The secret life of ZODIAC MINDWARP AND THE LOVE REACTION. Part one of an exclusive Kerrang! expose by MICK WALL
Interview taken from Kerrang July 1986
I FIRST met Zodiac Mindwarp four years ago. At the time, for want of anything better to do, I used to edit a little magazine called Metal Fury and Zody was employed to lay out and design the thing. Of course, in those days I didn't know I was working with Zodiac Mindwarp; then he was known as Mark Manning.
"I was still Zodiac Mindwarp in those days, but I only became him at night, after dark," he says, when I mention it.
Looking back, I remember Mark Manning as a figure not too dissimilar from the Zodiac Mindwarp character- I meet today; he was a 'scuzbag', as he likes to call himself, even then.
He doesn't have a Mohican haircut anymore, instead his tangled black hair now works its way down past his shoulders, but he never was acquainted with a decent razor blade, at least not for shaving, and the pinched black granny glasses have always been a feature, too.
If anything, though, Zody is a much leaner, wittier, and more animated persona than the Mark Manning I remember. The big, complicated boots, and the loose, dark clothes have always been there, same with some of the tattoos, Mark was always into all that raggedy-ass jive. But it is Zody's jeans, not Mark's,
that have tears from the knees down to the shin where some heavily excited girl fans had been tugging at them during the last gig. And it is Zodiac Mindwarp and not Mark Manning that has just signed a major deal with Phonogram Records in London, alongside the rest of his band, The Love Reaction.
I admit, I didn't know he had it in him, Mark I mean. I knew he used to hang out with ex-Killing Joke bassman Youth, and I think he had vague connections with Southern Death Cult and the Anti-Nowhere League, and you could never walk straight across the floor in his tiny basement studio because it was always
covered in a three inch layer of shit - drawing paper, bits of unfinished artwork, comics, magazines, empty Coke can ashtrays, screwed-up packets of fags, it was a tip alright, but a comfortable place to hang your head - so I knew all along he had a good dude's black heart.
But I didn't know that one day he would prove his class and actually have the nerve to transform himself into a legitimate ROCK AND ROLL STAR! No! I never knew that.
After I got bored of dishing the dirt on Metal Fury and the bosses finally had the sense to know this and kick me out. I didn't see Mark again until about 18 months ago. It was another Kerrang! Lunchtime at our old (and beautiful) offices in Covent Garden. I was on my way out for a drink and I bumped into Mark outside Covent Garden tube station.
Well, hello and how are you, and what are you doing, and so forth. It turned out Mark had made "a sort of joke tape," he said. He handed me a copy of
the tape and I glanced at the writing on the side of the box.
It said: ZODIAC MINDWARP AND THE LOVE REACTION
'WILD CHILD'.
I said: "You've got to be f**king joking . . ."
He stood there and laughed me.
"Give it a misten and see what you think, it's pretty raw", he said. I said, OK, and we parted and I took off to have my drink
Later, drunk, I played the tape. Just one track, 'Wild Child', and it went on forever… a guitar blasting out a riff that sounded like it began life on some prehistoric Marc Bolan B-side before getting chewed up by drugs and falling face-first onto one of the early Motorhead albums; it rocked and it sounded nasty and it had energy - too much energy, like I said it went on forever. But as good as that, more impressive even, was the voice and the words the voice was singing: trash lyrical cut-ups, slashed poetical imagery, street-slang slung low and spat out in the mad generous rushes, the hungry sound of the voice adding the taste os poision to everything…
It did go on, though.
ZODYS MORE recent history you don't need me to document for you. In September 1985 there was the first Zodiac Mindwarp And The Love Reaction single - yeah, a
cut-down and spruced-up 'Wild Child'. Geoff Barton was actually the first person to point it out to me. He was into it, and good, long before I knew it even existed. He dug all the glam-rock connotations, the spacey nervous guitars, the heavy echo on the vocals, the knitting needle drums, and he could
appreciate the "psychedelic nature of the lyrics," as he put it.
I knew what he was talking about right away but, as is my uneven style sometimes, I didn't really do anything about it… I gave it to Dave Dickson, told
him I thought he'd like it, told him maybe he should do a feature for Kerrang!
