Chapter Text
Lyrics of The Ultracheese from The Car (1984)
I still got pictures of friends on the wall
I might look as if I'm deep in thought
But the truth is I'm probably not
If I ever was
Oh, the dawn won't stop weighing a tonne
I've done some things that I shouldn't have done
But I haven't stopped loving you once.
Alex Turner on his fifth solo album The Car for the documentary “The Bourne Identity: Turner at 50” (2025)
“That album is probably my most personal one. Yeah- um- people call it a concept album and I mean, it is but- but there’s a lot of sincerity in there, and honesty in there that I don’t think I’ve really tapped into before. Or since. I have written a fair amount about me life- places I’ve stayed in, conversations I’ve had, people who’ve come in and out have y’know, weaved their way into most things I’ve written…but The Car was different. I was in an- in an… interesting… place in my life at the time, when I was making that album. Quite a few big changes happened in me- in me personal life, I was dealing with the aftermath of all that. Very much in the shit I were writing’ about. The world, the premise was a world I created in my mind but the emotions and confessions and insecurities were all very, very real. Real and urgent. So there is a certain rawness in moments in some songs..because I didn’t have the benefit of like, a retroactive objectivity, you know what I mean?”
“It was also personal in the sense of the significance it had on my, well, personal life. It was- It is an apology letter also. An explanation letter, to put it more aptly- a documentation of my mistakes and shortcomings, and my own assessment of my behaviour in certain situations that had happened. For whom or about what- now those details I cannot give you.”
“It is a very special record to me. I still get quite emotional listening back to it.”
Letter to Alex Turner, Miles Kane, December 1983
You made me cry, you bastard. You made me sit down at the foot of my bed and sob like a baby. You made me want to hug you so, so bad.
I do not know how to properly go about this letter. Is there a way to properly go about it? What do I say, how do I say it. You're making me feel so much. This is the fifth time I'm attempting to write this letter, I pray it doesn't end up in the bin like the others did.
I listened to your cassette first thing, after I returned home last night. Couldn't restrain myself. I'll be honest, there were many a moment during my cab ride home, when I wanted to chuck the brown paper packet straight out the window and never look back. I could feel it burning a hole in my pocket all through the evening. Could feel it right at me when I left it at the table and pretended I did not care.
There's so much I want to say to you, Alex. It's funny how we two always end up here. With so much to say and not enough words to tell them. Maybe the issue is not with words but with courage.
You were scared back then, you confessed so. What I didn't tell you, is that I was too. Else I would've returned back and fought for you, fought for us . But all that's water under the bridge, isn't it?
I am not angry with you. I meant it when I said it the other night. If I had to be angry at you, I must point the same anger towards myself too, for I made mistakes too. I hurt you too. We both had our hands in the mess that was made.
But anyhow, there's no point in digging up old graves, is there? I don't know what we did to deserve it but you and I are standing at the threshold of perhaps, a new beginning for us. We have grown older now, grown wiser too, I hope. You have your lovely wife and I have my own life too. Maybe we can salvage some good bits and create something stronger, braver this time. I would be the darndest fool to let an opportunity like this go. If you are offering me a hand of friendship, Alex, how can I ever refuse. I missed you so much these last years. I hope you missed me too.
Are we two cut out for gentle friendship? I do not know. But fuck me if I am not eager to find out.
Please tell me you are too, Al.
Yours truly,
Miles xx
PS: please let Alexa know I'm accepting her invitation for dinner on Saturday. I need to properly thank her, she really is the greatest. I hope you did as well.
In the summer of 1984, Alex and I waltzed back into each other's lives. Not waltzed probably, but took careful, measured steps in. All the acridity I had held onto so fiercely for six years disappeared as soon as I eased my grip. I wasn't cursed to carry around the ruins of my relationship, I just needed to learn how to let it go. And it seemed like, freshly turned 34, we both were at the right place and right time to do so.
