Twisting My Melon

by Shaun Ryder

  When we played Los Angeles we met Bowie, and the Beastie Boys turned up. We were all in a club called Enter the Dragon when Bowie walked in. Gaz Whelan was off his head and started going, ‘Haha – Bowie’s a midget! Bowie’s a midget!’ Gaz is obsessed with people’s height, he always was. We were trying to shut him up, because he always went over the top when he was drunk.

  He also had a bit of OCD, Gaz, and it could take hours to get him into or out of a club because he would have to touch something five times or something crazy like that. The bigger the band got, and the better known we got, the more his bits of OCD came out. He was a footballer at heart and all footballers have slight OCD, don’t they? They have weird rituals about how they put their boots on and stuff like that, which they have to adhere to. When Gaz was on a tour bus and it was just us, he’d be okay, although he still hated anyone touching his food. He also smelt shit everywhere. He’d always be saying, ‘Can you smell shit?’ Everything smelt like shit to him. He was also a hypochondriac. One week he thought he had bowel cancer, the next week he thought he had a brain tumour. It must have been a nightmare for him. He made Gillian McKeith look normal.

  When the band first started, Gaz’s mam and dad lived in a house that our pal Si Davis’s family had lived in before. Si’s dad had died in the house and Gaz was always a bit freaked out about ghosts and stuff. His mam and dad used to leave the windows open so I would climb in the window when they were out, go into Gaz’s bedroom and move things about, just to freak him out. I did it for quite a while. He’d come out and say, ‘There’s a ghost in that bloody house.’

  There were quite a few incidents on that tour of America with the Pixies. It was pretty eventful. We always seemed to meet big-time drug dealers when we were abroad around that time. Hardcore importers or people who ran smuggling rings. We just seemed to attract them. People who happened to have a kilo of weed on them, or the odd brick. We never seemed to meet normal people who were just selling an eighth of draw or a bit of coke. Wherever we went, nice restaurants or clubs or whatever, we seemed to attract these serious characters, people who were major players in some way. I remember in Los Angeles meeting this Bonnie and Clyde couple from Mexico, who were in their late twenties and looked quite respectable, but were actually responsible for bringing a lot of the weed from Mexico into LA. They were very middle class and well-spoken, none of your ‘bro’ talk or anything, but they were serious importers. I can’t remember how we met them, but they just gave us an ounce, as if it was nothing. I think they might have even given us an ounce each. Everyone thought ‘the chronic’ was the strongest weed at the time, but I can’t tell you how strong this stuff was. We were staying in the Hotel Roosevelt, which is facing the Chinese Theatre on Sunset Boulevard, and me and Muzzer had planned to go across and watch Batman, which had just come out, but we couldn’t even cross the road. It was like acid, this weed; we were tripping our fucking nuts off. Me and Muzz can handle our weed, but this tackle had knocked us sideways. You have to be pretty fucking stoned before you can’t even face crossing the road, but it seemed like an impossible mission to us.

  It makes me laugh when people say, ‘Oh the weed nowadays is much stronger than it was twenty years ago.’ Bollocks. There was skunk and chronic, or whatever you want to call it, around back then; it just wasn’t necessarily available in this country. But certainly if you went to the States or Mexico or Amsterdam you could get hold of it. The Dutch would always laugh at the Brits back in the day, because as soon as they arrived in Amsterdam and hit the coffee bars, they would go straight for the skunk, or the strongest weed available, roll a spliff, smoke it, and then spend the rest of the day almost in a coma, just nodding. It really bugs the shit out of me when people say the weed wasn’t strong back then. Bullshit. What a load of crap.

