After the show a young Glaswegian woman came up to me and introduced herself. ‘My mate really wants to fuck you,’ she said smiling and pointing over her shoulder at her friend who was waiting by the bar.
‘Ah, that’s, ah, very nice of you to say so … for her, and everything, but I’m a bit busy at the moment and, ah … maybe I’ll be out tomorrow night,’ I said.
I had never been approached so boldly by someone who wanted to have sex with me because I was in a band. Lorna was not to be so easily deterred. She directed her attentions to Jonny and dragged him off for a night of passion somewhere.
We had a day off the next day and I decided to go out and drink with Jonny. We went to the same place we had played the night before. Lorna and her mate were standing by the bar. We went and had a few drinks with them and after another couple we were all sat in a darkened corner. Lorna had one hand on my crotch and one foot in Jonny’s, who was sitting beside her as well. I guess she had a thing for the rhythm section. She went off to get another pint of heavy, and I turned to Jonny and said, ‘Jonny, man, do me a favour and leave us alone, will you?’
‘Fair enough,’ he said, and made his excuses when Lorna got back from the bar. Eventually, Lorna and I staggered back to the hotel and crept into the room that I was sharing with Mark Refoy, who was asleep on one of the single beds. After a while of fumbling and drunken groping, Lorna whispered something in my ear about condoms. I had no condoms.
‘Hold on a second,’ I whispered, and left the room.
I knocked as quietly as I could on Jonny’s door and he answered the door with a smile on his face. ‘How you getting on, man?’ he said with a leer and a laugh.
‘Jonny, I need a condom … have you got any?’
He laughed. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘But I’ve only got banana ones.’
‘OK. Give it to me, man,’ I said.
I took the suspiciously yellow-looking condom back to the room, snuck past the sleeping figure of Mark, and returned to the warm arms of Lorna.
‘Did you get one?’ she whispered.
‘Yep,’ I said, and started to peel the packet off.
As the bright yellow latex was revealed the room began to smell strongly of chemical bananas.
‘Fucking hell,’ she said. ‘Whit’s wrong wie ye? Fucking bananas … the pair o’ ye.’
And then we fucked on the bed as quietly as we could because we didn’t want to wake Mark up.
Twice-Dead Pork (in Treacle Sauce)
The piece of pig had been cooked beyond the limits of endurance and lay in the puddle of congealing treacle sauce as though it was undergoing some advanced form of culinary rigor mortis. It is said that we should not speak ill of the dead, so how then should we speak of the ill-cooked dead? This was a pig that had died twice, the first time at the hands of a slaughterman, and the second time of embarrassment at the indignities it had been forced to endure on the plate. The curled edges of the cutlets stood proud of their unctuous brown shroud as though the ghost of the pig was urging its insulted earthly remains to sprout wings and fly away. I was in agreement with the imaginary voice of the ghost pig, in that I too was hoping it would fly out of the window of its own accord, thus saving me the unavoidable task of eating it. I had been invited round to Kate and Jason’s to have dinner and had been promised a special dish. Kate was going to prepare pork in treacle sauce. I had put my initial gag reflex down to my own unsophisticated taste buds, existing as I was on Chinese takeaways, chips and packets of toxic dust baked by robots on industrial estates and fobbed off on the poor as a viable source of nutrition. I had looked forward to the dinner until I was actually faced with it, and now I was feeling like someone stuck on a blind date with an ugly psychopath who smelled of BO and treacle. Even to write this makes me feel as ungrateful as that poor piece of pig looked.
‘Yummy,’ I lied, ‘that smells good.’
Jason was also making encouraging noises about the food.
‘Thanks, Kate,’ we both said. ‘Treacle sauce, eh? Wow.’
He was wearing a t-shirt that said ‘drugs not jobs’ and I briefly imagined it with the last word replaced by ‘dinner’.
Kate was aware that perhaps we were not being completely honest in our enthusiasm and was watching us both for any noticeable signs of displeasure at her brave attempts to broaden our cultural horizons. An air of suspicion and fake enthusiasm mingled with the smell of cooked pig and treacle. None of it was helping any of us to begin chewing the strange meal. It was a dinner that cried out for an immediate end to experimentation on animals and not just while they were alive.
