Fabulously Flamboyant Friday: Ivory Cutlery’s Day Off – Drugs Are Bad, M’Kay?

Greetings pop pickers and please be welcome to tonight’s Fabulously Flamboyant Friday and another of our fortnightly mastications upon the marshmallowy pillows of musical magnificence.

Tonight, dear reader, as we say goodbye to Adopt A Ferret Month and respectfully mark National No Pants Day, Ivory Cutlery (currently numb of buttock, sore of foot and tired of limb) will once again be taking the night off.

I’m currently labouring in that there Lunnon (in one of the rather grim north-west areas of our beloved capital) and I’m afraid the onerous real-world pressure of being a full-time useless pillock has somewhat limited my opportunities for detailed, rigorous, fact-checked research.*

*a transparent tissue of lies – all the hard work is done by Grok

Because of this, tonight’s missive will be a shoddy and shambolic affair; a puerile stream of consciousness, written rapidly in a succession of shabby hotels and deeply insalubrious crew catering areas. And so, without further ado, laydees and gentlebodies, Fabulously Flamboyant Friday proudly presents… umm… *shuffles frantically through notebook*… Drugs! Not Arf!

I was recently chatting to a fellow freelance colleague, a chap most pleased to announce he’d recently been booked to work on the upcoming Heaven 17 UK and European tour. As a long-time fan of the band, this appointment pleased him greatly and he was clearly looking forward to the tour with great anticipation. However, when he’s not a touring tech, this particular chap has a very active side-hustle as a DJ (a pretty good one, too) and it was our chat around this topic that provided the inspiration for this evening’s missive.

In short, my colleague voiced the opinion that the UK dance scene is fast fading and is in fact (almost literally) dying on its feet – and the primary culprit for this sad decline, he suggested, is excessive and inappropriate drug use. As you might imagine, this superficially ludicrous suggestion initially produced a loud snort of derision on my part. As battle-scarred veterans of the UK’s original rave scene, way back in some vaguely remembered previous century, we were both acutely aware that far from inhibiting the UK’s dance and rave scene, drug use back then was – without the slightest scintilla of doubt – powering the genre along with great gusto and no little aplomb.

To say the original rave scene of the late 1980’s and 1990s was awash with drugs is something of an understatement. But this of course is not an unusual thing: drugs and artistic endeavour have long been comfortable and familiar (if somewhat messy) bedfellows. South American stone sculptures dating from around 3 or 4 millennia ago seem to depict* the ceremonial and celebratory use of hallucinogenic mushrooms; and much nearer to home (and far more recently) Shelley, Byron and Keats were all known to have been somewhat fond of the occasional spot of opium. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was dead keen on laudanum (a tincture of opium prepared in alcohol) and Kubla Khan is said to have been written as a direct result of the spectacular visions experienced by Coleridge while he was under the influence of his favourite drug of choice.

*according to contemporary reports by JWP

More prosaically, Little Richard famously remarked that although some artists do indeed use drugs to provide inspiration, most professional musicians, he suggested, use drugs simply to alleviate off-stage boredom and as a direct substitute for the feelings of exhilaration gained from performing in front of an appreciative audience. Nevertheless, whatever the reason, drugs and recorded music have a long and messy history of association.

In the 1920s, New Orleans had become the cradle of jazz music and was also one of the key early 20th century entry points into the U.S. for “muggles” (nothing to do with Harry Potter. Muggles was a then popular colloquial term for marijuana). Cannabis was quickly and enthusiastically adopted by the New Orleans’ jazz community. So much so, that when the city issued it’s first byelaws, specifically targeted at outlawing and restricting the use of marijuana, the documents specifically named musicians and criminals as a significant part of the problem.

Nevertheless, despite these early attempts at prohibition, those hip young jazz cats proved to be dead keen on the ‘erb, and as Jazz music spread to Chicago, New York, and many other cities throughout the U.S., the widespread use of gage (another popular term for cannabis) went right along with it.

