Twisting My Melon (38 page)

Just before the album came out, we released
The Grape Tapes
video, filmed by Too Nice Tom, which tracked the progress of Black Grape right from the birth of the band during the early rehearsals at my house, right through to
Stupid Stupid Stupid
, including the recording of both albums, going on tour and to America.
The Grape Tapes
is a pretty gritty, warts and all depiction of Black Grape. I haven’t seen it for a couple of years now, but last time I watched it I couldn’t fucking believe what I was seeing. It does capture the madness, the debauchery, the highs and the lows of Black Grape, but it doesn’t always depict me in the best light.

By the time we came to tour
Stupid Stupid Stupid
, the mood in the band had really soured. If the Man Made publishing money had already appeared, I don’t think Kermit and Carl would have even turned up for the tour. It was a nightmare. The atmosphere was just as bad as it had been on the last Mondays tour, and the writing was on the wall. On top of that, Oriole had gone to India to see some mystic she was into, just when I needed her. She rang me up just before the tour started and said, ‘I’m going to India.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s time.’

So I just thought, ‘All right, fuck you then. I’m going on the
piss
with the lads, and I’m going to have loads of lager and drugs … because it’s time.’

On the second to last show in Glasgow, I had an argument with Pat Warde on the tour bus, then Pat started rowing with Muzzer. I was in a right state because I was a proper drug addict again, the second album hadn’t been as good as the first one, all sorts of things were building up. Muzzer’s conflict of interest with Man Made was also really winding me up, so I just did one. Muzzer had a suitcase with the tour float and takings in, which he used to sleep with, sometimes handcuffing it to himself. He was asleep on the couch with the briefcase, and I just sneaked it off him. It only had about two grand in it, so I just grabbed that. I knew that would piss him off more than anything, because he hated being sneaked.

It was all coming to an end anyway, because Kermit and Carl were convinced they were going off to be big rap superstars. It was like the end of the Mondays again. It was a sinking ship. I was pissed off at Muzzer because he’d been my pal for so long. He knew the Nicholls were pricks, which they were, and so maybe he thought he should have been managing Black Grape, but I don’t think he realized how powerful Gary Kurfirst was.

Man Made then made the mistake of spending a fortune on some Motown sample, which crippled them, I think. It just never happened, which I was quietly chuffed about.

In January 1998 we made an announcement that Kermit and Carl had left, but Black Grape was going to continue. I’m not sure if even I believed it. I was in a real state by this stage. After the bitterness of the Mondays’ split, and being blamed by the rest of the band, I’d made this glorious comeback with Black Grape and then it had all collapsed again. Sadly, I’d also split up with Oriole.

I really needed to get myself off the heroin and I’d heard about these new Naltrexone implants, which were supposed to be a wonder drug, and decided to give them a try. I booked myself into the clinic in London and left Ireland with a small bag and just enough clothes for a week, because I was fully intending on going back. But I never ever did. I never saw that house again.

The Naltrexone treatment was horrendous. I would not recommend it to
anyone
. I’ve spoken to people since who had the same implants but had only been on heroin a couple of years, and they said it wasn’t quite as bad, but it was absolutely horrific for me. It sounded great, the way they sold it to you – that they would put you to sleep for twelve or twenty-four hours and speed up your withdrawal so you go through the worst while you’re out of it. That’s not how it worked with me.

I had the operation to sew the implants in, and then they wired me up and even stuck a catheter in so I could piss while I was still knocked out, as the Naltrexone triggered this quick withdrawal thing. I don’t remember much because I was out of it, but apparently I woke up and ripped all the tubes out and started going mental. It took six or seven doctors and nurses to force me back down on the bed and sit on me. I was going berserk.

But that was just the beginning. Then I started to come round. Fuck me. It was horrific. It was terrible. It didn’t matter how much Temazepam or whatever downers they gave me to help calm me down, it didn’t make any difference. I was climbing the walls. Literally. It’s the worst experience I’ve ever had in my life. It was terrifying.

