by Shaun Ryder
Amsterdam was the centre then, the hub for lads who were grafting all over Europe. People were always passing through Amsterdam wherever they were headed, or on their way back home. There were quite a few lads there that I knew from Manchester. At first me and my pals were living in hotels, as I had quite a bit of dough, and we also had a few stolen credit cards, as we still knew kids that passed on cards that went missing from the post office. We then moved into an apartment on Williamstraat. There were about five of us in that apartment, although someone was always off jibbing about somewhere. A few of you would jump in the car and go off travelling to Switzerland or somewhere, to do a few sneak jobs. There were loads of little scams that people were up to – stolen credit cards, sneaks, robberies, and even a few jewellers got done over. I was never a big-time sneak though; I just did what I needed to do to get by when I ran out of dough. I can remember walking round the streets of Amsterdam at five in the morning, looking for shops that were opening up. The staff would sometimes open the shutters a third of the way up while they were setting up and waiting to open, and you could sneak under there.
One of the main things lads were doing out there was arranging to get the E sent back. I wasn’t involved in that, but one of the Manchester lads was buying it in massive quantities and then there was a geezer out there who used to fit out the lorries with false compartments to import it all in.
We had a hairy moment when we ended up being held hostage in the apartment on Williamstraat for two days by a psychotic kid from Manchester called Skinny Vinny, who was coked out of his brain. A month or so before this, he’d been in the car with me and Platty and we stopped to get something from a shop, but when we came out of the shop he’d fucked off in Platty’s precious Golf GTI and we didn’t see it again for a month. Now he had a gun and was threatening to shoot us, and kept us there nearly two days with the fucking gun pointed at us. I ended up talking him down and bringing him round, then eventually someone made a move when he wasn’t expecting it and just grabbed the gun off him. He was an armed robber, Skinny Vinny, and not long after that incident he ended up robbing a bank and taking three people hostage, and having a big shoot-out with the police. Last I heard he was doing a very long stretch somewhere.
There were a lot of English out there in Amsterdam, all finding a way to make a bit of dough. There were a lot of Manchester kids and a lot of Scousers, a few Geordies, some kids from Sheffield, and a few Cockneys. That was when we first met all the Cockneys who went on to do the first acid-house nights in London, like Oz, Phuture and Spectrum – kids like Ian St Paul and his mates.
A few of the kids we met in Amsterdam are now quite big players and respected businessmen – restaurant owners and property developers and doing quite well for themselves. All of the ones that I’m still in touch with have now gone legit.
The band was still there in the background; it just took a back seat for a couple of months for me, while I was E’ing my face off out there and having a great time. When the band was ready to start work on our second album, I was still out in Amsterdam, having the time of my life. I got word that I needed to come back to start writing, but to be honest I was just having too much fucking fun. In the end, Bez had to come to the Dam to get me and bring me back home.
When I got back, Phil Saxe was still managing us, but he was also still running his shop in the Arndale and his market stall, and I felt that if we were going to take things up a notch we needed someone to look after us full time. He didn’t have an office, so we had to go to this shop or down to the market stall if we wanted to see him about anything. I put it to Phil that he should let Lenny, his brother, look after the market stalls and then he could manage us full time. But he made the decision that he couldn’t do that, so I decided we needed to look for a new manager.
Nathan McGough had first come to see us when we supported New Order in Macclesfield a few years earlier and made no secret of the fact that he was a fan of the band. Nathan had an office on Princess Street and was managing bands like the Bodines. He was a bit of a protégé of Wilson’s, as Tony knew his mum, Thelma, and Nathan had lived with Wilson at his house on Old Broadway when he first moved to Manchester from Liverpool in the early 80s. Thelma was married to Roger McGough, the poet.
I approached Nathan in the Haçienda and told him we’d sacked Phil Saxe and made it pretty obvious I wanted him to take over. Wilson was actually against Nathan becoming our manager at first, because he knew what he was like, knew how ambitious he was for himself and the Mondays, and thought he would be too much hard work for Factory. But I liked Nathan – he was great. He was business-like, but he was still young and liked to party. He was only twenty-five or twenty-six when he took over, and he was perfect for us, just what we needed.
