‘WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK HAPPENED?’ I asked my shovel.
The shovel was mute.
I stabbed it into the ground at the base of the trench and stamped a little bit too hard on the protruding edge. The pain was both satisfying and utterly futile. ‘OWWWWWWWWW,’ I screamed, while hopping briefly in the mud and sending a couple of small birds into flight from a small tree. ‘FUUUUUUUUUUUUCKK YOU, BIRDS!’ I shouted after them as they twittered off to somewhere more peaceful. I was in the grip of a fairly incoherent rage and it was not helping the trench get any deeper. It was too much effort to be so tired and so angry at the same time, so I climbed out of the trench, stuck my narrow trenching shovel into the earth with a spiteful jab, and then sat down on a pile of earth, quite enjoying the fact that I was wet and cold. I got my cigarettes out. ‘Fuck this,’ I said, knowing full well that I actually couldn’t fuck it at all, because it was the only job I had, and my bank manager was quite keen to get his money back.
Not only was I obviously not having sex with fabulous groupies, taking cocaine, or helping to thrill great crowds of people with powerful and innovative music, I was handing over the money I was making to the bank and couldn’t even look forward to the forgetful waste of spending it all on drink and drugs at the weekend. I was in debt and I was going to have to dig my way out of it. Literally. The only problem was that as soon as that heavy and preciously loaded shovelful of soil made it to the top of the trench, and my aching muscles went for the final push over the top, a little fucking root or random protuberance would twang the edge of the spade and everything would fall back into the hole again. I briefly considered digging myself a grave and then lying in it, but I realised that I wouldn’t be able to shovel the soil over myself once I was comfortably pretending to be dead. ‘Fuck it,’ I said, ‘and fuck it again.’ I flicked the butt of the cigarette into the trench with as much venom as my cold and spiteful hands could muster. I watched it burst into a pleasing shower of orange sparks and fizzle out quietly in the damp earth. Rather like my recent pop career.
It wasn’t that I had expected to get rich, I just hadn’t expected to get quite so poor, quite so quickly. In retrospect, I now recognise this as the ultimately self-destructive optimism that has taken me almost twenty-seven years to get rid of. That optimism was still there in the trench with me, lurking underneath my misery like a poisonous snake, but at the time I thought it was dead, and I was quite unhappy about it.
I had read all of the rock star manuals. I had read the Rolling Stones books. I had read No One Here Gets Out Alive. I had studied them quite carefully, and at no point had any of them offered any useful advice about working on a building site or friendly tips on how to shovel the painful shards of your own broken illusions from the bottom of a soggy trench in the Midlands. In the rain. With wet feet.
‘Fuck it,’ I repeated, and not for the last time in my career, as I climbed back down into the trench, retrieved the spade, and stabbed it into the earth at my feet. I’d done shitty jobs plenty of times, but I had never done a shitty job while carrying the full weight of disappointment before.
I concentrated my thoughts and heaved a good shovel of earth over the lip of the sewage trench. In the circumstances, actually getting a shovel full of earth out of the trench seemed to be a minor triumph, so I kept on doing it, and doing it, and doing it. While I did it, I learned to take pleasure in the small victories of the task at hand until, little by little, I had dug myself further out of the hole I’d found myself in, both mentally and financially. Then it was time to go home.
Six months previously I had taken a bundle of our recent press to a meeting with my bank manager. He was an affable fellow and he obviously found me a bit more entertaining than most of his clients. ‘I used to read the NME when I was at university,’ he told me, with some pride and a wink, as I handed over the three major music papers containing the recent reviews for Playing with Fire.
