Still Breathing

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

  He was in bed on the sixth floor and apparently his car passed him at 60mph going up in the air. Someone had blown it up. We fell under suspicion. One newspaper report said, ‘We contacted Anthony at Gio-Goi and he remained tight-lipped. He said, “I have no knowledge of the car being blown up but I would have loved to have been there to see it.”’

  The Face ran a piece about how we had blown up this rival fashion brand’s car. We rang the kid from The Face and said, ‘What the fuck are you doing, writing shit like that when you don’t know the ins and outs of it? It’s fuck all to do with us, we never burnt his car out.’ And then the kid wrote an article a month later in The Face about the phone call. He said that he’d received his first death threat! We couldn’t win.

  7

  F*CKED UP

  Harry Franco: The sales reps were really hungry for stuff all the time and we were all waiting for jeans to come in. Everybody wanted jeans. Everyone’s account was screaming for jeans. Then they arrived. They’d been dyed really dark blue and stone-washed but they’d been over-stone-washed, really battered about so all the edges, on the tops of the pockets and stuff, had already gone – frayed too much. The jeans had gone beyond looking worn and actually had holes. We all looked at them and thought, ‘Well, we might just get away with it.’ They were a great colour and they were a good cut. I blew about 200 pairs out to my accounts as fast as I could.

  A day later the phone rang. It was one of my accounts in Glasgow. ‘Yeah, we got the stock but it’s a bit fucked up.’ Chris picked up the phone and said, ‘Yeah, that’s right, that’s right. It’s fucked up, it’s fucked up. It’s part of the new range.’

  Christopher: So the F*cked Up range was born. It was a total blag but it meant we could produce any shit we wanted. Suddenly those T-shirts where the stripes came off were selling. We ordered ‘F*cked Up’ labels from the company who made our labels but when they were delivered they were just a big blue badge with the word ‘Range’ on them. The geezer who owned the company said, ‘I’ve not put it on because I’m a Christian.’ We had 10,000 badges with just the word ‘Range’ on them. Anyway, we got that sorted and this F*cked Up range took off. We did sweatshirts, a baseball jacket – you could make something, then screw it in a ball and say it was part of the F*cked Up range. You had kids buying the stuff and their mum taking the clothes back to the shops and complaining. The amount of complaints we got was great. It created a big stir. We were selling millions of pounds’ worth of clothes internationally – we were doing really well in places like Japan and Holland.

  Anthony: There were complaints all over the country about the F*cked Up range, people saying, ‘What’s the world coming to?’ Then [snooker legend] Alex Higgins got involved. Higgins had turned up at the funeral of a friend of the family, Mike Pollit. That’s when I started palling about with Alex. He came to the office and started just being round us. We didn’t mind him being there, Alex was okay.

  Christopher: Alex became a pal. I went to give him a load of clothes at a hotel in Liverpool while he was doing interviews. He was sat there in his skinny undies. He went on Wogan [Terry Wogan’s BBC1 prime-time chat show] with a Gio-Goi ‘Get Fresh’ baseball cap on and a F*cked Up baseball jacket. He stuck the baseball cap on Wogan’s head and opened his jacket to show the F*cked Up label live on TV. Alex then went away and when he came back he called me from the airport. He wanted me to pick him up. Alex had got it in his head that he was our figurehead – what a lovely man, he was crazy so it was a good fit.

  Anthony: It wasn’t unusual to have a lot of press and a lot of TV but Wogan was the most shocking. It was peak time, 7 p.m. Wogan was at his height. The phone rang a dozen times, ‘Terry Wogan’s got your hat on.’ Alex took it off his own head and put it on Terry. After that Alex thought he was on the payroll. He kicked off at the snooker World Championships at Preston Guildhall. It was big news; he had a row with a ref and Steve Davis or Stephen Hendry and then held a press conference. He was wearing a F*cked Up jacket – you could see the label – and he told the press, ‘You’re all fucked up.’ The press conference descended into chaos.

