Twisting My Melon

by Shaun Ryder

  Now we had a kid, we decided to move out of the city centre and we bought a house in Didsbury, on Beeches Mews. It was a new-build townhouse, three storeys but only two beds. It should have been £175,000, but the developer had gone bust, so they were selling them off for £90,000. Kevin Kennedy, who played Curly Watts in Coronation Street, lived in the flats opposite, so he was my neighbour and we used to have a drink with him now and again in the nearby Woodstock pub.

  Not long after Jael was born, we had to go on tour to the States, which would normally be a massive wrench, to leave your new baby. If I go out on tour now, I always miss my little kids, but I didn’t back then because I was just anaesthetized by the drugs. Heroin doesn’t allow you to miss anything except heroin.

  We played with Jane’s Addiction at Madison Square Garden and Perry Farrell, the lead singer, was an absolute wanker. We were slightly late turning up, through no fault of our own. We were stuck in gridlocked traffic, probably the worst traffic I’ve ever seen in New York; it was a fucking nightmare. But we had people from the record company with us and someone had a mobile phone and we were in touch with the venue all the way, keeping them up to date. But by the time we got there we were late and only had time to go on stage and do twenty minutes. We were only getting paid a poxy fee, about $400 or something, but we’d taken the gig because we wanted to play Madison Square Garden. We’d played venues that size in Europe, but Jane’s Addiction had never played a venue that big before, so I don’t know if it was Perry Farrell getting too big for his boots, or even being nervous about the show, but when Muzzer went to get our fee they said we weren’t getting paid. Perry Farrell was being a right obnoxious twat, stood there with this twenty-three-stone bouncer, this huge wide motherfucker who looked like he lived in McDonald’s, telling Muzz we’re not being paid because we ran over a minute or something daft. Muzz just stuck one on him. He wasn’t going to take that shit from some dick.

  When we got back we headlined a massive gig at Elland Road, Leeds United’s ground, called Match of the Day. It was us, the Farm, the La’s and Stereo MCs. I remember winding the crowd up during the gig, saying ‘Are you Man U, you?’, because that’s what Leeds fans always used to say when they were looking for a kick off.

  We’d played with the La’s before and they were sound, although I hope I didn’t get any of them into heroin, as I’ve got vague memories of staying in a dingy hotel and getting the tinfoil out – although ‘There She Goes’, which they’d released a couple of years before, is supposedly about heroin. John Power, who went on to form Cast, was a top lad.

  We’d known the Farm for ages. They were actually on TV well before us. I remember watching them on The Oxford Road Show in the early 80s. Their lead singer, Peter Hooton, got a bit jealous of our success later, but I’ve seen him more recently and got on with him fine.

  Me and Muzz decided to record our set and put it out as a bootleg live album ourselves, as we thought it would be a way to make a quick bit of extra dough, although we obviously kept it quiet that it was us who released it. We had ‘Made in Sardinia’ stamped on the cover, but they were actually made in Salford. I was quoted as saying, ‘The people who have produced this bootleg have assured me that all the profits are going to animals and poor children.’ I can assure you now that none of the profits went to animals and poor children. But there wasn’t really any profit. We thought we were going to make the same profit as we had with drugs, but it was nothing like it. In the end, we were like, ‘You know what, this ain’t worth fucking doing!’

  Weirdly, Factory decided to put out a live album of the gig themselves later that year, but taken from the same recording we used.

  That August we played Cities in the Park, which was a two-day festival in Heaton Park in north Manchester, featuring most of the bands on Factory, and everyone from Electronic to De La Soul and the Wonder Stuff. We headlined the Sunday night, and I remember as soon as I got there someone told me Salford had bumrushed the gate and a few hundred had got in for free. Which didn’t surprise me. Heaton Park is that close to Salford, you have to get the security bang on, or you’re just going to get taken for a ride. Alan Wise was the promoter and was moaning about the fact that we got a hundred guest tickets and got one of our lads to flog them outside. It was full of blaggers that day. I think Alan joked he even thought about turning the stage around, because there were more blaggers backstage than there were punters out front.