My bank manager had previously received a letter from Gerald Palmer assuring him that I would indeed be getting some monies for my musical endeavours, and that it would be a very safe assumption indeed on the part of Midland Bank, Rugby plc, that I would, at some time in the nearish future, be able to pay back the overdraft that I was trying to arrange so that I could eat and buy guitar strings while I was in Spacemen 3 ‒ the ten quid a day I was getting for the shows being barely enough to keep me in cigarettes and ice cream. It was clear, even to these men of business and commerce, that I was a safe financial bet. Things were looking up and it was only a matter of time until these trivial financial teething problems were a thing of the past. Big things were on the horizon, but we had no idea at the time quite how big, or just how much manual labour it would involve. At least on my part.
We were renovating an old vicarage in a village outside Rugby, where a group of hippies had lived in the sixties. Rumour had it that somewhere in the grounds somebody had stashed a big bag of LSD and forgotten where it was. We knocked down walls and pulled down ceilings in that place, and I was always keeping half an eye out for that lost bag of acid. After a while of digging trenches on-site and demolishing things I was promoted to hod-carrying. My first eight hours on the hod left me concerned that I might die of exhaustion and aches and pains. The second day left me certain I was going to die. On the third day I wished I was dead. After that, the nerve endings started to die off and it all got a bit easier to deal with. Nobody wanted to hear me moaning about it, so I shut up and saved the energy for carrying bricks. Hod-carrying really focuses the mind. A three-sided box full of bricks on a stick supported on your shoulder while you run up and down ladders all day is certainly a matter for concentration. I was still smoking a bit of hash, sometimes at lunchtime, and afterwards my concentration was not always as concentrated on the matter at hand as it might have been. On one particularly nice day, after a lunchtime of buckets and bowls, I had loaded the bricks into the hod, heaved it onto my shoulder and started the climb with my one free hand gripping the ladder and the other holding onto the pole of the hod. As I reached the top I took an ill-timed moment to look out across the rich green fields to enjoy the glorious English countryside. Lost in my blissful reverie of cows and distant fields of rape, I reached for the top rung of the ladder without looking and missed it. For one heart-stopping second I was standing with both feet on the top rung of the ladder with a load of bricks on my shoulder and no supporting hand. It was one of those moments where time slows down and stretches just long enough for you to react and save your own life if you are fast enough. And lucky. I snatched out a hand and grabbed the top rung, while the adrenaline in my pumping heart told me just how close I’d come to lying at the bottom of the ladder in a pile of broken bricks and bones. I laid off the hash at lunchtimes after that.
My anguish at having completely failed as a musician was diminishing a little as I realised that life actually would go on, and that maybe I had some sort of a future beyond Spacemen 3. It wasn’t easy, but it was necessary for survival, and in many ways the absolutely exhausting physical work was helping me deal with the situation. I was so tired at the end of the day that I had no energy left for worry, regret and recrimination. I also had no money for drug-induced self-destruction, which was probably a good thing. Sometimes when I was working I used to sing Leadbelly songs to myself to get through the day. There is a song of his called ‘The Gallis Pole’. I guess this refers to the gallows. The song itself is sung from the point of view of someone who is looking out from their prison cell seeing various members of their family coming to visit them. The protagonist is pleading from behind bars, asking if anyone has brought enough silver and gold to prevent his imminent execution because, in the olden days, if you were rich you were innocent enough to walk free.
I was not about to hang, but I could relate to the song in some ways. On the plus side, I was getting stronger, physically speaking, and it certainly worked as a paying gym and detox after my first proper year of rock and roll. It was not to be the only time.
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You Say You Want a Revolution?
The Blitz had closed for business. There was no more Reverberation Club and no more fighting with the psychotic hicks from the surrounding villages. We drank in the charmingly named Saracens Head, which was probably a reference to the decapitation of Muslims during the Crusades, or something fucking charming from our glorious colonial history. I had learned social and economic history at school and consequently my knowledge of historical events was limited to the broad and neatly ploughed field of the Industrial Revolution. I knew who made the seed drill, I knew who had invented the water-powered conger eel defenestrater in 1849, and I knew very little about revolution. There had been footnotes during our history lessons concerning the Diggers, the Levellers and the Luddites, but … the end always seemed to be the same. You lose, they cut your balls off in front of a cheering crowd in the marketplace, and then someone digs you up after you are dead and sticks your head on a big spike while the peasants piss on your body. What’s cool about that?
