Twisting My Melon (18 page)

As we started to get more dough, more disposable income, through the E, we would also stay at the Britannia Hotel in town. It just seemed easier to stay there than to bother finding a flat, because we were on the road quite a bit and if you’ve got a flat it needs looking after, doesn’t it? The Britannia was right in town, so you could nip out and do a bit of shopping, and there was a bar right next to the hotel. Me and Muzzer must have stayed there for at least seven or eight months. All the maids and cleaners at that time were young girls who were all on E and coke themselves, out raving their tits off every night. We used to leave Es and lines chopped out on the side for them so that they’d stay out of our business, and they would tidy our clothes and stuff for us in return.

At the start of 1989, we went to France to do a few dates, which all got a bit messy. We were just about to go on stage at this gig and Muzzer gets a call to tell him that his best mate, a kid called Robbo, had jumped off the top of a block of flats back in Manchester. He had this flat on the thirteenth floor of a tower block in Blackley and it was basically one of those flats where people would always be sat round smoking or whatever. This day, Robbo had just walked into the front room where two lads were sat having a smoke, said, ‘Y’all right, lads?’ to them and then just walked out to the balcony and jumped off. Committed suicide. He didn’t seem to be off his head or anything; he was apparently acting quite normal. But things hadn’t been going too well for him in his life – a couple of things were coming on top for him and it obviously had all got too much.

Muzzer hears this news just as we’re going on stage. It was his best pal from when they were kids, so obviously that does his head right in. Then some pissed-up French dick starts mouthing off, so Muzzer starts rowing with him because he’s
already
pent up, and he gives us the shout ‘Sack the gig!’ and that’s it then. Si Machan, our sound guy, wades in and punches some other guy who is also starting on Muzz.

It went right off. We were in the middle of a number, but we all downed our instruments, jumped off stage and waded in there. The club got absolutely smashed to bits. We ended up at the back of the club, barricaded in and trying to fight our way out. I grabbed this big metal pipe from somewhere and I was wielding that around my head. Fire extinguishers were going off and all sorts; it was proper Wild West tackle. The entire band jumped in, plus our crew and a few lads who were with us. There were probably about fifteen of us, but quite a few more of them, because some of the locals backed them up. The club was a bit bigger than the Boardwalk, maybe five hundred or seven hundred people. The riot police turned up and arrested us all, but I somehow wriggled out of it and got away with just a ticking off. Muzzer and another one of our crew were nicked and banged up, and we couldn’t get him out, so we had to hang around for the weekend. A few of us went to hospital, and one of their bouncers, a big six-foot seven Rastafarian dude, was there with his arm hanging out of its socket where I’d clobbered him with the metal bar. We didn’t get off that badly, really – we had a few cuts and bruises and a few black eyes, and Muzzer’s ear had been slashed by a broken bottle.

The thing about it in those days was that kids we knew would be all over Europe, sneaking about, and they would turn up at the gigs. They might be somewhere else in France, but they would get to us. Basically, these kids would get a couple of cars between them and drive all the way through Europe, stopping off at little towns off the map, where they might get away with things easier, and if we were playing somewhere in Europe usually some of them would tip up there. Four or five
Salford
kids and a few Manc kids were regulars at our gigs all over Europe.

In some of the clubs we were playing at that time in Europe we got shit from the other bands as well. We’d turned up at gigs in Germany and had the local bands say to us, ‘You fucking pigs, you come here and steal our gigs!’, which I never understood. If a German band or a French band or whatever came to play the Boardwalk in Manchester, we’d always say, ‘Y’all right?’ and have a chat with them. But in some parts of Germany and France their attitude was, ‘You English fuckers, coming here and stealing jobs that we should have.’ We weren’t necessarily looking for mither, but if you come at us with that kind of attitude then you’re going to get something wrapped round your head from one of us, y’know what I mean? So we always seemed to end up in quite a few fights.

At that stage, in 1989, the Manchester thing was beginning to attract attention on the continent. Most music fans in Europe seemed to think that it was just people in Manchester that were taking ecstasy for a little while, so everywhere we turned up to play, there would be people with money wanting to buy E. Even if we weren’t selling it as much ourselves by then, one of our lot would be knocking it out.

