Rock and Hard Places Read online

  “Fashion victim,” says Thom, pointing unabashedly. “Dear oh dear. Though what I really like is those Versace jeans that cost £300 and still look like jeans.”

  I’ve never seen the point of spending that much money on something you’re only going to spill coffee on.

  “Makes you feel good.”

  This from a man who is still wearing a fake fur coat that looks like it was assembled from the pelts of a dozen bathmats.

  “Colin spent £900 on a suit, but he only wears it now and again. Doesn’t want to get it dirty. I did have a lovely pair of £100 sunglasses, but they got nicked.”

  My point exactly. So. Have you made a load of money, then?

  “Ed’s the person to ask, because I find it all ultra-confusing. One minute we’ll have half a million in the bank, the next minute we’ll have nothing. Ed keeps saying ‘It’s okay, it’s all about cash flow, it’ll all come through in the next six months.’”

  You might want to keep an eye on him. It won’t seem so funny when you’re back busking outside Oxford station and Ed is sipping julep on the verandah of a plantation homestead with commanding views of Lake Tanganyika.

  “Yeah . . . bloody hell.”

  Thom’s squinting over the balcony again, this time at one of the under-dressed, alabaster-skinned goddesses that the Paramount seems to pay to saunter languidly about the building. We play a short game of she’s-looking-at-me-no-she’s-looking-at-me-no-she’s-looking-me-yeahright-I’m-the-pop-star-and-she’s-looking-at-you-fat-chance.

  “It’s when they start coming up to you and saying hello that you get completely freaked out.”

  Happen often?

  “No. I mean, yes, Andrew, it happens all the fucking time. I mean, no. The crew cop off a lot more than we do.”

  Always the way. Though that can be kind of funny. Other people’s sex lives usually are.

  “That borderline,” says Thom, “is interesting, that duplicity between extremely cheap and extremely beautiful. But someone coming up to you after a show and invading your body space ridiculously, or . . . or being in a lift! I was in the lift earlier on, with my fur coat on, and this woman—she’s obviously into teddy bears or something—got in the lift, and she was, like stroking me, and her opening line was ‘Hey, we’re in the green lift.’”

  Classy.

  “Mmm. Maybe I should wear it more often.”

  Thom smiles, which he does more than he’s given credit for. If he’s relaxed into his role over the last year, he still seems unduly spooked by the way other people react to his work. He has bridled at several interviewers who’ve accused him of relentless miserabilism, of preaching to a constituency of adolescent misanthropes who regard his lyrics less as songs and more as pre-packaged suicide notes.

  “There’s a few key words that keep coming up . . . I mean, you’re asking for my hard disk, and it’s really only the RAM working at the moment. Um, what people actually usually say is that the songs are beautiful, and they say nice stuff about the way I sing and the atmospheres and things, and the lyrics. Which I find quite weird. I was trying to get away from that on The Bends by printing them on the sleeve. I was trying to burst the bubble, saying they’re just words, it’s . . .”

  They’re important, though. You wouldn’t bother writing them otherwise.

  “The problem is having to deliver that sense of importance all the time. That’s where the problem lies, because then you get into that Morrissey territory of contriving situations simply to perpetuate the way that you think people think you are.”

  How do you rate yourself as a lyricist?

  “Inconsistent. Definitely inconsistent.”

  What’s the best one you’ve written?

  “Um . . .”

  There’s a very, very long pause. It’s hard to say whether Thom is indecisive or embarassed.

  “Suck your teenage thumb,” he decides. “Toilet trained and dumb. When the power runs out, we’ll just hum. This is our new song. Just like the last one. Total waste of time. My iron lung.”

  He rattles it out in an everyday, conversational tone.

  “Some woman gave me Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited the other day,” he continues. “She said, ‘Thom, you’re a poet, listen to this,’ so I listened to it, and then I read the sleeve notes and just burst out laughing. I mean, hang on a fucking minute . . .”

  That was Dylan’s act, though. Impenetrable, spurious nonsense that, for some reason, sounds like it explains everything. Michael Stipe does a fair bit of it as well.

