More joints. More cheers, and then the final push to the end while the lights wound up and round the stage and the air throbbed and sweated inside us and out. ‘Revolution’ started, and it was actually possible to believe it might grow from the tiny anarchy and the heresy we had wrought in this puritan palace to the greed for physical beauty. It growled and it slunk and the drums fired a salvo of rolls as Pete drawled ire and myrrh over his discontent, and the whole thing exploded in flames and fury as cannons fired and the end was revealed as a lightshow of stars and not the apocalypse it was never meant to be.
The drone began for ‘Suicide’ and, as tired as we were, we got ready for the marathon at the end. This two-note hymn to a death that never died and to a life that wouldn’t give up on its own death wish pulled itself up from the earth and down from the sky. It drew the walls around us into a dizzying hurricane as it span and twirled, over and over, bringing us back to attention and one last gasp, by the skin of its teeth and the beckoning organ, until it finally, inevitably, died of old age and exhaustion and the crowd went wild. We fought our way offstage through the sweating joy and the feedback and the light.
It was a good gig.
We sat in the dressing room under the too bright lights, sweating off our preferred exercise. The first gang of well-wishers burst in and as the conversations grew and the drug-fuelled friendships flourished, I took myself off for a little walk and a peaceful moment.
Walking back into the now empty performance room was as much of a shock as it had been earlier. The place was fucking wrecked. There were broken glasses everywhere. Cigarettes and joints had been left to extinguish themselves in fresh pools of vomit and beer on the carpet. A couple of stubborn souls were still holding onto the far reaches of consciousness, propped against walls, fitfully dreaming in chairs or snoozing on the floor amongst the detritus of our transportation. I walked up onstage, collected my effects, wound my cables and packed my Gibson Thunderbird safely into its case.
I walked back out into the corridor and bumped into Pete.
‘Have you seen the state of this place, man?’ he said. ‘It’s fucking trashed. Come and have a look at this.’
I followed him into the jacuzzi and sauna area. All of the hairdryers and beauty thingamajigs had been ripped from the walls. They were lying in piles in the sinks. The water in the previously pristine jacuzzi had turned a yellowy-brown colour and there were cigarette ends and empty bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale floating on the surface.
‘Oh dear,’ I said.
We wandered further in, past the piles of trash and broken equipment, until we reached the sauna. When we got close, the door opened and one of our friends from earlier looked out at us from the billowing clouds of steam. ‘It’s fucking impossible to get Rizlas to stick together in here,’ he said, and then he showed us the two cigarette papers that he had in his hands. The papers were obviously not sticking together at all. The sauna was pumping out steam and he was sitting in there, alone and fully clothed in expensive sportswear.
We were all back in the main room, packing up the gear, when the promoter approached us, looking a bit less relaxed than he had earlier in the day.
‘Oh, man,’ he said, looking worried. ‘The management are really not happy about the state of this place.’
We nodded sympathetically. It was pretty easy to see why they might not be over the moon about the situation.
‘Do you reckon I’ll get my deposit back?’ he asked us, seriously.
Gerald and the Two-Handed Shuffle
Gerald Palmer was a bullet-headed man with an easy smile. He knew his business, and his business was business. Nothing else really seemed to interest him beyond that, except that which might serve his interests, which were business. He talked about his family sometimes, but his eyes only lit up for business.
When Playing with Fire had been recorded and mixed and we were all sitting down at VHF listening to the playbacks and patting ourselves on the back, Gerald turned up to do some business. He smiled, as he usually did, and then produced two pieces of paper and held them out like a stage magician. In one hand was a contract, and in the other hand were two cheques.
One for Pete and one for Jason. I can’t remember how much the cheques were actually for, but they weren’t enough to buy anyone a house. It was a simple deal. Sign the contract, get the cheque.
Pete and Jason had a cursory read through the agreement. There was a short discussion between them while Gerald just kept on smiling.
After a little more discussion, the contracts were signed and the cheques were handed over. Gerald kept on smiling the same old smile.