At that time, the Mondays were also becoming figureheads for the acid-house scene a bit, even though our music didn’t really fit with that. I think it was because the scene lacked stars, as it was mostly built around DJs and people weren’t necessarily ready to see DJs as stars yet; the whole superstar DJ thing was a few years off. They needed a face for this acid-house scene or movement, or whatever you want to call it, because the music was so faceless. You knew the tunes, but you didn’t have a clue who was behind them and most of them were just written by kids in their bedrooms anyway. Our faces fitted the bill.

It was a bit weird when we got slots at techno nights or mini-festivals when we really shouldn’t have been there. But because we were so associated with ecstasy, people would want to book us to go on the bill before or after a techno DJ, when that’s never going to really work, or it shouldn’t have. But luckily most of the time everyone in the audience was just off their tits. Certainly later on. It still happens now and again. A couple of years ago we were booked on some dance bill at a festival in Ireland and when we turned up a lot of the young kids were like, ‘What are these lot doing on? We want techno!’

It was at this point we re-recorded ‘Lazyitis’ as a single, with Karl Denver. We shot the video underneath the Mancunian Way with the Bailey Brothers. The idea was that we were all convicts, playing football in the rain in the prison yard. Quite ironic, really, considering I got nicked while trying to promote it with Karl Denver. We got hold of some prison uniforms from Strangeways, no problem, but we ended up having to get a rain machine. Must have been the only time when it didn’t fucking rain in Manchester. We shot it all on one night, and we had a few of our crew in it playing football, John the Duck and people like that. It was freezing and we had the rain machine pissing down on us, so half of us ended up with colds and poor Karl Denver got pneumonia.

As ‘Lazyitis’ was coming out, I had to go and meet Karl in Jersey, where he was doing a season. We’d played the Kilburn National Ballroom in London the night before, and then I had to fly over in the morning to some press. I was a bit the worse for wear, and I got stopped at customs going into Jersey. The customs didn’t have a clue that I was in a band. They just thought I was some Manchester scum coming over to rob the island. At that time, any Mancs or Scousers going to Jersey would get stopped and searched because that’s what
they
presumed you were up to, just nipping over there on the rob.

The problem was I hadn’t checked my bags to make sure they were clean and when they searched them they found a couple of empty bags that had had coke in them. There wasn’t even any coke in there at all; they were just empty bags with a little bit of residue in them. But because there were traces they charged me with importation and locked me up. The worst thing was, they don’t really give you bail in Jersey, because if they do they think you’ll just do one off the island.

The place I was banged up in was unreal. It was like a proper old-school prison in some sort of castle, and we all got fucking shackled up. It was fucking medieval. I got nicked on my own, but got shackled up by the ankle to this fucking chain gang with ten other geezers – whoever else had been nicked that day. Fuck knows who the rest of them were – just ten geezers of all different ages who had been nicked for different things. Everywhere we moved on that fucking island, we had to shuffle around in a chain gang, all shackled up together. We all had to go for a piss together. We all had to go for a fucking shit together. All these pots were lined up next to each other and we all had to sit there in a line. Seriously. Proper old-school affair.

Tony Wilson had to come over to sort it all out. I think in the end we had to post eight or nine grand bail, which was a fucking fortune back then to them, and even then the only reason they would grant me bail was because I was playing a benefit gig for Hillsborough with the Mondays. The urban myth about that whole incident is that Tony came to see me in jail and said, ‘We’d need to get you an advocate,’ and I said something like, ‘What the fuck do I want a poncey fucking southern drink for, Tony, I’m in the shit here!’ but that’s bollocks. I knew what a fucking advocate was by then, trust me. What actually happened is that after I’d got bail and out of jail, me and Tony
were
having a laugh about an advocate being a poncey southern drink, and then that joke got re-told to someone else, then someone else, and twisted, and then that version became accepted as what happened, but it’s bollocks.

