It was fun, basically, and he was as engaging as ever.
He has a new film out by the way, which documents his continuously interesting life called Mr Nice, which you should get a copy of. We include an exclusive deleted scene below the main feature which only found its way to the cutting room floor as director, Bernard Rose, felt the presence of the man himself extricated believability from Rhys Ifans’s Marks portrayal.
Enjoy the feature, watch the film and, if you haven’t, for goodness sake read the book.
10. Tea.
“I can’t say much about this. I don’t like any of the sloppy teas, I just like builder’s teas, for want of a better description.”
9. Coffee
“More potent than tea, certainly in terms of caffeine content, and does have an interesting history. Don’t know if you’ve read the book The Devil’s Cup? It shows that the bean was used as a fertility symbol in Ethiopia. So it was used as an aphrodisiac at one point and is now primarily used to wake people up and effectively as a headache cure, especially one generated by a hangover as it’s scientifically verified to lower the blood pressure.
You should buy the book, there’s a prayer to the coffee bean in there."
8. Low-level hash/Soap bar
“Can be less potent than tea and coffee, disgusting fucking stuff. There’s no hash smoked in Morocco except for the Joujouka tribe which the Stones and Brian Jones visited once – but they were very isolated. Otherwise they used to just smoke Kief in Morocco.
In the early 70s and guy called Jake, from Canada, whom I knew, a friend of his from Lebanon went to Morocco and taught them how to grow hash. The first attempts were pretty good. It was delivered in an envelope and fell apart once the envelope was opened, but it was pretty good, so I’m not talking about that stuff.
They used to just taking the flowering tops of the plant, but then as the business was taken over by non-smokers they started putting more than just the heads in the mix, to the point where they would sweep up tin cans and bloody throw em in the mix. They weren’t even trying it. And they were putting plastic hardening agents in it to bind it together. Course, these agents vapourise when you smoke them and recondense in your lungs, which doesn’t get you stoned, just causes tissue damage and really fucks you up.”
7. Homegrown
“What used to be called “homegrown” weed was also disgusting in its early endeavours and has largely disappeared as the techniques to produce better gear are now widely known. So, yeah, early attempts by Europeans to grow weed in Europe were largely disgusting and ineffective. Imported weed back in the day was always better.”
6. Low-grade Charlie
“Follow someone into the loo, listen to their life story whilst they’re chopping out a line of the stuff, go back to your pint. Terrible shite.”
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[“Alcohol is somewhere in the middle. On the scale of harm it is higher. One of the criteria use is to compare the dose used to get you high to the dose used to get you killed. And with alcohol this is very close. We could sit here and decide to drink ourselves to death and achieve it. We couldn’t smoke ourselves to death. It would take decades.”
Alcohol is a psychoactive sacrament in at least two religions.
Also nicotine has to be in here somewhere..."}
[Look up "Nicotiana rustica" on WIkipedia and go and see one of Howard’s brilliant talks for more info - Ed]
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5. Peruvian Flake Cocaine
“I’m sorely tempted to put Peruvian flake cocaine in there. Most coke if you take it does three things: makes you think you’re shagging the person you’re talking to, but you/re not, obviously, you’re just talking about yourself; makes you want more; and makes you realise how cheap everything else is.
Peruvian flake cocaine is different. You can sleep on it, eat on it, fuck on it – it doesn’t get in the way.
Very easy to get in Peru.”
4. Hawaiian Baby Woodrow
"Seeds of a plant growing in Hawaii, it can send you well off it. Very difficult to accurately measure a dose"
3. The acid available in the 60s
“LSD25, different from the acid people take now. Like DMT but much more longer lasting. A solid 8-hour trip"
2. Ayahuasca
“A specific way of taking DMT, which we just spoke about”
1. DMT (di methyl tryptamine)
“The body produces it naturally, dripping it into your system at a certain rate every day, which increases when you dream. So we are all used to it, but in very small, concentrated doses which increase rapidly and immeasurably when you dream.
It also has different more important effects. For example, if you take it out of the brains of birds that migrate, they are no longer about to circumnavigate the planet. And also, if you take it out of the brains of animals who hibernate they spend the winter like they are on a gram of Charlie instead of sleeping.
The other interesting fact is that when you die your body releases all your natural DMT like it knows you are going on a big one and need to take the bloody lot. Every physiological death is accompanied by an overdose of DMT.
It’s very, very strong. The difference between DMT and other acid is marked though. If we’d taken acid 20 minutes ago and I began to look like a dragon, you would look at me and realise that you had taken acid 20minutes ago and were beginning to trip. On DMT you would just see a dragon. It suspends the belief that you have taken a hallucinogenic drug.
It’s a hort duration, about 40minutes.
There are different ways to ingest it: one is to smoke it in its synthetic form; and there are two natural ways: one is embodied in the ayahuasca process; and licking the toad is the hardcore way of doing it. It’s a quite a complicated process, you have to massage the toad – funnily enough called the Cane Toad – and it begins to exude white puss over the warts on its back, which you then lick."
So there.
Mr. Nice is out on DVD and Blu-ray now
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