Still Breathing

by Donnelly, Anthony; Donnelly, Christopher; Spence, Simon

  In Paris we went to a restaurant and ordered steak tartare. When it came out we were like, ‘What the fuck is this? Raw meat and a raw egg?’ I quite like it now.

  Anthony: This was the honeymoon period. We were having parties in Paris to see who could drink the most champagne. I think forty-eight bottles got drank one night in Paris. We flew all the lads to Paris on a private jet for a party. They brought sheets of trips. On one night out, we had 150 people all given free acid and tripping off their nuts – the bar staff were giving free drinks away. Daniel Poole, the barrister who set a clothing label up, was with us. The next day his staff turned up at the Paris clothes exhibition doing a Grand National over people’s stands, totally out of their heads. They barred him from the show. I was dropping £2,000 on restaurant bills, as opposed to a fiver in the local chippy.

  Harry the Handbag had all the shops for Scotland . He had five shops. Their first order in Paris was ten grand. He was delighted. All the sales reps worked on commission. I said, ‘Nice one!’ And then these Scottish geezers went, ‘Yeah, but Harry, you’ve got to times it by five – a £10,000 order for each shop.’ Harry’s legs nearly went – he had a fifty grand order. He was on commission and had made £5,000 in the blink of an eye. That set the day off. We took over seven hundred thousand pounds worth of orders on the first day.

  Christopher: We were taking massive orders but we just didn’t have the stock. We couldn’t keep up with it. It was a cash flow thing. We couldn’t manufacture that much. We did some jeans that had a leather patch with the Aztec eagle on. We made them with washing instructions that said, ‘Mum, please wash my jeans.’ The knitwear factory put a nightshift on to cope with the demand. The gear was selling that much that in the warehouse we had to start splitting the stock between the reps. They were fighting over it. Say we had 1,000 pieces of knitwear come in; it would be 250 for Harry, 250 for Nico, 250 for Joycey and 250 for Wack. Any one of them could have sold the full amount that day. Then they’d be screaming they had no stock. Jeff started taking backhanders in the warehouse. They would then give the factory backhanders, ‘Make me an extra 200 pieces!’

  Harry Franco [aka Harry the Handbag]: Because we had so little stock, there was always big competition between the reps. One of my orders from one account in Glasgow was £36,000. As I was taking that order I was thinking they were never going to get £36,000 worth of gear. I think I managed to get about £12,000 worth of stock to them. They wanted so much more. Anthony knew that and he’d wind everyone up, ‘I know where Nico’s got a load of jeans hid.’ Then they’d put the stock into the warehouse, open the doors at one end and Anthony would stand at the steps watching us literally fighting over a pair of jeans.

  My areas were Scotland and the South West. I’d get the red carpet treatment in those areas. I was going in to clubs in the evenings with the shops guys and being given free drugs, free beers, on the guest list. You were ‘the guy that worked for Gio-Goi’.

  It was a strange dynamic between Chris and Anthony. Chris was the quiet, mellow one and Anthony was the completely mad, manic one. If Anthony was in the room it was as if you had a wasp in your ear. It seemed at the time that if there wasn’t any trouble in his life, he’d go and find somebody else’s trouble to get involved in. Chris was bang into his clothes. Anthony just liked the kudos. The clothes didn’t really matter – it was just the status. Anthony loved all that, whereas Chris loved the clothes. Chris really wanted to learn about the industry and he got really into fabrics and designs. They knew everyone on the Manchester music scene. They managed to fire directly into every band. I was sent down to Northwich to find The Charlatans with a box of clothes, or I’d go round to Johnny Marr’s house and knock on the door and say, ‘There you go, Johnny. Here’s a box of clobber.’

  Christopher: We’ve always known the importance of marketing and product placement. [Actor] Max Beesley came to the office – he was playing the bongos in the title sequence of [new Ch4 youth TV show] The Word at the time. He became a big friend of ours. He was in a band called Incognito. Max was also going out with [soul singer] Mica Paris and working with the Young Disciples, so we’d send them clobber. He’d also get the clothes to Jamiroqui, The Brand New Heavies and Paul Weller.

