Twisting My Melon (20 page)

By 1989 there were other clubs springing up in Manchester as well, and most of them were quite moody. Konspiracy was a club below the Corn Exchange (which is now that poncey shopping centre The Triangle), near Victoria Station, which was put together by a mate of mine, Mario. Konspiracy actually used to be Pips, the club that we went to at the end of the 70s with the Bowie room. The main DJs at Konspiracy were Chris and Tomlin, the Jam MCs, who we actually took on tour with us to America. The other gaff that opened around the same time was the Thunderdome up on Rochdale Road, but I didn’t really go there much. It was a pretty moody gaff.

By the end of 1989 the gangs had started to come in the Haçienda and the club tried to clamp down on it.

Just after Dry Bar opened we played at the
Other Side of Midnight
end-of-series party at Granada. It was filmed in the afternoon and we played with Mike Pickering’s T-Coy and A
Guy
Called Gerald. They basically tried to re-create a rave in the afternoon in a TV studio. We did about four or five tracks, including ‘Wrote For Luck’, which was the track that went out on the show. Fair play to Granada for trying to expose a mainstream audience to what was going on. Tony probably had a lot to do with setting that up, along with Nathan, but Granada were actually really good when it came to stuff like that, and always have been, when you look at how they covered Dylan when he first came over, or the Doors. They even filmed a programme with Muddy Waters in Chorlton years ago. Someone at Granada always seemed to have their eye on what was happening with youth culture and they were pretty good at it. You wouldn’t get anything like that from any of the other British TV companies. It’s a shame they don’t really cover music in the same way now.

I don’t really remember the filming of that show, but that’s because I was completely off my tits.
Completely
. I know Tony introduced us, and Bez wasn’t there because he was stuck in Marseilles for some reason. I can’t remember what happened to him that time, but there were a few occasions when there were warrants out for his arrest for non-payment of fines or maybe missing a court appearance. He got escorted off a plane not long after that when we were flying to Ireland. There was a warrant out for him, so security and police came on the plane after we’d boarded and took him off. When we got to Ireland we managed to find a cardboard cut-out of Bez from somewhere and we stuck that on stage as a replacement. In fact, thinking about it now, I don’t even think it was a cardboard cut-out of Bez; I think we nicked a cardboard cut-out of a pilot from the airport when we landed, and then found a picture of Bez’s face from a magazine or something and cut it out and stuck that on this pilot and put some of Bez’s clothes on it. Anyway, we had this cardboard cut-out on stage as a
replacement
for Bez, and Macca, a pal of ours from Salford, got up and danced in his place.

Not long after that a young girl called Claire Leighton died in the Haçienda. It was the first death from ecstasy. By that time there were some pretty dodgy batches of E turning up. We always knew where our original ones had come from, but we had no idea about all the others. I remember someone giving me a pill one afternoon and saying, ‘Try one of these.’ It was red, I think. I necked the fucker and an hour later I was walking down Oxford Road and I collapsed. I was on my own and I just blacked out. I don’t know how long I was out for and I don’t think anyone actually tried to help me. When I came round there were a couple of people stood just looking at me. I got up and pulled myself together a bit and just got off. There were some pretty dodgy drugs going about at that time.

About the same time, I had another dodgy E experience when I was crashing at a pal of mine’s, Dave Reddie’s, in Walkden, near Little Hulton. I woke up in the middle of the night because I was being dragged off the sofa and round the living room by two big Alsatian dogs. They were pulling me round the room and ripping me apart, these two Alsatians. But while this was happening to me I sort of got my head together a bit and said to myself, ‘Hang on a minute – I’m in Dave Reddie’s flat, and I
know
he hasn’t got his dogs any more, he’s got rid of ’em.’ Next thing, I find myself on the floor in the front room of his flat, having a fit, convulsing and frothing at the mouth. But before that moment of clarity, I absolutely thought my hallucination was real. He’d actually only just got rid of the dogs, so you could still smell them in the flat. I must have smelt them in my sleep, and that smell had then triggered something in my brain, and the dodgy E had given me some sort of fit.

