Twisting My Melon (17 page)

‘Wrote For Luck’ was definitely an important song for me, lyrically. I surprised myself a bit when I wrote some of the lines on there, like ‘You used to speak the truth, but now you’re clever’. Although, to be honest, I always thought I never really finished it; to me it’s still a half-finished song. It needs another verse really, I think. Having said that, ‘Wrote For Luck’ was definitely one of the songs that helped me feel like I was getting more to grips with writing lyrics. It’s obviously very heavily influenced by the E scene and what was happening at the time. Again, it’s a mish-mash of different situations – he said that and I think this about that – strung together to make a song.

‘Bring a Friend’ is just pure filth. ‘I might be the honky, but I’m hung like a donkey’; ‘Come on in, grease up your skin’. The line ‘Clio and her sister Rio, were watching through the keyhole’ was ripped directly from one of the porn mags that I got charged for bringing back from Amsterdam a couple of years before. There were a few naughty sex parties that went down at the time. The E wasn’t necessarily a sex drug; it was more of a lovey, touchy, feely drug that would make you feel more like bloody stroking or hugging someone than fucking them. But if you mixed it with a bit of coke, then it was a different matter. Not just on lads either; it had the same effect on girls as well. They weren’t necessarily planned sex parties or anything, but you would get back to someone’s house for a bit of a party and one thing would lead to another. A few orgy-type situations. Like the lyrics said, ‘I say yes in every situation’.

‘Do It Better’ was definitely heavily influenced by the E scene, like I said. It was actually even called ‘E’ for quite a while, although if anyone asked me why it was called ‘E’ I said it was because it was in the key of E.

‘Lazyitis’ was the last song on the album, and I had really wanted to do a track like that, a kind of off-the-wall pop song.
But
I don’t think we quite nailed it. There were a couple of things that I wasn’t happy about on the finished album version. I was really critical about our songs and I think a few of the lyrics let me down on ‘Lazyitis’. I didn’t want it to be a single, but Tony was adamant. It was his idea to bring in Karl Denver later and re-record it as a single. Apparently, my dad took me to a Karl Denver gig when I was just a toddler, because he was into that sort of music, but I don’t remember it. We obviously all knew him from his hit single ‘Wimoweh’, though.

The album title
Bummed
was just a word we used for everything at the time. You’d say, ‘Oh, I’d bum that!’ or ‘Fucking hell, I’d bum that bird there.’ It was just one of those words that we all used, like ‘Sorted’. The album could easily have been called ‘Sorted’ or ‘Mega’ or ‘On One’. In America they weren’t sure about the title, because some people thought
Bummed
meant ‘failed’. They were like, ‘Hey, man, I’m not sure about that title. It sounds like it hasn’t sold, y’know, like, “Hey, that album bummed!”’

The cover was a painting of my face by Central Station. Again, it was all Matt and Pat’s idea. We would always just leave them to get on with the artwork, then if we didn’t like what they came up with we would say something. I remember seeing it for the first time and going, ‘Oh God, I don’t really want this as the cover.’ But Matt and Pat, and Karen, and Tony were all going, ‘This is great!’ I’m sure the rest of the band weren’t really into just having my face on the cover either. To make it worse, Factory then plastered the outside of their new office building with posters of the cover. That was also Wilson’s idea.

The inner sleeve also caused a bit of a stir, because it was an old picture of a naked bird. We all agreed on it, but it was Our Matt and Pat who found it. They’re artists, so they would trawl
through
loads of old shit, archives and second-hand shops, looking for decent images. No one at Factory had a problem with it. But then that was the thing with Factory; they never had a problem with anything like that. They would never try and interfere. The only people who really did have a problem with it were the Americans. One pressing plant in the US refused to press the album with that inner sleeve, so we had to change it.

