Was Jason involved with this particular release, or was this entirely a hands-on project of yours? If that’s the case, has Jason had any comment to you about it?
No, it was my project in that sense. (Not to take away anything from the great work Jason put in originally, from which Forged Prescriptions is, of course, taken.) All the Spacemen 3 reissues are seen over by me to make sure everything is as good as it could be in the situation. Jason apparently isn’t interested in seeing that side of it maintained, although he never professed to. I was always the one who archived everything I could. And I’ve heard no comment from Jason about Forged Prescriptions, although I only tend to have [my] attention drawn to his more dubious comments about me. I hope I’m big enough to sideline my feelings about what happened at the end of Spacemen 3 and Jason’s role in that and give him the credit he is due for this. His songwriting, his singing, his guitar plus other instruments please me as much now as they did then. I’m very sad that we seem unable to communicate. I’ve had no real contact since the early ‘90’s. I don’t know—he is very hard, by his choice, to contact. That’s his choice, and fair enough. I do feel that I lost a great musical partner and friend. Along with the destruction of the band, it was pretty devastating for me. It’s a very large part of my life, not just something I do for kicks as an aside.

A few technical questions: Comparing this material to the original Glass LP and the Fire Records CD of Perfect Rx (as well as the Glass singles that had some different versions of album songs), it gets a little confusing, due to the similarity of some tracks. The liner notes you wrote indicate that Forged Prescriptions takes are all different from what wound up on The Perfect Prescription, so I wonder if you could maybe tell me a little about your selection criteria for Forged Prescriptions or perhaps pick a couple of the tunes and outline what you think are some of the key differences, either in instrumentation, types of overdubs, general vibe or whatever stands out in your mind as most significant?
Well, some versions are demos and quite different performances, like “Walkin’ With Jesus” and “Come Down Easy.” Others are different mixes with different elements in the mix, like “Ecstacy Symphony.” Then there are the outtakes and unreleased tracks. The main idea was not to present a disparate collection, but to present a “could also have been” situation on CD1. CD2 has less cohesiveness, as it features interesting outtakes, but tracks that are more for the interested fan than the newcomer, I guess. I think some of the versions are better, and some of the mixes of previous versions are better and more interesting. I had the benefit of hindsight in collecting this release together. That might have been dulled by months of intensive work on this back in ‘87, when working in order to meet a deadline. I do like this as much as the original release—if not more, and I’m pleased to see it coming out.

In your liners you noted that these “full guitar laden versions” were adjudged by the band to be too hard to do live, so they were “reduced for the original release.”
Yes, and some more guitar tracks were wiped at the time. Jason was in favor of more complex arrangements, but ultimately agreed we didn’t need to do it for the songs to work well, especially in a live situation, which was critical to us in ‘87.

I know from talking to you previously that you more or less had unlimited time in the VHF studio in Rugby to pretty much smoke dope, record tunes and lay around assessing what you’d done.
Hmmmmmmmmm... Dope and then some............ We had mattresses for the best possible recording and playback positioning. Some days we would just get blitzed and spend a day just listening to stuff and checking it out—in situ!, so to speak. Think of it like the testing done before releasing a new drug. Hahahaha...

What were some of the conversations that S3 had about the material? Were there battles over particular songs and segments, for example, or moments when everyone looked around the room and simultaneously said, “We’ve nailed it, gentlemen?”
We felt we were doing something different, especially in the climate of Thatcherite/Reaganite era politics. We knew it was what we were aiming for. At that time we had no real following and the record was not greeted with enthusiasm by the press in the U.K. But we felt there would be other people who felt like us out there—people who lived their lives like us. It could be seen as the antithesis of the yuppie. We certainly used to get a fair amount of stick locally for being different and going against the grain. Certainly, I think we hoped the renaissance that was washing in on a wave of ecstasy would be fertile ground for us. Religious, drug and sexual taboos were all areas that needed some comment from a more liberal source than was mostly heard back then.

Can a band get a sense that a masterpiece—as time, fans and critics will eventually adjudge—is in the making? Did you ever have that sense? In our 1996 conversation and as well as in your liner notes you suggest that this period for S3 was a genuinely communal one, musically speaking, and that everyone was firing on all creative pistons.
Yes. We were very proud of it—and a little dismayed, tho’ not surprised, to see it falter a little on first release. Speaking for Jason and myself, there was a healthy (at that point) collaboration and competition between us to deliver the goods and mainly for ourselves, but also for those we hoped would find it useful in their own lives.

Do you feel the band of the Perfect Rx era reached its potential as a live outfit? I know that Roswell and Bain left the band not long after, before Playing With Fire, indication perhaps that some cracks were already appearing in the molding, so to speak.
One left (Rosco), one was booted out. They were always less committed to it than Jason and myself, and they weren’t prepared to put in the practice and effort needed. They also ran away with themselves on tour, getting too drunk to play well and generally being “unsympathetic” to what we were doing. We became a better band with Will Carruthers and Johnny Mattock, in my opinion.

On Forged Prescriptions are three unreleased cuts, including a cover of MC5’s “I Want You Right Now,” which I think actually came out on the U.K. label sampler A Taste Of Third Stone. As for the other two, tell me a bit about recording the tune “Velvet Jam” ...
Well, it was a sorta Velvetsy jam that happened one day in the studio. We never really did anything with it. The tape ran out one-half way through. It’s got that Velvets-do-Booker T-type vibe. Just one sunny afternoon’s jam. Actually, it was dark in the studio for the lights, but between stints we’d sit in the sun and smoke and drink tea.

... and also tell me about your cover of the Spades’ [pre-13th Floor Elevators combo of Roky Erickson] “We Sell Soul.”
A great song. Again, something we messed with. It was never really properly worked out. A lot of people think it’s disparate from the rest of the stuff. I love it. Roky Erickson, Stacy Sutherland and Tommy Hall all wrote such great songs. Which reminds me of calling Mayo Thompson at the time working for Rough Trade to check the lyrics to [Red Krayola’s] “Transparent Radiation.” He didn’t remember the song at first, but I insisted on running the lyrics by him and he allayed my fears about some of the stranger lines. That’s one of my all-time favorite songs. If there’s one cover I do I wish I’d wrote ... I met Mayo eventually circa ‘96. He’s a good egg.

Has there ever been talk of a definitive boxed set going all the way back to the ‘84 demos (some of which came out on the Sympathy album For All The Fucked Up Children Of The World)? If so, what would be, to your best memory, some of the more interesting things that might crop up which have not to date surfaced on official releases?
Nothing. All the CDs have all the best stuff on them for the projects covered. Remember that our first two demos are released as well as pretty much all the demos from our second and third LPs. It’s really been covered, so putting them all in a box would feel dishonest to me. I hope our releases have ALWAYS been about value. We were disqualified from LP and single charts with our first two 12-inches due to the inordinately long programming. We were more interested in the effect of it and the inherent “value” than any chart placing. Apparently, “Transparent Radiation” was the longest 12-inch ever [more than 39 minutes long] until the Orb exceeded it in 1990.

And what about issuing live archival albums? This is becoming a popular means among bands, given Internet distribution, to satisfy fans while generating some none-too-shabby additional income.
Well, there are two already, Live In Europe and Performance. Perhaps some early live stuff—that is pretty devastating!—might see the light one day. I do have a lot of tapes...