Too Nice Tom had come down to pick me up and drive me back to his house in Burnley, where he kindly said I could go to recover. He really is too nice. They discharged me at 7am and Tom was there to pick me up. They gave me a big bag of
Temazepams
and downers to last a fortnight, but by the time I’d got to Tom’s I’d eaten the whole supply and I was still climbing the walls. Imagine the worst come-down ever and magnify it by about a thousand. I didn’t even get a chance to think about the mental side of it because I was trying to cope with the physical side. I was shaking. Tingling all over. Sweating. Shitting myself, literally, because I’d lose control of my bowels. Tom is a strong bloke, because he’s a professional boxing trainer, but I was just picking him up and putting him out of the way. It was a living nightmare. I was so strung out I didn’t sleep for weeks. I’d go day after day and night after night without kip, awake for twenty-four hours a day, just strung out. Screaming. In so much pain, with no relief. I was on Temazis, Valium, and I had to have injections for the diarrhoea. I wasn’t drinking or smoking weed, and I couldn’t go out and score any gear because I had the implants, which just make you even sicker if you try and use gear.

No one knew I was at Tom’s. We kept it double quiet. The worst of it probably lasted about two months, but it seemed an eternity to me. Two months with pretty much no sleep, just screaming night and day, wanting Tom to knock me out. At some points I was actually begging Tom to punch me and knock me flat out, because I knew that was the only way I could get some respite from it. The only way to make the pain go away. I was screaming, ‘
TOM, KNOCK ME THE FUCK OUT, PLEASE
!’ Because no matter how many downers I had I couldn’t get any sleep. Temazis. Valium. Sleeping pills. Nothing. Still awake. You go mad when you can’t sleep for such a long time. I don’t mean staying up all night partying. I mean days and days and weeks without sleep. Never underestimate how much real sleep-deprivation can fuck with you.

Eventually we got through the worst of it and I started to sleep a little and eat a little, but at first all I wanted was cold,
bland
, fatty food. I would drink cold oxtail soup from a vase, and I would cook a tray of oven chips and then let them go cold, and eat them when they were limp. Thankfully Tom had a big house, because his wife and kids were there, and his wife was actually pregnant at the time. I can’t thank him enough for getting me through that.

Me and Tom were also supposed to be working on a script for a film called
Molly’s Idle Ways
while I was there, although I wasn’t in much of a fit state. We did actually film some parts of it, including a scene with Billy Graham, the boxing trainer from Champs Camp, which we shot in a hotel.

One of Tom’s friends was Tony Livesey, then editor of the
Daily Sport
, who’s also from Burnley; they’d been at college together. Tony dropped round to Tom’s one day when I was staying there and we all got chatting, and a couple of days later he offered me a column in the paper. I didn’t have any plans to get back into music at that stage. I just needed a break from it. I hadn’t walked away from it for good, but music wasn’t on my mind and I was looking to do something different for a while. So when Tony suggested writing a column for the
Daily Sport
it seemed like a good idea. It wasn’t my dream job, but you never know what these things can lead to. So I agreed, and they even gave me my own
Daily Sport
business cards. The first column I did was in June 1998, when I reviewed the football singles that had come out for the World Cup in France. They gave me a guy called Mark Smith from the
Sport
to work with, who would ghost-write it for me.

Radio One then asked me out to Ibiza, as they were doing some live broadcasts from there and wanted me to go on Steve Lamacq’s show. Smithy came with me from the
Sport
, because the idea was we were going to do the column on the party scene in Ibiza. But as soon as we got there I was invited to the Radio
One
villa, and when we were in the car on the way over there he said, ‘Let’s see what shit we can get on these lot,’ which shocked me. I said, ‘What? We’ve been invited into their villa, mate. Even if you do see anything going on, you don’t say fuck all.’ What goes on tour stays on tour. I fell out with him after that, and that was pretty much the end of our working relationship. I think he might have told Tony Livesey that I beat him up, but I didn’t.