It would be fair of me to say, at this point, that Kate was an ambitious cook. I had known her since I had been a callow youth riding my BMX around the suburban streets of Rugby, trying to learn tricks to impress myself and my friends. She had been going out with my best mate’s older brother, and we had lusted after her in that desperate and hopeless way that teenage virgin boys know so well. The idea of sex was obviously high on our agenda, but the actual chance of getting any, with anybody, was as likely as a package holiday to Narnia. Kate and I were friends, and I no longer lusted after her. She was way out of my league anyway, and I had accepted it. I was a bass player, after all.
Kate had replaced Steve Evans as the keyboard player in the band. I was fine with that, despite the fact that she couldn’t really play and had never been in a band before. It didn’t really matter. The keyboards were simple and Jason told her what notes to play. Why not, right? We were one big happy family.
I lived in the flat next door to Kate and Jason, above the plumber’s on the corner of Hunter Street and Cambridge Street in Rugby. Their flat looked fairly unassuming from the outside, except for the psychedelic dummy in the window and the black and white blobs on the wallpaper, which were like a toned-down version of Oxford Street weirdness and which were nowhere near visible enough to scare any timid souls who might look up from the shop window display of pipes, toilets and strangely coloured baths.
Jason and Kate had helped me organise the move, partly because it suited all of us to have someone we knew living next door, complaining neighbours being a perennial problem for all musicians. It was the first place I ever rented by myself and I set about the decoration with peculiar zeal. I contacted my friend Rowley Ford, knowing he had experience with painting and decorating. I had once seen him walking amongst the well behaved shoppers in the town centre, wearing a jacket that had some crude words painted on the back in white decorator’s emulsion. The words said ‘I AM A CUNT’ in bold and primitive letters. I don’t think he had painted it himself but it was certainly a brave fashion statement. Rowley wasn’t a cunt, of course, Rowley was a sharp-witted fool who laughed at himself, you, that guy who had just got out of prison for stabbing someone, and pretty much every figure of authority our small town had. He was a good dancer too, which is pretty useful for dodging punches and stuff that people throw at you when you won’t shut the fuck up. A moving target is always harder to hit, and Rowley rarely stood still: ‘Every day I get up and I take my medication and I spend the rest of the day waiting for it to wear off.’ That was how he had described his life under the influence of enough Dexedrine to keep a roomful of narcoleptics bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for a week. In the morning he would look like a grey deflated balloon as he waited for his prescription to begin its work, and then, as the chemicals took hold, he would become very lively and inflated indeed, often to the point where somebody would punch him ‒ because Rowley associated with some people who would quite happily punch you in the face rather than ask you to be quiet.
I decided that Rowley’s medication would suit me just fine for the purposes of painting and decorating. It wasn’t like I was doing drugs for fun. I wanted to get the work done. I asked him for a single dose of his magical green ‘jollop’.
After completely ignoring all of his warnings about the strength of his medicine, I consumed the peculiar-tasting liquid with my morning coffee before heading out to
the paint shop to choose my colours. I suppose that I was in the grip of a fully fledged Dexedrine typhoon by the time I got to the shop. ‘I’ll take that one, that one, that one, and that one,’ I said, with unnatural enthusiasm, indecent haste, and with little actual concern for the long-term aesthetic implications of my choices.
I picked the colours that looked most exciting.
Waking up in the morning, feeling slightly less enthusiastic about everything, I walked into my newly decorated front room. There was a bright green wall. There was a weird orangey-salmon wall. There was a big blue stripe and there was a huge purple wall. It had seemed like a very good idea at the time, and the work had certainly been done quickly. I was renting out a room from Natty at the time. He came downstairs, took one look at my hasty paint job and burst out laughing. ‘It’s pretty bright,’ he said, and then he laughed again.
I lay on the couch groaning.