I don’t think I ever stuck three or four pills down my neck in
one
go. Even the ones that I knew were 100 per cent MDMA. I would probably start off with one, or even a half, and then build it up, so over a night I might do three or four. A few years later, people were saying, ‘I’ve had seven, or eight, or nine pills.’ I’d just think, ‘If you had put seven of those early pills down your neck in one go, mate, the top of your head would have blown off!’

It’s a cliché, but the Es were definitely stronger back then. When we first started getting them they had pure MDMA in them. A 100 per cent pure MDMA pill would go for £50 a pop. Really expensive, but pure MDMA. But all of those first ecstasy pills were really good. You could tell when they started changing because they became quite whizzy; the first ones were nothing like speed. They made you feel like you had to shower and be clean all the time, and your clothes had to be really fresh. Obviously in some of the photos of the Haçienda everyone looks really sweaty because it was so hot and you were going for it, but the vibe was all about being really clean, washing your hair often and having clean clothes and feeling fresh. If you look at pictures from that period, everyone is
obviously
off their heads, completely off their nappers; but they all look quite healthy with it. Fresh-faced. And bloody young.

I was coming out of a warehouse rave one night and I had about ten pills on me. These ones were capsules, rather than tablets, so I put them in my mouth just to get out of there, because the police were searching people. But by the time I got out, these pills had melted in my mouth. Not good. I was absolutely out of my mind, and it gave me a real shock. I was knocked sideways for days and ended up taking myself to BUPA to get checked out, but they said I was fine. I’ve had a few near heart attacks like that, which is one of the reasons I stopped hammering the pills and moved on to other drugs.

Nathan, our manager, had a girlfriend called Trish at the time, and they were always arguing. She was only sixteen years old and Nathan was two years older than me. I was always saying to Nath, ‘Get rid of her! You’re always arguing and she’s only a kid.’ She was one of them who was always moaning, ‘Why aren’t you taking me out tonight?’ when Nathan would have a gig on, or have a meeting in London or something.

Around the same time, me and Muzz were in the Haçienda one night and I said, ‘Do you know what? I’m bit fed up of just shagging birds now. I want a serious girlfriend.’ So we set up a double date with two girls we knew from the Haçi who were best mates and both called Joanne. Muzzer ended up marrying his Joanne, but mine blew me out. Joanne was lovely but she wasn’t going to take any nonsense. The band had just started to really take off, and she knew exactly what I was like and what she would be letting herself in for, and there’s no way she would have put up with me shagging around. She was too strong a woman to put up with any shit.

So she went off and eventually got married to someone else, and had a kid, Oliver, and then got divorced a while later. But she never really went out of my life, because we always had mutual friends, and she used to come to Happy Mondays and Black Grape gigs.

After Joanne had blown me out, Nathan did finish with Trish, and I was still looking for a girlfriend so I jumped straight in there. She was quite tall, Trish, so you wouldn’t necessarily know she was so young. She was from Old Trafford and went to a comprehensive school and grew up in a council house, but her family, the McNamaras, came from money, back in Ireland. Trish had two sisters, Paula and Ursula, and her old bloke had died just before she arrived. His brothers had a huge construction firm and worked on the motorways. When we
were
on the road, I would always spot their names when there was a construction site along the way.

I was sick of couch-surfing and living in hotels, so shortly after Trish and I got together we got a flat in Granby House. It was one of the first developments of flats in Manchester city centre. They’re everywhere now. Every old mill and warehouse has been turned into flats, but back then hardly anyone lived in town. There was India House, on Whitworth Street, which was like an indoor council estate; Cromford Court on top of the Arndale; and then Granby Row. I didn’t really get mithered, living in town, because it was only our pals who knew I was there and we were a discreet little crew.

Granby Row was in quite a quiet part of town. There were a few trendy designers in there, including Trevor Johnson, who was a designer for Factory, a few business heads, and a few prostitutes who were making a lot of money. It was perfect for me, because I had both the Mondays’ office and Matt and Pat’s office on my doorstep.

