That’s it. Doug had been in the industry for years and he was very well mannered, expensively dressed and carefully groomed. Perhaps worryingly so.
Spacemen 3 were getting bigger even as they were falling apart. ‘Hypnotized’ had reached number one in the indie charts and, in another of those weird flip-flops of genre-hopping that Spacemen 3 managed so adeptly, it was getting played at raves.
One of the music journalists who had come up to Rugby, and who was a fan of both acid house and Spacemen 3, had been absolutely baffled when Pete had poured scorn on the whole acid house scene. After a few good-natured questions about his previous comments in the press, Pete eventually admitted, ‘I don’t know much about it, really.’ That old siege mentality which had sustained us against all of the crap surrounding us proved to be a problem sometimes.
Recordings for the final album began down at good old VHF, but by this point all semblance of a working relationship between Pete and Jason was over. Jason was going to work on his songs and Pete was going to work on his, and they were going to work separately. Things were getting ugly, but we still had to flog the almost dead horse of Spacemen 3 while pretending we weren’t.
‘Hypnotized’ had come out as a single while we had been on tour, and Pete had been livid that his song had only made the B-side. Jason had recorded the whole of ‘Hypnotized’ by himself, with Jonny playing drums. ‘Hypnotized’ was a great single, but what was good for the band didn’t seem to matter any more. It had partly become a self-destructive competition.
At VHF, Pete started tracking songs and Jason started tracking songs, and I would get rough mixtapes of the work in progress and take them back to my mum’s, where I would sit at the stereo with my headphones on and work out parts that might fit. I’d take those parts to Pete and Jason and they would tell me what they did and didn’t like, and then they would arrange them into the songs and we would lay down the tracks. I didn’t play on all the tracks on Recurring. The music sounded as good as ever. Although Pete and Jason were now pursuing separate visions, those visions were still somewhat coherent due to the proximity of the mutual experience that had informed them both.
I was growing frustrated with the pressures of the band and the constant arguments, and it started to weigh on me. I was growing tired of the bad feeling, and was tired of living at my mum’s and having no money. I was just plain old tired. We had done a lot of work in a short time. This was the third studio album in a year and we had recently completed a big European tour. Pete and I were beginning to experience tensions in our relationship too. One time, we were sat in his room at his parents’ house and he cooked up a shot and took it.
‘I don’t want a hit,’ I said.
He looked at me in disbelief. ‘Why not?’
‘I just don’t feel like it, man,’ I replied. ‘I don’t want it.’
He looked annoyed. ‘Why don’t you want some?’ he said.
‘I just don’t. I don’t know why.’
I had never had a habit all of the time I was in the band. I couldn’t afford one for a start, but, more than that, I didn’t want a habit. It didn’t look like much fun, and the drug itself was kind of boring after a while. I wasn’t looking down at him for doing it. I just didn’t want to do it myself. I know heroin is supposed to be instantly addictive. I know you are supposed to have no power against the all-consuming hunger of the drug, but it didn’t work like that for me at the time. I suppose I was lucky. I didn’t feel like I needed it.
However, I had taken a taste, and that was a taste that would prove difficult to forget. Wherever you go, the past is never far behind, whether you care to remember it or not.
Play the Fucking Hit
Being in a band is absurd at the best of times. Maybe when you are sixteen it is a great idea. Everybody wants to be in a gang then ‒ except for the weird loners, outcasts and misfits who have spent their formative years locked away in bedrooms learning to play instruments. Their grand reward is being in a band. If they are lucky.
So get in the van, eat your crisps, and shut up.
We are going for a drive around the world.
You will see things from a distance and meet people you could love who you will never see again. You might be forced to fake the joy and the feeling that you had when you first made that hit song fifteen years ago. The memory of the dead feeling will haunt you for ever if you are lucky enough to have had something resembling a hit. A ‘hit’. There is a word to conjure with. There is no time like the first time, and if you are forced to carry the memory of that first hit down the road with you like a dead love as it sustains you and sucks the life from you, then, well, what did you expect? Fucking glamour? Say hello to the pact you made with yourself and all of your stupid dreams.
The hit. Play the hit. Play the fucking hit. Nobody cares about what you are up to now. Nobody cares that you wrote it a million lives ago. Play the hit.
Play the fucking hit.
There are many reasons to stay together and there are many reasons to fall apart.
Here comes your Chinese rug.
Play the fucking hit.
Going Solo
There’s something vile (and all the more vile because ridiculous) in the tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes.
Fernando Pessoa
The Recurring sessions had been continuing down at VHF and the recording for the album was almost complete. Pete and Jason had not worked together at all: their separate songs were recorded during entirely separate sessions, and the two singers were now doing everything in their power to make sure that they didn’t meet. I was working with Pete on his tracks, and I was also working with Jason. Jonny and the newly drafted Mark Refoy were working with both Pete and Jason. It was obvious by this point that there was to be no reconciliation between the two songwriters. Of the two of them, perhaps Pete was the happier with the arrangement. He was perceived, by the people who were interested in those things, to be the leader and main man of Spacemen 3. Jason barely got a look-in as far as publicity was concerned, and Pete certainly wasn’t doing anything to push Jason’s interests, or talents, at that point.
