‘Because he is clearly deranged,’ I said. ‘We can work out the details later.’
He handed over his bass and I took my place on the stage.
I tuned the bass and tried to deal with the rip tides of adrenaline.
The first song started and my fingers did their thing. Muscle memory is a beautiful thing in these situations. I could play these songs through strobes, smoke, flying glasses, drugs and other minor complications. Or could I? ‘Just settle down, listen to the drums, and focus,’ I told myself. ‘Everything beyond music is unimportant at this point.’
The first note brought its customary relief and the music began to make sense of the situation where I could not. I had found my tree. The great branches spread over me and I was curled in the trunk with the trills and ululations of songbirds drifting down to me from its leafy heights as the pulse of the sap fired nourishment to the tips of the furthest twigs. I was the tree. I was the pulse.
We made it through the first song. The audience cheered.
The first fireball came ripping in from the glare of the stage lights. It was a big orange and yellow miniature sun and it was heading directly at me, at high speed, crackling as it came.
‘Holy FUCK!’ I swerved out of the way and heard it fizzing as it passed my left ear and continued directly through Jonny who, despite my horrified expression, smiled at me and carried on drumming. It seemed that the man was impervious to fireballs. I dared not take that chance.
We started the next song and with its increased tempo and ferocity came more of the completely believable fireballs. It seemed the music was encouraging them somehow, so I swayed and dodged and ducked them but, naturally, I kept playing, because to do otherwise would have been unprofessional. I offered a prayer to God, or the fireballs, or the acid, or something. ‘Look,’ I murmured, perhaps to myself, ‘I’m sorry, OK? I will never do it again. Just let me get through this set and I will never, ever, take LSD onstage again!’
WHOOOOOOSH … another big fireball ripped out of the lights trailing stars and smoke and smelling faintly of lavender.
I took this as a divine answer. I had invited the fireballs to the party and now they were going to dance for a while. Perhaps, if I danced well enough with them, the Gods would be merciful.
I glanced over to make sure my hands were still there. Somehow, by virtue of the strobes, the passing fireballs, the smoke and the general peculiarity, I found I had been blessed with two extra left hands. This made perfect sense to me at the time. Three hands are better than none, right? The only problem was, the more I became aware of the three hands the more I began to wonder which of them was actually mine. I became conscious of my general lack of unity, and with this I began to falter. Whenever I started to look at my hands and consciously try to make them do what I wanted, the less they became willing to do so.
I looked away and everything started to flow again. I looked back, and everything became mechanical as I wondered how the fuck to play the guitar with three hands.
The less I thought about it, the better it got, and I even started ignoring the fireballs ‒ though, to be honest, they were a welcome distraction from the three-handed conundrum that was somehow better off playing the bass without me, or at least without the part of me that couldn’t stop thinking about how to play the bass with three hands.
This continued for some unspecified time, until finally the last song of the set ended and the audience cheered. The air was thick with violet and green smoke and it was impossible to see more than three feet in any direction. Even for normal people. The strobes were flickering and the fireballs were flying when I sensed a disturbance at my feet. It was Mark Refoy, the guitarist. He was crawling offstage.
‘Mark, what are you doing, man?’ I shouted.
‘I can’t see a fucking thing,’ he said, as he continued to crawl through the smoke to the dressing room. I switched the amp off and followed him in a dignified and mostly vertical silence. We all sat in the brightly lit dressing room enjoying the relief and the mixture of adrenaline and endorphins that we were all happily pouring alcohol into. Perhaps I was more relieved than my bandmates that everything had gone well.
I was massaging a little Tiger balm into my overactive third eye when the first members of the audience came backstage. Two extremely wide-eyed young gentlemen bundled in through the dressing-room door and began shaking hands and congratulating us on the show.
‘Nice one, mate,’ one of them said to me.
‘Is that Tiger balm? Can I have a bit?’
He dug his finger into the tin I offered him, took a large blob, and stuck it directly onto his eyeball.
I looked at him disbelievingly.
‘Erm …’ I said, ‘You aren’t supposed to put it in your eye, you know?’