Shortly after I moved into Granby Row, Nathan and Factory encouraged me to go into rehab for the first time, at the Priory in Altrincham. I’d been using more and more over the past year, but I still didn’t really see as much of a problem as others did. It was pretty much a total waste of time anyway, because I didn’t really understand rehab when I first did it. As far as I was concerned, I was there to stop taking drugs, so I couldn’t understand it when they wouldn’t let me have a beer in there. Seriously. That’s where my head was at, and how naïve I was. The whole idea of rehab was just above me at that stage. I didn’t have a clue. I would make a phone call to one of our lads and say, ‘Bring us a bottle of whisky in will you?’ Or ‘Bring us some beers in will you?’, and they would bring it in for me. As far as I was concerned, I didn’t have an alcohol problem – I was
just
bored being in bed all day. I couldn’t even see why the Priory would think, ‘Oh God, he really is an alcoholic, he’s getting booze smuggled in here.’ In the end they said to me, ‘Look, even if you’re not an alcoholic, there are alcoholics in here and it’s bad for them to even smell alcohol. And they
will
smell it, even if you’ve got it stashed in your room somewhere, because they’re alcoholics. One of the first rules here is that there is no alcohol.’ So, me being a bit of a spoilt brat at the time, I just went, ‘Fuck it then, I’m out of here,’ and discharged myself.

In September, Factory released the remixes of ‘Wrote For Luck’ after they had had such a good reaction in the clubs. It was released as ‘WFL’, because the original ‘Wrote For Luck’ had already come out as a single. Like I said earlier, I preferred Oakey’s remix, which was called the ‘Think About the Future’ mix. It sounded totally fresh and new and had that whole Balearic thing going on. But Factory wanted to go with Vince Clarke’s mix as the A-side, because he was a bigger name. It did OK, but didn’t do as well as we thought it might. I think after it came out, and the dust had settled a little bit, then Factory and Wilson came round to my way of thinking that, yeah, Vince Clarke’s mix was good, but Oakey’s and Osborne’s mix was the one that captured the new sound that was coming up and the mood of the moment. At least that meant they were more open to us working with Oakey and Osborne again in the future.

We then went into the studio to record the next single, which was going to be ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘Rave On’. We had written the songs before we went into the studio and they were probably the first songs that had been influenced right from the very start by the whole E scene. By the time we started to write them, everyone in the band had started eating the E, and was
being
totally taken over by the effects of the Wednesday nights at the Haçi. It’s fucking obvious if you listen to those tracks.

We recorded at the Manor studio near Oxford, which was owned by Richard Branson and Virgin, again with Martin Hannett at the helm. Martin used to pass out a lot during recordings; he wasn’t in great shape then. We recorded four songs – ‘Hallelujah’, ‘Rave On’, ‘Clap Your Hands’ and ‘Holy Ghost’, but the recording is a bit of a blur for me, unsurprisingly, because we were all so off it. Apparently I had some of our lot in the vocal booth with us when I was doing the vocals to ‘Hallelujah’, because we were trying to get that club vibe on the record.

Wilson was desperate for us to get a single in the charts at this stage, after ‘WFL’ hadn’t quite done it, so Factory brought Steve Lillywhite in to work on ‘Hallelujah’ as well. Steve was married to Kirsty MacColl at the time, and she was a fan of the band, so she did some backing vocals on ‘Hallelujah’. Kirsty was great. We hung out together for a bit, and she even ended up doing some gigs and
Top of the Pops
with us.

At the same time we were down there recording, Branson was hosting one of his hot air balloon parties there. He was on his balloon vibe at the time, trying to break some record, and he had his garden party, which everyone right up to the Queen was at. Maybe not the Queen herself, but there were certainly elements of royalty there. It was one of those sort of parties where fucking everyone turns up. A proper circus. We were even on quite good behaviour, if I remember rightly.

The EP was called the
Madchester
EP. It was the Bailey Brothers who came up with the term ‘Madchester’ as a bit of a joke, but we were like, ‘Great, yeah, go with it,’ because Manchester
was
at that time, it was fucking mad. No one used the term in Manchester, unless they were a prick, but it quickly became adopted by the media, who lapped it up. The
NME
even
did a Madchester issue with me and Tony on the cover, in front of a Madchester poster outside the Factory offices.

It had only been six weeks since the ‘WFL’ remixes had come out, but things had moved on in that short time and it finally seemed like we were beginning to make a proper breakthrough. When it came out, the
Madchester
EP was our first Top 20 hit.