buying it – literally. And I need to talk about love. The happy sort. The celebratory, blissful, ecstatic sort. Enter Fern.
Fern is so clear-cut and straightforward. Her dilemmas are few and far between and so ordinary. The Americans are really going to relate.
‘The stuff you talk about, Fern, is so fresh and frank and authentic. I love it. You’re helping me think new thoughts. I’ve written so much in the last week. I’m working on this new album, called Wedding Album, it’s a bunch of love ballads. Something very different for me. It’s all about you.’
‘Really?’ Fern flashes one of her astonishing smiles.
No, not really if she means really in the absolutely, one hundred per cent truthful sense. But yes, really, the album is all about her, now. I’ve dropped her name into two or three of the songs, which only required the smallest of changes in the lyrics. It’s pedantic to insist on believing that just because I wrote the vast majority of the album before I met her, it’s any less about her than it would have been if I’d written it after I’d met her. I’m like dedicating it to her. The press will think it’s about her. My fans will think it’s about her. And in my experience if enough people think a thing, it makes it true. True enough. The thing is, more people will buy it if they think it’s about her.
I start to tell Fern more stories about myself. This isn’t just because I like talking about me, I’m wondering how she will react to it all. She’s appropriately (and understandably) enthralled, but more than that, her responses to my experiences are really fascinating. Fern understands my ordinary roots and extraordinary flowering. That’s special. I offer up fragile, immersed memories and she appreciates what I’m on about; I can elaborate on them, giving them warmth and texture and a meaning they sure as hell didn’t have when I was living them. Story after story pours forth. Some are blazingly bizarre; she’s surprised to hear I’ve had coffee with Nelson Mandela. Others are painfully predictable; everyone expects me to have snorted cocaine off the arses of women whose names I never knew.
‘I think it’s brilliant that I can tell you all this stuff,’ I mutter as I kiss her. I slip my tongue in her mouth and my hand up her skirt. I feel her warm wetness in both places. We’re lying side by side on the sand. It’s fun to push a fraction further, go a bit deeper, play a little harder. I allow this kiss to linger before I pull away, fall flat on my back and look at the sky. ‘I wonder if we’re going to manage this pre-wedding chastity thing?’
‘Not if you insist on giving me filthy looks and probing kisses in the sunshine,’ she laughs. We both know she wants it.
I love it that she’s so horny for me but I love controlling myself (and her) more, so I keep talking. There’s loads more stuff to tell her about me yet and she, like everyone else, can’t get enough. The difference between her and everyone else is that I don’t edit. If she’s shocked she doesn’t show it. The thing is, for a long time I believed that as a rock star I sort of had a duty to enjoy myself to the absolute limit. That’s what’s supposed to happen; it’s part of the natural order of things and rock stars don’t enjoy themselves line-dancing or whipping up a really tasty meal for two with only four ingredients. Decadence and depravity are the birthright of the rock star. It’s my job to be reckless and extreme. People expect it, because if I’m not shagging and snorting to excess then who the hell is? It would be an ungrateful waste of opportunity to be a rock star and to just turn up at a gig or the studio, play some songs and leave quietly by the back door. No one wants that. I’m in a unique position, not even models or princes get the same opportunities. I answer to no one. The stuff I’ve done isn’t evil; it’s just dirty. Really, very much so.
I tell her about parties where people left their clothes and sense at the door, where joints and women were rolled on glass-top tables and champagne and bullshit flowed and was lapped up with ravenous greed.
However sensationally beautiful and cool the party venues were (and they always