Twisting My Melon (27 page)

The first date was Whitley Bay Ice Rink. Apparently there was some bomb scare that was actually just a pissed-off bouncer being a knob, but I don’t remember anything about it. Mind you, at that stage, I would often not bother turning up for the soundcheck.

Around the same time, Factory opened their new offices in Manchester city centre, which they had spent a fortune on. Factory obviously had more dough, or were forecast to get a big influx of dough, so they were in a position to get mortgages or bank loans or whatever, when they hadn’t been before. Before that, the company had just been run out of Alan Erasmus’s flat on Palatine Road in West Didsbury. He owned the flat and rented it out to Factory as their offices.

There were arguments right from the start about the offices on Charles Street and some fucking ridiculous decisions. How anyone can try and blame the Mondays for the downfall of Factory when they spunked all that money on a fucking zinc roof for an office and shit like that is beyond me. I’m still not sure who decided to spend £25,000 on that ridiculous boardroom table that hung from the ceiling. Probably Wilson. Hooky was obviously moaning about the money they had spent on it, as usual. He probably still is. The first day I went into the boardroom and saw it, I just sat on it, as you
do
with a table, and
crash
, £25,000 worth of table comes flying off the ceiling. Everyone just went, ‘
Oh, for fuck’s sake, X
…’

I was being asked to do more TV, and went on
Jukebox Jury
with Barbara Windsor, some bloke from
Brookside
and Tony Wilson. Barbara was great, and her and me shared a bottle of champagne after the show. If you don’t remember
Jukebox Jury
, the panel had to give their verdict on that week’s singles, and they would have a couple of the artists there as secret guests, but didn’t reveal who it was until after you’d given your verdict on their single. They played a track by some American outfit called the Nelson Brothers and I said, ‘They look like they could give a good wabosh’, which means a good nosh, a blowjob. But the producers didn’t know what it meant and kept it in. Actually, although I don’t think they had heard it called that before, they weren’t thick, so they probably had an idea of what it meant but decided to keep it in there anyway. A lot of American musicians are not wet studenty kids; they often come from rough parts of the States. I don’t particularly know much about the Nelson Brothers, but when I said that they gave me a stare that basically said, ‘Do you want a fight?’ I never saw them after the show, though, so luckily nothing happened.

They also showed a Paul McCartney video and I said something like ‘That looks like more of McCartney’s illegitimate children,’ but they cut that from the show – it never went out. Not long after that, McCartney said in an interview that he’d seen the Mondays on TV and that they reminded him of ‘the Beatles in our
Magical Mystery Tour
phase’, which was mega to us. For Paul McCartney to have even
heard
of us was brilliant. I was like ‘Wow! Paul McCartney’s heard of us!’ I thought the
Magical Mystery Tour
was great as well. I don’t know if McCartney does. It might have been one of the Beatles
phases
he wasn’t that wild about, which would have changed what he meant. But I was into it, and just the fact that McCartney had even heard of us and heard our music was mega.

I met McCartney several times, a few years later, when I was in my thirties and I wasn’t in great shape. It’s terrible really, looking at those pictures now. He’s twenty years older than me, so he must have been in his late fifties then and I was in my late thirties, but he looks much healthier and younger than I do. I look fucked. It’s embarrassing. He must have wondered what the fuck I was on. He was always sound with me, though. He knew Nathan was the Mondays’ manager, and there were rumours and stories in various Beatles books about Nathan’s mum, Thelma Pickles, having a thing with McCartney back in the day.

