MUSIC & DRUGS

Cover for Promethea n. 32. Art by J.H. Williams III.

Excerpt form "An afternoon with Alan Moore", an interview by Alex Musson & Andrew O'Neill published in Mustard (Vol. one) n.6, 2006.

WRITING: MUSIC & DRUGS

MUSTARD: What music do you listen to whilst writing?

ALAN: I don't listen to anything much any more because I'm deaf in one ear. If I'm talking to people I can't have any background music because all the top and bottom drops out and there's just this fuzzy middle. And if I'm working I don't listen to music either. There's been a kind of progressive breakdown in my relationship with music; I used to be able to listen to it all the time when I was doing cartooning, back in the late 70s. and that was fine because you use your hands when you're inking, so your brain can be off doing something else, like listening to the radio.

Then, when I started writing, I tried listening to music, but if it had any words they got in the way of the words I was trying to write. So I started listening to purely instrumental pieces and that was fine until the rhythm of it started interfering with the rhythm of what I was trying to write. Then I started in with ambient music, and that was great for a couple of months - I'd got the house flooded with Harold Budd, Eno and all the rest - but then the ambience on the record was starting to interfere with the ambience of the stuff that I was writing. So morgue-like silence is my preferred medium at the moment.

MUSTARD: What effect have drugs had on your writing?

ALAN: I started smoking dope around the age of fifteen and acid around sixteen. Had a biiig year of taking acid a couple of times each week. I'd done about a hundred trips, and this was when acid was acid, like me tell you - this was five hundred mikes, a thousand mikes a tab. I've never really taken acid since, I've confined myself to an enormous amount of hash, which I do twenty-four seven. It doesn't really turn me into a shambling, drug-sodden pothead, either. I use it to work and always have done, it gives me kind of an edge.

There was a physicist who was accepting the Noble Prize for Physics - I think it was for molecular biology, some years ago. During his acceptance speech he gave thanks to mum and dad, and all the rest, but also said: "I feel that I should mention the enormous contribution that psilocybin has made to my research. I'd be sitting down there on molecules, watching the particles go by and understanding the way that they fitted together. And psilocybin gave me that ability." I've also heard another scientist comment that "caffeine science is very different from marijuana science".

So, yeah, I still take mushrooms. I haven't done so for a couple of years now, and always as part of a magic ritual these days - I don't take anything purely for entertainment's sake, which I think is perhaps my saving grace. There've been cultures since the dawn of civilization that have had drugs as a central part. We are certainly not the first culture to use drugs, but we may well be one of the first to have a drug problem. I tend to think that this is because there is a place for drugs in society, but it's a shamanic space that we don't really have anymore.

Robert Graves noted that a lot of cultures' names for mushrooms are 'snots' or 'shits', things like that. And he says that it's like telling a child 'kaka - poison', sort of dirty, because actually the mushroom is taboo, which is not the same as just being dirty. Taboo is, yes, profane but it's also sacred. It's because the mushrooms were sacred at one point, which meant you weren't supposed to eat them unless you were properly initiated in a tradition; you'd done your Eleusinian Mysteries or whatever. And that is part of the problem: in our current society, the only context we have to take drugs in is a leisure context. Which a lot of the time is disastrous.

Something I noticed when I was about sixteen was the difference between drawings inspired by LSD and drawings attempted while under the effects of LSD.

With an awful lot of those Promethea issues, especially that kabbalistic run, I was doing magical rituals that often - not always, but often - involved drugs, in order to put myself in those spaces so I could write about them. I think it was issue 23 - the one that was the second sphere of the Kabbalah, the grey, sort of pearly place - I'd had Steve Moore up, we'd had this incredible magical experience, then he went back to town. I was still sitting down here buzzing with the mushrooms, and I suddenly thought, right, Promethea: I know exactly how I'm going to do this next issue that I'm gonna start tomorrow, I know that the series is going to last until issue 32, because 32 is a good number - this has just been revealed to me. I know that the last issue is going to be some kind of incredibly weird comic book that somehow unfolds into a marvellous psychedelic poster, and great, well that's the rest of Promethea sorted out, so I'll go to bed now.

The next day I laid out the entirety of that issue in four hours, every page. It just came in this incredible burst of energy. It took me fifteen hours to write, layout, dialogue and type that entire issue. And then two years later I finally I got around to Promethea #32 with the giant poster thing.

