Twisting My Melon (30 page)

Chris and Tina moved me to a house on the other side of the island at one stage, left me there to try and write lyrics, and made sure I had no money to buy crack with. But I still had my clothes, so I just swapped a pair of Armani jeans and some Hugo Boss T-shirts for some rock. Of course, next thing someone spotted one of the locals wearing all my gear walking along the beach, and that became another legendary Shaun Ryder crack story, although it’s exaggerated. I wasn’t just left sitting there in my fucking underpants, smoking crack. I had other clothes with me, obviously. The locals all wanted to wear Armani, Hugo Boss and Stone Island, but it was prohibitively expensive for them to buy in the shops out there, which made it easy for me to do a deal.

The other famous tale was that I sold the sofa from the studio for crack, but that’s not strictly true either. It was actually a plastic sun-lounger from beside the swimming pool. One of the guys that I was scoring off wanted a sun-lounger, so I picked up one of these two-bob loungers to put in my car – one of the seven or eight cars that I wrote off while I was there. OK, I shouldn’t have taken it, but Eddy Grant who owned the studio wasn’t mithered about it. It was a plastic sun-lounger
that
was worth fuck all. But this American kid Bruce, who was working with Chris and Tina, stuck his nose in and said, ‘Hey, man, what ya doing? You can’t be taking that!’ I just said, ‘Fuck off, you knob,’ and hit him. Although, as I was cracked up, I didn’t just hit him. I threatened him with a broken bottle as well, I think, which fucking terrified him. I can’t remember the exact details, but it was something like that, and he went and grassed on me: ‘Shaun’s stealing furniture, man.’ I thought, ‘You mardy-arsed dick, it’s only a plastic fucking sun-lounger.’

I think the crack worked out at about 50p or £1 per rock, when it would have been £10 or £20 back home. The other thing I found you could use as currency out there was car batteries. A lot of the locals lived in shacks or huts without mains electricity, so they would run everything off car batteries – their lights and whatever they used to cook with, and so on. You could get a quarter stone or a nice bit of rock for a car battery. Every time I wrote off a car I would take the car battery out and swap it for crack. I think me and Bez wrote off the rental company’s entire fleet of cars. They didn’t have any left – we had written off every last one of them.

I mentioned that when we were in LA, Bez shouted to someone, ‘Don’t get in a car with X! He’s
lethal
!’, but I’d never written a car off at that stage, although I’d been in a couple of crashes. I made up for it in Barbados. Bez still wrote the first one off, though, when he drove straight across the plantation near the studio and flipped a jeep and broke his arm. That was madness doing that. There were great big ruts and holes that you couldn’t see, but Bez – crazed and cracked up – decided to just speed across it. So that was the first one. I rolled a lot of cars. I rolled one late one night coming back from some barbecue at the house where the others were staying.

I’d had quite a few experiences with car crashes. One thing anyone who’s been in an accident will tell you is that as soon as
the
car starts tipping over and flying, with you inside, it all happens in slow motion. The car is turning over and starting to roll down the bank or whatever, and you’re inside trying to hang on and thinking what to do, and it seems that everything is happening in slow motion. It happened to me the first time I had a car crash, and I survived, and when it happened to me the second time I had a crash, and I survived again, I decided that the key to surviving car crashes is you know you’re going to live if it starts going in slow motion. Some people might feel this is an odd way to look at it, but, you know, the way you think gets a bit distorted when you’ve taken large amounts of drugs.

If you think about it, the publicity that we got from the stories that leaked out of Barbados was priceless. We didn’t try to milk it; things just got reported everywhere. The rest of the band could never see the benefit of the amount of exposure stories like that got us, even if it was never part of any masterplan. Nathan wasn’t around in Barbados when it all started to spiral; he was back home trying to sort custody of his kid out, but to be honest I don’t think it would have made that much difference if he had been around. Things were out of control.