While we were recording in Driffield, Granada came down to film us and interview us for a schools educational programme, which was supposed to be an insight into how to get into the music business. You can see it on YouTube now. I can’t remember exactly how that came about, but it must have come through Tony’s Granada connections, or maybe it was something that Tony and Nathan cooked up together. Back then there was really no exposure for indie bands. It’s not like now. If you look at the number of programmes playing what used to be called ‘indie’ now; back then there was just one MTV channel, which only really showed Bon Jovi videos, and hardly anyone had Sky anyway, before the Premier League. So when Granada wanted to do this schools programme, which followed us around as a band that was trying to make it, that was great for us. It was a weird one, because at the time we thought we were like the kings of the indie scene, but this programme really put us in our place a bit, because we were portrayed as a band that hadn’t made it yet and, to the general public, we hadn’t. Only a select few indie types would view us as a band that had made it at that stage. It was also a bit weird to use Factory as an example to the kids of how the music industry works, when Factory worked completely differently to any other label. But that was Wilson weaving his magic, with Nathan’s seal of approval. Wilson also featured in it quite a bit
and
, as it was plugging his band and his label, it was a win-win-win situation for him.

When I say a kids’ TV show, it was aimed at college kids, not primary-school kids, so we didn’t get told to rein in our behaviour and smile for the camera, but on the other hand they didn’t show us swearing or skinning up either. In those days we’d have pulled out some whizz or coke, racked a few lines out and smashed it in front of anybody – we didn’t give a flying fuck. But they weren’t interested in capturing that rock ’n’ roll side of the band; it was about the process of making an album and releasing it. They filmed some bits with us in the studio, and they even went to the record plant to film the actual record being pressed, with a narrator throughout giving it all: ‘Okay, kids, first you need to get a band together, perhaps with your mates, then you need to get a manager, then you need to play some gigs, then you need to get something called an agent …’ and all that sort of thing, you know what I mean? ‘Then you get a record contract, then you make an album and then you have a launch party … simple as that.’

They also filmed Wilson going to see Tony the Greek, who did our radio-plugging then. Tony the Greek’s real name was Tony Michaeledes and he was an old Manchester head who’d been round for years. In the programme he complains to Wilson that we hadn’t turned up for some radio interview he’d set up for us, which sounds about right.

‘Wrote For Luck’ was the obvious single from the album, and when it came to shoot the video for it we wanted to capture the feeling of those early acid-house days and the parties and raves that were happening, because that’s what we were bang into at the time, that’s where our heads were at. The Bailey Brothers did the video again and had the idea to shoot it at Legends, which is the club that Spectrum took over one night a week. We just hired it out, and all the extras in the
video
are just our crew and the party people that we were knocking about with at the time.

Everyone in the club was on the E that night.
Everyone
. It was still people we knew that were the main supply of E in Manchester, although I was less involved personally. But I had a pocketful of pills on the night and so did Bez. If anyone down there needed one, they just got given one. The Bailey Brothers managed to capture a real trippy, gangster rave vibe, which absolutely reflected what was going on in Manchester at the time. If you want to know what those early parties and raves were like, just watch the video for ‘Wrote For Luck’. They did a great job of capturing the hedonism with a hint of menace underneath.

In the end, they also decided they had to shoot an alternative version on the same day, with schoolkids, as Factory thought ours might not get shown on TV because it was so trippy and overtly druggy. So they got some local schoolkids in during the afternoon and shot a version of it with them, and then all our lot piled down in the evening to shoot the proper version. I don’t think the kids’ version ever saw the light of day, though.

I really got on with the Bailey Brothers. We were on a similar vibe, and were big fans of all the same films –
Performance
and stuff like that. I remember saying to Keith Jobling once, ‘Have you seen that movie
Thief
?’ It was a 70s American movie about a professional thief, starring James Caan, and Keith said, ‘No way, man! I’ve asked loads of people about that film and no one else has ever seen it!’ Keith knew his films and I knew my films, and we could talk about them for ages. We were right on the same trip.

The video does look slightly edgy, but that scene was a bit edgy at the start, especially to those who weren’t in it. Particularly the press, like the
Manchester Evening News
– it
frightened
them to death. They certainly didn’t see it as a big love-in. As I’ve said, the
Evening News
would never really touch us as a band, before we made it, and part of that was because we were the sort of people that they would cross the street to avoid if they were coming out of a pub late at night in the centre of town. A lot of the people in the media were a little bit frightened of what was happening at that time, because they just didn’t get it. They would come in and see what was going on at particular nights, and it did have an edge to it. To be fair, a lot of the people involved in those early days
were
quite edgy. They were people from a different way of life. They weren’t nine-to-fivers, most of these kids, and they were never going to be.