At the end of 1990, I was asked to do a photo shoot for
Vox
magazine, which was like a monthly magazine version of the
NME
. They asked a few of us to be photographed with an object that had been ‘particularly significant’ to you in the last twelve months and explain why. Bernard Sumner chose his fake Rolex, Johnny Marr chose his Chevignon shades, and Tim Booth from James painted ‘crude’ on his chest in oil as some comment against the Gulf War. I chose Kit Kats and my explanation was ‘They’ve kept me going through our long arduous tours this year.’ It was a little in-joke that I thought everyone would get, but hardly anyone did. It wasn’t the fucking Kit Kats that kept me going; it was the tinfoil wrapper. Think about it. If you’re on tour or something, you can’t necessarily buy a big roll of tinfoil at an airport or a motorway service station, because it’s not stocked everywhere. But Kit Kats are. It can also bring it a bit on top if you look like me and just march into a shop somewhere just to buy a roll of tinfoil
and
nothing else. Unless they’re pretty fucking stupid, the people in the shop will have a good idea of what you’re up to. But Kit Kats are sold at garages, off-licences, everywhere, so they were a bit of a godsend. That was one of the reasons they changed the Kit Kat wrapper to the new-fangled one they have now. I think they changed it in Amsterdam first, and then they changed it over here later. The hilarious thing was, after the magazine came out fucking boxes and boxes of Kit Kats turned up at the Happy Mondays office, from Nestlé, who were made up because they thought I was bang into Kit Kats.

On Christmas Day 1990 I got a right kicking. This new party had started on Epping Walk in Hulme, which we used to go to. Like The Kitchen, it was in one of the disused flats. Two kids called Billy Caldwell and Nipper used to DJ there. I think it was the only party that was going on that Christmas Day, so me, Muzzer and our mate Foley headed down there. People forget how dodgy Hulme was back then; you had to watch your back, because it was pretty lawless. Epping Walk had not been going on long, but it was opposite this Irish boozer and they were obviously sick of the music banging out of there all night, so decided to do something about it and got a firm together. Me, Muzz and Foley were just arriving and this bunch of motherfuckers jumped us. I’ve no idea how many there were, but there must have been about a dozen pretty handy Irish blokes. They just jumped us from nowhere. Foley managed to get away, but me and Muzz were getting a right kicking. I had about three of them on me and I was trying to fight them off – it was really on top. Thank fuck Muzz was there. He basically got the better of the three or four of them he was up against and then came to rescue me. In the end he almost threw me over his shoulder and we did one with Foley, but we did get a bit of a hiding from those motherfuckers.

In January, we played the Great British Music Weekend at Wembley Arena, which was broadcast on Radio One and hosted by Jonathan King. People forget how big Jonathan King was. He was huge at one stage, like Steve Wright and Paul Gambaccini rolled into one, and he wrote a lot of hits and had some big TV shows. I remember him making an obvious effort to keep his distance from us that day. He clearly didn’t like us, and preferred hanging out with the younger boys in other groups. Which doesn’t surprise me, knowing what we know now.

We had a slight problem with ‘Step On’ during the gig, which we stopped after about thirty seconds because someone fucked up, even though it was being broadcast live. We had to have a sit down with the band after the gig and decide that we weren’t going to do that any more, that if there was a slight problem with the sound or something we would just carry on, otherwise it looks really unprofessional. If you make a slight mistake and carry on, half the audience won’t even notice, but everyone obviously notices if you stop and start the song again. I went to see Ian Brown last year, at the Manchester Evening News Arena, and he did that twice, stopped a song because he wasn’t happy, which I thought was really funny, because the way Ian does it, it’s almost part of his act.

Towards the end of January, we had a mental trip to Brazil. We were playing the huge Rock in Rio gig at the Maracanã stadium. It was our first time in South America, and along with all our lot there were a few journalists on the plane with us, including James Brown from the
NME
and Piers Morgan from the
Sun
. James Brown was just starting talking about this magazine he was going to do, which was what ended up being
Loaded
. Piers actually seemed all right, considering everyone had told us that these tabloid journalists were absolute
mother-fuckers
. He was sat near to Paul Davis on the plane at one stage, and PD just pulled out a big bag of coke and got stuck right in, there and then, on the plane. Just put a towel over his head and started snorting his little head off. Well, snorting his big head off.

We were all in first class or business class, and when we landed in Rio the plane was boarded by all these military-type geezers in sunglasses and these other serious-looking guys in dark suits. They all marched on the plane shouting, ‘Who are Happy Mondays? Where iz Happy Mondays?’ and we were all thinking ‘
Fuuuck
!’ So the band and all our crew had to stand up while everyone else on the plane was still sat down, and we were marched off the plane. We were led down this corridor into the airport and through this door, and we were all whispering to each other:

‘
Shhhhhh … who’s got gear on them
?’

