Come On Take Me For A Ride

In 1987 Spacemen 3 released their second album, The Perfect Prescription, an album where the sequence of the songs and the music the group recorded attempt to recreate a trip, highs and lows and inception to comedown. It paid homage to Lou Reed's Street Hassle and covered the Red Krayola's Transparent Radiation. The album is, like all of Spacemen 3's records, both a manifesto and the inner worlds of Sonic Boom and J Spaceman expressed on tape. Later on in 2003 an alternate version of The Perfect Prescription was released, a double CD called Forged Prescription. This was the original tracks as recorded by the group in Rugby in 1987 plus some demo versions. Pete and Jason had streamlined the songs for the album's 1987 release, removing a lot of the guitars and stripping them back, because there was no way to replicate them live and it seemed to make sense to put out an album that they could play live. Some S3 fans will tell you the more elaborate versions on Forged Prescriptions are superior to the Perfect Prescription ones. Some prefer the '87 songs and the '87 running order. I'm not sure it matters that much, they're all great, just variations of each other. One thing both the Forged Prescription album and the various re-issues of The Perfect Prescription have in common are the B-sides to the Take Me To The Other Side single, including this one...

Soul 1 

A combination of mid- 60s Rolling Stones, psychedelic guitar parts, bent strings, horns (sax and trumpet) and the beatific mindset of Spacemen 3 playing in a a recording studio box with no windows in an industrial estate in Rugby during the summer of 1987. Gorgeous. This song, the opener on The Perfect Prescription and the beginning of the trip, appears on Forged Prescriptions in demo form and shows the twin guitars of Sonic/Pete Kember and Jason preparing for blast off.

Take Me To The Other Side (Forged Prescriptions demo)

Forged Prescriptions and all the re-issues in recent years of Spacemen 3's albums on vinyl, plus various albums of demos, early recordings and live albums, have appeared on Space Age Recordings, a label owned by their former manager Gerald Palmer. The former members of the band, Pete, Jason and original bassist Pete Bassman have all said in public that Palmer has been ripping them off for years, releasing records without their input, paying little or no royalties, stealing their copyrights (logos etc) and asked fans not to buy the re- issues. Palmer (obviously) denies it all. One of those situations that leaves fans with moral dilemmas. I suppose for physical product on Space Age buy it second hand if you can. Forged Prescriptions is an album that I'm sure you can find digitally for free if you look around some of the corners of the internet for a few minutes.