Twisting My Melon (24 page)

The morning after the Haçi’s birthday we were supposed to go to Paris to do some TV show, but I didn’t get out of bed. I think we ended up telling people that I’d done ecstasy for the first time for quite a while and when Bez came round to get me the next day I was still too wasted. But the truth is more likely to be that I didn’t have any heroin, and I wasn’t going anywhere until I got some. If the gear wasn’t there, I wasn’t getting on a plane.

As much as we would listen to the new sounds and acid house when we went out at that time, we were still listening to old classics at home and on the tour bus. Remember we were born in the early 60s, so we were young kids when all the late 60s music first came out and it had stuck with us. We had always loved Donovan and decided to go and see him when we heard he was playing Colne, which is about forty-five minutes’ drive north of Manchester. To me and Bez, Donovan was as cool as Dylan; he’d written some brilliant songs.

A lot of people don’t realize who played on all those songs as well. When I got to know him later, I’d be like, ‘Who played bass on that?’ and it would be Noel Redding from the Jimi Hendrix Experience or someone like that. He would just write these numbers like ‘Sunshine Superman’ on his acoustic guitar and Noel Redding would come round and drop a bass line on it, just go ‘Bum, bum, bum-bum-bum-bum’ and then just get off. No fee, no publishing or anything on it; Donovan would get the lot. People like Noel Redding had just given these great bass lines away back then, whereas I had Our Kid saying, ‘I wrote the bass line on that. I want seventy per cent of that tune!’

Anyway, we heard that Donovan was playing up in Colne, so me and Our Matt and a few others went up to see him. We expected a full band, but it was just him and an acoustic guitar. We had a chat afterwards and he was cool, and I think we tried to get him to come down the Haçienda, but he had to carry on the tour the next day.

When we were about to go on tour again, we decided we wanted Don on the tour and Nathan had to do the deal. The thing was, we wanted him with a full band, not just doing the solo acoustic thing, but within about a week he managed to pull this full band together, and they were great. They were all session guys and they’d never played together, or played these songs before. They only had four days to learn these classics, but they sounded exactly like they did on record. I was blown away: ‘Wow, these guys are
real musicians
.’ It was such a big deal to get our lot to do anything, but these guys just turn up, look at all the dots on the paper and just play it, absolutely no messing. I’m thinking, ‘This is how it should be.’

Don was a real hero to us. We got on brilliantly with him. He was pretty mystical, but also quite down to earth, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. Not long after we met him, Our Kid
started
dating his daughter, Astrella. Our Paul was driving around in one of those early 4 x 4s at the time, can’t remember the make, but it looked really cool. Then he starts dating Astrella and a week later, the 4x4 is gone and he’s driving around in a little thirty-year-old battered white two-seater MG. I was like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ But they thought it was really cool. Until it died when they’d only had it about a week. They took it back to the MG garage, just opposite the Haçienda on Little Peter Street, and the garage replaced the white knackered MG, which looked OK, with this orange one, which was fucking hanging and knackered. So then they’re driving around in that and we’re all thinking, ‘My God, what is going on?’ That was one of the Mondays’ Yoko moments, really. As soon as Our Kid got with Astrella, the rumour started that he was going to leave the Mondays and set up a band with her. She played guitar and sang and had a No. 1 in Italy when she was five or something.

There had even been a bit of talk that the Mondays might write with Donovan himself, but that never amounted to anything in the end. Me, Bernard Sumner and Johnny Marr were also going to do a cover version of Donovan’s ‘Colours’ at one stage; we even started work on it, but it didn’t come to anything. I’m not sure why we were going to do that, although Bernard and Johnny were obviously working together as Electronic at that time.

That summer, we headlined Glastonbury, which was actually the first time we had played there.
NME
wanted to do a big cover story on us there, so we suggested doing a photo shoot with a mini Stonehenge, because we were all big fans of Spinal Tap and they had a mini Stonehenge. We did the shoot in Heaton Park in north Manchester. We drove up there in convoy and when we arrived Bez crashed into Gaz’s car in the car park.
He
was a liability behind the wheel, Bez, even though he used to slag off my driving.

