Twisting My Melon (6 page)

Pips was great; it was one of our favourite hang-outs in town. It had eleven bars spread across nine different rooms, playing nine different types of music, including a Roxy and Bowie
room
, a disco room, a pop room, and so on. We used to hang out in the Roxy and Bowie room, which was the coolest. And we might show our faces in the pop room, depending on where the birds were. A lot of the Roxy and Bowie fans would get all dressed up to go down to Pips, but we didn’t; we were more on the Perry Boy vibe. The Perry Boys were the original scallies, influenced by football terrace culture, who later became Pure Boys. By 1978 we would have side partings and a Fred Perry top, or if you were really lucky a Lacoste top. That was our look at the time.

By this stage we were really into clothes and had started shopping at the indoor market in town. There was a shop called Oasis (nothing to do with the Oasis high street chain), which the song on the first Mondays album is named after. A friend of ours called Si Davis worked there and the guy who owned it used to buy clobber off the kids who brought it back from sneak trips abroad in the late 70s. He’d have loads of one-offs in there, trainers that you couldn’t get anywhere in this country. Everyone wanted stuff that no one else had, so there were kids who would go abroad specifically on shoplifting trips and then sell the clobber on to places like Oasis. Stuff that was so rare it was like rocking-horse shit. I remember one shop in Manchester having two Fila shirts, which was a massive deal at the time.

When it came to going out, I kind of did things in reverse. When I was really young and had just started going out, I would go to more grown-up places, like Oscars and Rotters, not the punky places. I was old before my time really, from the age of thirteen to about seventeen. When I was fifteen I was going in working men’s places, drinking beer, seeing comedians, watching strippers and doing little marijuana deals. It was a couple of years later when I got into bands, whereas most people would do it the other way round – spend a few
years
into bands and then progress to the older men’s type of gaffs.

I ended up at the post office for about five years, and there’s no way I would have lasted that long if it wasn’t for the unofficial ‘perks’. When I started I was taking home about £17 a week, and I had to give my mam £5 for board, so after I’d bought my weekly bus pass there was fuck all left. Thankfully, being a messenger boy in the post office came with a lot of unofficial opportunities. In those days the banks used to send out bank cards along with the pin numbers, rather than sending them out separately like they do now. They were quite easy to spot, so I could pocket a new card and have an afternoon round the shops, buying some new clobber and even something for my mam. I could get away with murder. Because I had a uniform on, I could basically walk into any part of any post office building and no one would question me. So I’d pretend to sort a few parcels and then do one with a few that looked interesting. It was that easy.

Later it got to the stage when I would load a van full of parcels that were supposed to be for the shops in the Arndale Centre and take them down to a guy I’d met called Everton, who, like everyone else, did a bit of this and that to make money. He was a ticket tout but could get rid of anything I would take down to him. He’d just give me a couple of hundred quid and the stuff would end up on Moss Side market. Everton later came and worked as security with Happy Mondays.

Our Paul started at the post office eighteen months after me. That was towards the end of the 70s, when me, him, Our Matt and Pat started knocking about together more, and going to gigs quite a bit. We went to see the Buzzcocks at Belle Vue stadium when I was sixteen, in 1978, and that was the first time I saw Tony Wilson. I pointed him out and said, ‘There’s that bloke off the telly!’ and threw my plastic pint pot of beer
at
him, but missed. That was my way of showing my appreciation, because I thought Tony was great. He hadn’t started Factory Records yet, but we had grown up watching him on
Granada Reports
, and the music programme he had called
So It Goes
, was great. He had the best bands in the country on there, in my opinion, and a lot of them, like the Buzzcocks and later Joy Division, were from Manchester, which made the music business seem less distant. One of the great things about Manchester is it’s a big enough city to have a strong music scene, but small enough for you to feel a part of it, because you would see people like Tony Wilson and Pete Shelley from the Buzzcocks at gigs or around town.

We went to see the Ramones at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester when I was seventeen, which was great. Afterwards we got on the bus home to Salford and were on the top deck at the back. You could smoke on buses then. On the bus I met a girl called Denise Lomax, so I started chatting her up, and we arranged a date and I got her number. She was a really cool girl and we started seeing each other. She was two years older than me, at nineteen, and really into her music. It was actually Denise who first introduced me to Joy Division, when she lent me her copy of
Unknown Pleasures
.

