Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands

by Will Carruthers

  Over the course of a year that house changed. The drugs of choice became less benign and the atmosphere became considerably harder and a little more dangerous. I stuck around when I should have been gone because I didn’t know any better. I didn’t know the difference and I didn’t care to listen to any of the warnings I was being given at the time. It was all illegal, and it was all outside of a normality I didn’t particularly care for. I was young and naïve and I had a taste for self-destruction that I barely recognised in myself. I really wasn’t that interested in living a long and happy life anyway. It seemed impossible to me. I had run screaming into the jungle with a knife between my teeth and a desire to fight imaginary tigers. Barehanded if necessary. I suppose it was a kind of death wish, but at least I wasn’t going down without a fight. The problem was, I was only going into battle with myself, and that’s a fight that nobody is equipped to win.

  Eventually the musicians stopped visiting. The recreational users of the kinder drugs stopped coming round after the pubs, and the students moved out. The hippies were given the boot and what replaced them was altogether more serious. The people that lived there now were older than even the older crowd I had been hanging out with. The visitors the house received were more serious drug users, petty thieves and dealers from the town. I was still working in the sheet-metal factory in Birmingham, but I was spending all of my weekends at the house.

  We would listen to all the old punk records, David Bowie, Lou Reed, reggae, ska, the Rolling Stones while we laughed at the people that slept, as we raided the ashtrays for dog-ends, and played endless rounds of blackjack, waiting for the first TV programme of the morning. It was called Wacaday. The dayglo-suited idiot presenter would appear on the TV screen on Saturday morning and start screaming, ‘WE’RE WIDE AWAKE!’ And we were. We hadn’t slept all night because we had been injecting amphetamine sulphate and grinding our teeth with boredom and pointless energy. I had started off snorting the stuff and soon moved over into injecting it. Snorting speed was like sniffing broken razorblades off a piss-house floor. Banging it was like taking the top of your skull off and pouring spacedust into your brain. I never thought about the risks or about the fact that we all shared the same old needle, week after week. When all of my money was spent, I would catch the train back to Birmingham New Street on Monday morning, put in eight hours on the machines at the sheet-metal factory and then go back to the pub in Small Heath.

  After a few months of this, I suppose I started to unravel a bit. My dad sacked me from the factory. My mum had already kicked me out of her house in Rugby after she had found three thousand magic mushrooms drying under my bed, so I moved into Winfield Street and signed on the dole. I suppose I was a quick learner. In the course of a year and a half I had gone from being a complete neophyte, to hanging out and being accepted by some of the more serious elements of the Rugby underworld, even though I was so young. Nobody asked my age, because I had just been a fixture of the house when the rough boys had arrived. I was like a potted plant, or something. One time when we were all shooting speed in the kitchen, the mysterious powder had turned to jelly in the spoon as it cooled. While he drew the paste into the syringe and struggled to fire it into his reluctant veins, one of the gnarled old punks turned to me and said, ‘How old are you, anyway?’ When I told him I was seventeen he looked a bit freaked out.

