Twisting My Melon (19 page)

After we came back from Valencia, I really started hitting the gear. It helped me with my stage fright, and there was always money about then. Gear was relatively cheap by then as well. It wasn’t £90 a gram any more, or even £70 a gram. It had halved in price – you could get it for £40 a gram or something. It depended on the strength. Not that I’d be buying grams anyway. I would buy it in bigger weights. I’d be doing more than a gram a day.

When we played a gig I would never get the promoter to get
the
gear for me; I kept shit like that quiet. I’d go and score, or maybe get one of our crew to do it.

In July we went back to the States on tour, supporting the Pixies. I thought the Pixies were great. We used to have this image of American musicians being mainly college kids, but they’re not. A lot of them are like us and come from some quite hardcore towns or areas. I particularly got on with Johnny, the drummer from the Pixies, and I also really got on with Kim, the bass player who later joined the Breeders. The Pixies weren’t necessarily a band I had listened to much before then, but I really liked them as a live band and the music really grew on me. I thought they were great. They were a lot better live than we were, musically; they could really play. We were still winging it a little, I thought. We were just a bunch of kids who liked music.

At that time there were loads of crews of Mancs and Scousers in Los Angeles who had taken the E culture over with them. They were selling ecstasy and putting raves on. If we were playing out there, they would all tip up at the gig. Or they would even tip up at the hotel, and because they were Mancs or Scousers we’d chat to them and then end up going off partying with them.

When we played Los Angeles we met Bowie, and the Beastie Boys turned up. We were all in a club called Enter the Dragon when Bowie walked in. Gaz Whelan was off his head and started going, ‘Haha – Bowie’s a midget! Bowie’s a midget!’ Gaz is obsessed with people’s height, he always was. We were trying to shut him up, because he always went over the top when he was drunk.

He also had a bit of OCD, Gaz, and it could take hours to get him into or out of a club because he would have to touch something five times or something crazy like that. The bigger the band got, and the better known we got, the more his bits of
OCD
came out. He was a footballer at heart and all footballers have slight OCD, don’t they? They have weird rituals about how they put their boots on and stuff like that, which they have to adhere to. When Gaz was on a tour bus and it was just us, he’d be okay, although he still hated anyone touching his food. He also smelt shit everywhere. He’d always be saying, ‘Can you smell shit?’ Everything smelt like shit to him. He was also a hypochondriac. One week he thought he had bowel cancer, the next week he thought he had a brain tumour. It must have been a nightmare for him. He made Gillian McKeith look normal.

When the band first started, Gaz’s mam and dad lived in a house that our pal Si Davis’s family had lived in before. Si’s dad had died in the house and Gaz was always a bit freaked out about ghosts and stuff. His mam and dad used to leave the windows open so I would climb in the window when they were out, go into Gaz’s bedroom and move things about, just to freak him out. I did it for quite a while. He’d come out and say, ‘There’s a ghost in that bloody house.’

There were quite a few incidents on that tour of America with the Pixies. It was pretty eventful. We always seemed to meet big-time drug dealers when we were abroad around that time. Hardcore importers or people who ran smuggling rings. We just seemed to attract them. People who happened to have a kilo of weed on them, or the odd brick. We never seemed to meet normal people who were just selling an eighth of draw or a bit of coke. Wherever we went, nice restaurants or clubs or whatever, we seemed to attract these serious characters, people who were major players in some way. I remember in Los Angeles meeting this Bonnie and Clyde couple from Mexico, who were in their late twenties and looked quite respectable, but were actually responsible for bringing a lot of the weed from Mexico into LA. They were very middle class and
well-spoken
, none of your ‘bro’ talk or anything, but they were serious importers. I can’t remember how we met them, but they just gave us an ounce, as if it was nothing. I think they might have even given us an ounce each. Everyone thought ‘the chronic’ was the strongest weed at the time, but I can’t tell you how strong this stuff was. We were staying in the Hotel Roosevelt, which is facing the Chinese Theatre on Sunset Boulevard, and me and Muzzer had planned to go across and watch
Batman
, which had just come out, but we couldn’t even cross the road. It was like acid, this weed; we were tripping our fucking nuts off. Me and Muzz can handle our weed, but this tackle had knocked us sideways. You have to be pretty fucking stoned before you can’t even face crossing the road, but it seemed like an impossible mission to us.

