A quick scan suggests it ended on a sour note (no pun actually intended) with Alain.
A couple of quotes:
Of Kill Uncle Chas confirms: ‘You’ve lost it, but you’ll re-find it.’ I seem to be eternally cased in by friends who give me bad news because they care. Yet Chas introduces me to Boz Boorer, a known face on the British rockabilly scene, and Boz collects guitarist Alain Whyte, who works for Camden Council, Spencer Cobrin, who has a drum kit somewhere and who helps his father out in the family antique shop, and Gary Day, who plays bass and lives with his father in Neasden. They all know each other and they manage a certain harmony together, although Alain nurses an aversion to Boz that creates frequent difficulties. Generally, it works, and all four are essential to me after the session-musician embalming fluid of Kill Uncle.
Life blurs, like newspaper print held too close to the eye. Jesse Tobias, our Mexican panther-like style-baron, is the slick and sleek key to our new presentation. The marriage is perfect. Departed guitarist Alain had curdled somewhat prior to You Are the Quarry when a legal letter arrived demanding that Alain’s face appear on the cover artwork of the new – and every future – Morrissey album. Well, no. Life doesn’t quite work like that, especially not in the land of logic. His lawyers also demanded that Alain be given the right to publish his own book detailing his life with Morrissey. It wasn’t for me to bestow or forbid such rights, but the request certainly made me nervous. I didn’t quite relish the thought of Alain with a notepad watching me as I slept.
As we begin the You Are the Quarry tour in 2004 we say goodbye to Alain, who shuts the door upon himself – taking himself off the road amid fears that he is suffering from exhaustion, which certainly seems to be true. Backstage at the final Alain show in Dublin, he takes me aside and whispers: ‘I know who is planning your downfall. It is not me.’ I stand back and I let chance stirrings take their lead, but as Alain departs we are contractually bound to find an immediate replacement, and we eventually settle with the steely and stylish Jesse Tobias. We had all felt great concern for Alain, but, always knowing too much, I await personal criticism for Alain’s departure – having had no part in it. Assuredly, criticism whistles through the poplar trees soon enough with accusatory emails from Alain, and my only surprise is that I’m surprised. By such gestures I now live, as if whatever you bestow has no value unless the flow is endless, and as soon as your life-giving generosity retires, you are human filth. That’s just the way it goes. Having rescued Alain from the mad-death of his mind-crushing job at Camden Council, he would now cross continents rather than say a hello to me.
2006 sweetens with the news that Ringleader of the Tormentors has entered the UK chart at number 1, which is my third number 1 in three different decades (and still Alain Whyte says nothing).