Because crack had hit Barbados, it had also affected the music that was getting played there. Especially by the young kids. When I went out in Barbados I found this scene where the lads, the older teenagers who were on the pipe at sixteen or seventeen, or maybe eighteen or nineteen, would buy reggae 7-inches but play them at the wrong speed. They were on the pipe so they wanted the music faster, so they would play these old reggae records at 78rpm instead of 45rpm, which made it sound like early jungle – it gave it a bit of a breakbeat feel. They would then toast over it, rap over it. That was the vibe in some of the little beach bars or roadside shacks that we went into. In
the
centre where the yachts were moored up, or Sam Lord’s Castle, which was a hotel in an old buccaneer’s castle, there was a totally different vibe, but we didn’t really knock about there. Most of the time we ended up in the old rum-drinking gaffs at the side of the dirt roads that were little more than shacks. Then we’d go and get our hair cut under a tree for 50p or something. There would be a guy sat there with a pair of scissors who could give you a real close crop.

There were quite a few shootings while we were there as well. I remember needing to score one night and waiting until we heard the gunfire stop before we could go out. We saw a gun battle one day – some sort of drive-by when a cop was shot. I didn’t think about how dangerous it was at the time, because all I was thinking about was the drugs.

The wives and girlfriends were out in Barbados for most of the time, and our kids. We did try and keep all the drugs away from the kids, but they were only babies at that time. Trish was obviously trying to get me to stay away from the crack as well. It must have been a nightmare for Trish, to be fair; it must have been terrible.

It was a beautiful place, Barbados, it really was, but the atmosphere amongst the band was dreadful. The hatred from the band was poison. It wasn’t like a bunch of mates any more. I was just getting it from all sides: ‘You’re
ruining
the band, you and Bez, just taking drugs and getting us bad press.’ The thing is, it
wasn’t
bad press, us being painted as rock ’n’ roll. Even if it did make us slightly comedy figures, it still worked in favour of the band. I can’t tell you how many times I sat down with them and said, ‘What are you
doing
? What is this
really
all about?’

There were things I didn’t notice at the time, things that Muzzer would point out to me later. We’d go down to do
Top of the Pops
and someone would open the door for me and Bez,
then
as we walked through it they would just let go of the door and it would close in the faces of the rest of the band, and they would have to open it again to come through. I wouldn’t notice stuff like that half the time, but Muzzer is really observant when it comes to these things. He found it funny, but the rest of the band fucking hated it.

Whenever they did try to act like Charlie big potatas it would backfire on them as well. One of the first times we did
Top of the Pops
, I think it was for ‘Kinky Afro’, PD gave them a right run around because he didn’t feel he was being treated like a superstar. The keyboard stand that they had supplied him with wasn’t the exact same stand that he normally used. Like that really fucking matters. But he refused to do any shots or stuff for them until it was sorted. So they spent about four or five hours trying to find this right keyboard stand, and moving things around and changing shots and the order, all to accommodate PD. By the time we eventually came to record our performance, they had wasted about five or six hours, and when the performance went out on TV, you couldn’t even see PD. I think you saw a bit of his leg at one stage and that was it. The cameramen obviously thought, ‘We’ve had enough of this little fucker!’ because he was making such a big deal about his bloody keyboard stand, and just deliberately cut him off.

The other big myth about Barbados is that I took the master tapes hostage from the studio and demanded money from Factory before I returned them. That’s bollocks. But it’s been reported so many times, and it was included in
24 Hour Party People
, so I gave up denying it in the end. Once something has been reported that many times, it just becomes accepted fact, so even if you know that it didn’t happen there’s little point in keeping protesting, because no one will believe you. It’s like Napoleon. Did you know Napoleon was actually five foot seven? Which was above average height at the time. But someone
said
he was only five foot two, and the rumour spread, and now everyone thinks that Napoleon was this little guy, and people have started referring to a Napoleon complex.

What really happened with the master tapes is there were all these rumours that Factory was going down, that the company was going to go bankrupt, and Chris and Tina were worried about not getting paid. There were also rumours that Factory needed our album to save them from going bump, and Chris and Tina could see what was happening with me on the island, and knew there was no way Factory were going to get a finished album for a while. Plus we were in Barbados, in the sun, where it takes ages to get anything done. It’s ‘
mañana
’, or ‘Reggie time’. Everything takes time in those sorts of places.

