Twisting My Melon

by Shaun Ryder

  It really was a small circle, a tight-knit group of people, who got into E in those very early days. There might have been a couple who worked in trendy shops, but most of those involved at that stage were not exactly normal working people. They didn’t have jobs, but always seemed to have money. Even if they weren’t selling drugs, they had their own ways and means. Some of those kids would just sneak any way they could.

  I had grown a lot more confident in my lyrics by the time Bummed came around. It was just natural progression. I was arranging better and writing better lyrics. We shouldn’t have been on record before Squirrel and G-Man, really, because we weren’t ready. But by the time we came to Bummed, starting to record a new album almost felt like putting a pair of comfy slippers on.

  The dynamic was still great in the band at this stage. They would all still listen to me, when I could tell which way a song should go, and that pretty much stayed the same until Pills ’n’ Thrills. I always wrote the lyrics but I was also quite heavily involved in the music as well. Most of the music would come out of jams in rehearsals, and I was often kind of arranging it as we worked on stuff. Mark Day would start playing something on his guitar and I would say, ‘When you do that, can you just do this instead of that … and then give us three of them there,’ and he would listen and go, ‘You mean like that?’ and do it. Then I would say to Our Kid, ‘You know what you’re doing there? Well just lay off that, and go one up there or whatever … or do that twice, then bend it down there and bring it back up here,’ and he’d quite happily do that. I might not be able to play guitar myself, or even name the notes, but I knew the sounds I was after.

  It was only after we had been on Top of the Pops and made Pills ’n’ Thrills that things changed. Even on Pills ’n’ Thrills they still accepted my input. Half the songs on that album were written in the studio, and the music on at least four or five of them originated from the beats that Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osborne came up with. Our Kid would put his bass down on it, and Mark Day would put his guitar over the top. Songs like ‘Loose Fit’ came about like that. A lot of the keyboards on those songs were programmed as well, although PD would start thinking that he had written those keyboard parts. It was after Pills ’n’ Thrills became a hit, and the recognition that came with it, that the egos really came out and the dynamic changed in the band.

  There was no way, after Pills ’n’ Thrills, that they were going to listen to me telling them what to do – saying, ‘Can you do that?’ ‘Can you play it like this?’ Once the band got recognition, things changed. You had other guitarists telling Mark Day how fucking great he was, people telling PD how brilliant he was, people telling Our Kid what a great bass player he was. When people started telling Mark Day, ‘You’re the main influence on this band,’ and other people telling Our Kid, ‘You’re the core talent of this band,’ they then started to say to me, ‘I’m not listening to you – you should listen to me.’ But back when we were recording Bummed, the dynamic in the band was still working and still really good.

  The opening track, ‘Country Song’, was originally called ‘Some Cunt from Preston’, and is just the Mondays’ own individual take on country and western. By this time we had been rehearsing in the Boardwalk for a while and were really getting it down as a band, and were able to express the different types of music that we wanted to play. Before Bummed, we knew the music we wanted to play in our heads, but we hadn’t necessarily worked out how to get it out – both the band as musicians and me as a writer. But by this time we were all learning our craft. There is a line in ‘Country Song’ that says ‘Better put your house up for sale, the Indians are coming’, which is absolutely nothing to do with Asians or Pakistanis, in case anyone wonders. I remember thinking afterwards, ‘Bloody hell, I hope no one thinks that’s racist,’ but no one really picked up on it.

  Like on Squirrel, again there aren’t any songs on Bummed that are about me, necessarily, as I wouldn’t write openly about myself, but there are a few lines in there that refer to me. On ‘Fat Lady Wrestlers’ the line ‘I just got back from a year away’ could be about me coming back from living out in Amsterdam. Or it could be about me coming back to normality after spending a year tripping my fucking tits off. Or both.

