Throwback Thursday - Haggis from the Four Horsemen/The Cult/Zodiac Mindwarp

So welcome to the first of an occasional series on this page which is a look back at various articles and reviews I've done for various fanzines over the last 15-20 years. I thought I'd start with this one as it's still one of my favourite memories of the last decade or so.

I did this interview for the sadly now defunct "Bubblegum Slut" fanzine and it took place about a month after I moved to London in 2010. For those unaware of him, Stephen "Haggis" Harris may just have one of the coolest CV's in rock 'n' roll having gone through the ranks of Zodiac Mindwarp & The Love Reaction, the Cult and the Four Horsemen and, as an interview, my chat with him was everything I hoped it'd be and more.

Because of space restrictions, this article ended up being clipped quite a bit for "Bubblegum Slut" but what you're getting here is the full unadulterated version. Enjoy...and be warned, this is definitely not for the squeamish...

"A Life In Rock 'n' Roll" - Haggis from the Four Horsemen

As I step out of Tottenham Court Road tube station and head into deepest darkest Soho, I'm wondering just what I've got myself into with this, my first major fanzine journalism assignment since becoming a full time London resident a few weeks ago. All I know is that I'm heading to a tattoo parlour somewhere around here to interview a man with possibly one of the coolest CV's in rock 'n' roll history. The guy in question is Stephen Harris aka Haggis aka Kid Chaos. Having started out as bass player with Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction during their early days and the "High Priest Of Love" EP, legend has it that he was poached by the Cult for the world tour of their "Electric" album, the LP that saw them transcend from dreamy mid-'80s goths to States-conquering Rick Rubin-produced rock behemoths. However, his stint with Ian Astbury and Billy Duffy would be a short one and he would move on to put his own group together with Rubin as their producer and overseer. That group would be the legendary Four Horsemen, one of the best bands to emerge from the seedy underbelly of LA in the late '80s. Mixing Lynyrd Skynyrd's southern-fried boogie with AC/DC's power riffs and the sheer scumminess of prime time Guns 'n' Roses, the Horsemen should've been huge and their 1991 masterpiece "Nobody Said It Was Easy" still stands up as one of the best of that era today. Unfortunately, bad behaviour and sheer bad luck followed the Horsemen around like twin dark shadows and it took them no less than five years to release a follow-up in "Gettin' Pretty Good At Barely Gettin' By". By this time, the band had gone into tailspin - Haggis had left the ranks along with bass player Ben Pape, the group's powerhouse drummer Dimwit was dead from a suspected OD and madman singer Frank C Starr was in a coma following a motorcycle accident from which he'd never wake up. The group's sole surviving member lead guitarist Dave Lizmi soldiered on for a couple of years with a makeshift line-up led by ex-Little Caesar frontman Ron Young but the magic was long gone and the Horsemen finally called it a day in 1998 to be left as one of the great cult bands of the era, a memory for a few dedicated acolytes and those persistent enough to try and dig out their legacy.

Until now. Although a reunion is very much out of the question with only three surviving members, late 2009 saw a new Four Horsemen website set up by Haggis and Dave Lizmi which includes lovingly remastered re-releases of the entire long-deleted Four Horsemen back catalogue. The Horsemen have been one of my favourite groups ever since the always-reliable "Sleazegrinder" website pointed me towards them and, after much searching, I finally found an affordable CD copy of "Nobody Said It Was Easy" at a second hand record shop in my then-hometown of Bradford. Suffice to say that record has rarely been off my stereo for more than a few days at a time ever since. So, after agreeing it with our esteemed ed Alison, I sent an e-mail off to the website and Haggis was nice enough to get back to me saying he'd be in London in a few weeks and would I be interested in meeting up with him somewhere and doing the interview there?