He did. But by then so had The Face, Sounds, Melody Maker, you know the crowd I
Mean…
Since then, Zodiac Mindwarp And The Love Reaction have become something of a name to drop. They've done a lot of gigs this year, mostly clubs, and reactions have been strong both ways, but mostly the nice ways. In the press Zody has already established his reputation as a born-again eccentric, a self-confessed orphan from the planet Feakout, and a burgeoning character who talks nothing but quotable lines… I was interviewing Lemmy recently and I asked him if there were any new bands he'd seen that he really liked. "Only one, really," he replied.
Zodiac Mindwarp And The ...
Yeah, I know.
And there was talk that Sigue Sigue Sputnik had considered Zody as the support act on their forthcoming tour at one time…
Nothing has come of it though, so far…
And now, in July '86, as I write, Zodiac Mindwarp and his Love Reaction have just signed a deal with a major record company - Phonogram - and are about to release the first Zody album, or mini-album, as I understand it, on July 25.
Titled 'High Priest Of Love', the record will feature six original Zodiac Mindwarp compositions, including another reworking of his underground hit single 'Wild Child', this time replete with some real overkill from the production (from Dave Balfe), the band truly sizzling, Zody warbling on the intro, 'You
got another chaaance to ride on my white ROCKET SHIP/So take it!
And from there it's all insane.
I GOT a tape of' High Priest Of Love' just yesterday; it's the second tape Mark's given me and it's the best thing he's ever done, easily. But don't wait for me to get into it here. I can tell you what the tracks are called - "The High Priest Of Love", "Hymn Of The Speed Kings", "High Heel Heaven", "Dangerous", "Kick Start Me For Love" and "Wild Child" - but I can't spew out any more verbal tricks for you right now.
Wait for the review, or better still f**k the review and get yourself your own copy of the record… I am not familiar enough yet with the vices and tensions of "The High Priest Of Love". But I played it all, long and loud and out of every hot Summer window last night and the downstairs neighbour looked at me with troubled and weird expression on his face this morning.
I took it as a good sign…
FOR THE purposes of this interview Zody and I meet at his place. He lives about four storeys up in a tall old building in London. It's hot today, maybe 26 degrees; I'm swimming in sweat, it's in my eyes and I can't see shit. About halfway up the stairs one of the doors a neighbours flat shakes and pounds and I can hear a huge dog barking and snarling and chewing at the letter-box.
"Don't worry about that, "says Zody. "That's where Lord Baskerville lives."
Inside Zody's flat we settle in his bedroom; him in the only chair, me on a mattress on the floor.
"That mattress might still be a bit damp," he says.
What?
"We only had the signing party over at Phonogram two days ago," he explains, "and when I got home I was so f**king drunk and out of it I lit a smoke and must have just crashed out on the mattress.
When I woke-up about two hours later the room was filled with thick smoke - for a moment I thought I was still on stage somewhere and then it hit me that I'd set the f*"king mattress on fire. I ran into the kitchen and got some saucepans full of water and just threw it all over the mattress. It took ages to put
the thing out, though."
No, it's not wet any more, I tell him.
Then I turned the tape-machine on.
What do I call you these days -Zody or Mark?
"Anything you like!
Everybody asks me that but it doesn't bother me what you call me - as long as it isn't child molester," he grins.
I always knew you were into rock music but I never had you figured as the singer in a future band - and a Heavy Metal band, too!
"Well, I first started getting back into Metal when we were working on Metal Fury. I'd gone off it for a while, I admit, but you remember what it was like when all that punk crap came in, suddenly there seemed to be a real dearth of good new rock and roll bands, and all the papers were saying Heavy Metal was for bozos and so I used to listen to a lot of shit I
didn't really like. Then on Metal Fury started reading some of the interviews and the things some of these Heavy Metal guys were saying made a lot more sense to me than what the anti- this, anti-that gangs were always on about. The Metal guys sounded like they actually enjoyed life, had a good time, travelled the world and never really seemed to look back. So I started listening to the music again and I thought, "Yeah! Now this is f**king great!" It took me five years to get back into listening to Hard Rock and Heavy Metal but I made it there in the end."
You say you started getting-off again on Metal. Who were you listening to?
"Oh, Zeppelin, AC/DC... I used to go around to Youth's flat and he had this huge great cabinet speaker, and we'd sit around and play AC/DC at full volume. It used to blow us into the f**king wall!"
