Twisting My Melon (16 page)

The E had a big influence on the music. At that time we wouldn’t necessarily put the house music we were hearing in the clubs on at home, but then we were never
at
home. Most of our lives at the time were spent in nightclubs or at parties, so that was where we heard the majority of the music we were soaking up. We were either out or we were in the studio, and we would play that music in the studio because we were on the E. We also had all the records the DJ Paul Oakenfold had played in Ibiza that summer at the studio with us, because one of my pals had bought them all off Oakey in Ibiza at the end of the season. Tony Wilson later said he came across to see us when we were recording and just found us in a room in the
dark
, lying about on the floor with hundreds of vinyl records scattered around us.

Musically, the interesting thing for me about
Bummed
is that it came about just as the E had hit, so quite a few of the songs had been written beforehand. I’m pretty sure that Our Kid, Mark Day and Gaz Whelan hadn’t tried an E when we were first writing the songs, and hadn’t started going to Hot at the Haçienda on a Wednesday night, like the rest of us. Me and Bez had, and PD had a bit, but the other three weren’t on it yet. In fact, at first they were even a bit like, ‘What the fuck are you up to?’ We would be in our rehearsal room at the Boardwalk on a Wednesday, writing the songs for
Bummed
and me, Bez and PD would go straight over to the Haçienda afterwards to get on it, and the others would be like ‘What are you knobs up to?’ They did get on it later; they just came to it slightly after us. By the time we came to actually record the album, they were definitely bang at it as well.

So it’s hard to say exactly how much the E influenced
Bummed
overall, but it’s fucking obvious on some of the later tracks. ‘Do It Better’ is a total E track – it’s really hypnotic and even the lyrics are repetitive: ‘on one, in one, did one, do one, did one, have one, in one, have one, come on, have one, did one, do one, good one, in one, have one’ and ‘good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, double double good, double double good’. Everything was ‘double good’ to us at the time because we were on the E. ‘Hey man, that’s double good …’

I don’t think Hannett was particularly a fan of house music, but he was E’d off his head during the recording, so obviously this stuff was seeping into his nut as well. That’s what the E could do – music that you didn’t particularly like sounded great when you were E’d up. We were pretty much just listening to house music while we were recording and there was a brilliant
atmosphere
in the studio. It felt like one long party, which we just happened to be recording.

Driffield was a funny place. We stuck out like a sore thumb. There was a big army base in the town and I remember being in the disco there on a Friday night when a load of squaddies came in. I was with a load of our crew from Manchester and we were all E’d up. The disco was just opposite the studio – it was part of some crappy shopping precinct, a real towny place that held about five hundred people and had a DJ just playing chart music. He played ‘Push It’ by Salt-N-Pepa and ‘Theme From S’Express’, which were all right, but everything else he played was just dire chart rubbish.

This army lot, who had just come back from Belfast, were all looking at us and obviously spoiling for a fight. Bez was there with his big starey eyes, and one particular nutty squaddie wanted to start on him, because he thought Bez was looking at him. We also had a lot of the birds in the club hanging round us, so that was pissing the squaddies off as well.

There were more of them than us, probably fifteen of them and ten of us. If it had kicked off, it would have kicked off big time, because the lads that I was with certainly wouldn’t have backed down. No way. But we were all in a real party mood because we were on the E, and I tried explaining this to this ultra-violent squaddie who wanted to start on Bez. ‘Listen, the kid’s peaceful, he’s just off his head, blah blah.’ Then I just said, ‘Look, have one of these – it will change your life, and you’ll be looking like him before you know it,’ and I literally threw an E in this soldier’s mouth. He was so drunk he just took it. Now I used to give it an hour for the E to kick in, but he came back over smiling in much less than that, going ‘
Wowwwww!!!!! Gimme some more for my mates! Gimme some more for my mates
!’ So I gave him a few more and they
ended
up buying some off us too. Soon all of these squaddies were off their faces and they’re all hugging each other, saying, ‘I don’t want to go back fighting wars’ and ‘I don’t want to go back in the army.’ These are the same guys that had earlier been boasting about going to Ireland on a tour of duty, and they’re now all on this peaceful hippy vibe. Fucking hilarious.