  Our dole cheques arrived bi-weekly and each of us received them on different days, so whoever got paid would take everyone else up to the pub and pay for the drinks. We would drink in the Blitz and sometimes down at a pub called O’Malley’s, which was the hangout of choice for some of the more insalubrious and criminal members of our not so secret society. Once, there had been a serious fire in O’Malley’s and it had shut down for a few days. The owners painted the entire place black, including all of the furniture, and then re-opened it within a week. It smelled a bit burned but it was still operational. Obviously our dole money didn’t go too far, and there was always the problem of having enough to eat when all of the money had been spent. We began to shoplift from the supermarkets, sometimes immediately after we had spent all of our money on booze. I was an inept thief at the best of times, and being a drunk shoplifter didn’t help matters at all. Finally, I was apprehended by the security team at the local Sainsbury’s with a stolen bag of Maltesers and a clove of garlic in my jacket. I suppose I was nobody’s idea of a master criminal, although the judge did see fit to ban me from every Sainsbury’s in the land after he had found me guilty of the crime. I never had the heart to get any further into thievery than pilfering from the supermarkets. It wasn’t my thing. For me, it was easier to be poor, and that worked in my favour in some ways, because my friends stopped giving me the speed I could no longer afford to pay for. I still had my guitar, but I didn’t talk about that too much. Nobody was talking about making music at the house any more, and the general view amongst my friends in the house was that there was something a bit weird about the musicians in town. Eventually I moved out of the house of ill repute. When somebody had stolen all of the plug sockets and the carpets and there wasn’t a clean spoon left in the house. When the bailiffs and the police had come round and broken the front door down one morning to cut the electricity off. When there was a plastic bag full of some old lady’s sentimental stuff that some idiot thief had stolen and then thrown up into the tree outside when he realised he couldn’t sell it. I would look up at that bag, caught in the high branches of the tree, and wonder about the woman’s valued trinkets that had been worth stealing but not worth selling. To be fair to my housemates they had given the thief a good bollocking about it. They did have standards.

  I was learning to live with the constant fear of arrest. Much has been written about the paranoia of drug users, but little has been written about the mental strains of being constantly under the threat of law. Maybe it isn’t just the drugs that cause the paranoia.

  My friend Rowley Ford, an old-school sixties’ dropout from Rugby who had taken the trip to India and never quite come back the same way, advised me of a good way to throw the police off if you happened to be unlucky enough to get searched.

  ‘Always carry something weird in your pockets, man,’ he said. ‘Nothing disgusting or stupid. Just weird stuff, like mad people do. They won’t search too far if they think you are mad.’

  I asked him what kind of stuff in particular, but he couldn’t really be specific about it.

  ‘Just weird stuff,’ he replied, and after a while that stuff somehow found its way into my pockets without me being able to explain it or understand it either. I guess that is just the way that weird works.

  By the time I left the house I was nineteen. I had lost my virginity, metaphorically and literally, and I’d lost a good chunk of my innocence too. I was using intravenous drugs before I lost my virginity, which is a very strange set of priorities for a teenager to have. Eventually, when it happened, it happened with a woman who’d once been the girlfriend of a man called Christopher Fitzgerald. He died of an overdose. If you look at the back of Sound of Confusion, the first Spacemen 3 album, it says, ‘In loving memory of Christopher Fitzgerald.’ I think he had been about nineteen when he died and his father had started a campaign in the local press to hunt down the drug dealers he held responsible for the death of his son.

  It all got pretty messy when the television cameras turned up in town and started interviewing people who really didn’t want to be on TV. His old man had taken out an advert in the local paper that said, ‘A day in the wells of time killed my son,’ because it was his coded way of naming two people who he held responsible for the death. We all understood that he was angry and sad, but the truth of the matter was that you could have arrested every drug dealer in Rugby and there would still have been another to take their place. He might as well have blamed the manufacturers of the little peach Palfium tablet which his son had injected on the night he died. The only person who had killed his son had been his son. All the rest had been supply and demand
. I suppose no parent wants to think about the reasons for that, and neither did we.

  The Graveyard Shift (or How to Play One Note for a Very Long Time without Losing Touch with Your Mind)

  We loaded as much of the equipment as we could into stolen shopping trolleys, crossed the road from the flat, and entered the graveyard, making enough noise to wake the dead. It wasn’t out of a lack of respect. It was difficult to be silent. The wonky wheels skittered on the trolleys, the reverb springs twanged, and the amplifiers crashed against the cymbals, while we laughed and joked as we made our way across the paths that ran beside the graves. Rupert Brooke, the First World War poet who died before he saw action, and who was consequently revered for his patriotic verse, is buried in that graveyard, alongside the countless dead from various wars and other, more natural, causes. Intricately carved headstones line the paths amongst the yew trees, standing in mute testament to the love of the living for their dearly departed. We, of course, were very much alive and partly possessed by that feeling of invincibility that youth carries briefly, even as it walks so close to death. I had started hanging out with the musicians. My career as a thief had been going nowhere.

