by Shaun Ryder
What we didn’t realize before we went into the studio with John was that he had just got himself totally clean and off the drugs. I don’t think he was even smoking weed at the time; he just used to eat tangerines all day. So it was quite a straight recording session – it wasn’t as if we were partying together. I don’t think we really got to know each other during the recording, because he didn’t show any emotion. We would argue amongst ourselves, but we were dead polite to him and he never raised his voice with us. I could never really be sure if he thought we were quite interesting, or if he just tolerated us.
Factory had booked us in for a fortnight at the Fire House studio in London to record the album, and we already had all the songs written by the time we went down there. I had spent more time writing and arranging the songs than I had when we went in to record ‘Delightful’ and ‘Freaky Dancin’’, and was more confident about their structure. As a band we also had a little bit more of an idea about the recording process this time, although we were still relative strangers to a recording studio. It was our debut album, so it was our first proper length of time in a studio; we’d previously only been in for a couple of days at a time.
We were still pretty skint when we went down to London to record, because we had been trying to stay out of trouble, keep our noses clean and really concentrate on the band and finish writing the songs for the album. Only Mark Day, who was still a postie, had a job; the rest of us were all on the dole. Factory had packed us off to London and said, ‘There’s eighty pounds each. That will last you two weeks.’ I think my £80 lasted me an hour. Literally. It just went. It’s £80, isn’t it? Even then that wasn’t a lot of dough. Factory had put us up in Belsize Park, in one of those big houses around there that are split into bedsits. The whole band – me, Our Kid, Bez, Mark Day, Paul Davis and Gaz Whelan – were all staying in one room which had six beds squeezed into it, and it wasn’t a big room. On the floor above us were six builders and up above them were six electricians. We all had to share the same khazis and showers. Two khazis and two showers between eighteen of us. We were just on nodding terms with the builders and electricians; we never really got talking to them, so they didn’t know we were musicians. They probably thought we were just workers or grafters like them. It was hardly the most rock ’n’ roll accommodation. God knows who found that place. Phil Saxe probably.
Because we were struggling for money, everyone in the band would be borrowing off each other, and a few times we ran out completely and had either to get someone to come down from Manchester with some money or get a friend to send some cash. We were starving at some points, we were so skint. Mark Day was the worst in that situation, because he was so tight – he was notorious for it. He wouldn’t lend you a quid or even fifty pence. When we had money in our pockets, we would buy him a pint, or say, ‘What you eating Mark? D’you want fish ’n’ chips?’ But if he had money and he had to get you a pint he would say, ‘You owe me one pound twenty.’ ‘Shout us a fish ’n’ chips, Mark?’ ‘That’s two pound eighty.’ He was one of them, a tight bastard. We would be starving and penniless and ask Mark if he had money, but he’d say, ‘No, I’m skint too.’ Then he would sneak off later and we would find him, after he’d swore blind that he was skint, sat in a café tucking into a full meal. He’d try and justify it by saying, ‘You lot just spend all your money as soon as you get it!’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, mate, but you know what, you help us smoke and snort our money, don’t you? You don’t say fucking no when we offer you a line or a pint or pay for your food!’
We had loads of arguments and fights with each other during the recording. I had a punch-up or two with Gaz, and my finger is still bent from when I hit him during one of our scraps. I punched him on the side of the head and broke my finger and never bothered getting it fixed. The amount of times I’ve had fights over the years and I’ve broken a toe kicking someone or something and haven’t noticed until the effects of the drugs have worn off. Me and Our Kid would fight a lot. We would fight when we were kids, but healthily. It’s your brother – you’re going to fight, aren’t you?
