Spiked with peyote and beaten in a brawl: The pros and cons of being Public Image Limited’s support band in 1989
As support bands, you have the best of both worlds.
You can reap the rewards of the headline act (big hotels, huge venues, fancy clubs) without being overwhelmed by the pressure of putting on a memorable evening and winning the favour of your fans day in, day out. You get up there, do your thing, and hit the backstage party to sign odds and ends and hit the free drugs table.
In a roundabout way, these were the only positives of being Public Image Ltd’s supporting band in 1989. For Flesh for Lulu, the Summer of Love came two decades late as their goth rock band was on the rise and welcomed into the world of rock star bacchnalia. Another pro: having the whole world before you, a mirage of endless possibilities just waiting to solidify. But too many mind-altering drugs, and everything seems a little unreal forever.
Flesh for Lulu vocalist Nick Marsh opened up to Vive Le Rock about the downsides of the anything-goes dazzle and din of 1989. Turns out, the biggest problem was notorious jokester, John Lydon, who took to spiking Marsh’s drink with peyote one unsuspecting evening to instigate a bad trip. The former lead vocalist of the Sex Pistols took it a step further, whispering in Marsh’s ear all night, charged, dark, and ghoulish ramblings that wouldn’t go amiss in a Satoshi Kon script. Nobody would stand a chance against that.
Lydon wasn’t finished messing with the support band. Like many other image-obsessed musicians, Flesh for Lulu’s guitarist and vocalist, Rocco Barker, spent his band’s money on new attire to embody the global rock star that management had promised him was waiting to emerge from the chrysalis of his humble London beginnings. Happily, Cleo Murray, lead singer of The March Violets, even once treated him to a £130 Indian shirt in support of his endeavour. A corking amount, especially back in the day.
But the garms pissed Lydon off, and in an attempt to upstage the star, he spent a night boasting about his own attire, a “nylon Adidas thing”, a shell suit that’d cost him the pretty penny of £400. By the end of the night, both purchases would be ruined; Lydon would take a black marker and slice Barker’s Indian silk shirt with a grubby pen stain, while Barker would jab the end of a lit Marlboro all over the shell suit, all but just taken from its packaging.
Enough was enough. An unhappy, disgruntled, and now fashionably disgraced Lydon took a jab at Barker that landed on poor Murray, unassumingly caught in the crossfire. Watching the female vocalist knocked to the floor, Murray took another swing and ended up, for all intents and purposes, rummaging around the gutter outside with Lyndon.
Though most of PiL jeered and cheered at the brawl the next morning, the aching head was only ever a tangible reminder that the lights and fame came with a healthy dose of abandon.
Unfortunately, the outlandish tales of their wild support tour couldn’t save the band’s forthcoming album, Plastic Pantastic, from tanking in the charts. As 1980s bands fell out of favour at the turn of the decade, the eye-wateringly expensive album failed to live up to the hype, and the band were all but left with the pros and cons of a life swiftly leaving them behind, scribbled in the dusty windows of their tour van, with one side terribly longer than the other.
