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This article was intended for publication in Record Collector, as the second of a three part piece on Spacemen 3, Sonic Boom and Spiritualized. Although finished in 1999, it was eventually not used.

Forever Alien

After the break-up of Spacemen 3, Peter “Sonic Boom” Kember embarked on a diverse and prolific solo career. Ian Edmond meets a man who wasn’t made for this life.

The sign that greets me as I arrive at Rugby railway station announces “Welcome to Rugby – home of Rugby football.” I suppose it was unrealistic of me to expect “You are now entering Spacemen 3 country” as I’d hoped – after all, how can the most innovative music of the last part of the twentieth century possibly compare to a crowd of Neanderthals running around with a pointy shaped ball – but it would have been nice.

My remaining hopes that the locality felt in any way indebted to it’s musical progeny were dashed during the cab ride to the home of Peter Kember, one half of Spacemen 3’s creative driving force and, as we shall see, an inventive and prolific artist in his own right. As the conversation turned to the reason for my visit, I chanced a mention of Spacemen 3. No response. Thinking it even less likely that my driver would have a working knowledge of Spectrum, I went for the more popularist option, suggesting that he might have heard of Spiritualized. But no. He had, he offered, watched some of the Glastonbury coverage the other day, and admitted to “quite liking” Texas, but it seemed that home-grown Midlands’ space rock was an unknown quantity.

Undeterred, I arrived at the Kember household in good spirits. Despite the occasional distorted portrayal by the press, who would lead you to expect a barely functional shell of a man ravaged by years of overindulgence of the kind of pharmaceuticals that you can’t buy over the counter, he is a polite, softly spoken and genuinely friendly man, happy to spend far longer than was necessary discussing all aspects of his work. The Spacemen 3 story has been detailed previously (see Record Collector [whatever]), so my mission today is to take Kember back to the days when, as Sonic Boom, he first ventured away from the cover of his main band.

The first Sonic Boom solo offering was conceived and recorded when Spacemen 3 were still very much a going concern. So what was the impetus for this extra-curricular activity? “I had the material, the money was useful – I don’t think I bought anything particularly worth while with it!… I was writing more stuff than I could output in Spacemen 3. I actually regret doing that album within Spacemen 3. I don’t think it was in some ways a good move for Spacemen 3, for the band… there were some bits that caused problems within the band anyway, like music papers just putting a photo of one person on the cover and stuff. That never went down very well. Understandably, really.”

Kember signed a deal with Silvertone, mainly due to their enthusiasm and a particular key player. “I think really they wanted to do Spacemen 3 records, I think that’s really what it was. I had a lot of respect for Andrew Lauder coz of Radar, they put out a lot of interesting stuff, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, the Elevators, Electric Prunes… Even stuff like Dusseldorf were on Radar, y’know, there was some weird stuff they put out. So that was actually one of the only labels I’ve ever collected, was Radar.” Once Silvertone’s willingness to get behind Sonic Boom became apparent, plans to make an entire album of drone experiments were abandoned. “I thought that it would be perhaps a waste of their resources to just put out a record of these quite experimental drone pieces, that most people were going to hate, obviously. It was a sort of filtering thing in a way… if you turn a few of the wrong people away by doing stuff like that, it’s probably a good thing!”

The album, ‘Spectrum’, was not a great diversion from Kember’s recent Spacemen 3 style. The players also overlapped, with Spacemen bassist Will Carruthers playing throughout as well as co-producing (with Kember). Jason Pierce contributed some guitar, as did Mark Refoy, shortly to join Spacemen 3 proper. Kember admits that he didn’t adjust his perspective at all when making the album, and that working alone wasn’t a great change. “Not at all, really. Spacemen 3 even by that point, me and Jason… even though the myth was that we only started recording separately during ‘Recurring’, by ‘Playing With Fire’ we were working very separately on stuff.”

