by Shaun Ryder
That summer, we headlined Glastonbury, which was actually the first time we had played there. NME wanted to do a big cover story on us there, so we suggested doing a photo shoot with a mini Stonehenge, because we were all big fans of Spinal Tap and they had a mini Stonehenge. We did the shoot in Heaton Park in north Manchester. We drove up there in convoy and when we arrived Bez crashed into Gaz’s car in the car park. He was a liability behind the wheel, Bez, even though he used to slag off my driving.
I’d been to other festivals before, but I’d never been to Glastonbury. I wasn’t interested in the whole mystical side of it, and the ley lines and all that bollocks. To be honest, it wasn’t a completely jolly experience for me. It rained, so it was muddy, but that didn’t bother me much, apart from I didn’t want to get my trainers muddy. I spent almost the whole time on the tour bus. I didn’t even go to the dressing room. Glastonbury in 1990 was still quite basic; it was closer to what it must have been like in the 70s than to what it’s like now. When I went back recently, to headline with Gorillaz, it was a completely different experience, a much more professional set-up.
Back in 1990 we had a sleeper bus, but I also booked into a hotel so I could get off site for a bit. When I was on site, I spent most of my time underneath our bus, in the luggage hold. You know when you have a panel on the side of the coach, which lifts up and there’s a big hold underneath for everyone’s bags and stuff? I spent most of Glastonbury in there with about twenty other smackheads. We spent almost all weekend under the bus, just smoking gear. Stick a gram on a piece of tinfoil, smoke that; stick another gram on a piece of tin foil, smoke that. Just smoking constantly – it was a mad scene. We ended up with more and more of us under there, because someone would have to go and get some more gear, and they would come back with a few more hangers-on. I did have a break from it at one stage, when I got off to the hotel with this bird that I’d met at Top of the Pops. We disappeared for the night, but when we got back to the site I was straight back under the bus, and straight back to my tinfoil.
My mam has got this great photograph on her living-room wall that is taken from the back of the stage at Glastonbury while we are playing. You can see the back of me, and my Armani jeans, and then the whole of the audience and the tents behind – a great crowd shot. I can’t really remember much of the actual performance though, because I was so numb from the heroin. I think the most exciting part of the weekend for me was taking the bird back to the hotel. While we were there, some of our lot were making copies from our backstage passes and banging them out. I think they even had a colour photocopier and a laminating machine on the bus.
We also had people selling snide merchandise as well as the official stalls. As ever, you couldn’t stop people selling bootleg merchandise, so you might as well sell it yourself. We wanted both ends of the market. So we had a few lads out there working, and what they would do is when they had made a certain amount of dough they would go and bury it or stash it somewhere. John the Phone, the guy who had put on G-Mex with Jimmy Muffin, was heavily involved in the merch, and he actually got fucking kidnapped at Glastonbury. This biker crew – I don’t know for sure if they were actual Hell’s Angels, but they were a heavy biker crew anyway – kidnapped him and took him to this disused farmhouse nearby. They tied him up and had him in there for nearly two days, slapping him and torturing him. But you’ve got to give it to the little fucker – he told them nothing. He wouldn’t tell them dick. So eventually they just let him go. He had a fair few cuts and bruises and I think they’d shaved a bit of his hair off, but he just brushed it off. Went to the place where he’d stashed the last of his money, got it and brought it back to the bus.
We got asked to leave in the end, because our lot had brought it a bit on top. They realized how many backstage passes we had knocked out, and in the end their security surrounded our bus and made us leave the site. Glastonbury had its fair share of scallies, who used to come down because they thought it was easy pickings, but they just weren’t prepared for us. I didn’t think much of it at the time, because I was just in a haze, but looking back, we were pretty crazy.
We went to Ibiza after Glastonbury. We were playing Ku Klub and we were supposed to be chilling out, but me and Muzzer ended up spending a week trying to get paid for the show. I was sure there was something dodgy going on and they wanted to avoid paying us. It was about £100,000, but after a few days’ hanging around we eventually got the money. I think Muzzer had to throw his weight around a bit, but there was no way we were going to let them take us for a ride.
