"Freefalling through time, turning galaxies into chocolate bars, forging a different course through the badly fried brains of the '80s."
- NME, 1988

"They can do it all-turn you on, threaten you, make it all seem worthwhile. Spacemen 3 opt for colour, space and sensuality, and come up with the last word in English psychedelia."
- Melody Maker, 1989

During a brief five-album, seven-year existence, dimensional warriors Spacemen 3 lived fast, played hard and eventually left behind an attractive enough corpse to inspire rock 'n' roll collectors, writers and musicians alike. The latter group of S3 acolytes in particular have built upon the band's sound, often mutating and transmogrifying S3's aural hedonism successfully enough to qualify as new-era pioneers themselves-names like Jessamine, Bardo Pond, Labradford, Magnog, Brian Jonestown Massacre, Windy & Carl, Füxa, et al. Too, the Spacemen spawned a handful of subsequent ensembles that have elaborated and refined the S3 vision to arrive, at the tail end of 1996, intact and aiming to blow minds even further. Herein, find this legendary band's tale, and more.

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The small, unassuming, middle class burg of Rugby, England, is situated in the dead center of the country and is considered a commerce hub and not much more. For Rugby teens, then, the options proposed by rock 'n' roll would frequently appear more attractive than a career loading and unloading trucks. "Just a tiny town, same story-any entertainment, you had to make it yourself," recalls Jason Pierce, who figures significantly in our story. "I got a guitar at age seven-just an acoustic, no lessons. That kept me busy ... When I was 14, I bought the Stooges' Raw Power and I listened to nothing but that for a year ... Rugby's basically just a distribution center, so I guess drugs came through the town a bit, too!"

Adds Pete Kember, another of our central characters, "Particularly in my teenage years, a lot of the stuff in music that I related to was very important, helping you get through the problems with growing up. I started collecting records when I was about 11 or 12; The first record I bought, I think, was 'Denis' by Blondie, or maybe 'Jocko Homo' by Devo. And I got a copy of the first Velvets album in 1980 because I was interested in modern art and read about them in an Andy Warhol book ... I had gotten a guitar at the age of 13, and knew before I turned 14 that I was gonna play music."

Soon enough, teenage consciousness would get its necessary raising, via safety pins, suggests our third player, Pete Bain: "Watching Top Of The Pops and seeing the Sweet, Bowie ... Listening to The John Peel Show under the covers, on an old valve radio ... Peel was describing in his usual droll voice about being pelted with mud and beer cans whilst comparing an outdoor rock festival-'Well, everyone's got their problems,' he said, and then he played 'Problems' by the Sex Pistols."

It didn't take our three heroes very long to find one another. Bain was hanging around with a friend named Stick, who'd formed a band with Pierce called Indian Scalp, which Bain recalls as being Bauhaus-like, "tight and dynamic. Pete Kember hung around the band and took the role of manager for awhile. At the same time, I was in a band called Noise On Independent Street. I was the drummer and a pretty bad one, but we managed to get some songs together. It was a loose affair and didn't last long."

Nor did Indian Scalp. But while attending Rugby Art College, Pierce and Kember began collaborating musically. Pierce, though self-trained, was exhibiting traits akin to a prodigy's; Kember once described his bandmate as being able to "practically pick up any stringed instrument and play it." Whereas Kember was more of a willful primitive enamored with the possibilities of sound: "Bryan Gregory from the Cramps, those big sheets of feedback and fuzz, very minimal stuff. And John Cale to a certain extent, what he used to do with a viola-that sort of monotone-drone. The Rolling Stones' 'Satisfaction,' that minimalism and pure Troggery of that riff!"

Spacemen 3 had its beginnings around the tail end of 1982 in the spacious attic bedroom of Tim Morris, who'd been in Noise On Independent Street with Bain. Bain (now on bass) recalls that "the practices sounded great-when we were in tune!" Apparently, confidence was in no short supply, either; the young musicians adopted the habit of announcing to anyone who approached them, "We're spacemen," which in turn provided them with both an image and a name. (In an early Forced Exposure interview, Kember said that they'd had a poster for "The Spacemen," but as he hated the '50s pop band connotations, a new poster was designed to read, "Are your dreams at night 3 sizes too big?" The "3" stuck.)

