Twisting My Melon (3 page)

We first discovered booze through Bill, as stashes of all sorts of stuff would turn up at their house all the time. Crates of
Newcy
Brown off the backs of wagons or whatever. That wasn’t unusual in Salford. When there isn’t much money about, people are less likely to ask questions about where something has come from. Bill always had loads of booze in his shed and our mission, when we got to nine or ten years old, was to try and nick it and drink it. This went on until we were about thirteen or fourteen. We were allowed a drink in my nana’s house from about the age of ten and I remember being shown how to pour a glass of beer around then.

My mam and dad didn’t really drink when we were growing up, although they do have a drink now. My dad was usually off playing the pubs and clubs, so he would always be driving, but Bill was a big drinker and most of the Carrolls liked a drink. There was one other uncle who had a bit of a drink problem and would sometimes sell furniture from the house so he could go to the pub. We were taught about alcohol from an early age and I’ve never been an alkie. I’m forty-nine years old now and I’ve hammered drugs and I’ve had periods when I’ve drunk a lot, but I’ve never had an alcohol dependency. Obviously, like everyone, I used to like to go for a few pints and get pissed, especially as a young lad, but I’ve never really been addicted to alcohol. I don’t even drink at home nowadays, and if I did go to the pub for an interview or something I’d be half cut after four or five pints. I drink a lot of energy drinks like Red Bull or Relentless now, and could quite happily sit there all night in the pub with a Red Bull while everyone else is sinking the pints. Although, admittedly, I’ll probably stick a bit of vodka in if everyone else is boozing.

Because I live back in Salford now, I bump into kids from school now and again, and those who look a bit fucked have inevitably been abusing the booze. The ones that are my age but look about three hundred years old – usually they appear that way because of alcohol, not drugs. You can’t repair the
damage
that alcohol does to you. The weird thing about bumping into someone from school now is that I often haven’t seen them since they were about fourteen, so they’ve obviously changed a lot, but because they’ve seen me on TV or in the press for the last twenty-five years, they don’t think I’ve changed a bit.

Over the years, Salford and Manchester have had a big problem with smack. It was about 1980, when the smokable heroin hit, that it started to get bad, but I vividly remember being at primary school in Swinton in 1969 and the police coming in to school to talk to us about heroin. They told us about the dangers of it, and about needles and all that. I was seven years old and I can actually remember thinking, ‘I’m
never
going to get involved with that stuff, no way am I getting involved with that … that sounds
terrible
.’

When I was nine, my grandad Fred Ryder died from bowel cancer, which was horrible, as you could almost see it eat away at him. That prompted another move, back up to Farnworth. My dad had a compassionate and overwhelming urge to move nearer to his mam, because she was now on her own, so he packed in his job on the newspapers and we took over a chippy on Harper Green Road. It was a real old-school chippy, which looked pretty similar to the one the Khan family run in the film
East Is East
, which I thought was a pretty realistic depiction of what it was like growing up in Salford in the 70s. Certainly more realistic than most I’ve seen on screen, although the reality was a bit rougher. There wasn’t much racism though. I was about ten before I even realized that people at school were different races – it just wasn’t an issue.

We used to have chips for tea almost every night while we were living here, which I didn’t complain about, and I can still remember the smell of the freshly baked pies being delivered at
six
o’clock in the morning. It was actually a good chippy, and my mam and dad were a bit more forward-thinking than most, because they served curry sauce, which not many places did back then, not round our way. I didn’t have to help out in the chippy, but I would sometimes rob them a bag of potatoes from round the back of the greengrocer’s or somewhere. They didn’t ask me to do it, I just did. They had the chippy for a year, which coincided with the power cuts of the early 70s, so often there would be a couple of times a week when they couldn’t open because there was no electricity. They found it hard work, and towards the end my dad got a job at the post office, and did both jobs. Eventually they decided to sack off the chippy, my dad went full time at the post office and we went back to Nana’s for a few months, before moving to Avon Close on Madam’s Wood Estate in Little Hulton, where we stayed for a few years.

