Story by Andrew Male

'Around the end of 1994 we played at the Leisure Lounge in London . The support act was some guy who hung irons and swords from his dick. He played really loud techno while his naked girlfriend smoked crack on stage. We finally went on at about four in the morning to this half empty room of people coming down from smack. We've got these Indian backing tracks, singing about the sunrise, and there's this bunch of naked guys in the audience shouting, 'When are you going to start buggering each other?' THAT WAS A LOW POINT.

It's early Wednesday morning and a saggy-eyed Crispian Mills, Kula Shaker's singer/guitarist, is forcing himself to recount the secret and rather bizarre history of his group. At the back of their somewhat 'compact' touring bus, en route to a re-scheduled sold-out gig in the tunnel like environs of Birmingham's Foundry, Crispian - 'Dodge' to his friends - ruffles his post Brian Jones rock barnet and exhales loudly before continuing reluctantly with his tale.

'I suppose the real low point was the spring of 1995. We'd just finished a deal with Gut Reaction Records and they'd treated us like shit. We were all living together and the tension was getting to us.I remember going to Liverpool and having this real spiritual awakening. And that was when we changed our name....'

DESPITE THEIR RELATIVELY SHORT TENURE within the hearts of a Britpop-scarred audience, the story of Kula Shaker has already become a fixed part of music media folklore. The story goes that in the Spring of 1995, Crispian Mills experienced something of an epiphany.

It caused him to change the name of his slogging psychedelic four piece from the Kays to the more spiritually aligned Kula Shaker.

Within the space of three months they had - shazam! - secured a particularly enviable record deal with Columbia and had set about cutting a broad tantric passage through the rubble of post-Oasis guitar pop. After scoring a minor radio hit with the retro freakery of debut single 'Grateful When You're Dead', the band reached their chart nirvana this July with the top four hit 'Tattva' - sung, for the most part, in the venerable ancient tongue they call Sanskrit.

What 'Tattva' did, and what their debut album 'K' aims to repeat in spades, was to dump a much needed dose of lysergic chemicals into the real ale casks of the mine's-a-pint , British pub-pop scene. Kula Shaker's willingness to expound upon arcane theories of mystic syncronicity and Eastern religion, accompanied by rollickingly classicist Hammond 'n' wah wah orgies, has been accepted as a welcome antidote to a music scene that was finding it difficult to enter into any intellectual debate beyond who was getting the next round in.

Their is of course, far more to the inevitable rise and rise of Kula Shaker: stuff that, by any stretch of the imagination is surrounded by an aura of striking weirdness. Theirs is a tale of SPIRITUAL FREEDOM, HEADLESS BODIES, WORLDWIDE ARMAGEDDON and the QUEST FOR THE HOLY GRAIL.... Among other things.

Crispian Mills (Frail, blond, bit of a catch, looks like Mordred in Excalibur) was born in Hammersmith, West London on 18th January 1973. His father, film director Roy Boulting, left home when Crispian was two. A clever man who made some great British movies. Boulting wasn't exactly Crispians idea of the ideal father. 'That's why I haven't got his name. He was married six times. I was his seventh son'.

Despite being the son of Hayley ('60s wastrel actress) and the grandson of a knighted actor (Sir John Mills), Crispian insists that he saw few famous people during his childhood. 'We weren't bohemian. We weren't like the Redgraves. We never read Marx after dinner.' While probably not as high up in the Epiphanal Top Ten, the first time Crispian entered a Hare Krishna temple is also an experience he is keen to recount. A significant chapter in the inception of the Kula Shaker masterplan, it was a further step towards the cosmic hoo-hah that currently courses around his head.

'I was with my mum when she visited this temple in Watford. I must have been about eleven. There was a powerful energy there, but there were also all these weird guys in robes and I just wanted to escape. It did affect me, because suddenly I started to see that people were into some weird shit in this world. The things I thought were weird turned out to be normal and the things I thought were normal turned out to be weird.'

At the age of seventeen Crispian met up with Alonza Bevan. Fellow resident of HAMPTON VILLAGE and like 'Dodge', student at Richmond College. After playing together in the Objects of Desire and running a psychedelic nightclub at the back of Richmond ice rink Crispian is content to admit he had gone a bit wacko. It was a time of apprenticeship. Five years to be precise, a period which Crispian is reluctant to elaborate. Things happened. They probably weren't very nice. 'I really needed to do something with my life. So I decided to go to India.'

Rather than following a tourist trail of elephant-bothering and raving in Goa, or simply lying on a beach reading the latest Barbara Taylor Bradford, Crispian journeyed to MAYAPUR, under the tuteleage of 'MATHURA', a 'FREELANCE TRAVELLER AND MYSTIC'.

Another fellow resident of Hampton, MATHURA has, according to Crispian,lived the life of a Far Eastern 'informer', a monk and 'revolutionary conspirator', as well as serving time in a Siberian gulag. After seeking out the singularly monikered seer in the untamed wilds of Surrey, Select quizzed Mathura on the exact purpose of Crispian's sojorn in the Indian hills.

