Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands

by Will Carruthers

  We had been educated about drugs ‒ in a way. There’d been Zammo, the stereotypical smackhead from our schooldays soap opera Grange Hill. Nobody wanted to be like Zammo who, in the course of about a month of episodes went from being a loveable character to a shuffling zombie. Why didn’t Zammo put us off? I wonder why Zammo did heroin? Probably some evil drug pushers gave him some drugs outside the school playground and then he was gone. One of the less than human hordes who would nick your telly and stab your dog for a fix. We didn’t want to be like Zammo and we didn’t want to die of ignorance either, as the terrifying new public information films about Aids warned us with the weight of the crashing tombstone that ended that particular advertisement for life. It didn’t stop us sharing needles with every thief, drug casualty and decrepit specimen in our small Rugby underworld. It didn’t mean that clean needles suddenly became available either. What the fuck was wrong with us? There was quite a lot wrong with us, actually, and some of it was a direct consequence of years of disastrous policing and the attitudes of the people around us. Of course, we had personal problems too, but nobody wanted to talk about them. Just say no … to everything, including rational debate and harm reduction.

  I would like to tell you it was glamorous and bohemian, but we did live in Rugby. I would like to tell you that we actually had some sort of deliberate plan for breaking into the subconscious to bring back messages of universal truth and understanding; that we chose to plumb the depths of the human spirit to return with the name of the demon that caused the malaise. But we just liked taking drugs because we thought that life was a bit shit sometimes and we felt better when we were on them.

  We were kids when we got so deep into stuff that we might have been better leaving alone. Before we knew what we were doing, we were doing it, and after that there was no easy way back to the civilised society we now viewed with the same suspicion it reserved for us. Most of the alternative crowd were part-time outcasts and, to a degree, most of them were playing with rebellion. To go deeper, to go right down, was to risk being cast out by everybody ‒ to enter a world of thieves, criminals and violence, where the police were your enemy. This was not something to be taken lightly. It was heavy stuff. People died. People went to jail. People would kick your fucking head in. I suppose I kind of wanted that life in a way, having little respect for the prevailing ambitions and dreams of our time, and seeing no other way of getting out of it ‒ than getting out of it. I guess I also wanted to be dead, a little bit, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to outright suicide. My advice to you is to try to identify the prevailing idiocies of your age and avoid them whenever possible. If idiocy is prevailing hard, some sort of anaesthetic might be in order. At least then you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you chose your idiocy and that there might be a way back. I am in no way recommending you make the choices we made. You will not become a creative powerhouse by consuming vast quantities of drink and drugs, and if you doubt that wisdom take a little trip down to the park bench where the alcoholics gather and ask them about their latest creative projects.

  Back then, the drug underworld seemed more honest to me, and at least the people weren’t as boring. At least they didn’t talk about how much their house was worth all the time or what their new sofa cost. Drugs are an honest consumer product. As long as they are good quality you know what you are going to get, and you might even know the price you will be asked to pay, monetarily, physically and perhaps even spiritually. If you survive, that is. I still have survivor’s guilt, and sometimes I wonder how I was lucky enough to get through it all when so many people didn’t. I felt terrible after Spacemen 3, thinking that maybe we had convinced some lost and easily led soul that heroin was the way forward to a richer life. I got over that when I realised that I didn’t blame Lou Reed for some of the choices I had made. His recorded advice had actually helped me negotiate some of the dangers, although, of course, he looked fucking cool as well. For a while. Survival in these situations can be all about accepting responsibility and not falling victim to blaming someone else, which always gives your power to change your situation away. Information doesn’t hurt either. It’s certainly more useful than propaganda.

  Drugs it was, and we got some stuff we bargained for and some we didn’t. Perhaps it was the least worst scenario for us … or the best option we could see. Pat Fish, the man responsible for introducing Spacemen 3 to their first record label, had my favourite quote about it all. He said, ‘Spacemen 3: taking drugs so other people don’t have to.’

  Maybe those drugs gave us a peek into the divine and a little glimpse of what peace actually felt like. Maybe it gave us a good whiff of the demon’s breath. These things might well have been an illusion in themselves, but the feelings, however fleeting and unstable, were real.