"It wasn't long before we played gigs," says Bain, "the first at a very raucous house party that ended being broken up by police. The next two were at The Exchange, a grubby bikers pub. We played songs like 'Some Kind Of Love,' '2:35,' 'TV Eye,' 'Funhouse.' The first time wasn't too hot. Jason was shaking with nerves; Tim and myself hadn't ingested the same substances as the other two, and half the audience walked out. Jason said to me afterwards, 'We're gonna be big-the audience walked out of Alice Cooper's first gig, too!'"

The first incarnation of Spacemen 3 didn't last long, as Pierce left town for a different college. Bain and Morris formed a garage band called the Push and achieved some local popularity. Then Pierce returned to Rugby, hooking back up with Kember in early '84. The pair recruited Nicholas "Natty" Brooker to play drums; a demo session yielded embryonic but powerful versions of songs that would wind up on Spacemen 3's first two albums. The collision of bluesy melodicism and fuzztone overdrive was an alien, exciting sound emerging out of the dull British pop scene.

Bain soon returned to the fold and a new set of demos was recorded by the four-piece in January, 1986, in nearby Northampton. Soon enough, Glass Records offered a two-album contract, and the Spacemen went into a Birmingham studio and knocked out their debut LP, Sound Of Confusion, in five days.

This record (bearing the personnel credits "Peter Gunn, Jason, Bassman, N. Brooker") and its follow-up a few months later, the Walkin' With Jesus EP (Kember switching from "Peter Gunn" to "Sonic Boom" in the interim), defined the larger-than-life, fuzz/feedback/distortion, extended drone S3 sound, with epic translations of the 13th Floor Elevators' "Rollercoaster," the Stooges' "Little Doll" and a handful of equally brain-melting originals. Some of these originals were rewrites of/homages to existing material, like the one-chord thud of "O.D. Catastrophe," which used the Stooges' "TV Eye" as jumping-off point, and "Mary-Anne," a remake/remodel of the Misunderstood's "Just One Time."

Reviewers duly genuflected, as did shocked concert audiences caught off guard by the band's volume, the retro-psychedelic light show and what was perceived as a non-pop star stance; entire sets were frequently performed with the band seated on stools. (Later, Kember would demystify things in Forced Exposure: "I can hardly play guitar and don't understand a lot of chords and I always found it much easier to sit down and play.")

Antiheroes or not, the Spacemen grew quickly beyond cult status-and, on their second album, outgrew their heavy psych style that other groups like Loop and My Bloody Valentine had begun to emulate. In early '87, Spacemen 3 assembled at Rugby's VHF Studios to record what would be their classic LP. Shortly prior to rehearsals, drummer Brooker had been replaced by Stewart "Rosco" Roswell, and as luck would have it, VHF was about to upgrade from eight tracks to 16, so the four musicians agreed to help with the conversion under the provision that they could have unlimited time there. S3 basically moved in for several months, smoked many ounces of dope and recorded version upon version of their new songs to distill them down into ...

The Perfect Prescription: a concept album devoted to chronicling the inception, take-off, peak and plateau and, ultimately, the crash of a drug experience. An unqualified masterpiece of shimmering, beatific melodies, rhythmic/dynamic tension and stylistic contrasts, the record remains a favorite among all the members of the band. Pierce in particular remembers it as being "the first I wasn't writing songs that were based on anybody else's songs. So 'Walkin' With Jesus' was purely about what I was doing-I was kind of shocked to see the lyric written down, and, 'Hey, that's exactly what I was feeling! Yeah, I really want to do this, to write songs.'"

The LP also contained tributes to Lou Reed ("Ode To Street Hassle") and the Red Krayola ("Transparent Radiation"), and as Kember will quickly point out, during its tenure the band became infamous for the liberal plundering of its record collection in concert, with covers of the Godz ("Turn On"), Bo Diddley ("It's Alright"), Sun Ra-by-way-of MC5 ("Starship"), MC5-by-way-of-MC5 ("Come Together") and Suicide ("Che"). This influences-on-sleeves approach should have provided journalists with fertile fodder for inquiry, although the press tended to dwell more on Kember's open advocacy of drug usage.

