Twisting My Melon (29 page)

At this stage I had my heart set on working with Oakenfold and Osborne. I knew I wouldn’t have to be concerned about the lack of time to prepare and write, because I found it so easy to work with them and I knew we would have got the right result again. There really was no other choice for me. We asked Oakey and Osborne and we got word back that they really wanted to do it, but they had to finish off another album they
were
already working on first, so we would have to wait for a couple of months. I was fine with that, but Tony kept saying, ‘Yeah, but we need to go and record
now
. We
need
the album
as soon as
.’ Had we worked together as a band, we might have been able to persuade Factory to wait, but sadly Our Paul, PD, Mark Day and Nathan’s reaction to Oakey and Osborne was, ‘They should drop what they’re doing. We want them
now
!’ and ‘They had never produced an album before they worked with us.
We made them
– they should make us their priority!’ I was like, ‘Whoa. They’re in the middle of a fucking job, y’know what I mean?’

Oakey and Osborne were as keen to work together again as I was, because
Pills ’n’ Thrills
had gone to No. 2. It was kept off the top but went top five, so it was still a massive success. But Our Paul and Tony then started coming up with other names – ‘We could get thingy to do it, or so-and-so to do it …’ and then Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth from Talking Heads were mentioned. I didn’t want
anyone else
. I tried telling them, ‘No, this is madness!’ Working with Oakey and Osborne was a winning formula as far as I was concerned, but the rest of them couldn’t fucking see it. They’d gone right up their own arses after the success of
Pills ’n’ Thrills
.

When Chris and Tina were mentioned, Our Paul, PD and Mark Day’s immediate reaction was, ‘Oh yes, they’re
proper
musicians.’ I just said, ‘NO!! Look, this is
wrong
, it just won’t be right. It’s a step back, not moving forward,’ but they just wouldn’t listen. There was a band meeting over the choice of producer, and only me and Bez were up for waiting for Oakey and Osborne, and everybody else, even Gaz, wanted to go with Tina and Chris, so Our Paul and Tony went out to Jamaica to meet them. I didn’t bother going too because I knew they weren’t the right people for us and there was no way I was going to meet them when the decision had virtually been made
without
me. I had really liked Talking Heads and I was also into the stuff they had done as Tom Tom Club but, no disrespect, I just knew they weren’t right to work with us. It was a bit like when Vince Clarke remixed ‘Wrote For Luck’. When somebody so famous and well known gets involved in one of your records, it starts to sound like it’s them. Vince Clarke’s ‘WFL’ mix sounded like him, because it had his signature touches on it, and I knew that this time we were going to end up sounding like Chris and Tina. Everyone else thought it was a great plan, but to me, we’d just really found our sound and identity as the Mondays, and now we were going to be taken right back.

The rest of the band didn’t get it; they didn’t understand that our fans liked
our
sound. They thought that if we could incorporate Chris and Tina’s sound into the Mondays sound, then all the Talking Heads fans would get into it and we would break into a much bigger market. But it doesn’t work like that. I tried to explain my misgivings to them, but me and Bez had been outvoted and the decision was made.

Chris and Tina aside, I felt we were being rushed into this album and were in danger of running out of ideas. I also didn’t want the norm. We were now in a position to use big-name producers, but I wanted something people wouldn’t expect, something more unorthodox. And the band weren’t getting on either.

Mark Day had actually decided to leave the Mondays at one point, just before we started making
Yes Please
! He had pretty much decided he was off, for various reasons, mainly his missus, Jane, who was like a little Yoko. She’d say to me, ‘You don’t tell Mark what to do any more, blah blah blah …’ So Mark was going to go and set up his own band: ‘I don’t need this, I’m off, I’ve had enough of Shaun, I’ve had enough of Bez …’ He really didn’t appreciate what we had. Mark would say, ‘I don’t even like the Mondays’ music.’ Like the rest of
them
, he was pissed off that he wasn’t the main focus of attention, and really thought he was the important one. They had so little respect for my songwriting and what I did as a front man, or what Bez did. Gaz actually did like the Mondays’ songs, but the rest of them would slag them off.

