Happy new year from Mick, TJ, Dom, Jesse and everybody at Carbon/Silicon HQ!

We’ve got plenty planned for the new year.. new songs, new MPFree tracks, and – of course – lots of new content for carbonsilicon.com…

Many thanks for being with us through 2010 … and we hope you all have a great 2011!

France by Boat and by Train

We do a tour of France by boat then train (see pictures). I get Mark Laff to come with me to play drums. One night we open with Pipeline as usual, only to have Johnny say Pipeline another two times before deciding another early night might be best for us as it’s been quite stressful and that’s the end of the gig.  Another riot and another crowd of angry, short changed punters. (or Punteurs as they might say in France). This is what heroin does. It fucks everything up. It sounds great in “Diary of an English Opium Eater” or reading the Velvet Underground story but the reality? Even Billy thought it would bring him credibility after so much derision and some rock journalists still believe it is de rigueur to make it seem ‘cool’.  The bottom line  is it destroys life because it is a life.  Figure it out for yourself.

Back in Pindock Mews, now Heroin Central, more nights of madness continue. Hanoi Rocks, a wanna be Dolls band are hanging out there now. Mike Monroe and gang.

All I know is that nobody wants to play Scrabble with me and I’m starting to feel disillusioned…

(to be continued…)

On Magenta’s sofa at Pindock Mews.

The other night I sat watching the UK Snooker Championship Final live on my laptop – I just love BBC iPlayer, love that feeling of not being tied to a television – anyway, John Higgins the Scotsman fought back from 9/5 down, to level the match and then in an exciting climax, take the final deciding frame.  Amazing stuff.  It’s what I love about sport, any sport, when players show true greatness against all odds and despite the odds being stacked so firmly against them.

It reminded me of another great frame of snooker back in 1982, in the match between Alex Higgins and Jimmy White. Possibly the greatest frame of snooker EVER. It was the semifinal of the World Championship and Alex was the ultimate Rock and Roll sportsman.  Unpredictable, sometimes brilliant, sometimes frustratingly hopeless but always compelling.  Drinking, out of it, mad, but you never quite knew what might happen next and there was always the chance you might just witness a moment of pure genius.

I’d watched virtually every match he’d ever played on UK television and still felt that frisson of excitement every time he came smiling on screen carrying his pint of lager. I’d been watching snooker, (which was completely boring and inexplicable to anyone who was not a fan) since way back in the first mews house I shared with Mj just off Portobello road back in 1979. It used to drive Mj mad with what he perceived as the dreary click of balls and a boring green baize filling the screen, whereas I was in heaven.  Mj resisted all my attempts to explain the intricacies of the play to try to draw him in. He was not having snooker.

Whilst I was in the process of putting Sigue Sigue Sputnik together, I even started playing snooker in a dingy basement club in Kings Cross, which used to be open 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Perfect. I played with my friend Mike Rossi the guitarist from Slaughter and the Dogs. And we’d dream of seeing Alex live one day or even talking to him. Dreams.

The night that Alex played the game of his life found me in another mews house – the former home of Sid Vicious that I now shared with my girlfriend Magenta DeVine. She, annoyingly (but inevitably) was also not a snooker fan.  That evening I watched Alex claw back from the brink, to level the match against an up and coming young player called Jimmy White. It was the match of Alex Higgin’s life and I watched in awe as he squared the match with a series of super human shots.  As I sat there, riveted to the screen, I once again attempted to explain the rules of snooker from scratch to an unlikely and yet surprisingly willing companion sharing the sofa in front of the television.

His name was Johnny Thunders.

I think he soon picked up the nuances of the game and the characters.  It took me some time to explain that it wasn’t just another version of Eight Ball Pool on a bigger table and why it was completely legal to replace the colored balls from the pockets and place them back onto the sacred baize, even though they’d already been potted.  I think that outraged him somewhat.  But Johnny was prepared to accept these strange English people and all their quirks, he was after all accepting our hospitality and currently sitting on the magnificent, giant, grey unbelievably uncomfortable sofa that Magenta’s mother had donated to us.

As Alex played more and more shots that seemed impossible to mere mortals, the New Yorker and I whooped and shouted on the edge of our (uncomfortable) seats, willing Alex on to his exhilarating victory.