  When autumn came round, me and Bez edited Penthouse. The editor was a big Mondays fan and had reviewed the album, and Jayne Houghton got talking to him about us doing something. I’m not sure if it was just supposed to be more of a straight interview at first, and then it escalated – because when you’re in the band you don’t always get to know every discussion that goes on – but by the time it was suggested to us it was just, ‘Do you want to guest-edit Penthouse and do a photo shoot for them?’ and I was just like, ‘Damn right we do, yeah!’

  We went down to London to do it, and Trish insisted on coming with me. She said, ‘I’m coming with you on that …’, so she did. They call it editing, but it’s quite simple, really. I’ve done it a couple of times, for different publications. You sit at a desk, and first you read over a couple of letters and give your opinion on them, and that’s editing the letters’ page. Then you look at a problem letter and you give your opinion, and that means you’ve done the agony-aunt page. Then you have to look at a few pictures of girls and pick a couple out for a photo shoot. Then you pose for a couple of pictures at a desk and that’s it.

  Linzi Drew was the main girl at the time for Penthouse, and she was keen to be in on the shoot. There was also a girl called Miss Whiplash, who had got her name because she was caught whipping some MP. We did the photo shoot the next day at the Holiday Inn in Swiss Cottage. We had a suite with a jacuzzi, and we all ended up in it. I think Bez had a bit of a touch and a bit of fun. I was going to wear a sports vest at first, but then it was like, ‘Nah,’ so we just had boxer shorts on, but you couldn’t tell because they covered us up in bubbles.

  Shortly after that the News of the World did a number on me apparently confessing I had been a rent boy. It all stemmed from an MTV interview where I had been joking with the presenter, and the News of the World had taken the quotes completely out of context. The thing was, not many people had Sky back in 1991, before the Premier League, so they could almost get away with doing that. Weirdly, the picture they used was from the Penthouse shoot of me and several busty models, which hardly matched the story of me supposedly being a rent boy. Our Paul found it hilarious, but I was fuming. That evening I went down to Dry Bar with Muzzer. I was still seething, I was off my nut and drinking too, and I walked in Dry with my 375 Magnum. I was going to blow a hole in the bloody roof of the place because I felt I had to make a point, I had to show how furious I was about the piece. But I stopped short of that in the end. I just ended up smashing the mirror with a bottle. Again, it was not like it’s depicted in 24 Hour Party People. Leroy Richardson, who used to work at the Haçienda but was then running Dry Bar, was there and he just tried to calm me down and speak to me. Muzz and I just did one.

  The News of the World then had the fucking cheek to send the female reporter up to interview me about the whole thing, to see why I was so upset. I was still fuming and not thinking straight, so I rang up a little firm of girls I knew who were pretty naughty, who would sort someone out for you. They did that for a living. I had it all set up with these girls, who were capable of serious damage. They were hiding in the toilets of Dry Bar and they were going to leather this journalist when she walked in there, then nick her handbag and make it look like a robbery. But I had second thoughts at the last minute and decided to call it off, so I just nipped down to the women’s toilets and gave them a whistle and got them out of there.

  If it had been two years later, or even a year later, I would have just laughed off the whole story. I probably would have taken them to court, because we had evidence of what I had
said on film, and you can clearly see I’m laughing and joking. I could easily have got damages. In the end the News of the World printed an apology and retracted the story, but it’s one of those apologies that’s about the size of a postage stamp, so hardly anyone spots it anyway. I don’t know how they get away with that, the fuckers. I wasn’t surprised at the recent revelations about the News of the World. I know what some of these reporters are like.

  Whether the press were positive about us or not, they were certainly interested in us, and it was definitely me and Bez they were focusing on. If there had been simmering resentment in the band since we first got that front cover a few years previously, it was now openly coming to the boil.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘Tell me what you know about Cowboy Dave, did he whistle on brown, was his woman a sex slave?’

