Q Magazine
June 1997
The Kings of America
Written by Phil Sutcliffe


The "jocks", the squealing girls, the skinhead, the ordinary folk. Anyone who's American loves Bush, Britain's biggest band. A few snidey Little Englanders aren't impressed, but they'd better tread carefully, for, as Gavin Rossdale explains to Phil Sutcliffe in New Orleans, "I harbour everything..."

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! It's louder than God, if God were a 12-year-old girl. SCREEEEEEEE! More germane, it's louder than Bush. They're thrashing guitars and howling at microphones and still they can't be heard at all. SCREEEEEEEEEE!

Astonishing. In the days of Beatlemania, all the screamers had to outdo was three little Vox AC30s. Here at the University Of New Orleans Lakefront Arena they're up against the mighty megawattage of modern rock science, decibels pouring over them like the Mississippi in flood, and the screamers are winning. Up in the bleachers, they wriggle, writhe and, occasionally, vary their wordless open-throated squawk with a more whimpery, wishful "Gaaaaavin!" Haughtily cheekboned Bush singer and songwriter Gavin Rossdale is, candidly, the sole object of their particular fantasies.

But it's not just the young girls of America who have taken to Bush. Beside them, their 10-year-old brothers are punching the air. They get it too. So do the big, wild jocks and skinheads. Down on the arena floor, a circle of worried citizens stand well back as, shirts off, the mad moshers crash into one another.

Then there's the great amorphous mass of 15-to-35 year-old basic rock fans who fill the place to capacity. They talk, josh, and eat popcorn, but when, eventually, the sound engineer winds the PA up to the requisite war footing, they know all the words and sing along cheerily with dark stuff about "suburban suicide" and "there's a greedy fly in here" and "Everything Zen? I don't think so".

There's not the smallest sign of anyone pausing to complain, as American and British critics have, that Bush are but "teabag grunge" or "bubble-grunge" or, worst, "traitors" to the memory of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana.

Although Bush are still little more than a curiosity back home in the UK, as shaven-pated guitarist Nigel Pulsford remarks after the show, "We're the biggest English band in the world. Really. Sometimes you suddenly think about that and go... Fuck!"

At first, Bush baulked and bridled at those Nirvana references, inevitable as they were, given the style and sound of their debut album, Sixteen Stone. However, after a year or more of American success, they began to react in less predictable ways. Perhaps crazy ways.

Suddenly, it seemed, they were flaunting connections. The gossip was all Bush and Courtney Love, Bush and Steve Albini. Whatever next? This was largely Gavin Rossdale's doing.

His considerable length is curled into a cramped couch at the rear of the Bush tour bus, parked behind the arena. It's after soundcheck, three hours until showtime. Heavy-lidded and deploying a certain fundamental hauteur of countenance, for the most part he maintains a languid calm - occasionally offset by the nervy flicking of a Zippo against his thigh (there's a stippling of small holes burnt in his jeans).

Rumours that Rossdale was having an affair with Courtney Love began to spread last year. He's always denied it, insisting that they were just good friends. In the simple, valued meaning of the phrase.

"We met when Bush and Hole played a festival and I was introduced to her by a mutual friend," he explains. "We really got on. I thought she was brilliant."

"Then I was working in Seattle for a few days and I called her to see what was going on. Obviously, I was fishing, testing the water, because I liked her. I left a message and at five in the morning she called back. Gaaaavin! (a not bad, cracked, husky impersonation). That was the beginning of my friendship with Courtney."

But, strategically, shouldn't he have steered well clear? That way he'd have avoided those accusations of publicity-seeking and worse...

"It was genuine. There was no reason to hide it. It would be a sad, shitty existence if I decided not to be friendly with certain people because it might mean bad press."

He followed the same impulses - both the fascination and the defiance - when, to record Bush's second album, Razorblade Suitcase, he enlisted Steve Albini, producer of Nirvana's In Utero and a radical often held to specialise in making popular bands unlistenable.

"There, I knew I was stoking the fire," he concedes. "But after a year on tour promoting Sixteen Stone, I felt creatively fake. We decided to make a new album quickly and we all liked records he'd produced. Pod (The Breeders) and Surfer Rosa (The Pixies) are easily in my all-time top ten. Yeah, and Nirvana."

"I called Steve when I was in Chicago and asked him out to lunch. It did feel like taking someone out on a date - although his girlfriend was there. So a jerk-off band from London recorded with Steve Albini. I wouldn't have traded that dream for some journalist's good opinion."

The man who's about to address 8,000 says his present calling is an odd outcome because he was once a shy boy, couldn't ask a stranger the time without blushing to his hair roots until he was at least 15. He fancies he was always something of an outsider by nature - even alienated - citing a pre-teenage fixation with Sid Vicious which led him to spike his hair with egg white and endure peer mockery for the dandruff blizzard which inevitably followed.

When he was 12, his parents' separation led him into an adolescence played out in several different worlds, each offering a different experience of life. He went on living with his father, a GP in Kilburn. However, he was packed off to Westminster public school as a day boy. He hated the "complacency and privilege" he encountered there, and wished he could have gone to one of the local schools, like the council estate kids he'd grown up with.