Which brings us back to the present. After wandering through streets of second hand record shops, boutiques, peep shows and massage parlours, I finally find the establishment I'm looking for. With a deep breath I step through the door only to be told by the nice man inside that Haggis and the parlour owner, a friend as it turns out, have adjourned to a pub down the road. Far from the den of iniquity I was half-expecting it turns out to be a nice olde worlde place serving good beer with a relaxed atmosphere and I finally meet up with the guy in the back room. These days Haggis lives out in the States and is training to be a doctor at medical school. Certainly in terms of looks he bears very little resemblance from the long-haired mirrored shades-clad guitar slinger from his early days. In fact, he's a genuinely nice and laid back sort of guy. But believe you me, he's still got the stories to tell and as he spills them out in an accent that's half from his native Welsh valleys and half from his adopted home across the Atlantic, it makes for some pretty compelling listening. You thought "The Dirt" was a rock 'n' roll book? Trust me, you ain't heard nothing yet...

BS: So let's start at the beginning - how did you end up joining Zodiac Mindwarp & The Love Reaction?

I was eighteen when I joined the Love Reaction. At the time I was living in my hometown of Swansea and when I left school at sixteen, all I wanted to do was leave school and be on the dole with all my mates. Then the Tories stopped the dole and brought in this thing called the "Job Creation Scheme" which meant that you could get fifty quid a week if you could get a thousand quid to start a business. So I borrowed a thousand quid off my dad and started a record label just so I could get fifty quid a week off the government! It was called Fierce Recordings and I ran it with my mate Steve Gregory. Some of the bands we put out in the early days were Sonic Youth before they were famous and the Pooh-Sticks which was Steve's band. So it was basically two teenagers running a record label out of Steve's basement in Swansea. It was about this time I became friends with Youth who'd just left Killing Joke at the time and started a new band called Brilliant who were on Warner Brothers and managed by David Balfe. They were actually the first band on Food. One day I ended up going to see Dave because Youth had just made this ill-advised pre-techno record and Dave wanted the rights to it because he'd paid for it even though it was rubbish. While I was in there, I noticed this big pile of 12" records in the corner which was the "Wild Child" EP which was really just Zodiac on his own with some session musicians. I asked Dave who it was and he said "Oh, it's the new guy on my label" and gave me a copy which I listened to and really liked. Then about a week later I was talking to Youth because I was helping to put his record out and he said that he was playing bass for Zodiac but couldn't do both bands anymore so Zodiac was currently looking for a bass player. So I wrote to him and Balfe called me and said "Zodiac wants to know if you want to come and try out for the band." So I went up to their recording studios in October 1985 and I played for about five minutes incredibly loud and he said "Okay, you're in the band". Then Dave said I'd have to move up from Swansea the next week and the first gig was a week after that!

Dave was living in Dalston at the time and he'd just broken up with his girlfriend so he needed a lodger to keep up the rent. So I ended up moving in with him - in the space of two weeks I went from being this really naive valley boy sitting in my local in Swansea having a pint of Brains with all the old boys to being the bass player with Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction and Balfe taking me out to parties every night with people like Madness and going to parties at Suggs' house - it was a pretty amazing time. And the rest is history - we toiled around in bars for three months with everyone laughing at us then suddenly we were on magazine covers all over the place and that was that.

BS: Were the Love Reaction really as nuts in the early days as the legend suggests?

Yes, in a word. If you've seen the "Pandora's Grisly Handbag" DVD, that really shows how it was. We were like the Stooges a lot in that we only knew about three chords between us - it was insane. But it was incredible, I mean I would always say that my proudest achievement in rock was the "Nobody Said It Was Easy" album but the most fun I had was definitely with Zodiac Mindwarp.

BS: You left the Love Reaction just as "Tattooed Beat Messiah" was being recorded to join the Cult - how did that come about?

