Twisting My Melon (33 page)

I was reminded of that a couple of years later when Michael Hutchence died. Most people presumed it was a sex act gone wrong, but I knew Hutchence – I’d met him a few times and I
really
liked him, and I knew he was taking ridiculous amounts of Prozac, silly amounts, which there was no need to take. So bearing in mind the effect it had on me, it did make me doubt that it was just a sex act gone wrong.

Inevitably, I had got together with Oriole when she was staying in my house in Didsbury. I was still with Trish when I had crashed into the vicar’s Lada, but by the time it came to court I was with Oriole, and that was our first public appearance together.

I got on well with Donovan when I was with Oriole. I saw Johnny Marr recently and he reminded me how I invited him round to my house in Didsbury because he wanted to meet Donovan and he was over staying with us. Johnny came round and Don was sat there with his famous guitar, the one with the moons and the stars on it. Johnny said I was off my nut and said, ‘You two have got to jam together!’ and found some old battered guitar that the kids had been playing with that was fucked – the sort of guitar that you needed fingers like fat chips to play anything on, and gave that to Johnny. He said he and Don were jamming for two hours, but I must admit I’ve only got a hazy memory of that happening.

I was still getting asked to do a lot of TV appearances after the Mondays split, most of which I turned down, but just after the court appearance I went on
The Word
. I was interviewed by Mark Lamarr, with Oriole sitting next to me on the couch, and it was pretty obvious to everyone watching that I was high on gear. It wasn’t the greatest interview, not helped by Mark being slightly sly and trying to be a bit arch, as if I didn’t know what he was doing. I talked about getting a new line-up together and mentioned they might be called ‘The Mondays’ rather than Happy Mondays. But it’s not the interview that people
remember
from my appearance on
The Word
; it’s the fact that at the end I got up and danced with Zippy and Bungle from the children’s TV programme
Rainbow
. There was a cheesy rave version of the
Rainbow
theme out at the time by some band called Eurobop and the Rainbow Crew, and they were performing at the end of the show. Lots of people saw that as evidence of how low I’d sunk, dancing with Zippy and Bungle on
The Word
, but that didn’t bother me. I think people presumed I was a bit wasted and jumped up on stage of my own accord, but actually the producers of the show had mithered and cajoled me into doing it. They would often do that on
The Word
– wind up the guests or try and embarrass them if they thought it would turn into a talking point and get publicity for the show. I think Our Paul said something like, ‘Look at Our Kid – he’s reduced to dancing with Zippy and Bungle.’ You could say that. But another way of looking at it was that I was still being invited as a guest on TV shows, while the rest of the band were sat at home and signing on the dole, waiting for the phone to ring.

Me and Oriole decided to head off to Morocco for a decent break. I needed to get out of Manchester, away from all the bullshit, and just recharge my batteries. We wanted to go to Jajouka, which is up in the Rif mountains in northern Morocco, where Bachir Attar and the Master Musicians of Jajouka are from. Oriole’s family had had links with them since the 60s. Before she met Donovan, Oriole’s mother, Linda, had a child with Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones, Julian Jones. Brian had recorded an album called
Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka
with Bachir’s father, Hadj Abdesalam Attar, in 1968, when he was the leader of the Master Musicians of Jajouka.

After Linda split with Brian Jones she got together with
Donovan
for a while but they split and Don married an American model called Enid Karl and had two children with her – Ione Skye, who grew up to be a film star and went out with Anthony Kiedis from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and later married Adam Horovitz from the Beastie Boys; and Don Junior, who became a model. Donovan then had big success, and a big hit with ‘Sunshine Superman’, and shortly after he and Linda got back together. I thought Linda was all right – we got along OK, although she was quite contradictory. On the one hand she was this quite mystical being, but on the other hand she would have dizzy fits and strops if she had to miss a shopping trip to Harrods. Their whole family were all very mystical. Linda thought it was hugely significant that she and my mam shared the same birthday. They were also one of those couples who had brought their kids up as ‘little adults’. You know, those hippy couples who say, ‘They’re
not
children, they’re
little adults
and they should be treated as such.’ Bollocks. They’re kids. Let them be kids and enjoy life while they can. But they didn’t, which meant, ironically, that they grew up to be adults who were still kids, in a way.