Phil was a bit pissed off and disappointed. But I think after he thought about it for a while he realized that was what we needed. I bump into Phil quite a lot now, and we get on fine.
Just after Nathan took over, he got us our first £1,000 show, in Scotland, I think. It was a bit of a milestone – the first gig we had got paid a grand for, and we got paid in cash. But Nathan brought a bird back to the hotel with him after the gig and when he woke up in the morning she’d gone, and so had our first £1,000. So Our Kid, Bez and PD put bars of soap in pillowcases, threw Nathan in the bath and beat him with them, which bruises you really badly. That was kind of Nathan’s initiation into the Mondays in a way. We didn’t mind him partying as hard as us, but not if it was going to lose us money.
The songs for our second album were coming together in rehearsals at the Boardwalk, so we went into Out of the Blue studios in Manchester to record some quick demos of tracks, which we were really happy with. It felt like we were getting closer to the sounds in our heads.
At the same time, early summer 1988, the Haçienda really began to take off. They started a Wednesday night called Hot, with Mike Pickering and Jon Da Silva DJ-ing, and that’s when the roof lifted off the place. The E had now swamped the club. I remember Hooky once said, ‘There weren’t that many people on E in the Haçienda.’ You fucking what?? Where were you?? If there were 1,500 people in there, then 1,400 were off their fucking tits on the E, especially on Wednesday and Friday nights, and pretty soon on every night of the week. And the ones that weren’t off their tits on ecstasy were on something else. It all happened quite quickly, in a matter of months, if not weeks. The difference in a year was unbelievable. It had gone from being empty early in the summer of 1987 to being rammed every night.
People might think that us selling weed and then the E was part of a constructed image, but it wasn’t; it was what we needed to do to get by. We didn’t really earn any decent money from music until about early 1990 when we’d done Top of the Pops and were stepping up to do venues like the G-Mex. Before then, almost all the dough we made, we made ourselves, sometimes through selling our own merch, or touting gigs, but for a short while most of the money that came in was through turning people on to E.
CHAPTER SIX
‘And you were wet, now you’re getting drier, you used to speak the truth but now you’re a liar, you used to speak the truth but now you’re clever’
AS WE WERE getting ready to record our second album for Factory, I could feel the mood towards us at the label had changed. We were no longer the new boys; we had become more accepted. That was partly down to our music, and partly because they could see we were very clearly plugged into the Haçienda scene. By introducing the E we had pretty much filled their club and now, having heard the demos for the new album, they were starting to think we might be able to sell a decent amount of records. I definitely felt we were getting treated better and taken more seriously, rather than left alone to get on with it.
It was our idea to use Martin Hannett to produce the album. Factory had fallen out with him over the Haçienda, which he thought was a waste of money, as well as a few other things. Hannett had wanted to buy a Fairlight, which was one of the first synthesizers, but they spent the mon
ey on the club instead. He’d even tried to sue them, and had pulled a gun on Wilson at the Factory offices on Palatine Road. We spoke to Alan Erasmus, the other Factory founder and director, about it first, and he spoke to Wilson. They knew Hannett was not in a great place, financially or mentally. He was in a bit of a state, so I think they saw getting him back in to work on Bummed as throwing him a lifeline. I’m sure they also thought he would be good to work with us. They wouldn’t have done it otherwise, but it was a bit of a peace offering, an olive branch.
We recorded the album at Slaughterhouse studios in Driffield in Yorkshire, which Factory probably picked because they thought it was a small enough place that we wouldn’t get into much trouble and close enough that they could keep an eye on us.
I hadn’t met Hannett before we did Bummed, but obviously I knew all about him. I was a big fan of his production because I’d really been into Joy Division and Unknown Pleasures, but I also liked the other productions he’d done.
