The world-weary customs man came up close to the window, looked inside and gave us half a smile. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘That says a lot to the trained mind.’ He smiled more broadly as he gauged our reactions to what he had just said. But then he stopped smiling so much. ‘OK. Let’s have a look in the back, then, boys, if you don’t mind.’
Like it mattered if we minded.
We all got out of the van and lined up at the back door, ready to unpack the stuff we had recently packed.
‘Let’s have a look at the guitars, then, lads,’ our new friend said.
Pete, Jason and I hauled our guitar cases out of the back of the van, laid them on the concrete, and lifted the lids. Jason’s all-wood Telecaster with the big ‘3’ at the bridge, Pete’s Vox Starstreamer and my Gibson Thunderbird lay exposed and gleaming in the grey Dover morning.
The assembled customs agents cooed and began to make appreciative noises. ‘Mind if I pick it up?’ one of them said, pointing at the Starstreamer.
‘Be my guest,’ Pete replied, looking as confused as the rest of us.
We were expecting a full shakedown, but it seemed that they just wanted to have a look at the guitars.
‘Very nice!’ the customs agent said, admiringly, as he gently cradled the teardrop and played half a chord. ‘You’ve got some nice guitars.’
‘Uh, yeah. Thanks,’ we said.
‘OK then, lads. Off you go. Thanks a lot and have a good tour.’
We fastened the cases and stashed them in the van. Once we were a good distance from the customs point we all burst out laughing.
‘Fucking hell,’ said Pete, ‘what was all that about? They could probably tell we take drugs just from looking at the guitars!’
We did carry sumptuous and bohemian-looking guitars.
Suicide
Every night before we played ‘Suicide’ Pete Kember would pause to introduce the song. ‘This is a song for Alan Vega and Martin Rev,’ he would say, and then, after a short pause for dramatic effect, he would say, ‘“Suicide”.’
The last word always sounded somehow triumphant. The drone would begin from his keyboard, Jonny would kick the drums in with robotic precision, and Jason’s scorching wah-fuzz guitar would begin its ascent as I started the rumble of the lowest and higher octave Es. At the unbearable peak of impending one-note doom and tension the keyboard would step through the descending figure to bring the whole band crashing into the simple two-note riff, which would then propel the song through its varying eternal lengths. Sometimes we played it for ten minutes, sometimes for twenty, and sometimes it seemed to go on for so long that time itself ceased to have any meaning. For a bassist this was agony to play, like running a marathon, and whether we were playing for ten minutes or twenty, after a while I would be internally pleading for it to end, my fretboard fingers cramped into claws, my pick hand feeling like it was being hit with a hammer. Despite the hypnotic and transcendent nature of the sound we made and the volume reached, playing ‘Suicide’ live was always a uniquely painful sensation that kept me firmly rooted in the material world. It was the last song we played. Always.
One night in Geneva we played this song to a crowd of around fifty enthusiastic fans, and during the performance we noticed another crowd of noticeably less enthusiastic people had gathered at the back of the room as we brought our set to a close. These newcomers were looking decidedly confused and intimidated by the ungroovy noise pouring from our stage. Presumably, they had turned up hoping to find some kind of après-ski disco and we were postponing their chances for any off-piste mating rituals. They didn’t look very happy, which filled us with considerable glee.
Leaving the stage, after the usual ten minutes of maddening repetition and blistering noise, Jason and I left our guitars standing against the amps, feeding back into a huge and menacing drone with the notes that Pete had taped down on his keyboard. As we were squatting beside the stage, sweating with relief and exhaustion, it was suggested that perhaps the evening still held a little sport.
‘Shall we go on and do it again to piss the skiers off?’ said Pete, with a loud laugh. ‘They didn’t look like they were enjoying it at all.’
It was quickly agreed, with much laughter, that even though we were all tired it would probably be worth going through a bit more pain to annoy the people who wanted to have a good time without us.
We were difficult like that.
Jonny, who was still nailing the robotic Bo Diddley beat with superhuman endurance, played his last and triumphant cymbal crash and walked offstage looking like a man who had recently finished an assault course.