It was just as funny invading Driffield during the day. Obviously the E hadn’t reached this small Yorkshire town, so they hadn’t seen anyone dressing like or acting like us lot, which you were beginning to see around Manchester. When our pals came to Driffield, they brought a consignment of E that should have been for the consumption of everyone in Manchester. So all our lot were E’d up the whole time. We would be in the car at traffic lights on the high street, in broad daylight, then next thing a top tune would come on the car stereo, and we’d all jump out the car and start dancing round it. Me, Muzzer and Bez and everyone just dancing round the car in the middle of the afternoon. Then when the tune finished, we’d get back in the car and drive off.

The locals would just be staring. We also looked totally alien to them as well, with our designer hippy gear going on. We would march into the pie shop in Driffield like we were in a Madness video or something. You know that thing that Madness do in their videos when they’re all marching together? We’d be off our tits walking into the pie shop like that together, but thinking we were just behaving normal, you know what I mean? The old Yorkshire bird behind the counter would be like, ‘Aren’t you a nice bunch of cheery chaps?’ as we were dancing in the middle of the shop. The yokels had no fucking idea what to make of us.

That was the thing with the whole E scene; it also changed the way people looked. If you look at the pictures of us before we all started taking pills, we all have crew cuts and stuff – that
Perry
Boy/casual look. That was what the police would look out for back then – crew cuts and casual gear like Burberry jackets or whatever. If you looked like that, you were going to get nicked for something. When the E kicked in, we started growing our hair a bit longer, into a centre parting like curtains, or even a pony tail, and our clothes were also getting a bit looser, and all of a sudden the police didn’t look at us. We no longer fitted their stereotype image of the lads who were knocking out drugs or trying to sneak a shop for a till or something. The police didn’t give you a second look. You could be walking down the street with your curtains and your loose-fitting gear on, or even dancing down the street like we were half the time, and you didn’t even register with them. You were off their radar now because they were still looking for the crew-cut scallies. Which was great, because our lot were knocking out more drugs than before, but getting stopped much less. For a while anyway. We probably had at least six months to ourselves, a little window when it was almost like walking round in disguise really, because no one else was on it yet.

It really was a small circle, a tight-knit group of people, who got into E in those very early days. There might have been a couple who worked in trendy shops, but most of those involved at that stage were not exactly normal working people. They didn’t have jobs, but always seemed to have money. Even if they weren’t selling drugs, they had their own ways and means. Some of those kids would just sneak any way they could.

I had grown a lot more confident in my lyrics by the time
Bummed
came around. It was just natural progression. I was arranging better and writing better lyrics. We shouldn’t have been on record before
Squirrel and G-Man
, really, because we
weren
’t ready. But by the time we came to
Bummed
, starting to record a new album almost felt like putting a pair of comfy slippers on.

The dynamic was still great in the band at this stage. They would all still listen to me, when I could tell which way a song should go, and that pretty much stayed the same until
Pills ’n’ Thrills
. I always wrote the lyrics but I was also quite heavily involved in the music as well. Most of the music would come out of jams in rehearsals, and I was often kind of arranging it as we worked on stuff. Mark Day would start playing something on his guitar and I would say, ‘When you do
that
, can you just do
this
instead of
that
… and then give us three of them there,’ and he would listen and go, ‘You mean like
that
?’ and do it. Then I would say to Our Kid, ‘You know what you’re doing there? Well just lay off that, and go one up there or whatever … or do that twice, then bend it down there and bring it back up here,’ and he’d quite happily do that. I might not be able to play guitar myself, or even name the notes, but I knew the sounds I was after.