Well, I have to admit that Johnny did miss quite a few shots forced as he was to take more and more unfeasibly lengthy trips to the bathroom after borrowing a tie from me. I did think when he asked me for the tie that it was brilliant how he had really entered into the spirit of a game which encourages the wearing of formal wear including waistcoats, shirts and bow ties. However, I did think twice as he sat there pupils pinned, as he nodded out from time to time towards the end of the match that it had less to do with sartorial elegance and more to do with bad old habits. As you all probably know, Higgins went on to win the match and ultimately the World Championship.

And I felt doubly blessed that evening, pinching myself repeatedly as I glanced from the man sitting next to me to the man on the screen and thinking “Christ a legend watching a legend”.  Yes, I was that much of a fan.

As the days passed I found Johnny was happy to watch anything with me on television as long as he had everything he needed to hand and could sometimes take the odd nap just to keep his strength up.  He would sit for hours and I would watch with a vague sense of horror as he dozed sitting upright with cigarette after cigarette melting slowly through his fingers, only leaping up to wake him when the smell of burning flesh became too obvious.  He was a very undemanding guest.

Two Years later, I was in a nascent Sigue Sigue Sputnik and the guest at a party at Peter Stringfellow’s Hippodrome Club. Peter had always been really friendly with the band well before Sputnik became famous, always happy to supply us with free drinks and meals when we were really struggling. The dance floor was packed and for once there was no one I recognised in the flashing lights until, in one of those surreal moments, the crowd parted and I gave a huge intake of breath…

And I found myself face to face with Alex Higgins.

We surveyed each other up and down with what I hoped was measured cool.  I felt that he obviously recognized a fellow snooker player lost on the dance floor, looking good despite the fact I had full length bright pink hair. A thousand questions and memories were flooding through my frantic brain as Alex leant forward to speak to me with a conspiratorial look on that lovely Irish face. What was he about to ask me?  His best shot ever?  The best snooker club in London, even better and beyond and my wildest dreams – did I fancy a quick game?

“Have you got any Charlie on you?” he enquired, shouted in my ear above the music.

Noticing my look of momentary bewilderment and before I could stammer my reply to the negative, he was gone.

My one chance to talk to the Hurricane and I didn’t do drugs. Damn.

I now suppose I ought offer an explanation as to why Johnny Thunders, the ultimate Rock and Roll guitarist with my favorite ever band, The New York Dolls and known partaker of every chemical substance on the planet was doing staying at my house when I didn’t do drugs……….

(To be continued…)

Welcome to Carbon/Silicon’s new official home on the internet – carbonsilicon.com.

Please update your bookmarks & favourites – we’re here to stay!

Alongside the new domain name and website, we’ve got a bunch of new Carbon/Silicon announcements and features going live today, including…

- SIX previously-unreleased studio tracks – out today!
- All previous studio albums now available on iTunes.
- Brand new T-Shirts and Hoodies in the Carbon/Silicon store.
- TJ returns to blogging, with his latest entry – “The Game has Changed…”
- Rare 1994 archive recordings in the first instalment of The Story of Carbon Silicon.

…and lots more! We hope you enjoy exploring the new site.

If you’ve got any feedback, please drop us a note in the comments section below…

For a long time during the early 90s I had wrestled with trying to understand how I could do anything again in music. I’d been in some great, extraordinary bands and had just spent 2 years making an album and touring with The Sisters of Mercy.  This was a rather alien situation for me, just being the bass player in a band rather than being the instigator and songwriter, but hey, I really liked working with Andrew Eldritch, we’d been friends since the early eighties and it took me on a tour of the world traveling through a very different Universe to the ones I had invented myself.  It was called Gothworld.

“Oh what fun we had!….” as Madness would say.

Now, years later I found myself in a very strange place.  Half of me wanted it again, to be involved in my own creation, and half of me felt increasingly alienated from the whole world of Rock and Roll. I had just discovered the internet. I was dabbling in writing TV scripts, thinking about being a presenter, managed a band, got flown to L.A to have lunch with Mo Ostin (then head of Warner Bros) and generally doing anything actually except making music. The bass guitar was staying in its case. I wanted to do something new but more importantly something that was about the person I had become.  It’s a funny thing to have to acknowledge that after all years of those teenage revolutions, you wake up one day and know you’ve grown up.

