Twisting My Melon (37 page)

I’ve had to go to court several times to try and resolve this situation. Before one case, Gloria threatened me outside the court as we were waiting to go in to have our case heard, issuing a veiled threat against my kids. But she was so stupid she hadn’t noticed the judge standing near us. I had, so I just kept my mouth shut and pretended to start crying and, when we got into court, one of the first things the judge did was reprimand her.

I can’t tell you the amount of offers I’ve had from people over the years to take care of them. But you have to say to yourself, ‘Get real. Is it really worth it?’

I only found out quite recently that at one time the amount that I owed them had gone down to only a couple of hundred quid or something, unbeknown to me. It was out of my hands, but there was a late payment, which was not of my doing and which incurs a fine, which incurs collection fees, more solicitors’ fees, which incurs interest, which incurs more solicitors’ and receivers’ letters and more handling fees, and so on, and before
you
know it I owe £20,000 again, and I’m being charged so much interest it’s soon £50,000, but I could never get a straight answer about how much I owed. This went on for years and years. It’s good business for the receivers when they are handling hundreds of thousands of pounds, so they don’t want it being resolved. It was in everyone’s best interest for the court case to drag on and on, year after year. Except mine. I’m the only fucker who was not allowed to receive and who was getting screwed. The receivers, accountants and solicitors did make more money than the Nicholls. These people have no scruples and they operate just inside the law, and even then they’re bending it as much as they can. To me, those slimey cunts are far worse human beings than any criminal from the streets of Salford. At least a bank robber has the decency to put a mask or balaclava on before they go to rob you blind.

That’s as far as I want to go into that really. But that’s the reason I was unable to keep any money legally for years. Actually, that’s not true. I was allowed to earn as much money as I wanted legally; I just wasn’t allowed to keep any of it. Suffice to say I found ways and means to survive, which I don’t necessarily need to go into. If there was a film voiceover at this stage of the book it would say, ‘A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.’ Most people would hang themselves in that situation, but I dealt with it. Most people in the country would probably go bankrupt and have their house possessed if they didn’t have any money coming in for two months. Try managing without any official income for twelve years.

But back to Black Grape. At the start of that summer we were asked to do a football song for Euro 96. I thought we were being asked to do the official song, but in the end they went for ‘Three Lions’, recorded by the Lightning Seeds with Frank Skinner and David Baddiel, so we released our song
ourselves
and it went Top 10. We wanted to call it England’s something and I came up with ‘England’s Irie’. Keith Allen had heard we were doing it and volunteered himself to help out on it. I think he thought he was the patron saint of football songs or something after he had worked with New Order on ‘World In Motion’. The rap that he does on ‘England’s Irie’ he actually wrote for me, but he wrote it in what he thought was my voice. He’d tried to write it in a Mancunian accent, which sounded ridiculous, but quite funny when he did it, so I said, ‘Why don’t you just do it, Keith?’ Joe Strummer was also on ‘England’s Irie’, although I can’t really recall the recording at Real World – it’s all a bit of a blur. I do remember all wearing kilts when we shot the video in London, which was Keith’s idea. We also did
Top of the Pops
and wore the kilts again, then me and Keith went out on the town wearing them afterwards. I had a really nice Armani leather jacket on with mine and some nice Patrick Cox black patent-leather shoes, so I was looking really smart. Keith was dressed pretty similar, but we didn’t have anything underneath our kilts. I ended up later that night in King’s Cross, scoring some gear. We walked into this off-licence and this tiny old Asian woman said, ‘What have you got under kilt?’ so I just flashed her. She went, ‘Oooooooh, can I have another look?’ It made her day.

Danny was based in Los Angeles, so me and Kermit went back out there for a while to write more material. We rented a really nice house in the Hollywood Hills for our base, but it quickly turned into a bit of a den of iniquity. We didn’t really get a great amount of work done; we spent more time partying, smoking crack and drinking Guinness.

We met Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode while we were out there and me and Muzzer had a bit of a crazy night with him. We went back to his house and he had two boxes on his coffee
table
, one full of heroin and one full of cocaine. We ended up staying all night and for some reason Dave Gahan decided he had to go out and pick something up. I can’t remember what, but it wasn’t drugs, because there was no shortage of them. I was sat in his house waiting for him and he ended up getting arrested on Sunset Strip.