The two sides of Recurring perhaps reflect where they were at regarding the oncoming split. Pete’s side is joyous in many ways, filled with possibilities and hope. There were lyrical references to big cities, where everyone could be found, and to letting the good times roll. The subsequent video for ‘Big City’ even saw him dancing. The sight of Pete dancing was a fairly unusual one at the time. The song itself was loosely based on an old Roxy Music B-side and it is a glorious mixture of electronics and sequencers that foreshadows some of Pete’s later interest in pop and obscure electronica. The closing song on his side of the album ‘Set Me Free/I Got the Key’ is practically a declaration of intent regarding the way he feels about the imminent demise of the band he had devoted the previous six or seven years of his life to. The song fades out with a spoken aside that declares, ‘I think it’s gonna end pretty soon,’ followed by what appears to be a burp and a laugh. This, coming after a song in which he declares that he has the key and then sings about a desire to be set free, is not the sound of a man wracked with concern about what is to come. He sounds hugely confident. At that point he had every reason to feel that way. Between him and Jason he was, by far, in the more obviously strong position in terms of a springboard to the future. His songs on Recurring also deal with love. ‘I Love You’ is a positively rambunctious declaration of intent, but not without a trace of bitter understanding that there was nothing to be done about the inevitable end. It again returns to the idea of being set free, and after the idea of freedom is brought into the song, Pete sounds positively happy about it. The song ends with a jaunty flute solo, courtesy of Pat Fish. There are traces of bitterness and of love going wrong but the general mood is optimistic, forward-looking and even a little scornful in places.
The two halves of the album meet in the middle on ‘When Tomorrow
Hits’, which is a cover of a song by Mudhoney, who had covered ‘Revolution’ in turn for a planned double A-side single. Mudhoney had changed the lyrics in ‘Revolution’ into a junkie’s lament about the ‘long uphill walk to the methadone clinic’ and shoving morphine suppositories up your arse, which had gone down like a shit sandwich with Pete.
‘When Tomorrow Hits’ is the last Spacemen 3 track to feature both Pete and Jason and it is somehow appropriate that it never made it onto the original album. It never featured on the planned double A-side with Mudhoney either. There were fallouts and recriminations there too. At this point there were recriminations almost everywhere. This was a band, after all, that spoke beyond itself and that was ripe with synchronicities, occult meanings and hidden depths that were sometimes lost on the members themselves. The significance of some of the timings of key events in the band was completely lost on us sometimes. It had to be. If we had known, we would never have been able to play the parts.
Jason’s side of Recurring is a much more subdued and introspective affair. It starts with the lament and eulogy of ‘Feel So Sad’, in which he sings about wishing for his bitterness to be taken away, as he prays to a God he maybe doesn’t believe in. He sings about how sad he feels. His side of the album then progresses into a gently woozy psychedelia suffused with the idea of true love as a feeling sometimes difficult to distinguish from the effects of drugs. ‘Hypnotized’ is a joyful horn-driven lackadaisical boogie concerning itself with being so in love with someone that they have you under the power of hypnosis.
‘Feelin’ Just Fine (Head Full of Shit)’ meanders beautifully through spiralling effects and countless overdubs into a submerged, warm and fuzzy wonderland of feeling all right. The lyrics, though seemingly ‘druggy’, are noticeably about a person rather than about any drug in particular. Jason seems to be losing himself in love on his side of the album. To the point that he sometimes sounds like he is hardly there at all, as he escapes the realities of the imminent split and the internal warfare, seeking refuge in the bliss of music. The only overtly ‘drug song’ on Playing with Fire or Recurring is ‘Billy Whizz/Blue 1’, which is the final track on Jason’s side of the album and the last song on any official Spacemen 3 studio album. It is practically incoherent in its mumbled references to ‘Billy Whizz’ and ‘Mary Anne’ and it plays with imagery in ways that are hard to understand.
For a band sometimes remembered as a ‘drug band’ there are actually very few overt references to drugs on the last two Spacemen 3 studio albums. People never mention that. From the Sound of Confusion to The Perfect Prescription many of the songs were obvious hymns to various drug experiences, but that changed on Playing with Fire and it continued into Recurring. Love almost replaced the drugs somehow. Almost.
The two sides of Recurring couldn’t be more different, and those differences partially clarify what were the strengths and the weaknesses of the two estranged partners. It is an album that illustrates how far they had drifted apart, musically and socially. There are echoes of the past albums in the record but Recurring seems like an album that openly and implicitly acknowledges the different paths which lay ahead for Pete and Jason.
I didn’t enjoy the making of the album at all. The discord and the disunity were agonising. The constant bickering and the inability to come to terms for the good of the music were a source of constant frustration and disquiet. It seemed like a waste. Maybe the album would have been better if Pete and Jason had found a way to work together. Maybe music was all that mattered to me at that point, and maybe I was stupid because of it. Whatever. Who cares anyway? That’s a good fucking point. Maybe, if anyone at Dedicated had listened to the album, and believed it, they might have had an inkling of what they were getting into before they signed the deal that would see them wrong-footed and out of pocket within a year.