We got a £600,000 advance from Phonogram which, by 1986 standards was a LOT of money and we basically proceeded to spend it at an astounding rate. We went to the Manor Studios to record the album with Steve Brown who'd done the Cult's "Love" album which is how I met them. The thing is, there was always friction between Zodiac and me - he was 28 years old to my 18 at the time and it was his band, I'd never take any credit for anything in the Love Reaction back then apart from maybe adding a little bit of agitation around the edges. But what happened is that he worked hard and got famous - I mean we all got famous but I think Zodiac got a bit carried away and he wasn't willing to tolerate any other ideas. And when the money started running out and we still hadn't made the record, people started asking "Well, what do we do now?" I mean we basically had one song which we'd written in about 85 different keys and I was like "Can we write a new one now?" and it turned out that wasn't really gonna happen either. I saw the end coming, let's just put it that way.

BS: How did you find touring the "Electric" album with the Cult just as they were starting to break America?

It was crazy. I basically stepped straight out of the meteoric rise of Zodiac Mindwarp and into the meteoric rise of the Cult. It was a different situation, I mean I was never really "in" the Cult. One thing that I didn't really realise until I joined the band was that the Cult was only ever really two guys - Ian Astbury and Billy Duffy. I mean, maybe everybody else knew that but I didn't. But I did get on really well with Rick Rubin who was producing the "Electric" album. The two of us were both card-carrying members of the Bon Scott fan club and that's how we bonded. The first day I met Rick, I walked down the stairs to the Electric Lady recording studios in New York and the rest of the Cult were there with long flowing robes on and there's me walking in wearing Doc Martens, jeans and an AC/DC T-shirt and Rick was like "Hey mate!".

I actually did play on some of that album but I wasn't allowed to be credited because me and Balfe had fallen out over me leaving the Love Reaction and he threatened to sue. It kind of became apparent very quickly that I was interested in something very different to what the Cult were doing - I was in the band for almost exactly a year, I joined in January 1987 and left in December and did the whole "Electric" tour but by July, I was already talking to Rick about forming the Four Horsemen. Obviously I wasn't declaring that out loud but I could kind of see my future wasn't going in the same way as theirs was.

BS: The sleevenotes to "Electric" say that there was a lot of friction on that tour between Ian and Billy over the former's behaviour - is there any truth in that?

I think the drinking had a lot to do with it. I mean, people always talk about drug abuse in rock bands but that wasn't the case with the Cult, it was all booze, I mean we're talking tankers' worth here. I mean, I think the thing that made the Cult great was the friction between Billy and Ian because they're two such different people. Billy's the cool calculated businessman while Ian's the classic frontman nutter. Same as Zodiac is. I mean, you can't invent frontmen, they either are or they aren't. You can see the ones that want to be and aren't and the ones that are are always a bit unhinged. And while Ian's unhingedness is what made the Cult great, I think it exasperated Billy.

BS: So early 1988, you linked up with Rick to put the Four Horsemen together. How did you end up finding the rest of the band?

Well, while I was still in the Cult, Rick was always telling me I should just form a band. I mean, I was still just 20 years old at the time and I certainly didn't know at the time that Def Jam was about to split apart and he was gonna form Def American.  Anyway, what happened was we both knew there was no point trying to form a band without a singer and Rick kept telling me about this guy he knew out in LA who was a headcase and if I met him I had to talk to him. So I was in the Rainbow Bar & Grill on Sunset Strip one Saturday night having dinner with Rick, James Hetfield and Glen Danzig, I mean this is before Metallica broke big and before Danzig had even formed - Glen was still in Samhain who Rick was producing at the time. Suddenly we heard this big commotion in the car park and a guy yelling "Yeah! I kicked his ass!" And that was Frank. He had this big mushroom style haircut and he was wearing brown corduroy flares and had blood all down his T-shirt. And I didn't know this at the time but he was the singer in this terrible hair metal band called SIN. Anyway Rick waved him over and Frank was not remotely impressed by the company on the table that night. Rick was like "This is Frank Starr" and Frank's like "No, it's Frank C Starr!" Then he lifts this blood-spattered T-shirt up and on his back there's a hand-poked prison tattoo which you can see a picture of on the back of the first Horsemen EP. Anyway, Rick says "Frank, this is Haggis, he's in the Cult right now but he's getting a new band together and you're the singer." Frank's like "Do I get paid?" and Rick's like "Yeah, you'll get paid." So we shook hands on it there and then.