It still astonishes me how easy all of that was. How easy letting go was. I learnt to remember what drew me to Alex Turner in the first place all those years ago- how easy it was to be around him. Laughter came easily with him, as did conversations and music. Alex had changed in a myriad of small and big ways, and I suppose as had I, in the intervening years. In his letters and conversations he was much the same boy I knew, but when he stood up to entertain a whole party gathered in his sitting room or sat at the piano to command a crowd, he was a different man- one confident in his skin and his place in life. But it was a relief to know the basic essence of our connection still survived.
It took time and effort and care, but Alex and I slowly built back our friendship. Will it be correct to say, ‘build back’? Perhaps not, we were never quite friends. Looking back, I realised, we two were always chasing after something bigger than what lay in front of us, right from the moment we met. So despite knowing each other for over a decade, it was the first time that Alex and I were truly trying to become friends. Real, solid, honest friends.
Maybe it was the novelty of it that made it all successful, initially. We were trying to do it the correct way.
Of course Alexa helped. Repairing us had almost become a little project for her, without her intervention I doubt if Alex and I would’ve ever come forward and sorted our mess. We men can be stupid like that.
She made sure I was on the guest list of every soiree at the Turner residence over the summer, and every other she was involved in. Soon enough we became a fixture, the three of us- Alex, Alexa and I. I believe it generated a fair amount of chatter in the tabloids and our own circles.
Alexa had a fierce perception and remarkable social intelligence, I’ll never stop talking about it. I did not know to what extent Alexa had told her about us, but very little ever escaped her steel-grey stare, I believe. Whenever we would hit a stilted pause or enter into dangerous territory, she would swoop in with her chuckle and quips, and all awkwardness was bound to vanish into thin air. It was easier to become friends with Alex with her around, for she would act as the buffer between us, protecting us from either suffocation or explosion.
I was naive enough to believe that would work forever.
Nick was around a lot more, too. For all intents and purposes in public, he was my companion. Not in public- of course- we couldn’t do that, but most friends and well-wishing acquaintances knew him as my boyfriend. He was my date to all those events and parties, another buffer between me and Alex. And when he got a chance to exhibit in New York that spring, I was there to support him. It was working well for us, that way.
In private, we were slowly growing from bedmates to confidantes. Around the time Alex and I reconnected, he struck up a correspondence with his old love too. His name was Christopher, known as Chris. The comfort of somebody to hold at night was nice, but what we realised we need more from the other was the comfort of another listening ear. Someone who could listen and understand. And no one understood each other’s predicament better than Nick and I did.
We stopped sleeping together at one point, it just didn’t feel right anymore.
I introduced Nick to Alex at my birthday dinner that year. The meeting wasn’t smooth by any means, but first meetings with Alex rarely tend to be. But he was trying his best, and Nick knew better than to mind.
“He’s nice enough, that bloke.” Alex told me, a couple of drinks into that night.
“He is”, I replied, smiling. He was that. Nick was wonderful.
“Are you happy?”
I mulled it over for a moment. Was I happy? Hadn’t asked myself that question in a while, to be honest. Life had shown me what I thought happiness meant was not it. “I suppose so…. I am doing fine, my gigs are going fine, I got Nick, I’m getting a second chance with you.That’s great, innit?”
“Yes. I guess you are right.”
“What about you,” I turned to him, “Are you happy?”
Alex didn’t answer me immediately. He looked dazed, I remember, though it was from liquor or thought I couldn’t tell. He gazed around, gazed at Alexa glittering across the room. He looked strikingly sad, just for a fleeting second. Although I could’ve imagined it all. “I don’t think happiness is what I’m running after, would you believe it, Miles? It’s futile business, that. I am settled, I’d say. That’s more than I could’ve asked for.”
Truly, what more could we have asked for.
Well, certainly not what was to come upon us soon.
[Miles Kane, Alex Turner and Alexa Chung in the early 80s; courtesy of Chung's personal collection:
- at the Christmas dinner party, the Turner house in Mayfair, 1983. Also pictured Nikhil Vishwanathan, Esther Simon, Josh Vandenberg, Mary Dunce, Anita Pallenberg among others
- at Kane's birthday party, London, March 1984
- Kane and Chung at the Met Gala, 1984, both dressed by Yves Saint Laurent
- Kane and Turner jamming on guitars, backstage at Kane's concert at Alexandra Palace, October 1984
- Kane and Turner, smiling at Chung behind the lens, on holiday in Scotland, 1985
- Turner with Kane’s dog Max, London, July 1984.