‘We are gonna go back out there and do it again,’ said Pete. ‘Really go for it this time. Let’s do a crazy one.’
Despite his obvious fatigue, Jonny smiled like a man in possession of the keys to the store cupboard of enthusiasm.
We waited for the drone to play out for another minute or two and then walked back out onto the stage. The assembled crowd at the front of the room clapped and cheered and looked pleased to see us. The people at the back of the room looked hugely disappointed. We picked up the instruments and started the interminably long build-up again.
‘Hey, you lot at the back. Hope we aren’t stopping you from skiing,’ Pete remarked, sarcastically, into the microphone.
We played and we played and we played, mercilessly gouging the same riff into the patience of the unconverted. We played that same riff for another ten minutes or so, laughing throughout.
There is a recorded version. It sounds fucking great, but we were only doing it to be bastards, really.
After the sessions for Playing with Fire had been finished, the band were hoping that Alan Vega would provide a vocal for the recorded version of ‘Suicide’. Phone calls were made and Alan agreed to do it. A session was booked, and we made the journey to London where we had arranged to meet the singer and take him to the studio after a show he was due to play.
Pete, Jason and I stood in the venue and watched Suicide play to a largely disinterested Siouxsie and the Banshees crowd. Music had progressed enough by this point that the crowd didn’t actually hate them and nobody threw anything at the band as they played, which had happened earlier in their career supporting some of the first punk bands in Britain. Suicide were ahead of their time and they had suffered for it.
Suicide played a great set, and afterwards we made our way backstage to meet the band. Alan had mentioned over the phone that he had some lyrics together and that the working title was ‘Suicide: It’s a Way of Life’. This all sounded pretty hopeful to us, so we sat backstage in the small dressing room chatting to Marty Rev as we waited for Alan to appear. Pete was noticeably excited. After an age of waiting, and more than a couple of relayed messages, Alan appeared.
‘Shall we go then, man?’ said Pete. ‘We’ve got the studio booked and time’s getting on. We don’t wanna be late.’
Hearing this, Alan Vega looked a bit pained. He was sweating and he looked tired after the performance.
‘Ahhhh, man,’ he said, in his New York drawl. ‘I’m kinda beat. I’m gonna have to say no tonight, man. It’s too bad, but you know how it is.’
We were shocked.
‘What?’ said Pete. ‘We’ve booked the studio. You said you were gonna do it. We’ve come all the way down to see you and it’s all arranged. We’ve paid for the studio. This isn’t cool, man.’
And it wasn’t cool.
Alan started to get a little testy. ‘Well, man, you know how it is. I’m tired and I just can’t do it tonight. Maybe some other time, all right?’
We looked at him and he looked at us and we all knew it was never going to happen. He left the dressing room.
‘That’s not cool,’ said Pete, looking absolutely crestfallen. ‘That’s fucked up.’
We nodded, left the dressing room, got back in the car, and drove back up to Rugby.
‘Suicide’ was going to remain instrumental, and it was never going to be a way of life.
> Or Start Living with Your Mother
I was living with my mum again. The situation was far from ideal for me but at least I had somewhere that I could afford to live while I waited for the royalties to come through. She was pretty pleased that I seemed to be doing something positive with my life. She liked the music and she liked the members of the band. They were always polite when they picked me up or dropped me off, and the little container of citric acid she had found in my small bedroom was no real cause for concern. We had only been listening to records up there and citric acid was good for a hangover.
She wasn’t so impressed with my Spacemen 3 t-shirt. When she used to hang it out on the washing line, she always made sure it was inside out so that the neighbours couldn’t read the word ‘fucked’. She said, ‘Why does it say “for all the fucked up children” on it? It makes it seem like somebody did something to you?’ I didn’t really have an answer for that, or at least not one I was prepared to get into. My mum and I didn’t see eye to eye in some ways, but we were gradually starting to understand our differences a little bit. I guess I was still only twenty-one.