Then after I quit the Cult at the end of '87, I moved to LA and that's where I met Dimwit who was Chuck Biscuits from Danzig's brother. Apparently he was being lined up to play drums for Slayer after Dave Lombardo quit but Rick played him "Reign In Blood" down the phone and he said it was the worst shit he'd ever heard! So he came down from Vancouver to LA to meet me and Rick and my first memory of him is that he had the greasiest most disgusting hair I'd ever seen. And he was huge, about 6'5 and also had a hand-poked prison tattoo, one of the Black Sabbath crucifix logo. And then from there we found Dave and Ben and that was the five of us. So it was really just a case of Rick overseeing things while I did my own thing but I couldn't have put together that band without Rick. I mean I didn't have the connections, I was just living in this rarefied world of being a rock star.

BS: You got the first EP out in 1989 and then Frank got sent to prison for two years which put the album back until 1991, is that right?

Me and Dave always have a good laugh about this, it's like "Do we really want to ruin the legends and myths about this group?" The truth is that Frank went to jail on a number of occasions when I knew him. Once was when his he'd just dug a swimming pool in his back garden which was really just this big red mudhole and his next door neighbour was pissing him off and he started firing a shotgun over the fence into the guy's yard which led to a SWAT squad turning up and taking him away. Then there was the time he bodyslammed a guy through the pie counter at Denny's on Sunset Strip or the time a guy rear-ended him on the freeway near LA and he pulled a two-foot length of scaffold pole out and beat the guy with it. Those are just three examples but basically, Frank was always getting in trouble with the law. But that's the thing about him - he was the real deal. Nearly all the frontmen I've worked with have been singers first, nutters second. Frank was just a nutter who didn't really care about being a singer, I mean he could've made more money doing other things. He actually managed a porn shop when I first met him and just after he joined the band we all went there. The place was in the middle of this really bad neighbourhood in LA and he was telling us how this "Pulsating Pussy" sex toy worked really great if you put extra batteries in it because it made it go double speed! He also worked as a bouncer at this brothel which was supposed to be a hotel but it was really all just a front. I dunno if that technically made him a pimp but there you go. Anyway, we said to him "Frank, you're always borrowing money off us because you're broke yet you've got enough money to buy a Pulsating Pussy". He just said "No, I just borrowed it from the stock, washed it out when I'd finished with it and put it back on the shelf!"

Frank really was a one-off. The nearest equivalent I can really think of is when I met a guy called Dave McCracken who used to produce Ian Brown's albums and he was telling me all these stories about the Happy Mondays when they were at their peak of their craziness. He was saying that the thing that made them so scary was that they really WERE drug-dealers and nutcases who just happened to be in a band as well. That was Frank in a nutshell. We'd have to go and get him to take him to rehearsal and we'd find him pistol-whipping someone in the lobby of this brothel. He had an apartment there and it was the first room down the corridor. Whenever we'd go and visit him, every time he heard a noise outside he'd jump up, grab his pistol and go see who it was. We actually filmed the video for the single "Nobody Said It Was Easy" at that brothel - what a lot of people don't know is that there's a second uncensored version of that video which we left off the "Left For Dead" DVD which actually has Frank getting a blowjob from one of the whores at the brothel including him coming in her face. Then he executes her in the shower which is obviously fake. The only reason we didn't put it on the DVD is because Frank has a daughter who's about twenty now and we didn't want her friends at college to see that and bring it up with her.

But yeah, Frank was always in trouble. So we ended up having to make the album in two halves either side of him serving a six-month jail sentence in late 1990 and early 1991. But altogether it took about three days to record. Slayer were actually making their "Seasons In The Abyss" album in the studio next door to us and Rick was producing both albums. So at the end of the title track when you hear all these people cheering and clapping, that's actually Slayer!

