Twisting My Melon (15 page)

The E also changed the way people dressed. It made us want to be really clean and wear pristine clothes. I know all the baggy gear was coming in, but we were wearing Hugo Boss, Armani, Paul Smith, Dolce & Gabbana, Versace and Ralph Lauren. The looser bits of their gear. It was like a designer hippy vibe. Or hippy casual, if you know what I mean? It also obviously got everyone dancing, including people who had never danced before. If you want to call it dancing. Even the few people who didn’t dance would be moving in some way. It got rid of everyone’s inhibitions.

Late in 1987,
i-D
magazine did a piece on this new ‘scene’ in Manchester and called us ‘Baldricks’. They actually did two pieces, because they came back and did a bigger piece early in 1988. They called us ‘Baldricks’ because they reckoned we had haircuts like Baldrick in
Blackadder
. The article had a picture of a few kids, including Cressa and Alan Smith, who was another lad on the scene. Cressa was a nice kid and was one of the first on the scene. He went to grammar school with Ian Brown but he looked like a little sneak. He certainly didn’t look like Baldrick, because he went bald really early. He was a clever kid, but he was a bit of a drop-out. He used to do speed and marijuana, and then later ecstasy, but he didn’t sell it; he was just into music.

‘Baldricks’ was a load of bollocks. No one in Manchester called themselves a ‘Baldrick’. In Manchester, the lads would have called themselves Perry Boys earlier on, and some people called them ‘Pure Boys’, but by that time they were probably just ‘boys’. In London they would call themselves ‘casuals’ and Scousers were ‘scallies’, which ended up being the universal term for boys or casuals. The
i-D
piece talked about the return of the flared trouser, which they said had been happening since 1984, ‘or 83 if you were from Oldham or Salford’. I don’t know
how
Oldham got into it. There was no one from Oldham wearing flares at that stage.

At the start of 1988, I moved out to Amsterdam for a few months because I felt I needed a little break from the band and Manchester. Getting our first front cover hadn’t had the effect we thought it might. It didn’t seem to make any difference. I was a bit disheartened. We had got some good reviews, and we did a few shows and we did this and that, but it was still pretty hard work with the band; it still seemed like a slog. We still weren’t really making any money from music.

Life outside the band, however, was changing very quickly. It was actually more exciting. It had all changed since we got the E. So I went over to Amsterdam, where it was all coming from, and had the time of my life for a few months. I had a bit of money in my pocket from selling the E, I was eating nice meals and going out partying and having a good time. It wasn’t like I was never going to come back, and the band was still there, I just needed a bit of a break from it. Amsterdam is like a spider’s web, it draws you in and it’s really hard to get out of it, to untangle yourself from it.

Amsterdam was the centre then, the hub for lads who were grafting all over Europe. People were always passing through Amsterdam wherever they were headed, or on their way back home. There were quite a few lads there that I knew from Manchester. At first me and my pals were living in hotels, as I had quite a bit of dough, and we also had a few stolen credit cards, as we still knew kids that passed on cards that went missing from the post office. We then moved into an apartment on Williamstraat. There were about five of us in that apartment, although someone was always off jibbing about somewhere. A few of you would jump in the car and go off travelling to Switzerland or somewhere, to do a few sneak jobs.
There
were loads of little scams that people were up to – stolen credit cards, sneaks, robberies, and even a few jewellers got done over. I was never a big-time sneak though; I just did what I needed to do to get by when I ran out of dough. I can remember walking round the streets of Amsterdam at five in the morning, looking for shops that were opening up. The staff would sometimes open the shutters a third of the way up while they were setting up and waiting to open, and you could sneak under there.

One of the main things lads were doing out there was arranging to get the E sent back. I wasn’t involved in that, but one of the Manchester lads was buying it in massive quantities and then there was a geezer out there who used to fit out the lorries with false compartments to import it all in.

