I sound like some kind of whinging, pessimistic fool. Sadly I actually was.
In an attempt to alleviate chemically the cold, hunger and tiredness, I tried to get hold of some speed, but all I could find was cocaine and that didn’t interest me that much – too expensive. I had the odd line, of course, but it seemed like a lot of money for a numb nose and very little else. I couldn’t see what was supposed to be so great about it. I asked every likely-looking individual but amphetamine sulphate was not popular in Holland. Dope yes, speed no. Rob had asked around. Terry, also pretty knackered, had asked around, but we’d all drawn a blank.
Things were about to change. When we got to Cologne (home of Can), Dave Pils appeared beaming shortly before we were supposed to go on at the Basement Club located underneath an old church. (I should point out that Dave Pils touched nothing stronger than lager, obviously.)
‘Hey, Steve, I’ve gotcha some speed,’ he said holding out his palm in which rested a tiny bright-red five-pointed star.
‘What the fuck’s that?’ for it did look very unusual
‘It’s speed. I got it off a geezer at the door. He said its German speed.’
That was all the explanation I needed. I downed the tiny pill and immediately enquired, ‘Do you reckon he’s got any more?’ as I thought one pill that size wouldn’t do too much.
We always tried to play a different set every night. Generally the four of us and Rob would work out a set just before we were supposed to go on stage. By then we knew the songs inside out so it wasn’t a problem which order we played them in. However, I didn’t particularly look forward to the nights when ‘Disorder’ and ‘Transmission’ where played consecutively. Playing either of the two songs was tiring enough, but both played in quick succession was like running a one-minute mile. I’d feel like I was about to have a heart attack. I never did, obviously, but once you get an idea in your head that something is going to be difficult it becomes magnified. A worry, something to dread. That the hastily scribbled set in Cologne had these two songs next to each other might be pushing my overtired soul a bit, I thought. Some chemical assistance was required, sharpish. My need for speed had been urgent.
This was going to be another long set. Fifteen songs, over an hour, a marathon in those days. Ian never complained. He could see there was a point.
It was a great gig apart from an un-together ramshackle (and far too fast) version of ‘She’s Lost Control’ in which everybody seemed to get lost (especially the drummer). The sound on stage was particularly bad. There were howls of feedback and complaints from Hooky and Ian to Terry, who was doing the mix.
‘Turn the vocals up, Terry. Can’t hear a thing.’
We did a high-energy, intense set. As usual, I did a lot of sweating but I wasn’t feeling particularly chemically enlivened by the time we came off.
‘Any more luck with the speed, Dave?’ I asked, thinking of the next night and the next. ‘This stuff’s shit.’ But no, he’d drawn a blank.
‘Fucking German drugs are shit. You must need loads to do anything.’
Our accommodation for this tour had been hit and miss. Previously, in Antwerp, the promoter Raf first had us staying in a semi-derelict student hotel. It was only when we complained about the rats and the broken glass (not ours, honest) that he admitted it wasn’t the sort of place he would stay in himself, and so we began a late-night tour of the city looking for a bed. Our search ended with a stay in a cosy brothel (the Boomerang – I’ve never been back). I bunked up with Bernard – well, I slept on the floor. I thought this safest.
‘It’s a good place this innit, Bernard? Not many hotels have this fancy UV lighting,’ I said naively, checking for dandruff, ‘or speakers under the bed, that’s a nice touch.’
Trips to the toilet along the hall were . . . interesting.
Annik, a semi-permanent fixture on this tour, was disgusted at our eventual choice of lodgings. She would not countenance staying there and ended up being taken, along with a sheepish Ian, to the house of one of the promoter’s friends.
‘See you in the morning, you fucking lightweight.’
Rob tried to negotiate a nightly discount price with the lady in charge. The normal rate was by the hour.
That night in Cologne, two friends of the promoter were putting us up for the night. It was on the way to the digs where myself, Hooky and Bernard would be sleeping that I began to notice that something was slightly amiss. Out of nicotine, I’d persuaded our driver to stop at a cigarette machine, Ian and Rob having made off with the last of the fags and I always needed more.