Behind our house on Madam’s Wood there was a sewage works, which was so close you could often smell it while you were eating your dinner. You could even taste it sometimes; it must have been in the air. You’d be trying to eat your Sunday roast and it would taste like it had grit in it. The only things that grew on the sewage works were tomato plants, because the human body can’t digest tomato seeds, and that put me off tomatoes for years. We would mess around up there when we were bored, just doing stupid things like throwing bricks and other stuff into the sewage works, then later, when we got an air rifle, we would shoot the rats that were scuttling about.

There was also a train track behind our house and we would throw stones at the trains and put shopping trolleys, tree trunks and all sorts, even shit from the sewage works, on the lines. I honestly don’t know how we never injured anyone or even killed anyone, considering all the daft stuff we did as kids. But we just didn’t think. Then they would send out special trains
with
railway police on them, trying to get all us little urchins who were hanging round the train tracks and the sewage works, but we had loads of places to hide around there.

I also used to love what we called ‘sneaking’ – tiptoeing into shops and sneaking behind the counters, robbing stuff, without getting caught. It was only small stuff at first, and when I started I did it as much for the buzz of not getting caught as anything else.

Although my mam and dad were both still working, they weren’t on great wages and were still stretching themselves to pay the mortgage. When I was fourteen, we moved to Kent Close, facing the sewage works and me and Our Paul got our own bedrooms and my dad sawed the bunk beds that he’d made out of wire fencing in two to make single beds, but they still creaked. I could never have a wank as a kid, because the bed made such a fucking noise. Our Paul whinged and whinged about his, and eventually broke it on purpose, so my mam and dad bought him a new single bed, but they couldn’t afford to get me one as well. I was now fourteen and I was still in this creaky bed that I’d been in since I was seven, and it was
impossible
. So when Granny Ryder got a new settee, I was given her old battered one to use as a bed. It was really knackered and had bloody springs sticking out of it.

That’s all I had in my bedroom when I was fourteen – Granny Ryder’s tired old settee for a bed, and a chest of drawers. Our Paul had cabinets with a fitted Binatone stereo system – a record player, a tuner, an amp and everything – which my mam and dad had bought him. Even though I was the eldest, he got everything, partly because he was the baby, and probably partly because I was a bit of a tearaway. It didn’t really bother me at the time, because I knew they couldn’t always afford to buy for two, and I just thought, ‘He’s my younger brother, fine, let him
have
it.’ You don’t necessarily think anything like that is unusual when you’re a kid; whatever situation you’re in seems normal. The way I saw it, there was only enough for one, so the kid brother gets it and the older brother is left to fend for himself a bit. That was probably one of the reasons I started robbing. I would just go out and get my own gear.

The other thing that I felt counted against me in other people’s eyes was that I wasn’t very good with my hands. I’ve never been the sort of person who’s good with mechanical things. Even now, I’m useless at working out what’s wrong with a car engine. I struggle to change a lightbulb. But I always had that entrepreneurial spirit and I could always find or make money, even then.

To some extent, I was seen as the stupid one. Our Paul was the bright one who was going to go to college. I was never going to amount to dick: ‘Just leave Shaun, he’s never going to do owt.’ But that wasn’t something that ate away at me, and it’s really important to me that people understand that. I didn’t hold anything against Our Paul. We were really close when we were young, and throughout most of our time in the Happy Mondays. I don’t have a chip on my shoulder. Through rehab and cold turkey I’ve had to do so much self-analysing and reflecting that I’m pretty sure of who I am and how I got here. If anything is eating away at you inside, it’s going to come out eventually, but I really don’t have this massive hang-up that I wasn’t appreciated or anything like that. I just thought, fine, I’ll sort myself out. That was the real lasting effect it had on me. It made me independent.