We had a hairy moment when we ended up being held hostage in the apartment on Williamstraat for two days by a psychotic kid from Manchester called Skinny Vinny, who was coked out of his brain. A month or so before this, he’d been in the car with me and Platty and we stopped to get something from a shop, but when we came out of the shop he’d fucked off in Platty’s precious Golf GTI and we didn’t see it again for a month. Now he had a gun and was threatening to shoot us, and kept us there nearly two days with the fucking gun pointed at us. I ended up talking him down and bringing him round, then eventually someone made a move when he wasn’t expecting it and just grabbed the gun off him. He was an armed robber, Skinny Vinny, and not long after that incident he ended up robbing a bank and taking three people hostage, and having a big shoot-out with the police. Last I heard he was doing a very long stretch somewhere.

There were a lot of English out there in Amsterdam, all finding a way to make a bit of dough. There were a lot of Manchester kids and a lot of Scousers, a few Geordies, some
kids
from Sheffield, and a few Cockneys. That was when we first met all the Cockneys who went on to do the first acid-house nights in London, like Oz, Phuture and Spectrum – kids like Ian St Paul and his mates.

A few of the kids we met in Amsterdam are now quite big players and respected businessmen – restaurant owners and property developers and doing quite well for themselves. All of the ones that I’m still in touch with have now gone legit.

The band was still there in the background; it just took a back seat for a couple of months for me, while I was E’ing my face off out there and having a great time. When the band was ready to start work on our second album, I was still out in Amsterdam, having the time of my life. I got word that I needed to come back to start writing, but to be honest I was just having too much fucking fun. In the end, Bez had to come to the Dam to get me and bring me back home.

When I got back, Phil Saxe was still managing us, but he was also still running his shop in the Arndale and his market stall, and I felt that if we were going to take things up a notch we needed someone to look after us full time. He didn’t have an office, so we had to go to this shop or down to the market stall if we wanted to see him about anything. I put it to Phil that he should let Lenny, his brother, look after the market stalls and then he could manage us full time. But he made the decision that he couldn’t do that, so I decided we needed to look for a new manager.

Nathan McGough had first come to see us when we supported New Order in Macclesfield a few years earlier and made no secret of the fact that he was a fan of the band. Nathan had an office on Princess Street and was managing bands like the Bodines. He was a bit of a protégé of Wilson’s, as Tony knew his mum, Thelma, and Nathan had lived with
Wilson
at his house on Old Broadway when he first moved to Manchester from Liverpool in the early 80s. Thelma was married to Roger McGough, the poet.

I approached Nathan in the Haçienda and told him we’d sacked Phil Saxe and made it pretty obvious I wanted him to take over. Wilson was actually against Nathan becoming our manager at first, because he knew what he was like, knew how ambitious he was for himself and the Mondays, and thought he would be too much hard work for Factory. But I liked Nathan – he was great. He was business-like, but he was still young and liked to party. He was only twenty-five or twenty-six when he took over, and he was perfect for us, just what we needed.

Phil was a bit pissed off and disappointed. But I think after he thought about it for a while he realized that was what we needed. I bump into Phil quite a lot now, and we get on fine.

Just after Nathan took over, he got us our first £1,000 show, in Scotland, I think. It was a bit of a milestone – the first gig we had got paid a grand for, and we got paid in cash. But Nathan brought a bird back to the hotel with him after the gig and when he woke up in the morning she’d gone, and so had our first £1,000. So Our Kid, Bez and PD put bars of soap in pillowcases, threw Nathan in the bath and beat him with them, which bruises you really badly. That was kind of Nathan’s initiation into the Mondays in a way. We didn’t mind him partying as hard as us, but not if it was going to lose us money.

The songs for our second album were coming together in rehearsals at the Boardwalk, so we went into Out of the Blue studios in Manchester to record some quick demos of tracks, which we were really happy with. It felt like we were getting closer to the sounds in our heads.

At the same time, early summer 1988, the Haçienda really began to take off. They started a Wednesday night called Hot, with Mike Pickering and Jon Da Silva DJ-ing, and that’s when the roof lifted off the place. The E had now swamped the club. I remember Hooky once said, ‘There weren’t that many people on E in the Haçienda.’
You fucking what?? Where were you?
? If there were 1,500 people in there, then 1,400 were off their fucking tits on the E, especially on Wednesday and Friday nights, and pretty soon on every night of the week. And the ones that weren’t off their tits on ecstasy were on something else. It all happened quite quickly, in a matter of months, if not weeks. The difference in a year was unbelievable. It had gone from being empty early in the summer of 1987 to being rammed every night.