Natty had also set his considerable talents to work in the house. He had drawn a huge picture of Mickey Mouse on the woodchip wallpaper in the brutally unheated bathroom of our flat. Our bathroom was a fairly hostile environment in many ways ‒ even Mickey Mouse looked like he could feel the non-relaxing chill. Mickey looked distraught. Eyeballs on stalks were growing out of the ground and they had wrapped themselves around his spindly limbs. Mickey was struggling to get free and escape the confines of the eyeball stalks and the bathroom wall, which was understandable because the bathroom was horrible, especially in winter when long icicles would form at the dripping taps, making bathing a springtime possibility rather than a day-to-day necessity. Over the course of a couple of years, black patches of mould broke through the wallpaper into Mickey’s eyeball, and the paper began to peel away in sheets. Mickey’s disturbing world disintegrated around his big round ears.
That piece of work was never recorded for posterity. Much of Natty’s art went the same way. Many a psychedelic scene was painted on friends’ rented walls to be eventually stripped away in horror by new inhabitants eager to replace it with something more soothing and pastel-hued. Probably something with fewer spaceships and eyeballs. There wasn’t much of an audience for Natty’s work in our hometown. There had been an exhibition of local painters at the town library where Natty had displayed some of his work. Incongruously sandwiched between oil paintings of foxes and pretty watercolour canal-side scenes was a terrifying canvas that had been burnt, cut and generally abused in all sorts of socially unacceptable ways. It featured a ghostly skull face and was titled Syphilis.
It was pretty funny, if you had the right sense of humour. I don’t know what happened to Syphilis. Natty probably gave it to someone. He gave most of his art away.
He also painted a picture using some of the leftover paint from my ill-advised Dexedrine shopping expedition. Painted on a scavenged hairdressers’ sign was the face of some psychedelic Mona Lisa bursting out of a salmon pink and lime green blob world. In our flat it looked as though it was manifesting through the weirdly coloured wall it had been hung on. It’s all about context sometimes, and the picture did tie the room together a bit. Natty was playing occasional percussion in Spiritualized and he had also designed and drawn the devil and the angel that became the trademark for the band on its early releases.
The band were rehearsing in Jason’s spare room, which was right next to our kitchen. Jonny Mattock and Mark Refoy were frequent visitors, and we were all hanging out together like the fucking Monkees, or something. We were also drinking together. In the early days of Spiritualized we would get forty-eight cans of Red Stripe on the rider for every show. There were five of us in the band, and Kate didn’t really drink. That is twelve large cans each. During one show at the Pink Toothbrush in Rayleigh, Essex, I had been mystified by a low and irregular knocking sound that was audible as we played. I had checked my own equipment and the monitors until, looking around the stage, I realised it was the sound of Jason’s head gently striking the microphone as he was lulled into a pissed mid-song nod by the throbbing tremolos and the beer.
There were very few illegal drugs around during the making of the first Spiritualized album. I was taking LSD fairly frequently, sometimes even onstage, and smoking a bit of hash, but Spiritualized, in the beginning, were not really a druggy band at all, unless you included alcohol. We drank a lot. Perhaps in the light of this it should come as no surprise that some wit at the record company had suggested that the album be called Lager Guided Melodies.
Those Lights are Cold and Pretty and Nothing Like My Love
Spiritualized had a show to play in Blackpool. The guy who was driving was called Steve. He was Gerald’s right-hand man. Despite the fact that I had been instrumental in getting Gerald the break he so dearly needed with regards to Spacemen 3, Jason had taken him on as a manager for Spiritualized without telling me. I was kind of shocked, but he assured me it was only in the interim and that Gerald was the man to help the band get into a good position. There was nobody else to do the job. That news worried me a bit. I just kept playing. What else could I do? It had already been arranged. Jason had assured me that things were going to be different in Spiritualized. We were going to be a democratic band and everybody would get a say. We were all going to get an equal cut of the money we were getting for Lazer Guided Melodies and it was OK that I was going into a little debt again (to pay for my time making the record and touring) because the inevitable pay cheque was just around the corner. We even got a pay rise for the live performances. We were getting paid fifteen pounds per show now, so things were really looking up.
