Bit of a Blur (22 page)

There must be more hotels in West Hollywood than anywhere else in the world. From rent-by-the-hour sleaze holes to castles fit for mad movie stars and everything in between and, over the years we’d stayed in them all.

The Hyatt on Sunset Boulevard is the hotel where most bands stay the first couple of times they go to Los Angeles. Sunset is a long and quite ordinary road whose most valuable characteristic is that it’s famous. It’s famous because famous people go there. The Whisky is on sunset: The Doors played there, famously. Johnny Depp, the famous actor, has a well-known, famous nightclub called the Viper Room on Sunset. A lot of famous people do their shopping at Ralphs supermarket on Sunset. It’s famous for it. In Paris no one tells you that the Eiffel Tower is famous, or that many famous French people have lived there over the years. The elegance of the boulevards is ennobling. The cartoon crappiness of Los Angeles and its insubstantial garishness are undignified and have the opposite effect. The place is as nasty and delicious as a big slice of fresh pizza and, for all its ghastliness, there are always a lot of people it would be good to meet in the city.

The Hyatt is the most famous of all the rock and roll hotels. It cultivates its heritage carefully. A member of Led Zeppelin once drove its motorbike into the lift and there is, I think, a small plaque in there, commemorating the event. The first time we stayed there Graham was evacuated from his room by armed police officers carrying out a raid on the room next door. The famous elevator arrived, the doors opened theatrically to reveal a lift empty apart from Noel Edmonds. Graham said it was the strangest thirty seconds of his life so far and asked me if he was definitely awake.

Anyone wanting to mingle with more inspiring creatures than bikers and Noel Edmonds in the lift needs to go along the road to the Chateau Marmont, a kind of imitation castle. I popped in there once, very late; it was empty apart from Faye Dunaway, sitting at the bar alone. I winked at her but she told me to piss off. It was refreshing to hear someone say what they really meant.

After shopping around a bit, the band settled for Le Parc Suite Hotel. That became our Hollywood home. We all had our own sets of friends in Los Angeles, much as we did in London, but we all liked Le Parc. It’s comfy and quiet. In Hollywood, more than anywhere else, it’s important to have somewhere to retreat to, away from the unrelenting babble. There is no such thing as a comfortable silence in LA. People just don’t ever seem to stop talking. The taxi drivers are exhausting. The only way to shut them up was to say I was planning a trip to Mars.

Inside Le Parc, all is calm. Everything is big and simple. The rooms are big; the beds are big; the phones are big. Everything is so big I felt like a little baby.

Things were going well, I felt, as I opened another bottle of champagne on a lilo in the pool on the roof of Le Parc. Graham was having a nap in the Jacuzzi and we’d just heard that ‘Song 2’ had been added to super-heavy rotation at MTV, which meant things would soon start going crazy.

In drink I had started to tell people I wanted to go to Mars. Even in the mornings, lately, I’d been talking about it. It was on my mind. People would go very quiet when I started talking about it. Everyone thought it was unreasonable and said ‘Why?’ rather than ‘Why not?’, but we’re in a golden age of planetary science.

Three hundred years ago it took three months to get to Australia. Now it only takes three months to get to Mars. Soon we will go to other planets. Not because space is a place of infinite resources, but because it’s in man’s nature to explore. New horizons are exhilarating. Space is the new ocean and spaceships are the new cathedrals.

In Los Angeles fame has long been recognised as the most precious commodity in the universe. Famous people have great influence everywhere, but nowhere is it more obvious than in Hollywood. It’s built on fame. The easiest way to sell something is to get a famous person to use it, wear it or stick a picture of their grinning face on it. The big clothes companies are well aware of this and employ celebrity product placement coordinators. Even before our first photograph appeared in the
NME
, we were all wearing free Levis. It’s not just the big corporations, either. Even the smallest, most ethical producer of recycled Third World Fairtrade plimsolls would love to supply free plimsolls to recognised persons; it’s the most effective form of advertising.

Rather than become another clothes horse, I wondered if I could use my prominence to jump-start a Mars rocket. I called my accountant and told him that I wanted to initiate a space programme. He said he’d see what he could do. He was a very good accountant. I was sure nothing was beyond him.