‘Revolution’, as a single, had brought the band to a higher degree of public attention and popularity. Now we were reaping the rewards, in terms of publicity, for the positive critical reception and subsequent sales. We had even been on the telly. You really couldn’t ask for a greater degree of acceptance than that in some people’s eyes. The band had appeared on The Chart Show, which was a Saturday morning music programme that featured a ten-minute ‘indie chart’ section, and we had also been on Snub TV, another weekly music show that focused entirely on indie music. Imagine that, eh? Music programmes that didn’t involve Simon Cowell with a face like a cat’s arse lording it over a terrified bunch of hairdressers from Macclesfield singing tarted-up super-karaoke songs.
Before long Spacemen 3 were on the front cover of one of the weekly music papers. The Melody Maker sent Chris Roberts up to interview the band, which meant that he talked to Pete, who by now had become so much the leader of the band in the eyes of the press that the rest of us were reduced to shadows in the background of the photographs. Pete had taken the journalist on a little tour of Rugby, and nobody was any the wiser as to what they might have got up to.
On the day of publication I hadn’t had a chance to buy a copy of the paper so I had, perhaps unwisely, asked my mum to grab one when she was at the shops. I caught the bus back to Bilton, walked across the green, and down past the school I had attended when I was a child. I walked up the street, past the lines of semi-detached houses, saying hello to the neighbours I knew as I went past. I walked down my mum’s driveway and opened the door into the kitchen. She came out of the lounge and turned to face me, holding a copy of the Melody Maker in her hand. She did not seem overjoyed that her son was now so famous he could be seen lurking in the background of a photograph in the national press.
‘Have you read this?’ she said, with an angry look on her face. ‘It’s ALL about drugs!’
This didn’t come as much of a surprise to me.
‘It can’t be all about drugs, Mum,’ I said, trying to calm her down a bit. ‘Let me read it.’
‘WHAT ARE PEOPLE GOING TO THINK?’ she shouted, understandably upset by the fact that we were all going to be found guilty by association of a lot of things we might not actually have done.
‘I DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY ARE GOING TO THINK UNTIL I’VE READ IT, DO I?’ I shouted back.
It was fairly hard to defend an interview I hadn’t read.
She slammed the paper down and stomped off in a disappointed huff.
I picked the paper up, walked upstairs, lay down on my bed and looked at the front cover, which featured a larger than life picture of Pete Kember’s face, set in stark half shadow. The words ‘Spacemen 3 – from here to eternity’ were written across the picture. I opened the paper and read on with a grim sense of anticipation.
‘Pete Kember, aka Sonic Boom of Spacemen 3, takes me up to his sumptuous red room in the mansion he shares with his parents …’ the interview sort of began. ‘He sits me down, makes me a cup of tea, and then plays me a mangled cassette copy of what might be a Suicide bootleg. He then rolls me so many joints I forget why I have come to Rugby in the first place, although I do feel rather comfortable about the fact. After a short eternity of contemplation we go for a ride in his car. He takes me to the chemist and picks up his methadone prescription and then explains his current predicament and the ridiculous drug laws in Britain that are leading to innocent people being forced into intolerable and dangerous situations beyond the law, merely for exercising their right to choose which intoxicants they prefer …’
My mum was right. It was pretty much all about drugs. I wasn’t in a state of shock but I was wondering how to spin this so my mum didn’t kick me out of the house again. I was skint. I had nowhere else to go and I was in no position to throw any rock-star strops.
Of course, I completely agreed with most of the things that Pete had been saying, and I couldn’t see any logical arguments against his case for harm reduction and the resocialisation and medical treatment of people with drug problems. I also liked taking some illegal drugs recreationally myself, and they weren’t really a problem for me as far as I could tell. This may have been partly because I couldn’t afford to buy them any more. But how I was going to explain to my mum that it might actually be a good thing to open up some lines of communication about this taboo subject that didn’t involve outright hysteria was a different matter entirely. It was going to be difficult. I briefly considered the options while smoking a joint. I was leaning a long way out of the window, but not far enough so that the neighbours might see me. It wasn’t for my personal enjoyment. It was for the good of the situation. I was hoping it might make me a bit calmer if things got weird. I lay back on the bed and briefly considered not bothering to try to explain. But that didn’t really seem to be an option.