I’d been to other festivals before, but I’d never been to Glastonbury. I wasn’t interested in the whole mystical side of it, and the ley lines and all that bollocks. To be honest, it wasn’t a completely jolly experience for me. It rained, so it was muddy, but that didn’t bother me much, apart from I didn’t want to get my trainers muddy. I spent almost the whole time on the tour bus. I didn’t even go to the dressing room. Glastonbury in 1990 was still quite basic; it was closer to what it must have been like in the 70s than to what it’s like now. When I went back recently, to headline with Gorillaz, it was a completely different experience, a much more professional set-up.

Back in 1990 we had a sleeper bus, but I also booked into a hotel so I could get off site for a bit. When I was on site, I spent most of my time underneath our bus, in the luggage hold. You know when you have a panel on the side of the coach, which lifts up and there’s a big hold underneath for everyone’s bags and stuff? I spent most of Glastonbury in there with about twenty other smackheads. We spent almost all weekend under the bus, just smoking gear. Stick a gram on a piece of tinfoil, smoke that; stick another gram on a piece of tin foil, smoke that. Just smoking constantly – it was a mad scene. We ended up with more and more of us under there, because someone would have to go and get some more gear, and they would come back with a few more hangers-on. I did have a break from it at one stage, when I got off to the hotel with this bird that I’d met at
Top of the Pops
. We disappeared for the night, but when we got back to the site I was straight back under the bus, and straight back to my tinfoil.

My mam has got this great photograph on her living-room wall that is taken from the back of the stage at Glastonbury
while
we are playing. You can see the back of me, and my Armani jeans, and then the whole of the audience and the tents behind – a great crowd shot. I can’t really remember much of the actual performance though, because I was so numb from the heroin. I think the most exciting part of the weekend for me was taking the bird back to the hotel. While we were there, some of our lot were making copies from our backstage passes and banging them out. I think they even had a colour photocopier and a laminating machine on the bus.

We also had people selling snide merchandise as well as the official stalls. As ever, you couldn’t stop people selling bootleg merchandise, so you might as well sell it yourself. We wanted both ends of the market. So we had a few lads out there working, and what they would do is when they had made a certain amount of dough they would go and bury it or stash it somewhere. John the Phone, the guy who had put on G-Mex with Jimmy Muffin, was heavily involved in the merch, and he actually got fucking kidnapped at Glastonbury. This biker crew – I don’t know for sure if they were actual Hell’s Angels, but they were a heavy biker crew anyway – kidnapped him and took him to this disused farmhouse nearby. They tied him up and had him in there for nearly two days, slapping him and torturing him. But you’ve got to give it to the little fucker – he told them nothing. He wouldn’t tell them dick. So eventually they just let him go. He had a fair few cuts and bruises and I think they’d shaved a bit of his hair off, but he just brushed it off. Went to the place where he’d stashed the last of his money, got it and brought it back to the bus.

We got asked to leave in the end, because our lot had brought it a bit on top. They realized how many backstage passes we had knocked out, and in the end their security surrounded our bus and made us leave the site. Glastonbury had its fair share of scallies, who used to come down because
they
thought it was easy pickings, but they just weren’t prepared for us. I didn’t think much of it at the time, because I was just in a haze, but looking back, we were pretty crazy.

We went to Ibiza after Glastonbury. We were playing Ku Klub and we were supposed to be chilling out, but me and Muzzer ended up spending a week trying to get paid for the show. I was sure there was something dodgy going on and they wanted to avoid paying us. It was about £100,000, but after a few days’ hanging around we eventually got the money. I think Muzzer had to throw his weight around a bit, but there was no way we were going to let them take us for a ride.

We then went back to America to do a short tour, before ending up in Los Angeles to record our next album. The tour was called
The United States of the Haçienda
, and we also had Mike Pickering, Paul Oakenfold and the Haçienda DJs Graeme Park and Dave Haslam on the tour.