‘Oh, really?’ he said, laughing. ‘What should I do?’
‘Don’t panic. It’ll wear off eventually,’ I replied.
‘I saw you dancing onstage tonight, Willie,’ he said, excitedly. ‘You were getting right into it. Sounded fucking brilliant!’
‘I wasn’t dancing, I was dodging fireballs. How is the Tiger balm?’ I said, as he looked at me and the first tears began streaming down his face towards his unstoppable grin.
‘FUCKING INTENSE,’ he said, and we all laughed.
I got paid fifteen quid for that show.
That’s Not Normal Behaviour
Our particular brand of gentle and relaxing pastoral psychedelia had always found a natural home amongst people sitting in chemical baths of unnaturally fizzy water so, in many ways, Middlesbrough was a spiritual home for the band, there being not just one, or two, but three large chemical factories gracing the skyline of this peculiar seaside town.
It seemed not only right but fitting to change my own chemical composition while visiting a place that was so obviously dedicated to the moving around of molecules and the alchemist’s art. Although both myself and the town were experimenting with better living through chemistry, some of us were less obviously scientific about the procedure.
Two members of the touring entourage at the time were also milkmen in Rugby. As well as being milkmen, these multi-tasking gentlemen were also distributors of the fairly ubiquitous psychedelics that were becoming so fashionable amongst the brave and foolhardy proponents of all things acid house and rave-related that were working like a scourge against the prevailing religions of normality and boredom.
These abnormal entrepreneurs would pop a couple of squares of cardboard, or a yellow microdot, under your morning pint of milk and then you would be fairly well set for a weekend in which you might feel that your own head was crowned with silver and that your brains were also pure cream being gently pecked by small, feathered, tits. Of course it might always go the other way. Nobody ever said that exploration and adventure was a guaranteed bowl of cherries in a bed of roses. On one particularly harrowing occasion I had been travelling on a milk float with one of these milk-plus milkmen when we had become involved in a particularly nasty speed wobble on Bilton Hill. It was dangerous, and a little bit of milk was spilled, but we were both spared the indignity of sudden death by milk-float speed wobble, which might, at least, have made for an entertaining epitaph.
Our two unconventional Ernies were keeping me fairly well supplied with non-dairy related products while we were on tour and consequently, by the time the show began, I was once more in the realm of the gold top.
Flying fireballs, deranged roadies and extra hands being noticeable by their absence during the performance, the evening had progressed as smoothly as well-churned butter, and the fifty or so residents of Middlesbrough who had crowded into the spacious hall for the night were well and truly entertained. I presumed so anyway. Perhaps they had not been as well entertained as me, but I can’t really be expected to take the blame for that. I had done my bit.
The after-show and load-out passed colourfully and uneventfully, and by the time we had all arrived at the bed and breakfast, everyone was in a good moo
d and ready for bed(ish). The support band, Electrahead, were touring with us and, because they were not getting paid very much, they had been sleeping in their van when it was too far to drive home to Rugby. In the grips of psychedelic philanthropy and filled with the acid milkmen’s milk of human kindness, I had offered the floor and the spare bed of the room I was sleeping in to the paupers, despite the fact that none of us was feeling very sleepy.
Laughing and giggling, while trying our very best not to disturb the sleeping landlady with our high spirits, we tiptoed through her terrifyingly floral hallway. There were weird ornaments everywhere and, in the grip of my fever, I became entranced by their strangeness. Normally, a large statue of a Greek nymph pouring imaginary water into an empty plaster pond would not have given cause for closer inspection but, under the spell of the fumes from the three combined chemical factories, I could not bear to leave the lonely nymph to pour dry water into the darkened corridor alone. I was in the mood for company, so I tucked her, very carefully, under my arm and proceeded up through the psychedelic thicket of the spongily carpeted stairwell. On the way through the undergrowth of decoration I may have also accumulated a few more knick-knacks and fripperies to decorate the comparatively spartan room that we had rented for the night.