He called back fifteen minutes later. He said he’d arranged a meeting with someone in Milton Keynes.

Milton Keynes is a tidy new town, designed with cars in mind. Whoever designed it was obviously a big fan of roundabouts. It doesn’t feel like you’ve ever arrived. The only way to tell is that there are suddenly a lot more roundabouts than usual. The roads in Milton Keynes do seem to have been laid out with the idea of avoiding the centre of the place. I wonder if it actually has a centre at all. I’ve got a feeling there is an extra large roundabout in the middle. There is something gently benign about the town. It seems to want to help you, and would like you to stay.

Actually, I was banned from Milton Keynes in 1991. At the peak of the finale of a particularly good show, I threw my guitar into the audience thinking someone would catch it and go home happy. It hit poor Kevin from Newport Pagnell right on the bonce and knocked him senseless. It was very lucky that it wasn’t worse. Kevin seemed to be quite thrilled by the whole experience of being bashed by a flying bass, but his poor mother was beside herself. It wasn’t good at all and I shrink now, thinking about it. I’d already sneaked back in a couple of times to go to the Marshall amplifier factory, which is either in or near Milton Keynes, it’s often hard to say which.

The Open University campus was a microcosm of the larger municipality, more roundabouts and car parks with no definite heart, as neat as Germany and as clean as Japan. I found it to be very quaint, somehow, and serene.

I was with Dave. We were shown into an office and a man with very large sideburns appeared. He fished around for something in his pocket and passed it to me. ‘Know what that is?’ he asked, smiling. It was a small rock, quite round and pleasing to hold. ‘It’s a bit of Mars!’ he said, as we puzzled over it.

‘What? Where did you get it? How did you get it?’

My sense of being alive really kicked in and I realised I was staring at him. I transferred my stare to Dave. He was staring at him, too. He rarely stares, except when he’s playing drums. All drummers stare. It wasn’t a drumming stare, though. It was more focused and it was fixed on our host, Professor Colin Pillinger, who explained, in a thick West Country accent, that it had been found in Antarctica.

Most of Antarctica is so cold that it never snows. Virtually the whole of the continent is a vast, beautiful frozen desert. Things drop out of the sky and lie there waiting to be discovered. Any rocks found on the ice must have come from space. This can be confirmed by analysing their chemical compositions, which, in the case of this little nugget matched the make-up of Mars.

He talked a lot and we were dumbstruck. Seventy tons of Martian rocks fall out of the sky on to the Earth every year. He thought there was a good chance life started on Mars before it got going on Earth. Mars is a bit further from the sun and would have cooled more quickly to temperatures that would allow life processes to begin. If that was the case then there was a good chance that a bit of Mars with a living cell inside it could have been smashed off the Martian surface by a meteorite impact, landed on Earth and started the ball rolling here. So we could well all be Martians. I loved that feeling of being bamboozled by scientific hypothesising. He saved the best bit until last.

‘We need to put a lander on the surface of Mars in 2003. It would be stupid not to. I think I can show there is life there,’ he said.

I knew then that I’d found a friend.

We went through a door into a large laboratory. There was a clamour of silent concentration and dexterity. Everyone was wearing white coats. In the middle of the room, which was large, was a small model made from cardboard and wire. It was about the size of a car wheel.

‘This is what I want to build. It’s going to cost twenty-five million quid. It’s a bargain,’ he said. I had to agree. Colin was standing proudly beside his model. Even though it was made out of bog rolls, you could tell it was going to be quite complicated.

‘It’s quite simple!’ he said. ‘We’re going to burrow under the surface with this drill,’ and he waved a toothpaste tube attached to a piece of string. I’d already taken an instant liking to him, but this was the best idea I’d ever heard and the best thing I’d ever seen. He was so disarmingly straightforward about the monumental mysteries of the universe. ‘In order to find life on Mars, you have to go underground. Mars lost its atmosphere a long time ago, we don’t know why, but it’s gone and the sun has cooked the soil. You won’t find anything unless you get underneath that oxidised layer. NASA build these big bloody rovers, but they’re never going to find anything scratching around on the surface. We can beat them to it, but we need to start building this right now. Mars is about to make its closest approach to Earth for twenty thousand years and if we don’t start now we’ll miss it.’

