The boys in the support band

Apart from the constant sexual harassment by the MD and his bumtastic   Jonathan King type colleagues, being on a major label weren't all that bad. The recording industry is a corrupt beast, backhanders and sexual favours the common currency within its nefarious machinations.

For a spankingly handsome band like ourselves this can have it's advantages.

 I'm not exactly sure who blew who, what grimy wanks and sordid fiscal buggerisations went down behind the scenes but almost overnight we spunky little Love Reactors went from playing The Grim Smegma rock bar in Camden to supporting super big rocktastic rock band The Motor heads on their  Orgasmatron tour.

Now I wouldn't say I was a particular fan of The Motor heads but I found   the singer, a Mr Kilminster's badass persona quite endearing.

Mr Kilminster had contrived a kind of WWF good bad guy kind of image, cowboyish with a heavy dollop of biker camp thrown in for extra sauce.

It was a good look, a lot of people thought it was real, but I'd been to art school so naturally I could spot a poser a mile off.

It takes one to know one as the saying goes.

Mr Kilminster was a decent chap. I knew he would be, a little old fashioned in his gentlemanly manners perhaps, hence the bombastic nature of his public disguise, but a genuine fellow of sorts, all the same. 

I noticed a slightly feminine side to Mr Kilminster that is not often remarked upon, his immaculately turned out tough guy image which ..r inspection turns out to be a tad more Alan Ladd than Clint Eastwood. The neatly pressed kerchief, the immaculately ironed cowboy shirts and tight rayon pants, not to mention the intricate detail of the fancy Mexican boots, the dyed hair and sideys.

A little more line dancing than desperado if you know what I mean.

 I think possibly dressage would be more appropriate than riding the range for this sharp dressed man.

But this is by no means any attempt to detract from the mans natural abilities at the rocking and the rolling, most if not all great rocking and rollers have a whiff of the Lavender about them, just look at the girly outrage of Ms Jagger for instance and the tonsorial extravaganza that is Ms Little Richard. 

It never fails to amuse me how this aspect of heavy rock music is always overlooked by its hordes of fiercely heterosexual aficionados.

During the early days we supported quite a few of these faux-macho superstars and not one of these muscular dandies nor their audiences for that matter used to find anything slightly suspect about their bigboy heroes prancing around the place in bulgy spandex screaming out their soprano operettas about neurotic sex.

Guns and Roses for instance, Axl  belting around the stage in a pair of extremely tight leather trousers with the actual bottom part of them cut out. 

"Do you think he knows what he looks like?" A perturbed looking Stargazer queried from the side of the stage 

"What do you mean?" I  answered, knowing exactly what the uncomfortable guitarist was talking about as he stood as far away as humanly possible from such a distatsteful display of male arse "The cheeky trouser thing" I continued.

"The sodomy chaps, yes" Came Stargazers gruff reply, wondering exactly what kind of band these Guns and Roses fellows were after all.

"Oh Axl knows what he's doing" I reassured my forcefully heterosexual guitar player "Apparently very young girls and gay men share remarkably similar tastes in sexual matters'

"What, fisting!" Spluttered a shocked Cobalt, spraying manly beer all over the place.

"No, no, good fellow, not the fudge packing business dear boy, I was referring to the  display element you silly sausage. The things our homosexual friends consider attractive in a young man, cute bottoms, tight jeans, you know, like Take That, that kind of thing appeals to teenage girls as well so I'm told"

"Take That didn't wear trousers with no arses in them" Cobalt retorted, still not convinced.

"Oh I don't know, maybe it's something to do with all the Lithium the poor boy takes, I understand the lads a little unstable" I offered, trying to placate the beefy guitarist

"Nobodies that unstable.." Harrumphed strait-laced Cobalt stomping backstage to find his hairspray.

Not all the bands we supported had bottomley tendancies however, though thinking about it, Iron Maidens He-man outfits, sort of Conan meets Rob Halford they kind of….hmm yeah, well, enough of that.

Paul Dianno for instance, no one could level any shirtlifterish accusations at that colossus of rocktasticness, his heterosexual credentials were up there with the Yorkshire rippers.

Of all the acts, Alice Cooper included, that the Love Reaction supported, Mr Dianno beyond any shadow of anyones doubt was and is by far the most impressive on any level anyone cares to mention.

Paul Dianno quite simply is rock.

The man truly does not give a fuck, about anything or anyone, including, especially including; himself.

Forget your erstsatz hard livers like Audie Murphy Lemmy and Guns and   Axl, Dianno was the total bollocks, rock with a capital C.

It is quite criminal how this mans awesome talent has been neglected over the years, I personally believe he possesses one of the greatest if not the best  rock voices ever, up there with Mr Ian Gillan and Mr Robert Plant .

Mr Dianno possesses something that the career rockers, the hired tonsils like the David Coverdales and the Bruce Dickinsons will never have.

 Soul.

A corrupt, genuinely demonic soul, but soul all the same.

Mr Dianno in the truest and most old fashioned way genuinely has and some would say still is paying his dues.

And I'm sure if you asked him, the battered spitfire himself would tell you if you could get anything resembling a coherent sentence out of him that is, that that's the way he likes it.

Of all the bands we've had the privilege or the misfortune to support I think it was Paul and his band Killers that were the only ones that really won our respect and downright admiration.

The rest I'm afraid, even the Motorheads, compared to Mr Dianno  were as Paul would put it fucking lightweights.

Mr Paul Dianno, The Love Reaction, in our leather trousers, we salute you.

Adios Kid Chaos.

Obviously we couldn't see it at the time.

But with the dubious benefit of that ugly four eyed beast; hindsight, it was obvious that things were going horribly wrong.

Horribly, bumshiveringly, terribly, excruciatingly, wrong.

 I'm referring of course to our dreadful visit to Richard Branson's opulent recording studio, The Manor, and it's subsequent repercussions.

