[kj] Youth recounts his early 80's acid freak-out:

[Brendan Quinn]

That's funny, I never knew any of this stuff and I was yarning with Youth
about Robert Anton Wilson, DMT and all that when they came over a few months
back. 

 

From: gathering-bounces at misera.net [mailto:gathering-bounces at misera.net] On
Behalf Of Daimon Cook
Sent: Wednesday, 2 October 2013 10:10 a.m.
To: A list about all things Killing Joke (the band!)
Subject: Re: [kj] Youth recounts his early 80's acid freak-out:

 

god bless Youth.

 

GODDESS too!

 

On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 10:56 AM, Rheinhold Squeegee <kjlist at live.com> wrote:

http://jmrhiggs.blogspot.com/2013/10/youths-early-killing-joke-era-acid.html



Writing The KLF
<http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1780226551/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=
1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=1780226551&linkCode=as2&tag=jmrhiggscom-21>
was in part an attempt to scratch an itch created by an aborted attempt to
write a book about Killing Joke. There's a lot of cross-over between those
two stories, and many of the threads I explored in The KLF would have worked
equally well in a Killing Joke book - not least of which being the money
burning (see below). 

 

Here's a transcript of an interview I did with Youth for that book,
regarding his "acid flipout".

	

YOUTH:

I was doing acid regularly. I'd done a German tour and I'd hooked up with
this 21 year old hairdresser-come-acid queen called Heidi.  She gave me a
little quarter trip before each gig. She was wealthy so she put me up in
nice hotels and drove me to the gigs in a sports car which pissed the rest
of the band off.  

 

So I was doing quite a lot but nothing cosmic had happened.  I was still
treating it very much as a laugh. I was cocky, I always thought that I'd
never lose it on acid. I thought that you had to be born a shaman to be
cosmic or be like Jim Morrison or whatever, and I was too middle class,
ordinary and normal.

 

The rest of the band weren't really into acid.  Jaz had had a major freakout
when he was 16. He used to take acid at school but one time he was spiked
and he thought that his arm had disappeared. He was having The Horrors. His
mum was an award winning teacher, very progressive.  She just sat him down,
gave him some rocks to hold, did a bit of research.  She was very cool. So,
yeah, the other guys weren't into it, although we did take mushrooms
together. But we'd rarely take acid. I was the acid head.

 

But then there was this one event that pushed me over the edge.  I'd let
Ralph, this friend of mine, use my squat one weekend while I was away. When
I came back my TV had disappeared.  I couldn't get hold of him for ages, but
then I bumped into him at a club one night. He was there with this other guy
looking pretty rough.  I said, 'Oh Ralph, how are you?' And he goes, 'I hear
you think I nicked your TV.' And I said, 'No, no, I mean you stayed there
and it disappeared and I wondered if you knew anything or had seen what
happened?'  But he didn't quite get that, he was fixating on whether I was
accusing him and if I was still his friend.

 

Then he said, 'If you are my friend, take this,' and he gave me a tab of
acid. It was this Sorcerer's Apprentice trip with a picture of a little
Mickey Mouse with stars going between his hands.  I said, 'Acid? Oh yeah I
take acid all the time.' I took it. I mean he didn't force me but at the
same time I was taking it because that's what he wanted.

 

Half an hour later I'm in the attic of the club thinking that he's going to
murder me. I went down to the bar and met this Polish ballet dancer. I said,
'You're going to have to rescue me, I think these guys are going to kill me.
I've been spiked with this acid and it's freaking me out.' She took me back
to Westbourne Grove and shagged me solid for three days. But I never quite
came down.  I slowly started to come down a bit but it was very strong acid.

 

I was really upset about the whole thing. I thought my friend had set me up.
He lived in Croydon with his Nan, so I wrote to him there.  In this letter I
said, 'Look that really freaked me out, you should never do that, and lets
meet and sort it out'.  And then literally a few days later I found out that
he'd committed suicide and thrown himself off a railway bridge.

 

He was obviously in a very dark place. But that just totally spun me out. By
that point I was tripping all the time. I couldn't quite understand how that
could be, because I hadn't taken acid for over a month. 

 

As it progressed I got more and more out of it.  I started to get all the
classic delusions of messianic complex. I thought this white van was
following me around.  I thought the Masons were out to get me because of
Killing Joke stirring things up. I started to get intrigued by Masonry and
saw it as this dark conspiracy thing. I was reading Robert Anton Wilson and
stuff like that. And this just progressed and progressed.  The band started
to get a bit concerned because I'd always been very cynical about things and
now I was starting to see Masonic conspiracies in the drain covers.

 

I remember breaking into the Masonic headquarters in Covent Garden, that
huge square building. I'm not sure how I got in, it had this scaffolding
over it and doors going in and I managed to get in a side door somehow. This
was around 8 or 9 o'clock at night. I went through all these different
temples and put the crosses down because I thought that they were abusing
the cross. I ran up to the top of the building to these French doors which
were locked, and I was banging on these doors. This African guy came out in
red polka dot shorts. I thought they were going to use him for some
sacrifice.  I said, 'Come on! Open the door, I'll get you out, I'll rescue
you.' And this guy was talking to me in an African accent, saying 'Go away'
or something.

 

Then this Welsh security guard turns up. And I showed him this signet ring
with this crest on that my Dad had said was something to do with my family
from Llangathen. It had a dolphin on it.  I said, 'Look, I'm Welsh. This is
magic. Help me.' He said, 'I'm going to arrest you'. I just did a runner.

