Twisting My Melon (11 page)

In August 1986 we supported Julian Cope at the Boardwalk. What an arsehole. He behaved like such a prick that we promised ourselves that when we became a headline act we would always make sure our support bands got a decent soundcheck and we would never treat them like Julian Cope treated us that night. He said, ‘Who do they think they are, the fucking Undertones?’ because we all had anoraks and cagoules on. The cheeky bastard. He fannied about with this stupid microphone stand he had that he could climb on and spin round like a performing monkey for about five hours, which meant we got less than five minutes to soundcheck. We were stood there glaring at him, thinking, ‘Come on, you prick, fucking move, or we’ll move you!’ He was really lucky we didn’t batter him.

We did get our first national press that autumn, when Dave Haslam did a piece on us with the Railway Children and the Weeds. Colin Sinclair managed the Railway Children and I think because we’d started having a bit of success or attention as a group of Manc-y lads, he decided he wanted a Happy Mondays-type band. I didn’t really know them, but they didn’t
seem
to be anything like us. As soon as Colin Sinclair got hold of them, he got them little two-seater MG sports cars because his dad had an MG dealership or something. They had joined Factory, but that didn’t get them any money, although they maybe had also signed a publishing deal. I know for a fact when we played Finsbury Park the following year the Railway Children were pushed up the bill, past us, and we were pushed down. At that stage, a lot of people, including Wilson, thought they were going to be bigger than us, but I never thought that. When it came down to playing their instruments and crafting songs, actual songwriting, they were probably better at that than us at that stage. But even though what they were doing sounded better on record, or at least it was more together, it wasn’t my cup of tea. When it came to watching a live band, even though they could play better, we were far more happening. It just didn’t happen for them.

One of the good things about being an underdog is that you can never come out looking shit, can you? Happy Mondays were the underdogs right from the start. We were like the runts of the litter, the scruffy bad lads, and I’ve been the underdog ever since. I much prefer it that way. I liked being the underdog.

At the end of October, we were playing a gig at Blackburn King Georges Hall with ACR and the Railway Children which turned into a riot. A load of Blackburn youth turned up, and when we were playing one of them jumped on the stage and started giving Nazi salutes, so Bez smacked him one in the mouth. Next thing, loads of them jumped on stage, so all the band jumped in, hitting them with guitars and anything we could get our hands on. That was it then. The whole hall went up, and everyone was at it. I think most of the windows got smashed. We managed to get off stage in the end, but the place
got
trashed. The police arrived. Bez got nicked on stage and was took off, and I think they even had riot shields. That was quite a night. We would never go out to cause trouble like that, but wherever we were, if some idiot started something, then we wouldn’t back down.

Even though we had gigged quite a bit by that stage, I still had a bit of stage fright. Until a couple of years ago I had never done a show without being on some sort of drug, or completely pissed. Not that you could always tell. Sometimes I would be completely hammered but able to keep it together so that other people thought I was straight as fuck. Later on, I dealt with the nerve thing through gear. The success was exactly what we wanted, and you think you know what you’re getting into and that’s what you want, but dealing with it is another matter. I just went into my shell with gear to deal with it, and all nerves disappeared then.

It sounds a weird thing for a lead singer to say, but I never really liked being the centre of attention. Part of the reason for getting Bez in, I suppose, was deflecting a bit of attention from me. It doesn’t really bother me much nowadays, it’s fine, but I’ve only recently become more comfortable with it, in the last couple of years, or even the last year. I don’t know why it doesn’t bother me now – I just woke up one day and it was fine. You can’t always explain these things.

It wasn’t until I reached my forties that I became more comfortable with being me, with being Shaun Ryder. I like doing what I do, and I don’t mind doing interviews and stuff, but I don’t like the attention being on me. So in some ways, I’m in the wrong fucking game.

