Just think back to when you were at college, and think back to some little group of friends. Maybe you were in a play, or the rowing club, and you were just a bunch of mates who hung around the boozer. Now think of one of those people and imagine that they are the Prime Minister. How do you feel? It's like saying I once had a friend called Margaret Thatcher.
At the time it was just another band. If I could have my time again I'd record everything, I'd photograph everything and take notes. I remember him sending me a postcard when the whole Ugly Rumours story had become so huge and he wrote, 'Well, we've made it after all'. Because of who was in it, people talk about it as if it was Creedence Clearwater Revival. Well, um, it wasn't.
I remember going to our first gig. We didn't have a van or even a car. We had a trolley. And Tony turned up. He was a little bit late, and he was rocked up in his best outfit, and I must admit that there was this slight wince of pain behind the eyes when he realised that this wasn't exactly The Rolling Stones. But let it never be said that he didn't get down to it and push that trolley with the rest of us.
How did we start? I had joined this band with a couple of friends and we knew we weren't going to get anywhere without a front man. None of us wanted to step up to the plate or had the charisma or nerve to do it. One of my friends, Adam, said I've seen this guy in a review at St John's [College, Oxford] and he said he was a really remarkable performer, really impressive. And a review had said that this bloke, Tony Blair, was very much the focus of attention.
Why Ugly Rumours? Well, if you hold the cover of the Mars Hotel album by Grateful Dead upside down in the mirror, the stars spell the words 'ugly rumors'. Not that I think Tony was a Grateful Dead aficionado, but we were.
Anyway, Tony got back immediately and said, 'Great, what songs do you do?' And I think we told him we're doing 'Live with Me' by the Stones and 'Take it Easy' by Jackson Browne. Then he arrived at this audition with sheaves of lyrics. He had sat up with the records and transcribed them. Well, we were dumbfounded. We thought you could just make it up, stand around on stage smoking and hope that some very attractive girls in Laura Ashley dresses would come up and ask you out.
Anyway, we asked him to sing and he was very good. Don't forget, you've got to have a lot of self confidence to be the singer, you can't just hang around at the back behind a curtain of hair. He had that, in his big Cuban-heeled boots. He looked good - although we were a little worried about his haircut which, although long, looked suspiciously 'folk-rock' to us.
He was fantastically confident but without any arrogance or swagger. He had ambition, enormous charm. He even wanted to rehearse. He said to me: 'What's the point of doing it if we can't be good?' Our second gig was at St John's and Tony, who was a massive admirer of Mick Jagger, was waiting in the wings. He was wearing a hoop-necked, trumpet-sleeved T-shirt, loons and high heels, with lots of bare flesh on show. He came screaming on with the classic 'Let's rock!' and went into the first Stones number as if he was Jagger himself, all pointing fingers and pout. At the end? Well, all the women were talking to him, that was for sure.