Author:
  Martin Roach
  ISBN:
  1-897783-01-9
  Dimensions:
  130mm x 200mm
  Extent:
  288 pages
  Price:
  £6.99
  Format:
  Paperback

 

With the gig that night cancelled The Mission were left with less than twenty four hours to decided on their actions and head for Encinitas in southern California. The whole episode in LA had been fraught with intense emotion - when Adams had blazed around the tour bus asking for his passport home, the very existence of The Mission itself had been threatened, and the effect of this was traumatic. The rest of the band followed Perrin to the back of the bus where they all sat in confused silence and cried. Gradually they began to talk and confront the crisis - an hour later several key decisions had been made, the most important one being that The Mission would carry on, regardless.

The Los Angeles gig was remarkably the only date that was lost as a result of that eventful night in Los Angeles. Pete Turner, a balding mountain of a sound man, had played some bass before and now hastily took over, dwarfing the rest of the band. The following night in San Francisco they met up with a previous acquaintance called Surf who was himself a bass player and was now recruited to complete the line-up more effectively. Perrin had by now lined up a series of dates supporting The Psychedelic Furs and with these dates The Mission announced in no uncertain terms that their prolific touring attitude would continue unaffected. Incredibly, it also became apparent that their off-stage lifestyle would remain largely unaltered aswell. Indeed, the frenzy which had swept Adams into such a state increased if anything. As Hinkler remembers, instead of heeding the warning the band threw all caution to the wind and accelerated their excess: "In a funny way, and it's by no means a detrimental remark to Craig, but when he left it was the band's most rockin' period in some ways. He left us with several shows to do and we just went mental - we were doing ridiculous amounts of drugs so we just put it on the tour budget, you don't care when you're that fucked up. We got worse really, doing massive amounts of acid and coke, drinking Jack Daniels all the time, it just got unbelievable. It all seemed a part of the territory, and we couldn't care less. We looked absolutely terrible, no shirts on under grimy leather jackets, unshaven rock 'n' roll messes, but we kicked ass live I tell you. It was just like that first European tour with The Cult only worse. It was a culmination of way too many drugs and excess. It was a total burn-out. Certainly on my part it was a death wish almost, perhaps even more so after Craig left early, burn-out, die young."

The first gig with The Furs was in St. Louis but the band were still in Orange County, a trek across nearly two thirds of America, made worse by the fact that the truck they were driving had an automatic cut-out when it reached 55mph. As it turned out this was probably for the best, because it was decided that the cheapest way to get the equipment cross country was to give two roadies two thousand dollars each in cash and two big bags of cocaine. They forgot one crucial element - the two crew members would have to drive through Las Vegas to get to their destination. This horrible realisation only dawned on Perrin as they drove off and he waved forlornly at the disappearing exhaust fumes: "I was waving and smiling as they drove off thinking 'That's the last time I'll ever see them.' They weren't the quietest pair at the best of times but turning up in Vegas coked out of their heads with a thousand dollars in each of their pockets just didn't bear thinking about. They made it eventually, God knows how, but they didn't have a penny between them." The first sight The Psychedelic Furs had of The Mission was when two roadies pulled up in a truck, both out of it on coke, with the bus cab showered in white dust. When Jez was asked his name he grinned inanely, pointed at Nipper and answered: 'I dunno, ask him.'

Matters didn't improve once the band arrived. One gig saw Brown realising shortly before going onstage that there was no hope of his playing as he was blind drunk, and subsequently scurrying around all the bemused Furs crew and even their truck driver asking if they would fill in for him: "I was saying 'Go on, you can do it, you've heard us eight or nine times now, I bet you can do it.' Anyway, when we came onstage I walked across to my kit and I was staggering all over the place, really badly, no control whatsoever. I got onto the stool and I thought I'd made it, that was it, I'd made it. At that moment, just sitting down was my grandest moment. The next day I got some funny comments though - The Furs kept coming up and asking me if I fancied a drink." Two nights before The Mission had exacted sweet revenge on a record company executive, who became the unwitting bearer of all their anti-industry invective, as Hussey recalls: "We were chopping out some speed, which is a lot stronger over there than in the UK. He thought it was just coke so he said 'I'll have a line of that' so we gave him one. We met up with him a week later and he said 'You bastards, why didn't you tell me it was speed, I haven't slept for four days.'"

For The Psychedelic Furs, seeing this relatively new band blazing this trail of destruction and debauchery across the country was very frustrating because they had been placed under a strict 'No drink or drugs' policy after their own problems with this in the past. With such vast amounts of both being consumed with abandon by The Mission however, The Furs will-power cracked. Halfway through the dates The Mission were sitting in their dressing room doing a line of coke when one of The Furs slinked into the room and said 'Don't tell anybody will you?' and promptly joined in. Two minutes after he had left there was a furtive tap on the door and another member of The Furs sneaked in and did exactly the same, and so it continued until virtually all of the band and crew had crept into The Mission's dressing room, all thinking they were getting away with it in secret whilst everybody else was having to stay clean.

On arriving in New York The Mission went to a club where Hussey met up with a bootleg T-shirt seller from Birmingham who gave the singer £2000 as his share of some Mission sales. With the roll of notes shoved hastily into a back-pocket, Hussey rejoined the crew and headed for one of The Big Apple's many underground clubs: "We ended up in this really strange place. It was like a Vietnam Vets club, they searched you on the door for guns and knives and other stuff. We went in, all of us tripping, and it was full of the most bizarre bunch of people with stumps for arms and legs and mangled up faces. It was really heavy and because we were tripping it was all a bit crazy, surreal even". By chance Hussey met a girl in the club whom he had known from his band days back in Liverpool. After a few drinks she went back to the hotel and as they arrived Hussey remembered the wad in his pocket. Turning around to his old friend he hugged her and said 'Here you go, get a load of this, you can have it' handed her the £2000 and retired to bed. Fortunately the girl returned her surprise windfall the next morning, but had to remind Hussey where it had come from. The gig that night was no less eventful. After a great show at Radio City Hall, a Phonogram executive went to see the band and walked into the dressing room which Hussey and Hinkler were in the process of completely trashing. Hussey opened the window and hurled a bottle out into Rockefeller Plaza, where it smashed in front of the Plaza's private security who immediately headed for the venue. Whilst the two Mission men destroyed the room the executive prized the door open enough to tell the angry security that everything was absolutely fine, despite the sounds of smashing glass and furniture coming from inside. The pair were banned from the venue, even though they had to play the same club the next night aswell. As a result of the previous night's damage the duo were not allowed to soundcheck, but instead were escorted into the venue ten minutes before the show and escorted out immediately afterwards. All this was only a week after Adams body and mind had been shattered by just such a lifestyle. This was The Mission calmed down.


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