  Because of John O’Garr’s connection in London we were dressing Galliano. We had this really cool thing going on. We had our pals in the gear, the Mondays, Stone Roses, 808 State, K-Klass, A Guy Called Gerald … we had it boxed off. We dressed Take That for a tour. Max was playing percussion for them. Every week, whoever was playing The Word, we’d send a parcel of gear down. It wasn’t just the northern bands wearing Gio; we were rocking London also.

  Jeff Oughton: I went from warehouse man to warehouse manager to Jeff ‘friend of the stars’ – that’s what they called me. We used to have a book and any band that came in – Happy Mondays, Stone Roses, all the Madchester scene – if they took anything, they had to sign for it. Anthony used to write letters to The Rolling Stones and slip it in their box and the next thing he’d say, ‘I’m sure that’s one of our jackets Keith’s got on.’ He was unbelievable at promoting it.

  When Barney [Bernard Sumner] and Johnny Marr were doing Electronic, Barney came down to the warehouse. I don’t know if he was a bit off his tits at the time but he picked up these sample jumpers and they had codes on them. He thought that was part of the design. It was just a code for the knitwear. I said, ‘Yeah, that looks sound on you that, Barney.’ He took the gear and wore that jumper on Top of the Pops and in the video. It had Gio-Goi written round the neck – you couldn’t miss it. I was like that, ‘Get in!’

  Anthony: We never had a general manger or a PR or anything like that. Magazines would just ring up asking if they could send someone down. Then we’d poison them with booze and drugs, get them off their head. But you’d realise they were as mental as you and they certainly didn’t need to be force-fed anything – certainly at i-D magazine. It was in i-D that Vivienne Westwood described us as ‘ambassadors for a generation’. [‘Anthony and Christopher Donnelly are at the forefront of fashion and music, ambassadors for a generation.’] We were appearing all over the press.

  Christopher: We were doing business in Europe, Japan and America. Someone went to New York and came back and told us the staff in the Stussy shop in Greenwich Village were head to toe in Gio. Union in New York stocked our stuff. We had 200 shops worldwide stocking us. We had a cult following all over the world. We had the Japanese coming over, buying the stock and then they would send us pictures of the biggest Japanese bands all head to toe in Gio. All the doormen at Peter Gatien’s Limelight club in New York wore the gear.

  Anthony: The first year that we traded, we didn’t have an accountant or anything, we just had a tin box in the office. And there was quite a lot of money being taken. We got a guy in – a little Jewish guy called Jack Dunkirk, ‘Jack the Hat.’ He got a desk in the corner of the office and he wanted to go through the first year’s trading to get everything in order. I think we’d turned over about a million pounds and there was a tiny cash box with about 87p in it and a couple of receipts for some bizarre things. That cash box got smashed so many times. I used to come in and ask Jack for the keys and he’d go, ‘No, you’re taking fortunes and it’s being run very unprofessionally.’ I’d smash it open, take the cash and just fuck off. Quite a few people said, ‘You can’t behave like this.’ We thought turnover was profit.

  Christopher: Jack did a great job and soon had the company on the straight and narrow. He was about sixty. He used to go ballroom dancing and he ended up with the maddest firm in the world. He sat through all sorts of people coming in. We would often have difficulty with cash flow; there was one particular supplier owed a lot of money, and I mean a lot of money. They were saying they were not going to supply us anymore. Jack had words with them and guaranteed that they would get so much each month, to bring the bill down, and they continued supplying us. It was lucky because they supplied all the labels and badges. Jack was worth his we
ight in gold and extremely honest. The suppliers thought we were mad but they would listen to a respectable geezer like Jack.

  We were getting the stuff made out of Portugal, a bit closer to home because of the long lead times in China, Hong Kong and Pakistan, and the quality was not right. That’s when John [O’Garr] started doing the cola bottles and cow heads on T-shirts. We had one T-shirt that had this weird shape with Gio-Goi in the middle of it. I’m driving down the motorway one day and I saw the logo on the side of a van. It was for Seeley beds. He’d just taken their shape. I was like, ‘Fucking hell, he’s just taken that badge for a bed company and banged Gio in the middle of it.’

