Twisting My Melon (5 page)

‘You don’t smoke, sir?’

‘What
do
you do then, sir?’

‘What else is there to do, sir?’

Because everyone in that class, at the age of thirteen, either drank or smoked, and most of them did both. Even the goody-goodies.

I had first started smoking occasionally when I was about ten, but I was smoking properly by thirteen. My mam and dad both smoked and they did try telling us that we shouldn’t, but they were just saying it for the sake of saying it, I think. My dad’s and my nana’s generations had all worked since the age of thirteen, so by the time you got to that age you were almost treated like an adult. I still couldn’t light up in my mam and dad’s house, but I could at my nana’s. Any kid could buy cigs back then, and you could also just buy ‘singles’ – single cigarettes – if you only had a few pence. I also used to rob cigarettes. I would sneak into newsagents’ stock rooms or wherever. I was an opportunist. I spent the whole day on the lookout for things to sneak.

I first smoked a joint when I was about fourteen, but I didn’t start smoking pot properly until I was about seventeen. I’d have the odd blast if someone had a spliff, but it wasn’t that easy to get hold of it when we were growing up; it was easier to get hold of other drugs like speed. I saw my first syringe around the same time, when I was at a fairground in Pendlebury with a girl and we were on this ride called the Over-Rider. As we were going up and round, we spotted the police pull up at the fairground in cars and vans, and the girl just pulled out her works and stuck them down her knickers. That was the first time I’d seen a syringe, although I was probably more interested in seeing what was down her knickers, to be honest. I can’t even remember her name, and I didn’t really know her that well, so didn’t know she was injecting. It wasn’t heroin, it was speed.

There were a lot of amphetamines around Salford in the mid-70s. Our Matt got some speed about the same time and
showed
me, but my first reaction was, ‘No way, not a chance.’ He was only having a dabble, but I wasn’t interested at first. There were a few speed pills knocking around school a year or two later – Dexys or blues or bombers – and I did try them, but I never really got into it. I was always lively enough as I was. Even later, when I was a bit of a garbagehead and would take pretty much anything, I was never into speed. So it was mainly cigarettes and alcohol when I was still at school.

I also lost my virginity when I was thirteen, to a girl I knew from Salford, in an underground car park in central Manchester. I was wearing parallels at the time, which meant I could easily get my pants off without taking my shoes off. I didn’t want to be messing around trying to get my eight-hole Doc Martens off in some underground car park, so I just whipped my pants off and kept my Docs and my socks on. She didn’t seem to mind. I wasn’t the first of my pals to lose their virginity; I was probably about the average age. Most of us had girlfriends from the age of seven or eight. You might have not done much, but there was still the ‘doctors and nurses’ sort of games going on, you know what I mean? So losing your virginity at thirteen was no big deal. Although it always seemed like someone else was getting it more than you, to be honest.

It sounds really bad now, and I’m not proud of it, but during our teenage years we also robbed a couple of houses. Not properly, but if we saw a window open in a house, we would be up the drainpipe and in through the window. There were a couple of my pals who used to do that with me, but I won’t name them as I’m sure they’re not proud of it either. I still run into them from time to time, because they both live in Salford.

When I was thirteen or fourteen there were a few occasions like that when my dad really reached the end of his tether with me and threw me out of the house for a few days. When that
happened
I would usually go down to my nana’s and stay there, although sometimes my dad would ring Nana and say, ‘If he comes down there, don’t let him in.’ On those occasions I would usually crash at a mate’s, but there were a couple of times when I ended up sleeping rough in a cardboard box. I found this spot behind the laundrette where there was a kind of extractor fan which pumped out hot air, so if I put the box near there I could keep warm.

I was shit scared of my old bloke until I was about fifteen, because I knew he would leather me, and that would make me think twice about doing things. To be honest, I got into so much trouble then that if it hadn’t been for me being afraid of my old fella, and that slightly curbing my behaviour, I would have been absolutely out of control. It’s a good job I was scared of him.

When I was fourteen I got a job travelling around the country ripping out cinema seats. My mam and dad didn’t bother about me going to school much by this stage and one of the reasons was that I had started working. It was pretty clear from day one that I wasn’t going to be academic, so as long as I was working they didn’t mind.

