Twisting My Melon (31 page)

Like I say, I didn’t want to make a clone copy of
Pills ’n’ Thrills
, but I don’t think it would have been if I had got my way. The album I had in my head then, the ideas and the sounds that I was thinking of, were basically what became the
first
Black Grape album.
It’s Great When You’re Straight …Yeah
! is what
Yes Please
! should have sounded like, and if the other fuckers had listened to me, that’s what we would have ended up with. They would have had a critically acclaimed No. 1 album. But no, instead I was outvoted and we went with their genius idea instead, and we ended up with
Yes
fucking
Please
!

When I got back from Barbados the first thing I did was go straight into the Chelsea Charter Clinic. Well, not quite the first thing. We flew into Manchester and as soon as we landed I did one from Trish at the airport, dived straight into a taxi and went to score. But the next morning Nathan picked me up and took me down to London. We went to see a consultant and he told Nathan that I needed to be admitted for treatment. You didn’t need to be a specialist to make that diagnosis, it was fucking obvious to anyone who looked at me. I was mentally and physically exhausted. I weighed about six stone because I hadn’t eaten hardly anything since I had left the airport to fly to Barbados six weeks previously. I had just been drinking and smoking crack and didn’t want to eat.

Unlike my previous time in rehab, I was ready for it this time and took it seriously. They got an American guy in who was a top man in his field, and he was teaching us all about what he called ‘Stinkin Thinkin’. He told us that one of the things that happens when you’re coming down is you start all this Stinkin Thinkin – thinking bad thoughts – and straight away I latched on to that and suddenly I’m writing songs in there, and ‘Stinkin Thinkin’ ended up being the lead single off
Yes Please
!

I can’t really remember all my time in the clinic because I was pretty far gone, but apparently I did a phone interview with Simon Mayo or someone on Radio One while I was in there and told them I was in the Lakes and all this stuff about
me
being in drug rehab was nonsense. Meanwhile, Our Paul had gone back to our mam’s to try and recover there.

I was in the clinic for three weeks, then Nathan came and got me and took me down to Newquay. The idea was that I would write the lyrics for the album down there. I was pretty fragile at that stage. There’s a story that I went for a meal with Nathan and I asked him what veal was and he said it was a baby calf and I got all emotional and couldn’t face eating it, but that’s bollocks. I’m from Salford. I grew up eating tongue and tripe, so veal wouldn’t have bothered me.

After Newquay we moved to Comfort’s Place in Surrey, which is owned by Andy Hill and his missus, Nicola Martin, who wrote all of Bucks Fizz’s hits, to record the vocals. I didn’t have all the lyrics written, but I had some bits like ‘Stinkin Thinkin’ going round my head. The rest of the tracks we just played and played, over and again, me and Chris and Tina, till I came up with something, and we just picked up every morning where we had left off every night. I was pretty clean, fresh out of rehab, but my head was mashed and it was just really hard work. I was drinking cans of Boddingtons, but I managed to restrict it to Boddies. It was just hard because I really didn’t like the music.

I took Kermit into Comfort’s Place with me, and that was the first time we worked together. Kermit, as Paul Leveridge was known, had been in a Manchester breakdance crew called Broken Glass and then formed the Ruthless Rap Assassins. Me and Kermit were smack buddies – that’s how we knew each other. I can’t remember where I first met him, but we were both heroin users, so you would bump into each other on the scoring scene. Ruthless Rap Assassins had also played on the same bill as us at Cities in the Park.

Comfort’s Place was also where I met the most obnoxious people that I’d ever encountered. Their names were Gloria and
Nik
Nicholl, and they knew Chris and Tina. If only that had been the last time I met them.

The Nicholls were tour managers at the time. I remember having a conversation with Nik and talking about Big Audio Dynamite. He started telling me the story of that Big Audio Dynamite tune ‘Medicine Show’, and he said, ‘That could have been a great record. I tried so hard to get that rubbish off the beginning of it.’

I said, ‘What rubbish?’

‘All that “to hang by the neck” and all that.’

I said, ‘
That was what made the record
!’ Because you’d be in the pub with your mates having a drink and when that bit came on, ‘to hang by the neck until dead!’, which is a sample from
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
, it would start going off! It was brilliant and all the lads would fucking love it.