God, even the name, The Manor, what does it conjure up? 

Horrible visions of charmless David Coverdale sitting in the back of a Bentley enjoying cognac and cigars doing energy work with his attractive young ambience roadie.

Elton John and Freddie Mercury giggling like schoolgirls, throwing faux Marie Antoinette parties, hoovering up state lines of cocaine and buggering newspaper delivery boys dressed up as poodles.

Well, maybe not the poodle bit, but you know what I mean.

That whole bogus rock aristocracy theme, buying up stately old piles that the genuine aristocracy had wisely abandoned and lording it over the bemused local bumpkins. Autistic millionaire rock monkeys dressing up in 1930's tweedy things, shooting semi flightless birds and driving rollers into swimming pools. That or trying to save the starving of Africa through some psychopathic personality ego aberration charity thing and wondering why every one else in the world thinks that there a complete and utter tosser.

You know what I'm talking about.

So what were your low life heroes doing in this belly of this beast in the first place you may ask?

Well the truth was that we had been offered the Devils coin, we had signed a recording contract with a major label, Phonogram to be precise, and like a thousand young Faustian rockers before us and a thousand more to come no doubt, we thought that we were different, somehow thought that we were the ones that somehow would be able sidestep the payback and keep our delicate unspoiled souls intact. 

Unfortunateley it doesn't work like that.

Your soul is not purchased outright but in ever increasing payments, one small piece at a time.

Our trip to the Manor was the first temptation.

From Scumbag alley to Sir Richards private little Zoo.

Phonogram had booked us into the Manor with producer Steve Brown to work on demos for our first album.

Steve was the first and not the last producer we would find it impossible to work with. This in all fairness I hasten to admit was more our fault than his, Mr Brown had and still does produce great records with all kinds of bands, but just not with this curmudgeonly little outfit.

Mr moneybags producer boy turned up in his humongous Kensington tractor, dripping hideously expensive Johnson's leathers, the real wanky ones with too much chrome detail and ghastly tassels. Rich boy wanna-be rocker gear, the kind of tat that Jagger and Bono wear. 

First impressions are important, I mean you would have thought he would have made a little effort, The Love Reaction, did we look like we would be impressed by big cars and rockish bling. Well, it was the eighties I guess, and it did impress one of our members, a particularly ignoble bass player whose heart proved to be slightly the wrong shade of black, but more of that later.

It eventually turned out that Phonogram were determined that we were to be the English version of Bon Jovi, I know, I nearly shat my pants laughing as well when I found out, and for poor unfortunate Steve that was his task, to take this unwashed scumbag alley mess of drug and alcohol problems and turn them into an international rocktacular success.

For two weeks he persevered, making us run through the songs over and over again, bringing in session musicians and backing singers, whole fucking negro spiritualist choirs to wail away on Holy gasoline at one stage if I remember correctly.

 The thing was that the incredible opulence, the swimming pool, the trout lake, the brothel and funfair in the grounds of the manner, the promises of fabulous wealth if we just got our heads down, gave up any artistic integrity that we thought we had, castrated ourselves, got a bath, stopped swearing for five minutes and maybe didn't have whiskey for breakfast and maybe made a record that sounded a bit like Bon Jovi was never going to happen.

That record wasn't in us, old Scratch himself could offer us the moon itself on a silver platter and we wouldn't be able to give him it.

Steve eventually threw his hands up and gave up but not before himself and his satanic masters wrought a major blow upon the core of the Love Reaction soul.

As I said earlier there was one among us whose head was turned by the Devils silver.

Kid Chaos had been impressed by Steves Satanic bling and had cultured a creepy kind of friendship with Cult producer Mr Brown.

Although Haggis was a mere slip of a girl at eighteen years old, the little snake knew what he wanted.

And what he wanted of course as any stupid fucking eighteen year old hick wandering into Las Vegas or Hollywood or The Manor wanted was that same hoary old chestnut the Devils been selling at the crossroads since Robert Johnson and beyond; a short cut to wealth and fame. 

 Kid Chaos left the band to join the Cult a week after we left the Manor.

 It took us twenty years for us to forgive him.

Twenty years and more tears than anyone deserved to shed over such a banal and facile answered prayer.

The Love Reaction?

They did prevail.

U n d e r w h e l m e d

A lot of people find it a little strange when they visit my London penthouse here on the banks of the Fleet. I don't mean all the guns and knives I have lying around all over the place or even the underage girls draped languidly across the furniture. The thing that seems to puzzle my guests most seems to be the lack of any recorded music in my possession.

It's true; I don't posses a single CD or any form of equipment on which to play one even if I did.

I guess it was when I started making music myself that the habit faded. When you're wrestling around with a guitar riff, reshaping it, bending it this way and that and trying to find words that not only rhyme but make some sort of nonsense in a poetic way the last thing you want do is to listen to   some other fuckers stab at glory.

Listening to music in a recreational way just didn't work anymore. 

Instead of grooving along to your favourite songs you'd find yourself analysing the sounds, wondering about gated reverbs and bpm's, string arrangements, drum samples and guitar effects, all the boring shit that never used to trouble you when you just used to play along with your air guitar. That fantastic one with the strings that never broke and that never went out of tune, the one that seemed to know all the notes even to Frank Zappa solos.

The phrase a busman's holiday springs to mind. 

 It wasn't always this way, way off in my pre Zodiac days I wouldn't say I ever owned a vast collection of records, not in the John Peel, mental illness, obsessive compulsion kind of way, but it did fill up a good couple of shelves.

The usual early seventies rock collection, Purple, Sabbath, Zeppelin, the pioneers of heavy blues influenced rock stuff, lyrically anyway, especially Zeppelin. I mean you could barely recognize those old blues riffs beneath all the distortion and reverb but they were there. The lyrics however really gave that blues game away, and that was where the problem lay for me. I didn't know what the fuck they were on about. All that hanging around crossroads, squeezing lemons till mojos fell out of your arse. And as for Zeppelins Mr Plant himself, wanting to be my backdoor man? What the fuck was that all about? 