I don’t think we took any smack to London, because we were skint, but I was definitely dabbling a bit at that stage. Bez was another one of those who dipped in and out of it for years. He was what I would call a garbagehead then. He was addicted to drugs, but not one particular drug, just drugs in general. He would have a little dabble in heroin, but never get addicted, then go on to whizz, then go on to coke, then go on to the E, then go on to whatever, then go on to that, then go on to that … he never stuck with one particular drug, he just kept moving from one to another. Bez will quite proudly say, ‘I’m not addicted,’ but I would argue he is. He’s just not addicted to one particular substance.
When we started recording, it didn’t seem to matter that John Cale was classically trained and we weren’t, or at least we didn’t notice it being an issue. The band were getting more and more proficient, and anything that he asked us to play, we managed to play. We had all the songs written, and what John did do was drill the band and get us really tight, then he basically recorded us like we were live. If anything, I think he made the band too tight. We were definitely better and more proficient after working with him, but the detrimental effect of that was that the recording lost a little of that signature space in the songs that was really important to the Mondays sound.
The title of the opening track, ‘Kuff Dam’, was taken from a porno called Mad Fuck, but I just misspelt it backwards. It was a ballsy, bolshy opening track: ‘If you’ve got to be told by someone then it’s got to be me’. There were some lyrics on there that I wouldn’t dare use now, like ‘Jesus was a **** and never helped you with a thing that you do, or you done’, but I just didn’t care then. My mam was religious but wouldn’t say anything to me about something like that; she’d just shrug and let it wash over her.
‘Tart Tart’, which became the single, was the first track we recorded that I felt truly captured the essence and potential of the Mondays sound. To me, in a way, everything we had recorded before was really just us finding our feet as a band, feeling our way, getting used to the recording process and working out how we could best capture our own sound. It was named after a bird we knew from Chorlton called Dinah, who we affectionately nicknamed Tart Tart. She was older than us, well into her thirties when we met her, while we were only in our early twenties. She had been on the scene in the very late 60s and was still around and dealing speed on the music scene over fifteen years later. She would always be there when we played the Boardwalk in the early days. She took a bit of a shine to me and Bez and was very good to us, letting us crash at her place if we needed to and laying speed on tick for us. One day a guy we knew called Martin, a roadie who lived in Chorlton who also used to score whizz off her and knew her quite well, popped round to her flat and there was no answer. Because he was quite close to her, he suspected something was up, so he broke in and found her body. Poor Tart Tart had just had a brain haemorrhage and died. So I named the song after her, but it isn’t all about her, although she is there in the lyrics – ‘TT, she laid it on, and a few days later she’s gone, going back to the womb, to get drowned, drowned, drowned, drowned, drowned.’
Most of my songs aren’t specifically about one person or one thing. I would come up with snippets of stories, or what you would call vignettes, about different situations I’d witnessed, or people I knew, or tales I’d been told, and then I would string them together to make a song. ‘Tart Tart’ is a typical example of that. ‘When he came out of the locker, he said I’m looking for something better, so he made a shock announcement’ was about a pal of ours. ‘Martin sleeps on a desk, he wears a sleeping bag as his vest’ is a reference to the Factory producer Martin Hannett. We hadn’t actually worked with him at this stage, but I’d heard stories about him. ‘He says don’t know if I should, cos I worry too much about the test on the blood’ was a little nod to a pal of ours who had been diagnosed HIV+ through intravenous drug
use. I think he was the first person we knew who was diagnosed with it. So I would bring together that mish-mash of ideas or little situations to create a song. That’s the way I almost always work when I’m writing lyrics. It’s not quite as abstract as ‘I Am the Walrus’, but it does mean people often put their own interpretations to the lyrics.
If I was interviewed back then, depending on what mood I was in, I might say a song was about something more specific, about this or that, when it wasn’t really. Sometimes the songs were a little more abstract or surreal, just words that sounded good and created a good visual image in my brain when I was stringing them together. Half the time I was more concerned with how the words sounded than with what they actually meant.