Mark and Jonny and Jason and Kate retired sensibly early to their respective rooms, while myself, the driver and assorted members of our extended touring party stumbled into my room, where we proceeded to make ourselves as comfortable as possible in a small, brightly lit bedroom in a bed and breakfast in Middlesbrough with a potential dragon asleep downstairs.
Undeterred by the unpromising surroundings I began to arrange the gathered ornaments in a way that was pleasing to my delirious senses. I made an altar, with the previously lonely nymph as the centrepiece. Around her, I carefully laid a small basket of vibrant yellow chickens, an unnerving picture of a dog (I think it was a Jack Russell) and several doilies, totems, geegaws and mementoes of bygone holidays in presumably sunnier places. There was a donkey from Spain, a couple of snow globes and a weird glass bird full of red liquid which pecked at a glass full of water for no obvious reason. I served no disrespect to these precious items; rather, I treated them with a reverence reserved for religious artefacts and relics of a better time. Who knew which spirits they served or what they had once been used for? I genuinely loved them even though I didn’t understand them. When the room was dimmed and the atmosphere complete, the previously unremarkable room resembled a sylvan glade, or a venereal Roman grotto in a suburban back garden. At least it did to me.
With the stage set for our little after-show comedown, it was time for the music. I had become overly fond of one cassette in particular on the tour, a tape I had played so constantly that I had been asked to not play it quite so constantly, more than once. I continued to enjoy it in secret, regardless of the philistine protestations of my bandmates.
It was time for Dr John, also known as ‘the Night Tripper’, aka ‘the Gris-Gris man’. We were all set for a relaxing re-entry (via the bayou) into normal earth atmosphere, if indeed the atmosphere in Middlesbrough could ever have been considered to be normal. We sat and smoked fags and had a bit of a laugh about stuff. After a period of small talk I felt the need for something more in keeping with the tone of the evening and the surroundings. I felt the need for something biblical. I fancied the Book of Revelations, because it was quite easy to imagine strange and terrifying creatures rising from the chimneys of those factories we had passed on the way into town and I was already beset by weird visions.
Luckily, as is the case in most godforsaken hotel rooms, there was a bible at hand. I retrieved it from the chipboard drawer, blew the dust off it and, using the ancient scrying technique of bibliomancy, opened the book at random, and began to speak in somebody else’s tongue. At some point in the sermon, to which my colleagues were paying a sort of weary and bemused attention, I decided I would be better served to preach the word of God from a pulpit of some kind.
This being a bed and breakfast, pulpits were in short supply, although there was a wardrobe made of wood that looked like it might hold my weight. With a supernatural agility, I mounted it and continued my slightly confused sermon from the wardrobe top. It was going pretty well, I thought. We were somewhere in the New Testament and it was all peace and love and forgiveness, until I got a bit bored and flipped back to the front of the book where things weren’t quite so fluffy. I was probably deep into some passage about smiting and dismembering the enemies of God when I started to get the horror. I could see those poor sinners, all dismembered and tormented, and it was wrecking my vibe with some force. I ploughed on through the blood and the guts and the thunderbolts until, eventually, I dropped the book from the lofty chipboard pulpit with disgust. It landed on the floor with a blasphemous and reverberating thud. Now that I was no longer plagued by visions of slaughter, I felt considerably better, so I let out a loud laugh and pulled a little book of John Clare poems from the coat of my Russian admiral’s jacket.
Sparrows and rivers and little hedgehogs would soon dispel that Old Testament gloom. I could revel in the joys of creation as seen through the eyes of a lover of creation, and there would be no more of the Old Testament destruction and misery (at least not until we got to ‘The Lament of Swordy Well’ anyway).
Alas, our collective journey to the pleasant pre-enclosure fields of Northamptonshire was to be short lived, for lo, the terrible judgement of the landlady was upon us, and she said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was a lot of it, and it came as a bit of a shock, for she was standing there in righteous and vengeful fury in her dressing gown, and lo, we the assembled sinners did sore tremble in our fear and were verily chastised. She had appeared, in full Old Testament mode, in her anger and curlers, and she had entered the room without knocking. She was ready for some smiting. ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING ON THE WARDROBE?’ she asked reasonably but in an unreasonable tone.
