Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands Read online

  Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands

  Will Carruthers

  Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue: On Being an Imaginary Viking

  Part One: Gateway Drugs

  Mind Yer Fingers

  A Piece of Cake

  The Trip

  The Graveyard Shift (or How to Play One Note for a Very Long Time without Losing Touch with Your Mind)

  The Spacemen

  The Acid Party

  Playing with Fire

  Hash Yoghurt and Hells Angels

  Wide Awake in a Dream

  Back to the Bolts

  Elvis Died for Somebody’s Sins but not Mine

  The Nun Next Door

  Tiny

  Waves of Joy

  Part Two: The Key to the Door

  The Autist Turns Twenty-One

  Says a Lot to the Trained Mind

  Suicide

  Or Start Living with Your Mother

  Taking Drugs so Other People Don’t Have to

  Coventry

  Spacemen 3 on Spectrum

  Gerald and the Two-Handed Shuffle

  Elvis Plays ‘Revolution’

  ‘Are You Just Peripheral Shit or are You in the Band?’

  The Monkey Grinder’s Organ

  Better Off Alone

  Dependence

  Play the Fucking Hit

  Going Solo

  Part Three: Look Ma … Three Hands!

  In the Trenches

  You Say You Want a Revolution?

  What’s in a Name?

  Twice-Dead Pork (in Treacle Sauce)

  Those Lights are Cold and Pretty and Nothing Like My Love

  Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands

  That’s Not Normal Behaviour

  Little Thief

  Working on a Building

  Fifty Tons of Blood

  Jumping Ship

  Part Four: Living on Nuts and Berries

  Psychotic Reaction

  Fame at Last

  Two Christmas Stories

  Or Something …

  A Very Strange Dream

  No Lawyers, Only Longbows

  Thoughts on Being a Musician

  Epilogue: Thanks to the Ghostwriters

  With Thanks to

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  On Being an Imaginary Viking

  We are getting ahead of ourselves here. Very far ahead. Almost to the end, in fact. Time was neither a straight line, after all, nor memory an exact science …

  I was standing next to a man who had burned a million pounds. This was a rare pleasure in itself. Having occasionally burned money in public myself, as an experiment in defiance and occasionally for my own amusement, I was well aware of the reactions it might provoke in people who could think of money as nothing but good. I had never been near enough to a million actual pounds to set light to them but I had practised on the odd fifty here and there and I certainly had respect for the convictions of anybody who could strike that match and live with the consequences. We live in a time and place where the idea of money is an all-consuming fever, with very few real challengers. To destroy the symbols of the idea of this material religion is considered the ultimate heresy. Literally. Heresy. Even to question the concept of money puts you on shaky ground. If poor people question the great green god they are generally accused of jealousy and envy. Nobody could accuse someone who burned a million quid of being envious. That was an act of war. I mean, it’s not an act of war like a cruise missile or something (which also costs a million quid), but it certainly annoys people. Although money has no conscience, it can be a blank canvas upon which we may reveal our worst vices and trace the shapes of our desires and dreams. Money is the nothing that seems like everything when you don’t have it. The problem is, perhaps, that people begin to mistake the way for the destination. Money and fame are not happiness in themselves and if you doubt that, ask the zombie hologram of Michael Jackson for its opinions on the subject. Regardless of the void in these idols, they have become popular ends in themselves and, as such, perhaps need to be destroyed occasionally if only to limit the power they hold over our lives. It is telling that the ultimate goal for anybody involved in the creative arts is to be remembered after their deaths, by which point, hopefully, one might imagine their priorities will have changed somewhat.

  The man who had once (allegedly) burned a million pounds was explaining what it was that he was trying to achieve and why. ‘I realised that recorded music had become trivial and meaningless when I got my first iPod,’ he said. ‘It just didn’t mean anything any more, so I tried to imagine a world where no music existed and it had to start again from scratch.’

  There was something eternally hopeful in his nihilism.

  I too had fallen out of love with the idea of recorded music, although my personal epiphany had arrived on an easyJet flight. I was looking at the back of the seat in front of me and I saw a vibrant picture of a can of Coke and a bag of crisps. It was a flight, so it was perfectly acceptable for them to advertise this junk food at some extortionate price. Thrown in as an incentive to buy the crisps and Coke was ten free downloads of songs. Why would anyone want to spend their lives making something that was given away free with junk food? The worth of music itself had been challenged and debased and perhaps the only way to get people to appreciate it again was to withdraw it. Of course this was impossible, but it didn’t mean it wasn’t worth a try.

  The man who had burned a million quid went on. He said, ‘Music just didn’t mean anything any more. So now, I only want to record the sound of the human voice.’

  Relishing the obvious irony in the upcoming possibility of recording music (albeit only with the human voice) with a man who had just explained his belief in the pointlessness of recorded music, I nodded and agreed. I had occasionally entertained myself with the idea of a big red button that would eliminate all recorded music from the world. Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Abba, and the Spice Girls, freed from overwhelming zombie culture to exist only as memory in the mind of musicians everywhere. No copyright. No restriction. No more just pressing ‘play’. Only the possibility of musicians playing music. Would you press the button? Would you press it to save music? I can’t remember who it was that told me to remember to forget.

