The band rehearsed in that old-timey back room, where Spacemen 3 had played to a bikers’ party years before and been told after a couple of songs that their services would no longer be required. That room, with its fading Victorian façade and its dated decorations, had seen a thousand discos, dances and wedding receptions. That shabby back room, in a shabby corner of Rugby town, would see the last-ever Spacemen 3 show in Rugby … but none of us knew that then.
It seemed a good place to play a free show for all of those people had seen us on the telly and who wanted to come and see exactly who we thought we were. It was for all of those people who had never been in the back room of the Blitz, who had never come to a Spacemen 3 show and loved it. It was for the haters as much as the lovers, and that was perhaps as it should have been. Spacemen 3 had never made an appearance in the local papers all the time we’d been making records and making waves, internationally and within Britain. The locals couldn’t be proud of us. We were fucking junkies and pariahs and everyone knew it, or at least they thought they did. We were biggish fish in a very small pond, and we were fairly strange fish at that. The local press and most of the wider population of the town ignored us, and we ignored them in turn. That was that.
Playing for free was kind of masochistic, really, because it was only going to attract the very people who would have hated putting any money in our pockets. Not that there was much money in our pockets in the first place. We were getting paid ten quid a show.
We were going to play the same set we had been playing for the last year ‒ it worked, and the idea of rehearsing a fresh set and working on new live material had become increasingly remote as the relationship between Pete and Jason grew strained. The quiet stuff was difficult too. People wouldn’t shut up and listen when we tried it, and it always sounded weak after the full-on assault that we used to get people’s attention. In a way, the band had become a little conservative. Perhaps, in the glare of publicity, Spacemen 3 had become a little timid. The pressure was on and maybe we stuck with what worked because of it. The rock crowd were not going to sit around and be satisfied with gentle ballads about Jesus and love, so we just did what we knew best: turned it up, ripped it out, and left no room for protest. People loved it and, even though there was frustration on Jason’s part (perhaps more so than on Pete’s) that the quieter stuff wasn’t getting a chance, I think it was understood that limitations in equipment and in the band’s ability to communicate made a new set impossible. Put simply: Pete and Jason weren’t getting on well enough to even want to work on any new songs together. There was no room for the gentler sides of Playing with Fire or The Perfect Prescription. We were playing songs that we knew inside out, and it was strictly Sturm und Drang. It didn’t take long to rehearse.
On the evening of the show we set up our equipment and got ready to do what we did. The crowd came in and by the time we picked up the instruments the small back room was fairly well filled with the curious, the killjoys, and the genuinely interested. We plugged in and played, and we sounded pretty good by our own standards, given this wasn’t a proper venue. There was no stage or lightshow ‒ unlike the ones in the back of the Blitz, and numerous other shows that Spacemen 3 had played, which hardly anybody in town had bothered to turn up to. After the first song we received a reception that was weirdly muted. We didn’t give a fuck. Next song. Bang. Same weirdly quiet reaction from a full crowd. We were looking out at a room full of extremely visible people, most of whom we recognised, and not many of them looked particularly happy to see us. It was the strangest set I ever played with the band. It felt like people actually didn’t want to like us ‒ that feeling was palpable on stage. We played it out.
No fanfare. No party. No glorious homecoming show. It felt like a grim gig in a grim little town, played with grim determination. And that was that for Rugby and Spacemen 3.
The second show went as planned. Generally, I don’t think we ever really enjoyed the London shows. Somehow, there was press pressure down there, trendsetter pressure, capital city pressure, and, really, the crowds didn’t seem to go quite as mad as they did north of Watford Gap. People with less to lose seem to get more out of music sometimes. The shows in London were good, but I doubt any of them would be the ones that individual band members would mention as being the greatest. Subterranea was a mid-size venue ‒ maybe three hundred people ‒ and by the time we were due onstage it was a packed house.
We played the set we knew too well. ‘Revolution’ was played twice, once during the set and once as an encore, and then we came offstage and all sat together in the small windowless dressing room by the side of the stage. It was too brightly lit, covered in crude graffiti ‒ it was nobody’s idea of a great place to relax. The depressing room, scene of many a misery. Despite the problems between Pete and Jason, the atmosphere was OK. We had played well, the crowd had loved it and we all still cared about the music no matter what we thought of each other. The music was always the strongest thing. It was stronger than any of us and it wanted to be heard. It was a thing beyond us that was made by us. None of us could make the sound alone.
We sat in the dressing room drinking our drinks and smoking our joints while we waited for the first people to come backstage and say hi. Dean Wareham from the band Galaxie 500 popped his head in and immediately went over to talk to Pete. The crowd started bustling through the dressing-room door, all excited, ready for a party and buzzing from the show. Gibby Haynes burst in, looking wide-eyed and excited, walked up to me, jabbed a finger in my chest and said, ‘Are you in the band or are you just peripheral shit?’
‘Er, both actually, I think,’ I said, with a smile. ‘My mum fucking hates you,’ I added, because she had mentioned her dislike for the man after seeing him on a TV show.