I think all the videos we did with the Bailey Brothers were great, especially considering the small budget we had to work on. ‘Tart Tart’, ‘24 Hour Party People’, ‘Lazyitis’, ‘Wrote For Luck’, ‘Hallelujah’, they were all great. Even right up to ‘Judge Fudge’, where we had to cut the gates open and were driving around and playing cards – even that had a kind of
Performance
feel to it. We filmed that in the big glass diamond building in Stockport, which you go right past when you’re on the rattler to London. I think it’s a bank now, but it was empty then. It had just been built but it wasn’t being used for anything yet.

Around the same time as the ‘Wrote For Luck’ video, we had also started work on this Factory film called
Mad Fuckers
with the Bailey Brothers. We filmed a few scenes on the same day we shot the ‘Wrote For Luck’ video, including some scene in Legends with Donald Johnson from ACR. Me and Bez were supposed to be playing two little mad fuckers, and in that scene I was picking up a parcel from Donald, or he was dropping off a parcel with me; he was some shifty geezer and there was something going down or something like that. To be honest, I
still
don’t really know exactly what the film was supposed to be about. We did film quite a few scenes, but it never got finished. Everybody and anybody was supposedly going to be in
Mad Fuckers
, and there was quite a buzz about it, but most of it actually only happened in the Bailey Brothers’ heads. I think some people still see it as the great lost Factory film or something.

We launched
Bummed
in London and the idea was to have a gig and a rave in the same night – there was a launch at Heaven, the nightclub at Charing Cross, then we played Dingwalls in Camden, then everyone went back to party at Heaven. It was an idea that we cooked up with Nathan and Jeff Barrett, who had now taken over doing our press from Dave Harper. I don’t remember much about the gig at Dingwalls, but we had a load of our crew down there and half of them ended up on stage, and people like Jeff Barrett, who do remember it, say it was a great gig. Some people think that was a bit of a turning point for the Mondays, as that was the night when a lot of people
got
it, if you know what I mean, but I think it was just as much about them getting what the whole scene was about as getting what the Mondays were about. The thing is, wherever we went at that time, there was ecstasy with us and a lot of it was sold to people who came to see us, and many of these punters hadn’t had it before. So, even if the gig was a bit shit, everyone would have an incredible night and feel they were having the time of their lives. A lot of people had their first E watching the Mondays, so it was something they would always remember. Most people will always remember the first time they had E.

After Dingwalls we went back to Heaven, where Spectrum was on. There were three bouncers on the door and they wouldn’t let one of our lads in, one of the top boys. He wasn’t
a
particularly big lad to look at, only about my size, and he had blond hair with a centre parting. He looked like a mix between James Cagney and the Milky Bar Kid and used to wear Jean Paul Gaultier clobber. He didn’t look like the kind of serious character that he actually is. But these three bouncers made the mistake of trying to stop him coming in, and within the blink of an eye all three of them were on the ground.
Bang, bang, bang
– he battered all three of them in a matter of seconds, and then just walked in.

We would spend quite a bit of time in London at that time, when the club scene was kicking off. A few years before, back in Amsterdam, we had met Ian St Paul, who was involved in the London club scene. He had a really, really top gaff in Covent Garden and we would crash over there sometimes.

Some of my pals also knew Paul Oakenfold, from Ibiza. Three of our lot were pretty much the main heads in the clubs out in Ibiza, and had been since the early days, so they were well connected.

I didn’t have a gaff of my own at this point because I’d just come back from the Dam. I crashed at Muzzer’s mam’s for a bit. She lived on Rochdale Road in Blackley, the other side of Collyhurst, on the way to Middleton, just past Viccy Avenue. His mam actually came downstairs and caught me at it in her front room with Cressa’s ex-girlfriend Sue one day. After Sue split with Cressa, me and her were fuck buddies for a bit, and Muzzer’s mam walked in and caught us right in the middle of a particularly naughty moment. She was really religious and I think she had to say about ten thousand Hail Marys because of what she saw that day. I felt a bit guilty because she’d been really good to me, putting me up when I didn’t have a place of my own.