When we used to walk into the Saracens Head some local wag would always play ‘Revolution’ by the Beatles on the jukebox. John Lennon’s sarcastic voice would mock us as we stood at the bar trying to hold on to whatever dignity there was left in being a small-town rock star with no money. ‘You say you want a revolution,’ John Lennon’s voice would snark from the stereo, and people would laugh behind my back.
We had played the song ‘Revolution’ a lot of times but had perhaps never tried to imagine what a real revolution might entail. Death? A party? I really didn’t know, and these being pre-internet times it was difficult to find out. I went to the library to try to do a little research, but most of the books relating to the subject had been silently removed by Margaret Thatcher’s silent librarian storm troopers. I drank my lager and tried to imagine where this situation actually left me in terms of being cool.
We didn’t really want a revolution, we just wanted to live our largely self-harming lives in peace and not get arrested. I sipped my lager. The absurdity of my own situation was not lost on me. We had been defeated and to pretend otherwise was to indulge in the posturing of the ponce. Maybe that was better than nothing. We had absorbed all of the counterculture sixties rebellion stuff as a reference point. Very little of that had been concerned with overthrowing the state in any meaningful way. Those people just wanted to live a different life, and they were subsequently beaten with sticks and imprisoned on ridiculous marijuana charges. Check out the story of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators. Hounded, maligned, imprisoned and fried for daring to dabble in Eastern mysticism and for entertaining the idea that maybe there were ways of looking at the world that didn’t involve burning in eternal hellfire for masturbating or smoking a joint.
I liked the MC5, but even they had fallen short of actual revolution, and it was piss-easy to get guns in America, where shooting people was considered to be a socially acceptable way of settling your differences. Britain was different. We just destroyed ourselves with pollution, cultural atavism and hopelessly outdated hierarchies. Sometimes we just glassed each other when we were drunk. Sure, during the eighties Handsworth and Brixton had burned, there had been riots, there had been the miners’ strike. A political war had been waged in Britain and it had been won before most of the losers had realised it was even being fought. We were now at the beginning of a new decade. People were getting mashed in fields on ecstasy, but even that was in the process of being made illegal. We had lost and we weren’t even allowed to drown our sorrows in any way we saw fit.
Perhaps stupidity was the only way out, and all of our talk of revolution had merely been an intellectual conceit and a teenage pipe dream. Jesus and revolution had both been used as convenient vehicles for emotion rather than actual concepts in themselves. But then, to even float the ideas of rebellion and an honest religion with conviction in our time required a suspension of belief that came at the price of a little absurdity.
We weren’t alone in playing with ideas and wearing the costumes of rebellion.
There had never been street fighting men in the Rolling Stones ‒ they had all been quick to live the life of the landed gentry and be absorbed into the upper echelons of the class system. Nobody could blame them, unless perhaps that person was accidentally exposed to one of the lacklustre albums the band had made after it irretrievably lost parts of its soul. It seemed that the devil didn’t actually come down to the crossroads at midnight and buy your soul with one convenient blood-signed document. Losing it was actually an incremental process of attrition through luxury, decadence and things that were nicer than getting shot. The road to hell was paved not with good intentions but with resigned sighs and a pleasant buffet. Let’s look at Mick Jagger and David Bowie singing ‘Dancing in the Street’ at Live Aid. When those two flew in from Mustique on a private jet to sing about having a boogie with the great unwashed it looked like a charity photo opportunity or an invitation to shake a leg at the Conservative Party conference after a couple of Pimm’s. Fuck that. Everyone was scared of revolution, but perhaps tepid capitulation was worse. Have you ever heard ‘Let’s Work’?
What’s in a Name?
