For every rocker who, in true rock'n'roll style, fails to make it beyond his
or her twenties, there are many more who defy Roger Daltrey's early wish and
do get old before they die. Many of those who reach middle age admit to
owing their survival to some form of therapy. And for a notable few, it's
the giving, not receiving, of such therapies that underpins their endurance.
Take Terry Chimes, formerly of punk band the Clash. He is more likely to be
manipulating spines at his Essex chiropractic clinic than playing drums.
Similarly, Steve Guthrie, of the post-punk group Theatre of Hate, runs an
acupuncture practice in Brighton. It is also where Matt Irving, a
psychologist, and his wife Liz Morris, an osteopath, also have a clinic,
having both worked in the music industry for years - Morris was a US record
company executive; Irving a musician who recorded and toured with many
bands.
What prompted them to take up such altruistic second careers?Susan Hallam, a
psychologist and former musician, believes musicians are generally more
tuned into their emotions. “It's this and the desire that many have to
change things for the better.” Kevin Porée, who runs London's Berry Street
recording studio, and has worked with James Brown and Radiohead, adds:
“Despite the caricature of a musician as self-absorbed egoist, many are
selfless people who are driven to make the world a better place.”
Providing therapy, it seems, is one way they can do this.
TERRY CHIMES
Terry Chimes, a founder member of the Clash, is a successful chiropractor and
acupuncturist, having studied in the UK and China. He also runs an
international consultancy helping people to become alternative therapists
and is the chairman of the East London YMCA.
“As a child I was obsessed with nature and it was expected that I'd become a
doctor or a vet,” says Chimes, “and then at 16, I discovered girls and
realised that to attract them I needed to be a footballer or a musician.”
Coming from a family of musicians, the latter was an obvious career choice.
Nevertheless, Chimes adds, he never lost sight of his natural passion for
healing and always knew that he would eventually do something medically
related, “if not necessarily alternative”.
He joined the Clash at 19 but left the band before their second album, in
1977, “fed up with all the arguing”, and rejoined them briefly in 1982 for a
US tour, while the replacement drummer Nicky (Topper) Headon's
well-documented drug habit precluded his playing. Chimes also played with
Hanoi Rocks, Billy Idol and Black Sabbath, before training to be a
chiropractor and acupuncturist in the mid-1980s.
It was during his performing years, he says, that he realised that “the
natural way of healing was far better than pumping people full of
medicines”. He also gave up eating meat and drinking alcohol. “Most people
go one way or the other - healthy or beserk,” Chimes maintains. “There's no
middle line; I knew lots of people who died, including Sid Vicious, but was
never really into the self-destruction thing myself.”
Fame certainly doesn't make you happy, Chimes insists. Conversely, he adds,
his current job provides him with the satisfaction of making people happy
“by getting rid of their aches and pains”. And yes, he admits, many of the
people he treats are musicians: “Perhaps there's a feeling that I understand
something of their condition. Most people involved in healing have
experienced damage in some way, as have many musicians.”
LIZ MORRIS AND MATT IRVING
After 20 years at the cutting edge of the music industry, latterly as
international marketing director of US-based Geffen Records, where she
worked closely with bands such as Nirvana and Guns N' Roses, Liz Morris was
more than ready for a career change when, in 1997, she embarked on a degree
in osteopathy in London.
Now 47, she runs a successful osteopathy practice, specialising in
neurological and nutritional problems, from the Georgian townhouse she
shares with her husband Matt Irving, a chartered psychologist, in Kemptown,
Brighton. She looks back on her rock'n'roll years as valuable preparation
for her current job.
Working in the music business is far from cushy, Morris insists: “In fact
there's actually a very strong work ethic.” It was this work ethic, she
adds, that helped her to secure a first-class honours degree, despite never
having considered herself academic.
A natural empathiser, Morris spent a lot of time on the road with bands and
became something of a “Mrs Fixit”, helping people “who'd suddenly been
thrust into a position of huge power without having received any preparation
for it”. There's no script in the music industry, she says. “All the
creativity and freedom eventually becomes quite stressful; you're working
with emotive, creative people ... and you have to be able to read people's
motivation and work as an individual even though you're part of a team.”
Osteopathy, says Morris, is a “fantastic and solid basis for holistic
healing”. Her particular interest is in the neurological integration, a
system which, she explains, is great for those “sub-clinical problems not
addressed well by conventional medicine”.
Before becoming a chartered psychologist, Irving enjoyed a successful,
although ultimately exhausting, career as a musician. He played bass,
keyboards and accordian with well-known artists, including Manfred Mann's
Earth Band, Squeeze, Chris Rea and Paul Young. “I was what they used to call
in the Sixties a “side man”, rather than a session musician,” says Irving,
56, who recorded and toured with bands, often for more than a year at a
time.
He started reading Jung and early Freud in the late 1980s when he was working
with Squeeze. “I think of musicians as ordinary people in extraordinary
situations who are trying to get back something of their ordinariness.”
People would invariably go to him when they felt that they needed to talk to
someone, he adds, “and it became more and more clear to me what I should be
doing”.
He mulled it over for a couple of years, he says, “and then when Liz and I
married in 1990 it became pressing”. Now based in Brighton, Irving's
patients are referred by psychiatrists, friends and associates. He worked in
the NHS for ten years and spent much of his early training working with
community drug and alcohol teams.
Helping people to overcome anxiety
The theme of his dissertation was performance anxiety and, he says, this is an
area he'd like to pursue further. “Even successful people can be plagued by
such anxiety, which is very often related to alcohol and drug use,” he says.
“And while I like to work with musicians and actors, performance anxiety is
not exclusive to them.”
Irving decided to give up performing when he started his first degree. “But I
realised after a year that I had lost track of how much music gave me and of
how much pleasure and joy there is in music,” he admits. He now plays
occasionally in London, and at small festivals, with “a little band of chums
called Los Pacaminos”.
STEVE GUTHRIE
Steve Guthrie has what can genuinely be described as a kindly face and his
manner is as warm and gentle as his voice. It is hard to believe that this
eminent acupuncturist and director of the Dyke Road Natural Health Clinic,
Brighton, was once guitarist of the fierce and brooding post-punk band
Theatre of Hate.
Guthrie insists that his career progression has been an obvious one, growing
up as he did in Devon, “at the tail end of the hippie era and with an
interest in martial arts and all things Eastern”. “Like punk, the first
hippy movement was all about change, about revolution,” he reflects. “My
influences were already in place.”
People involved in the arts have always had another way of seeing things, an
idealism, Guthrie notes, “and as fantastic as Western medicine is, 90 per
cent of it is nonsense, as doctors just don't have the time to do things
well”. Although he no longer works there, Guthrie was instrumental in
establishing the Brighton-based Dolphin House Clinic for children as
“possibly the most experienced group of complementary health specialists
dedicated to the care of children, anywhere”.
Run as a charity, parents pay what they feel they can afford for treatment,
based on their income. He is also developing an interest in “green”
architecture, he says, having recently been the project manager for the
construction of a sustainable house near his clinic, for the architectural
firm BBM Sustainable Design, based in Lewes.
The thread running through all his interests, Guthrie says, is looking at how
we can all change society in a positive way. He admits to still playing “a
bit of music”, and last year embarked on a well-received, week-long UK tour
with Theatre of Hate. The band re-formed temporarily, to celebrate the 25th
anniversary of its first album, Westworld.