They were all having talks about going off and doing their own thing, and being the front man, which was fucking hilarious. They’d also be moaning about me and Bez being on drugs and giving it, ‘Grrrrrrr,
they’re
ruining the band,’ but all of them were off their faces too. And the more drugs they did, the more it focused their anger on us.

At one point, I asked Johnny Marr to join the Mondays and he actually did for about twenty minutes. He came round to mine one day and agreed that he would come and work on the album, but then he drove away and must have had a change of heart, because he was back within half an hour to say he had changed his mind. When I look back, it shows how little I knew about the game then, because I don’t think it would have worked. Johnny is brilliant, obviously, but him joining the Mondays wouldn’t have been quite right. We would probably have done a much better album than we did with Chris and Tina, because he actually understood us, but the Mondays was all about the chemistry, and Johnny was probably so much better a musician, he would have just got frustrated. He had Electronic anyway at that point, but I hadn’t really thought it through, I just thought, ‘Johnny Marr plays guitar. He’s from Manchester.’

Chris and Tina worked in Barbados quite a lot, because they had a house down there, and the idea was to use Eddy Grant’s studio, Blue Wave. At one stage we were going to use the Bee Gees’ studio in Miami to record
Yes Please
!, which I thought was a brilliant idea. But some people at Factory didn’t think
Miami
was the right location, or, more specifically, they thought there would be too much partying. It was a coke city, and a playground, and they basically didn’t think I would behave in Miami, or in front of the Bee Gees if they happened to be around. So Barbados it was.

Everyone always says that Barbados was chosen because there was no heroin there for me, but that wouldn’t have even bothered me, because if I had some methadone with me and could have got hold of some Valium or some codeine pills as well, I would have been fine without it. Anyway, the plan backfired because the one thing that no one – not Nathan or anyone at Factory – had realized was that in Barbados you could buy an ounce of crack for about a quid.

Yes, I did famously drop and smash my bottles of methadone at Manchester airport on the way out to Barbados, but the knock-on effects of that have been exaggerated. I wasn’t on that much methadone – only about 20ml a day, which is quite a low dosage. I’d had methadone on and off since the early 80s, and I did have a meth habit at the time, but it wasn’t like I was drinking 130ml a day – I was on a steady 20ml. I had been on a meth prescription but that had recently ended and it wasn’t a maintenance prescription that gets renewed; when the prescription ended that was it. So I’d started buying it, just so I had it there as a crutch when I didn’t have gear. I had two 500ml bottles in my bag, but I dropped my bag in the airport and the bottles smashed. I was on my knees, desperately trying to scoop it back up, and I did actually manage to salvage about 300ml, although it had broken glass in it. But I managed to get that into a bottle we found in the airport, and when I got to Barbados I strained it through a piece of linen to get rid of all the bits of broken glass before I drank it. That 300ml would have lasted me fifteen days, at about 20ml a day. We were going to be on the island for roughly six weeks, but fifteen days
would
have been more than enough time to get an alternative supply sorted, so those smashed methadone bottles aren’t as important as they’ve been made out to be.

When we landed in Barbados there was an issue with us not having return flights. We hadn’t booked them because we didn’t know exactly how long we were going to be recording, but they wouldn’t let us in without them, so Nathan had to buy us all flights out of there before they would let us in the country. Eventually he got it sorted, and we were there and ready to start work.

I do like Chris and Tina, personally, but right from the start it all felt wrong. Eddy Grant’s studio itself was all right; it was a nice enough gaff, that wasn’t a problem. We started working, but within a few days I just wasn’t interested in the music they were producing, or the way the rest of the band were behaving. By this stage I had become the hate-figure for them all. Meanwhile Chris and Tina basically saw me as a non-musician and thought that Bez did nothing. Because they were from the States, they weren’t that aware of how the band and me and Bez were viewed in the British press and by the British public. Mark Day was the only one of us who could read music, which Chris and Tina thought was a bit amateurish. They saw Our Kid and Mark as the best of a bad bunch, basically. So their approach was to concentrate on them, and keep telling them how good they thought they were, which they obviously loved. But the stuff they were playing was already sounding like Chris and Tina and Talking Heads. It was not what I wanted at all.

