One day Magenta’s mother arrived at the mews to take her daughter to rehab because sadly Magenta had also succumbed to the horror that was heroin. This in itself is a whole other story but one that I won’t ever be telling. I loved Magenta and trying to save her from herself and this terrible addition caused us both more pain than I could ever describe, nor would I want to. In retrospect, I can only begin to imagine the pain her mother was going through that day We were all rehearsing in the sitting room and the poor woman, already devastated at discovering her daughter had a drug problem, took one look at us and where Magenta was living and looked as if she was going to have a heart attack. It didn’t occur to me she might see me as the root of all her troubles....
All rehearsals were still played conventionally, i.e. using a regular bass guitar, X’s zebra skin covered Travis Bean guitar and a good old 808 drum machine that Fachtna O'Kelly gave us, recorded on to a 4 track PortaStudio. The tapes from then are wild but SO rough. Degville’s vocals a mad scream of sub Cramps and Devine. However slowly a sound was evolving all by itself. And I knew we had something.
But did I really know what I was doing, taking these people and making them believe in my vision? Had Degville secretly dreamed of being a singer all his life? I knew he wasn’t ordinary but was he really extraordinary? I still wasn’t sure. And was Neal really a genius musician or was he simply impersonating all the great guitarists he had been listening to when he learnt to play? He was a good guitar player but did he have it in him to come up with the original tunes I needed for the band? I had worked with Billy in my last group so I knew what great looked and sounded like. I had yet to discover what Neal and Martin were really about but for now I still believed.
When we were not rehearsing we watched films - Pink Flamingos, Performance, Clockwork Orange, Blade Runner, Escape from New York, Desperate Living and She Male porno movies as inspiration. Video taped any TV show on technology. We listened to Alan Vega doing Ghost Rider, endless Dub Reggae and Elvis. Those times formed the basis of the group’s musical core... Outrage and Sci-Fi in dub with movies and computers... and rock and roll guitars of course.
Then at night we lived the life John Walters imagined crossed with my visions of the Dystopian future. Hanging out in video arcades at midnight at Kings Cross station, walking with hookers, dressed to kill. We were hip to everything that was happening then, while the menacing Taxi Driver soundtrack played in the background. The world of information was less dispersed - not split into thousands of tribes like it is today
As far as we were concerned there was only one game in town and we intended to be it.