Twisting My Melon (10 page)

I was a bit disappointed with ‘Delightful’ because I was hoping it would turn out a bit spacier, and a bit dancier. I was after more of a looser new wave dance sound, like Mike’s band Quando Quango. It turned out too fast. We sound like we’re nervous or have taken too much speed. It was probably partly my fault. I didn’t think we were ready so I just didn’t want to be there. I can be quite difficult in a situation like that, a bit like I was on
Yes Please
!, the final album before the Mondays split up, years later.

The other two tracks on the EP, which we called
Forty Five
EP, were ‘Oasis’ and ‘This Feeling’. ‘Oasis’ was named after the clothing store in Manchester where our friend Si Davis worked, and I ripped a few lines from Tom Jones’s ‘It’s Not
Unusual
’ as well, although when we re-recorded it for our debut album later, we left those out. ‘This Feeling’ was a slower, more jangly number, which sounded a bit like Orange Juice, a band that we liked.

After getting their graphic design degrees from Salford Tech, Our Matt and Pat had moved to London for a bit, but they’d moved back to Manchester the previous year to start their own company, called Central Station Design, with Pat’s girlfriend Karen Jackson. We got them to design the cover artwork for the EP, which was quite minimal, with green hills, blue sky and a couple of birds flying. They went on to design all the Mondays and Black Grape artwork over the years, but it would usually be much brighter and bolder than this first cover.

By this point we had started rehearsing in the Boardwalk, on Little Peter Street, not far from the Haçienda. It hadn’t quite opened as a venue by that stage, but there were several rehearsal rooms there, and lots of Manchester bands have been through over the years. Oasis rehearsed there for a couple of years, before they were signed. When we moved in we took over the room that Simply Red had just moved out of. They were kicked out for various things, like putting plastic cups in the pockets of the pool table to stop the balls going down so they could get free games. This was just before they had their hit with ‘Money’s Too Tight (To Mention)’. Quite soon after they left the Boardwalk that single went massive.

Next door to us were the Jazz Defektors and when we recorded ourselves in there you could sometimes pick up their sort of acid jazz in the background, which I quite liked. James were upstairs and they were slightly separate from the other bands because they had ‘Hymn from a Village’ out and they were doing quite well. We were quite into James at the time. I thought they looked all right, with the side parting and stuff;
they
had a slight Perry Boy thing going on – not Tim Booth the singer, but the rest of the lads. A Certain Ratio (ACR) were across the road, and we got on with them quite well. But generally, we didn’t really knock about or socialize with too many other bands, as a lot of them were just studenty types in long macs and we just didn’t mix with those type of people.

In September we played the Cumberland Suite in Belle Vue stadium with a few of the Manchester bands we did get on with, including ACR, Inca Babies, Kalima and the Jazz Defektors. That was the same venue that I’d seen the Buzzcocks at a few years previously, when I threw a pint pot at Wilson.

Another Manchester band we really did get on with was the Weeds, which was Andrew Berry’s band. Andy – who was an old schoolmate of Johnny Marr of the Smiths – and Nick from the Weeds were hairdressers from the salon in the basement of the Haçienda called Swing. I think Andy did all the Smiths’ haircuts in the early days. They completely changed my opinion of hairdressers, because they were just normal lads, and before that we had a really clichéd view of male hairdressers. We played Corbieres with the Weeds, which was a top gig.

At the end of 1985 we supported New Order again at the Haçienda and it was a great gig for us. I always found Bernard Sumner the most sociable one of New Order when we got to know them a bit, but I was never one who would bang on about New Order and Joy Division to him, so maybe he appreciated that. Hooky never liked us at first, as people; he hated us. We were just a bunch of scruffy, thieving cunts as far as he was concerned, and he thought that if he let us near their dressing room someone’s handbag would get robbed. Never mind that he’s from Salford, and his mam and dad still lived in Little Hulton. Or maybe that was why he didn’t trust us: he’d grown up with kids like us, so he knew what we were like. Like I said before, we never got a negative reaction from the crowd
when
we supported New Order. The only negative reaction I got was from Hooky. At the Haçienda gig they had a rider and we didn’t, and I was hungry. I thought, ‘I’ll be polite here,’ and asked if I could get a drink and a sandwich from their rider and Hooky said, ‘No … no you can’t.’ I thought, ‘If you weren’t in New Order I’d poke your eye out, you cheeky cunt.’ I know Hooky well now and he’d be the first to admit he didn’t like us initially. After we released our second album,
Bummed
, and it did well and we started to take off, he accepted us as musicians, but before that to him we were just a bunch of pain in the arse, scruffy, robbing bastards.