People might think that us selling weed and then the E was part of a constructed image, but it wasn’t; it was what we needed to do to get by. We didn’t really earn any decent money from music until about early 1990 when we’d done
Top of the Pops
and were stepping up to do venues like the G-Mex. Before then, almost all the dough we made, we made ourselves, sometimes through selling our own merch, or touting gigs, but for a short while most of the money that came in was through turning people on to E.

AS WE WERE
getting ready to record our second album for Factory, I could feel the mood towards us at the label had changed. We were no longer the new boys; we had become more accepted. That was partly down to our music, and partly because they could see we were very clearly plugged into the Haçienda scene. By introducing the E we had pretty much filled their club and now, having heard the demos for the new album, they were starting to think we might be able to sell a decent amount of records. I definitely felt we were getting treated better and taken more seriously, rather than left alone to get on with it.

It was our idea to use Martin Hannett to produce the album. Factory had fallen out with him over the Haçienda, which he thought was a waste of money, as well as a few other things. Hannett had wanted to buy a Fairlight, which was one of the first synthesizers, but they spent the money on the club instead. He’d even tried to sue them, and had pulled a gun on Wilson at the Factory offices on Palatine Road. We spoke
to
Alan Erasmus, the other Factory founder and director, about it first, and he spoke to Wilson. They knew Hannett was not in a great place, financially or mentally. He was in a bit of a state, so I think they saw getting him back in to work on
Bummed
as throwing him a lifeline. I’m sure they also thought he would be good to work with us. They wouldn’t have done it otherwise, but it was a bit of a peace offering, an olive branch.

We recorded the album at Slaughterhouse studios in Driffield in Yorkshire, which Factory probably picked because they thought it was a small enough place that we wouldn’t get into much trouble and close enough that they could keep an eye on us.

I hadn’t met Hannett before we did
Bummed
, but obviously I knew all about him. I was a big fan of his production because I’d really been into Joy Division and
Unknown Pleasures
, but I also liked the other productions he’d done.

Martin could do incredible amounts of drugs. And he did. Sometimes in the studio in Driffield he would just be flunked out. Gone. He was the only producer that I’ve ever worked with that was more druggy than me. And madder. Shambolic. He had this nylon weatherproof BP Oil jacket that he wore all the way through the recording. He never took that jacket off. But we got on really well, and I think he preferred hanging out with us than hanging out with the rest of Factory. I became good friends with Wendy, his missus, and the whole family. Martin was always skint, even after he produced
Bummed
. While we were recording it he was on ecstasy, heroin, cocaine, acid … Martin took
everything
. We gave him the E, and I think it was the first time he’d had it.

Even though I had dabbled in heroin since the early 80s, I wasn’t really taking it then; when the E first came around, I was just bang into the pills. It wasn’t until late 1989 that heroin
really
got a grip of me. So I didn’t smoke any gear with Hannett when we were recording
Bummed
, although I did a year or so later.

Most people we worked with on recordings we then wouldn’t see again until we were back in the studio with them, but after we finished
Bummed
I used to visit Martin’s house in Chorlton a lot. Our Matt and Pat became really good friends with him too. They were actually out on a massive bender with him, which lasted for days, just before he died in 1991. After that huge blowout with Our Matt and Pat, Hannett went home and died of heart failure. He was only forty-two.

Working with Hannett was a very different recording process to working with John Cale on
Squirrel and G-Man
. John Cale had recorded us live almost, but Hannett had a few more tricks up his sleeve. It wasn’t just Hannett – by the time we came to do
Bummed
, we as a band were on a total different vibe as well. Because we were on the E, we were permanently in massive party mode. When we recorded
Squirrel
it was pretty much just the band in London, but when we did
Bummed
we had the E, so all our pals came across to Driffield to party with us while we were recording.