  We would arrive at the small rehearsal room in the old lampworks building and set up our borrowed and scrounged equipment. Natty Brooker would sit behind whatever tangle of drums he had managed to gather from hedgerows and junk shops, holding the noise together with his offbeat Beefheartian logic and his caveman stomp, while the rest of us played together, somewhere close by, lost in our own worlds but communicating distantly through rhythm, sound and noise.

  Darren Wissen would hunch over his guitar in a reverie, producing haunted sludge from the depths of the mushrooms he was so fond of, while Roscoe and Steve Evans added various woo-woo guitar and flying-saucer frippery as we collectively produced a fairly haunting and primitive dirge with few obvious connections to popular musical forms.

  I had been relegated to bass guitar, despite my initial reluctance and protestations. I was soon hammering away on those four strings, loudly, with enthusiasm, but with very little experience or technical skill. Somewhere there is a tape recording of my first ever change of key while playing in this group. In the recording, the rest of the band are desperately trying to alert me to the impending change by shouting over the clattering din of whatever bastard riff we were in the process of mangling. ‘NOW,’ they shout, many fruitless times, as I comically fail to count the bar correctly and move my fingers in time with theirs.

  This particular band never had a name and never did a gig. We never recorded anything beyond mono-cassette copies of our rehearsal sessions, and we rarely changed key or had any lyrics. We didn’t have titles for any of the ‘songs’ but we would go back to the same riffs, week after week, and hold on to them like a dog with a bone, gnawing at the same motifs for hours over hours. We were just happy to play and, even though we talked about doing gigs, we weren’t really that interested or ambitious beyond the rehearsal room.

  Although Rugby was a small town, and we were all vaguely aware of each other’s existence purely because of proximity, we had become firmer friends through our patronage of one particular pub and, specifically, through the Reverberation Club, which ran occasionally in its back room. The Blitz was a fairly typical mid-eighties British hostelry. Named after the famous London club, while sharing nothing in common with it except for the name, the Blitz was a coked-up designer’s mess of fake industrial pipes, neon lights, video jukeboxes and weirdly patterned carpets. This cheap recreation of last year’s brand new thing was housed behind an old Georgian frontage that looked out onto the main street leading up to Lawrence Sheriff School where I had tried to avoid as much unnecessary education as I could. Given that Rugby was a small provincial town, the clientele who frequented the Blitz were a mishmash of vaguely alternative people and the usual weekend pub crawlers. Thugs from the surrounding villages, punks, goths, and townies on the piss all gathered inside at the weekend to get their small-town kicks in whatever ways they saw fit. Bubbling away in the back room were the stirrings of a music scene that would influence countless bands, span the globe, and continue to be relevant thirty years and counting into the future. Judging by the tiny number of people who actually frequented the Reverberation Club, nobody would have predicted that at the time.

  A few months previously, before I took the full leap into the subculture that became such a large part of my life, I had been sitting in the Polish Club with my younger friends from school when I realised that I needed a sanctuary that was beyond the understanding of most of the people I knew.

  I fled that teenage disco, running through the town centre in panic and exhilaration while dodging the drunks and my own hallucinations as I tried to get to the Blitz, where the Reverberation Club was in full effect for the night. It felt like going home. OK, so home now looked like a peculiar undersea grotto, decorated with imaginary deep-sea fish heads and psychedelic netting, but it felt a damn sight more reassuring than groups of drunk kids vomiting in the toilets and disco-dancing badly in the hope of maybe sticking their hands in someone’s underwear later on. Of course I was interested in those things too, but on this particular evening, when the bright lights of the Polish Club bar had done nothing to soothe my jangled sensibilities, and my friend’s head had suddenly launched off his body, leaving me gazing at a vision of him with a wobbling bobble of a face on a fifteen-foot giraffe neck, I decided it might be time for a change of scenery. I realised that I needed to find people that might be able to understand my predicament more fully, and that all fifteen of them were probably in the back room of the Blitz listening to the Thirteenth Floor Elevators and the Red Krayola. When I arrived, I paid my fifty-pence entrance fee and walked into an undoubtedly weird environment that felt considerably less weird to me than my previous environment. I settled into the darkness and watched the old blobwheel push oozing colours around the walls of the undersea grotto as a strange trio of women emerged from the mandalas of the lightshow to dance in a soothing way to the groovy music. The people I knew here were unconcerned by my babbling about giraffe creatures and, as the Elevators turned into The Stooges and The Stooges turned into the Velvet Underground, while John Lee Hooker stamped his foot to some obscure psychedelic Nugget, then somehow it had all seemed very right and proper.