It makes me laugh when people say, ‘Oh the weed nowadays is much stronger than it was twenty years ago.’ Bollocks. There was skunk and chronic, or whatever you want to call it, around back then; it just wasn’t necessarily available in this country. But certainly if you went to the States or Mexico or Amsterdam you could get hold of it. The Dutch would always laugh at the Brits back in the day, because as soon as they arrived in Amsterdam and hit the coffee bars, they would go straight for the skunk, or the strongest weed available, roll a spliff, smoke it, and then spend the rest of the day almost in a coma, just nodding. It really bugs the shit out of me when people say the weed wasn’t strong back then. Bullshit. What a load of crap.

There was also a proper heavy incident in Cleveland. A few of us – me, Muzzer, a kid called Bones and some other lad – got a taxi to go and score. We were after some weed, and some smack for me. We pulled up in this taxi and started doing a deal with this kid, but he was being a bit of a smartarse with us and giving us a bit of aggro, so we started being a bit smartarse too, started giving him some agg back. He gave it us, we gave it him
back
. Next thing he just gives this kind of whistle and these kids come launching out of nowhere with guns and bats. We ran to the taxi and dived in, and they started putting the windows through and everything. The taxi was a bit like what we would now call a people carrier – fuck knows what it was called then – but it was a bit bigger than a car and had a sliding door on the side. Me and Muzzer managed to dive or fall back into the taxi as they started on us, and they started smashing the windows with baseball bats. We somehow managed to get away, to this day I don’t know fucking how, but by that time every window in the cab had been smashed and two of the doors had been ripped off, and the taxi driver was just sobbing, fucking bawling his eyes out. If me and Muzzer hadn’t moved so sharpish and somehow managed to get back into the taxi, we would have been dead. Absolutely no question. They were hardcore hustler kids who sold gear, probably in their mid-twenties, proper corner boys. They weren’t messing about. All because we were trying to do a deal and we thought this kid was trying to rip us off.

When we got to New York, the Ritz gig was quite a crazy gig. It was filmed and quite a few of our lot came on stage for the encore ‘Wrote For Luck’. That was included on our Madchester video compilation that came out later in 1989, along with most of the videos the Bailey Brothers had done for us up to then. The last date of the tour was in Chicago, and after the gig I took acid for the first time in ages. I think it was in Chicago, although admittedly I was absolutely tripping my nuts off. I ended up, in the early hours, tripping my box off in this van with what I thought were really annoying people. They might have been very nice, because they were really just punters or fans who had hung around after the gig and wanted to be friendly and had offered to take us to some party. But I was on acid and they had started to annoy me. You know that
certain
type of American who is probably quite a nice person, but just starts to rub you up the wrong way? So I just started taking the piss out of them really heavily, just ripping into them, and one of the kids said, ‘Oh my God! You’re so rude!’ But the more he kept saying, ‘Oh my God! He’s so rude!’, the more it was winding me up and I was going, ‘You fucking knob!’ Then, next thing, the driver just shrieks in this high-pitched voice, ‘I just can’t drive with this motherfucker in my van any more!
Get out of my van! GET OUT OF MY VAN
!!’ I was just laughing my head off, absolutely tripping my nut off, and I said, ‘I don’t even want to stay in your van, you fucking knob!’