Of course all these sexual innuendos which confused me at the time seem pretty obvious now, well nearly all of them, I'm still a little unsure about all those backdoor men sniffing around but to a barely pubescent lad back in the seventies it was just as well that the riffs were great because the lyrics were far too disturbing.

Then along came Alice with some healthy murder and violence.

 Alice threw off all those blues chains that proved the stumbling block to really digging all those groovy riffs; here were lyrics that didn't increase my frustration and confusion.

Sex and all its perturbations were too damn close to home for a pubescent lad struggling with all those weird hormonal things, songs illustrating these discomforts and frustrations just made things worse.

 Alice's songs were escapist, fantasy stuff, and horror movies, anything except that hideous monster that plagued your trousers every waking moment.

Of course I didn't realise at the time that Alice's songs were actually far worse, involving all kind of Freudian sublimation crap, the sex had just gone weirdly under cover.

Only when the great man himself decided to cover one of my own songs did I realise this. I mean, Feed my Frankenstein, come on, how more subliminally freako sex pervoid can you get, Meet my libido, he's a psycho, Freudian baby or what?

But enough of this, analysing ones own songs is far too dangerous, besides that's the job of the analyst and the rock critic and I wouldn't want to put those valuable contributors to society out of a job.

I'll just get down to what people generally want to know about the whole Alice thing. How did he get to cover the song? What was he like etcetera?

I only met Alice the once, his producer Pete Collins had come across the song on the Hoodlum thunder Album and thought it would be ideal for the grand old ghoul himself, what with the scary monster angle and everything.

It was quite weird when I heard Alice's version. Alice Cooper imitating me imitating him, very odd. I wasn't too happy about the lyric being changed, the surrealist references to Rene Oppenheimers fur teacup   for instance. Maybe Alice's people thought it might have been a bit over Johnny Rocks head or something, or maybe they just thought it was too dirty, I mean it was a pretty blunt muff diving metaphor, and this was still in a pretty pre internet time where record companies were still bending a little too far forward for radio stations. "Greasy fingers down, your dirty spine, ice cream cone…" No Alice, no! I would never have written such banalities.

But those petty quibbles aside I was genuinely thrilled when Alice decided to record it, even more thrilled when it appeared on Wayne's world.

As far as I was concerned that was it, job done, something to tell the grandkids, Alice Cooper the Grandfather of ghoul rock had recorded a classic record penned by your very own ghoulish grandpa' kind of thing.

I didn't particularly want to meet the old bastard.

More than that I didn't want to upset him, I mean I was obviously going to be under whelmed and I didn't want my childhood hero to register the disappointment that would inevitably be in my eyes.

I'd been on the receiving end of that one far too many times and I don't know, it just kind of bums you out.

Some young kid comes backstage to meet you and it's always squirmingly embarrassing, the poor bastards are invariably let down.

The larger than life character they imagine you to be turns out to be just some four-eyed cunt sat there dishevelled in his underwear.

Fortunately Alice wasn't quite as bad as I usually am.

I was led backstage at Wembley to meet his Grimness where I was introduced to some late middle-aged guy in leather trousers about to go onstage and do his job. We shook hands mumbled pleasantries, he offered me one of his cucumber sandwiches and that was it.

Pretty much as I expected really, so I wasn't too disappointed.

Except I must admit there was a part of me that had been hoping he would be back there shagging dead bodies, out of his gourd on Jack Daniels with half a dozen dead babies skewered all over the place, but you know, you cant have everything.

Maybe next time some little kid in a wheelchair comes backstage to meet the Love Reaction and get some autographs I'll arrange for a bunch of strippers to be hanging around sucking us all off or something, offer the kid a dig of smack and a toot on the crack pipe, make the little fuckers day.