We then went back to America to do a short tour, before ending up in Los Angeles to record our next album. The tour was called The United States of the Haçienda, and we also had Mike Pickering, Paul Oakenfold and the Haçienda DJs Graeme Park and Dave Haslam on the tour.
The gig in New York coincided with the New Music Seminar, which is a big industry thing in the States, so Wilson was in his element. I didn’t have much to do with it, but I know Wilson gave this speech giving it all ‘Wake up America, you’re dead!’ and bigging us up. The thing with Americans is, even if they think their music scene is shit at the time, or their current president is a dick, or whatever, they might be allowed to say it themselves but they won’t stand for anyone else saying it. They don’t like anyone else going over to America and telling them what’s what, so Tony going over there saying that was never going to go down well. Yanks like success. They’re different to the British. The Brits love an underdog. Look at X-Factor. People love it when someone goes on and is terrible, dressed like a goon, and can’t sing and makes a fool of themselves. They love someone like that Wagner bloke, the Brazilian PE teacher that was on X-Factor, who couldn’t sing at all. The English love someone like that. The Yanks can’t stand that. They hate it.
That was partly why the British loved Bez, but the Americans never really got the idea of him. They never really grasped the concept of Bez. They would be like, ‘What does that guy do, man? He’s not a dancer – that’s not dancing.’ Well, he’s not really a dancer, no. ‘So, what does he do? He doesn’t sing, he doesn’t play anything. He just fucks about on stage off his head.’ But the British loved that, and in Britain Bez almost was the Happy Mondays at one point, or at least he personified us. But the Yanks just didn’t understand it, and they didn’t like the way it looked, this guy with bulging eyes wandering up and down the stage. They didn’t mind it so much on videos, when he’s just standing around, because a lot of American videos, especially rap videos, are basically just blokes standing around. But on stage they want everybody to be doing a specific job, and they couldn’t see what Bez was doing there.
Keith Allen also came out on that tour with us. He was always a Factory fan, and knew Wilson and New Order, so he just started coming to the gigs, and then he came on tour with us to the States.
We were still quite young at the time, in our mid- to late twenties, but if we thought we were mad, you should have seen Keith. He was about ten years older than us, in his late thirties, but he was still hitting it hard, and when it came to doing mad things he would put us to shame. You could be out with Keith in a bar in America and it would kick off and you would be lucky to get out alive. Keith would be sat there and if something annoyed him, he would just pick up a chair and put it through a plate-glass window. Several times I can remember being in bars with Keith in America and it going off, and us having to fight our way out of there, and Keith was usually at the centre of it, if not starting it. Seriously. People thought we were complete madheads and would love to write about what we got up to, and people would lap it up, but Keith was a mentalist. Far worse than us.
When we played the Sound Factory he was on stage for the gig, like a second Bez, apart from he’d overdone it so much that he had to get his head down halfway through the gig. On stage, in the middle of the gig, he’s trying to climb in this flight case at my feet. Then he woke up again and got up for the encore, I think, for ‘Wrote For Luck’. When it came to craziness
at that time, I don’t think even Bez had anything on Keith. He used to drive about London in a black cab that he owned, with all his kids in it. But you see him now and he seems very together, and very grown up. Although he must be nearly sixty now.
Muzzer reminded me recently about this punky-looking girl I met in New York, who had dyed red and black hair, and was really nice looking. I was sharing a room with Muzzer again, and when I took her back to the room he was in bed but I thought he was asleep. I start getting it on with this bird and she says, ‘I want you to hit me.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to hit you.’ She said, ‘I want you to hit me – I like it.’ I was like, ‘Nah, leave it out.’ But she kept on at me, ‘I want you to hit me. I love it.’ So in the end I just gave a little slap, and she did love it. Then she hit me back, so I clobbered her again and so on. I picked up the phone handset and smashed her round the head with it, and that must have knocked a glass over on the bedside table because somehow some glass got in the bed and she got cut, and now there’s blood everywhere, but I’m still shagging her and she was loving it. Next thing she says, ‘I want you to cut me …’, but before I could say anything, Muzzer jumped out of bed and said, ‘Woah, I’m putting the fucking brakes on this now.’