‘Here, man. You wanna smoke with me?’ said Gibby’s friend, who seemed quite amused by our little exchange. So I smoked some weed with Paul Leary, while Gibby wandered off to entertain someone else. It was a fair old celeb fest in there, if indeed any of us could have been considered celebrities. We didn’t even know who we were half the time.
We drank a bit, we smoked a bit, we chatted a bit, and then we packed up and went back to Rugby and the van dropped me off at my mum’s house. I went up to my old bedroom and fell asleep.
Two days later, we loaded ourselves into the van and made our way down to Reading to play the festival. It was an unpromising day weather-wise ‒ the spots of drizzle that flecked the windscreen of the rented minibus did not promise a fine day in the British countryside. Reading is nobody’s idea of paradise anyway, and when we arrived the festival site looked like a grim prison camp for indie kids. We were due to play as the second band on the main stage on the opening day of the festival, just after Gaye Bykers on Acid. It was the first time playing at a big festival for any of us, and we had no idea what to expect. Reading was a big deal back then, and we had been advised how important the show might be for our career. Nobody knew at the time quite how important. The festival had been trying to shed its hard rock image by putting more alternative bands on the bill. It was us, Swans, The Sugarcubes, My Bloody Valentine, That Petrol Emotion, the House of Love and New Order. I can’t even remember if we were excited or not. I don’t think we were. We were beyond excitement somehow. We turned up in the drizzle, and were herded through the festival site to the caravan that was going to serve as our dressing room. We went up onstage, set the equipment up on the movable risers, and had a little line check because we were on so early. With everything ready to go, we were told that there was no room for our usual long tune-ups or gaps between songs. Having only forty minutes to perform, we had arranged a ‘medley’ of our songs in the back room of the Imperial, chopping up the songs, dropping some chunks here and there and condensing the set down to the required time. It lacked a forty-minute ‘Suicide’ and the two versions of ‘Revolution’, but it was fast paced and accessible, I suppose. At least for us anyway.
The time came to go onstage. Standing up there, l
ooking out at a muddy field sparsely filled with visibly bedraggled people, was a most unedifying experience. We played the first song and the second song, and then somebody threw a muddy shoe at us. The music sounded different ‒ thin and blown about ‒ but we could have probably played it blindfolded and upside down at that point. Jonny thwacked it out with the usual precision and we hit all of our cues and our crescendos. Jason and Pete sang everything in key and on time, and it all sounded fairly professional ‒ as long as you weren’t onstage. That is how festival sound is sometimes. You just grit your teeth and bear it. You don’t expect to enjoy it. Somebody threw another mud-caked shoe up onstage. I don’t think it was really aimed at anyone. It was just the crowd’s idea of fun.
Eventually, we played ‘Revolution’ and the crowd went as nuts as they thought they could manage, given the fact that it was daylight and nobody was drunk enough to pretend to want a revolution yet. That was that. We were finished and being rushed offstage to make way for the next band. Before we knew it, we were sitting back in our caravan smoking and drinking the seven cans of lager that had been provided for our refreshment. It was a relief not to have to worry about getting it wrong any more.
We sat in the caravan, looking out at the rain, then tried to summon the energy to go for a trudge through the mud to watch My Bloody Valentine. Pete and I stood and watched them as the light rain fell from the unrelenting grey skies above. When the band shifted from the blank racket and free-form noise into the gliding melody of ‘You Made Me Realise’ it was as if the sun came out for a moment. That was probably the high point of the day. We never thought to be bothered about the fact they were further up the bill than us. We weren’t competitive like that. The Valentines finished their set and we walked through the mud towards the backstage area and the relative comfort of the caravan. On the way through the festival ground we were laughing about the fact that people were taking shelter from the rain underneath the toilet blocks. We got back to the caravan and had just started to roll a joint when an official from the festival popped their head in and said, ‘Can you be out of here in twenty minutes, please, lads. We’ve got another band coming in.’
We thought we were going to have the caravan for the whole night, or something.
We cleared the guitars out and stacked them in the van.
It was raining quite a lot, so we took refuge in the backstage bar where it was dry. The beer tent had been done out in ribbons and bows ‒ it looked like it was going to be the scene for a bad wedding reception. Given that this was the height of acid house there wasn’t much of a party going on. The place was filled with all sorts of people we wouldn’t usually hang out with. They were sipping drinks and talking. There was no music. We found a dry spot and sat on the floor away from the crowd. Mary Mary from Gaye Bykers on Acid walked into the tent looking like everyone’s idea of a good trip. ‘SKIN UP, YOU BORING BASTARDS,’ he screamed, laughing through his psychedelic megaphone. ‘This is supposed to be a fucking party. What’s wrong with you?’
He spotted us, and came striding over laughing and pointing. ‘THANK GOD!’ he shouted through his megaphone, even though he was quite close to us. ‘SOMEBODY HAS GOT SOME DRUGS.’
‘All right, man,’ he said to Pete, without the benefit of his megaphone. ‘How’s it going? You want some acid?’
‘Err, no thanks, Mary,’ said Pete. ‘I’m good, thanks.’
I briefly considered taking some of Mary’s acid, but one look around the frankly depressing tent and out into the drizzle beyond it was enough to dissuade me.