I never knew you could play the guitar. You kept that bit quiet back then...
"I first picked up a guitar - one of those rotten cheap acoustic jobs when I was 12. But I couldn't play it very well. Some people say I still can't...
"I remember the first time I strummed the guitar, this appalling sound came out of it! I didn't know anything about tuning and I thought the shop had sold me a duff one because it didn't automatically make music when I started hitting it.
Then a mate showed me two chords - the riff to 'All Right Now' by Free - and it dawned on me that you could write songs with just those two chords! I don't think I've learnt anything new since...
DID YOU always fancy yourself as the leader of your own band?
"Well, after I left Metal Fury I started thinking about a band more seriously. By then, you see, I'd actually met a few bands and they were always flying around the world, getting all the birds, having a laugh, and with no responsibility, and I eventually thought, 'F**k it, I can do that'. I was in Spain and I decided I had to stop dreaming about doing something like that,
it was time to get it together and have a real go. And at the time it
felt like I was getting a divine message from God, you know?
Like, GO FORTH AND FORM A ROCK AND ROLL BAND! I was convinced of it. The truth was I was cracking up and suffering from acid flashbacks continually, I think I must have gone properly mad. But I've talked about that in every interview I've ever done."
Your lyrics, all that stuff like, 'I DON'T NEED PSYCHIATRY/JUST GIMME LSD/I AIN'T GOT TIME TO MEDITATE/EAT THIS BABY AND DETONATE...' I like that kind of garbage talk.
Where do you get it from?
"I can't write prose but I can write lyrics and poems; where it comes from though I don't know. It just comes out that's all, I don't need to know how it
happens, just that it does. It's the same when I'm drawing or illustrating something, I can never understand why everybody can't do it, when you can do something like that it's as natural to you as going to the bog and it doesn't feel like anything special at all.
"I tell you, for the last 15 years I've had people telling me I'm a dickhead and now, all of a sudden, people having started to tell me that I'm great…
After 15 years of being called a dickhead and being told I was a complete prat it kind of hardens you to other people's opinions, so now when they tell me I'm
great, luckily that doesn't mean anything to me either."
Yeah, but what about when you read something like Dave Dickson'S last live review of you and the band? I mean,'…
brilliant, totally and utterly superb, well groovy and extremely cool'. How much are you paying him?
He laughs.
"You mean those reviews that treat you like the Second Coming?" he licks his lips and grins.
"I like those reviews, they're my favourite ...
"But we're an over-the-top band so I think people, if they like us, end up writing suitably over-the-top reviews. We're not the sort of live act that many
people could write a sensible review about."
I was thinking back to that tape you gave me of 'Wild Child: the demo version, have you heard it lately?
"Oh God, yeah, I remember. It was about eight minutes long or something. That was the first song Zodiac Mindwarp ever rote. I'd got back from Spain, still completely off my trolley, and I used to cajole a mate of mine into letting me mess about on his porta-studio, and I just stayed up all night writing 'Wild
Child'… I got the riff sorted out and just sat there grooving away on it for hours. The lyrics were made-up spontaneously more or less as they fell out of me gob.
And that was it. 'Wild Child'.
"I made about four copies of the tape and I thought to myself I'll just take a copy to Trevor Horn, right, and that would be it!
He'd put a bit of his production on it and I'd have a hit record! So that's what I did. I went round to his office and I left them a tape with this cryptic message I'd symbols on the Frankie Goes To Hollywood record sleeves were all addressed to me!
"So I thought what would happen was I would leave him the tape with the message, he'd play it, ring me up the next day and I'd be a MEGA-STAR by
tomorrow! Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out the way I'd
planned it…"
WHO ELSE got a copy of the tape?
"Well, I gave one to you, I left that other one at Trevor Horn's
studio, I lost one, and two weeks later I was left with my last copy.
Nothing had happened, I didn't know what to do; I wasn't like Mick Jagger yet and I couldn't figure out why… And I was going somewhere on a bus and I bumped into Dave Balfe (former member of Teardrop Explodes) Who has now ended up as my
manager. At that time I knew him vaguely and it clicked in my head, aha!, a record company person. I say Dave, how about listening to my tape? I gave him
the last cassette I had of the tape and he took it away and listened to it and, luckily for me, got right into it."
