Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands

by Will Carruthers

  Jonny Mattock was not taking drugs to make music to take drugs to. Jonny was not very good at taking drugs at all. By our standards, he was a total amateur. I am not saying this in any way to disparage the man. He still remains the best drummer I ever played with, or at least the one I found it easiest to play with. Jonny’s drug was drums, everything else was secondary, and he was possessed by a sense of enthusiasm unrivalled by anything except his own ability to drum with unusual precision, grace and flair. Despite this, he was shit at taking drugs and he was from Northampton. People from there were understandably a little more jolly than people from Rugby, and although we kind of mocked them for it we were probably a little envious of the fact that they could laugh easily without the help of heavy narcotics and dinosaur wiggly pills. The first time I saw Jonny he was playing a show in the back of the Blitz in Rugby with a ‘wacky’ Northampton band called Apple Creation. I remember this incident not because I got chatting with Jonny or because I enjoyed his drumming. I noticed Jonny because he was wearing a kaftan. ‘Look at that twat in a kaftan,’ I had said, rather uncharitably. I had narrow tastes at the time and they did not involve smiling drummers in kaftans. I liked The Stooges, amphetamine sulphate and beer. Not the friendliest cocktail in the world.

  Anyway, there we were a few years later, and here he was, conked out in a paddling pool of puke on a piss-house floor in a ferry on the way back to Britain, and something had to be done about the situation. I went back to report my findings to the rest of the band, who had also been searching for him. ‘He has passed out on the toilet floor ‒ and it’s not pretty,’ I said. ‘He looks comfortable enough … but he really shouldn’t. Come and have a look.’

  The reasons for Jonny’s largely comatose state were fairly obvious. Prior to getting on the ferry he had approached me and said, ‘I’ve got this lump of hash that someone gave me. What do you reckon I should do with it?’ Jonny didn’t smoke a lot of hash, but we had led him astray a little bit, so now he did, but not very often.

  ‘Don’t take it through customs, man,’ I advised him, but perhaps I should have been a little bit more specific, because ten minutes later he came up to me and said, ‘I ate it!’ He laughed like a maniac, which he often did anyway.

  ‘The whole thing?’ I said, in a slightly disbelieving tone.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, looking a bit worried but still smiling.

  ‘You are gonna be fucked up, Jonny,’ I said. ‘That’s nearly a sixteenth. You’d better find somewhere comfortable to sleep on the ferry.’

  It was a rough crossing. The ship rolled and wallowed in the stormy seas and most of the people on board lost their lunch in the process. One puker would cause a chain reaction of puking from queasy passers-by, until it had become a veritable festival of reckless regurgitation. I have never seen so much vomit in my life. There was a group of schoolkids on board and I saw most of them throwing up in the toilets and along the carpeted corridors with youthful abandon. It was quite a funny spectacle, if you had a strong enough stomach. During all of the entertainment on offer we had somehow lost track of Jonny. He’d crashed out in a chair for a bit, nearly been sick on the manager’s wife, Tracy (who was on her first and last trip away with the band), and then gone walkabout. That was how I came to find him on the toilet floor.

  Jason and I looked down at Jonny from a safe distance. ‘Errrrrr,’ we both said. ‘JONNY!’

  No answer.

  We poked him with our puke-covered boots. He stirred but he didn’t wake up, so at least we knew he wasn’t dead. It would have been most careless for a drummer to choke to death on someone else’s vomit, although it might have improved record sales briefly.

  ‘Shall we pick him up?’ I said, with absolutely no enthusiasm whatsoever.

  Jason shared my lack of enthusiasm for picking up the sick-sodden drummer. ‘He looks pretty comfortable and we are nearly at the harbour, let’s come back and get him when the ferry docks,’ he said.

  We both nodded and left him where he was.

  When the boat finally docked, Kate Radley and I volunteered to go and help Jonny from the boat. He was still serene in the pool of now unwaving vomit. Kate started laughing and wrinkled her nose, as we both steeled ourselves for the unpleasant task of helping our stinking friend to get off the boat and negotiate customs.

  I reached down and looped an arm under his, while keeping my face as far away from him as possible. I hauled him to his feet and Kate looped her arm under his other shoulder. Eventually we managed to get him into a kind of upright position, and he even started making a few noises that suggested he might be approaching wakefulness in some small way.

  ‘ERRR, EEEE, OOOOO, AAHH,’ he sort of said, as we encouraged him to put one foot in front of the other while the two of us supported his weight. I tried very hard not to think about vomit and how much of it was getting on me. What are friends for anyway?

  Jonny was becoming more awake. We managed to get him out of his temporary bedroom and into the hallway.

  ‘Eeep,’ he said, and then smiled and staggered a bit, while Kate and I laughed and gagged and tried not to drop him into the little puddles of stuff he was dribbling onto the carpet. Staggering and laughing and with very little help from him, we eventually bundled Jonny into a seat in the most isolated corner of the van so that he could sleep off the last remnants of his foolish indulgence as far away from everyone else as possible.

