Spacemen 3’s Will Carruthers Releases Memoir

Spacemen 3 bassist Will Carruthers has a new memoir. Playing the Bass With Three Left Hands came out September 1 on Faber & Faber. Yesterday the Guardian published an excerpt, which you can read here. In it, he recounts Spacemen 3’s appearance at an “evening of contemporary sitar music,” for which they’d been booked despite not having sitars. The book tells the story of Spacemen 3’s rise and implosion, before the group segued into Spiritualized. 

In the Guardian’s excerpt, Carruthers describes the band’s plan to play drones at the sitar concert:

“Just play one note,” Sonic had advised us as we travelled down to the M1. “Keep it simple. One note. No fancy stuff.” By “fancy stuff” he meant two notes. Anything beyond that was pointless.

We could play one note … mostly. Anyone could do it. A monkey could do it. But could a stoned monkey do it with feeling and without losing its sense of identity in the glorious all-enveloping om?

After successfully completing the show—spoiler alert!—Carruthers realises his amp hadn’t been plugged in. “A monkey could have done what I had just done,” he concludes. “A non-existent monkey could have done it.”

Read the excerpt here.

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