Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands

by Will Carruthers

  The walls of the kitchen were painted in vibrating red and blue blobs, which ran over the walls and doors with little regard for any common rules of decorating etiquette. Everything in the kitchen that wasn’t art was squalid and uncared for. There was usually a tower of plates and cups in the sink containing traces of food and drink in varying states of decomposition. The settee in the front room was old, scavenged, probably unhygienic, home to an ecosystem all of its own. I slept on that sofa quite a few times. Everyone was on the dole except for Pete, who always had a good lump of hash and who would sometimes pass along the butt end of the joints he would constantly roll and smoke.

  He hid his stash in a gouged-out hole in the plaster of the wall, underneath a loose flap in the giant collage. If the cops had come round to raid the place, which was always possible, they would have spent a long time searching the peeling scraps and peculiar juxtapositions of images in that room.

  We listened to Captain Beefheart, old blues records, gospel, the MC5, the Red Krayola, soul, all sorts of odd psychedelia, the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, The Stooges, The Cramps, the Folk Devils, and on and on. We listened to them religiously … literally. There might be four people sitting in the room, eyes closed in silence, listening to every note and every breath of every beat. Kate once remarked that, on the few occasions she visited Jason there, she found it unsettling to sit in the front room when everyone was silently stoned and meditating on some obscure Suicide bootleg, or something. The atmosphere was quite dense at times, I suppose. Pete might be nodding off, burning holes in the already ruined settee, and Jason might cop a quick nod behind a can of super-strength lager and a bit of Pete’s gear, while we would sometimes turn up on speed, or drunk, and ruin the vibe by talking too loudly and laughing. This caused some problems. Heroin users and speedfreaks rarely see eye to eye. They are concerned with different things. Despite that, me and Pete Kember became firmer friends.

  Natty never took heroin at all when I knew him. He drank, and snorted the speed I occasionally brought round, and we would sometimes do mushrooms together, either up at Gavin and Darren’s flat, or down at his place, but he was fairly strongly opposed to the seductions of the opiate life and he tried, very subtly, to discourage me too.

  I had gone down to visit him once and, as I stood by the front door, I noticed he had painted all of the glass in the front bay windows of the house with white emulsion. After a while of knocking and shouting through the letterbox, he let me in and we both walked into the newly decorated front room. The entire collage, that riot of surreal images and rock and roll iconography that had taken days and days of work to cut out and stick up, had been obliterated in a snowstorm of white paint. There was a single, white-painted chair standing in the middle of the newly painted white floor. It was facing the only thing in the room that wasn’t painted white, which was a small photocopied Hells Angels insignia that said, ‘Approved by the Hells Angels.’ Natty had reclaimed his front room from the Spacemen.

  The Acid Party

  I had first seen an incarnation of the dreamweapon weaving soporifically among the drugged crowds in the cavernous halls and empty workplaces of an abandoned industrial building underneath the railway arches somewhere in London. On that evening, there had been blobwheels and trippy lights and a mixed and addled crowd of goths and psyche freaks, rogue mods, mini-skirted sixties Warhol wannabes and other oddball creatures of the night, all looking for a way out of the vampiric Thatcherite culture that was feeding at the soul of Britain. I watched The James Taylor Quartet wrap their considerably sharp-suited skills around ‘Soul Limbo’ as disenfranchised psychobillies chicken danced their way backwards between long hairs, short hairs, flat tops and backcombed fright wigs alike. The assembled crowd of people grooved and stumbled between stages in various states of self-inflicted discombobulation. Bowl cuts and paisley, skulls and leather, wafting fabrics and winklepickers … whatever could this glorious conglomeration of alternatives have been turning into? Nobody knew and nobody cared. We were united in taking it all in and celebrating the rites of existence, because almost anything was better than the mindless pap that we were being tube-fed by the all consuming organs of the great and the not so good at the time. At least this felt real. If it was a hopeful hedonism, too indebted to the past and always bound to fade in the light, it was still all cool (even if it wasn’t), so most people in attendance were tolerant enough of the different musical dishes on offer to at least permit their existence.

