The day of the show approached and I was reaching a state of high terror. I had only played two shows in my whole life and the prospect of playing a headline gig in London filled me with dread. A van was hired and we packed the equipment and ourselves into it and set off for the capital city.
We arrived at Dingwalls in Camden, unloaded the equipment and set it all up on stage. It was the first real soundcheck I had ever done. I had no fucking idea what I was supposed to be looking for or asking about, so I just nodded and mumbled my way through it while I did what I was told and stood where I was told to stand.
My Bloody Valentine were the support for the evening and they were standing at the front of the stage listening to the soundcheck, with their equipment in a little pile beside them. We left the stage to give them a soundcheck, and I wandered off and sat by the canal to try to calm myself down a little bit. I was absolutely shitting myself, to the point where I was tempted to run away and pretend that I had never wanted any of this in the first place. I was underprepared, under-rehearsed and under a cloud of fear and apprehension that was increasing as time ticked away. I smoked many cigarettes. I tried to think about something else. I failed. BONG, BONG, BONG, BONG … my heart thumped and fear had its horrible way with me, as I chickened out mentally and ran away to a place in my mind where there was nothing but more fear.
I went for a walk, which helped a bit, until I saw the crowds arriving for the show. It didn’t occur to me that even if I fucked it up nobody would know it was my fault. At this stage, my inexperience meant I was unaware of the secret immunity of bass players. Nobody sees you and nobody blames you. Drop a horrendous clanger and most of the audience will pull a face at the singer. Anyway, I kept on walking around Camden, looking at stuff that wasn’t related to music and my imminent failure as a potential rock star.
When I returned to the venue I wandered amongst the crowd like a man who had been hit on the head and had temporarily lost his reason. My Bloody Valentine played their set, but it was impossible to enjoy them in any meaningful way because with every passing song my personal moment of doom drew a little closer. I went outside for a cigarette. There were people fucking everywhere. There was no escape, even though nobody knew who I was or gave a fuck anyway. I found a little stairway, climbed it, and hid behind a low wall while I smoked another cigarette. Pete came and found me, sitting up there, biting my nails and drawing on a cigarette that had a one-inch burn going on. ‘You all right, man?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Bit nervous, you know …’
‘It’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘The rehearsals were good. You can do it.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, which was a massive lie. He passed me a joint and we listened to My Bloody Valentine while the crowd chatted and laughed in happy anticipation of the headline act which, inexplicably for me, was us.
My Bloody Valentine finished their set and an ominous silence replaced them.
It was ominous to me anyway.
‘Come on, man,’ Pete said. ‘Let’s go and do it.’
So we stood up, walked down the stairs, and entered the hot and sweaty club. My heart was like a wild animal in my chest.
I remember getting up on stage and standing there in the lights. I remember looking out at the crowd and then holding my plectrum in my hand and not being sure how I should hold my plectrum, even though I knew how to hold a plectrum. I moved the little triangle of plastic around with both hands while I was waiting for the last strains of ‘Ecstasy Symphony’ to fade out. I was just dumbly moving the plectrum around wondering why it didn’t feel right. I heard the words ‘thanks for coming’ like I was in a dream, and then the slow and menacing introduction to ‘Rollercoaster’ started and it felt like the first stirrings of a trip in the pit of my stomach. The seconds stretched out to years, and all of my thoughts about the audience and whether or not I was going to fuck it up and look like a prick in front of everyone melted away as we all came in on time and the first note played itself, while what was left of me looked on in amazement. It seemed I did know how to hold a plectrum, after all.
I can’t remember another thing about the set until we left the stage with the tail end of ‘Suicide’ feeding back into itself over the wavering backbeat and the flashing strobe lights.
The crowd were barely audible over the throbbing din, as Gimpy Pat played the effects on the mixing desk until flying saucers landed and civilisations crumbled while we made our way shakily to the tiny dressing room at the back of the stage. Thierry continued drumming as me, Jason and Pete lit our cigarettes. I was practically shell-shocked.
‘That sounded all right, man. Well done,’ said Pete with a smile.
