Twisting My Melon (39 page)

Simon came round to Gaz’s flat in Chorlton and pretty much got straight to the point. He’s not a man for small talk. He asked me straight out if I was interested in getting Happy
Mondays
back together. I told him I hadn’t thought about it for a minute. It was less than a year since Black Grape had dis integrated, and I hadn’t really spoken to the rest of the Mondays since the acrimonious split seven years previously. The idea of getting the Mondays back together hadn’t even crossed my mind. But Simon explained his plan and said, ‘All I’m really interested in is you and Bez … and we’ll play the Manchester Evening News Arena.’ The Arena was a much bigger gig than the Mondays had ever played first time around, not including festivals, but Simon was convinced we could sell it out. It slightly amused me that the guy who didn’t think we could sell out the G-Mex at the height of Madchester now thought we could sell out a venue twice the size when we’d been away for seven years. But I didn’t have to think long and hard about it, I just said, ‘Yeah.’

It was pretty much purely a financial decision for us. It wasn’t an emotional decision about putting any unfinished business with the Mondays to bed or any such bollocks. I also never thought of it as a long-term thing, and when I first agreed to it I never thought we would make a record again. I did, however, regret that I had never got to play the Arena, as it didn’t open until 1995, by which time the Mondays had long split, and Black Grape never played there. So that was part of the attraction for me.

I don’t understand why bands won’t admit that they’re getting back together for the money. Why do they come up with these bullshit excuses about doing it for the love of it, or doing it for the fans, when it’s so obvious they’re only doing it for the dough? Yes, the fans want to come and see you play those songs again, especially if they never saw you first time round, but you’re not doing it for them. You’re doing it because someone has offered you a big fat wedge to do it. What’s wrong with
making
a bit of money? Especially if you’re on your arse and need a bit of cash.

It does my head in a bit when fans get over-protective about ‘
their
band’. You’re watching the band; you’re not in it. If you think we shouldn’t be getting back together for the money, then fuck what you think. You might have been lucky enough to see us back in the day, but other people weren’t. If you like the band and like the music, why would you begrudge us the chance to make some money out of it? We’ve got to live and pay the bills and put food on the table just the same as everyone else. If we got back together and no one wanted to come, then I would be fine with that too. If people are no longer interested, then there’s not much you can do about it. But if they are, and if I still sell out venues, then I’ll go and do it. People say what about the ‘legacy’ of the band? Please. The
legacy
? Bollocks.

Simon installed Neil Mather, who worked for SJM, as our tour manager, although Neil was much more than that really – he generally looked after us on a day-to-day basis. Then it was all about putting the band together and getting into rehearsals. Simon knew it was me and Bez that the fans would pay to see. He also knew I wouldn’t want to get Mark Day or PD back in the band, so we’d have to find people to replace them. Bez had a few reservations at first, because he was still smarting a bit from the end of the Mondays and how he felt he had been treated at the end of his time in Black Grape. He was more concerned than me about the re-formed Mondays just being a cabaret act, but he had a missus and kids, and his house in Glossop, so even though he’d published an autobiography called
Freaky Dancin
’, which Debs had ghost-written for him, and done a few bits of TV and columns in the press, he couldn’t really turn down the money on offer, so Simon negotiated a deal with him.

Simon had also spoken to Our Paul and Gaz Whelan. I’d not really seen much of Our Paul during the Black Grape years. He had split up with Astrella and was living back at my mam’s, and having a pretty hard time of it. He’d grown a beard and had tried to come off the gear. He suffered a nervous breakdown and ended up being sectioned at one stage, admitted to the mental health unit at Meadowbank Hospital in Salford and then moved to Trafford General Hospital, but he was discharged after they found out he was still taking gear in there. He’d also robbed a lot of my stuff that I had stored at my mam’s – gold records and awards – and sold them to buy drugs. On one occasion I’d been visiting my mam’s on my day off on tour with Black Grape and he’d taken a load of methadone out of my bag. Despite all that, we were still on speaking terms, just about.

