Steve Sutherland freaks out with the greatest pop group in the universe | article published in Melody Maker, 13th February 1982

Miles Over Matter | Four Miles High | NO-ONE in Miles Over Matter can swim. That’s inconsequential. It’s also untrue but, what the hell, it’s a start ain’t it? — the only one you’re gonna get — and it sure makes as much sense as most of the other stuff they spout on about. Confused? Good. Read on.

Miles Over Matter are the greatest pop group in the world. No, let’s stick me neck out here — in the universe. I don’t know why, and even if I did, I probably couldn’t explain it.

I mean, I could list things like energy, ambition, strong sex urge, stronger songs, flash shirts, tight trousers, enviable hair-dos and out-and-out lunacy . . . but somehow that doesn’t seem to do them justice.

Nor do their only two recorded tracks —“Something’s Happening” and “Car” — on the criminally under-produced “A Splash Of Colour” compilation.

Nor, for this and that Matter, do that album’s lazy connotations and shoddy packaging. I mean, MOM to, say, Mood Six are like Motorhead to the Moody Blues, or the Monkees to Mario Lanza. Hey, I think they’d like that last one!

“What we wanna be is the NEW STONED Monkees,” says the dangerously deranged and dapper Miles Davis Landesman, poet, guitarist and Hendrix disciple. And, suddenly, this room don’t seem big enough for both of us.

“Steve and I were at college, man. The first time we met we took an acid trip together and he locked himself in the bog.”

Miles Over Matter | Four Miles High

Steve Counsel, sex-symbol bassist in split crotch-crunchers, enthusiastically confirms the anecdote. He’s as bad . . . if not worse. The walls are closing in.

“Miles knows Ken Kesey, man. I mean . . . y’know . . . WOW!”

Miles, in fact, knows an awful lot of people. He’s the son of American poet Fran Landesman and as a kid he had his photo taken with Jimi at Woburn Abbey.

His dad promoted the Floyd at Middle Earth, he saw Yoko Ono tied to a chair, blind-folded and screaming her head off and formed a band called Renoir with actor Phil Daniels. Now he occasionally works at Boy in Kings Road and has a most unnerving habit of behaving erratically just where and when he will.

“Oh, you mean like at the Golf Club, pouring that can of beer down my bollocks? I didn’t do that on purpose, y’know; it just HAPPENED man!”

A wide-eyed, tousle-haired American schoolboy really called Jason but — for reasons best known to himself — far happier being addressed as Freecloud Ivory, he accepts this outrage without so much as a wince.

“That’s what really grabs me about psychedelia . . . he jigs up and down in excitement . . . “the total over-the-top-ness and weirdness. I mean, I was the last to join this band, right? But right away I knew they were something special. There was something about the way the drummer could pass a joint at the same time as playing drums. That really impressed me . . . I just couldn’t believe it.”

Mercifully, this drummer isn’t here at the moment, isn’t enthusiastically blurting a hundred words a second at me and my tape in this unusually tidy Kentish Town bedroom. Right now, so I’m told, he’s plonked on his ass in some dingey old office selling ad space for the Sun or the News Of The World. Or – and this seems much more likely -stone asleep on the job, still somewhat smashed from last night’s great gig.

Miles Over Matter | Four Miles High

MILES Over Matter were, in fact, called the Electric Kool Aids up until last May. Since then they shed their singer, Babel, and played . . . and played . . . building a following in the good old-fashioned tradition. But with one striking difference.

Their staunchest fans are Camden schoolgirls, seldom averse, at the metaphorical drop of a booming bass-note, to manic screaming, mobbing the band and dancing dead starkers to stuff like “Interstellar Overdrive”.

“I like playing ‘cos I like turning girls on,” says Steve grinning a lot, but you know that he means it. “I like doing gigs because they’re really special,”

Miles contradicts almost earnestly. “More special to me than any drug in the world. I mean, the great thing about this band is we’re not categorised as anything. We’ve done supports with Hawkwind, we’ve done The Daze Of Future Past with The Professionals and Classix Nouveaux . . . we wanna support the Pretenders or Carlene Carter . . . anyone!”

“That’s right,” screams Steve, rocketing up on his cuban-heeled Chelsea’s. It’s like when Charlie (Harper of the UK Subs) and Chas Smash got up on stage and jammed with us at the Golf Club – ska met punk via psychedelia.

Miles Over Matter | Four Miles High

Ah, that word. That kiss of death. The merest mention’s usually enough to send your average sniggering hack into chortling convulsions, tickled pink and paisley by mirth-filled memories of the mod revival and all that Sixties crap about flowers and beads. Miles (Over Matter) don’t quite see it that way.