But Nik was like, ‘Nah, that sample’s rubbish. You don’t want that on it.’

I just thought, ‘This guy is just a fucking idiot!’

So that was my first impression of the Nicholls, at Comfort’s Place. Before I knew who they were, I just thought they were obnoxious twats. More of them later, unfortunately.

We managed to finish the record, but I wasn’t happy with it. I liked ‘Stinkin Thinkin’ – I thought that was all right, but most of the rest of the album I don’t care for. I don’t even like ‘Sunshine And Love’, which was the other single. At the end of the day, if my lyrics hadn’t been so off the wall and my vocals weren’t in that oggy, shouty way, then it would have been a pretty banal album. If someone had written some nice lyrics and sung them in a nice manner, then that album would have been even more underwhelming; it wouldn’t have stood out at all.

For the first time, I kind of gave up, and I even let PD and Our Kid come up with some of the titles, like ‘Angel’ and ‘
Theme
from Netto’. With the previous albums I had really cared about them and made sure they were right, but with
Yes Please
! I just gave up in the end. PD wanted to do an instrumental that he could call his own and he wanted to call it ‘Theme from Netto’, so I was like ‘Fine, you want to do that? Do it.’ ‘Netto’ meant ‘nothing’ to us, so the title meant ‘Theme from Nothing’. Shit idea, but yeah, fine, whatever, do it. It was PD’s favourite track on the album. He even wanted it as a single. ‘
Yeah, that will get us a number one – “Theme From Netto”
!’ For fuck’s sake.

The song ‘Cowboy Dave’ came from what happened to Dave Rowbotham, who was an old Factory musician who had been in the Durutti Column and was nicknamed Cowboy Dave. He was a mate of Martin Hannett’s, and he was on the brown. He was murdered while we were making the album, found in his flat in Burnage with an axe in his head.

We all got pulled in and questioned about it by the police, because Cowboy Dave had been on Factory and involved with drugs. That’s where the lyrics for the song came from – the opening line is ‘Tell me what you know about Cowboy Dave?’ which is the first thing the police said to me. This copper just said, ‘Tell me what you know about Cowboy Dave?’ and I said, ‘Well, he whistled on the brown and his missus was a sex slave,’ and straight away I thought, that’s a fucking song. So the lyrics are just what was said in that police interview, pretty much word for word.

I always seemed to get dragged into stuff like that and questioned. After the Mondays got back together I was staying in the Renaissance Hotel in Manchester, on Deansgate. The hotel had stuck me on the top floor, obviously because they presumed I was going to be rowdy and partying. They put me next to these motherfuckers who were in and out of their room all night partying and partying. It got past 4am and I was in one
of
my nice heroin nods, when I heard all this screaming and screaming, ‘Aaaaaaaarrggghhh!’ So I looked out of the window and it was just getting light and I could see two dead bodies, one with its head twisted round the wrong way, lying on the concrete canopy over the entrance. So I rang up reception and said you better send someone up to the room next door because something’s happened, and you better look outside because there’s two dead bodies out there. Then I got me head down and went back to sleep for a bit. I got up a bit later and looked out of the window and there were police down there and the bodies were still there and it’s a fucking crime scene now. There were also police guarding the top floor of the hotel. I had a gig that night and all I’m thinking is, ‘They’re going to have me in all fucking day,’ questioning me and everything. No one had knocked on my door yet, so I waited until the police who were guarding the top floor were talking and had their backs turned, then I nipped out of my room with my bag to the stairs and dropped it right down the stairwell to the bottom, because I didn’t want it to look like I was doing one with my bag. Then I went back to the lift and no one stopped me, because they weren’t really watching and I didn’t have a bag with me, so it didn’t look like I was doing one.

I got downstairs and grabbed my bag, and rang Neil Mather, our tour manager, to come and pick me up right away, which he did. But when we got to the gig later that day he got a call from the hotel saying, ‘Shaun has got to go and hand himself in at the police station. They know he was in that room and he did one, and they want to talk to him.’ Neil said, ‘Listen, he’s got a show, and he wasn’t involved in the incident.’ They said, ‘We know he’s not involved, but we just want to know what he heard. Did he hear any arguments or anything like that?’ I wasn’t keen to speak to them, so I put it off, but in the end some Detective Inspector Somebody or Other rang Neil and
said
, ‘Look, Shaun’s got to come in, or we’re going to have to come and get him. It’s been four or five days.’ I just told them I had heard some noise from the next room and that was about it.