I had nothing and no one to come back to at the time. No house, no woman, no band. I met a guy out there called Nuts from Moss Side, who I got on really well with. He was a real character. He looked like a superstar and I thought he would look good in the film that me and Tom were making. So I just stayed out there and hung out with Nuts for a bit and partied hard, and before I knew it, a couple of weeks had turned into a couple of months. The
Sun
actually put missing posters up around Ibiza when they couldn’t find me to do the column, although that was obviously also a bit of a publicity stunt on their behalf.

When I eventually decided I’d better come back from Ibiza, I couldn’t go back to Tom’s because he’d just had a new baby, so I asked him if he could sort something temporary out for me. A stopgap, just so I had somewhere to go. He fixed me up with this house about half a mile away from him in Burnley, where he thought he could keep an eye on me. It was unfurnished, but Tom stuck a mattress and a television in there for me, and then the idea was I was going to get it furnished. I’d told Tom I didn’t want anywhere squalid, and the house was actually all right; there was just no furniture. It had electricity, but no hot water. If you spent a bit of money doing it up, it would have been mint. It had a massive cellar, which would have been great for throwing parties. But as it was, there was just me, a
mattress
on the floor in one of the bedrooms, and a television.

I’d only been in there a couple of days when there was a knock at the door. I opened it and there was a guy there, about thirty years old, and he said, ‘Oh, it
is
you Shaun … you’ve been spotted going in and out of this house.’ Basically, he was a local drug dealer who was a fan of the Mondays and Black Grape. He wasn’t even a big drug dealer, he was just a two-bob dealer, the sort of kid who buys a few grams and knocks it out to pay for his own gear. He was stood on my doorstep and asked me to sign something, and then he waved a bag of smack under my nose and said, ‘Fancy a smoke?’ and I just crumbled. I let him in and we had a smoke.

That was it then. He started coming round all the time. I started smoking the gear again, then I started smoking the stone. Then a couple of other kids, smack buddies that he knew, started coming round and hanging out. The house didn’t get furnished, obviously; I still only had a mattress and a TV. It just turned into a drug den. A couple of girls came knocking at the door, so they came in and we had a bit of a party, and it was all getting a bit out of hand. Burnley is a small town, and there’s a lot of smack about. And a lot of the local smackheads were fans of the Mondays or Black Grape and loved the idea of taking heroin with Shaun Ryder. It was just what I didn’t need, getting involved in a small-town drug scene like that.

The
Daily Sport
had given me a new guy called John Warburton to work with on my column. I got on with him, and I’m actually still friends with him. Warbie now writes for different comedy shows, like
Gavin and Stacey
. He used to come up to the house in Burnley, while all that chaos was going on, and we’d do the column from there. That was the only break from chaos, when Warbie turned up.

After a couple of months, what had started out as a bit of fun had turned into another nightmare. It was so depressing. As if
that
wasn’t bad enough, I then had what little income I had coming in stopped. The Nicholls were already taking half of everything that I earned, but I got a call from the
Daily Sport
saying they couldn’t pay me from that week because the Nicholls had got a court judgement saying they could now take
all
of my income.

I was thirty-six. Living on my own in an unfurnished house in Burnley. No income. Spending all day smoking smack. I had to get out of there. So I did one back to Manchester. Tom didn’t want me to go back to town, because he thought I would resort to my old ways, but it was a bit too fucking late for that. Anyway, whatever I got up to in Manchester couldn’t be any worse than the small-town smack sketch I’d got dragged into in Burnley.

WHEN I GOT
back to Manchester from Burnley at the end of 1998 I was crashing at my mate Gaz Marsden’s flat, opposite Southern Cemetery in Chorlton, while I sorted myself out somewhere to live. Within a few weeks of me arriving back in town, Simon Moran from SJM concerts rang me and asked if he could come round for a meeting. I’ve known Simon since he first started putting on gigs in the late 80s and always got on well with him. SJM had promoted most of the Mondays and Black Grape tours since
Bummed
, apart from the odd show, like when we first played G-Mex and Simon wasn’t sure we would sell it out, so we’d put it on ourselves with Muffin and John the Phone. Like any promoter, Simon hates missing out on a gig, and SJM went on to promote Stone Roses at Spike Island, Oasis at Knebworth and most of the biggest bands in the country.