speak, and build your 100 000 hours (or whatever The Beatles did) on stage in the club scene. You play as many live gigs as you possibly can. For practice, for money, for exposure, for buzz, for the scene. You want everyone talking about you. You want to be a regular part of their lives. You grow with your audience and you’re allowed to. The songs grow too. Any good DJ or live performer will tell you that you learn everything you need to know about the structural and dynamic power and mechanisms of a song from the response of a live audience. When to drop, re-enter, build, repeat -the most effective sequence of a set list. You learn what falls flat and what makes people holler and yell and go wild. You can actively tweak the songs over time to get the most effective tension and reaction. Only then do you usually have the opportunity to go into a recording studio and cut a record.
Well, that’s how it was in the late noughties in Oz. That’s how we did it then, and that’s how my first band was signed, and how my friend’s bands were signed. So by the time of this memoir, everyone has access to a home studio inside their laptops and that sets an expectation for high quality recordings from YouTube-tutorial bedroom producers, preceding a high production performance (usually from artists who have no experience performing live). They are actually two completely different art forms. Performing and recording are an entirely different set of skills in my opinion. Not everyone is good at both, and they both need practice to make perfect. I’ll never forget watching this young major label signee living at my friend’s place getting basic “movement coaching” from a choreographer the label paid for in preparation for her first live show. She had a great voice, but no style, personality or charisma, couldn’t write songs and couldn’t move for shit. So they had to hire people to do the rest for her. How to stand and the angle to hold a mic even. That was a revelation to me; it expanded my understanding and appreciation of the industry -all ways to create are valid and valuable and the collaborative process is fruitful. I came from the Prince school of thought -that to be the real deal, you had to be the full package, and you had to just naturally tick all the boxes of every facet of your act, your craft. Whew, went on a tangent there…
I’ll meet you at the steps to Sacré-Cœur at sunset. I caught the train to Gare du Nord on a Friday and made my way up the steps to his smiling face, with the dry yellow brick sun curling it’s way around the spire and the belly of the basilica behind him. We kiss with all the little pieces of paris laid out beneath us. It’s stomach churningly romantic. It’s before 3G roaming is affordable in Europe, so there was the thrill of the chance for failure to show or find one another, but we achieve this glorious filmic success. We eat baked camembert over candlelight, buy a citron tart and a pack of cheap Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes on the way back to our room at Hotel Amour. We smoke them on the balcony with a glass of red wine in the significantly blue light of 3am, draped in crisp ivory bedsheets and the flush of love, because… Paris. The memories are so cliché, like a succession of black and white arthouse snapshots, and I think this is purely for his wistful comment that I looked like the girl from La Jetée (in the dream scene) when I was laying in bed under moonlight. He went to film school obviously (I see you rolling your eyes), and wrote me a list of classics to study upon request. I still have the hand scribbled thing in my little envelope of special papers, along with the bag tag from the hotel. Sometimes I keep these momentos in case I ever get dementia in old age and long for a trigger. Touch wood.
Many of my first songs in London were written for him, my muse. I would play him demos I’d made on my own with garage band and an omnichord with it’s built-in drum machine (which he loved), then these ultra produced tracks I was making with the songwriters my managers were putting me in the room with -and he hated them, and I would cry about it. I was so proud of them; they were close to sounding like how I had always imagined my songs. I didn’t want them to sound like mysterious, charming and sloppy bedroom music. I wanted them to last the test of time, I wanted Lionel Richie status and expensive chords. He didn’t think this was cool, but I don’t think he understood that I didn’t care very much about being cool (I knew I was cool) and that I wanted to make a classic record full of hits. I wanted to be secretly cool, so if you dug the surface you’d find a “if you know, you know” pleasant surprise, but publicly I’d be a Britney Spears/Tina Turner/Cher. I was confused about it, and so was everyone I worked with. Everyone could see I was talented, but no one knew quite where to place me. They still don’t. I’m too pop to be indie and too indie to be pop, and it’s just weird for people to wrap their heads around apparently. It’s uncomfortable for people when you don’t fit in a box, but this is especially true of women.
The first songwriting session I did was with the guy who wrote Dido’s ‘Thank You’ and the demo I’d made that was floating around (“Gardens of Paradise”) made this match-making make sense. I had never written a song with other people on the spot like this before. I had been writing songs since I was 3 years old, but always alone in my bedroom, usually when I was sobered after a bout of tears, and then I’d take them to my band to flesh them out. I was terrified. What if I couldn’t think of anything? How could I be vulnerable in front of these two random older dudes I’d never met? What if they understood my lyrics and could see straight through my soul?! I knew my voice wasn’t like a conventional trained pop voice either and wasn’t sure they would know what to do with it. Maybe I was CRAP? Imposter syndrome is unavoidable. It was all a completely foreign process to me. They brought up a Spotify playlist of references, none of which I was familiar with or even aspired toward in any way, but I bit my tongue and decided to go with it, stay cheerful and see what happened.