‘Spectrum’ is a difficult album to evaluate. Kember takes full advantage of the extra freedom he has to pay homage to his heroes, with covers of songs by Doc Pomus (‘Lonely Avenue’ – “The original isn’t quite as droney as that. The two versions that I know before doing that were Ray Charles’s, which I think is the original version… and Panther Burns did a nice version as well.”) and Suicide (‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Is Killing My Life’). Indeed, the influence of Suicide hangs heavy throughout much of the recording, with the most direct link appearing in ‘Pretty Baby’, which mirrors the structure and atmosphere of the Rev/Vega composition ‘Cheree’. “‘Pretty Baby’ is, yeah definitely,” Kember admits. “It’s like… There’s ‘Peggy Sue’ and then there’s ‘Peggy Sue Got Married’, y’know, it’s kind of like, it’s a pseudo follow up to ‘Cheree’ in a way, it’s like another part of the story almost. There are lyrical references to ‘Cheree’ in it as well.” This is not to detract from Kember’s songwriting strengths; ‘If I Should Die’ is haunting, the voice of someone for whom death may not be far away but whom accepts this with a large degree of fatalism (shades of ‘Walkin’ With Jesus’), and ‘Angel’ is simply gorgeous. A wonderfully cumulative production sees ‘Angel’ build from its basic finger-clicking backbone to sweeping peaks, occasionally settling to blissful plateaus of cello-driven serenity. The thrust of the song is effectively ‘Walkin’ With Jesus’ in reverse, with the narrator berating the higher powers for not saving his friend from an overdose – “Where was the guardian angel on the day my best friend died?”. Kember didn’t have to use his imagination too much for inspiration; “Yeah, well it goes back to ‘Sound Of Confusion’, I mean that album was dedicated to a friend of ours who died of a drug overdose, probably a year before that album came out... I’d also been present a couple of times when people had overdosed, and although they didn’t die, there was a distinct possibility at the time that they could do.” Worthy of its near eight minutes, ‘Angel’ is the standout track of the album.

Overall, though, there is something intangible missing from ‘Spectrum‘. ‘Angel‘ excepted, the production is lacking, particularly compared with Spacemen 3’s most recent release, ‘Playing With Fire‘ (unless the over-fuzzed pieces are further nods to the sound of early Suicide). A bit more thematic variety would have helped too; by the time of ‘Pretty Baby‘, references to “baby” and “honey” are recurring a little too often. Despite some decidedly unfavourable reviews (Andrew Collins, writing in the NME, suggested that ‘If I Should Die‘ should be suffixed “I Don’t Think We’d Notice”) ‘Spectrum‘ is far from a failure; neither can it  be judged an unqualified success. Commercially, however, Spacemen 3 were hot property, and the album sold impressively, outselling any Spacemen album to date.

Early vinyl copies of the album came with a striking interactive cover, whereby a transparent coloured disc could be rotated to produce patterns with a similar disk printed on the sleeve itself. Silvertone’s willingness to experiment in this area was another reason for Kember’s enthusiasm for the label. “It was the sort of sleeve that you need a really mad record company to look at. I mean, Silvertone, all the sleeves they did… were really good, y’know, they did all those clear sleeves, and if I came up with an idea, they’d really help me implement it and find someone to make it.”

The first 2,000 copies of ‘Spectrum‘ came with a coupon for a free 10”. Pressed on brown vinyl, the ‘Octaves/Tremelos‘ EP was playable at four speeds – 16, 33, 45 and 78 – and consisted of two studio created drone pieces, both logical continuations of Kember’s ‘Ecstasy Symphony‘ from Spacemen 3’s ‘The Perfect Prescription‘. “Originally, the whole solo album was going to be that type stuff, experimental type stuff,” Kember recalls.

After the acrimonious Spacemen 3 split, Kember abandoned a purely solo career in favour of a new band, recruiting guitarist Richard Formby, bassist Mike Stout, and percussionist Jeff Donkin. Formby had been in many bands, including The Jazz Butcher; together with flatmate Stout, an occasional periphery member of The Wedding Present, he had produced some early tracks for Pale Saints, amongst others. Donkin was also the drummer of Leamington band Beautiful Happiness. Early intentions to christen the band Sun were thwarted by an existing band of the same name, so Kember adopted the title of his previous solo work for the outfit.

The first Spectrum release was a 7” single, given away at gigs in early 1991, featuring an instrumental demo of ‘(I Love You) To The Moon And Back‘ backed with a live version of the Formby track ‘Capo Waltz‘. The single was issued in a custom die-cut sleeve, with a proper sleeve available as a free gift with the first issue of the Spacemen 3 fanzine Outer Limits.

