Still Breathing

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

  I had a burning ambition to re-launch Gio-Goi. Everybody thought we were fucked. Gone. Nobody could believe we were back again. But we understood you couldn’t launch it without a certain level of finance. We wanted to raise our game. We needed a certain type of investor, not someone who could pretend at it and put £100,000 in just because they wanted to be associated with something that was considered cool. We needed real investment. Alan was piped aboard for tea about eight o’clock and they put this meal out, all very flash. I showed him the book and explained what had gone on with Armani. He knew about the favour, that I was asking on behalf of what I’d done. I ate my tea and then Alan left me with the boat and staff because my flight was the following day. We agreed I could have the boat for three days any time. He was charging £15,000 a day, so I’d achieved a £45,000 free stay on the boat – which to this day I’ve never accepted. I wanted him to invest in the brand. I failed to get my investment from him.

  Before he left I asked him to change some money. He gave me forty quid and told me to have a nice time on the boat, enjoy your stay, please don’t drink beer on the deck and don’t smoke. I got off the boat, got legless. Then I got talking to some people who were taking my picture because they thought I owned the boat. I got off in the morning and flew to Majorca to meet Rhianwen for a week and rethink my next move.

  Basically we were back hunting. We were doing little flash collections, 100 shirts here, 200 there, pumping it up. There were other investment people looking at us. We were back in touch with Cream. Our story was getting better with age. There were more good things happening than bad things.

  Christopher: I was in Hale village with Natalie and I bumped into a friend called Ash Taylor, who worked at French Connection. I asked if he had half an hour to chat about Gio-Goi. We agreed to meet in a café in Hale. He turned up with his friend Steve Black. We sat there and I said, ‘Look, we want to sell the brand.’ Steve loved the book that Anthony and me had produced and said he would try and help out.

  I had the idea that if we had some Gio-Goi clothes on the shelves in the stores it’d be a lot more attractive to a potential buyer and we’d get more money for it. Steve liked the idea and he introduced me to his mate, Juls Dawson, to get that rolling. Juls was working out of Altrincham and a massive fan of Gio-Goi. When I met him I was looking at him for help, as we had been out of the game for so long. I spent a year working on Gio-Goi with Juls before Anthony really got involved. We set up an office in Altrincham and took some staff on – two girls, Caroline and Zoe – and Juls was going round the country making samples. I thought this kid knew everything about the business, but I was wrong. He knew how to sell gear, he was a fantastic salesman, but he didn’t know about branded business or production. I was looking at him for the answers but straight away I was having these doubts. The samples he made were not the best. We could work on that.

  Anthony: Chris had found someone to work with, so I didn’t interfere. But I’d given Chris the ammunition to do his deal, the maintaining of the trademarks. It started with him making some clothes to assist the book. I was waiting for Chris to come up with the collection and then I’d be able to go back out and say, ‘Here it is’ and look for further investment. You can’t launch a label unless you are properly financed. They say to launch a brand properly it costs three to five million pounds. We didn’t have that in our back pocket.

  Christopher: The next thing, Bread & Butter is on in Berlin, the big fashion trade fair [2004]. One thing we know how to do is put a wicked party on. So rather than go to the show with a load of clothes, I decided we’d do a party and that was how we’d re-launch Gio-Goi. I flew to Berlin and found a venue with Simon Farrell and paid for it. I built a catwalk back at the farm in Stockport and I got a load of plain garments out of my wardrobe. I had four of five T-shirts printed with Gio-Goi on. We invited 1,000 people and the venue fitted 250. We had a list of ten people who must get in, ten of the key people in the industry regarding investment.

  On the night, at first the venue was completely empty and I was having palpitations thinking no one would come. The next thing it’s rammed, banging. Three, two, one, the music comes on and all these male German and American models I’d auditioned in the day come down the catwalk in my clothes from my wardrobe and a printed T-shirt. Then the girls come out and they were in knickers and bra. I’d bought the knickers from Top Shop and printed Gio-Goi on the arse.