This was all music to my ears. It was a brilliant idea.

‘Are we alone?’ is the biggest question we are close to being able to get a definite answer to. It’s right up there with ‘Where did we come from?’ ‘Where are we going?’ and ‘Who are we?’ The solutions to those tricky equations still seem to be a matter of opinion, but finding life on Mars would suggest that biology might be commonplace. When you consider the question ‘Are we alone?’, either of the possible answers is quite devastating. Not to know is just irresponsible.

My impression from meeting scientists is that most of them have an inkling that there almost definitely was, and possibly still is, some kind of primordial ecology happening on Mars.

I was spellbound by scientists. I went to their laboratories and tea parties, to their colleges and museums. Colin was a natural TV star and public support for his Mars mission started to grow. There were a lot of big personalities involved in the project as it gathered momentum. Damien was in, straight away. I was particularly interested in meteorites and was invited with Dave to the bowels of the Natural History Museum to meet Monica Grady, meteorite lady. ‘Oh, don’t call me that,’ she said. Her meteorites were sitting peacefully in glass cases, but there was quite a menace about them. The stony ones had fused, blackened crusts, and the metal ones had been aerodynamically sculpted flashing through the atmosphere. Some of them must have made fairly big dents when they landed. Monica had a few bits of Mars, which she had found herself, in Queen Maud Land in Antarctica. Martian meteorites are among the most valuable, and the most famous meteorite of all is from Mars. It’s called ALH84001. ALH stands for Allan Hills, another Antarctic mountain range. It made the front pages when it was first analysed. It’s definitely from Mars and it contains what look like fossilised bacteria cells.

This particular meteorite was in the possession of a NASA scientist called Everett Gibson. He was a great friend of Colin’s. They’d met when they’d both been working on samples of moon rock brought back to Earth by the Apollo astronauts. He was a kind and enthusiastic genius with an infectious pleasure in meteorite matter. I met Everett at a drinks party at Mansion House, the residence of the Lord Mayor of the City of London. Every conversation I had there I thought about for some time afterwards.

‘Of course, if we do find life on Mars, it may turn out that it hasn’t evolved around DNA. It might be a completely different story,’ said one gentleman. Another man told me the majority of the material in the universe was unseen ‘dark matter’ and nobody had any idea what it was. Quite a lot of people were talking about the active volcanoes that had recently been discovered on one of Jupiter’s moons. Cosmologists studying the cosmic microwave background radiation - the edge of the universe - with radio telescopes discussed football with propulsion specialists working on interplanetary engines. Everett Gibson’s prize possession, ALH84001, had recently been stolen from his laboratory but then recovered. Since then he took no chances and carried it around everywhere with him in his pocket. You never knew what these guys were going to pull out of their pockets. A test tube containing an alien life form was the weirdest yet. As he took it out his face cracked into a huge grin. ‘It’s right here. Someone stole it and was trying to sell it on eBay! ALH84001! Bastard got twelve years! Can you believe it?’ It was all quite hard to believe. His prize meteorite was something he liked to share with everybody. That little piece of rock is possibly the most interesting thing ever discovered, and a spring of constant wonder and mystery to him. He was a naturally gregarious character and I could imagine him getting talking to someone in a pub, and producing his test tube. I don’t suppose many people believed him.

I went to meet Colin at the Eagle, a pub in Cambridge near his laboratory. It was in that pub that James Crick and Francis Watson, the scientists who first identified DNA, burst through the doors shortly after they’d made that Nobel Prize-winning discovery and pronounced to all present that they had found the secret of life. They too may well have been taken for lunatics. At the best of times it’s difficult to tell the difference between madmen and geniuses.

The laboratory where Crick and Watson made their discovery was right next door to Colin’s office. By some strange coincidence, the door was at the top of an external spiral staircase. ‘Look at that,’ said Colin. ‘Dead giveaway! I reckon that staircase saved them years of research.’ It did seem quite likely that the helical structure of DNA might have sprung to mind on one of countless journeys up and down that staircase. It was the exact shape they were looking for.