  A band called The Weeds summoned the ghost of The Doors downstairs as Sonic and Jason sat on stools one floor above and played around with modal tones and gentle melodies that oozed and melted into the omnipresent beanbag of drone. It was unusual. In fact, it was practically unheard of at the time, and that was just fine, because we were speeding and tripping and stoned and drunk and trying to figure out what it was that we actually wanted. We were also trying to figure out why the hell things weren’t as good as we thought they had been in the past, even though those glorious times had never been quite as rosy as our record collections might have painted them. That stuff had been a reaction to the overwhelming glum and prevailing blah culture of its time, after all, so perhaps our own slough of despond was actually a fertile breeding ground for every dark-loving mushroom and aromatic vision that had been forced beneath the ground by the shock troops of greed and materialism. We were young enough to not accept defeat gracefully. Duran Duran’s muse might have been Rio, who was poncing about on a big yacht and dancing in the sand at some heathen tax haven, but our muse was named Suzy Cream-cheese and she was dancing in the sands of our mind, which were turning a pleasant shade of turquoise with every touch of her twinkling toes. We held the unkillable optimism of better dreams spawning within a country that had taken a sharp turn into a rat’s nest of shallow ambition. The death knell for post-war optimism had been sounded and we were witness to the breaking of the social contract in favour of personal gain, war and hate. Despite this, we were somehow hopeful in our despair. I guess this was part of the beginning of the gathering of tribes that would eventually flower into the wordless hedonism and unity of acid house. After all, what was there left to say that hadn’t already been said, and where had it got us?

  Spacemen 3 were due to play a concert in the small hours of this houseless acid party. The band had successfully blown my mind at Dingwalls in London a few weeks earlier and I had been hoping for a rerun of the celestial overtones that had left me peering in amazement at the roof, wondering where it all came from. At the party the sound that Spacemen 3 produced when they took the stage quickly made most of the evening’s previous attempts at psychedelia and sixties revivalism look very pale indeed. The band played a song that roared, growled, grew fangs and drew blood. This was music taken beyond the realm of pastiche and imitation. Despite the fact that the riff was a straight lift from the MC5, and it did sound a bit like The Stooges and Suicide (and a bit like a few other things), it also sounded entirely other. It had taken the sum of its parts and become an entity beyond them. I was genuinely spooked at the power and ferocity, and it wasn’t just the cheap speed that had put the wind up me. It was totally believable, it was totally ours, and it wasn’t happening twenty years ago. The song in question, the one with the fangs, was an early version of ‘Revolution’ and it sounded like every indignation you’d ever suffered, pumped up on steroids, with a gun as long as your arm, and ready to kill everyone that had ever done it harm. It roared and it raged, while Sonic Boom hectored and spat like a man on a mission to redeem himself and lead a revolt against the very establishment that had nurtured him. I was further convinced of the absolute power of the band and submitted to the ecstatic maelstrom with gratitude and genuine awe. After the gently reassuring ebb and pulse of the earlier saz and guitar duet the fury of the full Spacemen 3 live onslaught had been a terrifying plunge into the righteous heart of the inferno.

  Heaven and hell indeed … and all based around the same simple but effective formula. One note. One n
ote. One note. One note. One note.

  Playing with Fire

  I was working nights in a factory that made bolts for the space shuttle. I’d walk into the filthy clouds of the shot-blasting room, unlock the doors to the machines, and pour the carefully measured bolts into the rotating drums. I’d set the timers to start the process, and the dirtiest washing machines in the world would begin to turn as the high-pressure ceramic nozzles blasted silicon carbide grit and wore away the microns of titanium necessary so that the fastenings might actually withstand the rigours of space travel. While waiting for the blasters to do their work, I would sit alone at my dirty desk and write down the waking dreams that stopped me from sleeping on the job. I was filthy with grit and fine metal dusts, and the dirt from my hands rubbed off onto the pages as I scribbled out the possibilities that had nothing to do with the job I was actually doing. Or maybe they did. I was so tired working the night shift it was hard to tell the waking life from the dreams sometimes and, with only the hiss of hydraulics and the grind of the grit to keep me company, I would drift off without even knowing it, only to be woken with a shake and a growl by my angry-looking foreman.