"Fuck man, yeah, know what I'm sayin? Motherfucker just starts laying into me with his goddamn fucking acoustic…" said Slam, our drummer from way back.
"What? The fucker hit you with his Gibson?" Replied Cobalt, obviously more concerned about the damage to the classic guitar than our drummers head injuries.
"The bastard smashed me in the teeth for no fuckin' reason...' continued the traditionally intellectual, Canadian drummer, checking out his hideous shiner in the mirror.
The previous evening had seen Slam drinking heavily and conversing intelligently at Nasty Hanoi Rocks Suicides gaff.
"Well you must have said something" added Cobalt " I mean guitarists don't just use classic vintage Gibson's like fucking baseball bats for no reason, no matter how fucking pissed they are " vintage, classic Cobalt was genuinely perplexed.
"Nothing man, I swear, well…" continued the wounded drummer, the clicks and whirrs of his memory circuits almost audible as he tried to make sense of the previous evenings debauch. "I don't know maybe it was the comments I made about the blues being a load of over rated crap, I don't know man, the mother just like, kicked off"
I started laughing as Slam continued his tale "The fucker was bullshitting on about the blues being some kind of musical heritage horseshit, some bogus John Peel, Andy Kershaw shite, ranting on about a bunch of fuckers called Blind Spinabifida Melonbox and Fat Arse Muddybelly, I don't know, weird black fuckers with strange names. He kept putting on all these scratchy 78's as well man, croaky old bastards singing about mojos, black cat bones, snakes moaning and stuff, Then like, the mental motherfucker just laid into me, whammo, knocked me over the fuckin' table, pole axed me with his stupid fucking guitar"
I kind of got the drift.
A musical heritage/social history discussion type thing that had succumbed inevitably to alcohol and general rockboy stupidity.
To understand this sort of pathetic rock train spotting rubbish you had to go way back to the early sixties and that handful of namby-pamby public school boy Nigel's who, armed with a few crappy old American import records, changed the face of popular music as we know it.
Well that's what these ancient anoraks and their journalistic DJ friends would have us believe anyway.
Like my good drummer Slam, I never bought it either.
It's a good story though, Mick and Keith, Lennon and McCartney, Jimmy Page and the other one that looks like Nigel Tufnell, (I think he means Jeff Beck-Sparklepants) all sitting around in grungy Soho /Hamburg wankdens changing the face of popular music with their funny little record collections.
I remember during my formative years when the sonic crunch of a Gibson Les Paul punished through an overdriven Marshall bit me hard and how much I loved the noise.
Naturally I needed to know more about the rock gods that were producing this epiphanous racket and where it came from. I scoured the rock comics of the day and hung on every semi literate interview, every word dribbled from their slack, inarticulate jaws.
Amongst the tales of drunkenness, drugs and groupies, they would occasionally mention the music.
This Blues thing kept being mentioned. Something about the Deep South. The Mississippi delta, old black guys with funky, spooky names like Lightning Hopkins, Lead Belly, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, and one that was revered above the rest, the legendary Robert Johnson. Some crazy bastard who'd sold his soul to the devil for a bunch of guitar licks or something, which in a thirteen year old boys estimation, more than made up for his lack of a far out moniker.
It seemed to be some bizarre competition with these early rockers to see who could find the most obscure record by an old black man sitting on his plantation, getting whacked on moonshine, singing about his troubles with a rotten old bastard called the man and a mean polecat woman who rolled jelly and left him every morning when he woke up.
Obviously to a thirteen year old from Armley, this stuff sounded the bollocks. I was constantly in trouble with my old man and if I ever did manage to find a mean polecat woman who rolled jelly well I was pretty sure she would leave me every morning as well.
Tracking down blues records circa 1972 in Armley might not have been as difficult as it was in 1920's Richmond where Mick and Keith reputedly found their treasured source, but it was no cakewalk either.
Gilbert and Roberts Hi-Fi shop on Armley Town Street eventually did manage to find me some old compilation thing, the sound of the Mississippi delta blues or something. The sleeve had loads of writing on it and a picture of a fat old black guy, obviously bladdered, with a banjo.
It didn't look promising.
To say I was disappointed when I placed these legends of the blues on my turntable was the understatement of that week.
I don't know what I expected but it wasn't this fucking shit.
Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Black Sabbath it certainly wasn't.
A bunch of reedy old fuckers with shitty acoustic guitars, mouth organs, banjos and busted old pianos that they couldn't even play properly, recorded in what sounded like a plantation toilet.
Not an electric guitar to be heard.
I was devastated, thought that my rock heroes were taking the piss, how could they possibly say that this fucking toilet music was what had influenced them, Big Bill Broonzy my fucking arse.
Obviously they were either on some higher musical plane than me or it was all the cosmic space dust they were snorting.
Years later of course, unlike dear Slammy boy, I did make the connection.
I figured out that Robert Planet wasn't literally squeezing a lemon down his trousers and that the blues wasn't an instrumentation, chord progression or even weird tuning thing either.
It was far more than that copying shit that all those white boys got up to into the sixties.
It was and is a living breathing thing, which is as alive now as ever it was back in those plantation days.
Blues for me has to do with attitude and rhythm, something about rising above your shitty situation and the bum deal life has handed down to you and not wallowing in it.
50 cent and his gangsta brethren sound a hell of a lot more like genuine bluesman to me than Eric Clapton down at his dumbass Kensington crossroads ever fucking could.
I mean what was a plantation anyway if it wasn't a ghetto.

The Seven Deadly Bassisms

 

A theory  first formulated in the seminal drummers biography Stool Pigeon by profound percussional thinker Robbie Vomm purported that depending on the instrument they play, members of bands usually share similar personalities and character traits. 

The scholarly drummer for instance had suggested that all singers tended to be prima donnas who vastly overestimated their own talent and proportionally undervalued the talents of their band mates.

Lead guitarists shared similar if not identical character flaws hence the continual antagonism between these two primary egocentric players.

Drummers of course were usually the most well balanced members, the heart, soul and intellectual bedrock of a band.

Bassists according to the unbiased drummer tended to be musical imbeciles who, unable to play a proper guitar, six strings being two more than they could count, had settled upon the simpler four string configuration of the bass guitar.   

Whilst conceding that his theories were by and large quite accurate concerning singers and guitarists I wasn't sure about the drumming genius's curt dismissal of that complex beast; the bass player.

 Over the years the Love Reaction have enjoyed playing with no less than seven bass players and in my observation each one resembled a snowflake, superficially they all appear identical but in themselves they are quite unique.

Take Haggis, Kid Chaos for instance, a young man who should never have picked up such a brutal instrument as the rumble hammer.

Haggis was a complicated, sensitive boy from the Welsh valleys who worried far too much about money and members of the opposite sex to play such a brutal instrument.

After leaving the Love reaction the sensitive lad spent a few years in the wilderness playing with various amateur bands until he eventually found himself pursuing a far more appropriate career for a lad of his sensibilities.   The ambitious misogynist is currently training in the US to become a plastic surgeon which will enable him to slice up women legally and get paid huge amounts of money for doing so, thus killing two birds with one fell swoop of a scalpel you might say. 

The next amiable buffoon to pick up the four stringed stumbling block to vast wealth and happiness came along as somewhat of a job lot with his   musical colleague Flash Bastard.

The two of these laughing boys couldn't have been more different.

Flash; a parsimonious, whippet-like ingrate of a fret scrabbler and

Trash D Garbage; a frothing Falstaff of a man, as generous in nature as he was in trouser size, the complete opposite of his dubious friend Flash.

Mr. Garbage was a fellow who loved life so much it could, and often did, make him physically sick.  No rider or female fan was safe from the rollicking appetites of this girthtastic y-front Lotharios gargantuan sensuality.

A spectacular thrusting leviathan of enthusiastic sex and buckets of Kentucky fried chicken was our jolly purple giant Trash D.Garbage.