We were at Donovan’s house in Ireland one night and Linda had us all throwing these mystical stones across the table, and then she would work out what the stones said and the significance of it. She became increasingly frustrated, though, when these mystical stones basically told her that I was the one with leadership qualities and they should listen to me. She said, ‘No, that’s not right. We must have done something wrong. Let’s try it again.’ So we threw them again and got the same result. It was hilarious. She wanted these mystical stones to confirm she was a powerful guru or something and they kept telling her that I was the chosen one and it was doing her head in.

When me and Oriole arrived in Morocco, we had a bit of a
nightmare
getting up into the Rif mountains. That’s the area where a lot of Moroccan hashish comes from, or ‘kif’, as they call it, so like any area where a lot of drugs are grown, it’s quite dangerous. We were stopped several times by the army and the police at roadblocks, but it was more for our safety than anything because it was proper bandit country. We were warned that the bandits were up in the rocks, armed with guns, watching who came and went, so they took all our details and next of kin, just in case we didn’t come back.

When we got up to Jajouka it was great. It’s only a small village of less than a hundred people, full of musicians, bandits and weed. We were actually staying in Bachir Attar’s house, which was a small walled compound, with several rooms facing this courtyard. We had a great time there. I had taken some methadone with me, so I was off heroin and just smoking weed. The only problem we had was I got really bad food poisoning. They would kill goats or other animals and cook them straight away, and I obviously ate something that had not been cooked properly, and I was really, really ill. Fortunately, that was right at the end of our stay, when we were just coming home.

I knew I wanted to get a new band together, and within a couple of months of the Mondays splitting I pulled together a rough group at my house in Didsbury. It was quite a ramshackle crazy gang that came together for the early sessions – a mad mixture of musicians, misfits, mates and smack buddies, including, at various times, me and Our Paul; Kermit; Ged Lynch, the drummer in Kermit’s old band, Ruthless Rap Assassins; Craig Gannon, who had played second guitar with the Smiths; and the two Martins from Intastella, Wright and Mitler, who played guitar and bass; plus a mate of Cressa’s whose name I can’t even remember, a smack buddy of ours
who
thought he could play bongos. Bez popped round as well. Too Nice Tom was there filming most of those early rehearsals. Tom’s real name is Tom Bruggen, and I’d met him a few years earlier at a boxing match when one of my pals was fighting one of his fighters. Tom was from Burnley, but a boxing trainer at Champs Camp in Moss Side. He was also a lecturer in film and interested in pharmacology, although it was more of an academic interest with Tom, he wasn’t one for getting wasted. We got on really well, and we could talk for ages about different films. Tom had wanted to make a documentary with the Mondays, but then the band split, so he filmed the birth of my new band, which didn’t even have a name at that stage.

Our Paul didn’t last very long. I could tell that he didn’t really have any enthusiasm for the new band and still had this resentment towards me for the Mondays’ split, and he thought this new band was nonsense. He came round for a rehearsal, but as soon as I started saying to him, ‘Can you do this, can you do that?’ it was the last straw for him, and he just flipped. He started ranting at me, ‘This is shit, and you’re shit!’ and then he started to smash my front room up. He put a window through and then he went to the kitchen and grabbed a carving knife and came at me with it, and everyone else had to jump in and calm it down. I still didn’t realize how deep his resentment or hatred towards me was at that stage. I was just putting together a new band and took it for granted that Our Paul would play bass for me, but he was obviously out after that.

Our Paul went on to have quite a tough time of it for the next few years, wrestling with his habit, and even being sectioned at one point. I didn’t see much of him for a few years, but I would still see him when I called in at my mam’s because he was living there most of the time.