Shortly after I had received the royalty cheque for zero pounds and zero pence from Gerald Palmer, Pete had booked himself to play his first ever solo show. It was in Rugby in the back room of the good old Imperial pub, supporting The Telescopes. Leading up to the show the situation between me and Pete had become increasingly fractious and I had reached the point where I could not see a future for myself within the band. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to continue making music, I just couldn’t see a way through. I suppose I was fairly well mangled, for various reasons, and in my wisdom I decided that the best way to broach the delicate subject was to first consume a delightful chemical cocktail of Sudafed and Special Brew.
Sudafed is a cold remedy that is a bit like speed; Special Brew is a brain-loosening beer of frightening strength that tastes like fermented soup dribbled out of a forgotten vending machine and strained through an unwashed sock. Street drinkers used to drink it before the government started allowing people to manufacture that shit-awful cider that costs two quid a bottle and which kills people quicker than euthanasia.
I was three cans and four pills into the evening when I appeared at the Imperial, unsuitably refreshed in preparation for the night’s entertainment. I was also, if it needs to be said, thoroughly miserable. In my perilous mental state I continued to drink myself into an alternately incoherently enraged and completely morose state. I guess I don’t deal with break-ups very well. Bands, people, places … whatever, it turns me over in ways I still don’t understand nor fully have control over. By the end of Pete’s set it felt like my world was coming off its axis. I was ready to break the news about leaving the band.
After that, it seemed to me, in my fit of self-loathing, that perhaps the easiest way to spare myself any further torment through music was to actually break my own hands in some irreversible way. That night, I punched many, many, things that were too hard to punch. I punched walls, doors, random bits of wood ‒ I probably punched myself. Thankfully, I didn’t punch anybody else. I didn’t feel a damn thing. Eventually, I put my head through the ladies’ toilet door in an effort to quieten my considerable mental confusion. Finding me with my head stuck in his toilet door, the landlord (an ex-police officer) quite rightly decided that I was not much of a good customer. He put me in a half-nelson and marched me off the premises. ‘Don’t fucking come back until you’ve sobered up!’ he said, quite reasonably, as he pushed me outside and slammed the door in my face.
I continued to punch things outside until I realised that my hands were hurting quite a lot. I jumped over a wall in the garden and fell a bit further than I would have liked. I picked myself up and found the breath I had knocked out of my body, then began walking down the street blindly raging at cats, street lights and parked cars. Pete pulled up alongside me in his car. ‘Do you want a lift, man?’ he asked.
‘Fuck off!’ I unreasonably replied.
‘Look. Just get in the car, man. You are gonna get arrested if you carry on like this.’
I told him to fuck off again.
After a while of his asking, I finally relented and let him do me a favour. I was too pissed to walk home, and all of the wall-punching and falling over walls had worn me out, despite the un-medicinal doses of cold remedy. I got in the car and didn’t say very much at all. What was there left to say? ‘Wrote for Luck’ by the Happy Mondays was playing in the car. When we got closer to my mum’s house, Pete said, ‘You’re fucking mad. Beating yourself up like that. You need help. I’m gonna tell your mum that you need to get some medical help.’
I turned to Pete, and with a vehemence he understood, said, ‘If you say one word to her about any of this I will kill you. Do you fucking understand me?’
He didn’t say anything. I got out of the car and walked the last fifty metres up the road under the street lights.
When I woke up in the morning I could hardly move. My hands were cut and bruised and swollen and I couldn’t bend some of my fingers. I had a raging hangover and there wasn’t an inch of me that didn’t hurt.
I had also left the band.
Part Three
Look Ma … Three Hands!
In the Trenches
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
It was really quite annoying. Every time the spade full of soil got close to the top of the narrow trench, one edge of the blade would catch on the side of the torn earth and upturn the precious cargo. I’d hack away at the clagging mud, get a good load, lift it up, and … splat … it would fall back into the hole I was standing in, leaving me no deeper down and just a little more tired. I had been digging for about five hours and the hard physical nature of the work was in no way being helped by the workings of my own mind. I felt like fucking Sisyphus but with less of a sense of purpose and no mountain view.
I was wondering what had gone wrong. The various scenes and situations that had lead to my current predicament played over and over in my mind with a maddening intensity and with no obviously happy ending.
I’d spent a solid year recording and touring with Spacemen 3. We’d made Playing with Fire, Recurring, Dreamweapon, Live in Europe 1989, and the Sonic Boom Spectrum album. We had completed a thirty-six date jaunt around Europe, a couple of full tours of the UK, and we had played a few singular prestigious shows. We had been on the covers of the music press, we had been on TV. The records had received glowing reviews from the critics and they had sold well.
I was experiencing a fair degree of cognitive dissonance as I struggled to come to terms with the reality of my current predicament. I had a quick look round to make sure nobody was watching and then I started yelling into the bottom of the soggy trench: ‘FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK! FUCK, CUNT, FUCK, WANKER, CUNT, FUCK, CUFKCUCFUCK …’ It wasn’t aimed at anyone in particular.
Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands Page 16