A prince among bass players.

Unfortunately good things don't last and for old Trash boy his stint at the trough was over almost as soon as it began. The hungry bassists appetite for fine whiskeys and food almost bankrupted the band and we had to let the flatulent gigolo go.

The rocking bon vivant was last spotted eating a cream cake whilst driving an unlicensed mini cab under the influence.

Bass player number three was a dark horse indeed.

The man known only as Raven.

Unfortunately this epitome of sobrieties stay with the Love reaction was very short. After a brief run in with the Brazilian mafia (don't ask, The Dons daughter if you must, but like I said, don't.) the avian bass man returned to play his instrument for his regular band, the Al Quaida house band; Killing Joke.

We didn't ask and we didn't argue.

Bass player number four, quickly; Suzy X. Ah, gentle Suzy, the loved up reject from the second summer of Love. 

A bass player to give bass players a bad name.

Of course all of this wasn't the poor little drug addicts fault entirely, his drugs of choice, ecstasy and industrial quantities of skunk, they

, had a lot to do with it.

Suzy and his attendant mental illnesses were the closest the Love Reaction ever came to Rave culture. I know, Iknow. A bleak, wasted time when ordinarily savvy and intelligent men succumbed to the moronic   gorilla stomp   and its wuffling basslines that repeated forever and ever and ever until the drug wore off. A tragic time when white boys thought that shuffling from one foot to the other whilst gurning and   making psychotic semaphore signals with their hands was actually dancing.

For me it was something like Trench warfare, keeping my head down until those chemically altered Manchester united fans retreated back to their piss stained football terraces and abandoned any pretensions they had towards making music of any description.

It was a long war, somewhere during it Suzy sneaked into our trench with an Akai sampler to try and subvert The Love Reaction to the enemies cause.

A fifth columnist trying to undermine the fine satanic rock of evil that we had made our lives work.

Suzy was the second bass player we lost to that dreadful debilitating lovey dovey cocktail of E's and spliff. The first one, Youth. I can barely bring myself to talk about.  A man with excellent satanic credentials, a founder member of Satanic Al Quiada supremos Killing Joke for fucks sake, till the smiley medaled, tie dyed Manchester united supporters captured him and force fed him ecstasy and stomped on his mojo. The poor bastard ended up producing lovely peace sensitive type boy bands with pianos and singers who keep their eyes closed while singing.

The last anyone heard of Youth, the Love reactions first bass player, he was in India making shed loads of money and attending tai chi  flower arranging lessons.

 Truly, a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.

We did eventually find a bass player to match our own fine brand of moronicism in Tex Diablo but alas Tex's particular moronicism outreached even ours, his nemesis and downfall was of course his own priapic fault, aren't they always.

Tex Diablo, what a guy. The chump to end all chumps.

Any one familiar with the soap opera that is the career of The Love Reaction will be well aware that one of our favorite ways to pass the time in between making recordings and playing the worlds finest shitholes is to mercilessly rip the piss out of each other. Chumping we call it.

Well as I said Tex's moronicism outshone even our own and the Mexican halfwit somehow even managed to chump himself.

I mean most guys who manage to pup a millionaires daughter and is offered a place on easy street for the rest of his life, well I don't know about you, but me and Cobalt man, we'd be round there ordering up a new plasma screen TV and sending out for a takeaway straight away. But not the brains from El Paso, oh no. The Latino genius man he hits the highway, vamoose baby, "No cheek she tie me down maan, no way, even eef she do look like Jennifer Lopez man, ass an' everything.." The last sighting of old Texy boy is some cctv footage just outside of Houston holding up a taco bell and making off with two hundred bucks and a big bag of burrito supremes, with everything on them.

Cobalt got a postcard form Acapulco, something about him diving off the cliffs like Elvis, we never saw or heard from him again.

 His little bambino man, as well, looks just like him, gold tooth, greasy black hair, stubble, everything.

Which brings me neatly round to the seventh brave man to pick up the four strings of doom for the Love Reaction.

It's early days yet and the man can sure hammer those frets.

 I ain't saying nothing yet hombre, but from what I've seen it looks like the boy has something very dangerous in those leather trousers of his…let's just hope it doesn't trip him up.

We'll see..

Piss Christ

"Why don't you write about the Reading festival gig?" Texted Sparklord Sparklepants, your webmaster and inspirational conduit for these obscure texts "A lot of your fans will have that album" he added.

I scratched my balls, lit a fag and thought about the two of you.

I was immediately under the impression that, like most things, I couldn't remember anything at all about it.

And then I remembered the incident.

The Piss Christ incident.

Probably the most sublime, transcendental incident that has ever happened during a love reaction gig.

It was witnessed by almost sixty thousand people but I think only three of us actually saw it.

This incident, once recalled kind of opened some strange door of memory and the whole day stuttered back into recall.

I'll get to the incident later, but first a few other things regarding that strange day in Reading in I987.

We were some way near the high end of the bill, but not that high as it was still daylight when we took to the stage. Alice Cooper was headlining I believe, though I cant be sure.

Motorhead weren't on the bill. But old Uncle Disgusting himself Herr Lemmy was prowling around in the backstage swamp area, his white clogs, despite the ankle deep mud as spookily pristine as ever.

We were allocated, like all the other bands a small caravan loaded with beer and bourbon which we painfully tried to avoid drinking until after the gig, despite popular belief to the contrary, the Love Reaction never perform, even to this day, bladdered.

After the gig, well, that's another story.

 An hour or so before our slot Lemmy called by to bum us out and give us some bad advice, I  don't know why he does this, maybe he derives some weird kind of pleasure out of it or something.

The gnarled one drank half a litre of our bourbon, tried to put us off our set and then stumbled off back into the mud, his clogs not quite as pristine this time.

Next in to unsettle us was a member of The Satanic Belligerents outlaw motorcycle club, the humongo manbeast strode into the dressing room and demanded to know if JJ Karate from The Throttlers was hiding in there.