All photographed on a Polaroid SX-10]
Alex Turner's Personal Diary, undated, estimated September-October,
1984
will leave the house in an hour to have brunch with miles. we went out last night, and probably will do so tonight too. lex is in barcelona for work this week, might just spend the rest of it with him.
still amazes me at times that i'm getting to do this once again. this time last year, i was adding the final touches to the car, hoping and praying miles would at least give me the grace of listening to it. just once, one last time. he has given me that and more. so much more. don’t know if i deserve all that. do i deserve the grace of his forgiveness? i wonder often.
he told me once he didn’t know if he could forgive me, but he has. he tells me so at least. miles has always been the bigger man. forever kind and gracious. taking anything broken my miles, my dear and special friend.
i see the life miles has built for himself in the past years- his lovely home, max his little pup, his records, his adoring fans. his nick. a perfectly charming fellow and talented to boot. i tried, quite hard in fact, to clutch onto my most unwelcoming misgivings about him. but i couldn't because miles just seems so happy to be with him. everything i couldn’t give miles, he seems to have found on his own anyway. he looks to have thrived when i wasn't there.
i wonder, sometimes, if i’m doing him a deplorable wrong by dragging him in with me again.
no. i shan't dwell on that any more. i'll get up and go have fun with miles. be the good and honourable friend he deserves. then lex would be back and i'd surprise her with a little holiday that she's been not so secretly yearning for. just the two of us. i'll be the good and honourable husband she deserves.
i'm a lucky bastard that i am getting chances still. i shall not butcher this. not again.
Sometime between me moving to London and the first blossoming of my relationship with Nick, we first heard those whispers of a strange new disease from the States. A mysterious illness, no one exactly could tell what it was or where it came from, but apparently gay men were falling prey to it by the dozens. It was like cancer, some told, pneumonia others said. You’d never know when it’d come to grasp you, and before doctors came to have a look, death was knocking at your door.
In the early days, it was mostly us queers talking about the disease. It barely got a mention in the respectable press, beyond two paragraphs in the international column. There was much concern in our circles, yes, but more was confusion; we couldn't clearly tell what was fact, what was not. It was difficult to decide what to believe and what to ignore.
The world at large was hardly paying attention. And to be honest, I wasn't either. A vicious illness that only targets the gays seemed to be something straight out of one of those propaganda pamphlets the church organizations sometimes gave out. Must be something they have contorted to demean and scare us unnecessarily after how loud we had been about our rights and treatment in the last decade, one of my friends said.
But then, at the tail end of 1981, news came of a man dying in the Brompton Hospital, of a similar affliction to this mysterious disease. It seemed to have reached our shores. The terror was now in our own houses. The next summer, Terry Higgins passed away. The first British man known to have succumbed to AIDS related illnesses. I had known the guy, saw him at the Heaven where he had been a DJ once or twice. I used to be a sporadic visitor to the club on nights out. The terror suddenly had a name and a face.
The story soon blew up and it was everywhere. A plague, a sin, a wrath unleashed upon the filth of the population- the gays, the druggies and the prostitutes: the sheer hysteria we had to see is well-documented in books and documentaries and archives now.
I remember sitting at a pub with Nick, one of those hole-in-the-walls we favoured, and one of our friends brought in a copy of The Gay News . In giant letters, it was blazed on the front page: Gay Cancer Or Mass Media Scare?
It was so much worse, we’d find out soon.
The numbers reported in the papers of patients and casualties were gradually shooting up. One day there were in the handfuls, and then the next month we'd find them in the hundreds. And horror stories were pouring in from left, right and centre. Hospital rooms full of healthy young men turned skeletal and death-cold. Parents rushing into emergency wards to find their son is gay and now at the brink of death. Doctors and nurses and volunteers pleading for support and assistance, but their calls met with horrid silence. Tenants being chased away by landlords in fear of them carrying the 'gay cancer', blokes being beaten up in pubs and alleys. Families turning away coffins because their loved ones couldn't possibly succumb to such shameful fate. You could walk the streets and feel the gaze of disgust and fear on your back, the smell of death and stigma clogging your throats.