  ‘I was driving my Land Rover, listening to the sound of the engine,’ he continued, explaining the concept further, ‘when I heard voices from the back seats. There was nobody in the vehicle with me, but I could hear singing behind my head.’ It seemed that our old friend, the drone, had manifested once more to weave its imaginary magic, like the musical equivalent of a random pattern of tea leaves in the bottom of your cup that might speak of the future to those who concern themselves with these things. ‘It was very strange,’ he continued. ‘It seemed to me like there were three Vikings in the back of the Land Rover and they were singing along in tune with the engine.’

  Then, while showing us the film of the recreation of his journey, he made some imaginary Viking sounds to better illustrate the sound of his vision. There he had been, driving through some unpopulated landscape in Northumbria, or the Scottish borders, or somewhere in between, and then … from somewhere between the sound of the engine, the wheels on the road, and his fevered and solitary imagination, three Vikings had sort of materialised in the back of the Land Rover to sing along with his journey. Being a curious sort, he had joined in with this unexpected choir rather than thinking he had gone mad. He now wanted us to approximate the sound of the (possibly) imaginary Vikings.

  I was also standing next to an incredibly hungover and amenable Au
stralian with a voice like a thousand late nights, who had, perhaps, burned a little money in his time but not in any way that had produced smoke and flames. There is more than one way to not give a fuck, after all.

  We had been chosen purely for the quality, or lack of quality, of our voices, which were as deep and sonorous as old bronze bells housed in picturesque and decrepit towers. Although we were green with the verdigris of time and other intoxicants, we could somehow sing in tune with the hum of the sleek forces that keep the world from wobbling off its axis and flying through space at a tangent to time. Or something.

  The producer played the actual recorded Land Rover sound and we began humming and omming along, in a low-sounding mechanical rumble that worked in sympathy with the engine and the Vikings. The drone was in the key of B, I believe. Everything has a key. Vikings, engines, lampposts, cats, you.

  Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm …

  The man from The KLF sang along and I tried not to feel intimidated by his presence. Somewhere deep inside, a ghostly voice was echoing a memory of a dimly remembered bacchanal. ‘MuuuuuumuuuuuuMUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU,’ it sang.

  I don’t think it was a Viking.

  Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

  Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr …

  We went across the borders, imagining imaginary Vikings, and embracing the sound of the engine that drove us and our marauded voices. We sounded like hungover and considerably road-burned musicians, standing around a microphone, impersonating Tibetan monks, pretending to be imaginary Vikings, in the back of a real (but now recorded) Land Rover, for a man who had once recorded a song with Tammy Wynette. I suppose I had reached that stage in my career where these things no longer seemed implausible.

  I had finally become a proper session musician.

  I was also going to be paid by a man who had burned a million quid.

  The three of us ran through the ‘song’ a few times.

  ‘I don’t think my Viking is low enough,’ said Bill. ‘You two do one together.’

  So the woken-in-fright Aussie and I gave it a run through until the engine of our voices was a dulcet dream machine and the Vikings had come into clearer focus.

  Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm …

  From the drone comes all manner of things.

  From the one comes the many, and so, to the one, the many must return … to mire and mingle and throw forth tentacles of existence from the void once more.

  I hadn’t obtained this particular job through my many weird contacts in the music industry (after years of service), or through an agent or a manager. I got this job by spitting schnapps into a Brandenburg barbeque that had been warming me and three of my friends after we’d spent a pleasant day cycling around the nearby forests and lakes. I may have swallowed a little too much of the schnapps before I started spitting it at the fire but, regardless, my impromptu fire-breathing and howling at the moon had served to impress our German host rather more than one might have expected, given the fact that we were actually on his property and I was in something of a berserker state of mind.

  ‘You have a very deep voice,’ he had said, calmly and reasonably, after I had growled at some real or imaginary injustice before spitting another mouthful of schnapps into fiery oblivion. ‘Would you be interested in doing some recording work?’

  ‘How much?’ I growled.

  ‘Only a couple of hours or so,’ he said.

  ‘NOOOOOOO … HOW MUCH FUCKING MONEY?’

  I produced another fireball, by way of punctuation, which produced a pleasing blast of heat and a solid whompfing sound. I looked at him slyly. ‘And who is it for anyway?’

  ‘It is for something I am recording with Bill Drummond in Berlin in a couple of weeks,’ he replied, still remarkably unfazed by my werewolf act.

  That name calmed me faster than a hand job and a couple of Valium.

  ‘From the fucking KLF? Bill Drummond who burned a million quid?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied.

  I sobered up and acted normal. ‘I’ll do it for free,’ I said. ‘I like him.’

  So, I had given our host my phone number, blown another couple of mouthfuls of schnapps into the fire to seal the deal and then retired to bed for the evening, expecting nothing more to come of it.

  And there we were, standing in the Berlin morning, doing our best to lend convincing Viking overtones to a Land Rover engine in B … or B flat.