  Anthony: We had no collection. Chris used all the gear out of his wardrobe. We turned the lights down, put a strobe light on and a smoke machine. They couldn’t see the clothes properly but were all applauding. All the fashion industry turned up to see Gio-Goi. They had no idea what had happened to us. We’d disappeared off the face of the planet but you can only imagine the rumours about us. Lots of people came to look. G-Star left their own party to come to ours. Everyone in the industry rolled up and wanted to be seen at our party. They all got fucked up and we had a great night. We were on the front page of the Berlin newspaper the following day, photos of the girls walking round in Gio-Goi knickers. Bang. We were back.

  Christopher: At the party my mate Danny Griffiths introduced me to this Scottish geezer David Douglas. He was frothing at the mouth. He said to me, ‘Do you want to make some real money?’ I was like, ‘Yeah.’ We’d put our fishing rods out and we’d got a bite.

  Anthony: David Douglas had just sold his business for tens of millions. He was mithering us all night for things. He found what he was looking for at our party. There is always something for everyone at a fashion event. The next day I was on my way to the airport and he phoned me to say what a fantastic night he’d had. He said, ‘If a bomb had dropped on your party there’d be nobody left in the fashion business.’ He offered us £3 million there and then.

  We went up to Scotland for a meeting where we agreed, in principle, to sell a percentage of the business for a price. For the record we would have accepted literally nothing. He actually offered us two million pound in cash there and then for the label and an earn-out of another million, I think. He’d sold a chain of major high street fashion stores and was now operating as Melville Capital. We refused, as we wanted to stay in the business. We had a point to prove out there in the fashion world and on the street. Melville were eager to get started now. We got a building round the corner from where we had started originally, a two up/two down with a nice dry cellar, on Oxford Road in Altrincham. It had once been a funeral parlour and the basement had been where they did the embalming. That’s where we were. We put phone lines in, carpeted it and we opened for business.

  We were fully funded, had a new office, the two girls were brilliant, Caroline and Zoe, and we had Juls and Simon. Melville brought a fella up from London, his MD – Mark Kilbourn, and put him in a flat round the corner. Melville knew about our reputation. When they came to Manchester, these people were away from their wives and girlfriends, so they’d be running around town. People were ringing me up: ‘Who are these fucking idiots off their heads, all throwing your name about?’ It wasn’t exactly what I’d envisaged when I got into bed with a corporate investment company. I thought people with straight money had a bit more integrity.

  Still, look on the bright side. We’ve come into a considerable amount of money. I’ve upgraded my car from a convertible to a Range Rover Sports. We had a large percentage of the company still and we were on handsome salaries. We felt we could now take Gio-Goi places we couldn’t before. We were away.

  Christopher: I went to Hong Kong with a new designer and Douglas and Kilbourn to design a range. Almost immediately we sacked the designer and sent him home. He’d blagged it. We’d be in factories asking him to do stuff and he couldn’t. So I ended up sitting and designing a full range. It was not a good situation. I rang Anthony and said, ‘These fuckers don’t have a clue.’ That was day one but we were in and we had a deal. So finally, after about five weeks in Hong Kong, we came up with a range. It was polo shirts, T-shirts with graphics, jackets, and knitwear. We flew f
rom Hong Kong to Turkey and did a load of shirts there. Melville knew a lot of factories and could pull favours in. We were only doing small numbers at this stage, but Melville were promising the factories the earth, saying they were going to do 10,000 units of this and that. When we went out with the range back in the UK and tried to sell it, only parts of the range worked. The shirts never got a reaction. When you’re starting off, same for any brand, people don’t want to be spending big money. All they want is some T-shirts to see how it goes. We’d done everything, including denim. There was nothing that stood out in that first collection because we were trying to find our feet, find our direction. At least we had finance.

  We went back to Hong Kong and Turkey to do another range. I hired a new designer called Glen [Dickinson] and together we designed and made a load of hooded tracksuit tops with stripes across the chest. They were made out of tricot, a silky material. The style name was Penang. I also made some white jackets and cardigans. Douglas said, ‘Cardigans? Who’s going to wear cardigans? My granddad?’ They also said the tracksuit tops would never sell but they were what really launched the brand again. We ran them for two or three years, just changing the colours; we couldn’t make enough of them. We sold hundreds of thousands of those tracksuit tops.

  The designer Glen had his own company and we were paying him a retainer. Then we decided it was costing too much and we needed an in-house designer. He closed his company and came as an employee, working closely with me on the graphics. Simon Farrell was great at doing the sales. Juls was removed from doing production and now doing the sales.