"I'll tell you something," reflects Kember, "the one thing we did was make it clear where our influences lay. We were always honest about that. It only ever gave people some sort of point that they could relate to, sort of go, 'Well, maybe I should check that out because I like the stuff they're talking about.' I mean, I knew it was inevitable the interviewers were going to ask about the drug angle-you could tell by the looks on their faces they couldn't believe I would say such (pro-drug) things, thinking I couldn't imagine this stuff would wind up in print. So I would also (do things like) list bootlegs when they'd ask me my top 10 LPs. I'd pick the records that were influential on Spacemen 3, and at least a third of them were bootlegs, like Velvet Underground things that were only known by collectors. It was important to show what was interesting to the Spacemen; for example, a song like 'Sister Ray' done different ways, showing different sides to a song. We did that with our songs, too-play them different ways, mix up styles. Even our cover of the Krayola's 'Transparent Radiation' was after the version on Epitaph For A Legend, rather than the better-known one of Parable Of Arable Land; that was really important to us-and it almost became our own song through that! 'Losin' Touch With My Mind,' on Sound Of Confusion, was kind of a take on the Stones' 'Citadel,' from Satanic Majesties. But we were always honest about it. People could then go and listen to 'Citadel' and go, 'Oh, I can see that, but there's enough different about it, too.' We were original enough to add to our influences, so there was no need to be ashamed about it."

S3 moved into 1988, wowing audiences across Europe. One very stoned evening in February, at Amsterdam's Melkweg club, was captured on tape and issued as the Performance LP. Kember would later admit it was an off night, noting that cracks were already appearing in the band. First Roswell left, aspiring to become a guitarist. Then Bain quit as well. "I desperately needed to straighten myself out, so I reluctantly left," says Bain on his final days with the band. "Jason had asked me if I was leaving, but I couldn't say yes or no. He said, 'Yeah, it's not spiritually fulfilling is it?' and I guess that summed it up. I don't know-it took us a lot of work, but sometimes you lose faith in it all."

William "Willie" Carruthers replaced Bain, and S3 then recorded its third studio album, Playing With Fire. It appeared in early '89 and was immediately buoyed by the U.K. chart success of the preceding single, "Revolution." That tune's heavy riffage, however, stylistically diverged from the rest of the album-a subdued, hypnotic affair that was destined to become the blueprint for a new generation of ambient-drone space rockers.

With press hype for S3 at a peak, all bets were on the band (which had added drummer Jon Mattock to the lineup) to take America by storm in 1989. This was not to be the case, however. Says Greg Shaw, owner of California-based Bomp! Records, "Fire Records had acquired Glass and was looking for an American licensee for Playing With Fire, was talking dollar figures to other labels and (asked me) 'Could I come up with 10 grand?' I'd never spent that much money in my life! I borrowed it from my mother! Having the hottest record in England would create a completely new image for our label and show we could promote a new artist, because we were seen as an archive label. So we made the deal, released the record, helped organize this huge American tour-that was promptly canceled right on the eve because Jason and Sonic had this huge fight. They put up a good front right up until the last minute."

It's worth pointing out that in the wake of the Reagan era, the likelihood of a revolution-talkin'/drug-takin' band being allowed a U.S. work visa was slim. Admits Kember, "We had some drug convictions on our records. And then we had to supply our albums and press and stuff to sort of prove our case 'worthy.' It was very hard to find enough press that didn't have drug references."

By this point, too, further "problems" in the Spacemen 3 camp were accumulating. In a The Catalogue article on S3, Fire Records' Dave Bedford told the interviewer, "They're a great band ... They had two very strong, opposing personalities and opinions. Spacemen were more difficult than most because of having two people not really working together or speaking."

The final Spacemen days were at hand. In 1990, Recurring was issued. It was a literal document of a band splitting apart, with one side comprising Kember's five tunes and the other of Pierce's five. Personnel-wise, too, the band had become less of a self-contained unit; in addition to several friends helping out instrumentally, a third guitarist, Mark Refoy, was brought into the fold. Refoy, a longtime S3 fan, recalls he arrived "at the very tail end and only did two or three gigs with them. I went to a few of the Recurring sessions and put guitar tracks down. But things didn't last very long."

By the time the album appeared in the shops, the band would be gone. Kember had laid the groundwork for his escape via a solo album, Spectrum, recorded around the same time as the Recurring sessions and utilizing some of the same players (including Pierce). For his part, Pierce was already recording material for what would become his post-S3 project, Spiritualized, whose first single was a cover of the Troggs' "Anyway That You Want Me." This move served as the final nail in the coffin for S3; as Kember told The Catalogue, "Originally, we all knew we were going to split up after the album was recorded, pursue different projects and then reconvene in a year's time ... Then [Spiritualized] recorded 'Anyway That You Want Me,' which I'd suggested Spacemen 3 should cover (during the Playing With Fire sessions). There didn't seem to me any great need for them to show they could do it ... I basically said, 'OK, if you have all these ideas, then fuck off and do it.'"