It was only after we had been on
Top of the Pops
and made
Pills ’n’ Thrills
that things changed. Even on
Pills ’n’ Thrills
they still accepted my input. Half the songs on that album were written in the studio, and the music on at least four or five of them originated from the beats that Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osborne came up with. Our Kid would put his bass down on it, and Mark Day would put his guitar over the top. Songs like ‘Loose Fit’ came about like that. A lot of the keyboards on those songs were programmed as well, although PD would start thinking that he had written those keyboard parts. It was after
Pills ’n’ Thrills
became a hit, and the recognition that came with it, that the egos really came out and the dynamic changed in the band.

There was no way, after
Pills ’n’ Thrills
, that they were going to listen to me telling them what to do – saying, ‘Can you do
that
?’ ‘Can you play it like this?’ Once the band got recognition, things changed. You had other guitarists telling Mark Day how fucking great he was, people telling PD how brilliant he was, people telling Our Kid what a great bass player he was. When people started telling Mark Day, ‘You’re the main influence on this band,’ and other people telling Our Kid, ‘You’re the core talent of this band,’ they then started to say to me, ‘I’m not listening to you – you should listen to me.’ But back when we were recording
Bummed
, the dynamic in the band was still working and still really good.

The opening track, ‘Country Song’, was originally called ‘Some Cunt from Preston’, and is just the Mondays’ own individual take on country and western. By this time we had been rehearsing in the Boardwalk for a while and were really getting it down as a band, and were able to express the different types of music that we wanted to play. Before
Bummed
, we knew the music we wanted to play in our heads, but we hadn’t necessarily worked out how to get it out – both the band as musicians and me as a writer. But by this time we were all learning our craft. There is a line in ‘Country Song’ that says ‘Better put your house up for sale, the Indians are coming’, which is absolutely nothing to do with Asians or Pakistanis, in case anyone wonders. I remember thinking afterwards, ‘Bloody hell, I hope no one thinks that’s racist,’ but no one really picked up on it.

Like on
Squirrel
, again there aren’t any songs on
Bummed
that are about me, necessarily, as I wouldn’t write openly about myself, but there are a few lines in there that refer to me. On ‘Fat Lady Wrestlers’ the line ‘I just got back from a year away’ could be about me coming back from living out in Amsterdam. Or it could be about me coming back to normality after spending a year tripping my fucking tits off. Or both.

There are quite a few obvious references to
Performance
littered
throughout
Bummed
.
Performance
was a huge film for me and the rest of the band. Everything about it, from the cinematography and style, to the acid and sex scenes, to the dialogue. Every line in that film is a fucking gem really. That was us beginning to know more what we wanted to achieve in the studio; wanting to include some film references and knowing we could do what we wanted, really, that we didn’t have to stick to a traditional format. ‘Mad Cyril’ is named after a character in
Performance
, and it includes dialogue from the film as well: ‘I like that … turn it up!’ or that Edward Fox line where he insists, ‘I need a bohemian atmosphere.’

The song ‘Performance’ starts out with a straight rip from the dialogue of the film: ‘One day he was admiring his reflection, in his favourite mirror, when he realized all too clearly, what a freaky little old man he was’, and I added the ‘who is, he is, you is now’. To me that is just the same as what rappers do, nicking bits of dialogue and catchphrases from here and there, like magpies, and making it their own.

Side two of
Bummed
opens with me shouting, ‘You’re rendering that scaffolding dangerous!’ at the start of ‘Brain Dead’, which was a line lifted from the film
Gimme Shelter
, about the Rolling Stones gig at Altamont. A lot of those film references come from our big acid phase. We would watch the same films over and over – although
Gimme Shelter
is about three fucking hours long anyway – and pick out different lines that became sort of catchphrases to us. The lines in ‘Brain Dead’, like ‘grass eyed, slash haired, brain dead fucker’, refer to certain characters, certain people that were around on the scene at the time. ‘Rips off town, steals from his brother’ – I certainly knew a few people like that. But, again, they’re not about one particular person; they are observations of different characters that I would put together to make the song, like a little short story.