The Spice Must Flow

We were somewhere around Sutton Bingham Reservoir on the edge of the Somerset/Dorset desert when the drugs began to take hold.

It's 2 AM. We're driving maybe 3 miles an hour, crammed into Rs hopelessly fucked 1978 Mercedes Benz, the lights all blown so it seems like we're just floating, like the car isn't even there. We're heading towards a usual druggy haunt, the deserted ruin of a Chapel Perilous on the edge of the water.

We're playing the Eon album at oblitering volume, the night is sucking into the car, trying to blind us all. Things aren't progressing; at some point we were supposed to be heading to a party but the only address we've got is a hastily scrawled Marlboro light packet with 'Dorset 5am'written in marker pen. P turns up the volume and the cold air and the fog from the reservoir and the music starts spinning us in another direction: we're gonna try and find the spice.

None of us know what it looks like, or even what it might be but P has seen David Lynch's Dune and he's convinced that we're on the right track. The Mercedes was once an automatic but now the gears are falling off like an asperger's social skills; we're down to what amounts to slow forward and reverse (later, for the last mile and a half home, we'll be down to just reverse). S decides he needs more air and sticks his head out the window like a Far Side dog, his dreads mixing horribly with the moisture in the air.

A chant rises: "The Spice must flow!"



P is starting to look a lot like the guy from Eon. I want this music off but everyone's too swept up in the quest for the spice, the fever is spreading like a Virgin Mary bleeding in the Italian countryside. K's on an unfortunate E and looks a little like a boiled sweet. There's no way he's gonna be able to manage the tape deck.

In a moment of almost Krishna clarity we all realise that the spice is suddenly everywhere and that it's searching for us. We're miles from home, the car is faltering, the petrol is on it's last legs and we're probably gonna die right here, right now, in the dark and the fog and the all-consuming spice clouds that even as we speak is leacking in from the woods and the water and the wind.

Someone yells out suddenly and the car lurches to a stop: "Oh God! Fear; the Mind Killer!"

And from here on in no one can say the evening's gonna be a success.

Eon - Spice

Eon - Fear; the Mind Killer