They built a Berlin “You Take My Breath Away” style synth bed track and I wrote an OTT poetic love letter to this guy. To my absolute joy and pride, I finished the song and recorded the vocal. When I got home the producer emailed, telling me they wanted to change the structure of the verse melody completely and could I adapt the lyrics to it? WHAT!? At that time, the song writing process was sacred to me, I believed every bit of music that came to me was perfect (even in utter frailty). I believed I was a conduit for some higher force and I had a purity and protective approach to what I channeled -it stayed as is, in it’s celestial form. I was scared to mess with it honestly. I didn’t feel like I could rely on lyrics and music coming to me on demand back then, I would wait for a song to find me and respect that process. Maybe growing up with the indie music ethos that lauded the “mistakes” and fragility you would hear on an early Cat Power record, built this sense of protectionism. The Steve Albini attitude. The recording to tape attitude (which is how I recorded as a teenager). Capture it -the feeling, above all technicalities. Anyway, out of some sense of duty, I rewrote the lyrics to fit the new melody. It was simpler, more obvious, far less poetic and less wordy, but… it was honestly better. This was another complete revelation to me and the beginning of an explosion of productivity and expansion in my writing. The song (Call of Love) thematically ripped off of Ain’t No Mountain High Enough. I learned to let go and give in to where a song wanted/needed to go to flow right. Let some lyrics slide for the bigger picture and greater good of the song. Go with it.
I heeded the Call of Love and made my way back to France. This time we caught a train to the Loire Valley where the church and the sunflower field was. We sat in cast iron furniture on gravelled garden paths eating the most incredible soft cheeses to ever dissolve on my tongue. The sunlight, the claw footed bath, the window looking out over the garden full of rosemary. Call Me By Your Name. I even made Ratatouille one night from a dusty 1980s Marie Claire recipe book I found in the barn, served on one of those cabbage/lettuce ware plates you’d expect to see in The Big Chill kitchen. The young raver who owned the property had inherited it from his somewhat wealthy parents (who I think were symphony musicians). I suffered over my demos, while he suffered over his masterpiece upstairs.
Back in London he became very sick with an immunodeficiency related illness to do with his colon (likely induced from the stress of thinking he had to create a radio saving album -as if any one album could take on a task so impossibly impossible!) and this became all encompassing. He was obsessed about what we ate -lots of raw foods initially. Which pissed me off as a young brat who preferred take away, pastries and spaghetti. He forced me to take nutrition seriously and bought me a good knife to encourage cooking when I was on my own. It irritated me, unreasonably, but I am retrospectively grateful. I was at the beginning of my adult life, trying to be a young pop starlet and wanted everything to be sexy and fun. He was in a lot of pain (bleeding), he must have felt so vulnerable, powerless and scared. He was prescribed a course of strong steroids as treatment. He warned me this might happen as a result, but he became kind of agro and super sensitive (and simultaneously I was being a fairly self involved and insensitive asshole about it all). I was navigating my way through my own persistent nightmares.
“Our time so far has been magical despite the shifting sands and tears” is the contents of the only email I can find from him.
He went back to Australia to finish some work, deal with his health and I suspect (go back to his long term girlfriend who would take care of him). His illness turned out to be life threatening and he spent the subsequent years in and out of hospital between playing Glastonbury and Coachella. He nearly died. He said he didn’t think I had the unconditional love for him he needed to support him through this health crisis, and to be honest -I didn’t. I was on a mission and I had tunnel vision.
A few nights before he left he won a BAFTA for a film soundtrack he’d worked on. We went to the afterparty inside Battersea Power Station (the building on the Led Zeppelin album cover). I was quickly drunk and distressed about our inevitable demise and made my way to the dance floor. A familiar face (a family friend -a brilliant actor and playwright) bumped his ass into me in the midst of an exaggerated and limb heavy swaying action. To his total disbelief and my tangible relief - “Holiday !! What are you doing here? Are you okay? Do you have somewhere to stay?”. “Actually, no” with complete transparency, “My boyfriend is skipping town and I don’t have anywhere to stay… help?”. “I’m shooting a series in Hungary for the next three months” he said, “You can take my room”. A caveat, a pause… “I have a flatmate, but he’s never there. He’s kind of weird -just don’t go into his room, ok?”. I didn’t go into his room, but I did marry him. *spoiler alert*
To be continued…