  While John was doing that I was making our own designs. I did a ‘Drug Free’ T-shirt that was an insider joke – you’d see kids on the dance floor all over the country all off their heads in a ‘Drug Free’ T-shirt. Was it, ‘I’m on drugs and free’? Or was it, ‘I’m drugs free, I don’t take drugs’? And we did ‘Narcotics Officer’ – which Anthony had seen on a girl he fancied at the time. All the doormen wanted ‘Narcotics Officer’ embroidered on the warm-up jackets. They looked official – black Gio-Goi jackets with ‘Narcotics Officer’ on the back. The police were not happy about those jackets. We put stuff on T-shirts that nobody else would do. We didn’t care. That was the beauty of it, that’s what made the business what it is.

  Anthony: We were dressing the doormen at The Hacienda. We changed the style of the doormen; we put them in black bobby hats and black warm-up coats that had more of an effect. They moved from that white shirt and dickie-bow look. We made it a bit more menacing and badged them up with the brand. It was when Manchester was going haywire. We stopped going to The Hacienda then. We were international fashion bods now. Manchester was like a pie and it was being carved up.

  Christopher: When the dark stuff started coming into play as the Ecstasy thing started to become really, really commercial, we pretty much stopped going to The Hacienda. When The Hacienda was being shut down with guns [closed in January 1991, reopened in May with metal detectors on the door], we weren’t going in there, we’d moved on. We were into our business. We’d been at the cutting edge of Acid House when it was a revolution, at the beginning of it, and we were instrumental in making it happen. When it became commercial you had all these people coming to do the doors. We’d already moved on by the time they were taking over and it went from ‘Madchester’ to ‘Gunchester’. We were on with doing big business in fashion.

  Harry Franco: There was an estate in Newcastle and the kids had got into robbing cars off it and stuffing them through shop windows of either nice clothes shops or electrical stores. They coined the phrase ‘ram raiding’ to describe what they were doing. [Newcastle-Upon-Tyne uprising of September 1991 – the biggest citywide rebellion since Liverpool in 1981.] Anthony came in the next morning and he was on his mobile screaming at John O’Garr. ‘Fill your bag full of our gear and get up to Newcastle and get that guy that you know – your mate from i-D magazine – get him on a train, get him up to Newcastle, find out who’s doing that and get them wearing Gio-Goi today.’

  O’Garr and the photographer went up to Newcastle and he said it took them about two minutes. They got out of a cab at the shops on this estate and the kids were all over them. Next thing they were all in Gio-Goi. The kids were like bang into it, they’d been on the news the night before, then this Manchester clothing firm had come down and given them free stuff. They took O’Garr and this photographer out to a club that night, this dodgy club in Newcastle, and one of the kids got a bit carried away. He pulled out a .45 and all hell broke loose. The police were everywhere. The next day it was in the national papers. We got a page in The Sun. There was a picture of Anthony and Chris and an interview.

  Christopher: The kids all had baseball bats and stuff outside the club. The police turned up and thought it was a riot. We had all the pictures of the kids being arrested with baseball bats in the magazine. At the time Gio-Goi was very drug orientated. There was no MD, there was no one running the company. It was just everyone doing what they wanted to do. John O’Garr went out to Portugal to make a new range and the next thing we were getting things he liked but weren’t really viable. He did a load of sweatshirt jersey jackets but with short sleeves in two different colours. We had 6,000 jackets with short sleeves – weird shit. John decided he was into boating shoes when no one else was wearing them. He made thousands of pairs in Nubuck – green, red and sky blue. They were slick but there just wasn’t a market for Nubuck boating pumps at the time. John also did a range called ‘International’. The badges were horrible, a picture of plane on it in yellow and black stripes. It was supposed to be a diffusion thing, you had main Gio-Goi and International, but people just didn’t get on it.

  So I started designing and making stuff myself and bringing that in, like the shirts – stuff that was a bit more sellable. I started choosing the fabrics and the buttons and having the stuff made in the UK because there was still quite a lot of factories about then. I was working out of a factory in Sheffield because the lead times from abroad, and the minimum order numbers, were a pain in the arse. We were still doing a hell of a lot of knitwear and I was doing that too. I might see a tie or a pair of socks with a stripe I liked and then I’d give the socks to the lads in the knitwear place and they’d develop the stripe.