Getting out of the van into the cold night air was an oddly slow-motion action. As I rummaged through my lint-lined pockets in search of what looked like German coinage, the glass-and-tin mechanical cigarette dispenser seemed to emit a strange blue glow that shimmered and vibrated gently under the Cologne streetlights. I found inserting the coins into the vending machine’s slot produced a curiously melodic tinkle accompanied by a throbbing sensation in my temples and behind my eyeballs. I began to feel very weird. The sort of feeling you get just before you come down with a bad dose of flu, but a lot more heightened and colourful.
Our lodgings looked like a construction site. There seemed to be some odd structural renovation going on.
To break the ice, I tried asking one of our hosts why speed was so hard to come by in this country, and explained what I had recently ineffectually ingested, ‘A little red speed star.’
He reminded me a lot of my old hippie friends, Dizz and Hobbo. He looked like he had more than a passing acquaintance with German drug culture. The joint he was rolling was a bit of a giveaway.
I took the spliff and began to notice that my new friend had an uncanny resemblance to the friendly gnome, Big Ears, Noddy’s pal from the children’s books by Enid Blyton. His ears were definitely getting bigger. Was his hair vibrating too?
It began to dawn on me what might be going on. Uh-oh.
‘Oh ja, Red Star,’ he said.
‘Ja, Red Star speed,’ I replied.
‘Nein, das ist kein Speed. Ist . . .’ Things in the room became a lot clearer and brighter. Vivid. ‘Acid fünf.’
‘Yes, it’s usually quite fun, acid.’ By now I was pleasantly confused by our conversation.
‘Fünf!’ he said, holding up his splayed hand, the internationally understood sign for five. Each finger left a vapour trail in its wake.
Now my German, what little I could recall from school, was not exactly the best in the world and my somewhat fuzzy mental state was not helping things. But somehow I managed to get the message that what I had swallowed was in fact five tabs of acid. Five microdots, all in one go, each point of the star being one hit.
Was I meant to have shared it with the rest of the band?
What a fucking dickhead. I’d spiked myself. This news amused Bernard and Hooky no end. Of all the people in all the world I would never pick to share a trip with, top of the list would be Bernard and Hooky.
‘Oh fuck, this is going to be interesting.’ For the last few years I’d avoided LSD or it had avoided me, so I was a little rusty. But I knew from previous experience that there was no predicting exactly how long a lysergic expedition would last. It could be a long time. A very long time. I tried to imagine that multiplied by the magic number five. It came out a squiggly zillion. I lit another awful-tasting, badly rolled joint in an attempt to calm my bubbling mental cauldron, and took another look at my surroundings, by now ablaze with electric-blue flickering vapour trails.
I began asking my German friend about indigenous German music (I tried to avoid using the term Krautrock). But despite looking the part, he had never heard of Amon Düül, Faust, Neu! or Cluster. He had maybe vaguely heard of Can, but that was about it. I was disappointed in our man from Cologne. I expected more than a very slight acquaintance with Holg er Czukay.
He’d never heard ‘German Overalls’ by Peter Hammill either, the lyrics of which tell the possibly autobiographical tal
e of a band on tour in Germany undergoing some form of severe psychological and possibly psychedelic breakdown. I know it’s depressing but I loved that song and the words were echoing around my head now with particular resonance.
I was sat at a table opposite my new German Gnome friend in a room with an unnaturally high ceiling. What had once been two storeys had been converted to one and a half. Half the upper floor had been removed, leaving only an elevated platform where the upper floor had once been. There was no way of accessing this mezzanine area except by means of a tall, spindly ladder propped against the wall.
I have mentioned my fear of heights, but did I mention ladders, particularly when tripping, as another phobia?
To make matters worse, or just plain weirder, Bernard and Hooky had started stripping off – this was the warmest place we’d been in all week – and were semi-nude as they gleefully chased each other around the room. To my dizzle-dazzle eyes, they looked exactly like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum after falling down the rabbit hole of a Lindsay Anderson movie. This was not how I imagined the night ending up. Not in my worst nightmares. This was turning into one of them.