What did make the whole situation more problematic is that when they did a blood test on me I did actually have cocaine in my system. When I got back I had to report to Swinton police station for a few months until the trial date. At that stage the band still wasn’t that well known; we certainly weren’t famous. We hadn’t been on
Top of the Pops
or anything, so unless you were into our sort of music, you wouldn’t have a clue who we were. I could still walk around the streets and wouldn’t really get recognized unless someone was specifically a Mondays fan. It’s when you go on TV that things change, and you become the property of the tabloids.

When it eventually came to court, it just got dropped anyway. The judge said there wasn’t enough in the empty bag to charge me with anything. It did make me more careful going through customs from then on. I already had an importation charge on me, from when I got caught bringing weed back from Amsterdam. I also had various other little charges, and even though the computer systems and records weren’t all linked up like they are now, if they stopped and searched you and ended up detaining you, they could find out all that information if they really wanted to.

Even though
Bummed
was a lot closer to the sound in our heads, it still hadn’t crossed over. I was still bang into Paul Oakenfold’s ‘Jibaro’, which I’d been playing loads while we were recording
Bummed
, so I had the idea to get him to remix ‘Wrote For Luck’. Nathan got it – he was pretty good on that score; he could see that there was massive potential if we could tap into what was happening in the E scene, and bridge the gap
between
that and the indie kids. I knew Paul Oakenfold was the man for the job. Oakey might be a world-famous DJ and producer now, but back then he hadn’t produced anybody and there was no established culture of DJs remixing songs by bands. I didn’t know Oakey personally at that stage. I might have met him briefly in a club in London, but I didn’t really know him at all, I just knew I wanted him to remix us. If I had told any other record company that I wanted this obscure DJ from London, who plays in Ibiza but has no real form in the studio, to work with us, there is no way they would have gone for it. But Factory did.

So Oakey and Steve Osborne did one remix, which actually ended up as the B-side, even though I personally thought it was a better remix. Factory also got Vince Clarke from Erasure to do a mix, which I didn’t like as much as Oakey’s. Vince’s was a great mix, but to me it sounded too much like other records that he had worked on and had in the charts before. Oakey’s and Osborne’s, on the other hand, sounded totally new. It had that whole Balearic feel to it. Factory punted out a few white labels of it to club DJs and it started to get a good reaction in the clubs.

We then went out to Valencia to do this festival called La Conjura de las Danzas. Jeff Barrett was with us and ended up scoring some mescaline for us. I don’t think I’d had it before. We were E’d off our faces and on mescaline and everything. We were out partying all night, and then we went down to the beach just as the sun was coming. Me and Muzzer fell asleep – we were just fucked and fell asleep on the beach – and the rest of the band thought it would be funny to just leave us there. But we were so fucked we didn’t wake up, so we lay there asleep all fucking day in the blistering sun. We both had T-shirts and shorts on and Muzzer got proper nasty sunburn, but nothing like mine. The burns on my arms and legs were like
third
-degree fucking burns. I was burnt to a fucking frazzle – it was horrible. I was really, really burnt, and the rest of the band thought it was fucking funny. I had to go to hospital, and in the end I actually had to go and score some gear, some smack, because the pain was that bad.

It was just after Valencia that I really developed a full-on fucking proper habit, which you could even trace back to that day. We had to do a TV show later that day, and all the Spanish cameramen and crew were laughing at me – look at the stupid fucking Englishman burnt to a frazzle. But I had to do it. That was one of the reasons I had to find some gear and have a lick, so I could bear the pain and get through that TV performance. The pain was fucking killing me and that’s how I probably ended up starting to hit the gear hard. I had messed around with it for years, but I’d never had a proper habit, and although I’ve never really thought about it like this before, looking back now, that’s probably when I started on the gear big time.

We then had a gig at about 5am. The burns were so bad that I couldn’t really walk or let my clothes touch me. I had to try and lean forward into the microphone, to try and let my clothes slightly hang off me so that they were hardly touching my burnt skin. I think Gaz Whelan fell backwards off the stage at that performance as well. It was a bit of a nutty gig.