I didn’t really have a reasonable answer, so I just shrugged and smiled a wonky smile.
‘THAT IS NOT NORMAL BEHAVIOUR!’ she said, which was also a fair point.
Then she turned her eyes away from me, which was probably difficult, because I was sitting on top of her wardrobe in my rather fetching jacket, which had a fair amount of gold piping and inscrutable Russian military finery festooned across the arms and shoulders. It had been a gift from Dave, the big roadie who went bananas in Leeds … but, anyway … somehow she stopped looking at me, which made me feel better for a moment, even though I was obviously seeking attention.
She cast her disgusted eyes across the room until they came to rest upon the final indignity. The ultimate insult. She saw the half-naked lady with the vase surrounded by many items from her treasured collection of stuff that had been arranged in a weird and unnatural way.
‘GET OUT!’ she screamed with the force of a banshee. ‘YOU MUST ALL LEAVE. GET OUT OF THIS HOUSE.’
At this point it seemed wise to actually leave the relative safety of the wardrobe, purely as a diplomatic move and a conciliatory gesture. I hoped that might serve to calm her after the shock of finding her knick-knacks in my boudoir. With the speed and agility of a seal I slipped down onto the carpet and started making apologetic noises. ‘Look. I’m sorry,’ I said, actually, genuinely feeling sorry, and also realising that it might be a bit cold outside. ‘I didn’t mean to bring those things of yours up here. I just liked them and I haven’t damaged them. I was very careful and we will just go to bed and not make any more noise and—’
‘NO,’ she said, to everything. ‘You must all leave. Pack your things and get out!’
‘But … but,’ I stammered. ‘It was all my fault. Don’t throw them out. I’ll go and then there won’t be any more trouble.’
‘I DON’T CARE’, she said, while gathering her belongings from the decidedly unmystical-looking altar. ‘I won’t have this kind of funny business in my house. You must all LEAVE.’
And with that final and terrible pro
clamation she left the room and started banging on Jonny and Mark’s door while screaming, ‘C’MON, GET UP. You have to leave. NOW!’
Jason and Kate appeared on the landing looking confused and sleepy.
‘What’s going on?’ said Kate, half to me and half to the obviously inconsolable landlady.
‘You must all leave,’ the landlady repeated. ‘He was on the wardrobe, and he has people in his room who shouldn’t be here. And he woke me up. God knows what all of that banging and crashing was.’
I thought that this wasn’t the best time to mention my struggle with the visceral stories of the Old Testament, so I just kept saying sorry.
There was the sound of weary, slippered footsteps from the stairs and her husband appeared, looking tired and as though he wished he wasn’t there. He was sporting a finely checked and tasselled dressing gown. Ten minutes previously he had been tucked up in a nice warm bed dreaming about kinder things, and now he was standing at the top of the stairs surrounded by confused and sleepy people, a battleaxe wife on a mission to destroy, and a strange-eyed creature in a Russian admiral’s jacket. He looked at me with a mixture of weariness and annoyance.
‘What’s all the bloody noise about?’ he said.
‘Sorry,’ I replied, for the fiftieth fucking time, ‘we have just played an exciting concert in your lovely town and we were having a couple of drinks with our friends here and then we were going to bed and somebody knocked something over. It was an accident and we all just want to go to sleep now. Everyone wants to go home and nothing is broken. Please don’t throw us all out. It wasn’t their fault.’ I kept a low and reasonable tone despite the fact that my eyes were probably singing a much higher song.
He looked at me and I looked back at him.
As I looked at him, I was thinking, ‘It’s all OK. Go back to bed. Go back to bed. We are reasonable people. Go back to bed.’ Like a Jedi mind trick.
He looked at me for a bit longer, then he made a kind of satisfied and pissed-off humphing noise, turned round, and went back down the stairs. ‘Keep the bloody noise down!’ he said over his shoulder as he left. ‘Some of us have got work in the morning.’
Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands Page 20