Martin could do incredible amounts of drugs. And he did. Sometimes in the studio in Driffield he would just be flunked out. Gone. He was the only producer that I’ve ever worked with that was more druggy than me. And madder. Shambolic. He had this nylon weatherproof BP Oil jacket that he wore all the way through the recording. He never took that jacket off. But we got on really well, and I think he preferred hanging out with us than hanging out with the rest of Factory. I became good friends with Wendy, his missus, and the whole family. Martin was always skint, even after he produced Bummed. While we were recording it he was on ecstasy, heroin, cocaine, acid … Martin took everything. We gave him the E, and I think it was the first time he’d had it.
Even though I had dabbled in heroin since the early 80s, I wasn’t really taking it then; when the E first came around, I was just bang into the pills. It wasn’t until late 1989 that heroin really got a grip of me. So I didn’t smoke any gear with Hannett when we were recording Bummed, although I did a year or so later.
Most people we worked with on recordings we then wouldn’t see again until we were back in the studio with them, but after we finished Bummed I used to visit Martin’s house in Chorlton a lot. Our Matt and Pat became really good friends with him too. They were actually out on a massive bender with him, which lasted for days, just before he died in 1991. After that huge blowout with Our Matt and Pat, Hannett went home and died of heart failure. He was only forty-two.
Working with Hannett was a very different recording process to working with John Cale on Squirrel and G-Man. John Cale had recorded us live almost, but Hannett had a few more tricks up his sleeve. It wasn’t just Hannett – by the time we came to do Bummed, we as a band were on a total different vibe as well. Because we were on the E, we were permanently in massive party mode. When we recorded Squirrel it was pretty much just the band in London, but when we did Bummed we had the E, so all our pals came across to Driffield to party with us while we were recording.
The E had a big influence on the music. At that time we wouldn’t necessarily put the house music we were hearing in the clubs on at home, but then we were never at home. Most of our lives at the time were spent in nightclubs or at parties, so that was where we heard the majority of the music we were soaking up. We were either out or we were in the studio, and we would play that music in the studio because we were on the E. We also had all the records the DJ Paul Oakenfold had played in Ibiza that summer at the studio with us, because one of my pals had bought them all off Oakey in Ibiza at the end of the season. Tony Wilson later said he came across to see us when we were recording and just found us in a room in the dark, lying about on the floor with hundreds of vinyl records scattered around us.
Musically, the interesting thing for me about Bummed is that it came about just as the E had hit, so quite a few of the songs had been written beforehand. I’m pretty sure that Our Kid, Mark Day and Gaz Whelan hadn’t tried an E when we were first writing the songs, and hadn’t started going to Hot at the Haçienda on a Wednesday night, like the rest of us. Me and Bez had, and PD had a bit, but the other three weren’t on it yet. In fact, at first they were even a bit like, ‘What the fuck are you up to?’ We would be in our rehearsal room at the Boardwalk on a Wednesday, writing the songs for Bummed and me, Bez and PD would go straight over to the Haçienda afterwards to get on it, and the others would be like ‘What are you knobs up to?’ They did get on it later; they just came to it slightly after us. By the time we came to actually record the album, they were definitely bang at it as well.
So it’s hard to say exactly how much the E influenced Bummed overall, but it’s fucking obvious on some of the later tracks. ‘Do It Better’ is a total E track – it’s really hypnotic and even the lyrics are repetitive: ‘on one, in one, did one, do one, did one, have one, in one, have one, come on, have one, did one, do one, good one, in one, have one’ and ‘good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, double double good, double double good’. Everything was ‘double good’ to us at the time because we were on the E. ‘Hey man, that’s double good …’
I don’t think Hannett was particularly a fan of house music, but he was E’d off his head during the recording, so obviously this stuff was seeping into his nut as well. That’s what the E could do – music that you didn’t particularly like sounded great when you were E’d up. We were pretty much just listening to house music while we were recording and there was a brilliant atmosphere in the studio. It felt like one long party, which we just happened to be recording.