WHEN FACTORY DECIDED
it was time for us to record our debut album in 1986, it was Tony Wilson who first suggested the idea of using John Cale as the producer. Tony had always loved the production that John had done on Patti Smith’s debut album,
Horses
, a decade earlier. John had also played at the Festival of the Tenth Summer that Factory had organized in Manchester earlier in the year, so there was a connection between him and the label. Tony also liked the idea of a member of the Velvet Underground producing Happy Mondays, for obvious reasons. He thought that would make a good story or publicity angle. As a band, we were all really into the idea, because we were big fans of the Velvets. I think Bernard Sumner was mooted as a possible producer as well, after we had worked with him on ‘Freaky Dancin’ ’, but I don’t know how serious an idea that was, because Bernard didn’t want to become a full-time producer.

What we didn’t realize before we went into the studio with John was that he had just got himself totally clean and off the
drugs
. I don’t think he was even smoking weed at the time; he just used to eat tangerines all day. So it was quite a straight recording session – it wasn’t as if we were partying together. I don’t think we really got to know each other during the recording, because he didn’t show any emotion. We would argue amongst ourselves, but we were dead polite to him and he never raised his voice with us. I could never really be sure if he thought we were quite interesting, or if he just tolerated us.

Factory had booked us in for a fortnight at the Fire House studio in London to record the album, and we already had all the songs written by the time we went down there. I had spent more time writing and arranging the songs than I had when we went in to record ‘Delightful’ and ‘Freaky Dancin’’, and was more confident about their structure. As a band we also had a little bit more of an idea about the recording process this time, although we were still relative strangers to a recording studio. It was our debut album, so it was our first proper length of time in a studio; we’d previously only been in for a couple of days at a time.

We were still pretty skint when we went down to London to record, because we had been trying to stay out of trouble, keep our noses clean and really concentrate on the band and finish writing the songs for the album. Only Mark Day, who was still a postie, had a job; the rest of us were all on the dole. Factory had packed us off to London and said, ‘There’s eighty pounds each. That will last you two weeks.’ I think my £80 lasted me an hour. Literally. It just went. It’s £80, isn’t it? Even then that wasn’t a lot of dough. Factory had put us up in Belsize Park, in one of those big houses around there that are split into bedsits. The whole band – me, Our Kid, Bez, Mark Day, Paul Davis and Gaz Whelan – were all staying in one room which had six beds squeezed into it, and it wasn’t a big room. On the floor above us were six builders and up above them were six electricians.
We
all had to share the same khazis and showers. Two khazis and two showers between eighteen of us. We were just on nodding terms with the builders and electricians; we never really got talking to them, so they didn’t know we were musicians. They probably thought we were just workers or grafters like them. It was hardly the most rock ’n’ roll accommodation. God knows who found that place. Phil Saxe probably.

Because we were struggling for money, everyone in the band would be borrowing off each other, and a few times we ran out completely and had either to get someone to come down from Manchester with some money or get a friend to send some cash. We were starving at some points, we were so skint. Mark Day was the worst in that situation, because he was so tight – he was notorious for it. He wouldn’t lend you a quid or even fifty pence. When we had money in our pockets, we would buy him a pint, or say, ‘What you eating Mark? D’you want fish ’n’ chips?’ But if he had money and he had to get you a pint he would say, ‘You owe me one pound twenty.’ ‘Shout us a fish ’n’ chips, Mark?’ ‘That’s two pound eighty.’ He was one of them, a tight bastard. We would be starving and penniless and ask Mark if he had money, but he’d say, ‘No, I’m skint too.’ Then he would sneak off later and we would find him, after he’d swore blind that he was skint, sat in a café tucking into a full meal. He’d try and justify it by saying, ‘You lot just spend all your money as soon as you get it!’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, mate, but you know what, you help us smoke and snort our money, don’t you? You don’t say fucking no when we offer you a line or a pint or pay for your food!’

