During the conversation with Gerald down at VHF, after I had mentioned the accounting oversights and my own lack of any remuneration whatsoever, Gerald had used the phrase, ‘If you pay peanuts, Willie, you get monkeys.’
I am sure, in retrospect, that this was probably an insult. Whatever. One of us got the sack and one of us left, so at least I was a monkey with some degree of self-determination, even if I didn’t have any bananas.
Better Off Alone
Pete and Jason had come to a point where they were barely communicating beyond matters of essential business. The gap between them that had started to grow even before I had joined the band was becoming a chasm that neither of them were prepared to cross. Kate and Jason were spending a lot of time together, understandably, and maybe Pete resented that intrusion into the band. Pete and Jason had been thick as thieves for the last four or five years. When Jason got together with Kate, he had something else to care about that wasn’t the band. Things were changing and, as they changed, the changes increased, because that is the way that change works. It wasn’t all about Kate. She had simply been an inevitable catalyst in the band’s demise. If it hadn’t been her maybe it would have been somebody else.
Anybody who knows anything about the music business, knows that if there is any money to be made in a band, then that money comes from songwriting. That was the way it had been set up, way back when those appliance salesmen were looking for a product to use with their brand new phonograph machines that just weren’t selling at all. It was as though they had invented the toaster before anyone had invented bread. It was a gun with no bullets. Welcome to the world of recorded music. Really, the people who wrote the first contracts for music recording were not immediately concerned with the wellbeing of musicians. They were concerned with money. Money was much more expensive than musicians. Musicians were always lying around in the streets ‒ you could just pick them up and give them some gin, or something, and they would probably play. Nobody left money lying around in the street. The musicians would turn up, play the songs they were told to play, a recording would be made, and then the musicians would get their gin for the night. Those drunk musicians probably thought that the recording contract was a joke, or that recorded music was some newfangled flash in the pan that wouldn’t last. Maybe they were right.
Writers and publishers, of course, got paid. In the olden days, musicians did not write songs, and if they did they had any mysterious rights stolen from under their unsuspecting noses before they even knew what they were. By the time they had sobered up and figured it out, it was too late. It was broadly accepted business practice. It was the same with the advent of radio. Musicians initially were never paid for the broadcasts of their work. They might receive a one-off flat fee and then they were given some gin and told to fuck off.
This leads to situations where, for instance, the Funk Brothers, who played on all of the Motown hits, were left almost penniless when the operation packed up and shipped out of Detroit. They weren’t songwriters. Despite the fact that nobody was charting out the parts for them, and that they were coming up with unique and timeless music, their contribution wasn’t considered to be songwriting. Unless someone sampled it, of course. Songwriting is the thing. If your name isn’t in the brackets you are gonna get chump changed, even if you play on a recording that sells a million, or play on a song that has fourteen billion plays on some internet jukebox.
Jason and Pete understood this and they began to argue over songwriting credits. They had begun to argue over a slice of pie that was not big enough for everyone in the band to get fat on. Of course, the real nutrition was in the music, but nobody gets fat eating music. They had shared songwriting credits between themselves without question, up to the recording of Playing with Fire. That is where the problems started. Cracks were appearing, mistrust was growing, and into a situation that was already stressed through hard work and the pressures of increasing public success were thrown those old demons of fragile egos, fame and money. Some things are much more destructive than drugs, it seems.
These difficulties had grown, as they do when people cease to communicate and lose sight of their ultimate goals behind initially petty differences and ongoing recriminations. It can be difficult to remember what is really important sometimes. Especially in a fight.
When we went into the record company to finalise the artwork for Playing with Fire, Pete had swung a punch at Jason during an argument over the songwriting credits on ‘Suicide’. ‘Suicide’ became the last Spacemen 3 song on which the two of them eventually shared writing credits. It has no words, no distinct melody, and the main riff was borrowed from The Stooges, who had probably borrowed it from somewhere else. It wasn’t funny to watch the two main songwriters coming to blows, but it was kind of funny to watch the reactions of the people in the office. They had just signed a boxing match, and it was unlikely that there were going to be any obvious victors in the end.
If the band hadn’t been on the brink of success they would have walked away from each other long before it got nasty, but it was getting close to payday, so they stayed together like a husband and wife team who couldn’t stand the sight of each other but knew it would have cost them too much to get a divorce. Perhaps if they had gone their separate ways after Playing with Fire they would not have become enemies. Perhaps if nobody had ever cared about the band they would still be friends.
Bear in mind, that the little fight in the Fire Records office (and it was a little fight) happened before Playing with Fire had even been released. Sometime after it had been released Pete was offered a deal by Silvertone Records for a solo album. He took the deal and began work on the Spectrum album in VHF studios. We began spending all of our time down at VHF recording his solo album. I think he wanted to be free of Jason at this point, and maybe Jason started wanting to be free of him, but it wasn’t financially practical just yet. I tried to convince Pete round this time that it might be in his best interests to try to look after the working relationship that he and Jason had. I thought they worked well together and I could see no reason why that couldn’t continue, but by then it had begun to turn into a personal feud and, by God, could that band feud when it put its mind to it. Grudges. Resentment. Revenge. That full scorpion treat bag of nastiness could burst out and leave everyone in the vicinity as sticky as shit and twice as smelly in a second.