So, yeah, those are instances where I didn't try writing anything in the surge of the drug rush, but the next day I'd got all the information there. It's important to have a channel, I think. If I was just taking this stuff purely for entertainment, then I wouldn't have anything to do with that energy. And it is an energy, and I can direct it, I can ground it in this huge variety of works that I'm doing at any one time. And it works great for me; I think that I've probably been more creative - my output's certainly been higher - since I formally took up magic. And that was one of the big proving points of it: I'd said to people, if I become less productive or if the work turns to shit, then pull me out, because I might not know. But that hasn't happened, in fact generally quite the opposite.

Mushrooms are the only psychedelic drugs that I take, and I don't take them very often. But I would trust them. Once you've done them a few of times it's very easy to feel a sense of entity. You can feel that there is a characteristic in this level of consciousness which almost seems... playful? Or aware, or sometimes a bit spooky. I know that is probably something which I am imposing, or that other people have imposed upon the experience, but you get the impression that they're probably called magic mushrooms for a reason. And given that these have been the shamanic drug of preference since Neolithic times, Paleolithic times, then we've got quite a good history of a relationship with mushrooms that goes back quite a long way, and they seem to treat us alright.

MUSTARD: Have you ever considered a work detailing your insights into drug use?

ALAN: Well, probably not, because I actually tend to think of drugs as an implement and a tool, rather than a thing that is interesting in itself. Now, I know that there are some fantastic things about drugs and drugs culture. Mike Jay wrote a wonderful book called Emperors of Dreams, all about the British involvement with drugs, from Sir Humphrey Davy, who did all sorts of experiments with Nitrous Oxide, saw visions and started a religious movement, with Coleridge and all that lot roped in - fascinating. Drugs have played a huge part in my life and there's plenty of things that I'm interested in writing about while on drugs, but I'm not quite so interested in writings about drugs.

At the Patti Smith gig, which I keep mentioning because I'm so inordinately proud of it. How cool is that? Patti Smith, I got to hug Patti Smith! Jason Spaceman was there, a local lad made good, from Rugby. I've met Jason and I really like him, he's great and he's a fantastic musician, and I'm reminded of that wonderful song title, back from his Spacemen 3 days: Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To. Which is a pretty good description of my working methods. I'm kind of taking drugs to write comics to take drugs to. Most of the psychedelia, I want it to be there on the page in the writing. I want my work to be acting like a drug as near as I can manage. I'd like to think that if you put the words in the right order with the pictures you can probably create a psychedelic state, you can create a fugue state.

This is why, with my performances, I very much prefer to have a dense monologue going on: complicated music at the same time as, maybe, a film show, a fire breather, a beautiful ballet dancer, so that you're overloading the audience. This is the same technique that people have used since time immemorial, that the Catholic Church has used since its inception; the stained glass window light show, incense, incantations, sonorous music, beautiful architecture - trying to push people into this peak aesthetic experience, which I think is very close to the psychedelic state, which is very close to the magical state.

So that's what I'm trying to do in my work. While I'm interested in drugs and I've got tons of books about the history of drug taking and things like that, it would probably seem to me a bit precious. I mean, I'm so obviously drugged out of my mind that I don't need to lay it on any thicker. I'll probably leave that to other people.

[...]

MUSTARD: Are you still using drugs in your work?

ALAN: I haven't done any of the hard-core ritual stuff for some years now. I had one experience early on with my magic stuff where just for a few seconds I was a boy of about 17 and I was dying in a trench just outside Ypres. It was the small hours of the morning - that grey bit just before dawn when the birds are singing. And I was laying on my left side up against the side of the trench. The reason for that was because my right foot was infected with maggots. It didn't hurt, but it itched. Unbelievably. And there were other kids, teenagers, slumped up against the other side of the trench and some of them were asleep, I knew, and some of them weren't. And I'd never had sex with a woman in my life. The woman I had the closest relationship with emotionally was my sister - and I don't really have a sister. But I was missing her profoundly and I was wishing I could see her one more time.

Me and Melinda were doing the working together, both on drugs. She'd seen me lay back and close my eyes and had noticed that my eye sockets were full of cobwebs and I'd got blood and worms in my hair. And she thought, 'Eurgh that's horrible. I wonder if I should wake him up and tell him? No, I don't want to impose my bad vision'. At that point I sat up, said 'Jesus Christ!' and burst into tears. I'm normally not terribly emotional, but I couldn't get myself under control for about three quarters of an hour. I couldn't stop crying, because I'd just suddenly realised that the First World War had happened. And my immediate feeling was, 'Was that me? Was that a previous life I'd had like Shirley MacLaine tells us and all the rest?' And then I thought no, I'm not convinced of that. The feeling that I have is more, 'Was everybody everybody?' which again ties back to 'everybody's sat here before me'. Is there some huge commonality? Are we all the same person? Is this all God talking to itself?