After ten minutes, I took the long walk downstairs and tried to be as diplomatic and understanding as possible. My mum wasn’t an idiot, but she knew only what she’d been told by the TV and the papers about the whole ‘drug’ subject, and that could sometimes leave people with large gaps in their understanding. The only problem was, because we were on drugs we obviously couldn’t be trusted, and every word we might say was probably just some crafty way to get more pot, or something. I went downstairs stoned and got ready for the stony silence.
‘Look, Mum, I’m not a junkie,’ I said. I thought it was a positive and hopeful opening gambit, and it was true. ‘We do these things, and I know it is hard for you to understand.’
She looked at me mistrustfully. ‘What are my friends and neighbours going to think about it all? What am I going to tell them? What am I going to tell Aunty Yvonne? She wants to read it. I already told her you were in the paper.’
This was a tricky one. Aunty Yvonne was probably not going to understand, despite the fact that we got on pretty well.
‘Look, Mum … he gets his methadone from the chemist. From a doctor. It’s a way of making things a bit easier. It’s dangerous buying heroin on the street. People are dying.’
The mere mention of the word heroin was enough to make her howl a bit, and it made me feel bad too.
‘He seems like such a nice boy too, and with that good education!’ she said, as though she had just found out Pete was an axe-murderer and that an expensive education wasn’t, after all, an impenetrable shield against the problems of the world.
‘He is a nice boy, Mum,’ I said. ‘You know he is. He’s been round here a few times. Has there ever been any problems?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s always very polite.’
‘There you go, then,’ I said. ‘Just don’t show the interview to anybody. I don’t suppose any of your friends buy Melody Maker, do they? If they make any comments, just tell them that Peter has got a medical problem and that they shouldn’t be so judgemental.’
She looked at me suspicious
ly.
‘I don’t like it, Will,’ she said.
‘None of us like it, Mum,’ I replied.
We were now in the unenviable position of being semi-famous druggies who lived in a small, small town, during a time when the use of illegal drugs could send you to prison, and draw scorn and mistrust from people who used different drugs. Everybody in the band, except for Jason, was living with their parents.
Taking Drugs so Other People Don’t Have to
‘Taking drugs to make music to take drugs to.’ This seems to be a phrase that people have taken to heart regarding Spacemen 3. It is fairly shocking, I suppose, and it certainly was at that point in the eighties when the overwhelming message being beamed at us loud and clear from every billboard and public information broadcast was: ‘Just say no.’ Just say no. Simple. Except, of course, it wasn’t and it never had been. It was like saying, ‘Just accept life is shit and get on with it’ ‒ at least for those us with the fever to change our minds and no idea how to do it any other way. Just say no. I love the ‘just’ in that phrase. ‘Just say no,’ like it was the easiest thing in the world. Although ‘just’ saying no might have been an ideal, we were living in a far from ideal world. This was the height of the ‘war on drugs’ cooked up by Ronnie Reagan and his creepy wife Nancy one night after a couple of strong cocktails and some slimming pills. Margaret Thatcher loved the idea. It was war. It was tough on drugs, but mainly it was tough on the users of drugs. Fuck those hippies, beatniks and Rastafarians. It was ‘just’ like that upstanding paragon of human decency Richard Nixon had foreseen all those years previously. It had been his bright idea to wage war on drug users in the first place.
Making your natural opponents illegal was an effective way to make life difficult for them. Those druggies weren’t going to vote for the joyless embrace of a solid career and boring sex in some miserably over-mortgaged fuck hutch at the edge of despair. Just say no. Pleasure was for the weak and this was the time of personal responsibility. If you had any problems they were YOUR fault and you should just bloody well sort them out and pull your socks up, or die and let the strong trample your broken body into the earth as fertiliser, or something. There was no such thing as society, or so we had been told by our swivel-eyed Iron Lady of the psychopathic stare. Unfortunately, we were in a band, which is a fairly social thing to do. We were understandably a bit confused about society, and we took drugs. We were never going to agree with our leaders.
Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands Page 10