When ‘How You Satisfy Me‘, the first Spectrum single proper, was released in May of the following year, it gave little indication that Kember had made any radical changes to his creative modus operandi. A wonderful compelling drone-pop song, driven by a compelling keyboard riff and overlaid with guitars on overdrive, ‘How You Satisfy Me‘ was a logical next step from the more accessible side of ‘Recurring‘. The main track was accompanied by two gentle, if slight, versions of the instrumental ‘Don’t Go‘, but tucked away between them was the single’s real surprise; another instrumental, ‘My Life Spins Round Your Every Smile‘, which was a definite progression of Kember’s minimalist soundscapes. Although sharing some elements with previous experiments such as ‘Octaves‘ and ‘Ecstasy Symphony‘,‘… Smile‘ was simultaneously sedate and rhythmic – and it positively pulsed with life. Utilising several effects throughout, including warm bass piano notes, electronic stings and feedback washes, the track suggested that Kember may have been developing new methods to tackle his well established areas of musical interest.

This was confirmed with the release of the album ‘Soul Kiss (Glide Divine)‘, a stunning work of quite breathtaking beauty. After opening with ‘How You Satisfy Me‘, as if out of a need to dispense with the most conventional track as soon as possible, the album develops into a surprisingly tranquil affair, especially in the marvellous ‘Neon Sigh‘, which conjures up an atmosphere as icy cold as the blue hues incorporated into the sleeve design. What makes this such an assured work is more what is not there than what is; there are moments where nothing is left but the sound of a single cello or saxophone, or a wave of electronic effects. Despite this, songs in the more usual sense have not been completely discarded, with ‘Sweet Running Water‘, an update of ‘Capo Waltz‘ enhanced by Kember’s lyrics, being a particular highlight. “A listening album that has more functions than just being something to skin up to. It glides, it rocks and every track is a winner” wrote Tony Wilson in Volume magazine, and even as recently as 1998, the NME’s James Oldham was describing it as a “magnificent” album. “We had quite ambitious plans for it,” recalls Kember. “We knew from the start that the whole thing was going to be a song cycle. I hate the word ‘Concept Album,’ but, y’know, concept with a small c. But certainly a song cycle, yeah.”

The packaging for the initial vinyl and CD copies of ‘Soul Kiss (Glide Divine) ‘ was the most elaborate yet for a Spectrum release. The sleeve was constructed from transparent plastic, moulded in several sheets to allow oils to be trapped between different layers. Commonly known as the “squish pack”, these are remarkable artefacts, especially the larger 12” version. As might be expected, this inventive design caused a few problems. “When they shipped them from the distributor, they just treated them like they were normal records. Obviously, you need to take some consideration with something like that, and they just chucked them in boxes, packed up with other records… they’re probably OK to be stood, but as soon as you drop,  the weight of the other vinyl squigged... So of course, when all the stuff arrived at the shops, it was all dripping oil! And all the stock that was shipped with it, including, apparently, the Manic Street Preachers were hoping to get some top ten single with some nonsense that week [‘Motorcycle Emptiness‘], and all their stock was shipped at the same time, all got ruined… I mean, everything had been ruined by it. So it did cause a few problems to say the least!” Whether it can be directly attributed to Kember or not, it’s worth pointing out that the CD of ‘Motorcycle Emptiness‘ came in a cardboard digipack rather than a jewel case, and that the single only reached number 17!

After another sublime single, a cover of Daniel Johnston’s ‘True Love Will Find You In The End‘ backed with superior mixes of recent Spectrum material, the ‘Soul Kiss‘ era came to a dramatic end. In the run-up to a couple of dates in London and Derby at the end of May 1993, on a bill shared with Stereolab, Kember suffered a collapsed lung and found himself hospitalised back in Rugby – a condition which then re-occurred two days after admission. As his manager at the time, Bert Harris, commented “[The doctors] couldn’t determine for sure what caused it, although we can all guess in his case.” With the gigs cancelled while Kember recuperated, an instant collector’s item was created. Spectrum and Stereolab had planned to give away a split 7” single at the shows, featuring exclusive tracks by each of the acts – for the full story, see Diggin’ For Gold in RC235, but be aware that the article erroneously dates the release to January 1995. Considering the fanaticism that both bands inspire, this record is phenomenally sought after, and although the Spectrum’s ‘Soul Kiss (Glide Divine)‘ had in fact already featured on the fourth issue of the CD magazine Volume, and Stereolab’s ‘Tone Burst (Country)‘ would eventually be included on the second volume of their ‘Switched On!‘ rarities collections, their ‘Tempter (Demo)‘ remains unavailable elsewhere.

