Spacemen 3

Track	Album / EP
Hypnotized	Recurring
How Does It Feel?	Playing With Fire
Suicide	Playing With Fire
Che	Revolution EP
Losing Touch With My Mind	Sound Of Confusion
Feel So Good	The Perfect Prescription
Call The Doctor	The Perfect Prescription
That’s Just Fine	Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To
Sometimes	Recurring
Big City	Recurring

Clockwise from top left: Pete Kember, Jon Mattock, Jason Pierce, Will Carruthers – 1989 promo photo via Fire Records

Aged 15, I was coming to a point where I’d spent every moment of my spare time listening to the Smiths, pausing only for a brief injection of Joy Division every now and then. Great as these bands were, I needed a change. This was pre-internet and although I sensed that there was other music out there, I had no idea how to get at it. John Peel, I thought, I reckon he could help. At this point Peel was occupying the 8.30-10.00pm slot on Radio 1 and was thus very accessible. One summer evening I turned on the radio and emerged with three new potential favourite bands – Cranes, the Lemonheads and Spacemen 3. Peel had played the Spacemen’s Hypnotized where waves of sound washed up beneath gloriously otherworldly vocals – like the sea, I thought. I went out and bought the single on CD, only to find that – horror – I couldn’t play it. It was on a teeny tiny CD about 3″ in diameter the likes of which I’ve never seen before or since and I couldn’t play it until I’d purchased a weird plastic adaptor.

Strange CD formats aside, it was a good time to start liking the Spacemen as they’d just released Playing With Fire, its cover emblazoned with the words LOVE, PURITY, ACCURACY, SUICIDE, REVOLUTION. At the time I thought this was very profound and emblazoned these words alongside the band’s triangular 3 motif over all my school exercise books. Now? I don’t think I really get it. Still, the album’s a corker. Pick of the bunch is How Does It Feel? which was like nothing else I’d ever heard before – at the start there’s a lot of silence with sparse notes picked out on a guitar. This song taught me to love the quiet in music as much as I love the noise, enjoying the frisson of anticipation as the song builds, the drums start and finally the vocals swoop in.

Drones and repetition were a big thing with Spacemen 3 and sometimes I worried that the band might be laughing at all these mugs (me included) who had gone out and bought records where they basically just played one note over and over. The flipside of this was that I found myself enjoying the sound of the vacuum cleaner and the washing machine as much as some of the records in my collection. The ultimate track in this vein is Suicide – lots of drones, lots of effects, lots of repeated riffs. The song is lengthy and probably at least 30% of it is drone, but it sounds incredible. Back then I listened to this over and over on my walkman in the dead of night.

Turning to back issues of the music papers, I read up on the band, who heralded from Rugby and at the time featured Peter Kember (aka Sonic Boom), his mate Jason Pierce (the two even shared a birth date) and Will Carruthers (whose book about this era, “Playing The Bass With Three Left Hands”, is worth a read). With Spacemen 3, it was as much about the drugs as it was about the music and I gathered countless cuttings in a scrapbook (sadly lost in the mists of time) of interviews in which Sonic – spokesman elect – extolled the virtues of ecstasy, heroin and methadone. I didn’t succumb – I didn’t need to – I had Spacemen 3.

Covers should not sound like the original, otherwise what’s the point? Fortuitously, Spacemen 3’s cover of Suicide’s Che is nothing like the Vega and Rev version. Its squally guitars, drones and bombed-out vocals channel the spirit of the original while creating something entirely different. It would seem music listening was a much less private activity in 1989 than it is now because when I bought the record this features on – the 12″ of Revolution – in HMV on Oxford Street I played all 3 tracks over and over in my nana’s living room and nobody ever said to me, “What even is this weird shit?” In the days before algorithms served us a torrent of stuff they know we’ll like, perhaps we just accepted off-the-wall stuff a bit more. Or maybe I just had indulgent grandparents.

After a summer listening to Spacemen 3, I was hooked. Tantalisingly, the band was featuring in the lower reaches of the undercard for the Friday at that year’s Reading Festival, which took place a 15-minute train ride from my home. I’d love to be able to recount here a tale about how I sneaked out of the house to go to see the band and was grounded for months afterwards, but to tell the truth, I wasn’t that kind of a kid. I was really boring. So, I just went on the family holiday and spent that day thinking about what could have been.