She cleaned herself up a bit and just got off. I think she had a bit of a dent in the side of her head from the phone, but that’s what she was into.
*
We eventually got to Los Angeles and we were supposed to jib up to San Francisco for one last date, but we just couldn’t be arsed. We’d just got to Los Angeles, where we were going to record the album, and Soul II Soul were playing in LA that night, so we fucked off the gig in frisky Frisco. Nathan phoned up and told them that PD had an abscess, which wasn’t total bollocks. He did have an abscess and it was causing him major grief, but it was also a slightly handy excuse for us. I’ve never been someone to pull gigs, really; it just wasn’t our style. I think I’ve only ever pulled a handful in this country, and usually for a very good reason. I’ve been really, really ill with all sorts and still gone on.
There have been a few we’ve sacked over the years. I sacked the last Black Grape gig, because that was all going tits up, and we sacked a couple of early Mondays gigs in Spain, after the stage collapsed and the lighting rig fell in and I nearly died. I’d just gone off stage when the lighting rig collapsed, and there but for the grace of God … Basically, if we’d done another song it would have fallen on me. So after that happened, when we arrived at the next few gigs our tech Ed would go out there and check everything, because health and safety wasn’t a massive priority in Spain back then, and if he came back and said it wasn’t safe then we wouldn’t do the gig. I’m sure it’s not as bad now in Spain, but back then everyone would be like ‘Mañana, mañana.’ Then you’d read another report in the paper of a stage collapsing and people dying.
Ed, Di and Oz, our crew, had all worked on Joy Division and New Order and when we started getting support slots they started helping us out, because up until then we just had our old fella doing the sound for us and working as a roadie, and we needed more back-up. Fair play to them, when we started gigging and were still travelling round in a transit van, Ed, Di and Oz would just dive in the back of the transit and come down to London or up to Glasgow with us, and basically work for nothing, because we weren’t getting paid hardly anything for the gig. Then when we did start getting paid and we needed someone to do those jobs, the work went to them, which is how it should be. Payback for good people.
So anyway, we sacked off the gig in frisky Frisco. We had arrived in Los Angeles, the sun was shining, and the vibe was right. We just wanted to go out and see Soul II Soul and have a top night, then have a few days’ chilling. Then it was down to Capitol Studios to crack on with the new album.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘Son, I’m 30, I only went with your mother cos she’s dirty, and I don’t have a decent bone in me, what you get is just what you see, yeah’
I CAN’T REMEMBER who first had the idea to record Pills ’n’ Thrills at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles, but I was bang up for it; I thought it was a great idea. I knew about the massive history of the place and who had recorded there, everyone from the Beach Boys to Beastie Boys. There was an engineer there called Ray who had been there for years and years and worked on a lot of the iconic albums, and he would tell us stories of past recording sessions. The building was just as iconic as the music, because Capitol Records Tower is a Hollywood landmark.
I remember Ray and me were in the studio one day, soon after we started, and we both suddenly really freaked out when this smell hit us. Some people like putting cocaine in their joints to smoke it and one of our guys had sparked one up. The smell of burning cocaine is pretty instantly recognizable and it really turns my stomach and makes me feel quite ill. Ray started absolutely freaking out. He jumped up and started shouting, ‘Whoa, what’s happening, man?!? What’s going on??!’ and started having these mad flashbacks and physically shaking. It had somehow tripped off some flashback for him, some memory of some band who must have been doing the same thing – smoking cocaine when they were recording back in the day. It totally tripped him out, and he was physically shaking like a leaf. He had to go and have a two-hour sit-down in a quiet corner and try and get his head together. That was poor old Ray’s introduction to Happy Mondays.