The numbers in papers and television screens turned into actual people I'd known. People I had danced with in New York and Los Angeles, people I had laughed and chatted with in parties in Paris and Milan, people I had shared a pint with in pubs and bars. People I played on stage with, people I had written songs for. People whose shops I'd visited, whose cafe's I'd frequent, whose homes I had had dinner at. People I went to school with. People I had kissed, I had shared memories with.
It was all too real, all too sudden.
***
In the beginning of 1985, I found myself in Italy. And I wrote and recorded my first soundtrack. It was for a television miniseries, a maudlin soap opera that achieved some popularity for a few years but has since been forgotten by most. The director was someone I had socialised with in London in the previous year. Our interactions hadn’t been anything more than inane party talk, until she mentioned looking for someone to do the music for her next project. And I immediately jumped on the opportunity.
The decision had been an impulsive, even rash, one but surely one of the best my impulses have led me to. It was partly borne out of my restlessness with the writing process for my next album, which was frankly going nowhere, and partly out of my desire to escape London for a while. I was stuck in a bit of a gloomy rut, with crisis building around me and my creativity running dry.
Plus I had always loved Italy. If Alex had his fascination with anything French, I had mine with Italian. The food, the fashion, the language, the football- all of it. I was a dedicated Sandokan fan back in the day, and was proper obsessed with the music Oliver Onion did (and Kabir Bedi too). So, I wanted to try my hand at something like that too.
That month and a half I spent in Milan was not only absolute bliss but also a great learning experience. I had never been on a film set before, never written music that wasn’t about my own experiences before. Writing incidental music is an entirely different beast from cracking out rock n’ roll tunes on the guitar and it took me a good while to get the hang of it. Leonardo, my producer, had to pretty much hold my hand and guide me through the whole process and what a saint he was. My work on that project isn’t my best, I can admit that. I suppose it’d be written off as cheesy and cliche by anyone with taste. But that whole experience really changed the way I think about music for the rest of my career.
So I returned to London that spring, with a fresh tan and fresher perspectives. Blood pumping and ideas bubbling behind my eyelids. I was all ready to head back into the studio as soon as I got off the plane. I was itching to see Alex again, to tell him all the stories I had brought back from Italy. To see Nick again- I had missed him too. But home had something else waiting for me.
First was the news of my friend Brian passing away. A news that came over like a collapsing ceiling on me, on every one who knew him.
Brian was one of my oldest friends; I had gone to primary school with him, lived streets away from each other in Wirral, but lost contact for many years when I moved to the States. Then, by a stroke of serendipity, we ran into each other at The Heaven one night, not many months after I moved back to London. You can imagine both of our utter shock- how tragically funny it was that the two of us grew up with our struggles in the closet in Liverpool, wondering if there were anyone like us at all, not realising that yes, it was just the boy next door. We discovered a new kinship, a precious one. He soon turned into one of the few connections back to my boyhood in Liverpool that I had left in my life in London.
Brian tested positive for AIDS sometime in the end of 1984, though none of us knew until after his death, except Marion, his sister who was working as a nurse. When I had seen him last, a couple of days before Christmas, he had already known his days were numbered. But no one could tell, you know, he was still as jolly as ever, chugging down pints and guffawing at jokes. Maybe if I had been more cognizant, a better friend perhaps, I could’ve noticed. I could’ve hugged him tighter when we parted ways.
His condition deteriorated rapidly and he suffered through all of it secretly, like hundreds and hundreds of men like him. He’d probably had to die a thousand more deaths before the final one if word of it had come out.
His funeral was so cold. So cold and dark and empty. Everything Brian wasn’t. In a little church tucked in a street in Hackney, only Marion, her partner Julie, me and two other friends came to bid our dear Brian goodbye on a chilly February morning. It was the closest to death like that I had come to in the three decades that I had been alive on earth. So close that you could smell its stench.