I was looking for a sign. something to tell me how to go forward and finally I got one.

One night in 1994 I was at a friends house and ended up watching again the Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman  movie Die Hard.  But this time when I watched it, I saw it differently. Not focusing on the jokey John McClaine character but this time on the Bad Guys. This time I saw cool smart guys in suits and roll neck sweaters walking along a corridor going to carry out the caper.


And Fuck, something stirred inside of me. They looked…. they looked  like a band to me that night!  But a band of grown ups. It set my brain whirring.

Next day I started writing again. All those months and months I’d been wrestling with the concepts of how you could be older and still be in in a Rock and Roll band. Of course there was The Stones still looking great and still out there but they were just continuing something they started as those sexy rebellious teenagers. How do you start again when you’ve already been involved in all these iconic bands. How do you start again when you look in the mirror and don’t know who you see. Now I could see it. It was different again than my old visions of how you needed to be and to look. Not my preconceived image of Rock and Roll, of The Dolls , the MC5, The Stones or The Pistols.

Maybe Experience could be edgy too.

A couple of weeks later I was talking to Mj about  these ideas and we riffed away like we always did throwing in more and more mad ideas and scenarios laughing together and getting carried away as usual when we were on one. What if Jack Nicholson fronted a band. Well he’d still be cool. Jack could pull it off.

So at the end of that summer Mj would walk over to my house in Maida Vale from Notting Hill Gate and we’d sit in my garage that had become my studio and I’d hand him a set of lyrics. And he’d start singing straight away. Not trying out different ways or ideas. No, there was just one version in his head.

He always wrote like this. I have this vivid memory of being at Mj’s grans flat one day. You know the flat on the 18th floor, with the Westway traffic endlessly passing below that became part of Punk mythology.  London seemed to be a city of continuous unending grey then and I was living at my grans flat as well, having to pile overcoats on the bed at night to get warm as she had no heating except for an old glowing gas fire that made that strange rushing sound but did little else.   Remembering those times now feels like watching a faded 70s TV series. The days of Whatever Happened to the Likely lads.  Anyway, that day at Mick’s gran’s Joe Strummer turned up clutching some freshly typed lyrics. Do you remember that great photo of Joe at an old black typewriter punching out streams of words on thin paper with Carbon copies?  That day he was holding the words to a song he had called “White Man in Hammersmith Palais”. And in the time it took me to go and put the kettle on, I could already hear them singing the tune.  It was already written. That was and is Mick’s gift – to look at lyrics and hear the song finished already, finished inside his head with the tune playing along in time to the rhythm of the words.  He always says that the lyric defines the song, that it’s already written out there in the ether, you just have to find it and you’ll hear it, just like seeing a sculptured head inside a block of stone. I love that.

So back in my garage (very appropriate) me, Mick, an acoustic guitar and a drum machine would sit and make music, imagining Jack, just being cool and relaxed, singing in his shades and giving that knowing smile. It was the first time we’d written together since 1975.

And I would record us singing into my little tinny mono tape memo recorder, propped up on the desk, with the Linn 9000 beating away behind us. Writing a new song every time we met up. We had started with a song called, appropriately, “Rock and Roll with Jack”. There was one called “Expensive Habits” and one called “Age Up”. The lyrics fitting the imagined band about life and the knowledge that experience brings. Actually now I say that there was a song called “Experience” too. We didn’t really think about what we would do with the songs. The fun was just in the writing. One day Mick said he knew Val Kilmer and I should ask him to sing because after all he looked great in the Doors movie!  We didn’t call him.

I think we wrote about 6 or 8 songs altogether, one a week. And then just like one of those drunken nights where you talk till dawn putting the world to right and seeing everything so clearly and being enthused with such energy only to find you wake up next day and can’t remember what you even talked about – the moment passed. One day we just stopped. I guess because Jack too was clearly not gonna be available. And the idea wasn’t fully formed, and more importantly looking back I wasn’t ready either because the idea was not yet from the heart, it was from the head because it was just a film and a cartoon, made up. Something I would learn to understand in the future. And Mick carried on with BAD2 and life carried on.