‘This is fucking boring, isn’t it?’ our megaphoned friend said, emphasising his point by taking up the megaphone and shouting, ‘BORING!’ at the assembled drinkers. He smoked the joint we’d rolled and surveyed the crowd. ‘BORING BORING, BORING,’ he megaphoned. ‘Right. Thanks for the joint,’ he said. ‘I’m off.’ And then he pranced off in his pink docs and his tutu with his psychedelic megaphone.
We sat there and smoked hash and didn’t say very much.
It was boring.
After a while we got so bored of sitting on the floor that we had to go and find a seat. We settled in the food tent and commandeered a table, where we continued to roll joints of hash and smoke them while watching the different bands come in and eat their dinner.
We watched Michael Gira eat his dinner. He didn’t look very happy.
The Sugarcubes came in and ate their dinner. They didn’t look very happy either. Maybe they were unhappy because we were smoking hash. Sometimes that made other people unhappy, for some reason.
We weren’t very happy either, so maybe it wasn’t our fault.
After a while we just got sick of sitting in the food tent.
We went and watched New Order and, in a way, we were happy because when it was over we could go home. I don’t know why we stayed, really.
That was the last show Spacemen 3 ever played.
The Monkey Grinder’s Organ
The queen doesn’t carry any cash either. That’s why they call them royalties.
Ancient musician wisdom
The final straw had come, as final straws must, towards the end of things.
I received the royalty statement that I hoped would pay off my debts. Having already spent the cheque I was yet to open, I tore the envelope, removed the contents and quickly scanned to the bottom line. I was left quite confused by the figure I found. It said, in fairly plain figures: £0.00.
Which seemed a little on the light side to me.
There was no royalty cheque.
I looked through the accounts again.
It was a reality I did not want to accept, and so I continued turning the sheets of paper looking for the real payment figure, which I had fondly imagined might amount to slightly more than nothing.
It was a grim truth that dawned on me and, in many ways, I wished it had still been dark so that I could have pretended that what was looming out of the light was not what it appeared to be.
Perhaps, in a way, I had been doing that for quite a while. That optimism will get you every time.
There were accounts attached to the statement and, in desperation, I started going through them. They seemed a bit wonky. I’d seen accounts before, and these didn’t seem to be like other accounts. I grabbed a calculator and started doing some sums. The more sums I did, the more things started moving around. Apart from the fact that my royalty statement was for £0.00 which, with the benefit of experience, I now realise is not that strange at all, it seemed that some of the (admittedly rather sparse) lines of figures didn’t add up, even when I had totalled them up three times. I finally came to realise that whoever drew them up must have been horribly overworked, or something, because there were a few glaring and obvious errors that even a half-sharp Saturday boy with a glue habit and a hard-on should have noticed.
I made a phone call to a friend who had more experience with this kind of thing, and arranged to show the wonky and possibly deranged accounts to her.
‘Umm,’ she said, thoughtfully, after looking through the papers for a while. ‘These figures don’t really add up, and they are quite confusing.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Whoever drew them up must have been up all night doing them and maybe they accidentally forgot to pay me. It’s a simple oversight and I am only a bass player. These things happen, you know. It’s tough at the top and we have all been working quite hard.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That is probably what happened. Have you shown these to the rest of the band?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But I intend to, because it seems obvious to me that whoever drew these up is probably in need of some help, and I want to help them get it.’
She nodded and so did I. There had to be a simple explanation for it all, and I wanted to hear somebody make one up as soon as possible, so that I could get back to playing the bass and pretending that all of this wasn’t even happening.
We arranged a meeting and I showed the accidental mistakes in the accounts to Pe
te and Jason.
‘Hmmmm,’ they both said, thoughtfully.
‘There do seem to be quite a lot of accidental mistakes in these hurriedly put together accounts, and there do seem to be quite a few accidental financial mistakes here and there … and there, as well. We should do something about it. What shall we do?’
We decided it would probably be best if we all had a meeting about it, like gentlemen, so that we could get to the bottom of the financial discrepancies immediately, and then we could all pretend it was all right and get back to doing the things we’d rather have been doing. It was agreed that we would wait for Gerald at VHF, set up a mic and a tape recorder and record the whole thing for posterity, and possible inclusion on a future album.
Pete had an urgent appointment in Coventry, so he could not attend the meeting. It was just going to be me and Jason at the showdown with the lowdown. I had all of the points fairly well covered, so it was just a matter of clearing it up and moving on.
Gerald arrived in his white Mercedes. Jason let me do most of the talking.
By the time our meeting had been adjourned, the last words on the tape were, ‘Jason, I can’t work with Willie, he’s a troublemaker,’ which seemed a bit unfair because I had only been trying to help.
Gerald had left the studio in a bit of huff and we were left with the tape.
‘Hmmm,’ we all said after we had listened to it. Pete and Jason went off to have a conversation about it all and then at some point it was decided that maybe Gerald was in need of a rest. He was given leave and Spacemen 3 didn’t have a manager, except for the bits of business that were still to be taken care of, which were nothing to do with me, so I could just relax again.
Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands Page 14