  I was in bed one night having a joint watching Alex being interviewed by James Whale on TV [The James Whale Radio Show, shown late-night ITV] and Alex started talking to me down the camera: ‘Anthony, this gear’s mega.’ Then the next minute Whale goes, ‘Anthony, is there any chance you can get me some as well?’ I’m not talking back to the telly but they are talking to me.

  Higgins also introduced me to Ronnie Wood. We just kept sending clothes out to Ireland for Ronnie, to County Kildare, where Ronnie had his pub built at the bottom of the garden.

  It caused murders that F*cked Up Range; people were writing to The Guardian and The Times. The national press were saying the last thing that was openly sold on the high street that was as bad was the Sex Pistols album, Never Mind the Bollocks. It appeared in all the red tops; how dare these people put F*cked Up advertising boards in their shop windows. It was great for us. It drove sales. We did a F*cked Up car sticker that went viral … remember, this is before the Internet. How do you make a country talk to each other before the Internet?

  Christopher: Everyone had the F*cked Up sticker in their car. We used to do a lot of stuff like that. One of our mates had something wrong with his pecker after having sex. It was swollen. We were going to do a car sticker with the word ‘Cheese’ on. Somebody came up with ‘Cheesy Helmet’. Then I said, ‘Very Helmet’. We did an orange car sticker, ‘Very Helmet’, named after my mate’s knob. We’d be interested to see where they’d turn up. ‘Who’s driving that car with that Gio-Goi sticker in the back window that says “Very Helmet”?’ If it made us laugh that was it.

  Anthony: There was no real organisation. It was just a gang of lunatics. We were on the cover of i-D [with the F*cked Up jacket] and we went to do a club night in Stoke with the magazine. We had a Gio-Goi stand with all the F*cked Up range and we sold everything. We’d also smuggled loads of brandy in with the clothes and by the end of the night everyone was smashing the stand up, off their heads.

  Amidst all this mayhem, Chris was slowly falling into it. He was messing with fabrics, cutting cloth; he wanted to be a good designer. It went from the back of the fag packet to developing ranges.

  Christopher: We did a pair of jeans with a skeleton on, skeleton bones. Random people would turn up at the office with ideas and we’d just say, ‘Cool, let’s have a go.’ This kid said he could do paintings on garments but he needed an airbrush machine. So I went out and bought this machine that cost £500. We designed the jeans with the bones on, did a few, and I never saw him or the machine again – but who cares?

  The skeleton jeans became part of a fashion show we did at Manchester Town Hall. There were other labels at the show but the way we approached it was different. We had girls in white denim suits and we painted the suits down the front with the words, ‘Lick’, ‘Rock’ and ‘Fast’. We gave all the lads replica guns and they were also on Ecstasy, so they came out dancing to the music waving guns. We saw ourselves as different from every other clothing brand that was around. In the programme there was space to describe the brand and everyone had put things like, ‘The silhouette for our range, the colour for this season.’ I put a poem about Jesus carrying this bloke when he’s at his lowest ebb [‘Footprints in the Sand’]. The bloke was walking with Jesus on a beach. There were two sets of footprints but when the bloke was at his lowest there was only one set of footprints, so he asked Jesus, ‘When I was at my lowest, why did you leave me?’ Jesus said, ‘I didn’t leave you, I was carrying you.’

  Anthony: The skeleton jeans were just for the fashion show but we were now selling thousands of pairs of jeans a week. On the back pocket it had ‘Gio-Goi’ and ‘Dedicated’ together in the shape of an eye. We’d keep the same shape of jean and we’d change the colour of the embroidery on the pocket every month, green and red or blue and purple.

  The jeans were being made by a fella from Preston. He had a f
actory and his dad had one that did Marks & Spencer. Unfortunately, he started to back door our jeans. Someone tipped us off that our jeans were turning up on market stalls in Cumbria. Wack and me went up, bought a few pairs and traced it back. We asked this lad to come for a meeting. He came in to the office laughing and joking with his fluffy moustache and he went home in tears, devastated. We needed compensating. We could have taken his factory off him if we’d wanted to. That’s the law of the street. Steal off me. I’ll steal off you. We brought the street mentality into our business.