BS: The record got good press but didn't sell well, why do you think that was?

It was being primed to be a huge record and we really thought it would be. Everyone asked us why it didn't happen and there's two reasons really. Firstly we were a bunch of nutters who were far more interested in being nutters than doing what we were told. The other thing is we made a really bad choice with our manager because he was also looking after the Black Crowes who were on the same label as us. The Crowes had just finished touring their first album "Shake Your Moneymaker" and he just assumed they would go away for a couple of years to do their second album and he'd be able to concentrate on us as we were just gearing up to tour "Nobody Said It Was Easy". What happened of course is that the Crowes got their second album done in six weeks and just as our record was starting to take off they basically called him back in to work with them. I think it'd be arrogant of me to say they were worried about how successful our record was because they'd just sold six million copies of their own record but I think they were worried about us maybe having a more authentic sound than they did. I'm not criticising the Crowes but there was always a funny atmosphere between us and them. Not least because Frank really didn't like Chris Robinson and frequently threatened to kill him. And Chris knew Frank really could do that. So it became a really awkward situation and the management often had to keep us apart. And we really suffered because of that. I'm really not moaning or complaining about that - I mean obviously they were the priority band on the label for a good reason and it probably wouldn't have mattered if we hadn't been such a bunch of dysfunctional psychopaths who were hellbent on destroying our own career simultaneously. So it was just a combination of events.

BS: You made an unreleased second album "Daylight Again" which didn't have Frank on it and has just seen the light of day now - what's the story there?

The basic reason the Four Horsemen broke up is that I was sick of Frank. I was about 23 by this point so still pretty green really. Basically, I forgot that Frank was a nutter who happened to be a great singer while I was the songwriter in a rock band who was just mildly dysfunctional. So I would have these earnest conversations with Frank saying "Listen mate, you're fucking this up, you need to start taking care of your voice etc etc" but it was like telling Ronnie Kray to behave himself because the neighbours were getting scared of him - it was pointless. With hindsight it was regrettable because I wasn't smart enough to see what was really going on - all I knew was that it seemed to me like he was fucking it up so we just ended up fighting and arguing all the time and it ended with me breaking the band up. Then I met some other guys and I ended playing and writing songs with them in New York while Frank was in LA. Then Dave came out and played guitar on it and Les Warner who'd been the Cult's drummer when I'd been with them and had also since been fired by them came along to help. Then our singer was a guy who'd played harmonica on some of the "Nobody Said It Was Easy" out-takes. So we just made this record, basically because I wanted to - we didn't know if the classic Horsemen line-up was gonna get back together at the time. I wasn't too keen on putting it out but when we did the re-issues, Dave was like "You know what, fuck it, people might as well get the chance to hear it." So it was basically a stop-gap between "Nobody Said It Was Easy" and "Gettin' Pretty Good At Barely Gettin' By" which I wasn't involved with. So if you look at the chronology, it's the EP and the album which both have the original band on them, then it's "Daylight Again" with me and Dave then Dave got back with Frank and did "Gettin' Pretty Good..." which I had nothing to do with. I'd left the music industry by that point, basically I didn't want anything more to do with it.

BS: What did you think of "Gettin' Pretty Good At Barely Gettin' By"?

Dave sent it to me and we've talked about it since. He was pretty nervous but I thought some of that album was pretty fantastic. I mean, all the reviews I've read of that record say that it's basically a facsimile of the first one but not as good and I think even Dave would say that's true. The biggest regret I had on hearing that record was what a complete and total control freak I'd been. Because that record is very much Dave's album and it shows what a talented guy he is. I never restricted his guitar playing in the Horsemen - every note is his thing on the EP and the first album because I can't play lead to save my life. But I heard all these great ideas for songs on that record and I realised he must've had a lot of great ideas for the band which I never really let happen. Because you see I'd got used to Zodiac being such a control freak in the Love Reaction and then Billy being such a control freak in the Cult. So I used to jokingly refer to myself as Billy Mindwarp in the early days of the Horsemen but the biggest joke was that I had nothing to do with the Four Horsemen Mark 2. And Dave always jokes that back in the early days he hated me for being such a control freak who wouldn't let him contribute any ideas but when the band reformed to do "Gettin' Pretty Good..." it was him who became the really horrible control freak. I think the moral of the story is that every band needs a horrible control freak at the top unfortunately.