  Once they had been ground to the exact specifications and checked with a micrometer by the man in the clean coat in the clean office, the titanium bolts would be tempered in the kilns, turning them cobalt blue and every shade of rainbow in the process. While they were still hot from the kiln, two young kids would dunk the baskets of bolts into an open bath of trichlorethylene that sat inside the shot-blasting room. It was a two-man job and when the hot bolts hit the cool liquid, both of the young workers would be enveloped in a hissing cloud of steam. Trichlorethylene is a heavy industrial solvent, and consequently those two kids walked around for most of the night wearing bemused and addled expressions. They would keep me entertained with their pickled observations and the hazy logic of glue sniffers. Every night, they would gradually turn into the village idiots of the night-shift factory floor and I didn’t envy them one little bit, because even though they were laughing more than the rest of us, they were often laughing at things that the rest of us couldn’t understand. Perhaps this was all part of the training too.

  The graveyard band became even less interested in itself than it was in the beginning, but I was still eager to play music. Gavin Wissen asked me to join the Cogs of Tyme, a garage punk band that he was fronting, who often played with the Spacemen and who were regulars at the Reverberation Club. He had previously, and perhaps unwisely, invited me up on stage to sing with the Cogs of Tyme during a gig in the back room of the Blitz one night. They were about to perform the song ‘Go Go Gorilla’ and he wanted me to sing backing vocals. My first time on stage had found me unexpectedly singing the backing vocals to a song I didn’t even know. In the absence of any kind of a clue as to what I was supposed to be doing, I made very loud monkey noises, gibbering, screaming and howling like a gibbon while beating my chest like King Monkey himself. This amused me and the rest of the band, although the audience were fairly silent on the matter.

  I made my live bass-playing debut some time later in the back room of the Blitz, playing garage punk covers and a few of Gavin’s own songs with the Cogs of Tyme. A second gig followed at a psychedelic club called the Sensateria in Birmingham and before long I was thoroughly swept up in music to the point where it occupied most of my waking hopes and dreams, even when I was loading dirty titanium bolts into machines and doing my bit to make sure that nothing important fell off a space shuttle.

  I guess it was around this time that Pete Kember started to show an interest in my bass playing too. We had become friends and he would sometimes come round to the flat I was sharing in Albert Street to smoke hash and listen to records. One day, when he was visiting, he casually asked if I would be interested in joining Spacemen 3. Jason had turned up to a rehearsal of the graveyard band a couple of days previously. ‘I like your bass playing and I like your banjo playing,’ he’d said, when nobody else was around. Then he had smiled his wide thin smile and said his goodbyes. There was nothing too strange in any of that. We were a small group of musicians in a small town, occasionally people would drop in to other people’s rehearsals. Jason had said nothing to make me suspect that I was being headhunted.

  I loved Spacemen 3 at this point and obviously I was keen to join the band, but I wanted to check it with Pete Bain first. He was my friend, and even though I knew he and Roscoe had been having problems with the band, I had not expected to be offered the job.

  I went down to Pete Bain’s house and sat on the same sofa where I had experienced the sheer terror of listening to ‘Frankie Teardrop’ for the first time after a particularly strong pipe of Nepalese hash. I asked him what he thought about Pete Kember’s proposal. Pete Bain was suffering from a crisis of ambition. On the one hand, he wanted the freedom to make his own music and to have his own band away from the rigid control of Pete Kember and Jason, who at the time demanded the fairly singular attention of any band members. On the other hand, he had done a lot of hard work with the group and he knew that Spacemen 3 were an excellent band who’d reached a level of popularity that none of our friends were even close to. Spacemen 3 had a record deal, they had made two studio albums, and they had toured Europe and the UK. Maybe Pete found some of his feelings about the contradictions inside himself difficult to articulate. It was a difficult band to leave even if you wanted to.

  ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Go for it if you think you can do it.’ And then he looked a bit pissed off.

  ‘Pete,’ I said to him. ‘If you don’t want me to do it, I won’t.’

  ‘No, no. I’m fine with it’, he said, with a tight smile. ‘There are other things I want to do. You’ll hate it in the end anyway.’

  I didn’t care to learn why he thought I might eventually hate being in Spacemen 3, despite some of the things I had heard and seen. I was just desperate to play and I had been given an opportunity to do so. That didn’t mean that I didn’t give a shit about anything else. In Rugby there was no getting away from the things that you’d done, either to other people or yourself. Despite Pete Bain’s mostly silent misgivings, I left his house feeling pretty excited. He’d given me the go-ahead I thought I’d needed and now I was going to be a member of Spacemen 3.

  I was twenty years old and I had only ever played two gigs in my life.

  I passed the affirmative news on to Pete Kember as quickly as I could. The band had started on the sessions for Playing with Fire down in Cornwall and I was told that I was expected there for recording duties, and that arrangements would be made for my travel. Pete and Jason were commuting every week or so from the studio on the outskirts of St Austell, which was a four and a half hour drive from Rugby on a good day.

  The only problem was: I had a job.

  I went into the bolt factory that night and talked to my supervisor. After I had explained the situation to him, he looked sympathetic and agreed to give me the one-week holiday I was due so that I could go to Cornwall and record. I figured that if things didn’t work out with the band, I could go back to my job. I worked the next couple of shifts in an endless clock-watching agony of excitement. I was so looking forward to the prospect of getting involved in a studio recording session with a band that I loved that I found it almost impossible to care about bolts any more, even if they were going into space.

  It was arranged that Kate Radley would give me a lift down to Cornwall. I was pretty fucking pleased with myself when she arrived to pick me up. We drove down to her mum’s house in Cheltenham, had dinner, and then drove the rest of the way to Cornwall. When we reached St Austell we found the road that took us out to the studio on the outskirts of town. We drove up the hill, until we reached the rough and bumpy dirt road that lead us towards the lights of the house. Jason opened the front door of the small cottage and let us into the front room that also served as the control room for the eight-channel tape machine and desk where the fledgling tracks for Playing with Fire had already been laid. It wa
s a basic hippy house in the country with a fairly primitive recording setup, but to me it looked like paradise and a dream come true. I was about to wield a blunt instrument at the cutting edge of music, and things were never gonna be the same.

  We said our hellos. Pete said hi to Kate, Jason was obviously pleased to see her, and then we were introduced to the owners. They were in a band called Webcore, who were part of the new age travellers’ scene. I was told I was going to sleep on a mattress in the room next to the studio, and I was perfectly happy about it. I was perfectly happy in general, to be honest ‒ just absolutely overjoyed to be off the night shift and in Cornwall, in an actual studio, about to do some actual recording. Perhaps a remote hippy cottage in Cornwall was not anyone else’s ideal first choice, but somehow the arrangements had been made and there we all were. The owners were friendly enough and Pat, the engineer, an older fellow of around forty, with dreadlocks and who smoked a lot of hash, seemed to be enthusiastic and friendly. We settled into the soft and tatty chairs and I opened the beer that Jason had given me while Pete chewed off a piece of his hash for me.

  ‘Don’t worry about food and beer and stuff,’ Pete said. ‘We have a budget for that and we’ll make sure you get backwards and forwards from the studio so that it won’t cost you anything. Wanna hear some of the new songs?’