  I started hanging out more and more with the musicians who ran the Reverberation Club, and I would spend time round at Gavin and Darren Wissens’ flat, where we’d brew up the tea from the mushrooms that Natty picked on the same fields where Lewis Carroll had played rugby as a boy.

  We’d sit there all night, mostly silent, watching the birds take flight from the entwined foliage of the William Morris wallpaper, while we listened to Kaleidoscope, The Incredible String Band, obscure garage punk, Hawkwind and Bob Dylan. When the dawn came and the first cars started to phase past on the road outside, we would gaze out over the graveyard and marvel at the strangely frosted yew trees and the spirits of the dead that seemed to grow through them and bring them to life as the day grew stronger. Around 8 a.m., the butchers in the shop downstairs would start work for the day. It was peculiarly unsettling to listen to the sound of someone chopping up huge joints of meat and bone. We would sit upstairs and try not to imagine the scene downstairs too clearly.

  Natty had once turned to me after a particularly long night and said, ‘Maybe he is chopping up dead people down there.’

  And then he threw his head back and laughed his old pokey-toothed cackle.

  Until you have seen a man turn into a lobster and then throw his head back and laugh at a joke like that, there is no way I can explain to you how it felt.

  Walking back to my house alone, one wild and windy night after another cup of some strange local brew, I approached the entrance to the graveyard and heard distinct voices calling my name. ‘Wiiiiiilllllll. Willlllllllllllll. Willllllllllll,’ they keened, and although I told myself it was the wind, or the tea, or a combination of the two, I didn’t really
believe myself. I just kept walking away from those voices, and they got quieter and quieter as I left the graveyard behind.

  The Spacemen

  I remember the first time I met Natty. He was sitting in the living room at Spacemen headquarters, which at the time was somewhere on Murray Road. I had gone round drunk with my speedfreak friends to have a little fun with the artists. They were into different things than we were. They played music and made art. We stole stuff and got into fights. In a larger town we would have never met, but Rugby was not a large town, so we did.

  We were pissing in the front garden when Pete Kember arrived. He just laughed and waited at the door with us to be invited in. Natty was sitting on the settee. I think the first thing he said was, ‘What month is it?’

  Nobody really had an answer to that.

  Through playing in the graveyard band with Natty and Roscoe, I began to spend more time visiting them down at the house in Oxford Street that they shared with Jason Pierce. Pete Kember spent more time at that place than he did at home. Spacemen 3 were recording The Perfect Prescription. It was 1987 and all we wanted to do was get stoned. From the outside it looked pretty normal. It was a run-down terraced house, rented out to three young oddballs who received a few odd visitors and who kept unusual hours.

  There was a huge stack of records in the front room, which were the massed collections of the three residents and whatever Pete Kember brought down with him when he visited. The entire front room had been plastered, walls and ceiling, with a huge collage of magazine cut-outs and photocopied album artwork. It was quite an experience to sit there on mushrooms and follow Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s echoing face into the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, while Iggy Pop looked on in mock horror at a toothpaste advert where Mom had been replaced by an alligator and the toothpaste tube was full of snakes. ‘I can’t find my mind,’ someone had written over the door, beside some tattooed sideshow freak from a sixties cartoon and a picture of a distorted badger. It was quite an understandable thing to have written over the door because if you lost your mind in that collage you’d spend quite a long time looking for it.