  There are quite a few obvious references to Performance littered throughout Bummed. Performance was a huge film for me and the rest of the band. Everything about it, from the cinematography and style, to the acid and sex scenes, to the dialogue. Every line in that film is a fucking gem really. That was us beginning to know more what we wanted to achieve in the studio; wanting to include some film references and knowing we could do what we wanted, really, that we didn’t have to stick to a traditional format. ‘Mad Cyril’ is named after a character in Performance, and it includes dialogue from the film as well: ‘I like that … turn it up!’ or that Edward Fox line where he insists, ‘I need a bohemian atmosphere.’

  The song ‘Performance’ starts out with a straight rip from the dialogue of the film: ‘One day he was admiring his reflection, in his favourite mirror, when he realized all too clearly, what a freaky little old man he was’, and I added the ‘who is, he is, you is now’. To me that is just the same as what rappers do, nicking bits of dialogue and catchphrases from here and there, like magpies, and making it their own.

  Side two of Bummed opens with me shouting, ‘You’re rendering that scaffolding dangerous!’ at the start of ‘Brain Dead’, which was a line lifted from the film Gimme Shelter, about the Rolling Stones gig at Altamont. A lot of those film references come from our big acid phase. We would watch the same films over and over – although Gimme Shelter is about three fucking hours long anyway – and pick out different lines that became sort of catchphrases to us. The lines in ‘Brain Dead’, like ‘grass eyed, slash haired, brain dead fucker’, refer to certain characters, certain people that were around on the scene at the time. ‘Rips off town, steals from his brother’ – I certainly knew a few people like that. But, again, they’re not about one particular person; they are observations of different characters that I would put together to make the song, like a little short story.

  ‘Wrote For Luck’ was definitely an important song for me, lyrically. I surprised myself a bit when I wrote some of the lines on there, like ‘You used to speak the truth, but now you’re clever’. Although, to be honest, I always thought I never really finished it; to me it’s still a half-finished song. It needs another verse really, I think. Having said that, ‘Wrote For Luck’ was definitely one of the songs that helped me feel like I was getting more to grips with writing lyrics. It’s obviously very heavily influenced by the E scene and what was happening at the time. Again, it’s a mish-mash of different situations – he said that and I think this about that – strung together to make a song.

  ‘Bring a Friend’ is just pure filth. ‘I might be the honky, but I’m hung like a donkey’; ‘Come on in, grease up your skin’. The line ‘Clio and her sister Rio, were watching through the keyhole’ was ripped directly from one of the porn mags that I got charged for bringing back from Amsterdam a couple of years before. There were a few naughty sex parties that went down at the time. The E wasn’t necessarily a sex drug; it was more of a lovey, touchy, feely drug that would make you feel more like bloody stroking or hugging someone than fucking them. But if you mixed it with a bit of coke, then it was a different matter. Not just on lads either; it had the same effect on girls as well. They weren’t necessarily planned sex parties or anything, but you would get back to someone’s house for a bit of a party and one thing would lead to another. A few orgy-type situations. Like the lyrics said, ‘I say yes in every situation’.

  ‘Do It Better’ was definitely heavily influenced by the E scene, like I said. It was actually even called ‘E’ for quite a while, although if anyone asked me why it was called ‘E’ I said it was because it was in the key of E.

  ‘Lazyitis’ was the last song on the album, and I had really wanted to do a track like that, a kind of off-th
e-wall pop song. But I don’t think we quite nailed it. There were a couple of things that I wasn’t happy about on the finished album version. I was really critical about our songs and I think a few of the lyrics let me down on ‘Lazyitis’. I didn’t want it to be a single, but Tony was adamant. It was his idea to bring in Karl Denver later and re-record it as a single. Apparently, my dad took me to a Karl Denver gig when I was just a toddler, because he was into that sort of music, but I don’t remember it. We obviously all knew him from his hit single ‘Wimoweh’, though.

  The album title Bummed was just a word we used for everything at the time. You’d say, ‘Oh, I’d bum that!’ or ‘Fucking hell, I’d bum that bird there.’ It was just one of those words that we all used, like ‘Sorted’. The album could easily have been called ‘Sorted’ or ‘Mega’ or ‘On One’. In America they weren’t sure about the title, because some people thought Bummed meant ‘failed’. They were like, ‘Hey, man, I’m not sure about that title. It sounds like it hasn’t sold, y’know, like, “Hey, that album bummed!”’

