KEY POINTS:
Pete "Sonic Boom" Kember reckons he's down with the kids - a bold statement from a bloke in his mid-40s who makes wheezing, droney rock.
Not exactly catchy, more trippy.
With his band Spaceman 3 he did, he notes with a laugh, make an album called Taking Drugs
to Make Music to Take Drugs To so most kids, no matter what generation they're from, will be down with that.
These days he tours under the guise of Spectrum, the project he formed after the demise of Spaceman 3 in 1991, who play with Dimmer at the Kings Arms tomorrow night. They also play an afternoon show at 3pm at Leigh Sawmill on Sunday.
Even Kember sounds surprised when he says the audience these days is a mix of older fans and kids who weren't even born when the band's classic Playing With Fire was released in 1989.
"That album is 20 years old next year but because of the internet kids these days can get music very easily, if not for free, and they don't have a conscience about it. But they do appreciate going to see live stuff and spending their money that way."
He admits his profile since the late 90s has been a low key, almost non-existent one. "There's been periods where it hasn't been very easy to see what I do because people just weren't interested," he jokes.
But a few years back he decided to start touring again and spends more time on the road than back in his hometown of Rugby, where "I still keep a house".
A new Spectrum album is also coming out in the next few months - the first since 1997's Forever Alien.
"It just got to a point where, again, through the internet, a whole new audience seemed to clue into what Spectrum does and what Spaceman 3 did. The internet has been an accelerator of clueing people into some of the more esoteric and interesting music that didn't commercially come across people's first path because they weren't commercially big things."
Kember's music became known as space rock in the mid 80s and early 90s when he was one of the two brains behind Spaceman 3, with Jason Pierce, who went on to form Spiritualized.
It's a term he's not too keen on but he's proud of the Spaceman 3 legacy and the influence the band and contemporaries like My Bloody Valentine have had.
But when he and Pierce started out in 1982 their sort of music didn't have an audience.
"We only hoped that there would be one. What we set out to do was not commercial at all and you only need to look at the titles of some of the albums. An album called Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To wouldn't sell a lot," he laughs in his lazy paced yet slightly posh English accent.
"In a small town we didn't know if there was anybody out there like us, but we hoped they were, and it took initially three or four years for us to build up any sort of following in the UK, and then the US and Europe.
"We were just doing it because it was what we wanted to do, and needed to do and it was the only thing I was interested in, and now it's the only thing I can do."
One of his musical inspirations was dark American experimental synth band Suicide. His brother bought the band's self-titled 1977 because he loved the song Cheree.
"But if you really like Cheree you probably won't like the rest of the album," says Kember. "They were an unusual band at the time, and I actually liked a lot of the other stuff and I pinched the album off him. I loved it."
His love of bands like Suicide and Kraftwerk, and the more rowdy and raw approach of bands like the Stooges, gives a good indication of what the pair were trying to do with Spaceman 3.
"There's a real minimalism where they get over a strong emotion with apparently a minimal amount of sound and that was always something we tried to do in the Spaceman, to take the minimal number of elements to convey what we wanted, because you can add and adorn stuff to something until the cows come home but there's a point where it doesn't actually tell the story any better.
"They were just a band who could tell a story in a pretty direct way."
He's involved in many musical side projects, but besides Spaceman 3 and Spectrum he is best known as one of the ringleaders of Experimental Audio Research (EAR), along with Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine and Kevin Martin, who these days is known as bass bin terrorist the Bug.
Kember says EAR is an experimental ambient and soundscape project - "It's very textural and about doing stuff just with sound and not using lyrics" - whereas Spectrum is his song-based outlet.
In this respect he has a similar musical outlook to Dimmer's Shayne Carter.
The pair both have a strong pop sensibility with an unashamed love of atmospherics, sonics and noise and there's nowhere better to hear it than on Spectrum's 1992 debut, Soul Kiss.
"I love a lot of pop stuff, going back to the 40s even," says Kember.
"But my favourite stuff is from the 60s and 70s, kind of whacked-out stuff - great songs but also are really great musically. So yeah, I try to do both."
LOWDOWN
Who: Spectrum, real name Pete Kember
What: Sonic drone pop rock
Where & when: Kings Arms, Friday; Leigh Sawmill, Sunday at 3pm
Essential albums: As Spaceman 3 - The Perfect Prescription (1987); Playing With Fire (1989); As Sonic Boom - Spectrum (1990); As Spectrum - Soul Kiss (1992); As E.A.R. - Beyond the Pale (1996)