Dave Balfe was running his own independent label Food Records and called Zody in and asked him what he wanted to do…
"He asked me if I wanted to form a band first, or did I want to make a record? I said, 'Naw let me make a video and get it played on TV, and give me money, turn me into a star', that sort of thing. Eventually, we agreed that I should make a record."
That was nine months ago.
Since then you've become one of the more infamous names on the club circuit, you've signed a deal with a major label, and Lemmy tells me you're one of
the best new bands he's seen in ages. You're becoming a legend in your own lunchtime, Zody.
How does it feel?
"I don't know if we're really what you'd call a name to drop - I should know, I turned up at the Hippodrome the other night, I had about 500 people with me,
and announced myself as Zodiac Mindwarp And The Love Reaction, and the bouncers took one look at the people I had with me and told me to f**k off!
But impressing someone like Lemmy, I was pleased about that all right. You know, it looks like we're going to be touring with Motorhead on their next tour of Britain in September!"
No. I didn't know. How come?
"I don't know but it's great, isn't it? Apparently they really liked us when they came to see us play. I was talking to Lemmy afterwards and he was great; he started giving me bits of advice, and I mean advice from a guy like Lemmy you take, you know? It was like the Father of Rock and Roll talking to the
young student…"
What was the best advice he gave you?
"I think his main point came when he said, 'You've got to take your lifestyle, how you really like to live, and put it on record'. I said, yeah, he's right.
You know, he told me he bought a copy of 'Wild Child'! And the guitar sound on that first single is so thin compared to the way I'd like to have it, and Lemmy
spotted it right away and he told me to put as much and as many guitars down as possible when recording.
"He said, 'You can't really hear the difference, but you really know it's there - you can feel them!' The very next time I stepped into the studio I ended
up putting thousands of guitars down on every track and in the end it all started to sound like mush. I kept saying, 'But this is how Lemmy said it was done! What have I done wrong?' I ran out of tracks I was putting so much guitar onto the songs. "We had to take loads of them off and bury them before it started to sound right again. I probably just over-did it. Trying to follow in the master's footsteps too closely and too quickly, I suppose, "he grins.
Theres definitely a touch of the Motorhead madness about the way you blast out your songs; hard but playful. Mostly hard… "Oh, I can see that, and they
Don't come much better respected than Motorhead. But it seems to me there are, like, maybe four different kinds of Metal: there's the people that want to be like ACDC, then there's the people that copy Van Halen, and there's people who
want to copy Motorhead, or ZZ Top.
"Sometimes it seems like there's just four great bands who everybody else just copies, or sounds like. I hope it's not too arrogant for me to say, but
perhaps Zodiac Mindwarp And The Love Reaction can be the fifth band that everyone copies? "No," he laughs out loud.
"That really is the most arrogant f**king thing I've heard anybody say today…"
When I took my girlfriend to see you play - it was one of the really early gigs, when the band supported Rock Goddess at the Marquee - she said you reminded her of Jim Morrison on Lemmys drugs…
"Really? Yeah! I like that, that just about sums it up, right? Put that in the story," he sniggers.
"Make it the headline…
PART ONE ENDS… In Part Two we get into The Theory Of Groupies, The Ultimate Goal Of Mega-Success, the strange Origins Of The Love Reaction… And Why Punk is Nothing But Junk!
ZODIAC MINDWARP'S band, The Love Reaction, know how to kick like a mule, they make a real mean team. There's three of them, you basic flat-out rock format: Kid Chaos on bass, Slam Thunderhide on drums and Cobalt Stargazer on guitar…
So I ask him. Zody, where did you get these guys, where did they come from?
"Nothing about it was planned, it all happened pretty much spontaneously, "he says, peering over the top of those small black grannys he wears.
"But that's been my story from start to finish, really. Nothing was ever planned… When Dave Balfe (Zodiac manager) first suggested I get myself a full-time band I didn't have the first idea how to go about it. I didn't fancy the idea of putting an ad in the Melody Maker or something, and Dave said, 'Well, why didn't I just go out and find a band?' I mean, how do you do that?. I didn't know.
"The first thing I did was get in contact with my girlfriend's girlfriend's boyfriend - he was the only guy I really knew who could play guitar and that happened to be Cobalt… He's a great guitarist too he's toured America with The Cars and stuff like that.