I certainly had no desire to see the band break up. That made me a hopeful idiot in some ways, because maybe the band was staying together for all the wrong reasons.
Pete and I spent more and more time down at VHF. Behind its unspectacular façade was a small reception room that led to a building inside a building; a windowless, breeze-block box, divided into two rooms, with a glass pane between them. One was a small control room, containing a sixteen-channel desk, outboard effects and a tape machine, and the other was a live recording room, big enough for a five- or six-piece band at most. It was a good basic studio but it was nothing spectacular for the time. Paul Adkins, who ran the place, was a good-natured, sober family man who also worked another full-time job beside his extracurricular activities down at the studio. He would work late into the night as the place filled up with hash smoke while some new drone monster was being worked into life and we sweated and strived for perfection ‒ all this was long before the advent of digital editing. It was not unusual for a guitar track to take four hours to lay down, or a bassline to take an afternoon. We took our time and tried to get it right, and Paul would engineer like a trooper. I’d often look over from my beanbag and see him falling asleep at the desk as the hypnotics and the repetition took their toll and lulled him into the dreamworld, while we went for the umpteenth take on another obscure overdub. We worked for hours down there, late into the night, and the poor fucker would be dead in his seat, sometimes waking up only when the music stopped or one of us gave him a little nudge. The Perfect Prescription was recorded at that studio; Playing with Fire was finished and mixed there. The Sonic Boom Spectrum a
lbum was recorded and mixed there. The bulk of Lazer Guided Melodies was recorded there. A great deal of music came out of that little industrial unit during the course of a few long and productive years. Not bad for a little studio on an inauspicious industrial estate in a little market town in the Midlands. Not bad for a bunch of wasters.
As the Spectrum album was getting close to completion, Mark, Jonny and I had all contributed parts. I had a conversation with Jason. He was properly concerned about the way things were unfolding and he was understandably uncomfortable with the fact that Pete was making a solo album. Jason always played his cards pretty close to his chest and he would never give too much away. Pete had asked him to play on the album, but Jason was in two minds about it. ‘What would you do?’ he said. ‘If you were in my position?’
I answered, more out of my own selfish desire to see the band stick together than anything else. ‘Jason,’ I said, ‘I think you should go and play on that track and lay down the best fucking guitar you can and hopefully he’ll realise that the two of you still have work to do together.’
Jason, to his credit, went and played a glorious and soaring wah solo over the top of one of the tracks called ‘You’re the One’. It’s still my favourite track on the Spectrum album. Sometime later, when we were playing in Spiritualized, Jason said to me, ‘I really wish I had never played on that track of Pete’s.’
I still believe that they were an excellent team when they were working together, and that is in no way to disparage either of their skills as solo performers. Together they shored up each other’s weaknesses and complemented their respective strengths. Sonic’s raw and instinctive talent for innovation and his bloody-mindedness (which could be a nightmare to work with sometimes) also made him able to take the risks he took musically and personally. He made his innate lack of traditional musicality work for him. The sheer brass neck required to play one chord for ever, and to take it as seriously as hell while you did it, was an innovation born of necessity in some ways. It was this same brass neck that drove a man who had been mocked for many of his young years for having been to a private school to write a song called ‘Revolution’. Pete took a fair amount of crap off people for the school he had been sent to and expelled from. He never hung out with his mates from public school anyway. He was hanging out with us, and with all sorts of other low life too. Pete took a lot of grief from people for doing what very few people who went to Rugby School actually did, which was to mix outside of his circle. Maybe that made him a bit oversensitive sometimes. I lived in that town for years, and Pete was the only friend from Rugby School I ever made. He talked openly and bravely about drugs. People do die from the stupid illegality and the criminalisation of people with problems. Our mates had died and, even now, I know more people from Rugby who have died of hepatitis C for want of a clean needle than ever died of an overdose. These were unwelcome truths and I still admire him for standing up and pointing them out, even though it made us few friends in our little town. It certainly earned us the suspicion of the people who didn’t agree and it was an understandably unpopular viewpoint with some members of our families. It also made us few friends amongst the drug users, some of whom thought we were bringing unnecessary attention to parts of their lives they preferred to keep hidden for legal reasons.
Pete is a peculiar and difficult character in some ways, as are many of the talented people I have had the good fortune to work with over the years.
I never got into this business to make music with accountants.
