Saturday Live

Spacemen 3 had a relatively brief existence and unless you were there from the start by the time you'd read about them in the NME or Melody Maker, seen them on Snub TV, picked up 1989's Playing With Fire and then begun to find other pieces of vinyl by them, they were gone. By the time of 1991's Recurring album it was over for the group, Jason and Sonic Boom/ Pete recording separately, one side of the album each. 

This footage on the internet is one of the few recordings of their gigs that exist, an hour of Spacemen 3 live at The Forum in Enger, Germany in 1989, transferred from VHS. 

The setlist is prime '89 S3, opening with their cover of The 13th Floor Elevators and then their cover of Red Krayola's Transparent Radiation, Sonic Boom on Vox Teardrop and fuzz, drummer Jon Mattock banging away, Jason brining his Velvet gospel Underground and bassist Will Carruthers locked in with both notes (his book Playing The Bass With Three Left Hands is a must read). This footage is grainy, close up and full of what made them great. 

Rollercoaster Transparent Radiation Things'll Never Be The Same Repeater (Break) Take Me To The Other Side Starship (intro) Starship Revolution Suicide Bo Diddley Jam

A Spacemen 3 Live In Europe came out in 1995, live recordings taken from four nights in Germany. Live, loose, ragged late 80s garage psychedelia.

Rollercoaster (Live In Europe 1989)

Revolution (Live In Europe 1989)

Take Me To The Other Side (Live in Europe 1989)

Playing With Fire

In his book Playing The Bass With Three Left Hands Spacemen 3's bassplayer Will Carruthers recounts the time a royalty statement arrived in the post, at a time when he was skint, and opening it to find out he had made the princely sum of £0.00. This is when he starts to open his eyes to music being a business, an industry, and not just some friends making music. He goes on to discuss the Spacemen 3 song Suicide, the only joint Kember-Pierce composition on Playing With Fire, a song Will points out the two men received royalty payments for writing- an instrumental, two note groove-drone, based on a Stooges riff (in itself ripped off an old blues riff), in tribute to Martin Rev and Alan Vega. That's how songwriting works. The song was agony for Will to play, his left hand clawed on the strings and neck of his Gibson Firebird bass. This version was included on the cd release of Playing With Fire, a live version recorded while they were on tour in The Netherlands. It is magnificent and as an extra you can feel Will's pain while it plays.

Suicide (Live)

Spacemen

I never saw Spacemen 3 play live. I bought Playing With Fire when it came out and was attending gigs in the period the group were active but for some reason our paths never crossed. I have recently got round to reading Playing The Bass With Three Left Hands, the memoirs of Will Carruthers, who spent a few years playing bass and taking drugs with Spacemen 3. The book is a must if you're a fan of the band or of the ones that came afterwards- Sonic Boom/Spectrum and Spiritualized.

Will is a gifted writer and there are two chapters that deal with the Spacemen 3 live experience in lurid detail. The first is a performance at an arts centre in Hammersmith billed as An Evening Of Contemporary Sitar. Will hits the one note groove early on and holds onto it for forty minutes or so while Pete and Jason do their thing. As the feedback rings out to close the set he leans to turn off his amp only to find he is so out of it he hadn't turned it on when starting. The set is recorded and released as one of the tracks on Dreamweapon. The cinemagoers and attendees of the gig are so horrified by the first set that Spacemen 3 are paid not to play their scheduled second set.

The second gig is a show in Chester, re-arranged to a health spa by the promoter, who also gives the group their first experience of E. A bunch of Ellesmere Port football fans turn up, not to beat the band up as they first think but to take drugs with Spacemen 3 and enjoy the music. The spa and it's facilities are thoroughly wrecked by the band and their fans. Will gives an honest, funny and at times bleak account of  outsider life in a small town in the Midlands, of the impact of being open about drug-taking on the band, their families and the people they know. He describes the recording of Recurring, with the band working on Pete and Jason's songs separately, the subsequent break up of the band and the divergence of Sonic and Jason into their post-Spacemen activities. It's out in paperback and available for less than a tenner and well worth picking up.

Sonic Boom (Pete Kember) has had the lower profile career of the two main men but his varied back catalogue since Spacemen 3 is full of one and two chord gems.  This one hits a blissed out organ tone early on and Pete's guitar ripples over the top of some celestial backing vocals.

True Love Will Find You In The End

Jason has gone on to Spiritualized, a group that have  recorded some of the most brilliant music of the last two decades. They can be prone to repeating themselves, but I've come to realise it's a act of refinement rather than just repetition. There's a new album out later this year and the lead song, I'm Your Man, is rather gorgeous.