BS: The band disbanded in 1997 after Frank's motorcycle accident and Dimwit OD'ing. Did you say you were through with music by this time?

Pretty much. There was a band from Leeds called Spacehog who needed a guitarist. Three of them were British but they had an American guitar player and they wanted a British one. So I filled in for them for a few months while they were looking for a record deal but that was never gonna be a long term thing. I think that was about 1994 or so. After that, I had very little to do with the music industry. I got into rock climbing and spent nine years travelling around the world doing that. Then I'm ashamed to admit I ended up joining Goldman Sachs teaching rock climbing to their employees at the company gym and I'm even more ashamed to admit I really enjoyed it because it was basically an obscene amount of money for very little work! I just sat on the ground yelling at big fat flatulent bankers what they were doing wrong! But I did meet some good people there, usually the programmers at the company who were a lot easier to get on with. Then 9-11 happened and while I wasn't there that day, the office that I worked in was destroyed so I spent a lot of time volunteering at Ground Zero afterwards. And it made me think a lot - I'd never really done any studying since I was sixteen and left school and after that I decided that I'd go back and study. And a lot of the guys I was tecahing rock climbing to were former Eastern Bloc physicists and mathematicians who had become programmers for Goldman Sachs. So I'd be giving them rock climbing lessons and they'd be teaching me all about physics and maths. So I went back to school and now I'm in medical school training to be a doctor.

BS: You also put a solo album out in 2002...

Yeah, I did that album with a friend of mine called Francis Dunnery who used to be the lead singer with It Bites and played guitar with Robert Plant on one of his solo albums. I was actually writing a book at the time and he suggested I should make it into an album so it ended up becoming this weird folky acoustic album which some people said sounded like Nick Drake and some people said sounded like some guy just mumbling. But it was a very cathartic thing although we did get some Horsemen fans saying "What the fuck's this?" It's very hard for me to talk about that record because it was just me and Francis making it so I've not really got any perspective on it but it got a lot of good press outside the world of the Four Horsemen.

BS: You've just completed the Four Horsemen re-issue programme - how did that go?

We had a great time. Dave's a real life collector so he had all this stuff stored away and we decided with the 21st anniversary of the band coming up we should put it out there. The EP was the most important thing for me - I thought the original mastering of it sounded really horrible so we decided to have a go at re-mastering it. Then we found all these demos lying about, then I wanted to re-release "Nobody Said It Was Easy" then Dave said we should really put out the "Daylight Again" demos. Later this year, we're gonna put out a re-release of "Gettin' Pretty Good..." with a bunch of new live tracks from the last few shows the band did with Frank and Dim just before the album came out. We've also got a second live DVD coming out to go with "Left For Dead" called "Death Before Suck-Ass" which is one some fans shot of us doing a big arena show supporting Lynyrd Skynyrd back in the "Nobody Said It Was Easy" era. A lot of fans have sent us in bootlegs in as well so that'll probably form a big part of it. We've also got Ben in to do the artwork for it and I'm really looking forward to seeing it come out.

As we finish the interview, Haggis mentions he'll be back in the country again in a few weeks if I fancy meeting up again and I'm quick to agree. What can I say, in the last four years or so of writing for "Bubblegum Slut" this has to be one of the best interviews I've ever had the privilege to do - not only is Haggis a thoroughly decent chap but also a man who, as you've just read, has got more than his fair share of stories about the world of rock 'n' roll. You can find the re-issued Four Horsemen back catalogue online at www.thefourhorsemen.com and I strongly suggest you go and check them out. In the meantime, cheers mate, it was an absolute pleasure.