I first had the idea to use Paul Oakenfold as the producer on Pills ’n’ Thrills when we were recording the last album, Bummed, at Driffield. I loved ‘Jibaro’ and the great Balearic mix of beats and Spanish guitar that Oakey had on there. He had then done the remix of ‘WFL’ for us, which I really loved as well. So right from the early discussions about recording Pills ’n’ Thrills I absolutely knew I wanted Paul Oakenfold from day one. The rest of the band weren’t too sure at first, and neither were Tony or Factory; they still saw Oakey as a DJ rather than a producer, even after the remix of ‘WFL’. At that time, Oakey was more of an ideas man than a studio man, and he worked with Steve Osborne, who would do all the knob-twiddling because Oakey was still feeling his way around the studio.
What really swung it, I think, was what he did with ‘Step On’. After Factory saw how it came back when he’d finished with it, then they were like, ‘Right, okay, you want him, you can have him.’ Still, no major label would have done that. There is no way it would have happened with any other record company but Factory, especially as this was such a big album for us; this was the album where we really needed to make that step up. With that in mind, any other record company would have opted for an established producer, a safe pair of hands.
We all got hire cars as soon as we landed in Los Angeles, and me and Muzzer got a convertible Golf GTI, which was quite a cool car in England at the time. But not in America. The Yanks were still quite backward in their thinking in some ways, even in Los Angeles. Me and Muzz would be driving about in it and everywhere we went these beefy Americans would beep us and shout something like, ‘Motherfuckin’ fags! Get a proper motherfuckin’ car!’ We’d just shout back, ‘Fuck off, you big, daft, thick cunt!’ Our Golf GTI could blow them away if we put our foot down. Booom! Just leave them standing at the lights. ‘You get a proper car, you fuckin’ rednecks!’ Nowadays you go to LA and they’re driving round in nippy little fuckers, Minis and that. But back then, everywhere we went it was the same – Beeep, beep, ‘Motherfuckin’ fags!! Get a proper motherfuckin’ car!’
Bez, of course, did want a ‘proper motherfuckin’ American car’, so he got a huge convertible Chrysler LeBaron. He wrote it off straight away. The same day we arrived I think. He piled into the back of someone, then proceeded to get out of his car and go and drag the fella he’d crashed into out of his car. This big argument went off. We had to calm Bez down and say, ‘You can’t hit these fuckers over here, mate, because you’ll get sued for the rest of your life.’ I think the dude did try suing him, but it got smoothed over. I think we might have had to give the guy a bung or something, but it got sorted out. Bez didn’
t even have a proper licence; he had a blag licence and he’d blagged the car from the hire company on that, I think, so we didn’t want that to come on top either.
Bez’s main problem when he’s driving is he doesn’t watch the road. You’ll be in the passenger seat and he’ll be driving, but he’s just looking at you going, ‘Right, where we gonna go and what’s happening and I reckon we should do this and get some of that and blah blah de blah blah blah …’, just looking at you and not looking at the road. Then someone in another lane will beep him and he’ll turn round and start giving them a right mouthful, and now he’s looking at them and giving it out, but still not looking where he’s going. He never looks at the road ahead.
But then if I offer someone a lift and they’re getting in a car with me, Bez will have the cheek to say, ‘Don’t get in a car with X – he’s fucking lethal,’ and I’m like, ‘Fucking hell, Bez!’ I’d actually never written a car off in my life at that stage.
We were staying at the Oakwood Apartments in Burbank, which is one of those gaffs that are full of musicians, actresses and porn stars. Again, it’s one of those places that when you phone up to book the apartment you have to choose from a menu – ‘Er, I’ll have the leather settee, two televisions, a vase of flowers, a silver teaset, and two pictures – the one with the crying boy and the one with the crying swan.’ Weird place.
Chris Quinten, who played Brian Tilsley in Coronation Street, was staying there at the same time as us, trying to make it in LA as a movie actor. He must have heard our accents, but I don’t think he had a clue who we actually were, because when we clocked him and said, ‘All right?’ he just blanked us. I thought, ‘You cheeky bastard!’