I was pissed off with the way both Our Paul and Gaz had acted during the Mondays split, but when Black Grape became so successful a lot of the ill feeling over the Mondays had faded away for me. So by the time Simon asked me to get the band together, I was fine with playing with Our Paul and Gaz again. I think when Gaz came back to the Mondays he realized how lucky we were and how lucky he was to be back in the game. All he needed to do to get four or five grand a night was play his drums. It’s not a bad gig, is it? Playing drums for an hour or so for five grand.

Simon arranged a meeting at Jackson’s Wharf in Castlefield, with me, Our Paul, Gaz and Bez, to hammer out the details. It was the first time we’d all been back in a room together since the Mondays split. It got a bit heated at one stage, but we got there in the end.

We asked Rowetta back – she didn’t need much persuading – and I also decided to bring in Nuts, who I’d met in Ibiza. I was still hoping that me and Tom might get our film,
Molly
’s Idle Ways
, off the ground, so I thought if I brought Nuts into the Mondays, then we could get some publicity for the film off the back of that. Nuts looked great and he was a real character, but he couldn’t really sing, and he didn’t even know the Mondays’ records – it wasn’t his type of music. He didn’t last too long in the end, but he did a few gigs with us.

Simon then brought in Ben Leach, who had been in the Farm, on keyboards. Ben was also kind of musical director, so he needed the old master tapes of the Mondays’ songs, with the different parts on, but no one knew where they were. Factory Records had gone under and London Records, who now owned our back catalogue, didn’t have them. I think Ben ended up sampling some of the tracks from our albums that he had in his own CD collection and re-created them from there. We then asked Wags in to play guitar, and that was the re-formed line-up.

I never heard anything from PD or Mark Day when we reformed. I’m not sure what they could have said anyway. By 1999, so much had changed. We’d all moved on. Mark Day had already gone back into civilian life big time and was working. He probably wouldn’t have been interested anyway, because Simon wasn’t providing a final salary pension. We also needed a keyboard player who could program all the samples and sequencers, and I’m not sure PD would have been up to it. Last I heard he was signing on. They still get an equal split of the Mondays’ royalties, though, so hopefully their next royalty cheque was a bit bigger due to whatever uplift in sales there was after we re-formed.

We started rehearsing in a small room at Greenhouse Studios. At first Ben would rehearse with the band during the day, and then me, Rowetta and Nuts would come in at night. I think Simon thought it best to try and keep a distance between
me
and Our Paul to prevent the old frictions from surfacing. By coincidence, nearly a decade after we’d first been on
Top of the Pops
with the Stone Roses, Ian Brown was rehearsing next door to us at the Greenhouse for his latest solo tour.

Simon wanted us to put out a new single as a kind of announcement that we were back together and to drum up interest in the tour, so he worked out a deal with London Records to release a single and a new
Greatest Hits
album. I had writer’s block at the time, and the rest of the band were pretty cabbaged, so they weren’t going to come up with any decent new ideas. In the end we decided to team up with Oakey and Osborne again and do a cover of the old Thin Lizzy classic ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’, which we did down at Hook End Manor and Real World studios. Most people don’t know the true story behind that song and its Mancunian connections. Phil Lynott was the lead singer of Thin Lizzy and his mum Phyllis used to have a late-night drinking gaff in Whalley Range in Manchester called Phyllis’s, which was pretty legendary. It was a bit before my time, really; its heyday was in the mid-70s when George Best used to drink in there. A gang from Manchester called the Quality Street gang used to hang out there quite a lot, and Phil Lynott wrote ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ about them. At the end of our version you can hear me give old Phyllis a shout out: ‘Phyllis, this one’s for you!’ I didn’t know Phyllis, but Arthur or Jimmy Donnelly asked me to give her a shout out. They were brothers in the Quality Street, and Arthur was the father of Chris and Anthony Donnelly, who had put on some of the early raves in town and gone on to set up the Gio-Goi clothing label.

Our version of ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ was pretty terrible. Simon never liked it, and I thought it was dire, but it served a purpose. We actually got a
Top of the Pops
appearance out of it, which I couldn’t fucking believe! So although it was
dreadful
it did at least let people know the Mondays were back together and going out on tour, and the tour sold out.