  Mercifully, we were not stopped by customs on the way off the ferry, and Jonny didn’t have to answer any questions he was in no condition to deal with. Many people were leaving the ferry in similar states of discoordination anyway and it was almost impossible to tell if any of them were drug related.

  We drove Jonny back to Northampton and dropped him off at his mum and dad’s house, telling them he had been suffering from a touch of seasickness. He was fairly coherent by the time we dropped him off and his mum didn’t seem too concerned about the fact that we had returned her only son to her in a state of considerable inebriation with sick in his hair. Of course, he was still smiling.

  Part Two

  The Key to the Door

  The Autist Turns Twenty-One

  To understand the limitation of things, desire them.

  Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

  I moved out of the ground-floor flat and into a small room at the top of the house in an effort to save money and to keep my spiralling debts from spiralling more quickly. A few of my other friends were renting rooms up there from the same landlord who had presumed that I was spending all of his rent money on a lavish lifestyle of drugs and paddling pools. I had moved into the small spare room at the top of the house without telling him.

  One of the people that shared the house was called Sid, an old-school punk and reggae skinhead who would sometimes decorate the house in the grip of a late-night fever. On more than one occasion I had come downstairs after sleeping through a night of noisily shifting furniture and hammering after he had taken the quick road to the long night and been inspired to make the place look nice along the way.

  Sid had a girlfriend who would sometimes threaten to kill herself if he did something she didn’t like. He had gotten sick of her threats, so one day he had taken a sturdy rope, tied a proper hangman’s noose in it, and slung it over the banister for her.

  ‘If you are going to do it, just fucking do it,’ he said.

  In the morning I had come downstairs to find the noose hanging in the stairwell near the front door.

  That noose stayed there for about three weeks and his girlfriend never used it, which was quite a relief for everyone. I suppose it was a bit weird, having to walk past a beautifully tied noose every time you went to get a pint of milk and some cigarettes, but nobody complained about it. Eventually, it became one of the fixtures of the house, like a potted plant or a picture on the wall ‒ a unique and striking hallway feature, which seemed fitting in some weird way.

  It was my twenty-first birthday and I wasn’t really celebrating in any joyo
us way.

  We had recently played a show down in London and we had received a review for it in one of the music papers, which we read religiously because we were sometimes in them. It was kind of strange and exciting to be mentioned in the national press, and I suppose we felt like we were important in some ways. It is pretty seductive to see your name in print or to see a picture of yourself staring back at you from the racks in the newsagent, even as you are wondering if you can afford a packet of cigarettes. This is particularly the case when you have a feeling that most of the people in your hometown don’t like you. It is revenge in a way, like a big ‘I told you so.’

  It is also a complete illusion, but I didn’t know that then.

  On the morning of my twenty-first birthday I walked down to the shops to buy a copy of that week’s Sounds, eager to give my wonky self-esteem a little boost with another dose of ego gratification. I wasn’t expecting a photograph of myself or any kind of personal mention (only being a bassist and everything), but I thought I might be able to catch a little buzz of association. I was in the band, after all.

  I bought the paper, treated myself to a fresh packet of Embassy Number 1 for my birthday, and went back to the house to see if there was any sniff of printed validation for my increasingly precarious existence. I walked up the stairs past the noose, and I suppose I was feeling all right. I didn’t have any money and I was sinking further and further into debt but I was in a band that seemed important to me. Of course that band was in the process of falling apart but I wanted it to be so all right that it blinded me to the reality of the situation. The music was good. What else mattered, really? I sat down on the settee, lit a cigarette from the fresh pack, and flipped through the pages of the paper.

  It was a fair-sized review. Half a page, or something, with a blurry photo of a mysterious shape intended to alert the casual reader to impending drugs, or something. I read on eagerly.

  ‘Stone bored,’ the title said, ‘written by Felix Taint.’

  I read on.

  ‘This band are truly awful and the hirsute bass player best exemplifies what it is that is truly awful about them. He shuffles onto the stage like an autistic sloth and plays the bass guitar like someone stuttering to speak. He looks, and sounds, like a twat.’

  Despite the fact that I had never been mentioned in a review before, it was not quite the validation of my ego or the birthday present that I’d been hoping for. The review continued: ‘Dressed like a casualty from a church jumble sale granny fight and looking like he still lives with his mum and dad, he was noticeable only by virtue of the fact that he is the most boring member of a fantastically boring band. I hate this band but most of all I hate him and everything about the way he stands.’

  I looked up from the newspaper and took a thoughtful drag on my half-finished cigarette. The author obviously hadn’t realised one of the golden rules of music. If the band is shit, it is never noticeably the fault of the bass player. We are the invisible members of every band. Victory and defeat are the same for us. We pass by, in the shadows, grimly waiting to take out our frustrations on the world as soon as somebody pays attention.

  ‘Fucking wanker,’ I said to myself and the empty room, and then I read it again just to make sure he was a wanker.

  Pete Kember came round to the house later on.