‘’Enery’ is a little more specific, as it’s pretty much about sexually transmitted diseases – ‘Pass your germ, pass your bug’. At the time I wrote that, Bez and Our Paul were crashing at my flat and there were a lot of sexually transmitted diseases passed on, so it would have been at the forefront of my mind. There were a number of girls we hung about with at this time. They weren’t necessarily groupies, they were just part of your extended social group, and at that age almost everyone ends up shagging each other. The worst STD I picked up was a few months after we recorded the album, when I got this huge genital wart that was almost the size of a throat lozenge and I ended up having to go to the clap clinic in town to have it seen to.
There was one song that I didn’t have lyrics or a title for when we went in to record. A lot of the time when the band were jamming at rehearsals I just used to make up words to go along with the tune, and then later I’d work them out in my head and eventually write them down and arrange them, and possibly find similar words or phrases that fitted the song better to make sense of it. When we were in the studio I was reading a book about horoscopes by Russell Grant which someone had lent me, and when we were recording this one particular song I didn’t have lyrics for, I just picked up the book and started singing what was written on the back cover: ‘Hold on to your hats, this is the book that you’ve been waiting for, the book that tells you everything you need to know to help you understand, not only the one you love, but yourself too …’ I just read it word for word off the back cover, and managed to make it fit with the tune. I thought about changing some of the words, but it actually fitted so well, I thought, ‘Fuck, why do I need to write words? We’ll just have that and call it “Russell”.’ Which is what we did. I don’t think Russell Grant knows he was the inspiration for an early Mondays song. Ironically, I think that was the only time I didn’t get any abuse from Our Paul, who would sometimes have a bit of a downer on my lyrics when we finished a song.
I never used to read anyone else’s lyrics for inspiration. I would listen out for lyrics in songs, but, you know how it is, no matter how much you think you’ve heard the words correctly, when you see them written down you realize you’ve been singing the wrong fucking words for twenty-five years. I do have a bit of attention deficit disorder as well, so I have to try really hard to concentrate and focus if I’m listening to lyrics. Otherwise I’ll find myself drifting off and following the bass line instead.
‘Olive Oil’ is named after Gaz Whelan’s girlfriend at the time. Again, it’s not about her; it’s just named after her. Just before we wrote it, we had all been away to Rhyl for a few days, taking acid, and while we were there Olive Oil just came straight out with it and asked, ‘Will you write a song about me?’ I don’t really write songs like that, so I said, ‘No, but I’ll name one after you if you want.’
That was a mad few days in Rhyl. There was a whole bunch of us who drove down, boys and girls, and stayed in a caravan for a few days. In those early days of the band we did all knock about together – or at least me, Our Kid, Gaz Whelan, Paul Davis and Bez did. Not Mark Day so much. But the other five of us were all really good pals and hung about together as well as being in the band. In Rhyl there was me, Our Kid, Paul Davis, Gaz Whelan and Tall Minny (I knew two Minnys – so one was Short Minny and one was Tall Minny), plus the birds. Bez wasn’t with us for some reason. We all stayed in one caravan, and we took a load of acid down with us. I’m pretty sure everyone was tripping, although maybe not every single one of the girls was.
I can remember, really clearly, tripping on acid when we were driving down to Rhyl, and I could see myself on the bonnet of the car. We took turns in driving, so I was either in the driving seat or the passenger seat, and I kept seeing myself stuck to the windscreen, with my face up against the glass, peering back into the car. I knew it was a trip, so I didn’t freak out, but it was quite fucking weird seeing myself out there looking back at me.
I never did really freak out on acid. Some people are better at handling it than others. There was a space and time, around then, when me and Bez spent every day on acid for a good year. Every day. It got to the stage where we were eating black microdots, which are quite strong acid, and they didn’t even phase us any more. That was probably our drug of choice at the time, before the E arrived. We had been dropping acid since about 1980, but during that period, around 1986, we must have taken it daily.
