Twisting My Melon (4 page)

When you’re stuck in the bottom set and it’s clear that half the people are there because they’re not bright enough to be anywhere else and the other half are there because they’re too much trouble for the teachers to handle, you very quickly get to the stage where you go to school in the morning not really expecting to learn anything. I wasn’t stupid, I just didn’t pay attention, and after I was put in the bottom set I just couldn’t be arsed. So that was it. Once you’re in those sets, nobody cares if you’re there or not. Especially if they know you would only fuck about if you did turn up. By the end of the first year of high school I had given up on it almost entirely. There was always somewhere else to go and something better to do.

I was a bit of a joker at school. I thought I was cool, although I was probably a bit of a knob. But more than anything I was becoming a bit of a bad lad. I got caned almost every day. I would walk in some days and the first thing I would hear was, ‘Ryder, go and get the cane.’ I became so disillusioned with school that it got to the stage where it was a good day if I was told to go out to the playground and pick up litter. When I had to do that, a pal of mine who was also disruptive would have to spend all day painting the bogs. Being sent to pick up litter in the playground was great for me, as it meant I could smoke all day while I was doing it, and run off out the school gates and sneak down to the precinct when no one was looking. That was better than being in class.

By this point my main mission was making some money and buying nice clothes. I was far more interested in having cash in my pocket and looking good than learning anything. Because we went to a Catholic school, we had to wear a bloody blazer and a jumper, which I wasn’t into, especially as you couldn’t really customize them and make them your own. I’d always
liked
clothes and I can remember mithering my mam for a pair of bell-bottom trousers at the end of the 60s when I was only about seven. They had become really important to me by the time I reached high school. In the mid-70s it was all about Doc Martens, parallel trousers, two-tone trousers, patch pockets, platforms and Royal shoes which were popular with Northern Soul fans. Looking good was important, so any money I laid my hands on, I spent on either some new clobber or on booze.

Ever since I first nicked the toffees at primary school, going on the rob had seemed natural to me, but by the time I was at high school nicking stuff became almost my main mission. There wasn’t much money at home and, as I’d become frustrated and disillusioned with school, there wasn’t a great deal else to do. It became a bit addictive as well. I’d steal anything – toffees, money, booze, clothes, bikes. I wasn’t unique in that. Most of my pals that I knocked about with were doing it as well. We would sell a lot of what we nicked, especially the booze, which we’d sell to ice-cream men, who would flog it from their vans. Back in 1973 we were lucky enough to have the Bulmers and Schweppes depots round our way, so we would rob both of them. The Bulmers depot had barbed wire and that black tar anti-climbing paint on the wall, but we would get over it quite easily. At Schweppes you used to have to get into the yard first, then kick a couple of doors in and then you’d be in the store where there were crates of booze – whisky, vodka, all sorts.

We also used to hit pubs and off-licences near us. One pub – which is actually not far from where I live now, so I’d better not name it – used to keep all its stock in a garage attached to the pub, so we’d break in there. We weren’t professional, we were just kids, so we just used to kick doors in or smash windows, or go through skylights to get in where we needed to. I didn’t have a particular partner in crime; there’d usually be a few of
us
, including some of my cousins. We might not have been professional, we were just kids, but we were good little sneaks, so we hardly ever got caught.

In 1973, a huge superstore called Scan opened near us, in Walkden. It was the first place of its kind in the area; we had never seen anything like it. Even now, it would be considered a big superstore. It was bigger than most of the places you get at those out-of-town retail parks. It was fucking huge. They sold everything from sports gear to guitars to records to food, but basically they had it set up like a fucking greengrocer’s – a couple of those useless security mirrors and then twenty old biddies on the tills. There were no security guards or anything. In Salford! It was a joke. It was an open invitation to nick stuff. We used to go shopping with my mam and dad sometimes, and we would purposefully put our fishtail parkas on, which had holes in the linings. We would then walk out with all sorts in the linings – records, airgun rifles, darts, you name it. It got ridiculous in the end. They had these old country and western amps in there and you could even get away with literally carrying them out. So we did. We ended up using some of that stuff when we were first trying to get a band together a few years later.

