If you’d called a psychic telephone hotline in Los Angeles in the late 1990s, there’s a chance you might have heard Phil Lewis on the other end. The British-born singer was on one of his periodic stints out of L.A.
Guns, the band he had joined a decade or so earlier after relocating to California, when a friend asked if he fancied making some easy money. ‘Why not?’ he thought. The fact he knew absolutely nothing about astrology wasn’t an issue.
It was just a matter of keeping the gullible rubes who called the premium-rate number on the line for as long as possible. “I was recording a solo album at the time, and I had my baby girl in the other room, watching her on a video monitor,” says Lewis now. “Every now and then the phone would go, this three ring alarm, which indicated it would be from the psychic hotline.
It was real basic psychology. Even though I knew nothing, I was pretty bloody good at it: ‘You’re Leo, Asparagus rising,’ you know.” Amazingly, his shtick worked.
But guilt quickly crept in. “The people who were calling weren’t too bright,” he says ruefully. “I felt like I was exploiting them.
I stopped after a couple of weeks.” Lewis was no Mystic Meg. Yet even if he had been, it’s unlikely he’d have been able to guess the wayward course L.
A. Guns would plot over the next 20 years. The band may have helped usher in the scene of the 1980s, but their career since then has been defined by fallings out, departures, firings and a bitt.