We had created this new sound with
Pills ’n’ Thrills
, which was a progression from
Bummed
and really worked. I didn’t just want another
Pills ’n’ Thrills
, but I don’t think if we had worked with Oakey and Osborne again it would have been just more of the same. There were definitely more ideas to explore with them. Because Oakey was a DJ, he was constantly mixing
and
had that Balearic thing going on where he could mix something like the Woodentops with some ‘Jibaro’ beat and make it work on the dancefloor. Oakey thought, and mixed, like I thought. That’s why I knew it wouldn’t have been
Pills ’n’ Thrills Mk II
. Because Oakey and Osborne liked to experiment with different sounds. They had the same approach as me, which was to rip ideas and then make them your own. But with Chris and Tina it was just not happening and straight away I could see this. They just saw me as a difficult artist. They were saying to the rest of the band, ‘You really should get rid of Shaun as the lead singer, you know. You should make Rowetta the lead singer.’

We had bought a pound of weed (in weight, not money) as soon as we arrived in Barbados, so straight away we were big spenders to the locals, and word got round quickly to the dealers. Which meant we very rapidly found out how cheap the crack was. By the fifth or sixth day the music was just not happening for me, and Chris and Tina were just focusing on the rest of the band, so me and Bez were like, ‘Let’s just go and get some stone.’

The first time I’d had crack was on our first visit to the States, when I had the gun pulled on me, back in 1987, five years previously. But when we got back home from New York it had never been my drug of choice. Crack didn’t really hit Manchester anyway until about 1990. It certainly wasn’t freely available. We had the odd lick on our travels, but that was about it.

The band were staying in different places in Barbados. Me and Bez were staying at the studio at first, so they could keep an eye on us, and the others were staying on this private gated estate, which was patrolled. But even though it had security, the house next to the rest of the band, where a German family
was
staying, got turned over by masked raiders. Basically, they got the wrong house; they thought that house was where our lot were staying, and thought we had dough because we were buying off the local dealers. Some of the locals even started calling us ‘the white niggers’.

The stone was so cheap that I wouldn’t just buy a couple, I’d say, ‘Give me ten of ’em,’ or ‘Can you do me an ounce brick?’ Within a week I was more interested in smoking crack than going in the studio. Our Paul was also on the stone, but he would still go in, piped off his head. I’d go into the studio and have a listen to what was being laid down, but then I would
have
to go out and get on the stone, because I just couldn’t write to the music they were coming up with, those loose beats like the song that became ‘Cut ’Em Loose Bruce’. I wasn’t feeling it at all, so I just couldn’t write lyrics to it and the nightmare just progressed. It wasn’t the drugs that stopped me from being able to write to the music, it was the music itself that prevented me writing to the music, so I then turned to drugs. I just didn’t like what was happening in the studio, so I went and got stoned and pissed and saw the sights, went to the beach and had run-ins with the locals.

There was a baboon on the loose in our area at the time that had been nicknamed ‘Jack the Ripper’ because it had ripped a family to shreds. I was walking down the beach one afternoon on my own, a bit wasted, and this fucking thing just dropped out of the tree in front of me and stood there growling, looking at me. These things can smell the fear, y’know what I mean? So basically I knew I had to front it out and just growl back. So I did, and kept telling myself ‘I’m hard, I’m hard, I’m hard,’ and it moved. If I had freaked out then it would have ripped me to bits. That’s not the sort of thing you want really, when you’re walking along the beach off your head on crack – a great big baboon dropping out of a tree and wanting to start a fight
with
you. But things like that would always happen to me.

We also kept hitting the bars and getting smashed on rum and generally having a good time. The only time I wasn’t having a good time was when I went to the studio and heard the music that was being made, which made me physically and mentally sick. I tried to speak to the rest of the band about it, but they were so sucked into what Chris and Tina were telling them, about how great they were, and about how they should get rid of me. The funniest thing about that was, a few years later, in 1996, when they did appreciate my vocal style, Chris and Tina asked me to do guest vocals on a track for them on an album they did as the Heads.