I tried asking our host if he had any orange juice. I remembered the old Tim Leary tale that the drinking of copious amounts of orange juice will help straighten out a bad trip. It is bollocks, by the way. He never mentioned orange cordial, anyway, and that was all my friend could find.
My bandmates reacted to my situation with a mix of hilarity and horror. Mostly hilarity. They must never have seen anyone on acid before and I began to feel like a zoo exhibit. Bernard was curious as to what might happen to someone who had taken five times the recommended dose of a powerful psychedelic drug – curious but not that concerned. Hooky was afraid in case I turned into a homicidal maniac or tried to peel my face off. Either way, to them it was a bit of a laugh.
I didn’t particularly like their attitude to my plight but there was fuck all I could do about it. In fact, knowing their enjoyment of practical jokes, I began to feel ever so slightly paranoid about the whole affair.
Not good.
This unease intensified greatly when it was decided by Bernard that I should be ‘sleeping’ in the upper area of the room and should climb high up the spindly ladder to the heavens. I started to clamber up.
‘Go on, Steve. It’s not that high. You’ll be all right. Won’t he, Hooky?’
Hooky, from above, reassured me, ‘Yeah, come on, nearly there,’
It was very hard to concentrate, even harder to move upwards. I’d heard of folk – mostly old wives – believing they could fly while undergoing an LSD experience, but not me. I still maintained my belief in the inexorability of gravity despite the electric storm raging in my brain.
My lack of faith in the trickster bastards proved justified for, upon reaching the summit and apparent safety, Bernard snatched the ladder away and gleefully ran off with it, leaving me trapped on the elevated platform for the rest of the night. With only Hooky and five tabs worth of hallucinations for company.
Fucking bastards, I thought, for Hooky must have been in on the jape. ‘I’m going to fucking kill the pair of you!’ I was not joking.
‘Fucking go to sleep will you?’ cried Bernard from below.
‘Put the ladder back. What if I want a piss?’ I tried to plead.
‘Use a bottle. I’m not having you keeping me up all night,’ said the ever-compassionate guitarist.
‘Just go to sleep,’ was Hooky’s well-meant advice.
Easier said than done. I hoped that an overdose of LSD was unlikely to be fatal, but all the same, I didn’t want to find out on a Tuesday night in the middle of Germany. My mind and my body began to separate.
I’d taken acid in some unusual places in my time, including one summer night spent in a cave on Alderley Edge. It was a Crowleyinspired experiment trying to summon some demon or other – don’t ask. It was a foolish and crazy idea. I had in my younger days been given a good kicking by a band of angry young farmers while tripping, and that was a bundle of laughs compared to this. This elevated perch took the biscuit. The crèm e de la crème of nightmare scenarios.
It was my companions for the night as much as the precarious locality that made this one excruciatingly unpleasant hallucination. I began to feel annoyed first with everyone else and finally with myself. As the flashing technicolour hours wore on, I began to succumb to some sort of paranoid psychotic breakdown involving dark and murderous thoughts. That took days to wear off – if they ever entirely did. I do wonder sometimes.
To this day I still cannot completely forgive them. I spent the rest of the tour psychotically staring out of the minibus window planning the best way to extract my murderous revenge.
After a while, Rob did begin to get worried about my welfare but by then it was too late. I was as back to normal as I was going to get for a while.
The following night’s gig in Rotterdam is one that I still have recurring dreams about. The fact that there was no stage gave the thing an odd feeling – we were level with the audience – and then, when we came out for the first song and I sat behind my drum kit, I knew at once that something else was wrong. It took me a while to work out exactly what it was: half of the drum kit was missing.
Dave had forgotten to set up my hi-hat and cymbals. I managed to attract his attention an d, as the set wore on, Dave would scurry on and add another item until, by the third or fourth song, all was present and correct. I’m sure it all looked like part of the act, but to my still befuddled brain it was incomprehensible.
Two days and one Mars bar later, I was getting better but they were two of the longest days of my life.