At that stage I loved David Bowie and Tamla Motown and all sorts of music.
The Man Who Fell to Earth
, in 1976, had been another big influence on me, more in fashion than music. David Bowie with his duffel coat on and that wedged centre parting, like a mushroom centre parting, had a great effect on what became terrace fashion. But the two biggest influences, ones that made me want to form a band and be in the music business, were David Essex and Joy Division.

I never saw Joy Division live, but my Denise did. The fact that they were a local band made a huge difference to me. They also had side partings and dressed almost like we did;
they
had a slight Perry Boy thing going on. They looked cool.

I remember Ian Curtis dying. I was working at the post office and one of the older posties said, ‘I see your mate’s dead …’ I thought he was talking about a fellow postie who was a mate of mine and a bit mental, but he actually meant Ian.

As I’ve already said
That’ll Be the Day
and
Stardust
were important influences on me because they were about the whole lifestyle and fashion and everything that came with music. They made me think, ‘I’m having some of that.’ But it was Joy Division that made the whole thing seem like a more realistic prospect. They had a big effect on me. By the end of the 70s I knew I wanted to be in a band, and it didn’t seem quite such a ridiculous proposition any more.

BEFORE WE STARTED
Happy Mondays, it sometimes seemed that all we ever did was talk about being in a band. It was mainly me and Our Matt, and two other kids from Little Hulton – Martin Langford, who we called Langy, and John Jordan, who we called Jordy. Langy was a mate of Our Matt’s who joined the post office after me. In fact, he still works for the post office now. I saw him just recently at my Uncle Tom’s funeral and reminded him, ‘Fucking hell, Langy, you were in the band before we were a band, when we were just pretending we were a band, before we had any instruments!’ He was never very musical, though. He was a music-lover, but he wasn’t a musician, so I don’t think he worries that he missed his vocation in life.

We got our first gig before we had any instruments or had even played a note. Our Matt, the daft bastard, managed to blag us a gig supporting the punk rock band Salford Jets. We used to go and watch the Jets all the time, from about 1977 onwards, at the pubs on the top road near our house. They played all those places, right up to 1979, when they played the
Bulls
Head in Walkden. We used to talk to the singer, Mike Sweeney, after the gigs and one night Our Matt said, ‘Come on, Mike, give us a gig. We’re called No Exit,’ and Mike said, ‘All right, get your gear and come down on Saturday.’

After we left we were like, ‘Matt, you fucking knob, what are you doing? We haven’t got any instruments, and none of us can play anything even if we did. We’ve got no songs, apart from these stupid little rhymes we’ve made up, and yet you’ve got us a gig!’ So it never happened in the end.

Years later, when the Mondays had made it, Mike Sweeney said to me, ‘Yeah, I remember when we gave you a support slot and you played with us,’ and I had to correct him and say, ‘Mike,
we didn’t!
’

After that, we decided we would actually try and start a band, because it looked like we would be able to get a gig. I pushed the others into it, really. Someone gave Our Matt an old battered acoustic guitar that only had two strings on it, and I fancied being a drummer so I got myself a drum kit from a music shop in town. I can remember one afternoon trying to bang something out with Our Matt in the front room of Lanky’s house. Lanky got hold of an old guitar as well, and I can’t even remember what Jordy had.

I quite quickly sacked off my drum kit, because I couldn’t get into it. I sold it to a kid called Tony Martin, who is actually still gigging around Manchester in some sort of Blues Brothers tribute act, although he’s not still using my old kit, obviously, as it would be over thirty years old now. After that we picked up a little drum machine, one of the first ones that came out, and used that instead. I think my dad’s still got it somewhere.

We recorded a very, very early demo at my nana’s house, with just three of us – me, my dad’s mate Barry and Our Matt on guitar – and a drum machine. I had tried to write some songs, but I was basically just copying Ian Curtis. Barry was playing
some
basic barre chords, and Our Matt was strumming alongside him, while I was singing ‘Voices in my heeaaad …’ over the top of it.