I also hung out with Michael Hutchence a bit while we were there, as he had been working with Danny Saber on his new album. I’d first met him when he and Paula Yates came to see us at Brixton Academy and after the gig I went back to the place they had near London Bridge. I remember me and Hutchence being in Johnny Depp’s club, the Viper Room, on Sunset Strip one night and these two young American girls came over, ‘Hiya, Michael. Hiya, Shaun. Can we show you our tattoos?’ They lifted up their mini skirts and they had no knickers on and shamrocks tattooed on er, let’s just say a delicate part of the female anatomy. One of the girls was a senator’s daughter and the other one was part of Bill Clinton’s administration, I think. I liked Hutchence; he was a cool guy to hang out with. I even went in and did some guest vocals on one of his album tracks, but the album never came out because shortly after that he flew back to Sydney, where he died.

Having sacked the Nicholls, I was looking for a new manager, so I spoke to a couple of different people about taking me on. I wasn’t in great shape at the time as I was taking quite a lot of drugs. I remember going to see Danny Goldberg, the guy who used to manage Nirvana, and he was telling me about how he’d lost Kurt Cobain to drugs and he asked me if I was on drugs. I obviously said ‘No,’ but I was coked up to the eyeballs at the time and hadn’t been to bed for days. It must have been blatantly obvious to him that I was off my head.

I then met Richard Bishop, who managed Henry Rollins, and who I seemed to get on with. I signed a contract with him, and he managed me for the second Black Grape album, although I didn’t really have much to do with him. He liaised more with Muzzer, as Muzz and my dad had started a management company called Hot Soup and were now managing Kermit and Carl. Richard only managed me for a short while and then after the second Black Grape album we both felt it wasn’t really working, so we tore up the contract by mutual consent.

Back in the UK, I presented
Top of the Pops
at the end of 1996, as Junior Jimmy, with a tracksuit on. Which I really enjoyed. There’s a clip on
Grape Tapes
of me messing around back stage at
Top of the Pops
and making up a chart run-down on my favourite drugs – at No. 10, two bags of brown, and stuff like that.

I spent the first half of 1997 recording the second Black Grape album and filming the part I had landed in the Hollywood remake of
The Avengers
. That was to prove the start and the end of my Hollywood career. The main stars were Ralph Fiennes, Uma Thurman and Sean Connery; then there was me and Eddie Izzard, who wasn’t as well known back then. Ralph insists on people calling him ‘Rafe’, but I kept forgetting and just calling him ‘Ralph’, especially when I saw it written down on the call-sheet. Uma was sound, but I never really spoke to her. What have I got to say to Uma Thurman? I was actually sat in her chair one day, by accident. You know when you’re shooting a film and the main actors have their names on the back of the chair? I was sat in hers by accident, and she walked up and just looked at me. I moved.

My big mistake was saying I thought the film was shit when it was finished, which you just can’t do. In the Hollywood
game
, no matter how bad the movie is, you have to go out and say you think it’s great. I’m pretty much cut out of it, if you see it now. You see me briefly as a moody dude on the corner, but they’ve cut out all the close-ups I shot for my dying scene. They re-cut it slightly, and put more Eddie Izzard in, because he played the game right and when he was asked what he thought of it afterwards he said he thought it was great. Eddie went on to Hollywood, but I never really worked in films again.

I did get offered a part in
The 51st State
, the film they shot in Liverpool with Samuel L. Jackson, just after
The Avengers
, but I was too preoccupied with sorting out my situation with the Nicholls at the time. When I saw the film I was a bit pissed off I’d passed on it, because I thought it was great. Mind you, it was probably great because I stayed out of it.

Acting is a weird game. As soon as you start to act, or you start to do what is your idea of acting, it looks like a school play. The way real actors do it is they don’t really act, or feel like they’re acting; they just submerge themselves in it. They just seem to be a different breed. The Yanks are better at it, even non-actors, even musicians. Look at Eminem in
8 Mile
– he was great. Pick an English kid, or musician, and stick him in a film and he looks like he’s in a school play.