“I worked in a record shop for a really long time and I’d put on glam rock records, Marc Bolan, The Osmonds -anything that was chart shit. But when punk came out, I put The Pistols on and it really meant a lot to me because it was something different.

“In the same way, the kids who buy ‘A Splash Of Colour’ won’t be buying it because they think it’s gonna sound like the Sixties. They’re gonna buy it because it’s something different.

“I mean, how come all those guys in Japan are dressing up as Teddy boys, eh? Because it’s a new experience to them and they fuckin’ love it!”

MOM – forgive the vernacular – fuckin’ love it too. The fashion, their fans and those freak-outs. Like the time that le swish Le Kilt club offered free entry to females before 9.30 and the lads, thinking this a mite sexist, turned up in drag and fought their way in.

Make no mistake, MOM can deliver. In their groping young hands, psychedelia could just turn out the weapon against complacency it once threatened but narrowly failed to be.

Live, they’re a mini spectacular, arms, legs and instruments here, there and everywhere. Like some chewed-up video of everything great in rock ‘n’ roll history, they artlessly, instinctively do it RIGHT.

They’re a rock band and proud of it; a revolution from within, not some meaningless mouthings and manifestos without.

We’re not a drug band

Actually it’s anarchy for the first time since the Pistols – a band entertaining an audience by unashamedly entertaining themselves. It’s young, it’s liberating and I love it but here I am, contemplating how to tell you all this when Mick walks in and the door disappears.

“We’re not a drug band,” he informs me immediately, suspicious of what’s been going down in his absence. “We just play music and smoke dope and sometimes take acid – that’s all.”

Oh well, that’s all right then, and “Happy Trails” is the greatest album ever . . . and where the hell did I leave that last line?

“We just wanna blow your mind man! That’s our only intention!”

Er . . . that’s it. Thanks Freecloud. Now point me at the window.

GIG REVIEW:

MOOD SIX / MILES OVER MATTER | The Fridge, Brixton

Tonight the Fridge, a cold, half-empty tomb of a club up one flight of stairs off dead-centre Brixton, plays host to the Beeb’s latest bid to cater for the “kids’” street taste. 

Quite why they chose this austere, sterile setting somewhat akin to a white-washed Marquee to film their rickety “Riverside Two” is well beyond anyone’s guess, but what you, the viewer, will eventually see are two of the more marketable new psychedelics fighting not only nerves, inexperience and abysmal acoustics, but atmospheric apathy as well

First victims of “Riverside’s” wretched little happening were to have been the scruffy High Tide, but recent line-up hassles and blatant record company politics blew them out at the last moment in favour of – and I promise this is positively the last time I mention them for . . . oh, at least a week – the fabulous Miles Over Matter.

Rampantly untogether, Matter tore into a depleted set with winning enthusiasm and a lunatic glee, their tough and ready approach, their sheer affrontery and their crude insistence on audience participation giving them an impressive edge over haughty headliners Mood Six.

Six exude an off-putting assurance and polished professionalism almost as if they had nothing to prove.

Fact is though, this scene has yet to sell its stars to a largely apathetic public and Spandau’s old trick of pushing arrogance, aloofness and select sartorials just doesn’t seem to wash any more. (Steve Sutherland) 

Sounds Letters page:

MAN IN A WIG

THIS LETTER isn’t intended to offend Karen Swayne, it is merely a slight criticism of what we consider her unjust review printed in your March 6th edition.

In fact, the review of the Earwigs (who played bottom of the bill to Mood Six and the Marble Staircase) is just slightly out of order.

Miss Swayne dares to claim she speaks as a ‘strictly impartial observer’. She hasn’t any notion of what her so-called objectivity is all about.

Her criticism of the Earwigs is highly informative in one respect only — it highlights her ignorance of what ’60s influenced ‘rock’ or ‘psychedelia’ is all about.

Her one redeeming quality is her youth — for young she must be. If she’d ever heard any of the great ’60s bands live she would know they played loud.

Their songs were melodious, soaring and always changing. They were positively not ‘heavy metal’ — a label which is also clearly inappropriate for the Earwigs.

The Earwigs are making positive music in a positive direction — influenced by the ’60s. They don’t like to be told what they are by someone who doesn’t have a clue what the ’60s were about and who doesn’t comprehend the aim of bands like the Earwigs today.

To understand the Earwigs, you would have to realise that they are a band playing their own songs, in their own way, influenced by the sound of the ’60s.

Our advice to Karen would be to get listening to some ’60s music, then come along and write about the new bands —possibly you might see what you missed the last time. We live in hope. — (An Earwig, Manchester – 20/03/82)