A few years ago, I was talking to Gerald about his new business venture, which involved cleaning up old recordings that had fallen out of copyright. He would digitally clean up the songs and make them into stereo, register the songs in his name, and then sell them, digitally, on the internet. He told me he had thousands of other people’s songs registered in his name and he was making money from them. It was all perfectly legal.
After he had told me that, he said, ‘I much prefer working with dead musicians, Willie.’
I told him I felt the same way about managers, and we both laughed.
Elvis Plays ‘Revolution’
Sometime towards the final demise of Spacemen 3, we were playing a show in the south-west of England and had somehow managed to secure free passes to Glastonbury festival. ‘I’m not going!’ Pete Kember said. ‘I hate those people and I hate camping.’ Kate was the only one of us who could drive, and she had a car, so she agreed to give me and Jonny a lift down to the festival after the show. She and Jason were then going to drive back to her parents’ house and join us the next day at the festival. We played the show, packed all the stuff up, and the four of us got in the car and headed down to Glastonbury. It was the first time at the festival for all of us.
As we got close to the site peculiar stragglers appeared on the roadside, briefly illuminated by the car headlights. Up ahead, blue flashing lights and hi-vis jackets indicated we were involved in some sort of police stop-and-search operation. This was bad news in many ways. I was carrying an eighth of hash in my hand and was ready for the situation. I put it in my mouth and held it between my teeth and my cheek and tried not to panic as the two policemen waved our car over into a side road that led up to the back of a frighteningly well-lit truck and more police cars. Standing in the back of the truck were two policemen, backlit and silhouetted like a scene from a horror film. They were theatrically snapping on rubber gloves. Everybody wants a nice cavity search on the way to a festival after a show at two in the morning, right? I swallowed the hash. ‘Has anybody got anything?’ said Jason, looking a little nervous. ‘Not any more,’ I said, and we all got ready for the inevitable questions. Kate did the talking. Her old man had been a fairly high-ranking copper and she knew the routine. She was pretty and well spoken and after a few initially probing questions she charmed the copper on duty enough for him to let us pass without looking up anyone’s arse. This was a big bonus for everyone, including, one might hope, the policemen on duty. The whole thing had been a ‘scare the hippies for a laugh’ kind of operation ‒ and it had worked on me.
‘Bollocks,’ I said. ‘I’ve swallowed my hash. It was everything I had for the whole festival.’ It was also more than enough to fuck me well and truly up.
Kate and Jason dropped Jonny and me off at the gate to the festival and said goodbye. It was dark and late and I was getting ready for the unbearable levels of intoxication that were about to become my lot for the next twenty hours or so. Jonny had a tent and some things that campers sometimes take camping, but I think the only thing I had brought with me was twenty quid and the hash I had already swallowed.
We didn’t have any wristbands or tickets, but we had been told to pretend to be Brendan Croker and the 5 O’Clock Shadows who were, presumably, a band. Because it was late, and because security was slack in those days, we were let into the festival grounds withou
t question and told to pick up our wristbands the next day.
Jonny and I walked through the darkened campsites, occasionally twanging our feet on unseen guy ropes and tripping over tent pegs. We were looking for a good place to put the tent in the dark ‒ with no torch, and with a quickly approaching drug casualty. I could feel my body becoming increasingly heavy as peculiar notions began to surface in the unclear waters of my mind. ‘Jonny,’ I said. ‘We really have to get this tent up soon or I am going to zonk out on my feet.’
‘Yeah, man, don’t worry,’ said Jonny in his cheerfully excited and enthusiastic way. ‘We’ll find somewhere good and then you can sleep it off.’
We walked a bit further and then we walked further still. With every step, each step became a little more difficult to take.
‘Jonny … I am not fucking kidding, man. Pitch the fucking tent. Now. Here.’
‘OK,’ he said, and we found the nearest clear spot and started pegging out his cheap two-man tent. When it was up I crawled into the baggy interior and fell asleep instantly without saying goodnight.
When I woke up, I wasn’t even sure that I was awake. I could see stuff with my eyes shut. I kept my eyes shut, mainly because I was feeling very worried about what I might find if I opened them. Something was not right. I tried to feel all right about the thing that was not right ‒ I think part of my brain had forgotten that I had recently been made to eat a very big chunk of strong Afghani hash by a policeman wearing rubber gloves and a strange smile.
