Getting High

by Paolo Hewitt

  That Guigsy was an exceptional player isn’t in doubt. As a teenager, he had trials at Oldham, Stockport and Crewe. Oldham never rang back, Stockport told him that as a player he was ‘too tricky’, and Crewe were impressed with the three goals he scored in three games under their watchful eye.

  But it wasn’t to be. Playing for his local team in a cup quarterfinal game, Guigsy jumped to head a ball and when he landed his legs gave way.

  ‘When I came down, I couldn’t stand,’ he remembers, ‘the pain was outrageous. The doctor told me that my knee was badly sprained. I didn’t play in the semi-final but I played in the final.’

  During that game, Guigsy’ s team went 1-0 down. Then they won a corner. The ball found its way to Guigsy standing on the corner of the penalty box. He coolly volleyed it back into the goal. Later on, one of his team-mates scored the winner.

  The next day Guigsy couldn’t walk. Following several visits to the doctor, Guigsy was diagnosed as having a torn knee ligament, and he didn’t kick a ball again for the next two and a half years. Instead, he got further into music and resumed smoking marijuana.

  He had taken his first spliff at age thirteen and kept smoking until he was seventeen. He could often be found over at Erwood Park with about fifty of the other lads from Levenshulme and Burnage. It was there that they would put their fifty pences in and try to make up enough to buy an eighth of hash.

  Erwood Park is where he first met Noel, although there was no formal introduction as such. As Guigsy explains, Noel was just a face you saw in the park. After a while, it was just natural that they started talking.

  He remembers Noel then as a chilled-out guy who smoked a lot of weed. In fact, it was Noel who first put Guigsy on to the more rockier and experimental side of The Beatles. Through the Love Songs album Guigsy intimately knew songs such as ‘Norwegian Wood’ and ‘Yesterday’. But he was unaware of tracks such as ‘I Am The Walrus’, or ‘Helter Skelter’. Noel pointed him in that direction.

  There were other musical favourites as well: Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, The Faces, The Kinks, as well as blues acts such as Brownie McGee and B.B. King who Guigsy had discovered through his scooter club connections. This was a tenuous link at best. Guigsy only went on one scooter run. Strangely, he travelled in a van.

  ‘I didn’t get it until we were halfway there, then I realised what the van was for. Store any stolen scooters that might come our way.’

  There was also another guy that Guigsy would see around. His nickname was Bonehead. He supported Manchester United but Guigsy soon realised that he was not as fanatical about his team or the game as people like him and Noel.

  One night, at the Severe wine bar, where everyone went after the pubs shut, Bonehead and Guigsy got talking. They discovered a shared passion for music, Bonehead revealing he could play guitar.

  ‘Couldn’t do that, me,’ Guigsy said.

  ‘Yeah, you could,’ Bonehead breezily replied, putting down his pint glass. ‘It’s a piece of piss. I’ll come round and show you one night.’

  And that’s precisely what he did.

  His story has been framed and hung in the main school corridor. It makes him so proud. Fifteen pages of his imaginative writing that tells of an old barge on a canal and a little boy who discovers a ghost living on it. Every day, he walks past and slyly glances up at it with a real sense of achievement.

  ‘Oi! Bonehead!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is that your stupid fucking story on the wall?’

  ‘Yeah. What about it?’

  ‘You fucking teacher’s pet!’

  Paul Arthurs is eight years old. Even then, he’s known as Bonehead. All his mates have quite longish hair but Bonehead has his cropped every week. It didn’t take long for his schoolmates at St. Robert’s in Longsight, Manchester, to bestow him with the name that he carries to this day.

  He was born on 23 June 1965. His parents were Irish, his mother Delia being raised just ten miles away from Peggy Gallagher. Yet the two women never met. It was only when Bonehead met Noel and Liam that they discovered the close proximity of their families.

  And, like Noel and Liam, Bonehead too spent his summers as a child in Ireland. Three weeks in the South with his mother’s side of the family, three weeks in the North with his father’s.

  His parents had met and married in Manchester, both having left Ireland in their teens. They would raise another four children (Martin, Maria, Celine and Frances), Bonehead’s father Ben supporting the family through his work in the demolition business. They were also staunch Catholics.