  The cover was a painting of my face by Central Station. Again, it was all Matt and Pat’s idea. We would always just leave them to get on with the artwork, then if we didn’t like what they came up with we would say something. I remember seeing it for the first time and going, ‘Oh God, I don’t really want this as the cover.’ But Matt and Pat, and Karen, and Tony were all going, ‘This is great!’ I’m sure the rest of the band weren’t really into just having my face on the cover either. To make it worse, Factory then plastered the outside of their new office building with posters of the cover. That was also Wilson’s idea.

  The inner sleeve also caused a bit of a stir, because it was an old picture of a naked bird. We all agreed on it, but it was Our Matt and Pat who found it. They’re artists, so they would trawl through loads of old shit, archives and second-hand shops, looking for decent images. No one at Factory had a problem with it. But then that was the thing with Factory; they never had a problem with anything like that. They would never try and interfere. The only people who really did have a problem with it were the Americans. One pressing plant in the US refused to press the album with that inner sleeve, so we had to change it.

  While we were recording in Driffield, Granada came down to film us and interview us for a schools educational programme, which was supposed to be an insight into how to get into the music business. You can see it on YouTube now. I can’t remember exactly how that came about, but it must have come through Tony’s Granada connections, or maybe it was something that Tony and Nathan cooked up together. Back then there was really no exposure for indie bands. It’s not like now. If you look at the number of programmes playing what used to be called ‘indie’ now; back then there was just one MTV channel, which only really showed Bon Jovi videos, and hardly anyone had Sky anyway, before the Premier League. So when Granada wanted to do this schools programme, which followed us around as a band that was trying to make it, that was great for us. It was a weird one, because at the time we thought we were like the kings of the indie scene, but this programme really put us in our place a bit, because we were portrayed as a band that hadn’t made it yet and, to the general public, we hadn’t. Only a select few indie types would view us as a band that had made it at that stage. It was also a bit weird to use Factory as an example to the kids of how the music industry works, when Factory worked completely differently to any other label. But that was Wilson weaving his magic, with Nathan’s seal of approval. Wilson also featured in it quite a bit and, as it was plugging his band and his label, it was a win-win-win situation for him.

  When I say a kids’ TV show, it was aimed at college kids, not primary-school kids, so we didn’t get told to rein in our behaviour and smile for the camera, but on the other hand they didn’t show us swearing or skinning up either. In those days we’d have pulled out some whizz or coke, racked a few lines out and smashed it in front of anybody – we didn’t give a flying fuck. But they weren’t interested in capturing that rock ’n’ roll side of the band; it was about the process of making an album and releasing it. They filmed some bits with us in the studio, and they even went to the record plant to film the actual record being pressed, with a narrator throughout giving it all: ‘Okay, kids, first you need to get a band together, perhaps with your mates, then you need to get a manager, then you need to play some gigs, then you need to get something called an agent …’ and all that sort of thing, you know what I mean? ‘Then you get a record contract, then you make an album and then you have a launch party … simple as that.’

  They also filmed Wilson going to see Tony the Greek, who did our radio-plugging then. Tony the Greek’s real name was Tony Michaeledes and he was an old Manchester head who’d been round for years. In the programme he complains to Wilson that we hadn’t turned up for some radio interview he’d set up for us, which sounds about right.

  ‘Wrote For Luck’ was the obvious single from the album, and when it came to shoot the video for it we wanted to capture the feeling of those early acid-house days and the parties and raves that were happening, because that’s what we were bang into at the time, that’s where our heads were at. The Bailey Brothers did the video again and had the idea to shoot it at Legends, which is the club that Spectrum took over one night a week. We just hired it out, and all the extras in the video are just our crew and the party people that we were knocking about with at the time.

  Everyone in the club was on the E that night. Everyone. It was still people we knew that were the main supply of E in Manchester, although I was less involved personally. But I had a pocketful of pills on the night and so did Bez. If anyone down there needed one, they just got given one. The Bailey Brothers managed to capture a real trippy, gangster rave vibe, which absolutely reflected what was going on in Manchester at the time. If you want to know what those early parties and raves were like, just watch the video for ‘Wrote For Luck’. They did a great job of capturing the hedonism with a hint of menace underneath.