Not long after I started pulling the band together, I got a call out of the blue from Gary Kurfirst. Kurfirst was a big
influential
music figure in the States. He’d organized the New York Rock Festival in 1968, with a bill including the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, which had inspired Woodstock the following year. He’d also managed the Wailers, the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, B-52s, Eurythmics and Jane’s Addiction. He knew me through Chris and Tina of Talking Heads, but he was also a real music fan, so he knew the Mondays. When he found out the band had split he just put a call in to me to see what I was doing and if I had any plans. I hadn’t been shopping myself around or trying to speak to any labels in the UK, because it was very early doors and I was still putting the band together at that stage.

I didn’t tell anyone I was speaking to Kurfirst. The rest of the Mondays were still shouting their mouth off about what they were going to do and I just kept pretty schtum, and within a couple of weeks of starting those early jams at mine, I was on a plane to New York to sort out a deal with Kurfirst.

I’d been asked to work with a few different artists and turned them all down, but I did do one track with the Manchester band Intastella. I didn’t really want to do it, but agreed as a favour to them. I think part of them might have thought they were doing me a favour, the cheeky fuckers, but far from it. I’d had untold artists and different bands on the phone, asking me to work with them – much bigger artists than Intastella, but had turned them all down. But I agreed to do a track with them as the two Martins were helping me out with my demos at the time.

Because it was the first thing I had done since the Mondays split, they ended up getting the front cover of the
Melody Maker
out of it, just by me saying I was retiring from the game. Which was the only chance Intastella had of ever getting a front cover. I wore a suit on the cover and declared I was
getting
out of the music game, knowing full well that I’d already started what would become Black Grape, and thinking, ‘Just you wait and fucking see.’

Everyone had written me off. I even had Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus and everyone knocking on my door in Didsbury, believing what the rest of the band were saying, because they were in the press claiming they were forming a supergroup, but that was just drug talk. I think they did try, but that’s when Andy Rourke rang me up in disbelief because he found out PD couldn’t really play keyboards. I just kept my mouth shut, thinking, ‘What are people like?’

After the jamming sessions at my house in Didsbury we went into Drone studios in Chorlton to lay down some initial tracks. This was me, Kermit, Ged Lynch and the two Martins from Intastella. Basically, after I’d done them a favour and got them on the front of the
Melody Maker
, I said, ‘Now you’ve got to do me a favour and come in and help on these demos.’ I didn’t tell them at that stage that I had a deal in the pipeline from Gary Kurfirst; they just thought we were recording some demos and they couldn’t really be bothered. All I got from them was a series of excuses and half-hearted commitments. ‘I can do half an hour this afternoon’; ‘I can come in and do an hour tomorrow’; ‘I can’t tonight ’cos I’ve got to babysit for my girlfriend’; ‘I’ve got to take my girlfriend out for steak pie.’ I just thought, ‘Fucking hell, no wonder you lot are never going to make it in the game.’

Even though I didn’t have the line-up settled at that stage, or a name for the band, I knew exactly what I wanted it to sound like. Upbeat Rolling Stones meets Cypress Hill, with a bit of Serge Gainsbourg, Stereo MCs and a bit of reggae thrown in, but all reinterpreted in my own style. Basically, a similar approach to
Pills ’n’ Thrills
and just as diverse, but a little less
Balearic
and a little more hip-hop influenced, with a deep booming bass. Which is exactly what
Yes Please
! would have sounded like if I’d had my way. Kermit thought pretty much the same as I did. He had the same approach to ripping records and knew exactly where I was coming from.

I sent Kurfirst those early demos and he liked what he heard, so before I knew it I was on a plane to America to do the deal with him.

I didn’t even really have many discussions with people or labels in the UK, because Kurfirst had got in there so quick. John Price at Warners had put a good publishing offer in after hearing the early demos, but I was already dealing with Kurfirst. That was how quick it happened.

Kurfirst actually wanted to sign me as Shaun Ryder, as a solo artist, but I just wasn’t ready at that time to strike out on my own; I still wanted to be part of a group. Kurfirst wanted me to sign to his record label, Radioactive Records, but he also wanted my publishing and he wanted to manage me. But one person can’t do all of that, because there will be a conflict of interest. So in the end he brought in the Nicholls, Gloria and Nik, who had worked for him as tour managers, and drew up a contract to make it look like they were managing me, while the idea remained that he would still be in charge really.