"Imagine it? He left school at 16 and toured America with the Cars! Then three months later he fled America because he was starting to lose his mind on tour;
he shagged himself way beyond human endurance and took mountains of cocaine every night. Three months solid of that and he just ran home to England… The band sent out litigation and sued the f**k out of him.
"When that was all over he did a course in philosophy just to try and get his head back together. Later on he even did some work with the Wham! Boys; he wrote the bass line to 'Club Tropicana' I think, something like that, never
got a penny, usual thing.
"By the time I met him he was hanging around with all these frilly-shirted glam-rock boys, you know lots of Keith Richards pouts and make-up - and he had this horrible little fringe. He looked like a Hanoi Rock, but he could really play that guitar. He started doing all these little Eddie Van Halen-type things and I said, 'I want him!'
"I knew he'd have to change his horrible image, but I could worry about that later…"
What ever happened to Boom Boom Kaboomsky, your original drummer?
"Boom Boom was a mate of Cobalt's, and he is a great drummer, no doubt about it, but he wasn't really the drummer for us. He's proficient, and he plays well, always lots of bounce, but what we really needed was someone with Slam's technique he just beats the shit out of his drums." he laughs.
And Kid Chaos? How did he join, "God only knows how he found out about us, but Kid wrote a letter to Food Records asking for a job… It went something
Like, 'I am Kid Chaos, surfboarding and skateboarding is my life, my bass goes blam kablam boom boom!'. It was a completely potty letter and I said 'Thats our man!' "He came down to see me and he looked like something out of that f**king group Orange Juice - a total f**king wimp! He did have this great bass, a Roland synth bass, but he looked like such a tosser! But again, I just thought, you know, worry about it later. That's my motto - worry about it later…"
Did you have to tell everybody how to dress?
"Kind of. Not what to wear so much as what not to wear. I told 'em, dress like me. So we scuzzed up their jeans a bit, dragged Cobalt by the hair through a garbage dump from the back of a motorbike, poured oil all over him, forbade him to bath for a month and told him to forget about shaving. T he funny part is,
Kid Chaos had only dressed like a tw*t because he was coming down to London to audition for a band. When I finally got to meet him in his street clothes he turned out to be a real scuzzbag, he was even dirtier than me!"
After 'Wild Child' (the first Zodiac single) came our and you started getting serious attention from the rock comix, what was all that stuff you used to talk about, the whole Planet Freakout gimmick?
"I don't know. Like everything else about me, it wasn't preconceived or anything. People started asking me questions and I just started spouting on about Planet Freakout because it sounded funny. Planet freakout is allegorical, obviously. It's my state-of-mind, the hidden place where I get all my ideas from, the imagination. My poetic way of trying to describe the creative process…
"We got invited to this party the other day, and the place was full of these real)y arty types, all media people and students and artists, you know, and this one girl said to me, 'Oh, you're a post-modernist band, aren't you?' I asked her what she meant, and she said, 'You know, you take uncritically from the past to create something new'. And I thought about it and said, "Yeah. yeah, if that's what post-modernism means then I suppose thats what we are - a Post Modernistic Rock Band! Cor!
"I don't really know what post-modernism means but if it's what she said it is then I think it quite sums us up. If we like things we use them."
UNDER MY feet and strewn across the room is a host of old and new comics, mixing with Zody's usual detritus of comfortable human crap. I see a lot of Spiderman issues. It relates. I say so.
"Spiderman is one of my favourite Marvel super heroes," he says... "He's got such depth to his character, you really feel like you're getting to know him at the end of one of his comics. And he's got all the same problems everyone else has got.
Silver Surfers another great favourite; in his stories everybody hates him at first.
There he is, saving the Earth, and everybody thinks he's a real bastard. I've really gotton into Silver Surfer lately. In fact, I put a clause in my record contract with Phonogram stating that part of the deal was that they should deliver to me Silver Surfer No.l - the very first issue!"
I laugh at that one and ask him how he thought of it?
"All the main points of the contract had been sorted out and I was on the phone to my lawyer and he asked me if there was anything else I thought I should get in advance of the deal. I said, yeah, get me Silver Surfer No.1!
He told the record company and they all started laughing. I said, right, just for that. I want the first
18 Silver Surfers!
"My lawyer told them that because I thought they were stalling I now wanted all 18, so they went out and got me my 18 copies of Silver Surfer... I suppose I could have asked them for a car or something, but at the time I couldn't think of anything else I really wanted that much..."