I never had a really bad trip. I think you can bring bad trips on yourself, depending on how you react to the acid. I’ve got a pretty strong mind, so even when it was incredibly powerful acid and my whole world was completely taken over, when the real world disappeared and I was absolutely submerged in a complete cartoon existence, I was always able to say to myself, ‘This is a trip.’ I always, always had a strong enough mind to know what was happening. Even when the whole planet was one big cartoon and I looked up at the clouds and they had turned into great big Greek gods, who were climbing down out of the sky and talking to me – even then, I always had a strong enough mind, as did Bez, to say, ‘No, this is just a trip, don’t freak out.’
Me and Bez would trip together all the time, talking each other through it and walking all day and all night. We would walk everywhere. We would walk round town; we would go and sit in fields with horses and cows and sheep. We would even purposefully drop trips at eleven o’clock at night so that we could go out and explore throughout the dark night and still be out at the crack of the dawn. You would develop this nighttime vision with weird trails and then BANG! it’s daylight, and you’re soaked in glorious technicolour. As dawn approached, we would be waiting for the sunrise, waiting for those colours to just overwhelm us.
We carried on doing that up until just before our second album, Bummed, really, until the E came in and took over. We weren’t acid purists, though; we were garbageheads, as I said. We’d do anything. If someone came along with some speed or heroin or whatever, we’d do it.
So ‘Olive Oil’ certainly wasn’t about Gaz’s girlfriend; it wasn’t about anything in particular, although there are elements of the band in there – ‘Everybody on this stagecoach likes robbin’ and bashin’ … big blags abroad and smoking large amounts of hash, that’s sweet … the bigger the dream, the better the time.’ In those early days, I was often just observing things that were going on around me and stringing bits together to make a song, which is why there are lots of in-jokes and references to people we knew. If something struck me, or if I was somewhere or with someone and something happened which I thought would translate well into lyrics, I would try and remember it through word association if I could. But if not, I would scribble it down on whatever was at hand – scraps of paper, beer mats or cigarette packets. Then when we were rehearsing and writing new songs at the Boardwalk, I would get all those scraps of paper and start piecing them together, and maybe try different snippets with different songs. Then when a song had started to form, I would write out the lyrics on a blank sheet of paper, and arrange those various scribbles and snippets into something more structured.
The original album had a track called ‘Desmond’ on it, which we had to take off after the initial pressings because someone at Factory got nervous that it was too close to ‘Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da’ by the Beatles. I had ripped
it a bit, nicked a bit of the melody, and the lyrics started ‘Desmond did a tour in the market place’, but apart from that it wasn’t that similar. That’s what I would call ‘ripping’ a record – that slight magpie approach which I had on some songs, where I might nick a bit of a vocal melody from one song, or reference a lyric from another. But they were never direct lifts or straight plagiarism; we always made the songs our own. I’m not sure if anyone even seriously complained about ‘Desmond’ to Factory; they were just being overly cautious. If it was a smash-hit single that topped the charts, then I’m sure someone would have taken issue with it, but it was just a vocal melody, almost in homage, on a record that was only going to sell a handful of copies in the bigger scheme of things. But certain people, usually lawyers, are overly cautious and paranoid. The same thing happened again with ‘Lazyitis’ on the second album, although we kept that on the record, but we credited Lennon/McCartney because the vocal melody and lyrics are ripped from ‘Ticket to Ride’.
So after the initial pressings of the album, we replaced ‘Desmond’ with ‘24 Hour Party People’. That was another bit of a step up for us, songwriting-wise. Along with ‘Tart Tart’, it’s one of the first signature songs to really capture the essence of Mondays. In particular, ‘24 Hour Party People’ captured that dance side of the band that a lot of people had missed before then. We recorded it quite quickly at Suite Sixteen studios in Rochdale, with Dave Young, who had engineered the album sessions. I was happy with the lyrics, but I was never completely happy with the production. There were some really good elements to it, but there were some bits that I just couldn’t stomach. We didn’t quite nail it.