'I helped him to study the teachings of an ancient Indian mystic called Chaitanya, ' he explains, 'He went back to England a changed person. When I met back up with Crispian and Alonza, they had formed The Kays and were living together in Swiss Cottage, listening to classical Indian music and researching Arthurian Legend.'

Other than Crispian and Alonza, the original line-up of the Kays included Paul Winter-Hart (drummer, 24, appears to carry a dark secret) and one Saul Dismont at one time their vocalist. As a further example of the twisted nepotistic shoots that threaten to engulf the Kula Shaker family tree, Saul was also Crispian's cousin. A strikingly handsome individual (a pattern is emerging here), it was Saul who set the rest of the band on the nutzo path of other-wordly discovery that they're still treading. He explained to them how 'K' was a magical letter, a symbol that was common to latterday kings such as Krishna and Kennedy. Their time in Swiss Cottage was spent dabbling with the magical teachings of the 19th century perv intellectual Aleister Crowley. Theirs was, according to Crispian, 'a mad reality. We believed we were knights in the stables, getting ready for armegeddon.

Then we met Don.' Don Pecker is Kula Shakers 'madness guru'. An ex-con and ex-minicab driver, Don was 'discovered' by Crispian in a Krishna temple in '93. 'He is an amazing character', he confesses, 'like some ancient ?' A onetime drinking and drug buddy of ultra-sauve '60's pop dude Scott Walker ('Scott liked his acid'). DON DISCOVERED THAT HE WAS A DESCENDANT OF THE KNIGHTS OF THE HOLY GRAIL WHILE BANGED UP IN WORMWOOD SCRUBS, ON A GBH CHARGE. It was with this Knight Royal at their side that The Kays travelled to the '93 Glastonbury Festival to play their first gig. The story that surrounds this debut changes with each telling. As far as 'Select' can deduce, Crispian and Don drove down to the festival in an old Mercedes 280, under the influence of some very strong acid. According to Don, the Merc was imbued with the spirit of his old guru, and unfortunate individual who had been murdered by disgruntled devotees in 1982, decapitated with a rusty hacksaw in the back room of Knobs And Knockers on the Finchley Road, London NW3. Somehow the car was reported stolen, and Don and Crispian were arrested by the Glastonbury police. In a manner akin to Obi Wan Kenobi's employment of The Force, a wildly tripping Don managed to convince Somerset constabulary that they weren't the men they were looking for, explaining that they couldn't be arrested because they were protected by the magic energy of the number 13. They were released without charge at 13.13pm. Crispian met up with the rest of the band and they blagged into the Krishna tent in the Glastonbury Green Field, where they subjected a mantra-beffuddled gathering to an hour of distorted acid rock (including current live favourite 'Govinda').

At the end of 1993, the ever mysterious MATHURA decided to pay a visit to the band's Swiss Cottage flat. He brought a friend from America, an original Krishna devotee who had lived with John Lennon and went by the name of Kula Sekhara, who recounted tales long into the night. 'He basically explainedhow the original Kula Sekhara was a ninth-century mystic and emperor,' says Crispian. 'A regal figure. By 1994 we felt that we needed a bit of regal patronage and that if we took his name he would look after us. Three months later we had a record deal.' Prior to all that came the arrival of one member, and the departure of another. Jay Darlington (29, thatched bowl haircut, one-time Sidcup milkman), joined The Kays in 1994 after a long history as the jobbing organist in a variety of obscuranist Mod groups. JAY had recently renounced the world of sensual pleasurefor a more rewarding astral experience, under the guidance psychic mother.

'Tattva', skyrocketing success and a welter of grand predictions vis-a-vis KulaShaker's future. 'I think we are a force for youth revolution,' stresses Crispian. 'We're subverting the system through the system.' 'A great cultural and spiritual revolution is coming,' he continues, 'but a lot of people are already shut off from it. There's no understanding of magic. We've become part of this disgusting machine creating death and destruction and we have to acknowledge that there is a higher power that we're not in control of. If we're not careful, this whole civilisation is going to be dragged into the sea.' 'We know people are going to think that we're mad, but it would be really boring if there was no resistance. That's all part of the sport. We enjoy that.' He pauses, before adding, 'we're the knights on a quest for the Grail and all of this is jousting. The knights like to joust.'

The band left Birmingham several hours ago. As their micro-bus speeds towards Uxbridge, a slightly sauce-weary Crispian is up for discussing everything from conspiracy theories to the numerological profundity of the 'Let's Sing About Ten' song from Sesame Street. 'We know things,' says Crispian Mills, 'Kennedy? Killed by the Masons. The Pope? Sold Zyklon B Gas to the Nazis. We know too much and we know that people are plotting against us. That isn't paranoia, that's real fear.'