  ‘Church every Sunday,’ Bonehead recalls. ‘Didn’t miss it. I was an altar boy as well. You got a choice. It’s either the Boy Scouts or be an altar boy. So I was like, fuck wearing a dress, gotta join the Boy Scouts. But then this woman was gassing to my mum one day and she was saying, “Don’t let him join the Boy Scouts, my son was in them and he got beaten up every day.”

  ‘It was like, right, altar boy for you. I must have done it for about three years, met the Bishop and all that shit. But then I got kicked out for laughing and drinking the wine. They have a good rider [the part of the contract that obliges promoters to supply drinks for bands] them priests. More than we get in Oasis.’

  His parents were also musically minded and at an early age they paid for their son to take accordion lessons. Bonehead took to the instrument and his playing quickly progressed. He even joined an Irish group that played traditional music.

  From there, he went on to piano lessons and then, in his teens, he picked up a guitar.

  Academically, Bonehead also displayed early promise. He passed his eleven-plus, winning a place at St. Peter’s Grammar school in Prestwich, North Manchester. It was a prestigious establishment but Bonehead grew to hate the place. Not only was it a lengthy bus ride from his home, but it was also, to quote the man himself, ‘full of spotty middle-class bastards’. As his dislike of school grew so his studies slipped.

  By the time he was thirteen, he and his friends would often stay on the bus and, using their free passes, travel on to Bolton or Liverpool to spend the hours wandering around town. Other days, he sat bored rigid in class, looking out of the window.

  No doubt on such occasions his mind turned to music. Bonehead had an abiding interest in his elder brother Martin’s extensive record collection. Along with all the classics that Martin possessed – The Beatles, The Kinks, The Who – Bonehead also listened to contemporary bands such as The Smiths.

  He developed a real taste for quality music and it was with like-minded pupils that he hung out at school. They were dressed in the Casual style; Perry Boys they were called in Manchester, with their designer label tops and wedge haircuts.

  When Bonehead left school at sixteen, he did so with just one 0-level to his name. That was in English. The rest of the subjects he took were marked ‘U’, denoting unclassifiable. When his mum saw the results she asked, ‘Paul, what are all these Us?’ And her son replied, ‘Unbeatable, Mum. It stands for unbeatable.’

  ‘Ah, you’re a clever lad,’ she replied. ‘I always said it.’

  Not long after, Bonehead signed on to a Youth Training Scheme and was placed on a building construction course which, much to his surprise, he found himself really enjoying. He had finally found something worth working for. He stayed at the college for two enjoyable years, and this time he passed all his exams.

  His first job was as a plasterer for a building firm in Stockport. He enjoyed the work, but the boss was a mean man and the rigid times he had to keep, clock on at eight, lunch at one, finish at six, didn’t appeal to Bonehead’s temperament.

  To divert himself, he and his brother Martin formed a band with two other friends. They called themselves Pleasure In Pain. Bonehead played the synthesizer.

  ‘We were sad as fuck,’ he says now. The band stayed together for about a year. Their first gig was the Trap pub in Glossop (‘I was proper shitting it,’ he recalls), and they also appeared at an all-day festival in Manc
hester which featured only Manchester bands.

  ‘There were about forty groups playing,’ Bonehead recalls, ‘so we all got about ten minutes each. It was mad.’

  Pleasure In Pain faded away, although Bonehead now possessed an amp, an electric guitar, a bass and a drum machine.

  One day at work his friend Jeff, who worked as a joiner, came to him with an idea. Fuck this job, he said, let’s save up all our money for the next six months and then piss off to Europe.

  ‘I was nineteen, I’d seen fuck all and I told him that’s a splendid idea.’

  They bought themselves mountain bikes, practised on them daily and stored away their cash. During these six months Bonehead also briefly met Guigsy who lived in the same area.

  On a day he recalls with great delight, Bonehead walked into work and told his boss he was jacking it all in.

  ‘You can’t do that,’ the boss snorted.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well what are you going to do?’ he asked.

  ‘Travel round Europe,’ Bonehead replied.