At the start of January 1986, I remember going down to the Haçienda for Bernard Sumner’s thirtieth, which was a good night. I was only twenty-three, so thirty seemed a long, long way off to me. Thirty seemed really ancient. I remember saying to him that night, ‘Fucking hell, thirty! That’s
proper old
, you know what I mean?’ Bernard just turned to me and said, ‘You’ll never reach fucking thirty!’

Terry Hall, from the Specials and Fun Boy Three, was also at that Haçienda New Order gig. Terry is a massive Manchester United fan. He was spending a lot of time in Manchester then and had a new band called the Colourfield. He must have thought we were okay, because he ended up inviting us to go on tour with them as support. We set off in the February. This was really good for us, as it was the first time we had been on a proper tour and it was good to see how professional the Colourfield were. I got on well with Terry Hall, and we were all massive fans of the Specials and Fun Boy Three. It was a bit of an eye-opener to me, personally, to see how Terry commanded the stage and the audience. He is actually a pretty shy guy when you meet him, but when he gets up on stage he’s great. He doesn’t put on a show, there’s no posturing, but he really knows how to work a crowd. It showed me a different approach to
being
a front man – I could see that you didn’t have to be prancing about and making a dick of yourself.

After the Colourfield tour we went in to record our second single, ‘Freaky Dancin’’. We initially tried recording with Vini Reilly, from the Durutti Column, but that only lasted about two hours before he decided he couldn’t handle us. I like Vini, and he’s a great guitarist, but he’s a bit of a weird one and everyone knows he’s a bit fragile. He once told everyone that I’d spiked him at the Haçienda, and the next morning I got phone calls from Wilson and other people at Factory, having a go at me, saying stuff like, ‘Why did you do that to poor Vini? You know what he’s like,’ when I hadn’t even fucking done anything. It was all in his mind.

Bernard Sumner ended up producing ‘Freaky Dancin’’ in the end, and he did a really decent job of it. Obviously we were big fans of Joy Division and New Order, but I also really liked Marcel King’s ‘Reach for Love’, which Bernard had produced with Donald Johnson. It came out on Factory in 1984, but didn’t really do anything, which was a real shame. Marcel had been in Sweet Sensation when he was young, who were kind of Manchester’s answer to that Philly sound, and had a No. 1 with ‘Sad Sweet Dreamer’, but he ended up homeless, sleeping rough in his car in Moss Side. He died in 1995 of a brain haemorrhage, and then his son Zeus was shot dead in a gang feud. I thought ‘Reach for Love’ was a bit of a lost classic, and years later I ripped a bit of it for ‘Get Higher’ on the second Black Grape album, in the hope that people would go back and discover the original.

With ‘Freaky Dancin’ ’, Bernard managed to capture the dance element of the Mondays that Mike Pickering had somehow missed. I thought it came out much better than ‘Delightful’, but again, I don’t think that was Mike Pick’s fault; we were probably a better and tighter band by then, and had
more
of an idea about the recording process. Bernard captured that looser, dancier feel that we had when we played live, and when he caught me on tape going ‘Ready? Right, we’re ready …’ he even kept that on the intro. People obviously presume that ‘Freaky Dancin’’ is about Bez, especially after he called his book
Freaky Dancin
’, but if anything it’s about being on acid. The opening lyrics, ‘You don’t like that face because the bones stick out’, are about looking in the mirror when you’re tripping and thinking your face looks all misshapen with bones sticking out.

The B-side is ‘The Egg’, which had been on our quite early demos, including the one I think Mike Pickering first heard. The famous story of that recording was Bernard chucking away his Chinese takeaway and me and Bez fishing it out of the bin and eating it. Which, unlike a lot of Mondays myths, is actually true. There was nothing wrong with Bernard’s Chinese, and we were skint and starving at the time.