  There was also a proper heavy incident in Cleveland. A few of us – me, Muzzer, a kid called Bones and some other lad – got a taxi to go and score. We were after some weed, and some smack for me. We pulled up in this taxi and started doing a deal with this kid, but he was being a bit of a smartarse with us and giving us a bit of aggro, so we started being a bit smartarse too, started giving him some agg back. He gave it us, we gave it him back. Next thing he just gives this kind of whistle and these kids come launching out of nowhere with guns and bats. We ran to the taxi and dived in, and they started putting the windows through and everything. The taxi was a bit like what we would now call a people carrier – fuck knows what it was called then – but it was a bit bigger than a car and had a sliding door on the side. Me and Muzzer managed to dive or fall back into the taxi as they started on us, and they started smashing the windows with baseball bats. We somehow managed to get away, to this day I don’t know fucking how, but by that time every window in the cab had been smashed and two of the doors had been ripped off, and the taxi driver was just sobbing, fucking bawling his eyes out. If me and Muzzer hadn’t moved so sharpish and somehow managed to get back into the taxi, we would have been dead. Absolutely no question. They were hardcore hustler kids who sold gear, probably in their mid-twenties, proper corner boys. They weren’t messing about. All because we were trying to do a deal and we thought this kid was trying to rip us off.

  When we got to New York, the Ritz gig was quite a crazy gig. It was filmed and quite a few of our lot came on stage for the encore ‘Wrote For Luck’. That was included on our Madchester video compilation that came out later in 1989, along with most of the videos the Bailey Brothers had done for us up to then. The last date of the tour was in Chicago, and after the gig I took acid for the first time in ages. I think it was in Chicago, although admittedly I was absolutely tripping my nuts off. I ended up, in the early hours, tripping my box off in this van with what I thought were really annoying people. They might have been very nice, because they were really just punters or fans who had hung around after the gig and wanted to be friendly and had offered to take us to some party. But I was on acid and they had started to annoy me. You know that certain type of American who is probably quite a nice person, but just starts to rub you up the wrong way? So I just started taking the piss out of them really heavily, just ripping into them, and one of the kids said, ‘Oh my God! You’re so rude!’ But the more he kept saying, ‘Oh my God! He’s so rude!’, the more it was winding me up and I was going, ‘You fucking knob!’ Then, next thing, the driver just shrieks in this high-pitched voice, ‘I just can’t drive with this motherfucker in my van any more! Get out of my van! GET OUT OF MY VAN!!’ I was just laughing my head off, absolutely tripping my nut off, and I said, ‘I don’t even want to stay in your van, you fucking knob!’

  We were in the middle of nowhere and I had no idea where I was, but I didn’t give a fuck. Then this sexy bird in the van said, ‘Hey, you can’t just leave him here, he has no idea where he is!’ and next thing, she jumps out and says to me, ‘I better come with you.’ We walked for what seemed like miles, because I was tripping, but fortunately she knew where we were supposed to be going. I’d never met her before, but somehow she knew where we were staying. It was about five in the morning at this stage, and I was fucked. I couldn’t walk any further, so I flagged down a juggernaut and just pleaded with him, ‘I’m an English guy and I’m tripping my nut off. Can you give us a lift please?’ This girl was laughing her head off at me, but thankfully the driver took pity on us. We climbed in the truck and the girl was trying to tell this driver where we needed to go, because I’d got no idea where I was, or what was going on, and he was laughing his tits off at me because I was absolutely flying and still slagging off the knobs in the van, going, ‘Those fucking dickheads’ and all that. He eventually dropped us off at the hotel and I banged the arse out of her all day. Then she got up about teatime and said, ‘Right, I gotta go and get my methadone.’

  *

  As we started taking off and getting better known, we had to spend more time in London, doing press or TV, and we found we got in places easier. We would find ourselves in some of these gaffs in London, B
rowns or wherever it was at the time, which were full of different crowds – aristocratic types, proper moneyed types, and even royalty.

  Actually, speaking of royalty, Muzzer once fucked one of the royals in the back of a black taxi, on the floor. Not one of the immediate Royal Family – it wasn’t Princess Beatrice or anyone like that – it was someone a bit further down the line to the throne. I can’t remember her name and I wouldn’t tell you even if I could, but she was something like seventy-eighth or eighty-fifth in line to the throne or something. Muzzer, her and me were in the back of a black taxi going through London. We’d been to some posh gaff where everyone was off their tits, and we were on our way to some other gaff and Muzzer just shagged her on the floor of the black cab while I was sat there. You might think they’re all high and mighty, but some of that posh set are right naughty little fuckers. Alex Nightingale, who used to manage Primal Scream, has got some really interesting photos of some young royals on his phone, but they should probably remain nameless here.

