The RED Era - 7
JAMES: We went on tour in the summer of 1980. We packed our bags, got on the crusty little bus sent for us, and drove off.
REGULUS: The first stop was a small little venue in Bristol. I think it was limited to about one hundred people, and it was mostly full. We were stoked, poking our heads out of the curtain.
PETER: I was shitting myself. Like, literally. First, I had milk and I really shouldn’t drink milk. Second, I was so scared to perform. Nobody else seemed scared. They were all excited. When I set foot on stage, I was worried I’d forget how to play the piano.
But one look at James, one of my best mates since forever, and I was okay. He winked at me, I winked back, and started playing “Red” with my best mates.
SIRIUS: It was… truly unlike everything I’d ever experienced. Even now. There were people who were dancing and enjoying themselves, people who were singing, even people who knew all the damn words to every single song.
REMUS: They loved us. And I was so proud. Of me, of my boys. I saw Effie in the front, bawling with Monty. I saw all of Regulus’s friends and some of our school friends.
…
And I never told James because I knew it would break him, but I saw Lily, with Nott. He was performing incredibly that night, and I wanted him to keep that piece of him.
JAMES: [scoffs] Of course I knew Lils was there. She was literally the first thing I saw.
I felt… terrible inside. I was nervous, and all I wanted to do was grab the microphone and apologize for everything I’d ever done. But instead, I performed. I performed to her . For her. All the songs I wrote, and even the ones I didn’t. I performed to tell her I loved her, and to beg her to take me back.
Then I saw her with Laurence Nott. She was wearing his jacket, and he had his arm around her, spinning her around to the songs I wrote about her.
But after the show, I didn’t look for her. I just went into the bathroom and threw up. And then, I started tweaking this song I’d been working on but ignored. I was there for an hour, until I finished it.
REGULUS: James thinks none of us knew about Lily, but I did. I mean, he was crying through some of the songs, and then he locked himself in the bathroom for an hour.
But when he resurfaced, none of us brought it up. We couldn’t, not when it had given us a great performance and an invitation to play another night.
Anyways, it turned out to be okay. Lily never came to another show on that tour.
SIRIUS: I swear we’re lucky. We were doing pretty well in all of our shows, getting invited to play extra nights pretty often. More and more people started to know our music, and we were even getting recognized in public.
PETER: I was walking to get a sandwich with Reg when we got stopped by a group of girls who immediately freaked out. We were so confused as to why there was someone screaming.
Eventually, Reg said, “Holy shit, I think they’re excited to see us.”
We signed their arms. It was sick .
We were fucking famous, baby.
JAMES: It was on the way to Leeds that Dumbledore told us to start planning our next album.
REGULUS: As James and I looked through our notes, we realized we had a solid seven songs that fit RED’s vibe.
We have “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”, which started out as me thinking of what I’d say to Barty if we ever got back together.
[laughs]
I was nineteen, okay?
Then we have “I Almost Do”, which James started about Lily and we tweaked it into this slowish sort of ballad instead of this punk rock thing he was going for.
That’s followed by “The Last Time”, which we started while drunk when we wrote “Red” but never finished.
“The Moment I Knew” is my favorite off the album. The whole thing. I had it tucked in my back pocket until we started the whole discussion about the deluxe album. It at the time… just felt so personal. I mean, I was still writing it while on tour. I had only finished it a week or two prior.
[pause]
For my seventeenth birthday, Barty said he was ready to date me in public, and I was so excited. We’d announce it at my party together, but he told me to wait for him. So I did.
He never came. It was single handedly the worst night of my life and even now, it’s up there.
JAMES: It’s a great song. I just wish he’d never experienced that. Even if that meant we didn’t get that song. It’s not worth it.
REGULUS: “Babe” was written the same night James wrote “Nothing New”, and it’s obviously about Lily. Peter was the one who came up with the idea to make it a song you can dance around to instead of the depressing piano ballad James originally wrote it as.
“Message In A Bottle” is a sickly sweet love song he wrote pre-breakup but didn’t want out yet.
And “The Very First Night” is one we wrote together, kind of about how you never expect things to end the way they do when you first meet.
JAMES: We presented our findings to the group.
PETER: I suggested the obvious—a deluxe version of the album. So we gathered together, looked over the songs, and started planning out what to add where. We showed Dumbledore about a week later, as we scoped out that week’s venue.
REMUS: He got us into a studio and we released it as soon as possible.
SIRIUS: We were gaining traction fast . I mean, we were by no means huge stars, but we were known. People loved the deluxe album, and we added… ten or so more dates to the tour.
PETER: I could really feel it then. That we were going to be bigger than we’d ever originally thought.
[laughs]
There was one night where someone who I had seen singing every damn song, even the deluxe ones, asked me to sign her tits. Best. Night. Ever.
JAMES: Halfway through the original dates, we started writing 1979 . We were all doing great. Good songs were being written, new dates had been added, and everyone was happy.
REGULUS: And then I met John.