We had loads of arguments and fights with each other during the recording. I had a punch-up or two with Gaz, and my finger is still bent from when I hit him during one of our scraps. I punched him on the side of the head and broke my finger and
never
bothered getting it fixed. The amount of times I’ve had fights over the years and I’ve broken a toe kicking someone or something and haven’t noticed until the effects of the drugs have worn off. Me and Our Kid would fight a lot. We would fight when we were kids, but healthily. It’s your brother – you’re going to fight, aren’t you?

I don’t think we took any smack to London, because we were skint, but I was definitely dabbling a bit at that stage. Bez was another one of those who dipped in and out of it for years. He was what I would call a garbagehead then. He was addicted to drugs, but not one particular drug, just drugs in general. He would have a little dabble in heroin, but never get addicted, then go on to whizz, then go on to coke, then go on to the E, then go on to whatever, then go on to that, then go on to that … he never stuck with one particular drug, he just kept moving from one to another. Bez will quite proudly say, ‘I’m not addicted,’ but I would argue he is. He’s just not addicted to one particular substance.

When we started recording, it didn’t seem to matter that John Cale was classically trained and we weren’t, or at least we didn’t notice it being an issue. The band were getting more and more proficient, and anything that he asked us to play, we managed to play. We had all the songs written, and what John did do was drill the band and get us really tight, then he basically recorded us like we were live. If anything, I think he made the band too tight. We were definitely better and more proficient after working with him, but the detrimental effect of that was that the recording lost a little of that signature space in the songs that was really important to the Mondays sound.

The title of the opening track, ‘Kuff Dam’, was taken from a porno called
Mad Fuck
, but I just misspelt it backwards. It was a ballsy, bolshy opening track: ‘If you’ve got to be told by someone then it’s got to be me’. There were some lyrics on there that
I
wouldn’t dare use now, like ‘Jesus was a **** and never helped you with a thing that you do, or you done’, but I just didn’t care then. My mam was religious but wouldn’t say anything to me about something like that; she’d just shrug and let it wash over her.

‘Tart Tart’, which became the single, was the first track we recorded that I felt truly captured the essence and potential of the Mondays sound. To me, in a way, everything we had recorded before was really just us finding our feet as a band, feeling our way, getting used to the recording process and working out how we could best capture our own sound. It was named after a bird we knew from Chorlton called Dinah, who we affectionately nicknamed Tart Tart. She was older than us, well into her thirties when we met her, while we were only in our early twenties. She had been on the scene in the very late 60s and was still around and dealing speed on the music scene over fifteen years later. She would always be there when we played the Boardwalk in the early days. She took a bit of a shine to me and Bez and was very good to us, letting us crash at her place if we needed to and laying speed on tick for us. One day a guy we knew called Martin, a roadie who lived in Chorlton who also used to score whizz off her and knew her quite well, popped round to her flat and there was no answer. Because he was quite close to her, he suspected something was up, so he broke in and found her body. Poor Tart Tart had just had a brain haemorrhage and died. So I named the song after her, but it isn’t all about her, although she is there in the lyrics – ‘TT, she laid it on, and a few days later she’s gone, going back to the womb, to get drowned, drowned, drowned, drowned, drowned.’

Most of my songs aren’t specifically about one person or one thing. I would come up with snippets of stories, or what you would call vignettes, about different situations I’d witnessed,
or
people I knew, or tales I’d been told, and then I would string them together to make a song. ‘Tart Tart’ is a typical example of that. ‘When he came out of the locker, he said I’m looking for something better, so he made a shock announcement’ was about a pal of ours. ‘Martin sleeps on a desk, he wears a sleeping bag as his vest’ is a reference to the Factory producer Martin Hannett. We hadn’t actually worked with him at this stage, but I’d heard stories about him. ‘He says don’t know if I should, cos I worry too much about the test on the blood’ was a little nod to a pal of ours who had been diagnosed HIV+ through intravenous drug use. I think he was the first person we knew who was diagnosed with it. So I would bring together that mish-mash of ideas or little situations to create a song. That’s the way I almost always work when I’m writing lyrics. It’s not quite as abstract as ‘I Am the Walrus’, but it does mean people often put their own interpretations to the lyrics.