The gig in New York coincided with the New Music Seminar, which is a big industry thing in the States, so Wilson was in his element. I didn’t have much to do with it, but I know Wilson gave this speech giving it all ‘Wake up America, you’re dead!’ and bigging us up. The thing with Americans is, even if they think their music scene is shit at the time, or their current president is a dick, or whatever, they might be allowed to say it themselves but they won’t stand for anyone else saying it. They don’t like anyone else going over to America and telling them what’s what, so Tony going over there saying that was never going to go down well. Yanks like success. They’re different to the British. The Brits love an underdog. Look at
X-Factor
. People love it when someone goes on and is terrible, dressed like a goon, and can’t sing and makes a fool of themselves. They love someone like that Wagner bloke, the Brazilian PE teacher that was on
X-Factor
, who couldn’t sing at all. The
English
love someone like that. The Yanks can’t stand that. They hate it.

That was partly why the British loved Bez, but the Americans never really got the idea of him. They never really grasped the concept of Bez. They would be like, ‘What does that guy
do
, man? He’s not a dancer – that’s not dancing.’ Well, he’s not really a dancer, no. ‘So, what does he
do
?
He doesn’t sing
, he doesn’t play
anything
. He just fucks about on stage off his head.’ But the British loved that, and in Britain Bez almost was the Happy Mondays at one point, or at least he personified us. But the Yanks just didn’t understand it, and they didn’t like the way it looked, this guy with bulging eyes wandering up and down the stage. They didn’t mind it so much on videos, when he’s just standing around, because a lot of American videos, especially rap videos, are basically just blokes standing around. But on stage they want everybody to be doing a specific job, and they couldn’t see what Bez was doing there.

Keith Allen also came out on that tour with us. He was always a Factory fan, and knew Wilson and New Order, so he just started coming to the gigs, and then he came on tour with us to the States.

We were still quite young at the time, in our mid- to late twenties, but if we thought we were mad, you should have seen Keith. He was about ten years older than us, in his late thirties, but he was still hitting it hard, and when it came to doing mad things he would put us to shame. You could be out with Keith in a bar in America and it would kick off and you would be lucky to get out alive. Keith would be sat there and if something annoyed him, he would just pick up a chair and put it through a plate-glass window. Several times I can remember being in bars with Keith in America and it going off, and us having to fight our way out of there, and Keith was usually at the centre of it, if not starting it. Seriously. People thought we
were
complete madheads and would love to write about what we got up to, and people would lap it up, but Keith was a mentalist. Far worse than us.

When we played the Sound Factory he was on stage for the gig, like a second Bez, apart from he’d overdone it so much that he had to get his head down halfway through the gig. On stage, in the middle of the gig, he’s trying to climb in this flight case at my feet. Then he woke up again and got up for the encore, I think, for ‘Wrote For Luck’. When it came to craziness at that time, I don’t think even Bez had anything on Keith. He used to drive about London in a black cab that he owned, with all his kids in it. But you see him now and he seems very together, and very grown up. Although he must be nearly sixty now.

Muzzer reminded me recently about this punky-looking girl I met in New York, who had dyed red and black hair, and was really nice looking. I was sharing a room with Muzzer again, and when I took her back to the room he was in bed but I thought he was asleep. I start getting it on with this bird and she says, ‘I want you to hit me.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to hit you.’ She said, ‘I
want
you to hit me – I like it.’ I was like, ‘Nah, leave it out.’ But she kept on at me, ‘I
want
you to hit me. I
love
it.’ So in the end I just gave a little slap, and she did love it. Then she hit me back, so I clobbered her again and so on. I picked up the phone handset and smashed her round the head with it, and that must have knocked a glass over on the bedside table because somehow some glass got in the bed and she got cut, and now there’s blood everywhere, but I’m still shagging her and she was loving it. Next thing she says, ‘I want you to cut me …’, but before I could say anything, Muzzer jumped out of bed and said, ‘Woah, I’m putting the fucking brakes on this
now
.’

She cleaned herself up a bit and just got off. I think she had a bit of a dent in the side of her head from the phone, but that’s what she was into.