Music Arcades: Spacemen 3: The Perfect Prescription

Sometime in 2001, my friend Jo said she'd thought about giving me a Spacemen 3 album. As casually I could manage, I complimented her wisdom. Time passed, and nothing ever came of that. But she'd planted the idea in my mind. I remembered the great show I'd seen them do at the Leadmill, on the same bill as Miranda Sex Garden and Birdland. And I wondered why I'd never got any of their stuff at the time. Strangely, they never did a Peel session; and if Peel didn't play a band that you might normally have expected him to, well, it might make you pause… So that may be why I got a Loop album in the eighties, but nothing by Spacemen 3.

Early in 2002, once it was clear that no gift was coming, I had to take matters into my own hands. Hence The Perfect Prescription. With the passage of time since the album's release, however, it's impossible not to hear it through the filter of hindsight. Half of the writing pair behind The Perfect Prescription went on to lead Spiritualized; the other half took a left turn and did projects like Experimental Audio Research. Because this album shares 95% of its appearance (if not its DNA) with the former and only 5% with the latter, it would be tempting to assume that Mr Spiritualized was the lead partners. My hunch, though, is that there's a bit more to it than that — and one of the most interesting things about Spacemen 3 (as, indeed, for contemporaries like Loop) was the way they melded those two fragments in a combustible mix.