This might seem like a slightly odd comparison, but a few years later I watched this film called
Quest for Fire
. It’s about a group of Neanderthals who have one fire that they have to keep going at all times, because they don’t know how to start another fire from scratch. They end up on this marsh after a
battle
with another tribe, and their fire dies, so they send three of the tribe off on a quest to find another. These Neanderthal geezers go off roaming the land, having all these adventures, and find fire and bring it back to the marsh. The other motherfuckers are still there grunting, ‘Fire! Grunt grunt fire!’ and they haven’t built a house or shelter or anything. Weirdly, this reminds me a bit of my situation growing up. I sometimes felt like I was the geezer who was sent off to get fire while the rest of them were waiting back on the marsh.

By the early 70s I was beginning to get more into music. There was always music on in our house and when I was round at my Aunty Mary’s I was exposed to all different music and influences because there were nine kids who were all into slightly different scenes. Our Pete was the oldest and he had a huge collection of thousands of albums that were leaning against every wall in the front room, about a yard deep. He was into stuff like the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Byrds, Captain Beefheart and Link Wray. Our Joe was an early skinhead, and into soul stuff like James Brown, Billy Preston and a bit of ska. Our Mag was into soul and the Tams. She was a long-hair skin girl at one point, which is a girl skinhead who doesn’t have a fully shaved head, and then she got into stuff like early Elton John, Gram Parsons and Townes Van Zandt. Our Gel was into her reggae, U-Roy, Bunny Wailer and Gregory Isaacs (who I got into a bit of trouble with, years later, when we played on the same bill and were misbehaving together backstage). Our Pat had a load of soul records that he used to buy on import from Robinsons Records in Salford or Yanks Records in town, as did Our Matt, and all of them were into Northern Soul. They were all a few years older than me, so I was exposed to all these great, diverse music styles and scenes at an early age.

My cousins were also the first ones of our family to go to
university
. Our Bernadette, Carmel and Joe all went, and Our Matt and Pat went to Salford Technical College to do art and ended up, years later, doing all the artwork for Happy Mondays and Black Grape.

Top of the Pops
was a big thing back in the late 60s and early 70s. I can remember seeing the Small Faces on there when I was only six or seven, and thinking, ‘Oh, they look smart, they look cool’, and asking my mam if I could get my hair cut like Steve Marriott. My other strong memory of
Top of the Pops
was watching David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust in 1972, singing ‘Star Man’ with his electric-blue guitar. I can remember that really clearly, because Bowie looked cool as fuck.

Seeing David Essex in
That’ll Be the Day
, when I was eleven in 1973, also had a massive influence on me, as did
Stardust
when that came out the year after. Watching those films made me want to be a rock ’n’ roll star. I had no fucking idea how I might go about it, and I couldn’t play an instrument or read music, so it was a complete pipedream, but it was one of the few things I could see myself doing. It was the lifestyle, as much as the music. I thought, ‘I fancy a bit of that.’ I can’t really remember wanting to be anything else. Although I’m sure I’m not unique in that. I’m sure every kid in the cinema was thinking the same as me. It was just like the tagline in
Stardust
says: ‘Show me a boy who never wanted to be a rock star and I’ll show you a liar.’

WHEN I LEFT
school I could read okay, but I couldn’t spell properly and I didn’t know the alphabet. I ended up teaching myself years later through rhyme, you know like kids do? ‘A, B, C, D, E, F, G …’ I didn’t actually get round to it until I was about twenty-seven years old and we started to make some serious money with Happy Mondays. I remember Nathan McGough, our manager, telling us one day that our company was going to be worth a million, and for some reason I thought to myself, ‘Fucking hell! I better learn my alphabet then.’

My problems at school weren’t simply down to me being a bit thick, despite the difficulties I did have with learning, because when I arrived at Ambrose High School at the age of eleven I was put in Set Two for English and maths. There were four sets, and Set One was for the brainiest kids, then Set Two was for kids who were pretty clever, but easily distracted. I clearly had some potential, but at the end of the first year when we had to do various tests on spelling and maths I didn’t do as well as I could have and I suddenly dropped down to Set Four. This wasn’t just because of the test results, it was also because
I
was a bit disruptive in class; it was a combination of the two.