  In the end, they also decided they had to shoot an alternative version on the same day, with schoolkids, as Factory thought ours might not get shown on TV because it was so trippy and overtly druggy. So they got some local schoolkids in during the afternoon and shot a version of it with them, and then all our lot piled down in the evening to shoot the proper version. I don’t think the kids’ version ever saw the light of day, though.

  I really got on with the Bailey Brothers. We were on a similar vibe, and were big fans of all the same films – Performance and stuff like that. I remember saying to Keith Jobling once, ‘Have you seen that movie Thief?’ It was a 70s American movie about a professional thief, starring James Caan, and Keith said, ‘No way, man! I’ve asked loads of people about that film and no one else has ever seen it!’ Keith knew his films and I knew my films, and we could talk about them for ages. We were right on the same trip.

  The video does look slightly edgy, but that scene was a bit edgy at the start, especially to those who weren’t in it. Particularly the press, like the Manchester Evening News – it frightened them to death. They certainly didn’t see it as a big love-in. As I’ve said, the Evening News would never really touch us as a band, before we made it, and part of that was because we were the sort of people that they would cross the street to avoid if they were coming out of a pub late at night in the centre of town. A lot of the people in the media were a little bit frightened of what was happening at that time, because they just didn’t get it. They would come in and see what was going on at particular nights, and it did have an edge to it. To be fair, a lot of the people involved in those early days were quite edgy. They were people from a different way of life. They weren’t nine-to-fivers, most of these kids, and they were never going to be.

  I think all the videos we did with the Bailey Brothers were great, especially considering the small budget we had to work on. ‘Tart Tart’, ‘24 Hour Party People’, ‘Lazyitis’, ‘Wrote For Luck’, ‘Hallelujah’, they were all great. Even ri
ght up to ‘Judge Fudge’, where we had to cut the gates open and were driving around and playing cards – even that had a kind of Performance feel to it. We filmed that in the big glass diamond building in Stockport, which you go right past when you’re on the rattler to London. I think it’s a bank now, but it was empty then. It had just been built but it wasn’t being used for anything yet.

  Around the same time as the ‘Wrote For Luck’ video, we had also started work on this Factory film called Mad Fuckers with the Bailey Brothers. We filmed a few scenes on the same day we shot the ‘Wrote For Luck’ video, including some scene in Legends with Donald Johnson from ACR. Me and Bez were supposed to be playing two little mad fuckers, and in that scene I was picking up a parcel from Donald, or he was dropping off a parcel with me; he was some shifty geezer and there was something going down or something like that. To be honest, I still don’t really know exactly what the film was supposed to be about. We did film quite a few scenes, but it never got finished. Everybody and anybody was supposedly going to be in Mad Fuckers, and there was quite a buzz about it, but most of it actually only happened in the Bailey Brothers’ heads. I think some people still see it as the great lost Factory film or something.

  We launched Bummed in London and the idea was to have a gig and a rave in the same night – there was a launch at Heaven, the nightclub at Charing Cross, then we played Dingwalls in Camden, then everyone went back to party at Heaven. It was an idea that we cooked up with Nathan and Jeff Barrett, who had now taken over doing our press from Dave Harper. I don’t remember much about the gig at Dingwalls, but we had a load of our crew down there and half of them ended up on stage, and people like Jeff Barrett, who do remember it, say it was a great gig. Some people think that was a bit of a turning point for the Mondays, as that was the night when a lot of people got it, if you know what I mean, but I think it was just as much about them getting what the whole scene was about as getting what the Mondays were about. The thing is, wherever we went at that time, there was ecstasy with us and a lot of it was sold to people who came to see us, and many of these punters hadn’t had it before. So, even if the gig was a bit shit, everyone would have an incredible night and feel they were having the time of their lives. A lot of people had their first E watching the Mondays, so it was something they would always remember. Most people will always remember the first time they had E.