Then again, at weekends and, often, during the week he'd stay with his Auntie Maggie, who helped her boyfriend run a pub called The Pepperpot in Docklands, which meant a proper blimey-guvnor East End good time: "Jellied eels and whelks on the buffet with cocktail sausages and cheese-and-pineapple on sticks when we made a special effort for Sunday."

Meanwhile, he was still a part-time Kilburn boy: youth clubs, bands at the National every Thursday, and down to Hammersmith for the roller-skating. Although he was "the only boy where I lived who went to a nobby school", he usually sidestepped trouble because of the respect accorded to any good footballer, and Rossdale was a "nifty" enough midfielder to have a trial with Chelsea.

More or less deliberately blowing his educational prospects, he saw his career as a choice between football and music, in which his talents were far less apparent. The young boho in him won through.

"I was never a 'lad', never wanted to be," he scoffs. "The water fights after training did get a bit tiring and I was just discovering books, the beat poets. Girls too. So I'd wear this dirty old mac, let my hair get really greasy, smoke Marlboros and walk around Kilburn pissed off with everyone and life in general. Funny how you do that."

His post-school "anaesthetised" years were spent hanging out with Culture Club's crowd. But, despite claims in Boy George's autobiography, he affirms, with credible lack of heat, that he did not shack up with Marilyn.

In actual fact, his romancing activities were largely exported to New York, where he'd decamp for a month at a time to move with yet another smart set, a gang of exclusive, $3,000-a-day English models that included his then girlfriend, Lindsay.

Meanwhile, the music career proceeded in comparatively low gear. There was Midnight, a "guitar-based pop-rock thing", who recorded two nowhere singles for Epic. Then there was Head, who did nothing at all (not to be confused with the Virgin-signed Head, who did next to nothing around the same time).

Fun had been had, but he was hardly getting on. By 1991, failure was the career path opening up to him. He went to America again. He spent seven months in Los Angeles, doing odd jobs and sleeping on friends' floors, without striking sparks. Then he tried New York, immersing himself in an artily arid loft, all white, furnished with a fridge and a sofa bed. Unsurprisingly, his gloomy verdict was that "there was nothing in my life" - except for what he calls "the two good nights in ten months": Mudhoney at the New York Marquee and Nirvana at the LA Roxy (the summer before Nevermind).

"Those bands gave me faith," he affirms. "Even so, seeing them wasn't the turning point for me - it was meeting Nigel. Until then, I was fucking terrified that everything I'd done since school was dead and I had no future."

Time to eat. Rossdale leads the way to backstage catering where he joins Gwen Stefani - No Doubt's singer, Rossdale's declared girlfriend (after many a denial) and with him for the week. They tuck into the local delicacies, downing catfish and quelling squeamishness to dismantle a heap of dauntingly insect-like crawfish.

A roadie taps Rossdale on the shoulder. "Time to get ready," the singer allows, rising from the table. "You got any Rizlas, Bob?"

When Suzi Demarchi, from Australian rockers Baby Animals, introduced Nigel Pulsford to her then boyfriend, Gavin Rossdale, backstage at a Bryan Adams's Wembley Arena gig on November 7, 1991, it was a meeting of rather morose souls adrift in the backwash of youthful ambition.

In a subterranean dressing room after the show, the guitarist explains how, like Rossdale, he had explored an alternative route to glory, not as a footballer but as a novelist. Being a devotee of Kathy Acker and into "articulating inner emotions through extremes", among his three unpublished manuscripts, he confesses, is "this hideous story about three imaginary soldiers going through my past wiping out, well, Morecambe, for example".

Abandoning literature, he toiled through several bands, King Blank being the last to fizzle before he and Rossdale got talking, then playing. Shared tastes emerged. Soon they were a band.

"At last, it clicked into place for me," marvels Pulsford. "Gavin could sing well, he looked good, but his attitude wasn't, I'm a fuckin' rock star - love me! There was nothing to hinder us. I thought, This could run. We were obsessive, working on demos every day for hours in this little studio I had in my bedroom."

Over the next two years, while constantly gigging around London's more bijou pub venues, they connected with the other people who fitted: manager Dave Dorrell (ex-M/A/R/R/S, Pump Up The Volume hitmaker and DJ), bassist Dave Parsons (ex-Transvision Vamp), drummer Robin Goodridge (ex-Beautiful People) and Rob Kahane (ex-manager of George Michael, by 1993 launching his new Los Angeles-based label, Trauma. He signed Bush after hearing five songs which, uncannily, became their first five American hit singles).

They weren't old friends. Only Bush brought them together. But coincidentally, it seems that, weathered and relatively illusion-free, they were ready to share all burdens and complete their growing up.

While they were recording their debut album with Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, Pulsford's father had a heart attack.

"We stopped work and I spent two weeks at home with my mum until he died," says Pulsford. "When we went back to it I was thinking, It's a week ago he died. Then two weeks. That horror. Getting drunk. Crying. I hate to think about the first album because it was the most miserable fucking thing that ever happened to me. Maybe it put some of the emotion into the record that people recognised in Ames, Iowa, or wherever."