A tiny step. But I was having the most amazing time with Penelope and I had fallen deeply in love. It consumed all.

Somehow the tapes and that idea just stayed in the Garage.

Interior. Fade to black.
Then the deep documentary voice over says “….Until Now!”.

You see I found those tapes the other day in a shoebox under another massive pile of not properly marked cassettes. Digging through I saw in tiny scratchy pen the words “Rock and Roll with Jack” written over lots of crossed out writing. I always seemed to be reusing old cassettes in those days. Early recycling I suppose, but then an insurmountable snag.  I now have finally got rid of every last cassette player in the house, the final one exiting with my old Mercedes.  The cassette stared back at me. Useless old technology, “Home Taping is Killing music!” it goaded.

But there in the  shoebox was the same tinny mono tape recorder that the songs were actually recorded on, looking very tired and dusty. Further miracle, there was life in the battery. Pressing play lit up its single red diode winking mischievously.

I tell you it took a Doctor Who type wiring up job to connect it to a modern Mac and convert its recalcitrant mono content to an  MP3.

The Die Hard Demos. Imagine Jack on Vocals won’t you.

(If you can’t see this music player, please visit our soundcloud page for alternative playback options)

Something has been happening out there….we’ve got a bunch of new gadgets in our hands…. and the game has changed again….

If you’ve been following Carbon/Silicon over these past years you’ll know that the first song we wrote was called M.P.Free inspired by the revolution Mick and I found ourselves in… actually, a revolution we found ourselves drawn to be a part of … that we could make music and give it to you, or any one who would listen… for free ….direct. It was as if the music was finally free and in the hands of the creators and we could at last deliver it direct to you the listener without needing a record company or relying on a radio dj to plug us or TV show to have us on… we could make music and just put it out there….

So many people were out there doing it…. and it started to change the music industry…

And then the war intensified….

Napster vs the Record Industry, Kazaa, Limewire, Pirate Bay…….. were just the start and record companies ran scared as their comfy nests began to fall apart… well you all know the story……

But lets think back…. What was it we actually wanted to achieve?

Great music to our ears, uncontrolled by market forces or middlemen fatcats… good quality music, music free to store where we liked on whatever device we owned (the DRM Wars). A close relationship with the artists who made that music and that art. Music we controlled to do what we wanted with. A feeling that we could get that music from Artist sites, fansites, Youtube, anywhere you found great music…. sometimes it was a hassle, but we got used to Free……. and yes IF we paid for it it was with a confidence that the people who did the work, had the ideas… that THEY got paid or supported for that work.

And the industry called us Pirates because they did not like us taking control…

But you see really, we’re not pirates, robbers, stealers… all of us here are in general good people, honest people… we want music, and to get that music to our ears……

There’s a piece in “Wired” magazine this month ( a magazine I’ve been reading for 10 years…. I even buy it direct to my iPad today, after all these years swearing I would never give up the feel of an actually magazine in my hands!)….. here’s the headline:

“The Age of music Piracy is officially over…”

It says this….”Mark down the date: The age of stealing music via the Internet is officially over. It’s time for everybody to go legit. The reason: We won. And all you audiophiles and copyfighters, you know who fixed our problems? The record labels and online stores we loved to hate”

The reason…iTunes and the rest of them finally got it right. They made it really easy to get the music to my ears……

Its a One Click world now… I hear a song anywhere, on Myspace, on Youtube, I read about them on NME.com, I read on a bands website and listened to the free tracks they put up on Soundcloud… and I think yea, I’d like this music.. and in One Click I’m on iTunes and minutes later its already directly loaded into my iPhone playlist and I’m listening to it in the car or on my way to work. One Click…. And I was happy to pay for it because because of the ease… and I felt I was supporting the band.. and what did it cost me for that album? the cost of a couple of cups of Coffee… I can afford that for the ease.

For sure if I wanted to invest the time I could chase the tracks down on a torrent site or the bands free tracks and assemble the album into my iTunes playlist… for a cup of coffee? And know I didn’t push some support to a savvy band?

