Write On: Brakes

Ramble, rant or reminisce, this is an artist’s opportunity to pen their own Clash article.

Eamon Hamilton, formerly of British Sea Power and more recently singer and guitarist with Brakes, settles down on the Clash Couch with a pad and some crayons and unleashes some psychedelic education. Kids, take note.

Mushrooms

I was sitting in some mismatched patched up brown corduroy armchair with the distorted face of my best friend Laurie screaming “IiiiIIIiiikkknnOOOowwyyYOOoooouuu” when I realised I’d urinated myself.

My outer self was shouting “BOB DYLAN DIDN’T DIE IN 1969” back at him whilst one of the many internal conversations I could hear started shouting, “Go to the toilet.” We’d eaten about seventy Welsh liberty caps each, washing them down with Cava and tequila slammers, and they’d come on pretty strong, strong enough to let me lose control of my bladder but not strong enough to let me forget that that there was something wrong in doing this.

I stumbled to the toilet, the Leytonstone flat we were in having been transformed into some terrifying ship hurtling over massive waves of nausea, passing by my friend Ben, who was shouting in twisted terror, “DON’T GO OUTSIDE” at Tim, who was shouting “I’M WALKING TO LONDON, I’M WALKING TO LONDON” over and over again.

There’s something bonding about losing all mental and physical faculties with your friends, but, cleaning off the warm piss, I decided then and there that mushrooms and four walls were a bad combination, and that the only way to guarantee a safe and happy trip was to take them during daylight in the countryside. Of course, ten years later, watching the air ambulance flying my friend’s broken body over the South Downs to Haywards Heath Hospital at the peak of our trip, I realised that misfortune could strike anywhere.

If you grow up in the countryside, late autumn is that magical time when rumours of fields teeming with white cap mind mushrooms abound and field trips are planned with military precision. Secret spots are whispered around and maps are poured over. Welsh villages with names like Sennybridge and Trecastle are discussed like French wine appellations, and old men in country pubs will tell you of fields in the Brecon Beacons where you can’t see the grass for the ’shrooms.

Wales is still the Mecca of the mushroom world, but I’ve found that once you get your magic eye in, you can find them growing pretty much everywhere in the UK, from the Derby Dales to the Wanstead Flats. The happiest mushrooms I’ve ever seen were on the grounds of a country manor hotel, where a colleague and I were delivering magazines.

The grounds were literally covered with them. The biggest problem with picking is picking the wrong type of mushroom. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, the chances are you’ll pick some poisonous fungi that’ll wreck your insides, or worse, send you under, but following the simple rule ‘no teat, no treat’‚ (the teat being the little nipple at the top of the bell) generally works.

The downfall of the mushroom came with the exploitation of the fresh-mushroom loophole in the law a few years ago. No market was com-plete without a Mr Bongo’s Mushroom Stall, and it seemed like every corner shop had a hand written notice behind the counter offering Thai, Mexican, Philosopher’s Stones, £10 a bag.

It seemed like the whole country was munching these gut rumblers and attaining that feeling of being an ancient newborn in a natural world. In 2003, the Labour MP Paul Flynn was even calling for grants to be givento Welsh youngsters to export “Welsh truffles.” “Nobody’s poisoned by them, no one’s addicted,” he said, and mushroom season was declared officially open. Two years later, of course, Parliament decided that the wild, fresh fungus was more dangerous than amphetamines and barbiturates, and in fact as dangerous to the stability of law and order as heroin, and magic mushrooms, fresh or dried, were classified as a Class A drug.

I’ve had some of the best experiences of my short life whilst under the influence of mushrooms, from watching the sun filtered through beechwood forests, to mystical games of hacky sack in London’s royal parks.

The last time I ate mushrooms, though, it ended in disaster. A friend had come down from London with a bag of beauties, and I decided to follow my no-four-walls advice and eat them on a country walk. We munched them down and set off into the hills and valleys of the South Downs, and the aweinspiring countryside opened itself up for us. We start to really feel the earth, and, far from any houses, I see a tree that looks good to climb. “Come on you pussy,” I chide my friend as she struggles to get up. She reaches the branch I’m on and starts to wobble, so she decides to jump down. I hear something crack and see my friend lying kind of weirdly.

I jump down, feel her leg and find that the lower half of her shin is flopping about, whilst the split bone inside is making stomach turning crunching sounds. She starts to turn a sickly green. We’re both off our heads, two miles from the nearest road, the sun is setting, and my friend’s leg is sticking out at a 90 degree angle. I manage to go to emergency default, and, miraculously, my phone ekes out a bar of reception.

999 sends out a helicopter, which whisks my friend away but leaves me, due to space and fuel constrictions, babbling in a pitch black valley miles from home. She spent a week in hospital and now has a metal bar holding her lower leg together as a permanent reminder of the dangers of the natural world, whilst I have a heavy guilt complex whenever I see her.

Mushrooms, they can fuck you up.