I just sat there, dripping with sweat, wondering what the fuck had just happened. ‘Thanks,’ I said, and smoked like a man who had been given a last-minute reprieve on the gallows.
Thierry stopped drumming and came backstage in a blur of sweat and smiles. He shook my hand, grinning and emanating a palpable sense of relief and excitement. ‘We did it, man. We did it!’ he said.
I wasn’t sure if we’d done it or not, because, to be honest, it felt like someone else had done it while I had merely been a bemused bystander holding the bass. ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘we did it. Well done, man.’ And then I smoked another cigarette as though it was the air itself and I was gasping for breath.
After the noise died down and the people left the venue, I emerged from the dressing room and packed down my equipment. Walking out of the door, I bumped into Kevin Shields. He shook my hand and said, ‘Sounded great, man.’ I mumbled a thanks, feeling like someone who had just blundered into something by accident and been applauded for it. He smiled. I walked past him and found the clear spot on the stairs, out of the way of the crowd, where the air was as fresh as London gets, and slowly brought my jangling nerves back to a gentle rattle.
Thierry went back to France, and the rest of us went back to Cornwall and carried on with the recording. Sometimes I worked with Pete alone in the studio, sometimes I worked alone with Jason. Sometimes they worked together. When all of the tracks were nearly finished and the time came to mix the album, there was a bit of a falling out. Ugly words were exchanged between Pat and Pete as we left the studio with the master tapes. Though I think there had been some background tensions between Jason and Pete about songwriting there had been no obvious arguments.
Playing with Fire was finished and mixed up at VHF in Rugby, where The Perfect Prescription had been recorded. VHF was a better studio in a lot of ways, but I wonder if those lighter moments on the album would have sounded the same without all of the greenery, that hippy house and the rope swings and the river that turned into milk when it rained.
We heard later, much later, that the house in Cornwall where we recorded Playing with Fire burned down. I don’t know if it did or not.
Elvis Died for Somebody’s Sins but not Mine
Every time I play this someone in my house gets angry at me. It’s not fair.
YouTube comment on Dreamweapon
It had been billed as ‘an evening of contemporary sitar music’, which was perhaps slightly misleading in that none of us had ever seriously played a sitar, nor had we brought one with us. Ideally, Sonic would have brought along his saz, which is a Turkish instrument that reverberates pleasingly around drones and which can occasionally produce Eastern-sounding scales. Unfortunately, that particular instrument had been stolen from him by some music killer and nefarious shit. The Turkish saz was actually an intrinsic part of the Spacemen 3 sound. Get hold of one and play some ascending one-note scales if you don’t believe me. Perhaps it was playing the saz on a teenage visit to Turkey that had first convinced Pete Kember that it was not necessary to be some twiddly-fingered virtuoso in order to produce a convincing and spiritually reassuring sound. Minimal is maximal sometimes, so if you can make it sound good with one finger and a bit of careful tuning, then why not? You don’t get points for unnecessary embellishment and random jazz chords that only impress your muso
friends. Keep it simple, play with conviction, make sure you are in tune and let the technicalities present themselves in the glorious overtones that only ever ask that you get out of the fucking way a little bit. Soloing over complicated chord changes is a trial sometimes. The mind has to be constantly aware of the shifting harmonic ground and cannot truly free itself into careless improvisation and inspiration. When you are sure of your footing, your eyes can scan the heavens. When you know where you are melodically it is sometimes possible to give free reign to the imagination, and from there perhaps even to find a spark of the divine itself. Keep it simple, stupid. It’s a good rule. Our limitations can be liberating if we choose to explore them and give them time to reveal the secrets they hold.
Drones, and the multitude of melodic and modal possibilities they allow, had somehow fallen out of favour with the Western musical tradition around the Middle Ages. The resurgence of interest in them could be traced back to the 1950s, wherein the seeds were sown for the revival of the one-note bed as a place of possibility rather than limitation. Perhaps it is no accident that the resurgence of interest in the mystical drone coincided with a renewed exploration of the mind-expanding properties of certain plants and their chemical derivatives.
