Most of us know this German concert recording from the double-LP release Live In Europe 1989, which was put out by the UK’s Space Age Recordings label in the mid-90s. For those of us who are Spacemen 3 completists, it’s one of those necessary evils you have to track down in order to bolster your credibility amongst the collector scum. I put it in the same boat as Performance and For All The Fucked Up Children Of This World (We Give You Spacemen 3) as Non-Canon. You don’t really need them to say you own everything Spacemen 3 recorded. I think Dreamweapon is more important than the aforementioned releases. Revolution Or Heroin was CD-only and came out about five years after the band members went their separate ways.
That’s the thing about being a Spacemen 3 collector. Do any of us really need anything that was released after 1990? Recurring was the last studio album the band recorded, and Dreamweapon — at least in Erik Morse’s book — has some importance to it…but even Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To was just a demos compilation from 1986. Performance, Taking Drugs…, For All The Fucked Up Children…Live In Europe, Revolution Or Heroin, they were just posthumous releases whose presence on any official discography is tenuous at best.
By the way, how great was Erik Morse’s book? I still remember standing at the cash register of Rocks In Your Head (when it was on Prince Street in SoHo), paying for the first Psychic Ills record, and having the cashier point me to the book. Not having known it existed, I added it to my purchase and we got to talking about music. He then gifted me a copy of the first Crystal Stilts single (“Shattered Shine” b/w “lights”) and told me I’d like it. I didn’t, really, but I’ll always be grateful for him pointing out Morse’s book. In fact, I think I wrote a blog entry about the book back in ’06 or ’07 but I can’t seem to locate it. Oh well. I guess it’s out of print now and fetches over $100 a copy? It really offers an unprecedented look at Spacemen 3, as well as the early Spiritualized years. Add to the fact it was beautifully written, and it makes for one of the best band bios I’ve ever read. If you can find a copy, it’s totally worth buying. I’d give you mine but I left it back in Jersey. Maybe ten years from now some enterprising computer nerd will painstakingly copy and convert the entire text to PDF, like Julian Cope’s Krautrocksampler. Then I’ll post it here for you, and the circle of me posting photocopies of entire books on my blog will remain unbroken.
I digress. Here’s your chance to listen to Spacemen Are Go! (aka Live In Europe 1989) without having to drop $40 or $50 on a clean copy of that Non-Canon LP. All the songs were captured in Germany during the spring of 1989. The recording quality is fine, not great. It’s not as weird or unique as Dreamweapon. It’s just, you know, a Spacemen 3 show. But it’s not every day we’re privy to those, so that makes it worth a listen. The only difference between this and the double-LP are that it is missing “Take Me To The Other Side” and the second, full-length version of Suicide that closed out the vinyl’s fourth side.
Spacemen 3
Spacemen Are Go! (Live In Europe 1989)
(BOMP!, 1995)
MediaFire DL Link
01. Rollercoaster
02. Mary Anne
03. Bo Diddley Jam
04. 2:35
05. Walking With Jesus
06. I Believe It
07. Lord Can You Hear Me? [MP3]
08. Things’ll Never Be The Same
09. Starship
10. Revolution
11. Suicide