We were in the middle of nowhere and I had no idea where I was, but I didn’t give a fuck. Then this sexy bird in the van said, ‘Hey, you can’t just leave him here, he has no idea where he is!’ and next thing, she jumps out and says to me, ‘I better come with you.’ We walked for what seemed like miles, because I was tripping, but fortunately she knew where we were supposed to be going. I’d never met her before, but somehow she knew where we were staying. It was about five in the morning at this stage, and I was fucked. I couldn’t walk any further, so I flagged down a juggernaut and just pleaded with him, ‘I’m an English guy and I’m tripping my nut off. Can you give us a lift please?’ This girl was laughing her head off at me, but thankfully the driver took pity on us. We climbed in the truck and the girl was trying to tell this driver where we needed to go, because I’d got no idea where I was, or what was going on, and he was laughing his tits off at me because I was absolutely flying and still slagging off the knobs in the van, going, ‘Those fucking dickheads’ and all that. He eventually dropped us off at the hotel and I banged the arse out of her all day. Then she got up about teatime and said, ‘Right, I gotta go and get my methadone.’

As we started taking off and getting better known, we had to spend more time in London, doing press or TV, and we found we got in places easier. We would find ourselves in some of these gaffs in London, Browns or wherever it was at the time, which were full of different crowds – aristocratic types, proper moneyed types, and even royalty.

Actually, speaking of royalty, Muzzer once fucked one of the royals in the back of a black taxi, on the floor. Not one of the immediate Royal Family – it wasn’t Princess Beatrice or anyone like that – it was someone a bit further down the line to the throne. I can’t remember her name and I wouldn’t tell you even if I could, but she was something like seventy-eighth or eighty-fifth in line to the throne or something. Muzzer, her and me were in the back of a black taxi going through London. We’d been to some posh gaff where everyone was off their tits, and we were on our way to some other gaff and Muzzer just shagged her on the floor of the black cab while I was sat there. You might think they’re all high and mighty, but some of that posh set are right naughty little fuckers. Alex Nightingale, who used to manage Primal Scream, has got some really interesting photos of some young royals on his phone, but they should probably remain nameless here.

If you’re moving in the right circles or have money, that’s how things happen – you end up meeting very different people. It’s always been like that. That’s how all the actor types ended up mixing with the Krays in London in the 60s, because they were all in the same clubs.

By the middle of 1989 our schedule was pretty relentless. There wasn’t really much of a life outside the band any more. If we weren’t out on tour, we were either in the studio or writing new material, and we were out every night. No days off. But none of us minded because it felt like everything was coming together. The whole E scene was going overground, but
it
still felt quite special at that stage. The Es were still good and the Haçienda was rammed every night. I felt like we had made a bit of a breakthrough with
Bummed
and ‘Wrote For Luck’. But I also felt like we were on the cusp of something much bigger.

AT THE END
of July 1989, Factory opened Dry Bar on Oldham Street. The Haçienda was still rammed and smashing it and Factory had decided they wanted a sort of pre-club bar for people to go to. Before Dry Bar we used to drink in old men’s boozers. We would go in the City Road Inn, opposite the Haçienda, or the Britons Protection or the Peveril of the Peak. They were our main hang-outs in the centre of town. We’d stopped going to the ‘trendy’ bars, or those bars that
thought
they were trendy. You know those late 80s type of bars? I suppose in London they would call them wine bars, but no one called them wine bars in Manchester. Just shit bars, full of mirrors and chrome and fucking dickhead beer monsters.

Ben Kelly, the guy who had designed the Haçienda, designed Dry Bar, and it was the first modern pre-club bar in Manchester, if not the country. They’re everywhere now, Dry lookalikes. There’s probably a Dry rip-off in Ipswich and fucking Doncaster. But Dry was the first, and when it opened it was completely different to everywhere else. It was like going to a nightclub that opened at 1pm. We immediately made it our
headquarters
and didn’t really go anywhere else. If we were in town and not on tour, we would go to Dry just after we got up, about 1pm, and we would be there until 1am. We might nip out to go to a meeting or something, but basically that was where we were based. The toilet was downstairs and people spent a lot of time down there, doing drugs and just hanging out. Sometimes I would go down to the toilet about 8pm and not come back out until it closed.

By that time, the band were more well known, but I wouldn’t really get mithered in Dry because of the lads that I had round me. I might get people letting on to me, or occasionally asking for an autograph, but I didn’t get approached much because the sort of crew that hung around us then weren’t really the sort of crew that you would want to bother. Let’s just say they were a bunch of lads that people knew they had to be a bit wary of.