‘Jonny,’ I whispered. ‘Jonny, are you awake? Man … something is wrong.’
I still hadn’t opened my eyes but then I remembered that I had swallowed the hash, and I knew that I could not feel my legs. It was freaking me out a bit.
‘JONNY!’ I shouted quietly, ‘I FEEL WEIRD. I THINK I MIGHT BE PARALYSED.’ I know all of this sounds stupid, but I was absolutely stoned to the bone in every possible way and the occasional lapse into paranoia and peculiarity was, perhaps, unavoidable. Jonny groaned, moved around a bit, and then started laughing. This did not help my paralysis or my feelings about it at all.
‘HAHAHAHAHAHA.’
‘What? What?’ I said in a frightened little voice.
‘Open your eyes, you twat.’
I opened my twat eyes, reluctantly. Jonny was twice my size. He was a giant and I was tiny. Not only was I paralysed but I had shrunk in the night so that I only came halfway up the tent. I was a paralysed dwarf and it was probably permanent, and it was all my fault.
Reality dawned slowly and in a way that was difficult to comprehend. Somehow, we had managed to pitch the tent on a ridiculously steep hill. Because we had failed to zip the front of the tent up, during the course of my night of deep dreams I had gradually made my way out of the tent feet first and been blissfully unaware of the fact. My legs had spent the night sleeping outside of the tent and the rest of me had been … well, in some exotic garden in Marrakesh.
It was quite a relief. ‘Hehehehe,’ I laughed weakly and unconvincingly.
‘How you feeling?’ said Jonny.
‘A bit weird,’ I said, as I made the long journey to my feet and stumbled around the steep hill like a newborn deer on my unparalysed but not entirely functional legs.
‘Oh dear,’ said Jonny.
‘Exactly,’ I said, walking and falling, falling and walking. ‘Why did we pitch the tent on a fucking mountain?’
Jonny merely laughed, the heartless bastard, and then he took me for a walk around the festival ground, as though I was a totally bemused dog. We met Kate and Jason at the sound desk of the Pyramid stage as Van Morrison began his set. ‘Hi, Will,’ they said. ‘How are you feeling?’ I just nodded and then we listened to Van Morrison singing ‘And It Stoned Me’ until it all made a bit more sense, as these things sometimes do.
Later on, when the hash had worn off enough for me to function a little bit, I bought two squares of LSD from a passing dealer.
‘Here you go, man. Watch out, they are pretty strong. Black witches,’ he said to me as he pocketed the five quid I had given him.
The little squares of paper had pictures of black witches on them, but I was not feeling superstitious … yet. I ate one and lay back on the very steep hill just up from the main stage, where we had pitched our tent.
A policeman stepped over my body, which was a bit weird, but he just smiled and carried on walking.
I waited … and waited … but nothing happened, so I went off to drink cider and meet the rest of the gang. We were sitting underneath some electricity pylons, sipping cider, and I was complaining about the weak LSD. ‘This stuff is weak as shit,’ I said, taking out the second black witch and eating it. I lay back on the grass amongst the plastic cups and listened to the buzz of electricity and the music, which was phasing in and out on the wind. I became fixated on the buzzing electricity, which seemed to be growing louder. I opened my eyes and the unmistakable first stirrings of the LSD emanated from my stomach up to the edges of my vision, sending ripples across teeming fields that were now somehow vibrating at the exact frequency of the buzz from the overhead cables. It seemed that the first black witch, although slow to get started, was not quite as ineffective as I had initially thought ‒ and I had just eaten another one. I braced myself for the incoming waves. ‘Uh oh,’ I managed to say, which made a change from nodding. ‘I think that first black witch just kicked in.’
Jason looked at me sympathetically and with a little pity. ‘Shall we move away from these electricity pylons?’ he said, perhaps sensing I would be better off some distance from the thousands of volts of electricity surging above our heads. I nodded and we wobbled off into the festival, as everything around me caught fire and was lit in increasingly vivid colour. It was really going to be a long night, maybe every thirty seconds or so.