Then Our Paul got a bass, and he learned to play much quicker and better than Our Matt, Lanky or Jordy. He couldn’t read music, but pretty quickly he got to the stage where he could play something when he heard it. So Our Paul was definitely in; he was part of the band. At that time we had nowhere to rehearse, so we would go down and try and jam in the front room at Lanky’s house. This was around late summer of 1980 and we didn’t even have a name or anything.

There was a bloke at the post office called Alan Day, who was sort of my boss. He was my AI, which stands for Assistant Inspector, and he told me that his son played guitar. I’d probably caused Alan a bit of mither with my various scams, like the Yellow Pages incident. When the new editions of the Yellow Pages needed delivering, you could book yourself in to do a few rounds and you got something like 10p for each one you delivered, so I booked myself in to deliver five thousand of the fucking things. At the time, the council estates didn’t get much post, so they would have more houses on each walk (which is what we called a postman’s round). On one walk in Little Hulton there were seven hundred houses, but they only got mail once or twice a week, whereas a walk on a private estate would only deliver to 250 houses, but each house would get mail every day. So I booked myself in to deliver Yellow Pages on quite a few walks around Little Hulton and claimed the money, which was about £500 – a lot of money back then – but never actually delivered them. I just dumped them. They were turning up on wasteland, in ponds, on railway bankings. I was terrible.

Mark Day was also a postie, and by coincidence he worked with my old fella who suggested we hook up together. Me and
Our
Paul went round to his house one day and had a bit of a jam in his loft. Mark was all right, if a bit dull, but more importantly he could already play guitar and he could read music as well, which none of the rest of us could. In fact, none of the other Mondays ever learned to read music. Mark lived in his mam and dad’s little terraced house in Wardley. The living room was only a bit bigger than a pool table, but they had a piano in it, which looked ridiculous. Because the piano didn’t really fit in the tiny room, they’d mounted the fucking thing on the wall. So when you came in through the door, you had to edge round this piano that was sticking out of the wall. I wouldn’t mind, but I never even saw anyone playing it. Maybe it was just a fashion accessory – let’s mount this fucking piano on the wall and take up half the room. A very odd set-up.

We came up with the name Happy Mondays during those very early rehearsals in Mark’s loft. Our Paul claims it was his idea, but that’s not quite how I remember it. I remember it as more of a joint effort. I think it was Mark who actually suggested the Mondays bit. It’s a terrible name for a band, really, but we all quite liked it for that reason. It’s a bit cheesy, a bit gay and it was kind of the opposite of what we were like, so we thought it might work because of that. We always thought it was a shit name, but that was kind of the point. We didn’t want a scally type of name; we wanted a name that jarred with us.

We started to practise in Mark Day’s loft through the end of 1980 and into early 1981, when we could get past the piano on the wall, and also we’d get together the odd time at my nana’s. Our Matt had a second-hand electric guitar by then, so he jammed with us now and then.

Eventually we settled on me singing. All of us had a go, but I was better at it than the others, and when we started trying to write our own songs I was also better at rhyming and coming
up
with the words. I never demanded to be the singer; we just sort of naturally reached the conclusion in those early rehearsals that I should do it – it just felt right. We played a few cover versions at first, including a couple of Joy Division numbers, as we had to know we could actually play together before we could figure out what we sounded like and try and write our own songs.

By 1981 I was properly seeing Denise. She was a pretty cool girl, Denise, and, as I said, it was her that first got me into Joy Division and bands like that. She knew we were trying to get a band together and her little sister Bev told her that someone in her class at school played drums. This kid was called Gary Whelan and she introduced me to him, but I actually knew who Gaz was already anyway. I’d seen him about because he lived near my nana and he was good at football. We had never really spoken to him because he was about three years younger than me and a year younger than Our Paul. I was eighteen then and Gaz was only fifteen and still at school. But when Bev introduced us he seemed all right, so I was like, ‘Okay, he’s got a drum kit and he can play the drums and he’s got a side parting, Farah trousers and a Pringle jumper … he’ll do.’