 

I ran into this bar opposite which was where Blitz had been, or one of those
New Romantic clubs.  I remember all these Masons were in there, all these
guys who had come out from some ceremony all in suits. And these guys
started talking to me, I thought 'They're on to me, I'm being followed'. I
was very paranoid.

 

We'd got a five grand advance for something and my dad set me up with this
bank manager at the Clydesdale Bank. He also tuned out to be a mason. I
deposited this money in and said, 'I want to borrow another five grand on
top of this.' He asked why and I said 'Well I want to do my shamanic
training, study kung fu and do all this stuff.' He said, 'Listen son, I'm
not going to lend to you five thousand pounds. You've got to learn the value
of money,' And I said 'I know what the value of money is', and I took a five
pound note out and set fire to it, there in his office. I said, 'Look that's
the value, it's just paper.' The guy freaked out, cleared his desk and threw
me out of the bank. 

 

I just kept doing more and more crazy things like that. I was starting to
tap into stuff, some powerful energy.  I remember getting the band to sit
round and put their hands out and we'd focus on something, and we'd make
something happen.  I could say to Geordie, 'look, if we focus our minds on
that streetlamp, it will go out. Or at least flicker on and off.' He'd say,
'Really? Okay, come on let's do it.'  And we did, and it worked.  And other
psychic phenomena stuff was occurring.

 

And, yeah, it just got progressively more and more crazy. Then one day I
woke up at my step-mum's. She'd just had a baby with my dad but my dad was
in prison at the time so he wasn't there, just her and this Spanish nanny.
And I remember looking out of the window and thinking, 'Oh the sky's going
green. This is it. It's the end of the world. I'm going to the river.'

 

I just had this pair of swimming trunks on and a kimono. I started walking
from Brompton Road to Chelsea. And I started going into these fruit and veg
shops and going to people, 'Look, you want some money?  Have some money!'
They would say 'No thanks' but I kept on at them. I was saying 'Look it's
just money, I'll start burning it'. Which I did.  And I immediately got
arrested.  And shipped off to a mental hospital.

 

It was very strange. I remember in the ambulance on the way, if you looked
out the front window it was like normal, if I looked out the back window I
thought it was the future, and everything was underwater. I remember going
past Tooting Bec tube and there was gondolas parked up outside it.

 

I was taken to Springfields Hospital, near Tooting Bec. I'd been put into a
sort of flashers' ward, which was odd in itself, with all these guys who
were flashers because I was in a kimono.  And I was going, 'I'm not mad,
you're all mad', which of course makes them think 'Oh he's definitely mad'. 

 

They gave me Largactil, which I think is supposed to make you compliant but
it just spun me out even more.  And they gave me ECT [Electroconvulsive
Therapy, also known as Electroshock Therapy], like in One Flew Over The
Cuckoo's Nest. They still use it. I must have had two or three sessions of
that. They put a wooden thing or something in your mouth, it's all very
Victorian.  I don't remember it being difficult or anything, I just remember
this white light.

 

And I just felt we were totally underwater. I remember my Dad coming to the
hospital and sitting with him and seeing utter shock on his face. This was
when Dad was doing time and he got let out to see me in the hospital, which
probably didn't do him any good. I said, 'Isn't it weird Dad, we can sit
here and have this conversation and we are underwater.' 

 

But there was one point where I thought the hospital was on fire. And I
remember running away in the middle of the night and leaping over this
fence, and stabbing my hand on the spike of the fence, running a few miles
to where my Dad had been living, which was the Coach House on the other side
of Wandsworth Common. He was in prison but his friend and his girlfriend
were there. I was completely spaced out. I said, 'Look', showing them the
wound on my hand, 'I'm the one! I've got stigmata!' I thought I was Jesus,
that the whole world was all on my shoulders.  

They let me stay the night and my step mum came by the next day and said,
'Look you've broken out, the hospital didn't burn down, there was no fire,
you're hallucinating. If you don't go back they'll slap a section on you and
you won't be able to leave'. So she persuaded me to go back.

 

While I was in there this guy called The Wizard used to come up every day to
visit me.  The Wizard lived in the church near Lyndhurst Road with twenty
feral cats. He had a seven pointed star tattooed on his face. He'd never
wore shoes, he was very much a nature magic person. This is the guy who used
to come to the early Killing Joke gigs and blow fire and do circles and make
ceremonies, he was our shaman basically. The whole 'ceremony' aspect to
Killing Joke was there from very early on, it came out of the community we
were living in really.

 

The Wizard came to visit me and gave me this crystal. I remember meditating
with this crystal in the hospital and seeing these stars, like lights. These
were my spirit guides. They talked to me and told me what to say and do.
They said, 'Look you're going to come up to a panel of doctors, you've got
to say 'I've just had some LSD and I feel really tired and I want to go home
and see my Mum', and they'll let you go. Don't say, 'I'm not mad you're
mad'.

 

And so I came up before this panel and that's what happened. I was released
from the mental hospital because I did what the spirit guides in the crystal
told me do. They let me go and I went up to Wales with the band. I was in
there for about two weeks overall.

 

It took me a good eight years or so, until I was about 29, before I would go
near psychedelics again. I still smoked pot a bit but I kind of almost
stopped that for a bit. It took me that time to rebuild my ego and get my
confidence back, and find a good anchor again.

 

But what's amazing is, I came back. I was watching that Syd Barrett
documentary recently, and the Peter Green one, and I did achieve going to
the place that they went to. But I managed to come back, which is very rare.
And that is an amazing thing, I think.  






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