As day passed to night and the second witch almost completely tipped me over the edge, Jonny and I decided to go and watch Elvis Costello headline the main stage. He was playing solo and came out in a suit that seemed to light up, but it was impossible for me to say for sure. At one point he played a section of a Beatles song. The lyrics were ‘So you say you want a revolution,’ and then, unmistakably and blown up to the size of the universe, he played two sarcastic bars of ‘Revolution’. ‘Did you hear that?’ I said to Jonny, who was deep in the arms of cider.
‘Yeah,’ he said, encouragingly but obviously unconvinced as to what it was he was supposed to have heard.
‘He just played fucking “Revolution”.’
‘Yeah,’ said Jonny, but I could tell by his eyes he thought I was bananas.
The set finished and Jonny carefully shepherded me back through the chaotic crowds and campgrounds making sure I did not become irretrievably lost or buy any more drugs on the way. Eventually we found our tent amongst the surrounding sea of very similar-looking tents. Jason and Kate were already trying to make themselves comfortable despite the lack of any kind of anything that would actually make a tent comfortable for anyone to sleep in. Jonny was pissed and I was still tripping my face off. ‘I’m going to sleep, man,’ Jonny said, peering into my face with half-cut concern. ‘Will you be all right?’
I assured him I would be, and so he crawled into the tent with Jason and Kate while I sat out on the hill and looked out across the heaving lights of the festival. A police helicopter was sweeping low over the crowds and I heard a man with a megaphone shout up to it from the seething masses below: ‘Will you lot please fuck off and give us a break. We’re tripping our nuts off down here.’
Eventually, I crawled into the tent around dawn and the four of us slept squashed into Jonny’s little tent on the hill that was a bit too steep.
‘Are You Just Peripheral Shit or are You in the Band?’
The band played the biggest show of its career down at the Town and Country club in Kentish Town. Before that show, feeling the expectant and intimidating energy of a large crowd for the first time, Pete and I crouched down behind the curtain at the back of the stage a
nd smoked a last cigarette. Pete turned to me and, for the first time ever, I saw fear in him. It put the fear in me too. ‘I can’t do it,’ he said. ‘I can’t go on.’ His eyes were wide and white and shifting in the dark.
‘You can do it, man,’ I said, acting brave. ‘Come on, we know this set inside out. We’ll blow their minds. We’ve got to do it.’
He looked at me but he didn’t look at all sure. We both finished our cigarettes and then walked out into all those bright lights in front of a thousand people, pretending that we didn’t give a fuck.
The show went well, despite the nerves, and a couple of weeks later we had another three shows approaching. There was a gig booked for Rugby and one at Subterranea in west London. They were both warm-up shows for the final date of the three, which was to be at the Reading Festival.
We rehearsed in the back room of the pub where we were going to play the gig. I had never played in my hometown with Spacemen 3; in fact, I had only played the one show in Rugby, with the Cogs of Tyme in the back room of the Blitz two short years previously. I felt a million years older than that now and a whole lot more ready to play, but I was still unsure about this show. I don’t think any of us were relishing the idea. In some ways it was more of a ‘fuck you’ than anything else. A big ‘fuck you’ to everyone who had talked behind our backs and snarked and been jealous, or offered us out, or hated us for trying … or whatever, really. Our answer was to put on a free show and just let the music speak for itself, because the music was speaking pretty loudly at that point and we were confident enough in its voice, if not always in our own.
We were sure enough of that music to put it in front of anything, or anyone, on a good night. We had played shows and been watched by various luminaries and pop stars and it never fazed us. Bryan Ferry, Keith Richards, Lemmy … if God and the devil themselves had said, ‘Show us what you’ve got to save your mortal souls,’ we would have played it, looked them both in the eye and said, ‘Fuck you if you don’t like it.’ It was all we had, really. It was certainly all I believed in at the time, except for getting wasted. The sure power of redemption in music. It might have been optimism, but it had got us somewhere. We knew we were good.
Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands Page 13