  Rugby is not a great cultural hub. It is a small market town in the Midlands that stands at a confluence of major transport routes. The M1, the M6, major train lines … Watford Gap: Rugby is where the comings and goings of Britain, north to south and east and west, are funnelled into a bottleneck that makes it a great distribution point for the rest of the country. Go there now and you will see monolithic warehouses containing all the food, gadgets and knick-knacks that the hungry people of the country consume as they try to buy their way into a better life. These giant grey boxes stretch out beyond sight on the fields where me and Natty used to pick mushrooms. Rugby is a distribution point and this fact was not lost on some of the major drug dealers at the time. A lot of drugs came through Rugby. We were blessed by geography. Rugby is central. ‘In the middle where it matters,’ as the signs welcoming you to the town said. Apart from this, Rugby really does not have much to distinguish it. It has a very expensive private school, and the remains of an industrial boom that brought people to the town from all over the country and from some of the countries of the crumbling British Empire. Back then, one half of the town comprised of manicured lawns, old buildings, concert halls and the children of the great and the good, while the other half was made up of a diverse group of people who had arrived in the fifties and sixties to work in the factories and at the burgeoning GEC turbine plant. Rugby is a wholly improbable town for Spacemen 3 to have sprung from. It was an absurd and inhospitable place for the band to exist in, and perhaps that is why it was ideal. Rugby was also home to a huge set of radio masts transmitting extra-low-frequency radio waves that were used to communicate with Britain’s Trident nuclear submarines. We all knew, when we were schoolkids, this made Rugby number three on the list of nuclear targets if the Cold War ever decided to get a little more heated ‒ something it always threatened to do in the eighties. As a child, I dreamt of nuclear annihilation. I dreamt of little mushroom clouds appearing on the horizon. I dreamt of the whole world and everything I loved in it being torn apart in a firestorm of shattering atoms and madness. Not many people were just saying no to that possibility.

  We were coming of age in the eighties, when all of the industrial promise that had brought people to the town was being asset-stripped and shipped out of the country to cheaper labour abroad. What was there left to do but ‘drugs not jobs’? Britain was being sold off, the unions were being smashed and fat money was king. I used to go and read all of the William Burroughs books at Rugby library when I was a young man. They had a great collection. At some point in the late eighties, those books vanished from the shelves, literary victims of a quiet censorship that ruled in law that any book ‘promoting’ drug use or homosexuality was to be removed from public libraries. Burning books attracted too much attention it seemed. It was much more efficient to quietly remove them from public view, and if the twenty-five weirdoes in town who actually read those books started to complain, who was going to care?

  There wasn’t much of an outcry about the removal of the books.

  So what did we do in the face of all this puritan psychopathy? We took drugs and made a fucking racket, for us and our friends. It wasn’t a rallying cry. We were too far into defeat to even dream
of any resistance beyond keeping ourselves entertained. It wasn’t ambitious. It was survival. At times it was a very self-destructive form of mental self-defence and, like many survival strategies, it eventually became a problem in itself after it had outlived its usefulness.

  Coventry

  Much of Coventry had been bombed flat during the Second World War. I had talked to old men in Rugby who remembered watching it burn from fourteen miles away. The city had been rebuilt afterwards, a little too quickly, as some sort of symbol of regeneration, and consequently it was a tangle of flyovers and concrete slabs that fitted together like a cuntish giant’s puzzle. I bet it looked pretty special on the architects’ drawing boards. Like a vision of the future, or something. Coventry, at ground level, did look like the future, but not a future most people would actually choose to inhabit. During the Second World War the bombing of Dresden was retaliation for the destruction of Coventry, which had supposedly been retaliation for Munich. The only bombing we were interested in was of ourselves, and where better to do it?

  Here was a city dropped in by helicopters and cranes, poured and laid into a geometric confusion of frightening shadows and unbroken lines that ate the sunlight and gnawed the soul, with little respect for natural harmony or human scale. It was built for, and by, machines, and a fragile bag of bones and flesh was no match for its gargantuan scale and civic appetite. It would eat you up and shit you out without a wink, a fart or a thank you. The annexe to the main swimming pool in Coventry was supposed to look like an elephant, which it sort of did, for about three seconds, if you were travelling by car at a particular angle over one of the many flyovers. It looked like an elephant drawn by a psychopath. Coventry city centre could make a person feel as though the future had arrived to stamp on the head of everything quaint and pretty in the natural world, and those great slabs of cement and concrete laughed at the wonky past, while staring into you with flat dead eyes. The statue over by the entrance of the cathedral, depicting a winged angel with a spear standing over a defeated Satan, succeeded in somehow making the devil appear to be the sympathetic combatant. The horned devil was prostrate, bound, left gazing up the triumphant angel’s skirt in a grotesque tableau of victory and defeat. This, in a city that had been destroyed by combat. Coventry had a skyline that bombs had turned into a full stop, and whoever had rewritten it was obviously angry or insane, because they’d just written ‘FUCK OFF’ in massive concrete letters and dropped them onto the smoking ruins and piles of rubble.

  The signs on the way in to the city said, ‘Welcome to historic Coventry.’ So maybe someone had a sense of humour about the whole thing.

  My first ever job had found me delivering fizzy drinks around the city. The Alpine man and I would drive to Willenhall in the early morning because it was safer. We would sell Alpine lemonade, cherryade and weird chemical limeade, travelling door to door, selling these dayglo beverages to our regular customers. I remember one lady who used to answer the door very slowly. Her house smelled of coriander, cumin, turmeric and fenugreek, and when I brought her the lemonade she would reach into her sari and take her purse out from close to her breast. Her money was always warm. Once, I asked her why there was a big hole in the wall of her garage. She said that the local skinheads had burned her car when it had been parked out on the street. The family had paid for a new car and locked it into the garage behind a big steel door with a heavy padlock. The skinheads knocked a hole in the garage wall and burnt the car inside. She had a steel cage on the inside of her letterbox, so that when people put burning things through her front door the house wouldn’t burn down. In the light of this, maybe it is easier to see what an absolute godsend a band like the Specials were to the town. Two-Tone, peace and harmony. Too much too young and the old skinhead moonstomp instead of the National Front and Paki-bashing. Lord knows that town needed a band to bring a little peace and harmony and give people a reason to get together that didn’t involve violence.