One of the few places we never robbed, funnily enough, was the clothing firm Henri Lloyd, which was based just next to our estate in Little Hulton. Henri Lloyd is now quite popular with young lads in Salford, but back in the mid-70s we didn’t even know it was a clothing label, we just thought it was an office of some type. If we’d known it was full of clobber we would have been in there, I can assure you.

I had plenty of different places where I used to stash stuff I’d nicked. There was a hidden gap underneath the chest of drawers in my bedroom, which was quite handy, but I had to be careful about stashing stuff at home because my mam would
catch
on. She’s not stupid and she became a bit of a rooter after a while. If she thought I was up to something, she’d have a look around while I was out of the house. So I started to stash stuff in the fields behind our house and on the railway banking, and even on the roof of my nana’s bungalow. It had a pitched roof, and if you pulled away a few tiles there was a hole underneath where I could hide stuff like money and digital watches. I don’t think my nana knew I used to do that, but she may well have done. She turned a blind eye to a lot of things.

I would make sure I left stuff that I couldn’t explain away, like a nicked bike for instance, at other people’s houses. I would even keep clothes, like trench coats or more expensive shoes, at someone else’s so I could leave our house in one set of clothes, nip down to a pal’s and get changed.

Given that I was often up to no good, it was a bit ironic that when I got nicked for the first time I hadn’t really done anything wrong. I was riding my bike down the road by Fountain Square, near Swinton precinct, and a copper beckoned me over with his finger. I rode over the road, up on the pavement and over to him.

‘Name?’ he said.

‘Why? I’ve not done owt.’

‘Riding your bike on the pavement.’

‘But I wasn’t riding on the pavement.’

‘You’re on the pavement now.’

I thought, ‘You cunt.’ He obviously just needed to make up his arrest numbers or something, so he nicked me for riding on the pavement. I had to go down to court with my dad a couple of weeks later, and I got a small fine and a criminal record. My dad wasn’t that angry with me because it was so obvious that the whole thing was an absolute farce. This wasn’t the last time I got in trouble, though, and I ended up down the cop shop a couple of times over the next few years, or they would come
round
the house if I got caught setting fire to something or accused of robbing, but usually I would just get let off with a talking to or a warning.

Me and Our Paul once robbed a couple of hundred quid off my grandad, Bill. We knew where he stashed his money in his wardrobe and we found £200 in there, so we just had it away. I don’t know how we thought we would get away with it. That was a lot of money back then, in the mid-70s, but I spent my half quite quickly on booze and clothes. We got rumbled for it, and I got a good hiding for that from my dad, but I took the blame and kept Our Paul out of it. I was supposed to pay Bill back, and I did try, but £200 was a lot of money. About a year later, Our Paul turned round to me and said, ‘Oi, knobhead, look at that,’ and chucked a post office account book at me. He’d only gone and opened an account with his half of the money and he still had £75 left, the cheeky bastard. Not only had I taken the hiding for him for it, but he was always pestering me for dough – ‘Our Kid, lend us a fiver will you?’ – and all the time he had £75 in the post office.

Our Paul was up to almost as much mischief as me. He did a lot of the same stuff that I did, but he never got caught, and I never grassed on him. I would take the blame, so they thought he was the good one. At that stage he was the one that was going to go to college and make something of himself. I was seen as a bit of a lost cause. I’m sure I was a nightmare for my mam and dad. From when I was thirteen, my mam used to panic whenever I walked through the door because she didn’t know what trouble I was bringing with me. I could see the dread on her face every time the phone went, as she would always be expecting the worst. Looking back, I can see that when I did get a hiding off my dad he was doing it to try and protect my mam as much as teach me a lesson.

I used to go to the pictures a lot when I should have been in school. I liked Clint Eastwood films like
Dirty Harry
or
Magnum Force
, or Bruce Lee in
Enter the Dragon
. There were some great films made in the early 70s. There was one particular cinema, the Princess in Monton in Eccles, which is part of Salford. That place was a belter. They’d let us in to see
anything
, even though we were only ten years old. And we didn’t even sneak in to the Princess – we would pay.