  “Well, I’m coming to the conclusion that your brain functions more honestly in spurious crap like that than it does in . . . things like ‘My Iron Lung’ happen every Saturday, say. The rest of the week it’s just that spurious crap. When I was much younger, I did this four-track demo, and this girl, a really close friend of mine, listened to it and said, ‘Your lyrics are crap, they’re too honest, too direct and too personal, and there’s nothing left to the listener’s imagination,’ and I’ve had that somewhere in the back of my head ever since. So now I want to write that spurious stuff that’s coming straight out of my head. There’s a song on Blood & Chocolate by Elvis Costello, the one that goes on and on for yonks . . .”

  “Tokyo Storm Warning.”

  “Yeah. Gibberish! Complete fucking gibberish! And it’s just wondrous. Because you open yourself up to that, because that’s the way human brains think. I just think Radiohead are in a really dangerous position at the moment, where we could end up supplying that pathos and angst all the fucking time, and I think there’s a bit more to it than that.”

  A closing line, if ever I’ve heard one.

  “Mmm. I’m dying for a piss, as well.”

  THE INTERIOR OF the urinal in the Paramount’s lobby is covered—ceilings, walls and floors—in gleaming, mercilessly reflective, polished steel. There is nowhere you can look without seeing everything else that’s going on while you’re in there, and from an alarming variety of angles. Thom and I pause, aghast, just inside the door.

  “You go first,” says Thom. “I’ll wait outside. I’m still too British for this.”

  2

  I’M THE TURBAN SPACEMAN, BABY

  Afghanistan under the Taliban

  MAY 1998

  WHAT FOLLOWS STANDS as an example of the sort of thing that used to happen back when the absence of email made it necessary for editors and writers to interact in person. I was having lunch with Craig McLean, then features editor of The Face, the venerable British monthly style and culture periodical. Britain was, at the time, still invigorated by the removal, the previous year, of a decrepit, incompetent Conservative administration which had often seemed at least as bored and annoyed with Britain’s people as Britain’s people were with it, and by the election of the Labour government of Tony Blair, who had ostentatiously embraced pretty much everything that The Face had spent years promoting as an edgy counter-culture. The appalling phrase “Cool Britannia” was being routinely deployed to suggest the accession of a gilded new generation.

  Which was balls, obviously—Britain’s new prime minister was, after all, a mid-forty-something lawyer. Craig thought it might be fun, therefore, to write a story about a place where the people of our generation really were in charge, and suggested Afghanistan, then under the control of a disproportionately youth-run Islamist cult trading as the Taliban. In many crucial respects, Craig noted, the Taliban were typical Face readers: crazy students who sold drugs and had firm opinions about facial hair. He suggested I go and meet them.

  I still feel a bit weird about the piece that resulted. I was, I think, seduced by how easy it was—both journalistically and morally—to regard the Taliban’s lunacy as amusing rather than malevolent (that said, I think America and the West could have lurched yards ahead, these last few years, by depicting Osama bin Laden and his fellow travellers as dimwitted, ranting wingnuts rather than omnipotent evil geniuses). I was possibly a few years’ more hard travelling from shedding my final vestiges of
idiot relativism (although my brief experience of the world as the Taliban would prefer it has been useful, subsequently, as ammunition in disputes with idiot relativists). And it didn’t occur to me, even for a second, that these people could ever pose any threat to anybody other than those sufficiently unfortunate to live in their dingbat fiefdom. (It’s not much consolation that entire western intelligence services made approximately the same assessment.)

  So, I wish I hadn’t written this story. I wish—for all the difference it would have made—I’d come home and written an impassioned jeremiad demanding a massive international intervention in Afghanistan. I wish I’d demanded that the civilised world send bombers, troops and aid on the grounds of elementary human compassion. I wish I’d suggested that we harry the Taliban up hill, down dale and out of business. I wish I’d urged that surely, whatever else we may respectfully disagree about, some ideas are such obvious transgressions against sense and decency that we can occasionally get together as a planet and solemnly, forecfully declare: this is bullshit. We said it, or words to that effect, about South Africa when it treated black people like barnyard animals; I fail to understand why so many other countries continue to get a free pass to do the same to women.