Jason was a very different character. He said very little and was never an obvious risk-taker in terms of standing out from the crowd. What he did have was a natural musical gift and an unusual flair for melodic invention. Music was in him in a way that music wasn’t in Pete ‒ traditional music that is: scales and harmonies, and fluid improvisation. Pete would rarely improvise. Jason had a magpie’s ear for tunes and melodies and musical ideas, as every great musician does. They hear a thing and use it and sometimes, maybe they forget where they borrowed it from. Jason could put together strings, he could orchestrate and harmonise, and he could arrange like a motherfucker. He was also a singer and songwriter of rare power and commitment. He could make you believe a song, live a song, and raise you up with the sheer power of his voice. What that voice was saying might have been altogether less interesting if it had hidden behind a desire to not be seen. His musicality, without the courage to be different, without the gall to experiment, without the controversy, and without that good old dumb one chord, might have blossomed into an inauspicious flower indeed.
Pete would be the first to admit that he is no virtuoso. Two chords: good; one chord: better, right? But he made that into a strength through good taste, a highly tuned aesthetic sensibility, and sheer force of will ‒ but then without someone to supply the musicality would he have turned out something as beautiful as ‘Walking with Jesus’? Together, they made a great team and when that team fell apart, it fell apart hard, with each member perhaps resenting the gifts in the other that they did not possess. A tragedy then, really, but not one that didn’t leave some great music behind. Both of them have done great things afterwards, but sometimes I can hear a little ‘if only’ in some of their separate achievements.
We all lost, Gerald included, because we couldn’t see just a little bit further than our own ambitions and egos. We couldn’t see that we would have been stronger together, and that ultimately we might have all got more of what we wanted by compromising and staying together instead of cutting off our own feet and selling them at the market. Then again, Spacemen 3 were not known for their compromising style. People seem very interested in the idea of why that band broke up. Perhaps it is more interesting to ask why it stayed together for so long.
Listen to the lyrics of some of those later songs: ‘don’t ever change’, ‘stay with me for ever’ … there is a longing for something even as it slips away. Perhaps especially as it slips away. That junkie’s longing to stay high. A desire for things to remain as they are and to never change. To never come down. Life isn’t like that, but some things are constant, and if we can only remember what they are, then maybe we can find some of that security that we feel we lack and search for in all the wrong places. In money, in drugs, in other people’s opinions. In our fear.
If we had kept a better focus on the music (which was presumably the thing we all loved most anyway), and trusted each other, maybe even looked after each other a bit better, we might have been strong enough to make it through all of the surrounding bullshit. But then, maybe, the band would still be together, crapping out albums to pay the mortgage, and maybe that would have been a bigger tragedy. Sometimes it is better to fall apart gracefully.
All of the fallouts, the ‘you did’, ‘he said’, ‘she said’ bickering, will hopefully be remembered by very few people. Never mind how much it made such good press at the time, or served people’s prurient interests in a good fight, it serves as an unflattering and strangely fitting epitaph for a great band torn apart by some unsavoury vices … and I’m not just talking about drugs, either. Hopefully nobody will care about any of that when they are out on some distant star, in a small town in the middle of nowhere, listening to ‘Ecstasy Symphony’ and it sounds like everything which nobody ever told you was true and beautiful in life. Nobody will care about who got paid and who didn’t and whether or not it matters. Nobody will care about who played the bass.
Maybe nobody will care at all about anything, including the music, and that’s all right too. They don’t call it ‘playing’ for nothing, even if it is the game that might save your life and give you something worth living for.
Dependence
The recordings for the final Spacemen 3 album began almost immediately after Pete had finished his solo album. The band were still contracted to Fire Records but negotiations were beginning with a brand new record company called Dedicated. At this point, in the late eighties, the major labels had realised that the independent music s
cene was flourishing and they wanted a piece of it. In fact, they wanted the whole damn thing. Like they always do.
Long before ‘indie’ became a genre of music and a high street brand, it actually meant something. It was short for independent. Independent of the major labels, that was. The independent charts were a heady and intoxicating mixture of many different genres and styles. There was goth, industrial, grunge, metal, our floppy-haired brand of effects-heavy psychedelia, Kylie fucking Minogue, new wave, avant garde, acid house. In the light of that, it is kind of ironic that ‘indie’ came to represent tepid guitar bands on major labels trying to sell out stadiums. But anyway.
BMG is a corporation. It stands for Bertelsmann Music Group, which was a huge German publishing house. They could, in no way, shape, or form, legally or otherwise, be considered to be independent of what they actually were, which was a major label.
Of course, they came up with a cunning plan.
That plan involved setting up new ‘cool’ indie labels, using all of their major-label money and influence to increase sales and grab back the section of the market that was out of their control.
These new indie labels sprang up all over the place.
Dedicated was one of them.
The head of the label was a man called Doug D’Arcy. Doug features briefly in a film called The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle. He is shown in a clip where he appears hurt and baffled at the treatment he has received at the hands of the dastardly ‘Sex Pistols’, a Neolithic, post-opera rock trio who were briefly famous for shitting in trumpets. In the film, Doug says, ‘I stuck my head around the studio door to say hello and they told me to fuck off.’
Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands Page 15