  ‘Hi, man. Happy birthday,’ he said, sitting down to roll a joint. ‘How’s it going?’ He looked at me warily, trying to gauge my reaction.

  ‘Have you fucking read that review?’ I said, knowing full well that he would have. ‘It’s my fucking birthday,’ I added, self-pityingly.

  Pete looked at me and immediately took the no indulgence route. ‘Man, you can’t take that stuff to heart, you know. It doesn’t mean anything anyway. It’s just his opinion.’

  I was less than convinced by his wafting away of the fact that I had been roundly print-fucked in a national newspaper on my birthday. At least the reviewer hadn’t mentioned my name, presumably because he couldn’t even be bothered to find it out. I tried to decide if this was worse or better.

  ‘Just ignore it, man. Don’t let it get you down,’ Pete said, which was easier said than done.

  ‘Fucking wanker,’ I said. ‘I hope I see him sometime. I’ll smash his fucking face in.’

  And then we smoked the joint and I stopped caring quite as much.

  Later that night a few of my other friends came round and we had a few drinks. At some point during the party, I took a trip to the toilet. On the way out, I spied the noose hanging in the hallway and decided to investigate it a bit more closely. I walked down the stairs, took the rope in my hands and inspected the finely tied knot. I would like to point out, at this point, that I was in no way suicidal because of the uncomplimentary review. I was just bored and drunk and fascinated by the noose because ‒ oh, I don’t fucking know ‒ it was unusual? I realised that if I stood on a certain step I could actually slip the noose over my own head, so I did, just to see how it felt to have a noose around my neck. How many times does that opportunity present itself in one lifetime? I tightened the knot up to my throat and tested my own weight a little bit to see how that felt and then, holding the rope above my own neck to take some of my weight, I swung out into space. Just to see how it felt. Maybe I thought it would be funny to call someone out of the room and freak them out and I was actually laughing at the thought, even as I was hanging in the hallway. When I tried to get back onto the step, I realised that although I could maddeningly brush the lip of the step with my toes, I was too far out to get back on to solid ground. It was an uncomfortable realisation. When I tried to swing back to the step, the noose tightened. It was a tricky situation and I was too drunk to find the urgent escape that I obviously needed. I started to panic. The rope around my neck made it difficult to call out for help. I swung there in the hallway making choking sounds, trying to hold on to what little breath I could force past my constricted throat.

  While I struggled to breathe, I began to imagine the tiny headlines written in a future issue of the Rugby Advertiser. ‘Local man kills himself on twenty-first birthday after bad review.’ Then I imagined that everyone would go and read the fucking review in the music paper that had lead to the tragic act. Luckily, at the moment when it seemed that I was truly finished, and I had accepted my absurd death would result in everyone reading about the fact that someone thought I wasn’t a very good bass player, a friend of mine came through the door at the top of the stairs to visit the toilet. He was stoned and whistling until he turned and saw me hanging in the hallway, turning purple and twisting helplessly at the end of my tether.

  ‘Fucking hell, Will,’ he shouted as he ran down the stairs towards me. He grabbed me by my body and pulled me in to the safety of the stairs again. ‘What the FUCK are you doing?’

  I was choking and gagging a bit, but I managed to get a few words out. ‘It isn’t what it looks like, Dave. I was just fucking around and couldn’t get back to the step. I wasn’t trying to kill myself.’ And then we both started laughing.

  I had a bright red rope burn around my neck for about two weeks.

  When people asked what it was I didn’t bother to try to explain it to many of them. It was too weird and nobody was going to believe me anyway.

  Says a Lot to the Trained Mind

  We were all sitting in the van at Dover, ready to begin a tour of Europe that would see us drive nineteen thousand miles and play thirty-two shows in six weeks. Along the way we would lose one tour manager and drive another one half-mad. Jonny would set Jason’s hair on fire, the German promoter would dislocate his shoulder teaching us how to dive into German lakes. We would carry our pleasures across many of the borders of the then European non-union. We would record the album Live in Europe 1989, there would be fallouts, make-ups, dull stretches of autobahn, insufferable Bavarian bed and breakfasts, and there would be a man dressed as a nun, with swastikas tattooed all over his face, who would greet us at our first ever show inside the Eastern bloc. We
didn’t know any of this then. We were just sitting in the van getting ready to catch the ferry and then drive to the first show, in Amsterdam. The first show had been booked in Amsterdam for a reason. As we approached the ferry we were waved over into a customs bay by a uniformed official. We hadn’t even left the country before being stopped.

  ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ the non-uniformed customs agent said as he leaned into the open window of the van. ‘What are you up to then?’ he enquired. He seemed friendly enough, kind of scruffy. He looked like he might even smoke a little hash himself.

  We were instantly suspicious.

  ‘We are going on tour!’ Pete offered, brightly and politely. ‘We are in a band.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ our new friend said, with either real or fake interest. ‘What’s the name of the band, then?’

  ‘Spacemen 3,’ replied Pete.