  As I write, of course, a massive international intervention in Afghanistan has been under way for some time, and I am yet to read a report describing the place as the Vermont of central Asia. I nevertheless believe the ongoing war there to be an effort worth making. Aside from considerations pertaining to self-interest—allowing Afghanistan to fester as a failed state worked out pretty badly for the rest of the world—it strikes me as a supremely elegant match of supply and demand. On one side, fervid holy warriors who declare that their dearest wish is a martyr’s deathfighting the infidel. On the other, the awesome military forces of NATO and its allies. An offensive named “Operation Form An Orderly Queue, Weirdbeards” is surely overdue.

  Finally, I apologise to American readers for the cricketing references in the opening paragraph, but that’s what you get for disdaining this supremely noble sport in favour of the boorish playground pastime of baseball, and as further punishment you may strap yourselves in for the following. A few months after the reported conversation took place, the player at the centre of it stepped into cricketing legend just over the other side of the Khyber Pass. In October 2008, while captaining Australia in a Test match against Pakistan at Peshawar’s Arbab Niaz Stadium, Mark Taylor piled up a colossal innings of 334 not out, equalling what was then the Australian record for runs scored by an individual batsman in a Test match, set sixty-eight years earlier by Sir Donald Bradman. I remember reading of Taylor’s triple century at the time, and hoping that the officer who’d been so excited to meet someone who shared Taylor’s birthplace had been able to get leave to see at least some of Taylor’s epic knock. Even if Mark Taylor was-it turned out, upon further investigation-actually born in Leeton, a bit to the northwest of Wagga Wagga, just past Narrandera.

  “MARK TAYLOR,” SAYS the young Wing Commander of the Pakistan Army’s Khyber Rifles, “is a very good batsman.”

  We’re outside in the stifling heat, incessant noise and choking dust of the border crossing at Torkham. He’s examining my passport, making sure my visa entitles me to come back into Pakistan at some stage. I’m kind of concerned on this point myself.

  “You were born in Wagga Wagga,” he continues. “Like Mark Taylor. Very, very good batsman.”

  Behind me are the CARE Afghanistan truck and driver that have borne me along the vertiginous Khyber Pass road from Peshawar, along with the armed military guard that any foreigners silly enough to travel the intermittently bandit-prone route must be accompanied by.

  “Very good batsman.”

  Well, I don’t know, I tell him. Without wishing to cast aspersions at Australia’s redoubtable captain, or his efficiency as an opener, I’ve always found him a bit prosaic, as a spectacle. Certainly no Dean Jones.

  “No. Very good batsman.” He emphasises the “Very” with a fervour that suggests further disagreement would be foolish.

  The border crossing point is an open gate between two white turrets that would be more appropriate to a mediaeval theme park. Between them, unchecked traffic teems in both directions: battered cars and gaudily decorated trucks; camels and mules; people toting sacks, suitcases and wheelbarrows; lone, swaggering turbaned Afghans slinging rifles; shoals of Pakistani traders in various shades of pyjama suit; women blundering about under veils, trying uselessly to control squawking flocks of children, chasing and scrapping in the dirt. On the fence next to the gate, six Japanese tourists perch and chatter like mutant galahs, and fire their cameras into Afghanistan.

  “But,” the Wing Commander concedes, “he has been having a bad patch lately. Please enjoy Afghanistan.”

  This conversation is the least peculiar thing that will happen to me for a week.

  ACROSS THE BORDER, I change some US dollars for Afghanis, the local currency. The Afghani is not one of the greats—children in low-slung hessian tents by the roadside sell it pretty much by weight, exchanging an inch-thick wad of purple 5000-Afghani notes for every 20-dollar bill. One kid holds my American money up to the sun and scrutinises it with an impatient eye, which is a bit rich considering that if I walk 50 metres back in the direction I’ve come, the notes he’s giving me will only be useful as novelty bookmarks.