Had we, as musicians and careless chemical guinea pigs, inadvertently stumbled into an age-old tradition through the recreational use of age-old plants? Maybe it wasn’t an accident, after all. Maybe illegal religions have always popped up as a welcome laxative for systems made sticky on an unrelenting diet of white bread and circuses.
Anyway, I presume that the bright spark or cunning entrepreneur who had booked this ‘evening of contemporary sitar music’ had somehow seen (or heard about) Sonic and Jason’s previous excursion into drones and ‘sitar’ music at the acid party in London. During that particular Dreamweapon set a suitably inebriated person might easily have been ecstatically transported to the banks of the Ganges, and it might have been quite possible for that person to imagine they were hearing some fabulous type of ‘contemporary’ sitar music, especially if they had never seen or heard a sitar before ‒ contemporary or otherwise. People didn’t play drone music at all at this time, so anyone could have been forgiven for thinking it was something it was not. Anyway, somebody had pitched the upcoming evening at Watermans Arts Centre in Brentford, west London, as something it really wasn’t, and the artistic overlords who ran the venue were satisfied with what they thought they were going to get. What they were going to get was not anything that any scholar of music would consider to be sitar music, whether it came from today, yesterday or sometime in the future. We had drones ‒ at least something in common with sitar music ‒ but we had no sitars. We sat … but we did not sitar. It could have been billed, just as accurately, as an evening of contemporary hurdy-gurdy and bagpipe music, but that might have understandably scared some timid souls away. Anyway, you get the picture, we were there, we had some nice guitars and we were going to play and get paid, which was fairly high on our to-do list at the time. If the price we had to pay was our playing one note for a very long time in order to accidentally entertain the cinema queue patiently waiting for the start of Wings of Desire, and the fifteen people who had actually come to see us, then so be it. Did I mention we were getting paid and that we didn’t have a sitar? Perhaps none of it mattered. We were playing in an arts centre, after all.
Were Spacemen 3 art? Maybe that is not a question a simple bass player should be expected to grapple with. It has too many strings, and I am by no means an expert in these matters. Regardless of whether or not it was art, Spacemen 3 were certainly not something you would expect to encounter at a serious-minded arts centre in the late eighties. It was too far ahead and behind its time, I suppose. Bands didn’t really play at art centres, anyway, or at least we didn’t. We generally played in windowless rooms that stank of stale ale, exhaled cigarettes and abandoned sweat, in which obvious art lovers were rarely to be seen obviously enjoying art. We played to drunk people mostly. Often, the only really drunk people at arts centres are artists, and the reasons for that are probably best left unexamined as well. Let’s look at the ducks instead.
When we arrived at Brentford arts centre we were pleased to look out through the generous windows that ran along one side of the reception room. These windows looked out onto the River Thames and Kew Gardens, beyond the far bank. Bobbing merrily on the river were ducks. Happy ducks. I have played a few shows in my time, but at no point recall another stage that provided a view including a picturesque river and complimentary ducks. We were going to perform in this windowed room, which also served as a cinema foyer, the main entrance, a bar, and a place where people could relax and talk about art while looking at ducks. I think there were a couple of swans too. This event was obviously going to be different. Because it was art, we hadn’t rehearsed. Pete and Jason would do their thing and the rest of us would play one note. There were no songs to learn, we didn’t need a drum kit or a soundcheck, and we only had small practice amps with us. Easy. Get stoned, play the music, load the gear into Pete’s car, and then make the hour and a half drive back up to Rugby.
‘Just play one note,’ Sonic had advised me and Steve Evans (who had joined us for this one-off show) as we travelled down the M1 to London. ‘Keep it simple. One note. No fancy stuff.’
By ‘fancy stuff’ he meant two notes. Anything beyond that was pointless.
We could play one note … mostly. Anyone could do it. A monkey could do it. But could a stoned monkey do it with feeling and without losing its sense of identity in the glorious all-enveloping om? Only time would tell and, as time was going to be behaving strangely again, we would probably have to wait until later to get a sensible answer from that notoriously flaky taskmaster.