Driffield was a funny place. We stuck out like a sore thumb. There was a big army base in the town and I remember being in the disco there on a Friday night when a load of squaddies came in. I was with a load of our crew from Manchester and we were all E’d up. The disco was just opposite the studio – it was part of some crappy shopping precinct, a real towny place that held about five hundred people and had a DJ just playing chart music. He played ‘Push It’ by Salt-N-Pepa and ‘Theme From S’Express’, which were all right, but everything else he played was just dire chart rubbish.
This army lot, who had just come back from Belfast, were all looking at us and obviously spoiling for a fight. Bez was there with his big starey eyes, and one particular nutty squaddie wanted to start on him, because he thought Bez was looking at him. We also had a lot of the birds in the club hanging round us, so that was pissing the squaddies off as well.
There were more of them than us, probably fifteen of them and ten of us. If it had kicked off, it would have kicked off big time, because the lads that I was with certainly wouldn’t have backed down. No way. But we were all in a real party mood because we were on the E, and I tried explaining this to this ultra-violent squaddie who wanted to start on Bez. ‘Listen, the kid’s peaceful, he’s just off his head, blah blah.’ Then I just said, ‘Look, have one of these – it will change your life, and you’ll be looking like him before you know it,’ and I literally threw an E in this soldier’s mouth. He was so drunk he just took it. Now I used to give it an hour for the E to kick in, but he came back over smiling in much less than that, going ‘Wowwwww!!!!! Gimme some more for my mates! Gimme some more for my mates!’ So I gave him a few more and they ended up buying some off us too. Soon all of these squaddies were off their faces and they’re all hugging each other, saying, ‘I don’t want to go back fighting wars’ and ‘I don’t want to go back in the army.’ These are the same guys that had earlier been boasting about going to Ireland on a tour of duty, and they’re now all on this peaceful hippy vibe. Fucking hilarious.
It was just as funny invading Driffield during the day. Obviously the E hadn’t reached this small Yorkshire town, so they hadn’t seen anyone dressing like or acting like us lot, which you were beginning to see around Manchester. When our pals came to Driffield, they brought a consignment of E that should have been for the consumption of everyone in Manchester. So all our lot were E’d up the whole time. We would be in the car at traffic lights on the high street, in broad daylight, then next t
hing a top tune would come on the car stereo, and we’d all jump out the car and start dancing round it. Me, Muzzer and Bez and everyone just dancing round the car in the middle of the afternoon. Then when the tune finished, we’d get back in the car and drive off.
The locals would just be staring. We also looked totally alien to them as well, with our designer hippy gear going on. We would march into the pie shop in Driffield like we were in a Madness video or something. You know that thing that Madness do in their videos when they’re all marching together? We’d be off our tits walking into the pie shop like that together, but thinking we were just behaving normal, you know what I mean? The old Yorkshire bird behind the counter would be like, ‘Aren’t you a nice bunch of cheery chaps?’ as we were dancing in the middle of the shop. The yokels had no fucking idea what to make of us.
That was the thing with the whole E scene; it also changed the way people looked. If you look at the pictures of us before we all started taking pills, we all have crew cuts and stuff – that Perry Boy/casual look. That was what the police would look out for back then – crew cuts and casual gear like Burberry jackets or whatever. If you looked like that, you were going to get nicked for something. When the E kicked in, we started growing our hair a bit longer, into a centre parting like curtains, or even a pony tail, and our clothes were also getting a bit looser, and all of a sudden the police didn’t look at us. We no longer fitted their stereotype image of the lads who were knocking out drugs or trying to sneak a shop for a till or something. The police didn’t give you a second look. You could be walking down the street with your curtains and your loose-fitting gear on, or even dancing down the street like we were half the time, and you didn’t even register with them. You were off their radar now because they were still looking for the crew-cut scallies. Which was great, because our lot were knocking out more drugs than before, but getting stopped much less. For a while anyway. We probably had at least six months to ourselves, a little window when it was almost like walking round in disguise really, because no one else was on it yet.