  ‘Travel round fucking Europe?’

  ‘That’s right. Well done.’

  ‘But what happens when you get back? What are you going to do for work?’

  ‘Give a shit, dickhead,’ Bonehead replied.

  The day of his departure was bright and sunny. Bonehead picked up his bags, said farewell to his parents and set off for Europe. Just as he was approaching the railway bridge in Albert Road, Levenshulme, he saw a young guy, wearing shades and sporting a Mick Jagger haircut. Bonehead recognised him from round his way so he pulled up.

  ‘You all right, mate? What you up to?’

  ‘I’m just on me way home,’ Noel Gallagher replied. ‘The Inspirals played last night and I got right off me box. What you up to with all them bags?’

  ‘Going to Europe. Going to travel round until me money runs out.’

  ‘Europe? You’re going to cycle round Europe? You’re fucking mad.’

  ‘I know. Top, isn’t it? See ya when I get back.’

  Bonehead and Jeff caught the ferry to Ostend and, over the next six months visited Vienna, Venice, Rimini and Paris, before corning home. Then it was back to the real world.

  Not long after signing on, Bonehead’s brother-in-law visited and mentioned that he was getting rid of a van of his, an old Mazda 1800 pick-up. It was a bit rundown, but Bonehead could have it if he liked; it would at least allow him to start up his own plastering business.

  Bonehead went to look at the vehicle. To say it was rundown was to compliment it. You could only enter the vehicle if you knew the special way of using the handle. It was also necessary to start the engine with a screwdriver. Apart from that, it was fine.

  Bonehead took ownership of the van and turned self-employed. He was now hanging out a lot with Guigsy, and the following Wednesday night he told him about his new job. This was the night they always met up on to go to the pub, drink themselves stupid, throw up in someone’s garden and then stagger home.

  Guigsy decorated Bonehead’s van in garish psychedelic patterns and, along with other friends such as Tony French and Chris Hutton, they all piled into it in the summer of 1990, and took off to see The Stone Roses play in Spike Island.

  The following week a picture of the van was printed in a local Manchester paper as part of their special on the event. The photographer was Michael Spencer Jones.

  By now, Bonehead had started teaching Guigsy the bass, and the boys eventually formed a band called Rain, with Chris Hutton on vocals and, later on, Tony McCarroll on drums.

  For Rain’s first gig they put all their instruments through Bonehead’s amp and used a drum machine to back them.

  Not long after that they sacked Hutton, and then Liam Gallagher swaggered into their lives. He visited them at the house Bonehead now shared with his girlfriend and future wife, Kate.

  Bonehead had met Kate at the Severe wine bar in Fallowfield. ‘It was this mad cellar,’ he remembers, ‘with a top jukebox, and it was full of students and a few madheads.’

  The night he and Kate met, Bonehead went back to her flat and they have been together ever since. They started living together at Kate’s place and later on, having sold that flat, they took a place in West Didsbury which Bonehead then spent a year renovating. It was here that Oasis would be photographed for their debut album cover. By Michael Spencer Jones.

  In the first Oasis line-up, Liam would write the words and Bonehead the music. They first rehearsed at a hotel that had not yet opened for business. It was called The Raffles. Guigsy had got friendly one night with a girl who worked at the hotel and she had invited him back. With loads of space at their disposal, not to mention the hotel’s amenities, the band rehearsed here until the hotel opened.

  Paul Gallagher then found them rehearsal space at the Plymouth Grove Club but barely two weeks later they were ejected because of their constant spliff smoking. They then moved to the Greenhouse in Stockport which for twenty-five pounds a day allowed them access to a backline.

  They came up with four songs: ‘Reminisce’, ‘Life In Vain’, ‘Take Me’, and ‘She Always Came Up Smiling’, which Bonehead automatically assumed was about the act of fellatio.

  The band used Bonehead’s van to transport their equipment. After Liam changed the band’s name to Oasis and Noel subsequently joined, they started rehearsing at a studio called the Red House before moving to the Boardwalk.

  Bonehead’s van was a valuable possession for the band. It meant they could transport equipment and use it for their own personal gain.

