This interview excerpt (from 1988) is from a Spacemen 3 web site:
------------------------ Gerard: OK, I'm sorry. Tell me about drugs.
Sonic Boom: Ahhh, I find drugs to be very inspiring. All of our songs are about drugs our about experiences while on drugs. Seriously, without drugs I don't think I would be here today.
Gerard: Oh come on, I would've still come down here with you.
Sonic Boom: (visibly annoyed) No, that's not what I mean! Without drugs, I think I would've committed suicide! At one point, without drugs I had nothing left to live for. I can.t imagine going thru a single day without getting high. All of us in the band smoke every day. The bass player sells dope. I don.t ever drink but the rest of the group do. I'm very into hypnotic drugs, not just acid. Opiums are very nice, and there's lots of magic mushrooms out where we live. .Sound Of Confusion. was written about taking speed. I've stayed away from it for 2 or 3 years now, but that doesn't mean I've stopped anything else. I've probably tried every drug that's ever been available in this country at one time or another. I've got a very good friend who's a professional chemist, so I've access to virtually any prescription drug I want, which is very nice. It's for relaxation and recreation, really. I can't see how you could possibly be against it.
Gerard: I think you are going to burn in hell.
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Yeah, the interviewer was being a prick throughout the entire interview, but the patterns were generally the same: Sonic would say "legalise everything, drugs are great, but use them responsibly" and journos thought he was a terrible person for saying those things. This was before the E-generation hit (pardon the pun) in England. Sonic turned out to be ahead of his time, because post-E, speaking for the responsible use of drugs became far more common. Sonic's bragging probably took the message a bit too far. He used to be way overboard with the glamourization, which is particularly disturbing considering the types of dangerous substances he was using. In this respect, Sonic eventually grew up -- in a 1994 interview, he claimed he regretted his heroin use, but stood behind his main theme of responsible drug use.
This is one example of how Pete "Sonic Boom" Kember was (and is) an unheralded pioneer. Sonic gets a bad rap these days -- he's considered to be the Marty Jannetty of Spacemen 3 -- but he's made some fantastic music in his own right. His opinions on drugs were way ahead of their time. He beat Jason Pierce to the punch by combining his trademark minimal drones with soul music on 1994's "Highs, Lows and Heavenly Blows". That album has more soul than just about anything Spiritualized recorded in the 1990's. It drips emotion, bleeds heartache, and didn't require an orchestra to do so. HL&HB and Inspiral Carpets "The Beast Inside" are, in my opinion, the foremost "lost classic" albums of the last decade. They have been criminally ignored.
While most guitar bands turned to heavy-handed grunge in the early 90's, Sonic got more and more chilled out. He used heavily treated guitar tones to create blissful ambience long before anyone spoke of "post-rock". With his EAR collective, he collaborated with techno giant Thomas Koner (one of his many forays into electronic music long before it ordained fashionable by every Tom, Dick, and Radiohead to do so), and also with Kevin Shields, dragging him out of mothballs for his first post-MBV recordings.
Can you tell I've been listening to a lot of Spacemen 3 this week?