What sort of music do you listen to these days, when you're not playing?
"Anything and everything, I'm completely uncritical. As long as it sounds good to me I don't care who it's by. I like music with lots, of guitars and drums, mostly. I've been listening to a bit of ZZTop again recently and, God help me,
I've even been listening to a bit of The Smiths... I tried for two years not to like The Smiths, because the singer is such a wimp, you know? But now I can't help myself because I really like some of their songs."
When you're up onstage performing, are you 'straight'?
You don't always look it...
"No, I'm completely straight when I go onstage. I've tried to play drunk a few times but I just end up falling over, and besides, if people have paid money to
come in and see you the last thing you really want to do is stumble onstage drunk out of your mind, losing all the words and missing your guitar strings. I
wouldn't want to take the piss like that.
"But it has been tricky trying to maintain our, mmm, high standards sometimes," he admits. "What's hard is that when the band and I finish a soundcheck there's absolutely nothing to do for the next six hours before we go onstage. So, like most people, we just used to sit around drinking, which usually meant we'd make a complete balls-up of the gig later on. So now we've started going ten-pin bowling. Before, it just never occurred to us that there might be something else to do with the spare time before a gig besides drinking..."
WHAT HAPPENS after your British tour (possibly supporting Motorhead in September)? Do you know yet? Is there a plan?
"No. no, no," he shakes his head. "No plans whatsoever, except to carry on playing and making records. There are no little schemes and tricks coming from the record company to make this band big.
"The way I look at it is you sell records when enough people think you're good. You can't trick people into thinking you're good, they either like you or they don't. We just do our stuff and if it's good it will do all the work for us.
To plan anything too finely would be to take all the fun and the joy and the spontaneity out of things, it would spoil everything for me."
Alright. But what about a thousand tomorrows from now, how do you dream of spending your retirement one day?
"In Los Angeles!" he cries. No hesitation whatsoever. "With a big swimming pool and a Rolls Royce -- that would do me. I'd be in love with that alright. I don't want to be a horrid little indie label person for the rest of my life, I want MEGA-STARDOM on a grand scale!" he laughs. "Then again, you see, none of this might happen, it certainly hasn't happened yet. I mean, we haven't actually sold any records yet. It all might completely bomb!
"I keep reading these great things about us and I'm just waiting for the slag-offs to begin.
People might start saying they really hate us, you never know... I'll probably end up committing suicide."
There's probably one or two people right now busy sharpening their pencils for you...
"Yeah, I know. I'm absolutely dreading the Zody Backlash, but it's got to happen. So far I've only had a couple of little reviews that you could call real stinkers. I took them very badly, too. You can't answer back and it's very frustrating."
I tell Zody how artist Salvador Dali never used to read his press cuttings; instead, once a month, he would receive a folder containing the last four weeks worth of clippings and he would place it on the scales and weigh it. As long as the folder was heavy enough, Old Salvador, he, was happy. He wasn't interested in what they were saying about him, just as long as they kept saying it...
"Yeah, that's a good idea. I'll probably end up having to do that," he says.
And if you attain this MEGA-STARDOM, Zody, will I still be able to talk to you?
"Oh, I expect so, but I shall probably be quite insufferable after the first ten minutes," he grins. "No, joking aside, although I certainly intend to enjoy the full benefits of success if I get offered even half a chance, I'm not a complete idiot. There does have to be a degree of sanity in some things otherwise real craziness sets in and that can kill you. I don't want to end up like a Razzle, although I can see how easy it would be to do that. Rock musicians seem to drop off like flies, don't they? It's practically an occupational hazard, but none of that stuff is for me - I hope. I want to live to be 100. Old Zodiac in his rocking chair, cradling his guitar. Like all those old blues guys, you know? Bullfrog John Blind Lemon Tortoise-Shelf... and Zodiac Minwarp... ha! ha! ha!"
HAS YOUR new record deal given you a lot of money so far?
"It depends which way you look at it. I'm someone who's never had a f**king penny in his life. Up until a week ago that was my financial situation - nothing, just living on the goodwill of my closest friends. I got my first week's wages a couple of days ago. I got £140. I thought it was a f**king fortune! I'd never had so much money to spend in my life, not for one week's so-called 'work'... What did I do? I spent the f**king lot the first f**king day. Now I'm skint again...