  Many was the time when rehearsing was finished for the night that Guigsy would ask for a lift down to Moss Side, to score some weed. Bonehead hated going down to Moss Side. So did the others. It was Manchester’s notorious drug-dealing area and anything could happen.

  On Bonfire night, for example, a lot of old scores are settled by the gun. The noise of fireworks exploding in the sky provided the perfect cover.

  ‘Ah fuck off, Guigs,’ Bonehead would say when the bassist said he had to score some weed. But he would always take him. These two provided the perfect counterbalance to Noel and Liam’s increasingly tempestuous relationship.

  Within the band, Bonehead was looked upon as a madhead, a man they would all nominate ‘as the funniest man in Manchester’. Whether it was smashing up hotel rooms or diving into pools naked and drunk beyond belief, Bonehead was the band’s humour.

  As the band progressed, so their commitment deepened. To miss rehearsals was a major issue. One Saturday, a good friend of Bonehead’s invited him and Kate to his wedding. Bonehead couldn’t go. The wedding took place on a rehearsal day, he explained. His friends couldn’t believe it, but Bonehead held firm. The band first, other things second.

  ‘The way it worked at rehearsals,’ Bonehead states, ‘was that Noel would always come in with something new and then we would jam on it. But you didn’t miss rehearsals for anything.’

  On the day before Bonehead and Kate moved to their home in West Didsbury, the rhythm guitarist called up the Gallagher household and told Liam, ‘I can’t make rehearsals. Got to move house tomorrow and I’ve got to pack everything up.’

  Liam just slammed the phone down.

  Bonehead put the phone down and was just about to redial the number when the phone rang. This time Noel was on the line.

  ‘Right you dickhead,’ he ordered, ‘get your amps and guitar and get your arse down to the Boardwalk, or you’re out.’

  Then for the second time in two minutes, a Gallagher slammed the phone down on him. Bonehead was amazed.

  ‘I thought, I’m not having this, got to sort this one right out.’ Bonehead jumped into his van and drove to the Boardwalk. He pulled up just as Noel was arriving.

  Within two minutes of trying to explain to Noel why he couldn’t rehearse, the two of them were shouting, arguing and threatening each other with severe violence. Then Liam and Guigsy arrived.

  ‘Look,’ Bonehead shouted at Liam, �
�I’ve got to move house. I can’t do anything about it. I’ll be here tomorrow.’

  ‘See you tomorrow night then,’ Liam casually remarked, and the three of them then disappeared into the Boardwalk, leaving a speechless Bonehead out on the street. It’s the only major ruck he has ever had with Noel.

  ‘You have to understand that we totally believed in the band,’ he states, ‘and the only way it was going to work was by grafting at it. You weren’t going to rehearse two hours a week every Sunday afternoon and do something. In a band you either do it full-on or you treat it as a hobby. We decided to do it full-on.’

  Eight

  She came in through the bathroom window. Or at least that’s what she and her friend look like doing as they wait outside Patsy Kensit’s London home.

  They have sat there now for hours on the wall opposite the actress’s house and have not moved an inch. They simply stare.

  It’s Sunday 14 July 1996, and the object of their obsession, Liam Gallagher, sits in the kitchen staring back at them.

  ‘They’re off their tits,’ he mutters to himself. Never in a million years would he have indulged in such behaviour, not even for his all-time hero, the man he sincerely believes lives inside him, John Lennon.

  Since moving in with Patsy, Liam has got used to people waiting outside the house. The majority of them are photographers who know that one good picture of Liam and Patsy is front-page news. Oasis sells papers, so they go to every extreme. The other day Liam came out of the house to find a photographer hiding under a car.

  ‘You daft cunt, what the fuck are you doing?’ Liam said to him, shaking his head in benevolent disbelief. It was almost as if a champion boxer was taking some kind of pity on his beaten opponent.

  Liam, much to his chagrin, can do nothing about it. He can’t sue the photographers for taking pictures, nor can he stop the reporters writing their stories. So he plays up to them.

  ‘They think I’m this,’ he says, ‘so that’s what I give them. They don’t understand it, so fuck them.’