  If you’re moving in the right circles or have money, that’s how things happen – you end up meeting very different people. It’s always been like that. That’s how all the actor types ended up mixing with the Krays in London in the 60s, because they were all in the same clubs.

  By the middle of 1989 our schedule was pretty relentless. There wasn’t really much of a life outside the band any more. If we weren’t out on tour, we were either in the studio or writing new material, and we were out every night. No days off. But none of us minded because it felt like everything was coming together. The whole E scene was going overground, but it still felt quite special at that stage. The Es were still good and the Haçienda was rammed every night. I felt like we had made a bit of a breakthrough with Bummed and ‘Wrote For Luck’. But I also felt like we were on the cusp of something much bigger.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘Twisting my melon man, you know you talk so hip, you’re twisting my melon man … call the cops!’

  AT THE END of July 1989, Factory opened Dry Bar on Oldham Street. The Haçienda was still rammed and smashing it and Factory had decided they wanted a sort of pre-club bar for people to go to. Before Dry Bar we used to drink in old men’s boozers. We would go in the City Road Inn, opposite the Haçienda, or the Britons Protection or the Peveril of the Peak. They were our main hang-outs in the centre of town. We’d stopped going to the ‘trendy’ bars, or those bars that thought they were trendy. You know those late 80s type of bars? I suppose in London they would call them wine bars, but no one called them wine bars in Manchester. Just shit bars, full of mirrors and chrome and fucking dickhead beer monsters.

  Ben Kelly, the guy who had designed the Haçienda, designed Dry Bar, and it was the first modern pre-club bar in Manchester, if not the country. They’re everywhere now, Dry lookalikes. There’s probably a Dry rip-off in Ipswich and fucking Doncaster. But Dry was the first, and when it opened it was completely different to everywhere else. It was like going to a nightclub that opened at 1pm. We immediately made it our headquarters and didn’t really go anywhere else. If we were in town and not on tour, we would go to Dry just after we got up, about 1pm, and we would be there until 1am. We might nip out to go to a meeting or something, but basically that was where we were based. The toilet was downstairs and people spent a lot of time down there, doing drugs and just hanging out. Sometimes I would go down to the toilet about 8pm and not come back out until it closed.

  By that time, the band were more well known, but I wouldn’t really get mithered in Dry because of the lads that I had round me. I might get people letting on to me, or occasionally asking for an autograph, but I didn’t get approached much because the sort of crew that hung around us then weren’t really the sort of crew that you would want to bother. Let’s just say they were a bunch of lads that people knew they had to be a bit wary of.

  By 1989 there were other clubs springing up in Manchester as well, and most of them were quite moody. Konspiracy was a club below the Corn Exchange (which is now that poncey shopping centre The Triangle), near Victoria Station, which was put together by a mate of mine, Mario. Konspiracy actually used to be Pips, the club that we went to at the end of the 70s with the Bowie room. The main DJs at Konspiracy were Chris and Tomlin, the Jam MCs, who we actually took on tour with us to America. The other gaff that opened around the same time was the Thunderdome up on Rochdale Road, but I didn’t really go there much. It was a pretty moody gaff.

  By the end of 1989 the gangs had started to come in the Haçienda and the club tried to clamp down on it.

  Just after Dry Bar opened we played at the Other Side of Midnight end-of-series party at Granada. It was filmed in the afternoon and we played with Mike Pickering’s T-Coy and A Guy Called Gerald. They basically tried to re-create a rave in the afternoon in a TV studio. We did about four or five tracks, including ‘Wrote For Luck’, which was the track that went out on the show. Fair play to Granada for trying to expose a mainstream audience to what was going on. Tony probably had a lot to do with setting that up, along with Nathan, but Granada were actually really good when it came to stuff like that, and always have been, when you look at how they covered Dylan when he first came over, or the Doors. They even filmed a programme with Muddy Waters in Chorlton years ago. Someone at Granada always seemed to have their eye on what was happening with youth culture and they were pretty good at it. You wouldn’t get anything like that from any of the other British TV companies. It’s a shame they don’t really cover music in the same way now.