  Pete and I would take trips to Coventry. Sometimes we would go to Willenhall, sometimes we went to the other estates. I vividly remember listening to the Suicide bootleg 23 Minutes Over Brussels while we drove around the city trying to score. Sometimes it took fucking ages, even longer than twenty-three minutes, and then we would listen to the tape over and over again. Marty Rev’s panic-attack rhythms and Alan Vega’s heartfelt screams were the perfect soundtrack to our search for oblivion in the concrete jungle of flyovers and high-rises. What could any of it have meant to me? Twenty-year-old Frankie? Working in a sheet metal factory in Birmingham? Stamping out washers. Thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud. Putting the same bend in five thousand identical strips of metal.

  One dealer lived in Hillfields in the big tower blocks. Pete would park the car and we would enter the block and take the lift up to the higher floors. He would knock on the door and call out, ‘It’s Pete, with the big feet,’ because he does have big feet. The guy would let us in to his small flat where a massive tower of speakers completely filled one wall. The heroin dealer liked to play floor-shaking reggae music. I guess the neighbours didn’t complain, or if they did, he couldn’t hear them. Sometimes we would cook up a hit there because the dealer always had a needle. One needle. We would use that ‒ it was hard to get clean needles at the time. Everyone else who went there to buy heroin in a hurry might have used that needle too. This was common practice at the time, due to a government policy which was supposed to discourage us from doing what we were doing. It didn’t stop us, of course, but it was certainly a big bonus for the hepatitis C virus that was silently spreading like wildfire amongst people desperate enough to be using illegal intravenous drugs. Maybe the government wanted us to die.

  That little insulin syringe would sting as it went in and slid out, but soon afterwards the warm flush would take away the care and we wouldn’t think about the broken veins and the cops and whoever’s blood might have been left on the syringe. We might even forget everything else that had lead us up to that flat in a tower block in Hillfields to try to find a little peace in all the wrong ways. After we had finished, we would smoke a cigarette, make a bit of woozy small talk with the dealer, and then we would both walk out of the tower block in a pleasant haze and drive back to Rugby. I was twenty-one years old ‒ old enough to know better but young enough not to care.

  We didn’t always take the heroin in the flat. Sometimes we would use the public toilets in the city centre. This was worse, because we would have to carry the syringe and the smack and we would both have to try to get into the toilet cubicle without anyone becoming suspicious. We never took water from the tap, because that looked suspicious too. Back with my speedfreak friends it wasn’t unusual for us to take the top off the cistern, suck up the water from there, and then cook it up and shoot it. Me and Pete didn’t do that. We used bottled water. Once, we did some smack in the toilets and then went record shopping. Pete was pretty wasted and he fell asleep on some records he was looking through. The woman behind the counter was not very happy with this type of shopping. ‘Oi!’ she said. ‘Wake up. What’s wrong with you?’

  Pete kind of half-woke up, lifted his head from the records, and mumbled something about narcolepsy. The woman was not convinced.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ she said to me.

  I walked over, smiled and tried to calm the situation.

  She looked into my eyes and said, ‘And you’re the same?’

  I thought that was a bit unfair because I had managed to look through the records without falling asleep on them.

  ‘Fuck off you bitch,’ said Pete, undiplomatically, and that was the end of that.

  We left the shop and wobbled off to somewhere more friendly.

  If we didn’t do the drugs in Coventry we’d drive back to Rugby with them. I think we once did that fourteen-mile journey in under ten minutes. Maybe the drive back was more dangerous than the drugs themselves. Maybe the way we were forced to take the drugs (because of the laws that were put in place to stop us taking t
hem) was worse than the drugs themselves. Nobody forced us to take the drugs, of course. We just wanted to.

  We really weren’t such happy young people, for various reasons, and maybe sometimes we couldn’t see what we had to lose. We had problems. We had problems with drugs, we had problems with the police, and we had problems with all of the people who thought we shouldn’t take drugs. None of it was fucking helping.

  If you think any of this sounds like a good idea you might have problems too. Please believe me when I tell you that heroin is probably not the cure for your problems.

  Spacemen 3 on Spectrum

  After a brief lunchtime walk around the charming walled town of Chester, we had been expecting a fairly well behaved show, even though we were deep in the godless north of England. Spacemen 3 were often most well received in the north. Maybe they understood drugs and desperation more completely up there.

  The promoter met us at the B&B. He was young, enthusiastic, wide-eyed, and very new to the game. He looked like a college kid; he was a fan who obviously thought he was going to have some fun putting on some of his favourite bands in his spare time. ‘I’ve had to change the venue at short notice,’ he said, a little warily. ‘It’s a bit weird but I reckon it will work out all right. It is in a health spa, but we should get a good crowd out.’