  It was my responsibility to make sure the product didn’t appear on the grey market. What he was doing was not bootlegging but over-production. I’d order 10,000 pairs of jeans and he’d serve me at £18.99 with a V.A.T. receipt but he’d make 15,000 pairs, a bigger run, and charge £15 cash for the over production to whoever. Once I picked up my garments the back door of this factory was open. They had 40,000 of our labels in stock, so they stole 5,000 and put them on these jeans and sold them out the back door for cash. He was using our rivets and our zips but on cheaper denim and selling them on market stalls. That was a one-off situation.

  Other brands were virtually ruined by bootleggers. Gio-Goi was never ever bootlegged. We were the bootleggers! We were the biggest pirates in town. Why would anybody bootleg Gio-Goi when every bootlegger in town, in London and Leicester, knows us? If someone came in and said, ‘I want to print up 10,000 Gio-Goi,’ they’d just ring us up. You go anywhere and every brand is getting battered but people won’t bootleg Gio-Goi – not in this country, not if we are involved.

  In May 1992 The Hacienda celebrated its tenth anniversary with a fashion show called TEN: THE FASHION, featuring Michiko Koshino, Vivienne Westwood, John Richmond and Body Map. Gio-Goi was one of the most talked about fashion labels in the country but they were not invited to the show. They took it as a snub.

  Anthony: The organisers of that fashion show hadn’t recognised us as a brand. We were deeply offended. We knew much more than a bunch of pretentious people with their underpants stuck up their arse. We knew what sold.

  Christopher: We gave 100 of our guys a white T-shirt each with a black sheep on it and the words ‘Gio-Goi – Black Sheep of the Fashion Industry’. They walked around this fashion show in these T-shirts. It was fashion terrorism. I think they had balaclavas on with their hoods up. It didn’t go down very well at this show. I think it intimidated everybody. It completely freaked out all the arty people, so it had the desired effect.

  That was a set-up but Gio-Goi was very real. All our pals who we’d go out with on a weekend in pubs or clubs were all fully kitted out with Gio. We were also dressing a lot of long-term prisoners, so we did kind of ask for it [the label’s reputation] a little bit as well. Someone’s in jail, or coming out, they’ve got no readies and someone asks, ‘Can you send my pal some T-shirts?’ Yeah, course we can. Then a parcel would go to Durham prison and we would be spoken about. ‘It’s off that Manchester firm, the Donnellys.’ The same was happening in Nottingham, Brixton … all over.

  Anthony: We had Barry Grant [actor Paul Usher] wearing the gear on Brookside when he was [involved in a storyline about] blowing up shops – he was the bad boy at the time on Brookside. He had a big Gio-Goi badge on the arse of his jeans and they were panning in on the badge to make it look like he’s associated with some bad guys. He’s burning down these shops because he’s got those jeans on.

  Harry Franco: We did a ‘Bank Robber’ range as well. The coat had an inside pocket on it that was about two inches wide and about two foot long – a perfect fit for a sawn-off, apparently. There was some really nice clobber coming in. Half the range was really nice and half the range was padded out with absolute crap, with absolute shit knitwear. It was really hard to flog a full range. The shops really wanted it but we couldn’t meet demand. That was still the main problem. We had big international accounts but we didn’t have the stock. It needed a huge injection of cash.

  The next step up was instead of manufacturing in thousands, it needed manufacturing in tens of thousands and that was a huge big step. There were people certainly sniffing round interested in investing, but Anthony wanted to keep complete control.

  Anthony: The knitwear brothers were doing thousands of pieces of knitwear for us and you’d get slight seconds. They’d be pulled off the conveyer and put in bags – 150 in one bag, 1,000 in another, an amount was building up over a period of six months. One day I went looking for more space in the building and I came across this stuff and I sold it all for cash. The knitwear brothers found out and were not happy. The communication with the knitwear brothers was breaking down anyway. They were being pushed to one side.

  The ‘Bank Robber’ range was a wax range – like Barbour but lighter. We did wax jeans, wax shirts and wax three-quarter-length coats with the concealed pocket. We would do anything we weren’t supposed to do. Our friends were bank robbers and they requested coats they could put weapons in. We made sure you could easily access the pocket on the inside. We gave [Alex] Higgins coat number 147 from that range. Then the next range was the ‘Prison’ range. All the stuff had mock prison labels and ‘Gio-Goi State Pen’ and stuff written on them.