  Harry Franco: John [O’Garr] went away to Portugal and sourced a load of fabric and a range came in, which was really nice and very hardwearing, but it was really expensive. It was over-the-top expensive – we’d have to put sweatshirts out at like seventy, eighty quid, which was about twenty, thirty pound more than you wanted to sell a Gio-Goi sweatshirt at.

  Chris started to do more of the designing but he didn’t do it in an overpowering way. There was a reason for it. Chris would research things a lot more, he’d want to know what was selling and why it was selling, then how he could make that better. That was really how he thought of it. Anthony would just be flying around. He’d come up with the ideas that were just gold, like the Newcastle thing.

  Christopher: John and Jelly would come in every day, get stoned and leave. You’d be like, ‘What have they done today?’ You’d have people coming in to sit down to talk business and they were both stoned. Or you’d find out that John had bought a load of fabric from Portugal and the bill had come in for £60,000 and then he’s decided he doesn’t like it and he’s doing something else over here. It was like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ So it got to point where in the end I just went like that, ‘I’ve had enough.’

  Anthony: They didn’t deliver on their end of the bargain. The last thing I heard was one had slept with the other’s girl and they were fighting like animals in the street and one of them knocked the other’s teeth out …

  Christopher: They had a massive fight in the office over a girl. We were at a party and John had tried to have a bash at a girl Jelly had a crush on. On Monday morning they were kicking the fuck out of each other. Jelly left. He said he couldn’t work with John. I’ve never seen Jelly again from that day to this. John was head designer but he was getting stoned and he wasn’t doing any work. I was doing more and more of it, and in the end we said it’s not really working out. We said to him, ‘You need to bail,’ and he left. We were turning over millions of pounds. We were quite a way down the line and it was becoming a business. We were growing up, saying get with the programme or jog on. It was a shame it ended like that but that’s rock ’n’ roll. They were both nice kids and should be proud of being a part of something special.

  Anthony: There was a bloke in the background who had a fashion business and anybody who left our place, he’d sign them up. If he’d have managed us, he would have taken us somewhere other than the out of control rock ’n’ roll road we was going down. He was working up the road, importing shoes for us. When John left, he went and set up business with this fella. He gave John 1 per cent or 2 per cent out of the brand that became Hooch, which was around for a good few years. I gave
John O’Garr the name for Hooch.

  Christopher: It was probably worth the money we spent, the money we lost, with John for the photo shoots we got off it. We did a shoot for i-D [April 1992 issue, headline: ‘Blags To Riches’] with photographer Grant Fear, a friend of John’s who became a friend of ours. We didn’t want to use proper models so we used our friends, people like Stephen [Yates]. We did it down our local shops in Wythenshawe, outside Flanny’s, with Stephen and a few kids off the estate, Boz Eye, Gilly and Dale.

  John [O’Garr] had made some samples: silk shirts, silk waistcoats and striped cords. He spent a fortune on the sampling. It all looked so incongruous on these estate kids. Those shots ended up in a museum in New York; they became iconic. Things like that gave us kudos. But those clothes never got produced, the designs were never going to get made – they were just not what people were wearing in the street at the time. No one was watching John. The things we were selling were the stuff I was designing … knitwear, T-shirts, jackets, shirts, and all the stuff we were making in the UK.

  John was tripping off going to China making the craziest shit you can imagine. He was a great designer but we should have kept hold of his ankles and kept him on the ground. Saying that, he went on to do some really cool stuff and set up on his own.

  Harry Franco: When John left, we had grown up a little bit business-wise – Anthony mainly. The way that John left was handled quite well. He still got slagged off and stuff like that but no one blew his car up.

  Anthony: We had another kid join us, Steve, a pattern cutter. We were told we needed a pattern cutter. You could have told us we needed a pink horse with yellow spots and we would have hired it, we didn’t know our arse from our elbow. As was often the case, he was a friend of the person who told us we needed one. He wasn’t with us long and he left to set up a brand called Mas-if – which, funnily enough, we ended up owning. He was basically trying to replicate our model. Then we found out his dad was the head of the Dog Unit for GMP. Nobody had told us when we gainfully employed him. Allegedly our family is linked to organised crime and his dad was a bogey, so the two don’t sit very well.