It had been billed as “an evening of contemporary sitar music”, which was perhaps slightly misleading in that none of us had ever seriously played a sitar, nor had we brought one with us. Ideally, Sonic Boom would have brought along his saz, which is a Turkish instrument that reverberates pleasingly around drones and which can occasionally produce Eastern-sounding scales. Unfortunately, that particular instrument had been stolen from him by some music killer and nefarious shit. The Turkish saz was actually an intrinsic part of the Spacemen 3 sound. Get hold of one and play some ascending one-note scales if you don’t believe me. Perhaps it was playing the saz on a teenage visit to Turkey that had convinced Sonic – then still Pete Kember – that it was not necessary to be some twiddly fingered virtuoso in order to produce a convincing and spiritually reassuring sound. Minimal is maximal sometimes, so if you can make it sound good with one finger and a bit of careful tuning, then why not? You don’t get points for unnecessary embellishment and random jazz chords that only impress your muso friends. Keep it simple, play with conviction, make sure you are in tune and let the technicalities present themselves in the glorious overtones that only ever ask that you get out of the fucking way a little bit.
Drones, and the multitude of melodic and modal possibilities they allow, had somehow fallen out of favour with the Western musical tradition around the middle ages. The resurgence of interest in them could be traced back to the 1950s, wherein the seeds were sown for the revival of possibility rather than limitation. Perhaps it is no accident that the resurgence of interest in the mystical drone coincided with a renewed exploration of the mind-expanding properties of certain plants and their chemical derivatives.
I presume that the bright spark or cunning entrepreneur who had booked this “evening of contemporary sitar music” had somehow seen (or heard about) Sonic and Jason Pierce’s previous excursion into drones and “sitar” music at an acid party in London, when a suitably inebriated person might easily have been ecstatically transported to the banks of the Ganges. It might have been quite possible for that person to imagine they were hearing some fabulous type of “contemporary” sitar music, especially if they had never seen or heard a sitar before. Anyway, somebody had pitched the upcoming evening at Watermans Art Centre in Brentford, west London, as something it really wasn’t, and the artistic overlords who ran the venue were satisfied with what they thought they were going to get. What they were going to get was not anything that any scholar of music would consider to be sitar music, whether it came from today, yesterday or sometime in the future. We had drones, but we had no sitars. We sat … but we did not sitar. It could have been billed, just as accurately, as an evening of contemporary hurdy-gurdy and bagpipe music, but that might have scared some timid souls away.
You get the picture. We were there, we had some nice guitars and we were going to play and get paid, which was fairly high on our to-do list at the time. If the price we had to pay was playing one note for a very long time in order to accidentally entertain the cinema queue patiently waiting for the start of Wings of Desire, and the 15 people who had actually come to see us, then so be it.
Spacemen 3 were certainly not something you would expect to encounter at a serious-minded arts centre in the late 80s. Bands didn’t really play at arts centres, anyway, or at least we didn’t. We generally played in windowless rooms that stank of stale ale, exhaled cigarettes and abandoned sweat, in which obvious art lovers were rarely to be seen obviously enjoying art. We played to drunk people, mostly. Often, the only really drunk people at arts centres are artists.
Advertisement
When we arrived, we were pleased to look out through the generous windows that ran along one side of the reception room. These windows looked out on to the River Thames and Kew Gardens, beyond the far bank. Bobbing along merrily on the river were ducks. We were going to perform in this windowed room, which also served as a cinema foyer, the main entrance, a bar, and a place where people could relax and talk about art while looking at ducks. Because it was art, we hadn’t rehearsed. Peter and Jason would do one thing, and the rest of us would play one note. There were no songs to learn, we didn’t need a drum kit or a soundcheck. and we only had small practice amps with us. Easy. Get stoned, play the music, load the gear into Sonic’s car, and then make the hour and a half drive home to Rugby.
“Just play one note,” Sonic had advised us as we travelled down to the M1. “Keep it simple. One note. No fancy stuff.” By “fancy stuff” he meant two notes. Anything beyond that was pointless.
We could play one note … mostly. Anyone could do it. A monkey could do it. But could a stoned monkey do it with feeling and without losing its sense of identity in the glorious all-enveloping om?