Spectrum soon underwent various line-up changes, with the departure of Formby and Donkin and the temporary addition of Kevin Cowan, a longstay of the Rugby music scene who had previously been a member of Spiritualized and The Darkside; this incarnation recorded an EP of four cover versions, although other songs were recorded before being discarded. “I tried Buffy Sainte-Marie’s ‘Codeine‘, and I couldn’t get that to work, or I thought that it’d been done better by other people,” says Kember. “I did a version of ‘Love Is Strange‘ – Buddy Holly did it, although he didn’t do the original… I did quite a strange version of that song, a very spacey version, which actually wasn’t too bad, it was going in the right direction, but I guess I just ran out of time. There was a Van Morrisson song that I tried, I forget what it was… from ‘Astral Weeks.‘” Another shift in personnel left the band centred around Kember, guitarist Scott Riley and studio and electronics guru Alf Hardy, and it was this line up that delivered the 1994 single ‘Undo The Taboo’ and it’s parent album, ‘Highs, Lows And Heavenly Blows’.

‘Highs, Lows…’ is an odd mixture of aural textures, falling broadly into one group characterised by warm, flowing electronic accompaniments and enveloping bass backings, giving a remarkably “full” overall effect, and another marked out by sparser, guitar-picked melodies and a generally lighter tone. It doesn’t help the flow of the album that the two styles are separated in the running order, the more ponderous and solid songs grouped at the start of the album with the more fragile compositions at the end, the gap being bridged by ‘Take Your Time,’ a Scott Riley composition on which he also sings lead vocal. Opinion is divided as to which are the most successful, although some, Kember included, don’t see the album as having any inconsistencies at all. “Really. Ha. An album of two halves – that’s a horribly football-like statement!” he laughs in answer to the question. His favourite of the Spectrum albums, ‘Highs, Lows…’ was also the point that relations with Silvertone began to fall apart.

Whereas every Spectrum release on Silvertone up to this point had featured some kind of special packaging, from the “squish pack” to the clear coloured sleeves of the singles, ‘Highs, Lows…’ came in a disappointingly conventional sleeve. “Great sleeve, nice one, hey?” says Kember sarcastically, looking it over. “This sleeve was meant to be a limited edition… [it] looked like this, but it was all clear packaging, and this was all transparent inks, and it looked superb… And they never even told me they weren’t gonna do it, they made me believe they were gonna do it until it came out… Someone, like y’know, had to tell me, “Er, yeah, we’re not doing it. And we’ve pulled all the ads for the single.”” This was indeed the case; both ‘Undo The Taboo’ and ‘Highs, Lows…’ were barely promoted, and worse, once the initial (small) pressing of the album sold out, it was never re-pressed, and is consequently fairly scarce.

With relations between Kember and Silvertone unsalvageable (Andrew Lauder having long left by this stage), Spectrum found themselves temporarily without a label. However, Kember was already planning Spacemen 3 re-issues with former Spacemen 3 manager Gerald Palmer, leading to the creation of the Space Age label. While Space Age is Palmer’s label in a business sense, Kember has a large degree of artistic control, fulfilling the A&R role. Spectrum are currently signed to Space Age in a two album deal. The situation in the U.S. was more bizarre, seeing Spectrum signed to Reprise, an offshoot of Time Warner. In fact, it was Reprise that released the first post-Silvertone Spectrum material, the U.S. only ‘Songs For Owsley’ EP (issued on vinyl on another Time Warner label, Birdman, for some obscure reason).

