Twisting My Melon (13 page)

Of course, the rest of the band were pissed off that it was only me and Bez on the cover. But that wasn’t our idea or decision; it was either
Melody Maker
’s or the photographer’s. It certainly didn’t come from the band or management. I always had a ‘one for all and all for one’ mentality when it came to the band, and so did Bez, so we didn’t notice it at the time, but the rest of them would have loved to have been on that cover. The jealousy wasn’t right in our faces, so we didn’t clock it at the time, but looking back I think that’s where it all started. That was the first time me and Bez were singled out from the rest of the group and treated differently. By the time we did become aware that there was resentment and jealousy, a few years later, it had already built up and built up and built up over the years. Don’t forget that none of the rest of the band had been that keen on Bez joining in the first place – that was my idea.

A few months after the album was released we went to New York with Factory. It was our first time there, and first time in America, but we had no desire to go sightseeing or do any of the usual tourist things. The first thing me and Bez wanted to do when we landed was to get our hands on some crack. We wanted to sample it, we wanted to know how to make it, we wantedto know all about it.

We were met by a woman who was working for Factory in
New
York, who we’d met before when she came over to Manchester, and I asked her to take me and Bez to an area where she knew we could score, but she wouldn’t drive us all the way up there because it was too dangerous. She stopped her car a few blocks short and said, ‘I’m not going any further up there in my car.’

Me and Bez carried on up, on foot, and met this black geezer on the street, who had this green army coat on, like an anorak without a hood. When you’re looking for drugs, you generally know the score; you can weigh up the situation and tell who’s dealing and what’s what. You only have to look at the right person a certain way and you’ll clock each other, and you’ve done the deal without even saying any words, just by eyeballs and movements. We got chatting to him and he told us he’d been in Vietnam, and he knew what we were after so he said, ‘Come to my crib, man.’ So we went to his crib, which was in the basement of a nearby building. He built the pipe for us and I went first. Bez was going, ‘What’s it like? What’s it like? What’s it like?’ and I just went, ‘Fuuucckin hell … fuuuuuccckkkininnnnnnn hhhhheelllllll … I’m going through fucking space,’ and Bez was like, ‘Lemme have a go! LEMME HAVE A GO!’

That’s what that first hit felt like. It felt like going through space and the universe at a million miles an hour, ‘Boooom!’ It lived up to expectation and the hype. We’d read all the scare stories in the press: ‘This new drug has hit in America, one hit and you’re hooked’, and the first hit was no disappointment. It did exactly what it said on the packet.

We then bought some rocks from this geezer. I think we paid $5 or $10 a stone, and we got about four each. But by the time we got back to the hotel we had smoked all of it. So we decided we had to go back and see the geezer to get some more. Unfortunately, we took a wrong turning and ended up in
another
part of the ghetto. It was now beginning to get dark, as it was about nine o’clock at night.

We met a different geezer, and we got the same look, the same vibe, and he comes over as Mr Friendly. He had the crack on him and gave it to us in these vials, and we just did the deal there on the street. After we left him, we stopped so I could skin up and were quickly surrounded by a bunch of street kids, about half a dozen of them, who were a bit younger than us, probably in their late teens. I was skinning up and Bez was talking to them, but when he’s off his tits he sometimes sprays when he’s talking. All of a sudden, this one guy, a scrawny, wild-eyed black kid, who was off his tits, shouts at me, ‘You motherfucker, you spat at me, you asshole!’ It obviously wasn’t me, but I thought, ‘I can’t go it wasn’t me, mate, it was Bez.’ So I just said, ‘Oh, sorry.’ He looked a bit like the American rapper DMX and had a similar accent, and he then went, ‘
You just done it again you motherfucker
!!’ So I just said, ‘Sorry, mate, I didn’t mean to.’ But whatever I said didn’t placate him. He must have known it wasn’t me, because he was looking at me and my mouth was closed, while Bez was going ten to the dozen, ‘feh feh feh feh!’ Then this dude just went, ‘
You motherfucker
!’ and he pulled out this fucking gun and stuck it right in my face. It all happened in a couple of seconds. I had a bottle of beer in my hand in a paper bag, and I just remember thinking, ‘This is going to have to go in your face.’ But just then, the first geezer we had met miraculously appeared from nowhere like some cracked-up black guardian angel and told this cunt to leave it out and put his gun away, that we’re his people, we’re with him and we’re cool.

