June 2011
So as some of you know, to escape the difficulties posed by my unorthodox home life that seeped into early adulthood, I fantasised many things. Not only had I been a leading actor starring in a top US cop show that ran for 12 seasons (See "Kid Cop"), but I’d also been in a late 80s synthesizer duo that went onto make one of the greatest pseudo jazz albums of the 90s. In fact, I went on to be in, well three bands actually, three of the most extraordinary bands this country’s ever produced. As all my family got into their beds in the same room night after night, I retreated deep into the recesses of my mind to make incredible music performed before millions of people globally. I was performing in packed out stadiums and arenas, all from my bed sit.
Now if you remember a few weeks ago, on The Daniel Ruiz Tizon Podcast, I was telling you about one of my greatest friends, Nelly Jenkins, whom I grew up with. Now we may or may not have been in Tears For Fears, I don’t know. No one’s quite proven to me that we weren’t. But after Nelly and I became estranged at just 18, the band broke up after releasing the Seeds of Love, during which I wrote, sang and produced most of the material – with Nelly just providing a face really, a bit like Micky in Please Don’t Hug Me. And the album, whilst artistically it was a huge achievement, particularly for two teenagers, failed to shift many units and Nelly and I decided that I would leave the band. Nelly wanted to take Tears back to the more US friendly “Songs From the Big Chair” template. He liked that, he liked it when we were the biggest band in the world.
So I went on to form, in late ’92, Joy Division with the rather intense front man, Seb Waterson. I talked about Seb in show 9 or 10. Also known as the wheelchair (Long story). In real life, I haven’t seen Seb since the summer of ’85. But Seb was a massive presence and I stepped back into the shadows, just playing guitar and keyboards, and backing vocals, as you do, you know.
Now Seb killed himself in the summer of ’93, just a couple of weeks after we performed on Gary Crowley’s late night Carlton tV music show, The Beat, and just a day before we were due to tour the States. Meantime, that summer, Nelly had released the first Tears album without me, Elemental, and it proved a big hit in the States. He posed for a picture on the album cover, clutching a bunch of dead sunflowers – we’d used the sunflower as our symbol on the seeds album, and here he was now, clutching a bunch of dead sunflowers, symbolising the death of our friendship.
So not only had I lost my original band, Joy Division was dead now. So we reformed, myself, the drummer Ayuk, his girlfriend, a blonde keyboard player, our young maverick bassist, also female and we were joined by this Bahraini girl whom I was to date at college and we reformed as New Order before the Christmas of ’93, being catapulted into the public glare after playing the John Peel show. I was the oldest in the band at just 21, and we’d all met up at college in Putney where I was retaking my A Levels and at just 21, I was in my third extraordinary band.
I often beat myself up, but my I really never stopped to laud my musical achievements.