The most recent Spectrum album, 1997s ‘Forever Alien’, saw Kember once again forging out in a new direction. By this point, he had been developing a keen interest in the history of electronic music, and this almost totally informs the compositions that make up the album. Forgoing guitars almost entirely (there is one on there somewhere, apparently, but you’d be hard pushed to spot it), ‘Forever Alien’ is densely packed with synthesised pieces, from the dreamily haunting ‘Feels Like I’m Slipping Away’ to the disturbingly intense ‘Close Your Eyes And You’ll See’ and ‘Owsley’. A glance at the equipment credits is enough to indicate where the new Spectrum are coming from; previous mentions of Fender Jaguars and Gibson Firebirds are replaced by the inclusions of EMS Synthi AKS & VCS3s, Theremins and “Serge Modular Music System”, to name but a few.

The radical new direction taken on ‘Forever Alien’, previewed on the Space Age sampler ‘The New Atlantis’, has lost Kember some of his traditional, more guitar oriented fans, but this itself has been the source of some inspiration. “[A friend] sent me a printout where this guy had said something on the [DroneOn] mailing list… he had bought the Space Age ‘The New Atlantis’ sampler, and he was generally slagging it off and saying “What’s going on, where are the guitars, what’s all this stuff, it’s all droney shit.”… He made some comment about he could do as good himself on his little Casio home keyboard with one finger.” Thus the looped “one finger” refrain, repeated throughout ‘Like…’ – which, to be honest, wasn’t the wisest move, as it obscures what sounds like a most atmospheric piece. Those who believe that more recent Spectrum works are simply made through random knob-twiddling would do well to recognise the amount of thought that really goes into a track such as this. Kember again; “Well that song, that piece, how it works is that there’s an arpeggiated six note riff that’s recorded six times in perfect parallel… the note lengths are perfectly sustained, each note is sustained ‘till the next note, and I recorded the six riffs, each one starting one note later so that… as they were all changing it should have just been a shifting around the same chord as different layers took over... And of course, it didn’t give the effect that I expected at all, which was to have this chord which had this very unusual shifting effect. I don’t know why it didn’t but it didn’t, but it did have this lovely lopsided effect.”

I don’t know if anyone ever actually uttered the phrase “We just do what we like, and if anyone else likes it, it’s a bonus,” but it’s a sure-fire way to guarantees instant derision. Kember wouldn’t directly say anything so crass, but it does seem to be at the heart of his philosophy. He’s under no illusions that the path he now follows is one that leads to mainstream success. “Yeah, I mean a lot of people don’t like that stuff, the material, they find it depressing. I think it succeeds in what it’s meant to do, yeah… Obviously there isn’t that big a market for that kind of stuff!”

If this is the case, Kember’s other musical activities must be seen as even more off the beaten track. While recording the closing track of ‘Soul Kiss (Glide Divine)’, ‘Phase Me Out (Gently)’, a fifteen minute recreation of whale song via saxophone and voice modulation, guest musician Kevin Martin suggested that Kember hive off his more experimental work as a separate project. Thus was born Experimental Audio Research (E.A.R.), described on their first release as “a loose affiliation of non-resident ‘sound makers’”. Contributors to the project since it’s inception in 1992 have included Kevin Shields (My Bloody Valentine), Kevin Martin (God and Techno Animal, amongst others) and Eddie Prevost (legendary sixties improvisational collective A.M.M.), as well as sometimes Spectrum players Scott Riley and Alf Hardy. The only constant throughout the many E.A.R. releases is Kember himself.

While not seeing E.A.R. as a pure solo project, Kember acknowledges that it doesn’t function as a democracy. “I do talk to them about the way I’d like to see things going, but ultimately it’s up to them to interpret that. We do work with scores live, but very loose, very loose scores. You work with people with Eddie Prevost who is such an experienced improviser, he’s not the sort of person you give a score to, he’s perfectly adept at knowing – he’s got a rough idea of what’s the vague kind of outlying mood to follow, he’s very quick at working off what’s around and stuff. And inspiring the people he’s working with as well, very good.”