‘We need a name for the band,’ Jason had announced. Kate was sitting beside him smiling. Jonny, Mark and I were sitting in their flat. We were all a few drinks into the evening. ‘What we are going to do is, everyone is going to write their ideas on a piece of paper, we’ll put them in box and then I will look through them later and decide which one to choose. If any of them are any good, of course,’ he said and then he laughed.
It seemed like fun and we did need a name.
The initial Spiritualized rehearsals had taken place in an old school building in Rugby and they had gone well. We had played long and rambling versions of some of the Spacemen 3 songs that had never gotten an airing live, and we were working up a completely new set. Some of the songs that would eventually become Lazer Guided Melodies had been written live in the back room of the Imperial. The music was sounding good, and it was time to take it out on the road. The public perception back in the days of Spacemen 3 had been that Sonic Boom was the leader of the band and that the rest of us were just along for the ride; Jason had never been great at pushing himself forward in interviews and, despite being the singer, he had been content to rest in Sonic’s shadow in some ways. Subsequently, when Spiritualized started, we were viewed as Sonic’s backing band who were having a little go at being in a band by themselves. We had fallen back in the popularity stakes as far as the public was concerned and we were now in the unenviable position of having to prove ourselves again.
We were a new band, with a new sound and we were very different to the live blitzkrieg of Spacemen 3. Here were songs about love, wrapped in gentle, meandering psychedelia; gone was the revolution and the steamroller of yore. We had yet to release an album and, well, we weren’t Spacemen 3. Brands mean a lot to people and we had effectively put ourselves in a position where we were playing to less than half of the crowd we would have been playing to six months previously. We had work to do.
Spiritualized was fun at the start. It was a much looser entity musically and we had free reign to express ourselves within that. Having been out touring and making records constantly for the last year and half, we knew how we worked. Certainly myself and Jonny had developed an almost telepathic ability to communicate rhythmically; all of us had developed that subconscious instinct common to all good bands, wherein we could predict each other’s musical intentions and react as one to subtle cues within the sound, even as we were making it.
There was no more of the bad atmosphere that had come to dominate Spacemen 3. Pete’s rigid and strict laws of simplicity and his insistence on extremely tight arrangements had given way to something more relaxed, and in that freedom there was a certain joy. Having said that, I hear many bands that attempt to recreate the sound of Spacemen 3, and it seems to me that the element many of them lack is the discipline and the accuracy that made it so direct. We inevitably carr
ied much of Pete’s aesthetic over into Spiritualized but, at the same time, we found the space to improvise around it and attempt more of the quieter and nuanced songs from the later albums in a live setting. Without the elements of destructive competition and control between Pete and himself, Jason was freed into a new live creativity. It was a completely new thing and although it was good to be playing different songs, initially it won us few friends. The first Spiritualized show was in Glasgow. We travelled up the M6 towards Scotland and stopped at my dad’s village on the way. He lived in Gosforth, a small place close to the nuclear reprocessing facility at Sellafield in Cumbria.
We had woken up hungover at the old man’s place and then gone for a quick look around the Sellafield visitors’ centre, leaving the gift shop with badges and t-shirts proclaiming the legend, ‘I’ve been to Sellafield.’
From there we had driven up to Glasgow and arrived at the cheap bed and breakfast mid-afternoon on the day of the show. We checked in and got ready to play the first ever Spiritualized show.
We weren’t very rock and roll ‒ or at least we didn’t sound obviously rock and roll. We didn’t really care. We played a mixture of Jason’s songs from the old Spacemen 3 albums and some new Spiritualized songs that nobody had ever heard before. The audience was unconvinced. We were quiet and delicate and the amateur efforts of our new soundman hadn’t helped us to get the dynamics of the music over at all. A friend of ours called Neal Bradshaw was working as soundman and tour manager. Neal had never done sound for a band in his life but had somehow managed to talk his way into the job. At one point during the set, somebody in the crowd called out, ‘I should have brought my granny.’ Flying feedback and screaming guitars this wasn’t.
Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands Page 17