Louis Armstrong, first tried cannabis in Chicago and immediately declared it to be “one hundred times better than whiskey”. He and other musicians who became keen early ganja adopters called themselves “vipers” and believed cannabis to be a preferable alternative to alcohol, ideal as a creative relaxant and one without any of those pesky hangovers, as well.

Cannabis use flourished during (and many argue because of) the U.S. era of alcohol prohibition. So it is perhaps not surprising that a rich repertoire of “reefer songs” began to emerge from the jazz scene and soon wormed their way into popular culture. Louis Armstrong recorded an instrumental track called Muggles and a later track called Song of the Vipers. Cab Calloway scored a big hit with Reefer Man in 1932, and Fats Waller delighted audiences with You’se a Viper (aka The Reefer Song) in 1936. By the outbreak of World War II, many popular jazz and big band songs were alluding to marijuana in both implicit and explicit ways – a clear reflection of just how ingrained cannabis use had become within U.S. jazz circles.

The post WWII jazz scene (by now well into its be-bop era) was hit by an epidemic of heroin use. Musicians who subsequently developed a problematic habit included John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker – and it wrecked the lives and careers of many a jazz musician. To be fair, by the time the heroin crisis started impacting jazz, its day in the sun was already beginning to fade. The emergence of rock ‘n’ roll would soon devastate the ability of jazz musicians to earn a decent living and there would be no jazz superstars on the level of Coltrane, Parker or Miles for quite some time (if ever, IMHO).

The historian James Lincoln Collier has claimed that as many as three-quarters of all Jazz musicians used heroin during this period, and four of the six musicians on Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue (1959) (still the best-selling jazz album of all time) were heroin addicts at some point in their lives. Several jazz greats, including Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Art Pepper, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, and Jackie McLean, all spent time behind bars for drugs and drug-related charges.

Meanwhile, over in Jamaica, the bouncy, energetic and upbeat tempo of West Indian ska (think Millie Small and My Boy Lollipop) had started to slow as it morphed into the more laid-back sub-genre that would eventually become known as rocksteady. Some credit the growing influence of American soul music for this development, others cite the downbeat and sombre economic realities facing Jamaica in the period immediately after the island gained independence from the United Kingdom. But some have wondered if the noticeable drop in recorded tempos was simply a case of ganja quality getting ever better and drummers becoming ever more stoned. Whatever the reason, tempos continued to slow, bass lines became heavier and eventually the distinctive ganja-soaked sound of 60s and 70s reggae was born.

And as the ’50s morphed into the poptastic ’60s, we simply have to mention LSD and its impact on the music scene of the mid-to-late ’60s. With its origins in psychiatric research, Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD, aka acid) had emerged as a significant cultural force by the mid-1960s and was widely popularized by figures like the Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary. LSD was soon embraced as a tool for expanding consciousness and became closely associated with the era’s desire for rebellion, freedom, and spiritual exploration.

In music, LSD became a catalyst for experimentation and innovation and was clearly one of the key driving forces behind the development of psychedelic rock. In the U.K., The Beatles’ embrace of LSD marked a dramatic shift in their sound, as illustrated by albums such as Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. And as for the US west coast scene, The Grateful Dead embodied the LSD-fuelled American counterculture movement more than any other band I can think of.

Pink Floyd, led by the acid-fuelled (and soon to be acid-destroyed) genius of Syd Barrett, produced their magnificent debut album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, which was viewed at the time as a surreal and whimsical exploration of LSD-induced creativity. The album did very well in the UK and Pink Floyd quickly picked up a tabloid reputation for making music for LSD users. The popular (and for me still much-missed) broadsheet newspaper, News of the World, printed a story claiming “The Pink Floyd specialise in psychedelic music designed to illustrate LSD experiences”. Although, at the time, only Syd Barrett was known to be taking LSD with any great regularity.