That summer saw the Festival of the Tenth Summer. This was a big deal for Factory, because it was the tenth anniversary of the Sex Pistols playing the Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976, which Wilson and the rest saw as the Big Bang for Manchester music or something, because Wilson, Joy Division, Morrissey, Mark E. Smith and even Mick Hucknall had all been there and had all gone off and formed bands afterwards. We played at Rafters with Easterhouse and the Weeds as part of the festival, which I just remember as being a real sweaty gig. The big gig of the festival was at the G-Mex Centre, with New Order and the Smiths. We didn’t get tickets for the G-Mex, but I don’t even think we asked for them. We were still the new boys at Factory then. We only really became fully accepted at Factory when the E thing took off.

We got an opposite reaction in London in the early days. In Manchester we weren’t like any other band, but they occasionally saw people like us on the street and would cross the road to avoid us. In London they had never seen anything like us. When we first went down to meet Dave Harper, who was the first guy doing our press, we all drove down in the back of a transit and he’d never seen anything like it. He even got a photographer to take a picture of us in the back of the van, and then instead of putting out a press release he just recorded us arguing in his office and sent a transcript of that out to journalists.

Jeff Barrett, who later started Heavenly Records, worked at Creation Records at the time, doing their press, but was also putting on his own gigs in London and he booked us for quite a few of our early gigs down there. We called him Foxhead or Lionhead, because he looked like a big friendly lion with his mane of red hair and his freckles – a bit like the lion from
Wizard of Oz
. Lionhead was sound and really got the Mondays straight away; he totally understood where we were coming from, and in his eyes we were the most important new band around. I know that because he used to tell us.

The first gig he got us in London was supporting the Weather Prophets in Hammersmith. When I look back at a band like the Weather Prophets, it reminds me what we had in the Mondays, what we had built up over the years, and what the rest of the band threw away so lightly when the Mondays ended. The Weather Prophets didn’t make it, but they were a great band. They wrote far better songs than I could at the time. They were another of those bands that Our Paul would go on about: ‘We should be more like the Weather Prophets. You should write songs more like that.’ They could really play, but when I compared them to us I could also see early doors that success wasn’t just about the music. I could see we had
something
that they didn’t, even though they were better musicians. I understood that from the start. If it was just about the music, we would have never made it.

We didn’t have a big entourage at that time. There was probably us and about three or maybe four of our pals. Later on, when the E came in, there would be a lot of lads at our gigs, but they weren’t necessarily people who travelled with us. They would just turn up wherever we were playing. Our pals would get about all over the place. A lot of them were robbers, sneak thieves, grafters or ticket touts. They would be in town anyway, working, and would just tip up at the gig.

Thanks largely to Lionhead, we were almost getting bigger crowds in London than in Manchester at that stage. He put us on a couple of times upstairs at a pub called the Black Horse in Camden. It wasn’t even a gig venue; it had no stage, it was just a pub room with a carpet, and we had to play in front of a fireplace and a glass cage with a stuffed heron in it. Those gigs were all hard work. I had no choice but to connect with the audience. But we were off our nuts and got into it.

During those early Mondays gigs the band could always start a song together. ‘One, two, three, four …’ and off they went. But they could never stop – they could never get the timing right to end a song together. So a song that was only supposed to be three minutes long could go on for fifteen minutes. They’d all be looking at each other, looking for a sign from someone else, looking for someone to take the lead. Then Gaz would put another drum roll in, thinking if he did that the band would stop, but two of the others might think that roll meant carry on a bit more, so then they’re back into another verse, even though there isn’t another verse. I’d get really angry and turn round and start shouting at them over the music, but they would all have dead serious faces on, concentrating, especially if they were on speed. So I’d have to adlib another
verse
from somewhere, or end up throwing in some lyrics from a song that was out at the time, like ‘She’s Crafty’ by the Beastie Boys.

Some of our songs were even born out of those gigs when I was forced to freestyle vocals. Sometimes my brain was at its best and most inventive when I was off my nut and just adlibbing, and we would record most of those gigs on the mixing desk. If Gaz and Our Paul were still carrying on, Mark would start playing some new guitar line over the top and if it sounded good I’d give him the nod to carry on and then I would start freestyling along with it. If I still thought something sounded good, then we would listen back to the recording of the gig afterwards, and perhaps try and work out what we’d played and work on it in rehearsals.