Looking back, I didn’t have time to shit myself. You just react instinctively in situations like that. My thought process was really simple: ‘He’s pulling that gun and putting it in my face and he’s going to let go … all I’ve got is this forty-ounce
bottle
in my hand – it’s going to have to connect in his face.’ There wasn’t time to be scared, and the fact that I was cracked up probably helped in a way.

We just brushed off the incident, and didn’t really think about how serious it was, and got out of there. We got back to the hotel only to find that, after all that, the vials we’d bought from the other kid were just full of polystyrene balls, the type you get in a fucking beanbag or something.

It wasn’t until the next day, when we got up and went for something to eat, that it actually hit me – how close I had come to getting my head shot off and my face blown apart, and I was like, ‘Fuck-ing hell.’ We still went back down there to score again, though.

We were staying at the Chelsea Hotel, which was Wilson’s idea. I didn’t then know the full history of the Chelsea and everyone who had stayed or lived there, but I obviously knew that Sid and Nancy had lived there, and Nancy had died there.

We were in New York for five nights for one show, which was on the second night. Me and Bez had already had a proper bollocking off Wilson for what happened the first day. During the afternoon of the second day we turned up to the Limelight, where we were playing, and we met this really sexy older woman. I was twenty-four at the time and she must have been about thirty-eight. She was quite a classy woman, and she took a liking to me and Bez and took us back to her apartment, where we had some really, really strong coke. She was undressing and giving us the come on, making it absolutely blatantly obvious that she wanted a threesome, but me and Bez were so coked up that we physically weren’t capable. We didn’t even try. She was doing all the trying and we were just sat there, completely whacked out. It wasn’t the first time we had done coke, but this was nothing like the
coke
we had taken back in Manchester; it was
proper
cocaine.

By the time of the gig the two of us looked like proper coke yetis. We were absolutely flying. Completely out of it and
looking
completely out of it. Sweating profusely, with eyes on stalks, thinking this is fucking great. We thought the gig was absolutely fantastic. Tony thought it was shit. He thought it was the worst gig we had ever done. The rest of the band were all wasted as well. PD had to play the gig lying down, he was so fucked. Phil Saxe and my dad had both come to New York with us, but that didn’t curtail our behaviour one bit. Not for a minute. When we had first started out we wouldn’t have really done drugs in front of my dad, but by the time we got to New York that had pretty much gone out of the window. We were all on crack or Charlie, and there was no way of disguising it.

I thought New York was fucking great. Don’t forget, New York in 1987 was still dirty old New York, like it was in the 70s. In fact it was possibly even worse than the 70s in 1986, because it was at the height of the crack epidemic, so it was ultra-violent. It was pretty much still like Night of the fucking Living Dead back then. Nothing like the sanitized New York of today.

We didn’t really do any sightseeing. The photographer Kevin Cummins was with us and wanted to take a picture of us for a Salfordians exhibition he had coming up, so we did go on the Staten Island ferry to do a shot with the New York skyline in the background, and this became quite an iconic photo. We also went shopping at Macy’s, but that was about it. Looking for crack cocaine was the only sightseeing me and Bez really wanted to do.

When we got back we shot the video for our next single, ‘24 Hour Party People’, which was another Bailey Brothers job. It’s basically us starting outside the Boardwalk and then bombing
around
town in an Oldsmobile, a big old American car that was owned by some guy that Tony Wilson knew who collected classic American cars. The little kid driving the car at the start is Mark Bradbury, who was the little brother of Suzy, who I was seeing at the time. He still lives round the corner from me now. He was about ten or eleven then; he’s about thirty-five now and he’s got about nine kids. He’s actually done all right for himself, Mark. He’s a businessman, a proper entrepreneur type. I’d not seen him for about ten years, but then I ran into him in the shop at the bottom of the road quite recently and he said, ‘All right, Shaun?’

Back then, you didn’t really expect to make a lot of money from a debut album, but even with all the gigs we were doing we weren’t really earning any money. It was still a real struggle, and anything that we did make as the Mondays was ploughed back into the band. We were pretty focused in that respect. The band kept us all going for a few years, because we all really believed in it, but it didn’t really seem to be getting any easier. Even though we’d started to get a bit of press and built up a bit of a following, we were still struggling to make ends meet. We were all on the dole, apart from Mark Day, and were getting sick of being skint. Thankfully, that was about to change.

