THE SUNDAY HANGOVER
011
WARREN ELLIS


Boom. Boom-boom. Snap.

1950. Phil Spector's father shoots himself.

1963, and Larry Levine is trying to fit a 1948 RCA Ribbon mic into Hal Blaine's bass drum, because Phil Spector won't shut up about the fucking drum sound and Larry Levine can't help that the drum sound leaks because it is for Christ's sake 1963 and they don't have digital boxes or filters or any other damn thing yet. So he's trying to fit this ancient, beautiful microphone into the drum, so that when Hal Blaine hammers out the start of the Ronettes' "Be My Baby," it'll go boom, boom-boom. Snap.

Brian Wilson later declares it the greatest pop song ever made. It's said that he still listens to it every day, as an aural talisman. He was playing piano on a few Spector sessions around 1963, and even wrote a song for the Ronettes.

2004: Kieron Gillen's telling me about this song called "You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve," but I'm in Vancouver, and my handheld machine isn't going to download an mp3, so I sit in my hotel suite and fume while a burlesque dancer does bendy yoga poses on my balcony, because Gillen can talk up a song like nobody else. I get to listen to it two weeks later, and it goes boom/boom-boom/snap. It's "Be My Baby" recast for the early 21C. And I've heard that drum figure a million times, because I was born five years after Larry Levine made a drum explode around an old ribbon mic and it's fucking inescapable -- but it's the first time I've really listened to it, I think.

Somewhere, there's a list of all the songs that have ripped off the opening to "Be My Baby." I think that, if it exists, it is probably a history of the Western world since 1963.

1979, and Tony Wilson's doing his pieces because producer Martin Hannett has got Stephen Morris in a booth with the drum kit Hannett's made him rebuild a couple of times, and the studio's costing Wilson an obscene amount of cash, and something funny's going on. And the wires aren't going to the board. The wires are going downstairs to the bloody toilet, where a speaker sits on the toilet seat and a mic points at it, and the wires on that mic run back upstairs into a digital box stuck on the side of the board, and when Morris hits the drums the sound off the board has no humanity or sunlight left in it. It's the sound of the dead. Boom. Boom. Boom. Until it fades into silence. Boom. Boom. Boom.

1967: Brian Wilson's had a massive breakdown, and in the middle of it is claiming that Phil Spector is telepathically stealing all his ideas, calling Spector a "Mind Gangster."

Peter Hook on Martin Hannett: ""Bernard and I were very down to earth, and he was, like, from another planet."

1963, and Lee Harvey Oswald cranks off three from the Book Depository. Boom, boom-boom.

1988, Shaun Ryder on Martin Hannett: "E sorts 'im right out! During the Hallelujah sessions we were givin' him two a day and this were when they were twenty-five quid a go, right. But it were worth it 'cos he kept saying, 'I can't feel anything but I'm in a fookin' great frame of mind.'"

2003: Boom. I think it reverberates around the hallway of Phil Spector's Alahambra mansion. Boom, boom-boom. There's a photo of the gun next to Lana Clarkson's foot. The final percussion shot after the echoing boom.

1991: Martin Hannett, ballooned by drink and oscillating drug use, dies in his chair of a heart attack at age 42. Boom. Boom. Boom. Fades into silence.