Spacehog’s Royston Langdon is a tremendous frontperson. He comes across as 10 feet tall, tendons taut in his neck, playing out of his skin. Offstage, he’s shy, quiet, sensitive, kind, and humble.
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Royston is iconic in any setting. I’ve seen him roll across a grimy club floor in a pink faux fur coat and show off pictures of his young son backstage at Coachella. The last time I saw him perform, it was a low-key solo show during a break from hospital visits with my mother-in-law. Royston greeted us with his usual sensitivity. It was a much-needed energy reset, the kind I’ve come to expect from him and his Spacehog bandmates: drummer Jonny Cragg, guitarist Richard Steel, and rhythm guitarist Antony Langdon, Royston’s older brother.
Spacehog has always been effortlessly cool—a magnet for celebrities, both in the dressing room and at the afterparty. During the band’s heyday, Royston married the ultimate it girl, Liv Tyler (mother of said son). All of this began during a visit with his brother in New York, after traveling from their native Leeds. This led to Spacehog’s formation and Royston becoming one of NYC’s more enigmatic figures.
“In the Meantime” launched the band into mainstream consciousness. The perennial earworm has shown up in Guitar Hero 5, Rock Band 3, countless bass tutorial videos, and recently, in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3—trailer and film.
Now, nearly 30 years after their debut album, Resident Alien and a decade since their last live show, Spacehog returns. They’ll co-headline a U.S. tour with EMF starting June 14.
Ahead of that, Royston dials in from a park in Australia, clad in oversized silver headphones and giant black sunglasses that reflect the passersby in front of him. He’s here to dissect “the Why and the How” of “In the Meantime,” Spacehog’s raison d’être and ruination (though I’m being dramatic).
“The thing that was difficult for the band was the success of the song,” Royston says. “It was really hard to stop it. The world was lapping it up. People say ‘one hit wonder,’ but we couldn’t get another song out because they didn’t want to let that one go. There was a lot of confusion. Our personalities, our stability, it was difficult for us to manage that sort of success.”
Bass is the Place
It wasn’t until I met Jonny Cragg and played music with him that I started playing bass guitar, as opposed to the guitar, which I’d always played prior. There were three of us that were contenders for the bass. I remember a series of arguments between us about trying to pass it off as a hot potato nobody wanted. The reason I ultimately did it was because those guys didn’t even try to pretend they could play or wanted to. They purposely did poorly at it. I sort of took to it. I enjoyed the challenge. Having to sing and play at the same time took a little while to figure out. It’s funny how it happens, but it became part of the fabric of the band.
Years ago, I was staying in the Hamptons with Stella McCartney and Paul happened to be there. He’s got a little two-man boat, and I don’t think he wanted me to come with him, but Stella said, “Go on, take him with you.” So I went along, Paul and I, in the middle of Long Island Sound in a tiny boat. We had a conversation about being bass players. I’m not trying to compare myself with the Beatles in any way, or Paul McCartney as a bass player, but he said the verbatim thing that Spacehog went through, which is he didn’t want to play the bass either. He tried to pass it off to George or John and they didn’t want the bass.
The melody and the bassline are what makes something work. The bassline in “In the Meantime” is seemingly complex, but actually, it’s not that complicated. Years later, I see people all over the world learning that song, young kids, it’s just amazing. It blows one’s mind to think you have that sort of effect on people.
New York Minute
I lived in a place on Second Avenue and [guitarist] Bob Curreri was still in the band. It was a railroad apartment with four bedrooms. It was his bedroom we used to rehearse in. It was the sort of thing where the songwriting meets the people at the right time in their musical trajectory. “In the Meantime” had that feeling immediately. It clicked.
I had the chorus idea a little while prior to coming to New York, but it wasn’t completed. There are certain elements to the song that are quite rhythmic, and it has to line up. Meeting Jonny and having his ability to lock into a rhythm, he found a character and personality for the song that really helped drive it, put it together and complete it. There was a certain economy in it too. Antony’s part was really pivotal, partly because it’s so straightforward and simple, but everybody can play it.
In One Weekend
We had done the demo at a commercial studio on 57th Street one weekend and it’s very similar. When we went up to Bearsville to actually record it, I brought Bryce Goggin, who was the head engineer at Monster Studio where I worked. He had heard the demo and liked it. That was the thing about that song, and I think about a lot of songs for rock ‘n roll bands, it worked in the room. When we played it, it just felt good. There wasn’t a lot to do to it, just capture a good performance of it. And we did that. The passion one has as a 21-, 22-year-old in New York City is quite a force energetically. Around that work there was a lot of powerful energy, not just for myself but from the whole band. Bryce did a really good job enhancing the sound and the feel of it. By the time we left Woodstock and came back down to New York to mix, it sounded pretty good. We knew that song had that mysterious thing where if you listen to it in the right way, it makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
Famous Faces in the Video
Harold [Hunter] is in our video for “In the Meantime.” Justin [Pierce] is in the video. Jake Scott made the video. It was what was going on around us creatively: Kids, Larry Clark. We were hanging out with people who were as passionate as we were in the various fields they were in. The cultural existence that happened at that time in ’90s New York was all rubbing shoulders with each other. It was a great time. I don’t think that will happen again. There was a lot of connection. People were getting together in clubs. We were playing those clubs, so we just put them in our video. Ned, who cast the video, lived with Quentin Crisp, around the corner from Ant and I. We’d have lunch with Quentin at the Sports Page Cafe. That was our world. It was so exciting. So much going on all the time. What a great age for curiosity and real growth, individually and collectively.
Losing Control
I lost control of the rights to “In the Meantime” a long time ago. It was in Guardians of the Galaxy, which, on a certain level, is incredible. It brings an audience to it that probably never would have heard it. It put it back in the charts and had all the effects on streaming. But I didn’t know it was being used, so I didn’t find out about it until everybody else found out about it, when the commercial came out
From a creative perspective, it’s an anomaly for me as the writer. I don’t have any say, which feels a little unfair—although I am grateful for all the stuff it has brought us. It’s brought people so much joy. I’ve had the reflection effects of that as a songwriter. One of the greatest things you can do is to get anything like that, at any time. It’s a lovely feeling to make that connection with people. That’s what that song is about in the first place. I have a strange relationship with the song, but mainly it’s gratitude.
Reunited
“In the Meantime” brought the four of us together again. The Guardians of the Galaxy and the effect that we saw that had, and the love there seems to be for the music and the band, we thought we should get together. Jonny put forward the idea that we get together in Sausalito. He had a friend who had bought the Record Plant where Fleetwood Mac and all those geezers [Prince, Sly & the Family Stone, Santana, Grateful Dead, Rick James, Metallica] made all those great records. We put two weeks aside, and it was lovely because we didn’t have any pressure or any agenda. It’s been like going back to the ’90s on a night out. You didn’t have to tick any boxes other than see how it felt and whether we liked it.
There was so much joy and love from not just the music, but the camaraderie we had through this traumatic experience of becoming massively successful in a very short period of time. It bound us together. Coming back together and playing those songs, the spirit of that, that joy and the lack of distractions, we were very much in the room together.
We weren’t in there every day. We took time off in between and got to know each other a bit more again. Also, to have that deeper, lateral perspective on ourselves and on the group with the benefit of hindsight from a long period of time off was reassuring and really compelling that we should do something. It’s a luxurious feeling to play music at our age.
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