Listening to the recordings of these gigs today, it’s surprising that, despite the fact that we were all tired and I was extremely spaced, we were really tight and powerful. Even the Cologne gig, starting with ‘Atmosphere’ and ending with ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ is still electrifying. We had become by this time an incredible live band, unbeatable. It was hard to tell when we were doing it just how good we actually sounded. I can be immodest now because it’s so long ago – it’s another person, another time.
My reckless attitude to drugs, though, had once again got me in trouble. After the fistful of barbs incident of my younger days, you’d have thought I would have learned, if not a lesson, then at least something like caution. But no, I would still blithely swallow anything. I thought myself invincible, but now I know I was just lucky.
It would take me nearly thirty years to figure that one out.
Mars Attacks Eindhoven.
24
CLOSER
Closer as in ‘nearer to’ or Closer as in ‘shut off from’?
It’s the former, I think.
The way we went about making Joy Division’s second album in March 1980 was a development and departure from the way we’d previously worked in the studio.
We wouldn’t be recording at Stockport for a start. This time we were off down south to Pink Floyd’s Britannia Row Studios in Islington for a couple of weeks. No dawn drives back to Macc. Martin was still producing but without his Strawberry sidekick Chris Nagle engineering. We rented two flats off Baker Street, figuring it would be cheaper than a hotel. These were divided up along the usual party lines: nice flat – Ian, Annik and Martin. Across the landing- Not-sonice flat: Bernard, Hooky, Rob and me.
The songs written when we went into Britannia Row were ‘Twenty Four Hours’, ‘Colony’, ‘Atrocity Exhibition’, ‘Passover’, ‘Heart and Soul’, ‘Isolation’, ‘A Means to an End’, and ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ (started in Pennine Studios in January 1980, and continued at the Strawberry ‘She’s Lost Control’ session in March; Tony turned up with a Frank Sinatra LP for vocal inspiration – I don’t think Ian had been a particularly avid fan of Frank until then).
We also had rough versions of ‘The Eternal’, (a new idea), an instrumental called ‘Cross of Iron’ by some (later retitled ‘Incubation’) and a vague idea that would eventually becom
e ‘Decades’.
‘Written’ is perhaps not a completely accurate description. Let’s say for the most part they were pretty well shaped up and most had been played live to a greater or lesser extent.
They needed arranging, a few words needed writing, ooh and of course titles. ‘Decades’ laboured under the descriptive name of ‘Europop’; to me it was always ‘The Cinzano One’. Why? I have no idea. Maybe I thought it would make a good soundtrack to an aperitif TV ad.
My one abiding memory is of sitting on the sofa at the back of the control room at Britannia Row listening to the tracks as we were recording them, thinking for the first time that these were songs that people might dance to. OK, not all of them and certainly not in the slow, slow, quick-quick, slow style of dancing.
As I closed my eyes, I could see rows of demented sparkly Tiller Girls high-kicking away. Our music was danceable? It had never crossed my mind before, certainly Unknown Pleasures had never struck me in that way. The 12-inch ‘She’s Lost Control’ remix maybe slightly – but this was different.
A terrifying thought: we were getting groovy. Blimey, was I turning into the thing I swore I would never be? Was I becoming a swinging, groovy drummer? And if I was, was it really such a terrible thing?
Was I becoming a proper musician?
Noooo! Best put a stop to that right now! No way, J osé.
As an antidote I got the drum synths out, put them through a Sh in-ei fuzz pedal that had been lying around because nobody was interested in it, and came up with some frightening noises. This was Martin’s sort of thing! Together we made the sound even more sonically malevolent.
‘It sounds like Hendrix jamming in a slaughterhouse,’ I observed and we gleefully cackled together. This became the ambience of ‘Atrocity Exhibition’. ‘If it’s sounds too musical, fuck it up with a bunch of effects’ became another motto.
Martin came up with the idea that we needed a drum machine, particularly for the song that would be ‘Decades’. The acoustic drums I’d recorded weren’t working for Martin and my synthesised percussion parts were better but not that great.
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