He wasn't but the Belligerent one checked the toilet just in case. 

Our nerves as you can imagine, were starting to jangle, not only did we have to appear in front of the biggest crowd we'd ever played to, but we were being given bad advice from his Lemmyness and being accused of harbouring a transgressive Throttler. 

What JJ had exactly done to piss of The Satanic Belligerents MC we never did find out.

The hour rolled by and the bell tolled.

I stood in the wings and surveyed the enemy.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Sixty thousand tanked up Beavis and Buttheads.

The stage was drenched in piss and electricity.

This was way back in the eighties, festivals weren't quite as well organized as they are these days.

Simple things like toilets were often overlooked.

The punters as some kind of of dirty protest would fill their empty two litre bottles of beer with piss and hurl them at the performing bands.

"What are all those broken records all over the stage Cobalt?" I said worriedly to the Stargazer, noticing the razor sharp shards of plastic swept into piles at the side of the stage "Some bright fucker from the Melody maker has been giving out free promotional records to the punters" replied the guitarist, fastening his German helmet securely

"And they're throwing them at the bands?" I said nervously

"That's right" He answered, "Here, put this on" He continued, handing me a crash helmet "And watch out for the glass bottles"

I could see Lemmy out of the corner of my eye, smiling, he was loving this, he wasn't playing.

 Cobalt crashed out the first chords and we ran onto the stage, the first thing that hit me was a dead rabbit full in the face and then I saw the piss bottles.

Dozens of them spinning out of the sun and exploding all over the stage.

Crashing into the cymbals, splitting open, piss splashing everywhere.

The crowd were literally baying for blood; it was more World War one than rock and roll, razor sharp records, hellish Frisbees coming in at deadly angles bouncing off of my crash helmet. And then it came, the weirdest thing I've ever had thrown at me, a dead fucking fox, some unfortunate road kill cart wheeling out of the sky and splattering bloodily across the monitors.

What kind of fucking gig was this?

I remember wondering if George Michael ever got this kind of shit. 

I loped to the side of the stage for a breather during one of the Stargazers solos, totally shell-shocked and covered in fox blood and punter piss.

"Just fucking tell 'em Zed" Said wing lurking Lemmy, that shit eating sly grin of his all over his face, I should have fucking known "Tell them what?" I said, desperately. "Tell them that if they don't stop chucking shit at you, that you're going to walk off stage and stop playing, that's what I'd fucking do."

Like I said I should have known, up to the mike I strode, puffed out my chest and demanded as authoritiveley as possible the sage words of his Lemmster. Talk about a red rag to a pit bull. An awesome barrage, thousands off piss bombs and jeers came raining down, we were like cats on a hot tin roof. Hopping out of this way and that, dodging, ducking, sidestepping and singing and playing as well.

How we got through the set I'll never know.

And then at the end of the last number, it happened.

The sublime, the amazing, the transcendental, the piss Christ incident.

I remember it clearly, like a vision.

The adrenaline kicked in, that fight or flight chemical that turns the world into slow motion.

I gazed into the setting sun and saw this two litre plastic Evian bottle filled with yellow piss come slowly somersaulting in, it was so slow I could almost count the revolutions it made as it rolled out of the sky.

I followed its trailing image as it passed over Cobalt's head, the Stargazer noticed it too, his hands fell from his guitar and his mouth dropped slowly open. The music slurred down from 45 to 33, Slammy threw off a perfect drum roll and finished with a tight snare flamm, he jumped up in ultra slo-mo, reached out his right hand and grabbed the revolving bottle clean out of the sky, the piss exploded, drenching the drummer from head to toe. The divine drummer boy threw his arms out in a crucifix position, bottle in one hand, sticks in the other, grinning beatifically, holy glow backlights making him shine in the piss like Jesus himself.

The crowd screamed hosannas for the man!

Piss Christ baby! Fuck yeah!

I tell you star child, it was one fucking way to end a gig.

Even the curmudgeonly half bladdered Lemmy seemed impressed.

I mean, come on man, it's not every band that has God working the special effects.

The Love Reaction;

Boy band.

All bands when they first form are boy bands.

Even the most staunchly unsexual and seriously unfrivolous, miserably miserable bands like Paul Weller and his Jam are boy bands.

How can they not be, they are young and they are boys?

The bloom of youth is fresh upon their cheek, every room they enter they permeate with the ruttish odour of adolescent pheromones, fanny antennae quivering nervously, pockets bulging with teenage lust.

The young Love Reaction although their charms were buried deep beneath a thick crust of squattish filth possessed this quality in squalid abundance.

My God we were a fine looking bunch of horny delinquents.

And not an arse bandit amongst us.

So heterosexual it hurt.

The tragic thing looking back now with twenty years or so of extremely hard living weary upon our shoulders is how painfully aware of this fact we all were.

 Holy mother of God, bless me father for I have spunked, we were damned beautiful.

Chisel featured Slam; Tom Cruise as Jesus.

Kid Chaos; a stubbly seventeen year old Clint Eastwood; uncanny, more hair on his face than on his balls.

Cobalt et moi; Positively outer space dream boats Mon Cher, veritable Love machines of the fiery cosmos.

Although I have not really bothered to figure it out concisely and completely, this boyband sex appeal thing, I am sure has more than a little to do with the fetishization of the repetition of image.

Endless photographs scattered across the lustful teenage frequency.

Week after week your teen idols appear in scrappy little publications their mysterious glamour growing like a strange nocturnal mushroom with every repetition.

I mean how else can one describe the sexual allure of a young Pete Townsend without some form of psychological bad hypnotic mass hysteria bamboozlement thing going down.

The same goes for the goofy looking young Keith Richards.

The pair of them like a couple of Plugs from The Bash street kids.

