Playing The Bass With Three Left Hands

Will Carruthers FABER & FABER. £14.99

Spacemen 3 four-string maestro’s frank, everhilarious confessions.

Sprinkled with more drug stories than you can shake a Thai stick at, here’s a rock loser’s memoir fit to dine at the same hardluck top-table as Andrew Matheson’s Sick On You, and the Anvil movie. Carruthers was already shooting speed while working in a Birmingham sheet-metal factory, when he fell in with fellow late-teen wasters Spacemen 3 in nearby Rugby. Suddenly, he’s banging up heroin with Pete ‘Sonic Boom’ Kember, and debuting ad hoc on 1988’s immaculate Playing With Fire. Carruthers’ anecdotal extravagance borders on the Ustinovian: at Brentford’s Waterman Arts Centre, outrageous pre-match stonerism and duck-spotting leads to him thrumming for an hour without realising his amp isn’t switched on. Amid pitiful economics, a royalty cheque for £0.00 arrives, and he quits Spiritualized penniless while moonlighting at an abbatoir. That Carruthers has emerged alive, with self-deprecation, warmth and humour intact, is little short of miraculous.