The only other funeral I had clear memories of at the time was of my grandmother’s. And that was a remembrance of a life well lived- children, nephews, grandkids and grandnieces, friends, neighbours and family from every corner had come down to celebrate the grand old lady. There were tears, yes, but music and sharing of sweet memories too.
There were no tears when we bid goodbye to Brian. No music, no sermons, no readings. It was a remembrance of a life cut cruelly short. I remember Marion just sitting on the front pew, stiff and lifeless as a robot. She spoke nary a word, went through all the motions precisely and clinical. We could hug her and hold her hand, but none of it reached her.
I remember feeling so numb. No pain, no sadness, just nothing, pitchess black emptiness from one of those nightmares that you can’t shake off well into daylight. That numbness too, stayed with me long, long after.
I felt so pathetically helpless. I could do nothing but sit around while my friends and peers fell ill one after the other. Nick had already started working with the Terry Higgins Trust as a volunteer, answering emergency calls and organising campaigns. But I couldn't even do that, no matter how much I wanted to. My label had made it plenty clear some time before after I had tangentially expressed my frustration with the government's sloppy response to the crisis in an interview- that if I still wanted to have a record deal, I could not open my mouth regarding anything about the AIDS crisis in public.
***
That summer, Alexa suggested we take a holiday to Scotland. We meaning Alex, her and me, of course.
“You can’t be serious about this.” To put it mildly, I was stupefied hearing the suggestion. Alex and I were doing quite well by then, we were well on our way to building an easy friendship. But no way well enough to be taking a holiday together. And certainly not with Alexa being there.
“Lex is. She is very serious, in fact. She says you really need a break from London…. With, y’know, everything going on.” Alex delivered the message to me with eyes cast down and fingers fidgeting with the cuffs of his shirtsleeves. He was as hesitant about the prospect of the holiday as I was, I could clearly see that.
“Why?”
Alex snapped his eyes up to me, “What do you mean why?”
“Why…. why are you doing this?” I asked him plainly, directly.
He didn’t answer me immediately, instead squirming and twitching and his mouth opening and closing many times as if trying to catch hold of the correct set of words. Then, he took a deep, shuddering breath.
“There’s no- no ulterior motive, trust me. You can reject the invitation, of course, I won’t force you- I have no right to. Alexa has just been worried about you. And m- me too,” he stared at me for a good few seconds before continuing, “--you don’t- you don’t look well, Miles. You haven’t looked like yourself in weeks.”
He was right of course. Brian’s death had been a huge blow to me. The magnitude of which I hadn’t been able to properly assess then. The impending doom hanging above our necks had terrifyingly suddenly come so, so close, that I could taste it on my tongue.
Alex knew about all of it, the details of them at least. But I wonder if he could feel the crisis in as personal terms as I or Nick did.
“Come with us to Scotland,” he told me, in a voice so gentle that one would use it to talk to injured animals, “It’s a lovely house. There’s a big garden and a lake- you’ve always loved to be near the water. The Highlands are so nice at this time of the year.”
“I’ll think about it.”
He broke into a sparkling grin at once, “We’ll have a lot of fun, you’ll see. We’re doing so well now, surely we’ll survive a holiday together right?”
I did not have an honest answer to that. “I’m sure we will.”
“Lex will be there with us, and friends go on holidays together all the time, don’t they?” Alex sounded enthusiastic, but also like he was trying to convince himself as much as he was trying to convince me.
“And I’m a respectable married man now, so you need not worry about your honour, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”
At first I wasn’t sure how to read what Alex had just said. But I looked at him and he had that stupid grin on his face. He was joking.
I was glad we had come to a point where we could joke about it.
The Guardian, January 1986
Kane Blasts Govt About AIDS
“It’s a darned outrage,” Miles Kane, the superstar singer-songwriter, said about the government’s handling of the AIDS crisis in an address to the crowds before a special concert in Manchester on Sunday night. “People are dying . Young, bright men are rotting away out there in hospital beds. There aren’t even enough hospital beds for all of them. Now’s not the time for dilly-dallying and bullshit. We need to act now!”