Recorded on a four track tape recorder and heavily influenced by sonic eccentrics Syd Barrett and Captain Beefheart, the bizarrely-titled ‘songs’ ( Your Pussy’s Glued To A Building On Fire, Blood On My Neck From Success), with their scratchy acoustic guitar and surrealist/nonsensical stream-of-consciousness lyrics, are the sound of overloaded mental circuitry melting down. To get a glimpse into John Frusciante’s mindset in the period framing his departure from one of the world’s most successful rock bands, you need only listen to the music on his first solo album, 1995’s Niandra La Des And Usually Just A T Shirt. But the quartet, rounded out by garrulous Minnesota-born drummer Chad Smith, were getting on better than ever, and hitting new creative peaks, so he chose to block them out. The voices in Frusciante’s head told him to walk away when he’d completed his guitar parts for BloodSugarSexMagik, the band’s fifth full-length album. Being a rock star, he realised, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Frusciante had always wanted to be a musician, but increasingly it was becoming all too apparent that music now played only a minor role in the circus that was his day-to-day life. The meaningless sex got routine, the drinking and drug-taking monotonous, the fame and adulation nothing short of embarrassing. But all too soon, the dream started to sour. For his first couple of years in the band, Frusciante threw himself headlong into the rock ‘n’ roll whirl, taking full advantage of the myriad temptations laid before him.

The Peppers were his favourite band: frontman Anthony Kiedis and bassist Flea heroes in his eyes. When he’d been invited to join the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1998, it was a dream come true. In the quiet of a Tokyo hotel room the 22-year-old had time to reflect upon where it had all gone wrong.

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