  Christopher: It was full range of over-dyed garments made out of cotton canvas. The badge had my date of birth as the prison number: 240568 and underneath ‘Manchester State Pen’. We did jeans, three or four jackets and shirts. They ended up in GQ [magazine]. The reason it was all cotton canvas was because we could buy bulk fabric and then over-dye it. It was also easy to handle, even the swing tickets on the range were canvas. We were not working with any factories in Portugal or Dubai anymore. We were using the factory in Sheffield and others in the UK. We were back in fast turnaround mode just trying to get stock on the floor.

  Gang-related gun crime in Manchester had continued to escalate throughout 1991 and was now attracting mainstream media attention. A spate of shootings involving young men and reports of teenagers carrying handguns as ‘fashion accessories’ led to Manchester being dubbed ‘the Bronx of Britain’. Mac-10 automatic machine guns were reportedly spotted as attempts to control the doors of the city’s clubs grew more intense. The Manchester Evening News declared this was the ‘Menace of Gunchester’ as recorded crime in the city rose to be 57 per cent higher than national average.

  Anthony: Everyone was getting blasted in Manchester so we started to do a line of bulletproof vests. There were a couple of incidents where gang members came and test-fired our bulletproofs. Somebody put one on and somebody shot him and it worked perfectly. The vests were surplus stock from the army, green Kevlar army issue. Someone fired one bullet in the warehouse, a .45, and it went through a box of baseball caps. The caps got sold for more money ’cause they had an entry and exit hole. We were doing a roaring trade in bulletproof vests but then everybody started getting shot in the head. Once the headshots started, people stopped buying the vest. We sold about 800 of them in Manchester alone.

  Christopher: We were taking the covers off them and embroidering them up with the Gio-Goi logo and ‘Dedicated To Those Dodgin’ the Rain ’n’ Bullets.’ We did one for [TV presenter] Normski when he used to do that [TV] show [BBC2, Def II]. We sold them for £200 each.

  Unless a shop requested the vests we were quite happy to sell them from the office. There might have been a few quid in it, there might have been a necessity for certain people to use them, but for us it was a marketing tool. It didn’t matter whether the press was good or bad. There was not another company that’d sell bulletproof vests at that time – or any time.

  Anthony: We were a multi-million pound clothing company but there was also a massive suggestion that we were heading up a gang and we were heavily involved in the drug market. We were suspected of being involved in the importation of Ecstasy. The police misinterpreted the Gio-Goi label as being colours. If you wearing Gio-Goi, you were with us. If someone was caught robbing a post office in Gio-Goi, they were part of the ‘firm’. The reputation of the
brand, the undercurrent, became the Quality Street thing. Then one day we came to work and a whole row of trees and had been cut down so there was a clear view from the building opposite into our office. So now we were under observation. The police were taking photos; they were about 150 yards away. It was blatant. So I used to walk in to the office in the morning and I’d tell all the staff, ‘Wave to the police.’ The police would then start coming in over this and that. It didn’t make any difference to us because it was what we were brought up with. The police thought we were very, very serious. There were all kinds of other activities going on around us. Manchester, at the time, was mental.

  Christopher: If we were in the pub with one of our gang of friends on the Sunday and they’ve gone off on a Monday and committed a crime, why was that automatically linked to us? Because we were tearaways when we were growing up, even though we have now got into legitimate business, the police would always assume that there’s got to be more to it because of our associations. They thought you couldn’t be successful from Benchill and in legit business. Whatever we did they always assumed there was more going on. They used to bust our office on a regular basis for different reasons but never found what they were looking for.

  Harry Franco: John Collin from Glasgow was one of my accounts. He was sat in the office and the Serious Crime Squad arrived to turn the place over. The word went round from John, ‘It’s real. Them guys down there, it’s the real thing. This isn’t like some middle-class designers sat in some nice little office instigating all this in a Malcolm McLaren style. This is proper.’