E.A.R. is primarily a chance for Kember to work unhindered by the requirements for conventional songs that people expect from Spectrum (although the division is sometimes blurred, with the occasional E.A.R. candidate escaping to a full Spectrum release). And given such freedom, he has flourished; there have been eight E.A.R. albums released since 1994, and an array of singles for myriad labels, often with special features, such as different sizes (5”, 7”, 8”, 9”, 10” – “and eventually I’ll fill in the other sizes! Slowly but surely.”) or special “unbreakable” polycarbon vinyl. Albums are given over to other artists to deconstruct and re-interpret (‘The Köner Experiment’), or conversely, are adapted from other sources (‘Pestrepeller’). Entire 74 minute albums are constructed by recording the output of Speak ‘n’ Spell machines that have been re-wired to produce unexpected results (the questionably titled ‘Data Rape’). Obviously, these extremes are not going to appeal to everybody – curious beginners should check out ‘Phenomena 256’, which collects some singles as well as including some new material.

Much of Kember’s electronic experimentation is inspired by his passion for E.M.S., the company that produced many of the earliest synthesisers, and which still exists today. “Yeah, the more I looked into the company, first of all I found out they make a lot of very interesting and innovative products, and then I started finding out more and more about Peter Zinovieff, the guy behind it, and realising what a pioneer he was in using computer technology in his music. Then I got in touch with him, coz I knew he’d made music, and I had a tape of a piece called ‘January Tensions’ that he did, which is a really nice piece, and I got in touch with him about releasing some of his stuff. And he was up for that, so we’ve been working on that for two or three years, it’s quite a long term thing. There’s a lot of information, it’s a very in-depth project, which will probably eventually be three different CDs.” Another source of inspiration is the work of the now-defunct BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and in particular, the work of Delia Derbyshire. Derbyshire was responsible for realising the theme music for Doctor Who, inventing techniques that should have been far beyond the capabilities of a 1963 recording studio. Kember and Derbyshire have recently become friends, after Kember discovered that she was practically a neighbour of his. “Yeah, since the 80s she’s been living in Northampton, which is pretty local from here. Also, the guy at E.M.S. had a group with her, an early electronic group called Unit Delta Plus, who did concerts and stuff. They did one concert at the Roundhouse in 65, may have been very early 66, where Paul McCartney played tape music.” This is more likely to be the Carnival Of Light Rave, held on 28^th January and 4^th February 1967, where The Beatles’ legendary (and still unreleased) ‘Carnival Of Light’ was played.

As well as Derbyshire’s involvement in Unit Delta Plus (together with Pete Zinovieff and Brian Hodgson), she also provided the music for several Yoko Ono events, including the Indica Gallery exhibition where Ono met John Lennon. Now, Kember finds himself working with his heroine. “I’ve been loosely working with her in that she’s been helping me on a sort of a producers kind of level… I’ve been encouraging her and helping her to catch up with technology a little bit, coz things have become a lot cheaper do to stuff now, it gets cheaper every week, practically, to record at home, and to do complex sound manipulation becomes easier and easier. Stuff that Peter Zinovieff could do in his studio, his analogue studio, which was a unique state-of-the-art place in 69, 70, has only just become available on computers in the last ten years… She has been working on some new music, some new pieces and stuff. She’s very much still got the talent, she’s very talented musically, very.”

It’s impossible to know what Kember’s next moves will be. There’s no reason why his E.A.R. projects can’t continue indefinitely (indeed, more releases are already planned), but the future for Spectrum is less clear. Recent concerts focussed mainly on ‘Forever Alien’ material, but he has hinted on more than one occasion that the next album may see a return to full-on guitar-based songs. There is even a possibility of a book about the history of E.M.S., following articles he has contributed to in the past on the subject. This wouldn’t be a totally new direction for Kember – long term readers may recall his Thirteenth Floor Elevators article in Record Collector 147.

In the cab back to the station, I am again asked why I’ve been visiting. Deciding not to go through the same depressing experience, I simply state that I have been interviewing a musician. “Oh yeah, Spacemen was it?” rejoins the driver, to my surprise and delight. Maybe, just maybe, and it’s only a maybe, Rugby football won’t be alone on that welcome sign forever.

Many thanks to Peter Kember, for time and tea. Thanks also to Mark Lascelles for invaluable help with the discography, Andy Rigg, Chris Barrus (www.no-fi.com/spectrum), and Dave Skinner.

SONIC BOOM DISCOGRAPHY

U.K. SINGLES

U.K. LPs

U.K. CDs

Overseas Releases

Other Important Releases

SPECTRUM DISCOGRAPHY

U.K. SINGLES

U.K. Albums

U.K. CDs