I didn’t know if these kids knew that I was in the room next to them, but what I heard sounded like people messing about and trying to climb across the balcony to my window. Maybe they were daring each other to see if they could get across or something, but it sounded like they were trying to get across. There was also something going on with the three of them – I think the two guys were bi and they were with the same girl or something like that. I’m not sure if they ever got to the bottom of exactly what happened, and why they fell.

When we finished the vocals for
Yes Please
!, we went to New York to mix the album, which I can’t remember much about, because I was still on my way back from rehab. I remember Steven Stanley, the Jamaican guy who worked with Chris and Tina on the mixing of the record – he was sound. Our Paul was there with Astrella, who was the second Yoko in the Mondays. You had Mark Day, with his bird Jane in his ear, and now you had Astrella in Our Paul’s ear, and the two of them in the corner whispering, ‘We’re gonna form a band together … we’re gonna be big.’

You could read all the undertones of what was going from the interviews we did around then. Our Paul said in one that he had five favourite tracks on the album before I put the vocals on them, and then realized what he’d said, so added something like ‘but then Shaun puts his vocals on and it’s like the cream on top of the coffee’. What he really meant is he had five favourite tracks and then Shaun put his vocals on them and ruined them.

The title
Yes Please
! came from something Phil Saxe, the
Mondays
’ first manager, used to say. Whatever you used to ask him, he said, ‘
Yes please
!’ really enthusiastically. ‘Do you want a cup of tea, Phil?’ ‘
Yes please
!’

When the press and reviews started to come in, it was pretty much the first time that the Mondays had ever got bad reviews for an album. I knew it was going to happen, I expected it, so it didn’t surprise me, but the rest of them had been giving interviews saying it was the best thing they had ever done and that sort of bollocks. I know you have to have a bit of bravado and say some of that when you have an album coming out, to big it up – that’s part of the game. But the rest of them actually did believe it, and I’m thinking, ‘You’re off your heads!’ But because they had been made to feel so special by Chris and Tina, and because I hadn’t got involved with asking Mark to change his guitar lines or asking Our Kid to play a different bass line, they felt it was more their record than the previous ones. I let them choose song titles, I let them choose the singles, and they felt it was more their record and they really did believe in it. So when it came out and it got hammered, they couldn’t take it and started to blame me.

All the press coverage we had got about the recording of the album and all the stuff that went down in Barbados had actually built up interest in the album, but the rest of the band suddenly decided
that
was why it was a failure. Not because when people got it home and listened to it they were disappointed.

When
Yes Please
! came out, Nirvana had just made
Nevermind
, and I could see things changing.
Yes Please
! sounded soft compared to Nirvana. All I could think was that if we had worked with Oakey and Osborne we would have ended up with something completely different. They always had ideas for new beats, so they would have said, ‘Let’s work with this beat or that beat’; ‘Put a guitar line to this and that
bass
line’; and we’d have gone in a different direction. That’s the way I wanted to work, because it was faster and more contemporary.

I pretty much expected it to get bad reviews. It wasn’t a good album. There were no catchy grooves like there had been on
Bummed
and
Pills ’n’ Thrills
. It had absolutely no character.
Yes Please
! wasn’t the Mondays. It could have been anyone.

Just after the album was released I got in trouble for writing off a vicar’s Lada while under the influence. I’d not long been out of rehab in the Chelsea Charter Clinic, and I was trying to stay clean and stick to the steps, but things were quite bleak with the band and I knew the record was terrible, so I’d had enough one night and just necked a bottle of vodka at home. After I’d polished that off, I decided in my drunken wisdom that I was going to get some gear, because I’d not had some for a bit. At the time I had a BMW 325i Sport, and Trish had a little Peugeot for nipping to the shops and stuff. The Peugeot was blocking my BMW in, so I took that instead. I drove out of Beeches Mews and on to Barlow Moor Road, and I’d only gone about twenty-five yards when I ran straight into the back of a Lada. I didn’t have my seatbelt on and my head went straight through the windscreen.