We set up our amps in a small semicircle in the middle of the room facing the ducks. After a quick line check to make sure we were all making the correct noises, we retired to the dressing room to smoke hash. Well, everybody except Jason, who wasn’t smoking much hash at the time.
The dressing room had neither ducks nor windows, so at least we were on familiar territory there. The small room filled up with the heavy smoke as we stoned ourselves into a one-note state of mind. Some of our state of mind might have leaked out into the main room, and perhaps that was the start of the problem. An arts centre is no place for mind-altering substances ‒ or at least this one wasn’t.
‘Could you keep the door shut, please?’ a concerned patron of the arts told us, warily sticking his head round the door and being careful not to inhale. ‘The smell of that … stuff … is getting out.’ We fake apologised for the smell and continued as we were. We were fairly blatant and continuous in our usage of hashish at the time. To us it seemed to be no cause for concern, concerned as we sometimes were with more dangerous amusements. I suppose we considered marijuana like other people considered coffee, and it wasn’t like we were shooting speedballs in the foyer or anything. We were much more discreet about that sort of thing. Other people were not so easy with our choices. We considered this to be largely their problem, except when it threatened to turn into a legal situation. Of course, the illegality of our actions wasn’t going to stop us, it just made us a little more careful sometimes. We weren’t criminals by inclination, we just liked drugs, and some drugs were illegal and some were very illegal. There seemed to be no logical reason why that was the case. At least to us, anyway. Marijuana is a great drug for passing time. Anybody who has ever been in a band will know how much time you have to kill waiting around to do a show. Like Charlie Watts, the drummer from the Rolling Stones said, ‘Being in a band is twenty years hanging around and five years playing.’ It’s not like we were actually bothering anybody beyond their warped opinions of how we should live our lives anyway. We stuck our Rizlas together in our chosen arrangements, licked and ripped our cigarettes to reveal the legal tobacco, laid it on the papers, and then warmed the hash with our lighters and crumbled it into the joints. A little lick, a deft fold, and a ripped
and rolled strip of Rizla packet in the end and we were ready to be officially ‘on drugs’. Actually, we were usually fairly protective of the Rizla packets because it looked incriminating to have ripped Rizlas. We cared, a bit, and we weren’t stupid all of the time.
When time finally arrived at the appropriate place for the impending performance, we made our way out to the amplifiers and guitars. The band were facing the ducks, while the majority of the crowd were congregated in a seating area somewhere off to the side of our equipment. Behind us was a line of people waiting for the cinema to open. I think there were as many people in the queue for the film as there were to watch our performance. We tuned the guitars and plugged into our amps. Sonic played the first chord of the performance on his Vox Starstreamer using the built-in repeater and a heavy tremolo, so that the sound might be pleasing to people who liked that sort of thing.
The guitar pulsed out a regular rhythm all on its own, that phased and gelled with itself as he turned the dial on the tremolo. ‘W a w a w a w a w a w a w a wow W a w a w a w a w a w,’ it said, turning time into atomic uncertainty and mystical probability, as all focus settled upon the one, which was the two and three and the four in the wawawawawawawa wowawawowawawa …
Steve and Jason began to play one note somewhere in time with the tremolo and repeater, which were phasing across each other as the drone started to congeal into itself and become more than it should. I moved my plectrum around between my thumb and index finger and went for the most inconspicuous E I could find on the fretboard. Nothing too low and nothing too high. I wasn’t going to be faffing around sliding between octaves and running around the neck, so I started as I meant to go on … and on … and on … and on.
I locked into Steve’s inconspicuous E within the blurring tempo and tried my best to find the natural mean between the inconsistencies. It sounded fine. I wasn’t standing out, or ruining the drone. In fact, I was so in time and tune that I could barely hear myself. I kept myself in line with the tempo by using the feel and the audible click of the plectrum on the strings of my electric bass. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, wawawawawawawa wowawawowawawa … Twatwatwatwatotwatwatwa …
Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands Page 7