Muzzer and my dad, as Hot Soup, were managing Kermit and Carl, who had a side project called Man Made. Well, I thought it was a side project, but it quickly became apparent they wanted it to be more than that. Because the first Black Grape album was a success there was interest in what they were doing, so they were offered a decent-sized publishing deal and they thought Man Made were going to be bigger than Black Grape. The American rappers Tupac and Biggie were huge at the time, and I think Kermit and Carl really wanted to be the
English
answer to them. That’s how it seemed to me. I felt they just wanted to get rid of the white guy. They’d been on
Top of the Pops
and done loads of interviews and TV with Black Grape, which is the first time they’d had that level of exposure and attention, and inevitably they got someone in their ear going, ‘You don’t need him. It’s you that people come to see,’ and they started to believe it. Same old story. I don’t know if part of it was because they saw Black Grape more as my band because I was the one who had originally signed. But that wasn’t important, really, because I was still splitting the writing credits and publishing with Kermit, and they were getting all the attention, so why did it matter?

When the time came to record the second album, it was a nightmare. We were recording down at Real World and it was impossible to get Carl and Kermit into the studio. If they were supposed to arrive on Monday, they would say they were coming Tuesday. Then they wouldn’t arrive Tuesday and say they were coming Wednesday. Then Thursday would come and go. Then Friday. They would finally turn up on Saturday and stay for a night or two nights when we were supposed to be spending a week or two weeks in the studio.

What bugged me was they were never open. I would have preferred it if they’d said, ‘We’re leaving Black Grape because we want to concentrate on Man Made,’ but they didn’t. They were sort of half-heartedly in Black Grape because that’s where they were getting their money and publicity, but really they were concentrating on getting Man Made going. So me and Danny Saber were left waiting in the studio for a week. I was pissed off at Muzzer as well, because he had a real conflict of interest managing Man Made. They were getting booked into a studio to work on Man Made tracks, when they should have been in the studio with me making the second Black Grape album.

After the success of the first album I really wanted to make another upbeat party album, but the vibe in the studio was hardly upbeat and it wasn’t what you would call a party. Half the songs are not collaborations like they were on the first album. There is none of that infectious riotous atmosphere.
It’s Great When You’re Straight …Yeah
! sounds like the best house party.
Stupid Stupid Stupid
sounds like the morning after the house party when everyone is coming down.

It wasn’t all bad; there were a couple of decent tracks. As I mentioned earlier, I loved the Marcel King track ‘Reach for Love’, which was one of the best tracks Factory had ever put out in my opinion, but it sank without trace when it was released in 1984. Me and Kermit decided to rip a bit of it for the track ‘Get Higher’, which became the single, in the hope that journalists would ask us questions about it and we could big up Marcel King and the record would end up getting re-released. Instead I got a couple of idiots complaining that I was ripping Marcel off. I said, ‘I’m paying homage to it, not ripping it off, you fucking goons!’ I’m trying to help it get recognized as a lost classic.

The mock Ronald Reagan speech sample on ‘Get Higher’ was just something that amused Danny and was for the American audience really. I also like ‘Marbles’, the second single; I thought that was one of the few tracks that had that infectious verbal sparring that the first album had. There was a bit of that on the chorus of ‘Squeaky’ as well, but generally you can tell that the band aren’t really working together any more. It was my idea to do a cover version of Frederick Knight’s ‘I’ve Been Lonely for So Long’, which worked out okay, but as ever we tried to rip it and make it our own rather than just do a straight cover.

The album title was what Kermit substituted when we were doing TV performances of ‘Reverend Black Grape’. He
couldn
’t say ‘Talking bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!’ so he said, ‘stupid, stupid, stupid’.

During the recording, in the time I wasn’t in the studio, I was either off getting gear or I was in bed, particularly if I was just waiting for days on end for Kermit and Carl. It really was a fucking awful time for me. The band was splintering and the music really suffered because of it. It just felt like
Yes Please
! all over again. It was a nightmare. Apart from this time it was near Bath instead of Barbados.