I mention this apropos of something that the former poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman said, when asked towards the end of his life if there was anything that he regretted not doing enough of. Rather saucily for one so avuncular the old rascal, probably musing wistfully upon one of those home county, tennis playing gels of his youth informed the interviewer "Yes actually there is. I wish I'd had more sex"

And baby, do I second that emotion.

The blart we passed up on back then, foolishly thinking that they weren't up to scratch for such a fantabulous boy band as ourselves, dear boy, it was sinful.

A couple in particular strike me now, like thunderbolts from missed opportunity heaven, as I sit here creakily in my old man bath chair.

It was Kid Chaos's tribute to our lost boy band selves, his video thing compiled from all the old footage he found stuffed tucked away in the dusty attics and damp cellars of gig world past.

A Betjemanesque Joan Hunter Dunne type tear runs down my leathery cheek as I viddy well the sprightly nymphet's of Love reaction past scampering across the snowy pixels. The arrogance of youth, what fools, what damn fools we were!

Why didn't we shag them! What were we thinking!

Our boy band season was a brief one.

Approximately eight or nine months immediately after the release of the frisky High Priest of Love mini album and ending with the deluded jadedness of the Tattooed beat Messiah recording.

Cardiff, sometime around 1986 it was.

 A full blown boy band experience.

Dozens of little black clad Goth chicks, pale and chubby in pointy buckly shoes hurling themselves at us from the wings, hugging and trying to kiss us.

Marvellous.

It only ever happened the once and I'll never forget it till the day I die.

Our Welsh Beatle experience.

A small incident of sexual hysteria in a seaside town.

Like something Morrissey would sing about.

Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction; boy band.

 

Scumbag Alley

 

I was on the highway out of Hell.

Well, that was the theory.

After nineteen thousand or so bottles of vodka I'd found myself in some nightmarish place of recovery.

Oh my bad brothers and sisters, for my sins, I shit you not, this place was not The Priory.

Elton John and his lovely husband?

Kate Moss and her elegant cigarettes?

I did not share group therapy sessions with them.

This place was the last resort.

The place where the real manic street preachers ended up.

Home of the Tennants supermen.

Rugby House on Long Yard.

A drying out clinic for the down and out and even downer.

The communal room was full of broken noses and people with pockets full of go to jail for free cards. A spongy snouted soak with electric hair and no teeth battered an out of tune guitar in the corner, murdering the only song he didn't know.

My room mate, a shaky lad of about ninety seven, brought me a plate of cold fish and chips with mushy peas and baked beans.

That's how wrong it all was, peas and beans.

Like I said, this was definitely not the Ritz.

It was my second night, and as all hard core alkies can tell you, the forty eight hour scratch on the wall?

That's the worst.

That's when the flickering horrors, the heebie jeebies, the screaming pink mastodons kick in.

We were given the meanest dosage of Librium, not nearly enough to keep the spiders and bats at bay, this place being a charity joint like, with no doctors  to prescribe the correct catatonic millidamage.

I was shaking like a skeleton about to fall apart, the walls were starting to catch fire, my mind unravelling like a wounded golf ball when the ultimate horror hit me.

"OH MY FUCKING GOD!" I screamed, as the gibbering realisation of where I was hit me like a runaway steamroller "I'M IN GIMPOS ROOM, THIS IS SCUMBAG ALLEY!" I ran for the door, my poor room mate shivering beneath his grubby duvet, lost in his own dypso apocalypse, oblivious to the bolt of absolute stark raving reality that had just skewered yours truly.

I checked out at reception telling the poor confused charity worker chap that I couldn't possibly stay here, that the place had memories.

Obviously he thought I was shaking around in some delusional alky panic attack, he feebly attempted to get me to stay, tried to reason with me, that I was imagining things.

But oh my bad brothers and sisters, this was no delusion, this truly was, truly fucking was Scumbag Alley.

And I had truly been in Gimpos room.

Gentle reader let me explain.

Let me pyschogeographically explain.

London is a city of ghosts, some real, some imagined.

For some reason, the imagined ones seem to grip our imaginations more powerfully than the real ones..

The urchins of Charles Dickens' London for instance, for they are the spirits that possessed the early manifestation of The Love Reaction.

I digress, save to say, that Scumbag alley lay in Mr Dickens' very Manor.

The Love Reaction had once more found themselves homeless.

Their squirty charms with the homely girls exhausted.

Bedraggled on the capitals streets, stealing handkerchiefs, picking a pocket or two, "Please sir, I don't want anymore" says poor little Oliver Chaos in a Picadilly toilet.

The Artful Gimpo however, on one of his midnight rambles, crowbar and jemmies in his adidas bag, had come across an entire block of unoccupied apartments down some peachy little cul de sac just off of Lambs Conduit street in fair EC1.

Up the drainpipe he shimmied, like the cat burglar he was, in through the window, down the stairs, screws open the door.

"Homeless no more lads" he thought to himself as he scampered back   to the Saffron Hill tavern where his ragged, musical orphan chums huddled, smoking opium with the Jew.

"I've just found this brilliant fucking squat!" Said The Artful Gimpo bursting through the doors of The Three Cripples, tripping over Bill Sykes' dog.

 Cobalt, Chaos and the Thunderhide looked up from their Gin and put down their pipes.

"Massive fucking place, about thirty rooms, down this posh street, all on it's own, grab your guitars boys, come on, we're moving in tonight!"

The massive place was called Rugby House, on long Yard, off of Lambs conduit street.

It was just around the corner from 48 Doughty street, the house where Charles Dickens wrote Oliver.

These days it is a drying out clinic for down and out alcoholics.

In 1986 it was an abandoned nurses home for the angels of the Great Ormond street hospital for sick children.

On that fateful night it was about to become home for some very sick children indeed.

And it was there, within the peeling walls of that cold water, candlelit penury that we christened Scumbag Alley that the High Priest of Love album was conceived and written.