I had plenty of money then. I think part of my recklessness with money in later life came from having pockets full of dough as a kid, because it meant I didn’t really learn the value of money. I could always get money if I needed it. It was a bit of a shock later when I ended up having to get a job at the age of fifteen and I was on £17 a week. When I was thirteen I would spend that in a day, easy; I’d spend that in an
hour
. I’d go in a shop and buy a bike, ride it around all day and then just leave it somewhere if I couldn’t get away with taking it home. I was probably making £100 a week at that stage. I was a thirteen-year-old kid and I would be jumping in a black cab with my girlfriend and going into town to the Golden Egg, a café on Deansgate that would serve us alcohol. We’d be sitting there having a mixed grill and a lager when we were supposed to be at school.

On the rare occasions I did go into school, I started rhyming in the playground. My little crew, who went around together setting fire to stuff and robbing, would also all stand around and make rhymes up. We would just come up with silly little riddles and poems about ‘Miss Annie had a smelly fanny’ and stuff like that. Really childish nonsense, just to amuse ourselves.

If the teacher back then had said to our class that one of us would become famous one day, none of the other kids would
have
ever thought it would be me. I wouldn’t have thought it would be me. I suppose the first person from our school to become famous was the kid who strangled this woman with her own tights, round the back of some pub, just after he’d left school. If we’d known that one of us would become famous, we probably would have presumed it would be for something like that – for killing someone or getting caught doing an armed robbery or something. We certainly wouldn’t have thought it would be for music or anything in the entertainment world.

There was actually one other kid from our high school who did become famous. On my first day at Ambrose we got chased by the older lads, who wanted to flush our heads down the bogs. One of them managed to get hold of me, and his name was Nigel Pivaro. He later became Terry Duckworth, Jack and Vera’s tearaway son in
Coronation Street
. He was a couple of years older than me, but we ended up becoming pals and we even knocked about with him later when we were in the Mondays.

I started wagging school when I was about eleven. Initially I tried to cover myself, but by the time I got to thirteen I just didn’t bother hiding it. I didn’t give a fuck. I can remember quite clearly in the third year of high school thinking to myself, ‘I haven’t learned a fucking thing since I’ve been here.’ My mam and dad went to parents’ evenings at school anyway, so always found out what was going on, and things would often get back to my mam because she worked in the nursery.

Even though I liked messing around with words and coming up with rhymes, I was never really into reading. The only books I read were the
Skinhead
and
Suedehead
books by Richard Allen. Well, I say ‘read’, but I never really read them properly. I would look at the covers, then just skip to the bits where there was swearing and shagging. I read a few music autobiographies as well, but that was it. Even now I only really read music books.

I got my first bits of work in the summer when I was thirteen, working on building sites. There was an older lad who had a group of lads working for him and he recruited me as part of his gang. You were supposed to strip the wallpaper and take the window frames out, but rather than stripping the paper I just started knocking the walls down, because it was easier. So I was sacked.

It was around that summer that we were first able to get served in pubs. There’s a road called Bolton Road in Salford, which runs from Irlams o’ th’ Height pretty much right up to Bolton. On the part which ran from th’ Height all the way through Swinton and Pendlebury there was a pub, without a word of a lie, about every ten yards. Pubs galore, and most of them were infested with underage drinkers. It was notorious in the 60s and 70s. They were always getting busted, and people were always getting nicked. It’s nothing like it used to be now. The landlords all knew we were under age, but there were certain pubs that would let us drink. I started off, originally, on pints of bitter, usually Stones Bitter or Boddingtons.

We also started going to the Wishing Well in Swinton, which was quite rough and pretty infamous round our way. You were supposed to be eighteen, but they just let everyone in. At that time, if a place played Northern Soul it could attract a lot of drugs, fighting and trouble, so some places, like the Wishing Well, would err towards playing more straight Motown and pop. Most kids round our way were drinking by the age of thirteen. One day our games teacher, Brin Cooper, told us that he didn’t drink or smoke, and the whole class was just amazed. Everyone went, ‘You don’t drink, sir?’