The success of Playing With Fire prompted Fire Records to re-release S3’s earlier albums, meaning that, having spent the summer almost destroying my cassette copy of Playing With Fire through repeated playing, I enjoyed an autumn of new/old Spacemen music. First up was Sound Of Confusion – just 7 tracks, 3 of which were covers. I listened to this just now – a gratifying howl of guitars lends it a gritty underground feel, but it’s not seminal. Pick of the tracks is Losing Touch With My Mind which to an impressionable 15-year-old felt suitably wrecked and degenerate.

The re-release of 1987’s The Perfect Prescription was an altogether different proposition; this is still one of my all-time favourite records. Feel So Good is both a lullaby and a song about blissed-out ecstasy. Guitars and a trumpet combine with two voices – one ravaged and one floating ethereally above it and it’s quite, quite lovely.

It is, of course, impossible to talk about Spacemen 3 without mentioning drugs. When my dad overheard my brother talking to me about the semi-official LP Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To (which I bought in Oxford’s legendary Manic Hedgehog record shop), he made standard Dad comments about what was the world coming to if kids were listening to music like this. Weird, when you consider how many copies of Sgt. Pepper have washed up in my possession as older relatives have shed their vinyl. Apparently, this doesn’t apply to the Beatles. Anyway, this LP is billed on the cover as ‘rehearsals in Rugby’ but other sources suggest these are the Northampton demos that secured their first record deal. In contrast to the slick production of later albums, this is gloriously homespun, sounding exactly like a bunch of out-of-it guys from Rugby playing in a dingy Northampton basement and boasting cover artwork of over-zealous doodling with a Sharpie. That’s Just Fine was the standout track for me when I bought it, largely because it was the only one I hadn’t heard before, a languorous voice drawls about everything being just fine atop a Velvets-like guitar tremolo.

Lyrics aren’t Spacemen 3’s strong suit, with most of their lines owing a debt to standard rock ‘n’ roll clichés. The standout is Call The Doctor which explores the seedy side of addiction, featuring the voice of someone in the middle of an OD. You’d better throw away the spoons and all the other dirty things, Cos when the law arrives this evening, I don’t think they’ll wait and ring is sung atop a swooping guitar whose player is hammering their effects pedals for all they are worth. This song, rather like Irvine Welsh’s “Trainspotting”, gives the lie to the oft-peddled argument that people who write or sing about drugs are irresponsibly glorifying drug use. Once you’ve seen the baby crawling across the ceiling in the film version of “Trainspotting” or listened a few times to Call The Doctor you’re really left in no doubt about the potential downsides.

Despite more commercial success, all was not rosy in the good Spaceship. 1990 saw Sonic Boom release solo album Spectrum (featuring the coolest ever optokinetic visuals on the cover) while Jason’s side project, Spiritualized, covered the Troggs’ Anyway That You Want Me. The inevitable happened and, in May, my friend read to me over the phone a Melody Maker article reporting that Spacemen 3 had split. It was the day before my maths GCSE Paper 4 and it’s testament to my resilience that I still managed to pass the damn thing in the face of this trauma. It felt as though I’d only just discovered this band and now they were gone.

There was, however, to be one more album. Recorded when Sonic and Jason were no longer speaking, Recurring features a Sonic side and a Jason side. It’s a bittersweet album in that it documents the sound of a band falling apart. It’s also interesting to Spaceheads in that it delineates exactly what the two main players brought to the picnic.

Jason’s side is spiritual: all angelic harmonies and gentle guitars, the highlight being Sometimes. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve lain on the floor with this on full blast and let it wash over me.

Kember’s side has more hard edges. It also shows that he was the one willing to experiment and push boundaries, with the likes of Big City capturing something of the dance groove of the era. Sonic Boom also made sure to evangelise the prevailing drug craze for ecstasy when interviewed by the music press about this single.

In the face of such a bitter breakup it’s difficult not to take sides and among enthusiasts I enjoy spirited debate about whether we are a Sonic person or a Jason person. It’s a difficult one. Although I’ve enjoyed pretty much all of Spiritualized’s work and Kember’s work with his band Spectrum and collaborations with others such as Beach House, Stereolab and Panda Bear, for me it was the sum of the parts that made Spacemen 3 special and nothing in their subsequent work has ever really hit the same high watermark. But yeah, if you force my hand, I’d choose Sonic.