JM Barrie comes to mind, the cat who wrote Peter Pan, a tale about a bunch of lost boys, he dedicated all the royalties from

his play to the sick children of Ormond street.

We lost boys ourselves thought about following his lead.

For about six seconds.

Sick and lost we might have been.

But fucking stupid?

We had far more sensible things to spend our grubby fortunes upon.

As in the following weeks,

 you most certainly will see….

My Bloody valentines

I did some voluntary prison work once.

I must admit though that I volunteered more out of morbid curiosity than any genuine altruism.

Those terrible, dreadful iron doors clanged behind me, the grinding keys turned and there I was, on my own with about thirty cat A's.

A sadder looking bunch I've never seen.

Believe me tough guy, it wasn't like the movies, no Sly Stallones and Fifty Cents lounging around looking defiant and glamorous. Mostly pale, beaten looking young men who you knew just never stood a chance.

The odds had always been way stacked against them.

These were supposed to be the most dangerous of their kind, the murderers, the sociopaths, the violent, venom hearted ones.

They just looked vulnerable to me.

Lost, vulnerable and wounded.

Nearly every pair of eyes in that windowless room told you a similar story.

That somewhere along their journey to this inevitable waiting room of short tempers and crass stupidity, that a woman had been involved.

Their skin ornamentation reiterated this.

A blue/black gallery of pain and betrayal.

Broken hearts, hearts with daggers through them, flaming hearts, all draped with the names of their co conspirators in bad love and misery, Rachel, Sally, Anne, Ruth and a thousand Lucille's.

Bloody valentines tormenting them to the grave.

Mangled hearts are popular amongst the incarcerated.

I looked down at my own version, the heart with the flames and the dagger with  my ex wife's name draped across it on a funeral scroll and I kind of understood.

The thing that really got me though, amongst this convict art show was the number of guys that had that Love/hate thing across their knuckles.

That narcissistic, self-loathing, Robert Mitchum thing.

Nearly every fucker in there had it.

From the faded blotchy blue version of the gnarled old lifer to the fine line scratch of the kid barely out of his teens, their shaky nervous knuckles all scarred with this legendary motif of the loser.

When Sparklord asked me to tell you about my tattoos I instinctively retreated, talking about tattoos is difficult. No one really knows why he or she had them done.

But if anything gets close it's that knuckle thing, that love and hate thing.

Tattoos are about self-harm. The scars are somewhat prettier than the livid red gouges you see on certain sad teenage girls, but it's essentially the same thing.

A burning unfocused rage that turns in on itself.

A confused violent existential protest about self-pity and alienation.

I was fourteen when I got my first tattoo, I was consumed with an anger that went far beyond any ordinary teenage angst shit.

I wouldn't say I was bullied, I gave off too much of an unstable vibe for any shiny teen hotshot to try anything with me, I appeared to be capable of anything. Being bullied would have probably have been easier I could have reacted to that in kind, but I wasn't bullied I was shunned, avoided; I gave off a weird heat. So without a tormentor to take out my anger on of course I turned it in on myself. If those bastards were going to avoid me, shun me, treat me like a leper I wasn't going to try and ingratiate myself with them I was going to alienate myself even more.

Give them something to be really fucking wary of.

I walked out of Fat Bobs fishing tackle come tattoo parlour with a big fat skull with a dagger through it on my fourteen year old fore arm. In my own mind it said Fuck off, leave me alone, don't bother me, I hate you and you're whole scummy fucking world. Of course my mother cried when she saw it, she saw what it really said which was; Help, I'm scared, I'm lonely and I don't fit in.

She was right of course, no wonder she cried.

All outsiders wish they were on the inside, it's like being an orphan outside in the snow with your nose up against a window watching a TV commercial happy family tucking in to a big Charles Dickens Christmas dinner, shiny turkey, laughing faces, Christmas crackers and presents under the tree.

You burn up inside and want to kill them all or at least let them know that you want to kill them all.

That's what all the skulls and daggers, serpents, panthers, swastikas and other vicious scars are about.

Being pissed off because you're not invited to the party.

The whole worlds thrown a party and you weren't invited, your big horrible tattoo screams that you don't want to go to their stupid fucking party anyway.

It works of course, it fools everyone, even yourself for a while.

Which is why one is never enough.

The bloodletting ritual soothes your rage, a vague serenity descends upon your confused sense of anger but it doesn't last. As the wound heals the anger, irrational hatred and confused self-loathing starts building up again until it's unbearable. You pour booze and drugs upon the fire to extinguish some of the pain but it's like fuel to the fire and just makes things worse and you find yourself back in the chair the hair on your skin slicked with Vaseline and shaved with a cut throat waiting for another inky paper dragon to scare away whatever it is that is scaring you.

The tattoo thing got me the worst during my early twenties, I'd ceased being scared of other people, they all seemed as scared as me as I was of them.

It was religion that was creeping me out then.

All the LSD I'd been chomping down on at the time didn't help much either.

My fear had gone cosmic.

For ten years I devoured comparative religion, the more I read the more confused I became.

Obviously the more lurid belief systems appealed to me the most.

Aztecs, all that pagan shit.

My bodily ornamentation reflected this.

A psychedelic confusion of Aztec and Chinese deities started colonizing my arms.

Of course I managed to unscramble all of this weird shit around the same time I stopped doing drugs. Funny that.

The cross? That big spooky thing on my chest.

Matthew, chapter five through to seven, I figured out that that was pretty much a distillation of what all the important religions were trying to say which was kind of be excellent to each other.

I thought that the black crucifix had more gravitas though than a big tatt of Keanu Reeves.

The last tattoos I had done were the Greek inscriptions on my wrists.

They are the two maxims carved in stone above the oracle at Delphi and are supposed to be the sum knowledge of all mankind.

"Know thyself" and "Everything in moderation"

That sounded about right to me.

I reckoned it was probably something that would take a lifetime to achieve though, so I left the ink thing there.

I wasn't scared anymore.