They completed the album. Then the man who'd championed them at Hollywood Records, the company who held the purse strings for Kahane, was killed in a helicopter crash. His successor thought Sixteen Stone was rubbish and refused to release it. That same week the judge in the George Michael vs. Sony court case denounced Kahane as "a thoroughly unreliable witness" motivated "to an unacceptable degree by self-interest".

Without much alternative, and not naively ("Any guy in the record business is going to have a dodgy past, what can you do? We thought we were down the dumper," shrugs Goodridge), they stood by Kahane and explored the possibility that working their arses off might yet do the trick, success-wise. When Kahane landed Trauma a partnership with the Interscope label, Bush were off.

The lucky radio break came when super-influential Los Angeles station KROQ directed their attention to Everything Zen. Thus finally galvanised, Bush played 230 gigs in 15 months up to May last year, while Sixteen Stone climbed steadily to Number 4 (a place ahead of Oasis), selling seven million US copies. Its successor, Razorblade Suitcase, went straight into the American charts at Number 1 (and, briefly, 4 in the UK).

Now, they're not displeased with their achievements, naturally. Sometimes pride erupts in flicking V-signs at their detractors, accompanied by cries of "Fuck off big time!" and the like. More substantially, their satisfaction emerges in quieter ruminations on how their lives have moved on.

"I went to university, but I quit after ten days and my dad was gutted," laments Pulsford. "He got over it, though, and he was very supportive, always bunging me twenty quid when I needed it."

"The weird thing is it's almost as if he had to die before I could do well. I didn't learn to drive until he died because then I had to ferry mum around. Since then I've bought a house and got married. So I've done it now, I'm a fully fledged grown-up. It's really horrible dad couldn't stick around to see it."

Pulsford pours a large Jack Daniel's into a plastic cup.

Some time after midnight, Rossdale is out by the tour buses, idly stargazing as he waits to start the overnight drive to Little Rock, Arkansas. For some reason, responsibility is on his mind, too. He thinks a certain lightness and spontaneity has passed from his life in the last two years. On the other hand, he says, it's nice to think of Bush as the source of all this gainful employment.

He pulls out his wallet and produces three rumpled snaps of Winston, his pet Hungarian sheepdog, a dreadlock wig on legs, as featured on the sleeve of Sixteen Stone. Besotted, he has named his own record label Mad Dog Winston. Pulsford reckons that one sure proof that his rock-god colleague is still human is that he clears up after Winston when he dumps in the park.

"I took him on after looking after him for a friend over Christmas a few years ago," Rossdale coos. "It was the first time I'd had that much responsibility. Until then I'd been used to just drifting, day to day, trying to get my music together, going out. Then it was, Fuckin' hell, I've got to be home every day at seven to walk Winston and feed him. My dad's looking after him at the moment. He's a sweet man and Winston's fine with him."

Unlike Pulsford, Rossdale has been able to tie up the frayed ends of teenage conflicts with his father. He's paid back the equivalent of the fees for the schooling he more or less wasted. "I always felt guilty because I fucked up at Westminster," he admits. "It's like, I've paid for myself, everything I have is my own. It's about being independent."

Success well handled can bring about such satisfactory "closures", as the psychoanalysts say. However, for Rossdale, "maturity" has not eased all the exigencies of Bush's ascent into the firmament. During their American tour of early last year his five-year relationship with his girlfriend, Jasmine, fell apart.

Then he wrote much of Razorblade Suitcase in the two weeks that were left before the studio time they'd booked with Steve Albini began. While lyrical references to his distress abound, two of the most pungent lines are Synapse's "Hell is where the heart is" and the plain admission "I miss the one that I love" at the end of Swallowed.

"There's a terrible downward spiralling world you can get into when you're murdering an emotional life within you," he muses. "We'd set up home. Then everything was moving under me. Like walking on an ice rink. It was hard because the others were finding such solace in coming home - Nigel got married, Robin's girlfriend had a baby."

"It seemed that going home was the hardest thing, because it was an empty house and half the things that we'd had together had been taken away. Holes in the wall where a picture had been. Various items in my wardrobe burnt. Possibly it's overdramatic to say, Hell is where the heart is, but lyrics are snapshots. It was true for me."

That said, he hopes the whole album is not taken as a lovelorn lament. He'd recommend consideration of, say, Cold Contagious, which he'd introduced to New Orleans as "a song about revenge - nothing wrong with a bit of that."

"I harbour everything," he warns, grinning. "People who attacked me when we had some success, their lofty opinions, condescending to us as if we were scum. I remember all the bad stuff, none of the good. I got some insight into dealing with that through living in Kilburn, knowing certain families. I'm at home in the darker recesses of those estates where many people would be unwelcome. It's really good when someone pisses me off and I just make a call."

He gives an enigmatic laugh. He's joking, almost certainly.

"So few people had better watch out. I've noted down names. And the sweetest revenge is the one you wait for."