  YES PLEASE! WAS pretty much doomed from day one.

  We were sort of pushed into recording a new album because Factory’s financial situation was getting more perilous by the end of 1991, and it had also been over a year already since Pills ’n’ Thrills had been released, so it was about time for us to get back in the studio. We hadn’t really had any time off in that year. We hadn’t been lazing about or anything – we’d been gigging and doing press, so we hadn’t really had time to write new material. Bez and I had done so much press that year that Nathan joked that the only person who’d had more coverage than us was Lady Di.

  At this stage I had my heart set on working with Oakenfold and Osborne. I knew I wouldn’t have to be concerned about the lack of time to prepare and write, because I found it so easy to work with them and I knew we would have got the right result again. There really was no other choice for me. We asked Oakey and Osborne and we got word back that they really wanted to do it, but they had to finish off another album they were already working on first, so we would have to wait for a couple of months. I was fine with that, but Tony kept saying, ‘Yeah, but we need to go and record now. We need the album as soon as.’ Had we worked together as a band, we might have been able to persuade Factory to wait, but sadly Our Paul, PD, Mark Day and Nathan’s reaction to Oakey and Osborne was, ‘They should drop what they’re doing. We want them now!’ and ‘They had never produced an album before they worked with us. We made them – they should make us their priority!’ I was like, ‘Whoa. They’re in the middle of a fucking job, y’know what I mean?’

  Oakey and Osborne were as keen to work together again as I was, because Pills ’n’ Thrills had gone to No. 2. It was kept off the top but went top five, so it was still a massive success. But Our Paul and Tony then started coming up with other names – ‘We could get thingy to do it, or so-and-so to do it …’ and then Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth from Talking Heads were mentioned. I didn’t want anyone else. I tried telling them, ‘No, this is madness!’ Working with Oakey and Osborne was a winning formula as far as I was concerned, but the rest of them couldn’t fucking see it. They’d gone right up their own arses after the success of Pills ’n’ Thrills.

  When Chris and Tina were mentioned, Our Paul, PD and Mark Day’s immediate reaction was, ‘Oh yes, they’re proper musicians.’ I just said, ‘NO!! Look, this is wrong, it just won’t be right. It’s a step back, not moving forward,’ but they just wouldn’t listen. There was a band meeting over the choice of producer, and only me and Bez were up for waiting for Oakey and Osborne, and everybody else, even Gaz, wanted to go with Tina and Chris, so Our Paul and Tony went out to Jamaica to meet them. I didn’t bother going too because I knew they weren’t the right people for us and there was no way I was going to meet them when the decision had virtually been made without me. I had really liked Talking Heads and I was also into the stuff they had done as Tom Tom Club but, no disrespect, I just knew they weren’t right to work with us. It was a bit like when Vince Clarke remixed ‘Wrote For Luck’. When somebody so famous and well known gets involved in one of your records, it starts to sound like it’s them. Vince Clarke’s ‘WFL’ mix sounded like him, because it had his signature touches on it, and I knew that this time we were going to end up sounding like Chris and Tina. Everyone else thought it was a great plan, but to me, we’d just really found our sound and identity as the Mondays, and now we were going to be taken right back.

  The rest of the band didn’t get it; they didn’t understand that our fans liked our sound. They thought that if we could incorporate Chris and Tina’s sound into the Mondays sound, then all the Talking Heads fans would get into it and we would break into a much bigger market. But it doesn’t work like that. I tried to explain my misgivings to them, but me and Bez had been outvoted and the decision was made.

  Chris and Tina aside, I felt we were being rushed into this album and were in danger of running out of ideas. I also didn’t want the norm. We were now in a position to use big-name producers, but I wanted something people wouldn’t expect, something more unorthodox. And the band weren’t getting on either.