The first major trouble I got into was when I was fifteen. I was with my mate when he took his dad’s mate’s Ford Granada. I was still at school, just about. Well, I wasn’t
at
school, but I was supposed to be. I wasn’t actually one of those kids who was bang into joyriding. I was always more about doing things that made money. But we did take this Ford Granada, and he crashed it into this old couple’s garden wall and got nicked for it. I wasn’t driving, but I was in the car, and thankfully my name was kept out of it all.

I was actually waiting for my starting date for my first proper full-time job, at the post office, and if I had been charged with
anything
I would have lost the job. I had managed to get the job because my dad worked there, and if you had family in the post office you got put to the top of the waiting list. I didn’t want to work really; I didn’t want to be doing any job, especially one like that, but I had no choice. I needed the money. I started out as a messenger boy, which meant you could be put on different shifts. You could be on earlies or lates, or you could be on overtime and be there from six in the morning until seven at night, or even later.

It was on my way to work early one morning, not long after I started, that I first saw a UFO. I was on an eight o’clock start, and I was just about to get the bus, so it was probably just after 7am when it happened, because it was still pitch black. It wasn’t just me who saw it – there was a little kid in a blazer there, on his way to grammar school and getting the same bus as me. It wasn’t that close to us, but we got a good look. It seemed about the size of a beach ball, but as it was quite far away in the sky it must actually have been quite big. It moved across the sky at incredible speed – it must have been going about 5,000 miles an hour. It zigzagged all over the place, all over the sky, and then it just shot off. I wasn’t scared at all, for some reason, not one bit, and the little kid didn’t seem to be freaked out either. The two of us just stood there watching it, without saying anything to each other.

It’s well documented that a lot of paranormal activity took place at this time, over towards Bolton, up on the moors, but we could see it from where we were in Salford – this thing flying about at ridiculous speeds, just bombing about. I’ve seen a few things like that over the years. I saw a lot of strange things going on in the skies around Salford in the late 70s, and a lot of other people did as well. All sorts of mad things. If you go back and look at the papers from about 1978 to about 1981, the
Salford Reporter
and
Manchester Evening News
, and
even
the
Daily Mirror
and the
Sun
, it was widely reported. If you watch the Discovery channel and see people talking about stuff like this, a lot of it seems to have happened over northern England around that time. I think anyone who doesn’t believe that there is life out there will end up looking as ignorant as those people who used to think that the earth was flat and if you went too far out to sea in your boat you would fall off the end of the world. Ridiculous.

When I started work full time, there were post offices all over Manchester city centre, on Oxford Road, Portland Street, York Street, and the main one on Newton Street, and we’d work in all of them. One of the things that I really enjoyed about it was that it was the first time I had really met lads from other parts of Manchester, lads from Ancoats, Blackley, Hulme, Moss Side, Wythenshawe. Before that I didn’t know that many people outside Salford. I didn’t appreciate having to work, but we did have a great laugh, and we were always up to something.

The famous story from my early post office years is about when I poisoned the pigeons, but it didn’t happen quite like it’s been reported over the years. It wasn’t me and Our Paul, for a start, like they showed in
24 Hour Party People
. Not that anyone should believe what happens in that film. The Shaun Ryder in that film is a caricature. It amazes me how many people just swallow everything whole. Although, in a way, part of Shaun Ryder was always a caricature. You’re not going to make it in the music business just by singing songs; you need to be a bit of an extreme character. Especially nowadays. People need something to latch on to, something that makes you stick in their mind. If you look at someone like Lily Allen, she’ll admit that the Lily Allen the public sees is an exaggerated version of her true self, and likewise the Shaun Ryder the public saw was always part caricature. I was always aware of
that
, and it didn’t bother me one bit. It makes it easier in a way, because it means you don’t have to bare your soul, or any of that bollocks. When the Mondays were first coming up, there was none of this reality TV nonsense. The less you showed of yourself and the more you presented a façade, the better. I knew it would never work if we tried to be the deep and meaning ful moody types, because there was no air of mystique about us. People didn’t understand us, and thought we were from another world, but that’s because who we were and where we came from was alien and a bit shocking to them, so I just played up to that. That’s what you do. You play the game. Then you bring in a pal who’s a real nutcase, like Bez. Bez is actually pretty talentless at anything apart from being Bez, but he was
really fucking good
at that. He was better at being Bez than anyone. He’s certainly not thick and he loves his music, and knows a groove, but he hasn’t got a musical bone in his body. He can’t play an instrument and he can’t write lyrics, but he can certainly be rock ’n’ roll. Me and Bez were always rock ’n’ roll. Always. It just came naturally. We were rock ’n’ roll long before we were in a band. Long before we had any money.