THE SUMMER OF
1987 is when things really changed. That’s when life suddenly went from black and white to technicolour. When I first had the E.

It was Bez who gave me my first one. Predictably. He said ‘X, try one of these – they’re fucking mega,’ when we were rehearsing one day at the Boardwalk. It blew me away. It made me feel euphoric. It’s pretty obvious why it was called ecstasy, but it also felt really clean and fresh. So much so that it made me want to go home and have a shower and change my clothes. Like I said before, me and Bez were garbageheads. We’d had almost every type of drug, from acid to crack; we’d take whatever was around. But the E was a totally different buzz.

The first Es we got were little white ones. They didn’t have a stamp on them or anything, just a line across them sometimes. They had originally come from Amsterdam. Like I said earlier, our lot had been going to the Dam on and off for a few years, and had a few really good contacts. The first E we had came from a French guy in a gay club there. One of our lot used to
score
weed off him, and one night he gave my pal this pill to try. He was knocked off his feet by it and brought a few back to Manchester in a tube of toothpaste. I’m pretty sure those were the first Es to arrive in Manchester, in that tube of toothpaste. One tube of fucking Colgate changed everything.

Around this time I split up with Suzy. I was partying so much that it had ruined the relationship, so at the start of the summer I moved in with Bez and his girlfriend Debs in Fallowfield, in the basement flat of an old Victorian house on Egerton Road. That house really was where it all changed. That was the epicentre, the root of it all. The house was split into three flats. Me, Bez and Debs were in the basement; Our Matt, Pat and Karen had the top flat; and Nige, or Platty, a friend of ours from the Haçienda, was in the middle flat; and a mate of his from Blackley, Antony Murray – Muzzer – lived just round the corner. That was our core group.

People bang on about the Sex Pistols at the Free Trade Hall, and how there were only forty or so people there, but it changed everything. When we first had the E, there couldn’t have been more than about a dozen of us, perhaps twenty at a push, in our corner of the Haçienda. There was me, Our Kid, Bez, Big Minny, Little Minny, Muzzer, Platty, Our Matt and Pat, Cressa, Eric Barker and a couple of other kids. We were the only ones with the E at that time. No one else had a clue what was going on. We already had our spot in the Haçienda by then. There were four alcoves under the balcony, underneath the DJ booth, and we had the first one, by the dancefloor – that was ours, although we later spilled out into the second alcove.

The lads who were bringing the E back from Amsterdam got us involved. They were importing it, and it was our job to spread the word about the E in the Haçienda, to get punters. We were actually put on wages, like proper little salesmen.

Before the E arrived we were still skint. We weren’t making any dough from the band and we were still trying to keep our noses clean, or relatively clean. Sometimes, when we were really broke, we would just nip down to the Factory office on Palatine Road and fill carrier bags with cassette tapes and albums, then take them down to one of the second-hand record shops in town and sell them for a bit of dough. It was pretty easy to make sure no one at Factory spotted us doing that, although when someone looked round afterwards it was obvious that loads of stock had gone missing. We didn’t have a key to the office, but we’d go in there for a meeting and then hang about and lift some gear from their little stock room when no one was watching.

After a few weeks we started to make a bit of money from the E, from introducing people to it, but it did take people a little while to get used to spending £25 on it. People weren’t used to spending that amount of money on drugs, especially on one little pill. You had the hip kids that were straight on it and knew what it was about. Then you had the people with money – either rich kids or grafters. But it took a while for your normal punters to get used to paying £25 for something. I remember coming back to Little Hulton to have a meeting with one of the local drug kingpins, and saying, ‘Do you want some of these? They go for twenty-five quid a pop, but we can do ’em you for this much,’ and he went ‘
What? Twenty-five quid a pop
!? Nah, that’s too dear – these will never take off.’ I’m saying to him, ‘Listen, it’s
happening
. Trust me.’ But he wasn’t having any of it. Then I went back six months later and they were all at it, although the price had gone down to £20 by then. It settled at around £15 eventually.