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

[jpwhkj at aol.com]

<snip>
 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. 
</snip>

Sounds awful.




-----Original Message-----
From: Rheinhold Squeegee <kjlist at live.com>
To: Gathering Gathering <gathering at misera.net>
Sent: Tue, 1 Oct 2013 15:56
Subject: [kj] Youth recounts his early 80's acid freak-out:



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



Writing The KLF 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’dhooked up with this 21 year old hairdresser-come-acid queen called Heidi.  She gave me a little quarter trip before eachgig. She was wealthy so she put me up in nice hotels and drove me to the gigsin a sports car which pissed the rest of the band off.  


So I was doing quite a lot but nothing cosmic hadhappened.  I was still treating it verymuch 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 Morrisonor 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. Heused to take acid at school but one time he was spiked and he thought that hisarm had disappeared. He was having The Horrors. His mum was an award winningteacher, very progressive.  She just sathim down, gave him some rocks to hold, did a bit of research.  She was very cool. So, yeah, the other guysweren’t into it, although we did take mushrooms together. But we’d rarely takeacid. I was the acid head.


But then there was this one event that pushed me over theedge.  I’d let Ralph, this friend ofmine, use my squat one weekend while I was away. When I came back my TV haddisappeared.  I couldn’t get hold of himfor ages, but then I bumped into him at a club one night. He was there withthis other guy looking pretty rough.  Isaid, ‘Oh Ralph, how are you?’ And he goes, ‘I hear you think I nicked yourTV.’ And I said, ‘No, no, I mean you stayed there and it disappeared and Iwondered if you knew anything or had seen what happened?’  But he didn’t quite get that, he was fixatingon whether I was accusing him and if I was still his friend.


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


Half an hour later I’m in the attic of the club thinkingthat he’s going to murder me. I went down to the bar and met this Polish balletdancer. I said, ‘You’re going to have to rescue me, I think these guys aregoing 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 Inever quite came down.  I slowly startedto come down a bit but it was very strong acid.


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


He was obviously in a very dark place. But that just totallyspun me out. By that point I was tripping all the time. I couldn’t quite understandhow 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 ofmessianic complex. I thought this white van was following me around.  I thought the Masons were out to get mebecause of Killing Joke stirring things up. I started to get intrigued byMasonry and saw it as this dark conspiracy thing. I was reading Robert AntonWilson and stuff like that. And this just progressed and progressed.  The band started to get a bit concernedbecause I’d always been very cynical about things and now I was starting to seeMasonic conspiracies in the drain covers.


I remember breaking into the Masonic headquarters in CoventGarden, that huge square building. I’m not sure how I got in, it had thisscaffolding over it and doors going in and I managed to get in a side doorsomehow. This was around 8 or 9 o’clock at night. I went through all thesedifferent temples and put the crosses down because I thought that they wereabusing the cross. I ran up to the top of the building to these French doorswhich were locked, and I was banging on these doors. This African guy came outin red polka dot shorts. I thought they were going to use him for somesacrifice.  I said, ‘Come on! Open thedoor, I’ll get you out, I’ll rescue you.’ And this guy was talking to me in anAfrican accent, saying ‘Go away’ or something.


Then this Welsh security guard turns up. And I showed himthis signet ring with this crest on that my Dad had said was something to dowith my family from Llangathen. It had a dolphin on it.  I said, ‘Look, I’m Welsh. This is magic. Helpme.’ 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 NewRomantic clubs.  I remember all theseMasons were in there, all these guys who had come out from some ceremony all insuits. And these guys started talking to me, I thought ‘They’re on to me, I’mbeing followed’. I was very paranoid.


We’d got a five grand advance for something and my dad setme up with this bank manager at the Clydesdale Bank. He also tuned out to be amason. I deposited this money in and said, ‘I want to borrow another five grandon top of this.’ He asked why and I said ‘Well I want to do my shamanictraining, study kung fu and do all this stuff.’ He said, ‘Listen son, I’m notgoing to lend to you five thousand pounds. You’ve got to learn the value ofmoney,’ And I said ‘I know what the value of money is’, and I took a five poundnote out and set fire to it, there in his office. I said, ‘Look that’s thevalue, it’s just paper.’ The guy freaked out, cleared his desk and threw me outof the bank. 


I just kept doing more and more crazy things like that. Iwas starting to tap into stuff, some powerful energy.  I remember getting the band to sit round andput their hands out and we’d focus on something, and we’d make somethinghappen.  I could say to Geordie, ‘look,if we focus our minds on that streetlamp, it will go out. Or at least flickeron 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. Thenone day I woke up at my step-mum’s. She’d just had a baby with my dad but mydad was in prison at the time so he wasn’t there, just her and this Spanishnanny. And I remember looking out of the window and thinking, ‘Oh the sky’sgoing 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. Istarted walking from Brompton Road to Chelsea. And I started going into thesefruit 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 burningit’. Which I did.  And I immediately gotarrested.  And shipped off to a mentalhospital.


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 backwindow I thought it was the future, and everything was underwater. I remembergoing past Tooting Bec tube and there was gondolas parked up outside it.


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


They gave me Largactil, which I think is supposed to makeyou compliant but it just spun me out even more.  And they gave me ECT [ElectroconvulsiveTherapy, also known as Electroshock Therapy], like in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. They still use it. I must have hadtwo or three sessions of that. They put a wooden thing or something in yourmouth, it’s all very Victorian.  I don’tremember it being difficult or anything, I just remember this white light.


And I just felt we were totally underwater. I remember myDad coming to the hospital and sitting with him and seeing utter shock on hisface. This was when Dad was doing time and he got let out to see me in thehospital, 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 onfire. And I remember running away in the middle of the night and leaping overthis fence, and stabbing my hand on the spike of the fence, running a few milesto where my Dad had been living, which was the Coach House on the other side ofWandsworth Common. He was in prison but his friend and his girlfriend werethere. I was completely spaced out. I said, ‘Look’, showing them the wound onmy hand, ‘I’m the one! I’ve got stigmata!’ I thought I was Jesus, that thewhole world was all on my shoulders.  
They let me stay the night and my step mum came by the nextday and said, ‘Look you’ve broken out, the hospital didn’t burn down, there wasno fire, you’re hallucinating. If you don’t go back they’ll slap a section onyou 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 comeup every day to visit me.  The Wizardlived in the church near Lyndhurst Road with twenty feral cats. He had a sevenpointed star tattooed on his face. He’d never wore shoes, he was very much anature magic person. This is the guy who used to come to the early Killing Jokegigs and blow fire and do circles and make ceremonies, he was our shamanbasically. The whole ‘ceremony’ aspect to Killing Joke was there from veryearly on, it came out of the community we were living in really.


The Wizard came to visit me and gave me this crystal. Iremember 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 tosay 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 togo home and see my Mum’, and they’ll let you go. Don’t say, ‘I’m not mad you’remad’.


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 inthe crystal told me do. They let me go and I went up to Wales with the band. Iwas 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 kindof almost stopped that for a bit. It took me that time to rebuild my ego andget my confidence back, and find a good anchor again.


But what’s amazing is, I came back. I was watching that SydBarrett documentary recently, and the Peter Green one, and I did achieve goingto 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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