Where I was while you were getting high
by Nina Bhadreshwar
Oasis, California 1996
Despite growing up in and around Barnsley, Manchester, Sheffield and London in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I'd never heard of Oasis . When I started my weekly trips to Afflecks Palace and Eastern Bloc record store to sell my little graffiti/social commentary/poetry magazine The Real State, all I knew was rave was over, (thanks government and corporations), and I was desperate to find that community which by 1992 had been broken up. Having been raised in a lively civic community that was decimated within two years, I felt a hurt and a rage my Southern and ex-pat university friends never understood. Nothing in so-called “culture” could replace it. Rock music on the radio was literally making me suicidal; it was so tame and mundane. I attempted to end my life three times between 1991 and 1993, twice in Barnsley and once in Lavender Hill, London which was a very close call. It’s well-documented how my penpal correspondence and the magazine became my passport to a different future but I did miss my melodies and guitar music. My closest girl friend was and is Heather Nova and I started off my music journalism through taking photos of all the gigs round London in the late eighties/early nineties. I had a moment of hope when The La’s hit the airwaves in 1989 and was obsessed with Lee Mavers but then they split. Bereft and utterly disappointed, I gave up on guitar music.
I set up my own underground music and art magazine, The Real State - no advertising, yet each print run sold out internationally mostly due to the graffiti writers who took it everywhere. I sold it on a sale-or-return basis through record stores in Manchester, Sheffield, Doncaster, Leeds, York, London – South, West, North and central: Bleecker Street and Berwick Street as well as the main HMV flagship which always sold out and wanted more. Independent record stores in New York, Amsterdam and Rome also sold it; it was amazing what could be done on an inter-rail ticket. Record stores were my first port of entry into the world of publishing so I’ll always be wed to recorded music. Then Doug Biggert of Tower Magazines (Tower Records) chased me for as many units as I could give them which sold out internationally, most of the sales being in California and Japan. I had two more smaller USA distributors – Desert Moon and some place in New Mexico but they didn’t shift the units Tower Magazines did. So, aged 24, I decided I was going to either Japan or California. If The La’s had split, so would I - to the USA and gangs. I wasn’t a fan of hip hop but California was emerging; the music was slower, with oldies melodies and funk and, more importantly, its lyrics were real: it was about the struggling underclass post-Rodney King riots. Plus, it wanted me – unlike the UK - and Tupac was there.
I wanted to write the stories of real, struggling people. The two books I’d read while in Italy in 1992-3 were James Joyce’s Ulysses and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and Grapes of Wrath. I wanted to write those kinds of stories in the tongue of the people who lived them. Even though I had my own international, albeit small business, it was mine. Nonetheless, the daily pressure of corporate mindset wore into me and I began to feel I was powerless, small and insignificant; everything had to serve Death Row Records and Interscope, the big American dream. My business, my own health were just not in the frame anymore. Gradually, the effect of working in a big corporation ate away at me…and my magazine. It was a good year before I clocked on that they needed me more than I them.
When I finally did realise how I’d been used and what a nefarious net I was being dragged into, I left, taking my Apple MacIntosh I’d shipped over from Sheffield with me. That had all my business on it – and all of Death Row’s as they had zero infrastructure before I got there. But I’d quit with no job to go to. My work visa at Death Row was an H2 visa and I was only contracted as a magazine editor/press officer for Death Row Records/Interscope. I couldn’t even get waitressing work. I had to make do with stand-up comedy and babysitting for folk at church while writing a post-World War 1 novel in my bedsit listening to The Smiths’ “You Just Haven’t Earned it Yet Baby” on repeat. I broke my leg doing stand-up at The Townhouse in Inglewood, LA. With no health insurance and my leg got worse, ulcerated and was badly set by students at the county hospital in USC. My meagre funds ran out quickly. A certain record company didn’t pay me nor the artist who asked me to handle his business because he was fighting a murder case. My brief toleration of west coast rap was waning, apart from Tupac, but I feared for him as I knew the company he would have to keep.
My brother told me about a band called Oasis I should listen to but I was over new music. I just played The Smiths and Kirsty McColl on repeat in my bedsit. But broke and broken, confined to my bedsit, I succumbed to subscribing to one of those junk mail CD catalogues with a promotional offer of upfront CDs in exchange for my personal details.
The CD arrived, along with two others I can’t even remember. I lived on the second floor of an apartment block on Sepulveda Blvd, just east of Venice Beach which had become my prison since I’d left Death Row, just waiting for hope, something apart from the death threats to catch up with me. I put on the CD and lay down on the floor, my broken right leg elevated on my sofabed. Hello came roaring out at me like a huge wave in a voice that was warm, familiar and yet demanding. It truly felt like a call home. Like someone I knew, who loved me and just leapt over my balcony and called out my name through the screen doors. I burst into tears then and there. I played it over and over. Hello still remains my favourite as it was so simple and sudden but the whole album became my reason for getting up every day. I wrote to Pac and said I need to go home now. I told him about ‘Morning Glory’. He said he loved it too – his favourite was Champagne Supernova.
Very long story short, my scriptwriting pal bought me a one way ticket to Amsterdam and then Manchester. To this day, I don’t know how I got out alive. ‘Where were you while we were getting high?’ – being held at gunpoint in a motel in Orange county.
If Oasis didn’t save me, they certainly yelled at me and dragged a crippled girl out of a burning house. They brought me back to consciousness. A resuscitation for real. I got back to Barnsley (not so good) but I was alive and with a decent National Health Service (good) and therefore I had a chance. I was walking – or rather hobbling - slowly down the hall faster than that cannon ball…
which I’d swerved, thanks to this band.
Hello feels to me like hope arriving. To this day, it still takes me back to that moment when I was back to my senses – in truth. It reminded me who I was, where I came from and that I had a home. From the opening roar of the guitar to the bolshie lyrics, to the chorus. Even if that hope was just on a record, it was in my consciousness which was formed long, long before that. It was home because it’s where I felt safe and belonged.
I wrote about this in 1996 because I had only just got back to Barnsley with the broken leg, on the train to Barnsley passing through the petrichor of Burnage from Manchester airport. My hopes of getting to Knebworth were non-existent but I was alive. Apart from the real drama I was embroiled in, my day-to-day life revolved around trying to get my leg better now I had a decent health service and praying that Oasis would not split up. That was my biggest fear: that they’d split up before I got to see them. On Saturday 14th September, I was listening to Radio 1 news but brushing my teeth. I just caught something that sounded like ‘in Oasis’ and then something about ‘the twenty-five year old was shot’. But the background music was California Love which made no sense really unless they were in California? Something about splitting up, their tour being cancelled. And which one had been shot? This is all pre-internet so I had to hang on to the lunchtime news and that’s when I heard: Oasis had indeed cancelled their USA tour but also on the same day, Friday 13th September, my friend Tupac Shakur had died following a drive-by shooting the previous weekend in Las Vegas.
I never even knew Tupac had been shot on the 7th. Even though I had called the office to ask about my computer, no one had told me. I don’t look back in anger because I’ll forever associate Oasis with both lifting me out of a deadly situation in LA and being my source of comfort afterwards, away from everything I’d known and been a part of. I know some might say it’s coincidental or it was just Friday 13th but I think cosmic forces were trying to bring down two of the greatest lights of my generation.
Oasis has always meant hope, love and community to me – when I had none. I can get there anytime I put on that vinyl. They speak the same language as me, grew up in the same time and places as me, are as battered as me. That continuity and shared consciousness cannot be bought or sold. It’s something precious – usually only shared with family.
The rest? I'll wait for that Champagne Supernova in the sky.