‘
Why did you bring fucking cocaine to Brazil, you fucking prick
?’

‘
What have you got on you
?’

‘
Why have you brought weed with you
?’

‘
What have you got up your jacksie
?’

They opened another door, and there was another room with more security guards, then we went through yet another door and down another corridor. We had to wait a bit, then we were marched off down yet another corridor and round a corner where we found our luggage waiting for us. This guy goes, ‘Pick it up!’, so we grab it and follow him, thinking, ‘We’re
fucked
here.’ Then all of a sudden this door opens and all we can see is beaming sunshine. It was a real
Midnight Express
moment, you know when that guy Billy finally escapes into the daylight at the end? This guy just pointed and said, ‘Your coach … you go now!’ We couldn’t believe our fucking luck. We didn’t go through passport control or fuck all. They just
escorted
us off the plane and whisked us straight through the airport.

Then we got on the coach and there were all these screaming girls surrounding us like we’re the Beatles or something, and all these women in their late twenties and thirties holding their bloody babies up to us. I just thought, ‘
What the fuck
?!’ Bands talk about being mobbed in Japan, but I think that reception in Brazil was the maddest one we ever got.

Once we got on the road, someone handed us the local newspaper and the headline on the front page was ‘ECSTASY DEALERS COME TO RIO!’ Someone translated the story for us and it said something like, ‘Big-time English dealers are planning to flood Rio with 25,000 ecstasy pills’. That was probably my fault. I’d done some telephone interviews with the Brazilian press before we came. I thought this one geezer I was speaking to was a music journalist, so I was just having a laugh with him on the phone. He said ‘So, you will bring ecstasy with you to Brazil, yes?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, course mate, I’m going to bring fucking tons of it with me! Do you want some? I’ll bring you some over!’ I was just having a laugh with him, having a bit of a nobble. But this guy had then gone and sold it to the Brazilian equivalent of the tabloids and they’d done a huge story on it.

We found out a little later that it was a pal of ours who had arranged for us to get whisked through security. He was over in Rio and had a few business things going on there and was quite cosy with the chief of police. He saw this headline in the paper and thought, ‘Uh-oh,’ and could see it might be a bit on top for us when we arrived, so he made a few calls to his contacts and arranged for us to be whisked straight through the airport. What a legend.

All the bands that were playing the Rock in Rio festival were put in the same hotel, apart from us and Guns ’n’ Roses; they
stuck
us both together, out of the way, because they thought we would be causing mither. While we were there, we went round to the Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs’s house for a barbecue. Piers Morgan actually set that up so he could get a picture for the
Sun
. Ronnie was great – we got on well because he was a fellow Leo.

Rio itself was pretty hardcore. You weren’t supposed to go down to the beach or wander about town because of the danger of being mugged. At that time people were being held up with syringes full of blood. The muggers would threaten you with them because AIDS was a big concern. We were fine, though, because our pal out there had a lot of contacts and was well known as a character that you shouldn’t mess with, so we got to see a lot of places where Westerners and tourists would never go.

One night we went to this club called Help, which was like nothing else I’ve ever seen. It was wild, and it was full of prostitutes. Jayne Houghton, who was doing our PR at the time, was with us, and because we were talking to her and she was a white girl with blonde hair, all the Brazilian prostitutes thought she was a German prostitute who was bagging all the men. Jayne is a mouthy Leeds bird, who doesn’t normally take much shit, but I had to explain to her: ‘Jayne, look, I know you think you’re hard and you’re from Leeds, but these girls will fucking kill you. I mean, actually,
literally
kill you.’ She ended up getting held up at knifepoint in the toilet. I had to rescue her and I just said to her, ‘Jayne, be quiet
now
. Shut your fucking mouth
now
. This is not Friday night in Leeds, this is
serious
.’ It really was that on top in there. These girls would have cut Jayne’s throat without even thinking about it; they were in a completely different fucking league.