Do you get bored easily? I ask because it seems to be a favourite trait of a lot of the more extrovert rock performers.
"I don't know if I get bored easily, I think my mind does tend to flit about a lot, though. I switch from one thing to the next very quickly. I have a lot of nervous energy. I usually go three or four days without any sleep then go into a complete coma for 24 hours and awake refreshed.
"And that's not drugs," he says, when I ask him. "That's natural energy. I don't really touch drugs at all any more. I just don't get tired. It drives my girlfriends crazy when they come to stay. They go to bed and I'll still be up reading my Spiderman comics; they wake up in the middle of the night and I'll be standing by my bedroom window, looking through my telescope trying, to name the craters on the moon; they get up the next morning and find me hanging from the walls in the corridor pretending to be f**king Spiderman, and it drives them all nuts! After three or four days of that they crack-up and leave."
How will you manage on tour if you don't sleep?
He pulls a wry expression and says, "Hopefully, I'll be able to find some nice people to spend the night-time with me - if I'm lucky!
"Actually, I think it's only ever happened once that a member of this band has had a groupie. I don't think they exist any more, they're extinct. I mean, we always have lots of girls who want to come backstage after a gig to say hello to us, but those people aren't groupies they're just nice kids who want to come back and tell you they think you're great. I've actually said to the band,
'You know, if you abuse these kids and treat them like groupies I'II f**king sack you. 'I know it sounds really corny but I do care about the people come to see us…
"Sometimes they ask the Earth of you - I've had girls who wanted me to come home and meet their mums and dads - but mostly it's all very pleasant, really," he smiles. "Besides the idea of f**king loads of groupies is a bit of a turn-off. Who wants to shag a girl who shags every band that comes to town? 'Oh, yes!
Please take me home and add me to your list, and by the way, have you got any rare, exotic and incurable diseases I can take away with me later?!'"
You do get a lot of young women at your gigs, though, I've heard all about it. Good lookers, too, by all accounts. What is it about you that appeals to them? "I honestly don't know. Maybe it's just because they know that I like them as much as they like me. And it's not just me, either. When people are real popular and loved, you know, like Lemmy's loved, I'm sure one of the big reasons why they are so popular is because they really do love their fans back.
I CAN'T understand these big bands who like to insult their audience. Like John Lydon in Public Image - I mean, how he's gotten away with it all these years completely escapes me. He's such a bastard to his audiences, pours nothing but contempt over them from start to finish… And the more he tells them what a bunch of c**ts they are, the more they like it!"
His attitude was always the epitome of punk; perhaps it's now the only real asset he has left?
"I don't know, but I know I don't like what Lydon's about at all. He's got a bad attitude to everything. The public persona he adopts does nothing whatsoever for me…
"You're right, though. Maybe it is a punk hangover, a very bad one. Backstage at one of our gigs there was this little punk girl, and she had millions of huge great f**king scars all over her arms, she was one of those kids who think it's cool to cut themselves. I asked her why she did that to herself and she said she was bored. I mean, what a massively negative thing to do to yourself… I Said 'If you were bored why didn't you go and see a f**king movie or something?'
"All this stuff about punk kicking the music business up the arse is a lot of shit. It was bad, it's influence remains bad.
Do you see yourself as closer in spirit to the bands who dominated the early Seventies music scene? The more articulate and inspiring rock acts like,
maybe, The Doors? That breed?
"I don't know about Jim Morrison and The Doors. I probably feel closer in spirit to ZZTops and the AC/DCs of this world. The Van Halen attitude is the epitome, for me, of what being in a rock band should be about.
"You see this guy grinning from ear to ear and he's playing the most amazing f**cking guitar you're ever likely to hear, doing things with it you've never heard done before, and the words and everything is such a total celebration of life.
"It's great, really inspiring. And all the old arguments about them being able to afford to be happy is a lot of bullshit. Some of the happiest times of my life have been when I didn't have a single penny in my pocket…
"It's always better to try and see the good in everything; I'm telling you, if someone sawed my leg off tomorrow I'd think, oh well. I'll just have to be a really good hopper! I want to celebrate the mere fact of my life in all its astonishing detail…"
