I’m not sure what time of year it was. I remember it was really cold. I remember that the city… I had never been to a place like that before. It was really rough, and you could tell right away how poor the place was. When I walked into my hotel room, it smelled like somebody had died in there. When you walked around the streets, you could feel the heaviness of the place. You could feel what people had been through, but that was mixed with the fact that we were doing gigs in places where it would cost a month’s wage for an average person to get in. The clubs were full of stupidly rich people and mafia. There was no working class Russians. And I remember that the gigs were not full at all. They were quiet. I remember we were telling the promoter to just let some people in, because there were masses of people outside who couldn’t afford to get in. But the promoter didn’t allow it, because he would have got in trouble. He got into trouble anyway. The day after the gig, he showed up with a black eye. All the clubs were run by mafia, and they were like, “What’s all this weird music you’re bringing into the club?” Fucking hell. They punched him hard.

I kind of remember the gig, but I don’t really remember. I can’t remember if we even played actually. I think I lasted at least three or four days before I ended up in the hospital. I think during one of those days, Bruce Gilbert, the guy from Wire – well at the time, he was doing shows where he requested a shed, and he would play from inside the shed. The promoters got him a shed I believe, and he played, and it was very avant-garde. I remember the owner of the club came up with some security guards, and the security guards had Uzis. They threw Bruce off forcibly, and put Paul Oakenfold on, because he was the most likely to play something danceable. Even at that time, he played slightly more 4/4, clubby kind of music.

I also remember being with a friend of Autechre’s, who was quite a character, he was named Russell. We sort of wandered off into this club in a backroom downstairs, and we opened the door. You know the Robert Palmer video where are the girls are dressed in black? There were loads of girls like that on tables, and then all these mafia guys. And another security guy came up with an Uzi. And I remember looking at Russell and saying, “We need to get the fuck out of here.” We had basically walked into the mafia’s den. The security guard came up and said something in Russian, but I think the mafia guys talked him down and said something like, “No, these guys are alright. They're part of that weird British thing.”

On the fourth or fifth day, I was walking around Red Square. I remember at the time feeling really tired – really knackered. I didn’t know why I was feeling like that, but I just wanted to sleep. I remember I was going to the hotel, it was in the afternoon, and thinking, “I’m exhausted, I don’t know why I’m feeling like this.” So, I fell asleep in the afternoon, then woke up, and it was suddenly obvious that something was really, really wrong. Really bad. I felt really weird, really uncomfortable, I was anxious, my stomach felt really horrible. I’d never had that feeling before and I could tell something was really, fucking wrong. My manager was there, and I called him up and said, “Take me to the hospital.” They basically called an ambulance. The ambulance turned up. The only way I could describe it was that it looked like an old traveller van, some weird van people travel around in and do free parties. Some crusty weird, broken down thing. It had a table in the back, but you couldn’t lie on the table. The cupboards had all their doors off. I just kind of sat in the back with my manager. They didn’t have any paramedics or anything on board.