We moved into a bigger space at Greenhouse and started rehearsing the full set, but already the old jealousy towards me had resurfaced. Part of the problem was Simon wanted us to play ‘Reverend Black Grape’, because it was a big hit, but Our Paul didn’t want to play it as it wasn’t a Mondays song and he hadn’t been involved in the writing of it. Because I’m not a jealous person, I didn’t really understand the problem with playing a song he hadn’t written, but it was tearing him apart, you could see that. Then came all the accusations about ‘
You’re
using drugs,
you’re
going to ruin this.’ I
was
using. But yet again, I wasn’t the only one. I was the one that admitted it. I wasn’t the hypocrite. Me and Gaz used to follow Our Paul outside the rehearsal studios and he’d be sat in his car smoking gear. We’d even film him sat there in his car having a whistle on the heroin or crack. Then he would come back into rehearsals and say, ‘
You’re
ruining this again, because
you’re
doing drugs and
you’re
doing that!’ I’d say, ‘Fucking hell, Gaz, you just stood with me watching him!’

Despite all that, rehearsals went really well and some of the songs were sounding better than they did first time round. Just before the tour started, Simon hired Birmingham National Exhibition Centre so we could do a couple of days running through the set in an arena-sized venue and get a feel for it. We were staying at the Copthorne Hotel in Birmingham and I remember Neil Mather moaning when we checked out because the band had spent well over a grand on porn channels over the couple of days we were there.

The first gig was at Hereford Leisure Centre, which Simon had stuck in as a bit of a warm-up date before we played the Manchester Evening News Arena a couple of days later. I was a bit nervous, partly because I’d not played live for a while and
partly
because I did quite often get a bit of stage fright, so I had to get someone to bring a tub of Valium down from Manchester for me. Then on the afternoon of the gig, a bailiff from the Nicholls arrived and tried to issue a writ on me, but he had to physically hand it to me and Neil Mather managed to keep him away from me, so it wasn’t officially served.

I’m not a real football head, as I’ve said, but we watched United come from behind to beat Juventus before we went on stage, which had everyone buzzing and the gig was great. Afterwards, we drove up to Manchester on the tour bus, and as I didn’t have anywhere to live at the time, I just slept on the tour bus for a couple of nights in the bowels of the arena.

It was a big step up from Hereford to the Manchester Evening News Arena, especially as the Mondays hadn’t played for six years, and again I had a bit of stage fright, but the atmosphere was great, and you could feel the goodwill from the crowd, as if they wanted us to smash it. It was St George’s Day and a Friday night, so a lot of people had been out all afternoon, which probably helped the celebratory atmosphere, but it was great. We had also reworked a few of the songs slightly, so we weren’t just rehashing everything. It was packed out, and probably two thousand of the eighteen thousand were on the guest list. Because United had reached the Champions League Final in Barcelona, we played the Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé song ‘Barcelona’ as the lights went up at the end. That wasn’t my doing – that would have been Gaz or Neil Mather, who were both big Reds.

We then did the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre in Glasgow and two Brixton Academy dates, but after Manchester I was less nervous, because I knew the band could pull it off now, and I knew I could. The fucking Nicholls’ bailiff turned up again in the early hours after one of the Brixton gigs, but Neil and our security managed to stop him getting to me,
and
he ended up throwing the writ at me and tried to claim he’d served it because it hit me. It was fucking ridiculous. We had to get the CCTV from the venue in the end and watch the incident to check if it actually had hit me, but it hadn’t.

We then went out to Ibiza to play Manumission. The brothers who ran the club, Mike and Andy McKay, are from Manchester and started off promoting clubs in town before they got sick of being targeted by gangs. After one particularly nasty incident, they simply jumped on a plane to Ibiza and never came back. The highlight of a lot of punters’ nights at Manumission was when Mike would have sex with his girlfriend, Claire, on stage in front of thousands of people. I don’t remember much about the gig, but I remember Howard Marks being there. We were only supposed to be there for a couple of days and I ended up staying nearly a week.

I still didn’t have anywhere to live at that point. The Mondays tour was only supposed to last a few months, but we kept getting offered more gigs. For about eighteen months from when we got back together in early 1999, if we weren’t on the road I would split my time between Gaz’s flat in Chorlton, the cellar of Muffin’s house on Rochdale Road, which was like a little granny flat, or Rowetta’s house out towards Brooklands in south Manchester, because I was still seeing her on and off.