We set up our amps in a small semicircle in the middle of the room facing the ducks. After a quick line check to make sure we were all making the correct noises, we retired to the dressing room to smoke hash. Well, everybody except Jason, who wasn’t smoking much hash at the time.
The dressing room had neither ducks nor windows, so at least we were on familiar territory there. The small room filled with the heavy smoke as we stoned ourselves into a one-note state of mind. Some of our state of mind might have leaked out into the main room, and perhaps that was the start of the problem. “Could you keep the door shut, please?” a concerned patron of the arts told us, warily sticking his head round the door and being careful not to inhale. “The smell of that … stuff … is getting out.” We fake apologised for the smell and continued as we were. We were fairly blatant and continuous in our usage of hashish at the time. To us it seemed to be no cause for concern, concerned as we sometimes were with more dangerous amusements. I suppose we considered marijuana like other people considered coffee, and it wasn’t like we were shooting speedballs in the foyer or anything. We were much more discreet about that sort of thing.
When time finally arrived at the appropriate place for the impending performance, we made our way out to the amplifiers and guitars. The band were facing the ducks, while the majority of the crowds were congregated in a seating area somewhere off to the side of our equipment. Behind us was a line of people waiting for the cinema to open. I think there was many people in the queue for the film as there were to watch our performance. We tuned the guitars and plugged into our amps. Sonic played the first chord of the performance.
The guitar pulsed out a regular rhythm all on its own, that phased and gelled with itself as he turned the dial on the tremolo. “W a w a w a w a w a w a w a wow W a w a w a w a w a w,” it said, turning time into atomic uncertainty and mystical probability. I moved my plectrum around between my thumb and index finger and went for the most inconspicuous E I could ding on the fretboard. Nothing too low and nothing too high. I was going to be faffing around sliding between octaves and running around the neck, so I started as I meant to go on … and on … and on.
It sounded fine. I wasn’t standing out, or ruining the drone. In fact, I was so in time and tune that I could barely hear myself. I kept in line with the tempo by using the feel and the audible click of the plectrum on the strings of my electric bass. It melded perfectly into a seamless whole and the grand pulsating amoeba settled into its centre, content and undividing as it rippled and flexed gently within itself.
Let us pick a word.
Let’s choose the word “strawberry”.
Take a deep breath and say that word rhythmically until you have run out of breath. Now do it again … and again … and again, until it stops making any verbal or audible sense to you. Now try saying that same word for 20 minutes … over and over again. Perhaps as a further experiment you could invite some friends round an do it all together. Can you tell your voice from everyone else’s?
Fuck it, it sounds nice and that’s the main thing. The tone is pleasant … and now that the band is playing all together we are almost loud enough to drown out those two people talking loudly over in the far corner of the bar about how shit we are.
Then … the actual voice of God appears. “Ladies and gentlemen, would you please take your seats for this evening’s showing of Wings of Desire.” What? We are already sitting down. What does God even mean by that?
Spectral shapes, motifs and melodic archetypes drift in and disappear, while the occasional mythical beast emerges from the ocean of drone, rising and submerging with barely a ripple. Imaginary colours pulse lysergically, and the drift of time is forgotten within the boundaries of limitless sound. How could so little mean so much? And what happened to all of those stupid and meaningless questions that seemed so important earlier? After 44 minutes and 17 seconds of this sort of thing, our perpetual motion machine begins its descent back to what we will laughingly refer to as reality. The music ends and a smattering of applause greets the relief and disappointment of relative silence.
I looked up from my bass and tried to come to terms with not doing the thing I had been doing for nearly 50 minutes. I shook the blood back into my rigid and aching left hand and flexed the claw of my pick hand. I checked that the other musicians were finished and then reached down to switch off my amplifier.
I was quite surprised to find that it was impossible to switch it off.
It was impossible to switch it off because I had never switched it on in the first place. This was quite confusing and embarrassing until I realised that nobody, not even me, who had been sitting on my amplifier, had actually noticed that it wasn’t switched on. A monkey could have done what I had just done. A non-existent monkey could have done it.
The live recording of that performance continues to sell, 27 years later. To this day. I’m not sure if it was art or not.
This is an edited extract from Playing the Bass With Three Left Hands by Will Carruthers, published by Faber & Faber.