Of the same incident, Pierce says, "Spacemen hadn't been on tour for a year and didn't look likely to, so Spiritualized needed some product to be able to go out on tour. What the press picked up on was that I left Spacemen 3 and took the band with me. What actually happened was those guys (Carruthers, Mattock and Refoy) left individually over a period of about seven months. But it seemed crazy to let them go because they were obviously attuned to what we were doing and creating those kinds of sounds, so I kind of followed them."

The simple truth was that Kember and Pierce had grown apart personally and ceased writing together professionally. That much is clear from statements Kember made at the time indicating he'd grown tired of sharing credit for songs he'd written "totally away from" Pierce. For his part, Pierce tends to agree, observing that the split had "mainly to do with songwriting. I'd had an agreement from the start of the band that I'd share songwriting credit. When we got to the third album, Pete started writing songs on his own, and it was the first time he'd tried to write and claim the credit. That's why the credits on [Playing With Fire] are kind of weird. (Only "Suicide" is a joint Kember/Pierce credit.) We tried to carry on, but the next album was very weird, recorded totally separately. At the end of the day, I wasn't prepared to have that kind of relationship with anybody in making music. And it seemed dumb to say, 'This is my song, and that is your song.' So, that was that."

Well, not exactly. As is often the case with defunct but highly regarded (and sellable) bands, Spacemen 3 lives on, courtesy of assorted reissues, archive projects and outright bootlegs. In fact, the discography of S3 and related bands has reached such labyrinthine proportions that it's taken a Web site to unravel all the minutiae. Compiled by S3 fan Chris Barrus, "The Spacemen 3 Archives" should clear up most questions S3 fans have, and it's appropriate to point out that a lingering source of friction between Kember and Pierce stems from the posthumous release aspect of the band's legacy.

In 1990, not long after the breakup, a bootleg S3 album appeared entitled Dreamweapon, which hailed from an unusual drones/tones '88 performance. Word had it that Kember himself had leaked the tapes to Fierce Records, which infuriated Pierce. (Interestingly, several years later Pierce would leak a live tape, possibly in retaliation, to Fierce; it became the Revolution Or Heroin bootleg.) Around this time, Sympathy For The Record Industry's Long Gone John struck up a relationship with Kember, who subsequently authorized Sympathy to issue S3's '84 Rugby demos (as For All The Fucked-Up Children Of This World) as well as an expanded version of Dreamweapon. Says Long Gone John, "When I put that out, Jason called me up and wasn't too happy about it: 'Man, I didn't get paid the first time around!' But he calmed down and asked me if I'd do a Spiritualized single. I said I'd love to-although I wasn't surprised the next time I talked to Sonic when he said that if I did anything with Jason, that was the end of our relationship."

Sympathy, of course, would go to the well with Kember numerous times over the years. Likewise, Bomp!'s Shaw struck his deal with Kember to release Spacemen material; Kember presented Shaw with six DATs, which have resulted thus far in two CDs-Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To (consisting of the '86 Northampton demos) and Spacemen Are Go! (recorded live in Europe in 1989). Although much of the rest of the material is live and tends toward redundancy, song-wise, Shaw says there are some amazing demos waiting to be heard. "Those from The Perfect Prescription were very cool and radically different from the released versions," says Shaw. "Sonic is an absolute perfectionist when it comes to mastering and putting together artwork, and we got as far as the artwork and even had a title, Call The Doctor."

Enter Space Age Recordings. The label was started by Kember and Gerald Palmer, the former manager of Spacemen 3 who legally owns the masters of all the Glass/Fire-era S3 material. But when Palmer got wind of the Call The Doctor project, things got litigious; to avoid a lawsuit and get the material released, Kember went into business with Palmer.

Pierce isn't overjoyed with the situation. "I can go back and look at stuff I was doing then, and I guess I don't mind it's out there," he says. "But it seems weird to get involved with something that is six or seven years old now. And I think Pete's quite content to do it how he's been doing it all along. He puts them out and he takes the money. But I haven't seen a cent from any of it."

Kember counters that he'd rather be involved than not: "If you're not (involved), it tends to come out anyway!"

Once the Prescription demos (rechristened Forged Prescriptions) are released, plus a possible similar project involving Playing With Fire demos and outtakes, Space Age plans to concentrate primarily on new projects.