So Chris and Tina really started panicking that they weren’t going to get paid, and they asked me if they could say to Factory that ‘Shaun wants money’ and ‘Shaun has got the masters and is threatening to burn them’, because they knew Factory would believe them considering the stories that were coming out of Barbados. They asked me if they could say that, and I shrugged and said, ‘Yeah, go on then.’ Really, my loyalty should have been to Tony and Factory, but I was in a place where I didn’t want to be, and I was annoyed at him for putting us with the wrong producers, and annoyed at the band, plus I was off my head on crack, so I just said, ‘You know what? You say what you want. If you want to use my name, then go ahead and use it.’ So that’s what they did – they came up with that story, saying that I was going to torch the masters if Factory didn’t send over money. If anyone wants to ask Chris and Tina about that, then go ahead and ask them. They’ll tell you that’s what really happened.

It wasn’t even a vast amount of money – it was their wages, plus PDs (
per diems
, not Paul Davis), so it couldn’t have been more than about £10,000. Maybe it was £20,000, but it was
not
a huge amount. Tony said he had to remortgage his house to get the money, but I’m not sure that happened. As everyone knows, Tony never let the truth get in the way of a good story. He wasn’t shy of a bit of exaggeration. Not that the stuff we got up to needed any exaggeration half the time, because the stories were pretty fucking wild as it was, but you’d often find something else had been added on to the tale. It was like Chinese whispers: by the time you heard a story back, and it had been retold through six people that worked in and around Factory and the music business, what was a pretty fucking wild story anyway had turned into a ridiculously mental tale with all sorts of shit added on. Anyway, the money arrived without any problem in a couple of days.

I don’t think Tina and Chris were really scared of me. I think they were really worried more than anything. By this time, Tina wasn’t the rock ’n’ roll chick of the 70s; she was a mother. I’m sure she must have seen a few things in her Talking Heads days, although she did later say that they were surrounded by freaks and weirdos in New York in the 70s but it was all just a show – they were all normal people underneath, and she didn’t think people really lived like that until she met the Mondays. But then we really did live like that for real. If we wanted something and we didn’t have the money, then we just took it. I’m not saying that’s how you should live your life, and I certainly wouldn’t teach my kids to live that way, but that’s how we were.

I don’t feel responsible for what happened to Factory records because of
Yes Please
! and Barbados. Don’t forget,
Pills ’n’ Thrills
had gone to the top five and been a big hit, and off the back of that, our first two albums had also started selling again, so we were bringing money
in
to Factory, not bleeding it dry. Unlike all these other acts, like Cath Carroll and the Adventure Babies, who had ridiculous amounts of money pumped into
them
that the company were never going to recoup. Unlike fucking zinc roofs and £25,000 boardroom tables suspended from the fucking ceiling.

I didn’t put one vocal down in Barbados. Not one. I did try. I’m not a quitter, so I did try and write lyrics there, but it just wasn’t happening. I was dry of inspiration. They had finished the music, but I just wasn’t impressed with any of it. To me, we’d taken a step back. We’d made three interesting and different albums with
Squirrel
,
Bummed
then
Pills ’n’ Thrills
, but this just took us back into safe ground, which is not where I wanted to be. I could see what Factory and Tony thought they were doing – they were hoping they were going to get an album with mass appeal that would sell worldwide, and particularly in the States with Chris and Tina’s names on it, but I thought we needed another big, successful album at home before we made that push for the States.

Part of the problem about conquering America was that America wasn’t ready for the Mondays just yet. They weren’t ready for a couple of years more, until Black Grape came out. America hadn’t really had the acid-house revolution that we’d had in Britain, even though the music originally came from the States. Their music scenes and radio stations were still very pigeonholed and genre-specific. If it was a rock radio station, then it just played rock. They did have bands like Santana and Dr John who were doing freaky stuff, but they were pigeonholed too. If we had put out a record at that time with a sequencer and beats on it, then it wouldn’t really get played on rock radio, and it wouldn’t get played on dance radio either, because it had guitars on it. It was mad.