Although LSD still featured in the musical landscape of the 1970s (and left a significant trail of casualties behind it), in truth it was cocaine that came to dominate the music industry (and indeed many other areas of the entertainment industry). Its use was pretty much ubiquitous throughout the ’70s, and many might suggest that little has changed since then. However, with the emergence of punk rock in the middle of the decade, there was a definite shift to amphetamine and heroin use. The initial punk rock era was also the first time I noticed substantial levels of solvent abuse entering the industry.

Heroin is not a particularly forgiving drug (just ask Sid Vicious) and its use seemed to drop off dramatically during the 1980s. Most agree its fall in popularity was driven by the AIDS epidemic, which made intravenous drug use appear to be an increasingly risky business. However, it had a noticeable resurgence in the late 80’s and early ’90s when snorting heroin (as opposed to injecting or smoking it) became a reasonably common mode of use. The term “heroin chic” entered the lexicon during this period and snorting smack suddenly seemed to become a hip and trendy activity with middle-class knob-heads and Grauniadistas. Filums such as Trainspotting and Pulp Fiction seemed to echo this cultural shift.

Additionally, in the early 1990s, heroin became closely associated with the rise of grunge music in Seattle. A New York Times article listing the city’s principal drugs as coffee, beer and heroin underlined this association; and in all truth, the use of heroin did seem to appropriately mirror the somewhat self-hating and nihilistic ethos of the Seattle grunge music scene. However, chic or not, heroin addiction, as the jazz and punk scenes had quickly discovered, can be a bit of a bugger, and sadly there were a fair few grunge casualties along the way. Additionally, during the early noughties, I also recall a bizarre but thankfully short lived burst of popularity for the snorting of plant fertilizer – people really can be such complete and utter idiots.

But what of my DJ colleague, I hear you ask, and his dire fears for the UK’s dance scene? Well, back in the 80s, the UK’s dance and rave scene was dominated by the use of ecstasy (MDMA). Raves were awash with the bloody stuff and dance-floors were full of gurning, loved-up, blissed out and very sweaty kids with pupils the size of saucers. And I’m not joking about the sweaty part. I worked gigs and events during that period where it quite literally rained sweat. The air within a venue would reach a point where it simply could not hold any more evaporated perspiration. Condensation would begin and it would eventually begin to rain sweat – it was not a particularly pleasant working environment, I can assure you.

Anyway, my colleague voiced the opinion that the use of MDMA at dance events had dropped off dramatically. His theory is that this decline in usage happened because of covid, and there does seem to be some support for his suggestion. Research indicates that during lock-down there was indeed a sharp decrease in the numbers taking party drugs such as ecstasy and cocaine – simply because people weren’t going out, weren’t partying and weren’t getting together for celebrations and social occasions. Ecstasy and cocaine (apparently, M’Lud) are social drugs and using them is not nearly as much fun when you’re on your own or isolated from your peer group. As a result, people seem to have looked around for a recreational pharmaceutical that wasn’t an upper, and a great many seem to have settled upon ketamine as their chemical of choice.

Ketamine is a horse tranquilliser, an anaesthetic and users claim it can quickly knock you into a comfortably fluffy dissociative state. However, it can also reduce you to a shuffling, dribbling, brain-dead zombie – particularly if you mix it with alcohol (apparently, M’Lud). Ket also has the advantage of being much cheaper than ecstasy or cocaine, so when the post-covid dance scene reopened, ket simply stuck around and produced an entirely new and thoroughly subdued dance scene that now seems to be populated with plodding, shambling hoards of “Special K Zombies” (now that really is a great name for a band!).

This lack of energy and enthusiasm from his young audience seems to have made my DJ-ing colleague rather downhearted about the once thriving (but now simply staggering) dance scene in his home town of Bristol, so I sincerely hope his upcoming work with Heaven 17 (I am very jealous) can perhaps cheer him up a bit.

Anyway, I think that’s probably quite enough of my inane and narcotically infused dribbling for tonight. So I shall say TTFN to one and all, and I think we’ll wrap things up for this evening with some good ol’ Sex & Drugs & Rock ‘n’ Roll.