The pigeon incident was actually me and another post boy I was mates with from Blackley. One lunchtime we were sat in St Peter’s Square by Central Library, eating Kentucky Fried Chicken, and the fucking pigeons wouldn’t leave us alone. They were all over us, hassling us and trying to grab the chicken out of my hand. I was shooing them away, shouting, ‘You dirty fucking vermin! You horrible cannibal bastards!’ But they kept on hassling us and it really wound me up. After lunch, we found a box of rat poison behind a door in one of the post office buildings and I said to the other lad, ‘Do you think this rat poison will kill pigeons?’ We just stuck a load of it in some bread and went round town throwing it to the pigeons. I didn’t actually see pigeons falling to the ground but they must have
done
because there were eyewitness reports in the newspaper about pigeons dropping out of the sky, dive-bombing trains and splattering on Market Street. One of the headlines in one of the papers was ‘Sick Maniacs Poison Thousands of Pigeons’. They never found out it was us. It only came out much later, when I started talking about it. I have slightly mixed feelings about that incident now. I’m still not happy with pigeons. I just don’t like them. We’re not talking about racing pigeons here, we’re talking about vermin. So I don’t necessarily have any massive regrets about doing that, but on the other hand I’m a very different person now. I’ve changed a lot over the last ten years. I wouldn’t hurt a fly now. If I found an insect in the house, I would actually try and remove it and put it out the back door rather than kill it.

Those early years working at the post office were a brilliant time for me. The postie’s uniform made you look older, so I’d have no problem getting served anywhere in town. The pubs were ace then, really smoky, bustling places, rammed full of blokes, posties and villains. At lot of them would have strippers and comedians like Bernard Manning on at lunchtime. They were pretty rough, but I loved it. We used to go in the John Bull, which was up on Brown Street, and we would also go to Fagins and Rafters on Oxford Street, which were nightclubs that opened during the day. We’d stay in there all day. The pubs were supposed to shut in the afternoon back then, from 3–5pm, but there were always places where you could get a bevy all afternoon if you wanted to. It was like a northern episode of
The Sweeney
.

I also started going out in town at night when I was about fifteen, to places like Pips. I was just too young for the punk thing. I never went to the Ranch Bar, and I missed the Sex Pistols at Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976, although I did see the Ramones there a couple of years later. I didn’t officially leave
home
until I got married at nineteen, but from around the age of fifteen I stayed away quite a bit, at mates’ houses or birds’ houses or whatever.

Although during the day we could get served in the pubs with our postie uniforms on, when we started going to places like Pips we had to get some false ID. On a night out it would usually be me, Our Paul and a pal of mine from school called Mark Pierce – Piercey. Our Paul might have been eighteen months younger than me, but he actually looked older than I did at that stage, so he’d be all right for getting in, even though he was still at school. He was bigger than me as well, by then. By the time I was about sixteen, Our Paul could deck me if he wanted to.

I lost touch with Piercey for years, then in 1991, after the Mondays had made it, I was back visiting my mam and ran into him and another kid I knew from school, called Pez, in the pub and they were slightly arsey with me. They were a bit drunk, but they were a bit off with me. I think they presumed I’d changed, and I was now this Charlie big potatas pop star, even though I wasn’t acting like that. But since I’ve moved back, twenty years later, Piercey and anyone else I run into is fine. We’re all grown up these days … He’s a builder now. He’s the only kid from my school that I still really know and we get on well. He was brought up in Pendlebury but now lives just over the East Lancs Road from me. Where I live there’s a bit of a running joke about the two sides of the East Lancs. I live on the Worsley side, which is supposed to be the posh side, and he lives on the other side, which is the Swinton side, but there’s not much difference. A lot of the houses over his side are privately owned now as well.