  Mark Day had actually decided to leave the Mondays at one point, just before we started making Yes Please! He had pretty much decided he was off, for various reasons, mainly his missus, Jane, who was like a little Yoko. She’d say to me, ‘You don’t tell Mark what to do any more, blah blah blah …’ So Mark was going to go and set up his own band: ‘I don’t need this, I’m off, I’ve had enough of Shaun, I’ve had enough of Bez …’ He really didn’t appreciate what we had. Mark would say, ‘I don’t even like the Mondays’ music.’ Like the rest of them, he was pissed off that he wasn’t the main focus of attention, and really thought he was the important one. They had so little respect for my songwriting and what I did as a front man, or what Bez did. Gaz actually did like the Mondays’ songs, but the rest of them would slag them off.

  They were all having talks about going off and doing their own thing, and being the front man, which was fucking hilarious. They’d also be moaning about me and Bez being on drugs and giving it, ‘Grrrrrrr, they’re ruining the band,’ but all of them were off their faces too. And the more drugs they did, the more it focused their anger on us.

  At one point, I asked Johnny Marr to join the Mondays and he actually did for about twenty minutes. He came round to mine one day and agreed that he would come and work on the album, but then he drove away and must have had a change of heart, because he was back within half an hour to say he had changed his mind. When I look back, it shows how little I knew about the game then, because I don’t think it would have worked. Johnny is brilliant, obviously, but him joining the Mondays wouldn’t have been quite right. We would probably have done a much better album than we did with Chris and Tina, because he actually understood us, but the Mondays was all about the chemistry, and Johnny was probably so much better a musician, he would have just got frustrated. He had Electronic anyway at that point, but I hadn’t really thought it through, I just thought, ‘Johnny Marr plays guitar. He’s from Manchester.’

  Chris and Tina worked in Barbados quite a lot, because they had a house down there, and the idea was to use Eddy Grant’s studio, Blue Wave. At one stage we were going to use the Bee Gees’ studio in Miami to record Yes Please!, which I thought was a brilliant idea. But some people at Factory didn’t think Miami was the right location, or, more specifically, they thought there would be too much partying. It was a coke city, and a playground, and they basically didn’t think I would behave in Miami, or in front of the Bee Gees if they happened to be around. So Barbados it was.

  Everyone always says that Barbados was chosen because there was no heroin there for me, but that wouldn’t have even bothered me, because if I had some methadone with me and could have got hold of some Valium or some codeine pills as well, I would have been fine without it. Anyway, the plan backfired because the one thing that no one – not Nathan or anyone at Factory – had realized was that in Barbados you could buy an ounce of crack for about a quid.

  Yes, I did famously drop and smash my bottles of methadone at Manchester airport on the way out to Barbados, but the knock-on effects of
that have been exaggerated. I wasn’t on that much methadone – only about 20ml a day, which is quite a low dosage. I’d had methadone on and off since the early 80s, and I did have a meth habit at the time, but it wasn’t like I was drinking 130ml a day – I was on a steady 20ml. I had been on a meth prescription but that had recently ended and it wasn’t a maintenance prescription that gets renewed; when the prescription ended that was it. So I’d started buying it, just so I had it there as a crutch when I didn’t have gear. I had two 500ml bottles in my bag, but I dropped my bag in the airport and the bottles smashed. I was on my knees, desperately trying to scoop it back up, and I did actually manage to salvage about 300ml, although it had broken glass in it. But I managed to get that into a bottle we found in the airport, and when I got to Barbados I strained it through a piece of linen to get rid of all the bits of broken glass before I drank it. That 300ml would have lasted me fifteen days, at about 20ml a day. We were going to be on the island for roughly six weeks, but fifteen days would have been more than enough time to get an alternative supply sorted, so those smashed methadone bottles aren’t as important as they’ve been made out to be.

  When we landed in Barbados there was an issue with us not having return flights. We hadn’t booked them because we didn’t know exactly how long we were going to be recording, but they wouldn’t let us in without them, so Nathan had to buy us all flights out of there before they would let us in the country. Eventually he got it sorted, and we were there and ready to start work.