The band were all sitting in Jason and Kate’s flat waiting for the van, and it was getting later and later. It is a good drive up to Blackpool from Rugby, and Gerald’s apprentice was late. Steve was around our age, but even though he hung around with us sometimes and even did some of the things we did, he was never our friend. He was Gerald’s right-hand man. He probably knew that even when we forgot.
When he arrived, he was an hour late and it made me kind of angry. One hour late meant we might miss our soundcheck, and sounding good was fairly important to the band. He walked into the flat smiling and said he was sorry he was late.
‘Why are you late?’I said.
‘I’m just a bit late,’ he answered, not looking particularly sorry.
‘It’s not fucking good enough, Steve. We’ve been waiting an hour for you, it’s a long drive, and we’ll probably miss soundcheck now,’ I said, which were all fair points. If your driver’s late without a solid-gold excuse, sack your driver. There are enough random variables and flaky personalities involved in any band, at any given time, without bringing yourself the unnecessary stress of a flaky driver.
‘What’s it got to do with you?’ said Steve, instantly on guard and defensive.
‘I’m in the fucking band, Steve, and I want us to get there on time. That’s what it’s got to do with me. It’s not fucking good enough, mate.’
‘You’re a fool, Willie,’ he said. ‘I don’t take orders from you. You’re a fool.’
‘Steve, you are late and you don’t have a good reason for it. Fuck you.’
He laughed and said again, ‘You are a fool, Willie.’
He was probably right.
We loaded the equipment into the van and set off up the M6 towards Blackpool. It was a bone-cold day and we were soon shivering in the weirdly small van. The vans we rented were never big, there was never much room to stretch out and get comfortable ‒ but this one was a step in miniaturisation too far for people of our size. I was sitting in my usual position by the large sliding door, which gave me a chance to stretch out a little and rest my head on the endlessly vibrating window. I always slept in the van. The ability to do so was my greatest gift as a working musician. Sleeping is cheap and it is not boring.
In this particular van sleeping was not proving to be a viable option. The ceiling was low and started curving into the walls very early, which meant it was impossible for anyone fairly tall to sit next to the windows and remain comf
ortably upright. We laughed about that for a while, until it became apparent that the heating system didn’t actually heat the back of the van very well, and that the door didn’t shut properly. This meant that the back of the van was quite cold and the sub-zero motorway air was making its way into the vehicle and doing a little dance around our extremities in ways that were not entirely pleasing. Sitting on your arse in a van for three hours is not the best way to keep warm. We laughed about it, until it became too uncomfortable to laugh about it any more, and then we just shut up and gritted our chattering teeth as the long hours crawled by and we made our way towards the Riviera of the North.
By the time we saw the gaudy lights of Blackpool, we weren’t even thinking about alcohol. We wanted cocoa and a fire.
Blackpool, a popular holiday destination in the north of England, is famous for its ‘pleasure beach’, illuminations, kiss-me-quick hats, and for selling rock and candyfloss. Seaside rock, that scourge of dentistry and nice smiles, is sugar in stick form, sold in a million colours and flavours. Sometimes it is shaped like a massive red dummy or a walking stick. Children are taken there to watch the sub-psychedelic lightshows and to be filled with sugar until they reach the point of delirium. As a ten-year-old, the Blackpool illuminations looked pretty fucking trippy after five or six sticks of pure sucrose mind-warp and a chemist’s arsenal of additives and dayglow E-numbers. We had basically been introduced to drugs as children. Sugar works on the same receptors in the brain as cocaine. I didn’t make that up. Science did.
As we drove along the main promenade underneath the neon Rudolphs and the leering Santas, it seemed that the very lights themselves held the promise of the warmth we lacked. There was a shooting star flashing a rainbow trail and a train of cows gurning and flickering at epileptic frequencies. It all looked fairly jolly and joyous. Perhaps everything was going to be all right as soon as we ate some rock and raised our core temperatures above imminent hypothermia. We huddled around a lit cigarette in the back of the van and oohed and aahed the last of our bodily warmth out and the cold clouds of our breath were illuminated by the colours shining through the van window.
Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands Page 18