Ecstasy In Slow Motion
Playing The Bass With Three Hands
Will Carruthers’ memoir, Playing The Bass With Three Hands (Faber & Faber, 2017) is dark, laugh-out-loud funny, insightful, inspirational, druggy, and brutally honest. It's also nearly impossible to put down. Carruthers is a hell of a storyteller, with his voice lifting off the pages and flowing into your mind's eye with crystalline clarity.
There’s really no need to be a fan of any of Carrtuthers’ bands 1 to enjoy the book. That said, it is a must-read for Spacemen 3 fans, if only for the hysterical chapter on the Dreamweapon concert, aka “A Night Of Contemporary Sitar Music.” 2
Playing The Bass… is so much more than just a look back at a “career” in music or yet another spill the dirt show-and-tell (though dirt, there is plenty of). Anyone who grew up in a go-nowhere town craving escape, be it via chemicals, music or otherwise, will be enthralled, as well as anyone who spent any time working a shit job (there’s one particularly horrifying chapter on that). The book also works as a perfect primer on the grim realities of how commerce corrupts art, and how unglamorous life on the road in a band on a limited budget can be.
Rating: Three thumbs up.
Will Caruthers crucially played in Rugby England’s Spacemen 3 (appearing on Playing With Fire, Dreamweapon, Live In Europe 1989, and Recurring) and Spiritualized (appearing on their debut album Lazer Guided Melodies). He also played with Spectrum, The Guaranteed Ugly, and The Brian Jonestown Massacre.
“I presume that the bright spark or cunning entrepreneur who had booked this ‘evening of contemporary sitar music’ had somehow seen (or heard about) Sonic and Jason Pierce’s previous excursion into drones and ‘sitar’ music at an acid party in London, when a suitably inebriated person might easily have been ecstatically transported to the banks of the Ganges. It might have been quite possible for that person to imagine they were hearing some fabulous type of ‘contemporary’ sitar music, especially if they had never seen or heard a sitar before. Anyway, somebody had pitched the upcoming evening at Watermans Art Centre in Brentford, west London, as something it really wasn’t, and the artistic overlords who ran the venue were satisfied with what they thought they were going to get. What they were going to get was not anything that any scholar of music would consider to be sitar music, whether it came from today, yesterday or sometime in the future. We had drones, but we had no sitars. We sat … but we did not sitar. It could have been billed, just as accurately, as an evening of contemporary hurdy-gurdy and bagpipe music, but that might have scared some timid souls away.” -excerpt from Playing The Bass With Three Left Hands by Will Carruthers (published by Faber & Faber, 2017).