  We took a break from the recording and retired to the kitchen table to drink tea. ‘I gotta say, Bill,’ I said, as calmly as my impressed inner fanboy would allow, ‘you kept me fairly well entertained during the dark times of Britpop and New Labour in the nineties. Thanks for that.’ I didn’t directly want to mention the burned money, or the crazed acid house singles, or the fact that they had deleted their entire back catalogue at the height of their career. I didn’t even want to mention the forty grand he had nailed to a board for the future Turner Prize winner, nor the Echo and the Bunnymen tour he had booked in the shape of rabbit ears in order to appease an ancient and vengeful bunny deity. He looked kind of haunted for a moment and said, ‘My kids think I’m an idiot.’

  And then we both laughed for quite a while.

  When he was satisfied with our interpretation of his imaginary Land Rover Vikings, we all said our farewells. He left, looking a little hangdog but with a twinkle in his eye and plans and schemes that were somehow in him and beyond him and that might leave his children wondering what the fuck was wrong with him, until they were old enough to know better.

  I would happily have worked for free. It’s not often that you get to pretend to be an imaginary Viking in the back of a Land Rover driven by a man who burned a million quid the hard way.

  Part One

  Gateway Drugs

  Mind Yer Fingers

  I left school at sixteen and went to work in a sheet-metal factory in Birmingham. My dad was an absent partner, so I suppose I had joined the family business. The factory was run by a father and daughter team who spent most of their time in the warm office drinking coffee. My dad had decided that it was better for me to start at the bottom and work my way up, so that’s exactly what I did. Well, the first bit anyway.

  Three people worked on the factory floor. Me and two lads from Birmingham called Wayne and Ray. Wayne had a wet-look, permed mullet, and one of those little moustaches that were so beloved of British football fans in the mid-eighties. He was a Birmingham City supporter and I didn’t give a fuck about football, so there were no problems between us in that respect. Ray was a tattooed ex-borstal boy from Small Heath who had been given a bit of tax-free casual work from the old man to see how things worked out, while Ray was trying to go straight and get himself out of the world of glue sniffing and petty crime that had been his lot since he was a kid. Me and Ray got on well. We all worked in a long narrow corridor of floor-space between two lines of ancient and dirty machines. Standing stacked along each wall were work benches, hand presses, metal saws, spot welders, MIG welders, brake presses, guillotines, drills and all sorts of things that whacked, bent and cut metal into whatever shapes people would pay us to make. Set in a tangle of decaying Victorian buildings in the Jewellery Quarter of Hockley, the factory itself looked like a narrow unlit sweatshop from a Dickensian dream of industrial Britain. There was no real heating system, so we stood on ripped-up pieces of cardboard while we worked to keep our feet from getting cold. When it was really cold, our fingers stuck to the bits of metal we were working with. The radio was always on and it tormented me daily with the endless production line of pop that we were being fed at the time. If they played a song I half liked I would jump for joy. That happened about four times in a year. Mostly, Radio One played Stock, Aitken and Waterman, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran and all sorts of other forgettable eighties shit that could cut through the whine and clatter of the factory and the brutal whacking of the washer machine. Not a washing machine, a washer machine. That infernal contraption had a unique rhyth
m all of its own: 160 beats a minute and nothing else mattered while it hammered out the unhappiest of hardcore, stamping out metal washers the size of your fist from hand-fed strips of fourteen-gauge steel. Operating this machine was like being hit on the head with a heavy thing, quickly and repeatedly, which is perhaps not the most soothing way to spend Monday morning, freezing the balls of your feet off after a weekend of no sleep and intravenous amphetamine sulphate. Like many things I will try to describe in this book, I do not suggest you try it yourself.

  The mundane and relentless twattery of the music and the mindless chatter of the DJs were ominously broken every morning, just in time for tea break, by the mournful violins heralding the beginning of ‘Our Tune’. This was the mawkish low point of a show hosted by Simon Bates, which made a daily feature out of an awful sob story sent in by one of Mr Bates’ depressed listeners. After reading the story out on air Bates would play some sentimental song chosen by his willing victims to soundtrack the memory of their beloved dead dog, or the time they had all contracted syphilis together.

  Sometimes we would get so bored at work that we would abuse the various chemicals that had been left on the shelves of the factory over the years. We had no idea what these chemicals actually were, crusted and rusting in their old spray cans and forgotten pots, but we were hopeless narcotic explorers and we hacked our way through the chemical undergrowth with glee. You might not be able to change the world but at least you can change your mind, right?

  One day we were abusing the contents of some arcane tin by spraying the contents into a rag and inhaling it.

  ‘Do you feel anything?’ I’d asked Ray after we had both taken a good blast.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘my feet have gone really cold.’

  ‘Mine too,’ I said, and we both laughed and laughed. Then we did it again, just to make sure it had really happened. We chalked that experience down as another victory for entertainment and then went back to the machines and the boredom. The fact that we would occasionally alleviate our boredom with a mid-morning snifter of feet-go-cold spray was pretty ironic given the fact that we spent most of the day standing around on squares of cardboard to stop our feet from getting too cold.