  The Afghan customs officer is friendlier than his appearance, which isn’t difficult, and asks about the purpose of my visit. I mumble some obsequious platitudes about coming to learn the truth about his beautiful, historic country and its sensitive, cultured, deeply misunderstood people. This is all true as far as it goes, though it’s interesting to reflect that a dangerous-looking chap with a gun and an attractive woman will, if for entirely different reasons, reduce the average bloke to spouting exactly the same sort of fawning drivel.

  For my purposes, anyway, it serves better than “Well, think about it: you’ve got a country with no rule of law, other than that dictated by the whim of a bunch of crazy students, and not only that, but crazy students who control the world’s richest natural resources of recreational drugs—on paper, this place should be one gigantic Glastonbury. But, if we believe what we read, it’s a total no-fun zone populated by ill-educated peasants living in perpetual fear of bearded wackos with rocket-launchers who think they’re working for God. What’s all that about?”

  The customs officer stamps my passport, and walks me out to the bus station: a muddy lot behind the money-changing tents, full of merchants trying to sell each other shoes, bread and watches. He helps me buy two seats—one for me, one for my pack—on a crowded minibus headed for Jalalabad, shakes my hand, and waves me off.

  THE REASON FOR my visit to Afghanistan is the reason that’s motivated every hack who’s come here since 1994. The Taliban, Afghanistan’s rulers, are the journalistic equivalent of an open goal with a keeper lying injured somewhere near the halfway line. You can’t miss. The Taliban are extremists so extreme they can’t be bothered pretending they’re not, and oppressors so oppressive they excite the liberal outrage of Iran. As if that wasn’t enough, they have an undeniable comedy value—the global guffaws that greeted the Taliban’s edict on facial hair were probably audible from deep space—and are also a convenient cipher for the image of Islam that so much of the western media, either through mendacity or ignorance, is keen to project. The Taliban, and their creed of the Koran and the Kalashnikov, are bloody good value, as long as you don’t have to live in Afghanistan.

  Under the Taliban’s uncompromising reading of Islamic sharia law, Afghanistan is the most repressive society on earth, a place where everything is illegal, except beards and praying, which are compulsory. If you’re trying to have fun in Afghanistan, you can forget the following: cinema (closed), drink (punishable by flogging), dancing (illegal), or being outside for any reason at all after 9:00 PM (curfew, about which the Taliban aren’t kidding—a few days before I got into Afghanistan, tw
o foreign aid workers, lost on their way home in Kabul at 9:15 PM, flagged down a Taliban patrol vehicle, apologised, and asked for a lift, whereupon they were arrested, locked up for four days and threatened with a public beating, before the poor sods’ employers interceded and the Taliban settled for driving them to the border and throwing them out of the country). If you’re male, you can go out for a meal, but you can’t take your girlfriend, because eating would necessitate her removing the mesh face-mask from her all-over veil—the burqa—and women may not show any part of themselves in public, on pain of a sound thrashing.

  And if you decide, all things considered, to stay in and watch telly, you’re in for a slow night—there isn’t any. The only broadcaster permitted in Afghanistan is Radio Shariat, which offers a schedule consisting of religious programmes and heavily censored news bulletins, and is light on chuckles.

  The sole legal amusement I detect in a week in Afghanistan is pestering foreigners. Everywhere I walk, I get followed by droves of people, children and adults alike, a few begging, most just curious. One afternoon in Kabul, while I’m standing outside a mosque watching punters arrive for prayers, a kindly shopkeeper scuttles up with a chair. When I sit down, I am surrounded by dozens of people, staring and gawping. They eventually crowd so close that the first few rows land in my lap. I have a sudden insight into how deeply tiresome it must be to be famous.

  THE SPINGHAR HOTEL in Jalalabad is situated at the end of a gravel drive amid pretty and well-kept gardens. By the front door is a sign bearing a picture of a Kalashnikov assault rifle with a red cross painted over it. Classy place, obviously.

  Jalalabad, capital of the province of Nangarhar, is a grim footnote in British imperial history. It was here, in January 1842, that an early attempt at bringing this wilful country to heel came to an end, when a Dr. Brydon, the only surviving member of a 17,000-strong British army that had marched to Kabul three years previously, rode into the city on a lame horse.