  I don’t really remember the filming of that show, but that’s because I was completely off my tits. Completely. I know Tony introduced us, and Bez wasn’t there because he was stuck in Marseilles for some reason. I can’t remember what happened to him that time, but there were a few occasions when there were warrants out for his arrest for non-payment of fines or maybe missing a court appearance. He got escorted off a plane not long after that when we were flying to Ireland. There was a warrant out for him, so security and police came on the plane after we’d boarded and took him off. When we got to Ireland we managed to find a cardboard cut-out of Bez from somewhere and we stuck that on stage as a replacement. In fact, thinking about it now, I don’t even think it was a cardboard cut-out of Bez; I think we nicked a cardboard cut-out of a pilot from the airport when we landed, and then found a picture of Bez’s face from a magazine or something and cut it out and stuck that on this pilot and put some of Bez’s clothes on it. Anyway, we had this cardboard cut-out on stage as a replacement for Bez, and Macca, a pal of ours from Salford, got up and danced in his place.

  Not long after that a young girl called Claire Leighton died in the Haçienda. It was the first death from ecstasy. By that time there were some pretty dodgy batches of E turning up. We always knew where our original ones had come from, but we had no idea about all the others. I remember someone giving me a pill one afternoon and saying, ‘Try one of these.’ It was red, I think. I necked the fucker and an hour later I was walking down Oxford Road and I collapsed. I was on my own and I just blacked out. I don’t know how long I was out for and I don’t think anyone actually tried to help me. When I came round there were a couple of people stood just looking at me. I got up and pulled myself together a bit and just got off. There were some pretty dodgy drugs going about at that time.

  About the same time, I had another dodgy E experience when I was crashing at a pal of mine’s, Dave Reddie’s, in Walkden, near Little Hulton. I woke up in the middle of the night because I was being dragged off the sofa and round the living room by two big Alsatian dogs. They were pulling me round the room and ripping me apart, these two Alsatians. But while this was happening to me I sort of got my head together a bit and said to myself, ‘Hang on a minute – I’m in Dave Reddie’s flat, and I know he hasn’t got his dogs any more, he’s got rid of ’em.’ Next thing, I find myself on the floor in the front room of his flat, having a fit, convulsing and frothing at the mouth. But before that moment of clarity, I ab
solutely thought my hallucination was real. He’d actually only just got rid of the dogs, so you could still smell them in the flat. I must have smelt them in my sleep, and that smell had then triggered something in my brain, and the dodgy E had given me some sort of fit.

  I don’t think I ever stuck three or four pills down my neck in one go. Even the ones that I knew were 100 per cent MDMA. I would probably start off with one, or even a half, and then build it up, so over a night I might do three or four. A few years later, people were saying, ‘I’ve had seven, or eight, or nine pills.’ I’d just think, ‘If you had put seven of those early pills down your neck in one go, mate, the top of your head would have blown off!’

  It’s a cliché, but the Es were definitely stronger back then. When we first started getting them they had pure MDMA in them. A 100 per cent pure MDMA pill would go for £50 a pop. Really expensive, but pure MDMA. But all of those first ecstasy pills were really good. You could tell when they started changing because they became quite whizzy; the first ones were nothing like speed. They made you feel like you had to shower and be clean all the time, and your clothes had to be really fresh. Obviously in some of the photos of the Haçienda everyone looks really sweaty because it was so hot and you were going for it, but the vibe was all about being really clean, washing your hair often and having clean clothes and feeling fresh. If you look at pictures from that period, everyone is obviously off their heads, completely off their nappers; but they all look quite healthy with it. Fresh-faced. And bloody young.

  I was coming out of a warehouse rave one night and I had about ten pills on me. These ones were capsules, rather than tablets, so I put them in my mouth just to get out of there, because the police were searching people. But by the time I got out, these pills had melted in my mouth. Not good. I was absolutely out of my mind, and it gave me a real shock. I was knocked sideways for days and ended up taking myself to BUPA to get checked out, but they said I was fine. I’ve had a few near heart attacks like that, which is one of the reasons I stopped hammering the pills and moved on to other drugs.