See it’s like this in my modern world. I hear about something – I want it now. NOW. Bang, its in my hand and I’m listening and enjoying it. Look, I still stream new movie releases not because I don’t wanna pay but because I want it now. If movie houses released their movies to iTunes or whatever simultaneously with theaters then I’d happily pay. I want it now. I read about the new hip extraordinary movie while I’m eating my breakfast then i want to watch it that night on my widescreen TV..THAT night. I don’t wanna wait till its released on DVD. I want Now, on demand. And I’d like to pay for it and support those who made it happen.

And there’s also another reason… we’re moving away from from the web to the iPhone, Android and iPad world (what they call “semi closed platforms” in geektown) Apps are taking over from browsers… who of us saw that coming? You spent all day on the internet but not on the web. These new toys just make life easier and faster… and time is something I’m definitely prepared to buy. So as much as I loved freedom of choice I like better things that just work, reliably and seamlessly…..

Now I’m happy to still put out the music of Carbon/Silicon for free as well, to put up videos and reports on Youtube and to let you guys out there swap tunes on P2P just like I did once on cassettes….. .nothing changing there. But.

The music did break free……. because WE own it now..

Here’s another quote from that Wired magazine article ….

“ That leaves one last war cry: Music should be free! It’s art! Friends, a song costs a dollar. Walmart has pushed some of its MP3s down to 64 cents. At Grooveshark, you can sample any song you want before you buy. Rdio charges $5 a month for all the music you can eat, served up via the cloud. So there’s really no reason not to buy—and surely you understand by now that there are reasons why you should. When you buy instead of bootlegging, you’re paying the band. Most download retailers send about 70 percent of each sale to the record companies that own the music. Artists with 15 percent royalty deals get 15 percent of that 70 percent, or about 10.5 cents per dollar of sales. Those who write their own music and own their own music publishing companies—an increasingly common arrangement—get another 9.1 cents in “mechanical royalties.” Every download sends almost 20 cents straight to the band.”

We favour convenience and reliability which which I am prepared to pay for so I’ll buy that album, all of it, from iTunes even though its out there somewhere for free.

Interesting to see Wired now espousing the pay model! It was Wired magazine that turned me on to Napster et all back in the day, steered to the sites of many a pioneer like John Perry Barlow….

I don’t have the time to mess around. Fine if you have. You choose.

So the wheels are changing again and I’m gonna make all that Carbon/Silicon music One Click available…… Being a Pirate?…. well, what a great time we had in the noughties, waved our sabers, relieved a few record companies of their expense accounts and changed the music business for ever…. and more importantly we still made a load of great music because we felt part of something, a revolution that invigorated us…. I was the biggest exponent of Free music, but remember we didn’t start the revolution, we were carried along with it, gladly. And like all revolutions it suddenly takes an unexpected turn, dictated by the changing world we exist in… and I’m happy to be carried along with that change too because its for the better.

You know I’m a big Steve Jobs fan anyway, but Apples iTunes, the Global content distributor and the like have made the delivery of music from the Artist to your Ears so easy and accessible. I think having our music out there on iTunes and the like will help us connect to many more people, and that is always the aim. I believe in this music and it needs to be out there easily available. There are plenty of people out there now who ONLY know how to download music via iTunes. I want them to hear us too.

Music is thriving just like I always knew it would.. there are more bands than ever, more songs and Rock and Roll out there…. there’s a new spirit ahead…

The revolution continues, but, I think we’re winning…… So bring on the Next one….

Watch this space.

[ Off-site Link: Wired Magazine - The Age of Music Piracy is Officially Over ]

The first four Carbon/Silicon ‘download’ albums – “A.T.O.M”, “Western Front”, “The Crack-up Suite” and “The Carbon Bubble” – have been officially re-released in updated 2010 editions, and are now available from all major digital download stores.

View Carbon/Silicon on iTunes (UK)
View Carbon/Silicon on iTunes (USA)

Of particular interest to long-time fans will be the updated version of The Crack-Up Suite… now featuring four recently-completed (and previously-unreleased) tracks from the original recording sessions – HillBilly Slamdown, Giving Heaven Hell, Hey Charlie Chaplin and My Brain is Broken.

Full track listings for all the new versions can now be viewed on our Discography page – and download links are available now in the Carbon/Silicon Shop.