  The first order we got was for £34,000 off Republic [high street retail chain], who had about a hundred stores. The stuff was a week late and they wanted discount. I said I’d rather keep the stock than give them a discount. They told me to go away and build the brand. So now I had £34,000 of stock up my arse. It was a blessing in disguise, because we wanted to pitch the brand a lot higher than where Republic were. But we didn’t know what we were doing at the beginning, so we’d try anything. From that moment, we did exactly what we did first time round – we started with the independent shops and the gear started flying. We were in some of the best shops in the country; people would go in a store and buy a Stone Island coat, a pair of Evisu jeans and Gio-Goi T-shirt. We couldn’t stay in the basement office anymore because we were growing pretty quickly, so we moved back into town [Manchester city centre], into Fourways House [in the Northern Quarter].

  Anthony: The investors at Melville were riding the crest of a wave, having just sold their business. They were out buying Ferraris and partying heavily, throwing money about. To be honest, it seemed to be a pet project for them. All we discovered about the investors was that they were becoming a headache. They weren’t what they appeared on the surface. We were getting to know them more and finding out a lot of other things about them that wasn’t all good.

  Christopher: We were doing a lot of stuff to promote Gio. The first thing was we got the [Gio-Goi-branded] double-decker bus, painted it, had it done up like a club inside and took it to Glastonbury. We were doing stuff that other labels didn’t really do. People would come up and say, ‘What’s the bus about? What does that mean on the side, Gio-Goi?’ There’d be loads of people out of their brains partying on the bus. On the roof we painted, ‘It’s A Crime Not To Be Organised’. We knew the police would be able to see it in a helicopter as we parked it in our scrap metal yard next to the police heliport flight path. We were working with Mojofuel [Manchester digital creative agency] making little films for the Gio website. Amongst other things, we did one of kids in balaclavas and the gear peddling bikes around the streets at midnight. All menacing but cool.

  Anthony: The double-decker bus was appearing all over the country at festivals and gigs. We needed comfort when we were travelling and there were plenty of stash holes. It was like a new War Wagon but with the brand on the side. It was a great form of advertising. It was the best club in Britain on wheels. People would use it to do private after-show parties.

  Christopher: Damon [Albarn] out of Blur and Gorillaz was wearing the label. Footballers wore it and so did Mani, who was then in Primal Scream; all our old pals had it on. We were actively looking for music people to wear the brand. I heard this record on an evening radio show called I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor. I rang Anthony and said, ‘Get in touch with these kids; they’re going to be big.’ He said, ‘I’ve never heard of them’. I said, ‘You’ve never heard of nobody.’ Anyway, I left it and he never got in touch with them. Then three weeks later they were on their way to number one and Anthony is like, ‘Oh yeah, we need to get in touch with these kids.’ But at that point everybody wanted to get in touch with them. We were a couple of weeks late.

  A similar thing happened to us with Coldplay. We were supposed to meet Coldplay at Glastonbury about doing their merchandise. I had meeting set up for three o’clock but I got absolutely out of my brain and never went. That’s the problem with our industry: far too much rock ’n’ roll.

  Anthony: The whole world had converged on the Arctic Monkeys. Our friends were doing the security for them but they wouldn’t compromise their business for us. We decided not to go to the Arctic Monkeys circus in London and we sent one of our boys, John Faulkner, my old pal and co-accused in Operation Bluebell, to follow the Arctic Monkeys on tour in France. They were playing Lyon. John got in the car and drove over there. We hadn’t looked where Lyon was on the map – turned out to be a bit of a drive. The NME couldn’t get backstage but John got backstage. He took pictures of all the band wearing the clobber. John had been hanging about with Babyshambles and he called us and said it wasn’t very rock ’n’ roll backstage at the Arctic Monkeys. They had Lucozade, Midget Gems, organic drinks and baby wipes, as opposed to syringes and tin foil and Rizla with Babyshambles, but getting a picture of them wearing the brand was a significant step for us.

  The [Bafta-winning] TV show Shameless also started using our gear. [Wythenshawe was used as a filming location for the Ch4 show. In 2000 Benchill had been named as the most deprived ward in England. Shameless continued to use the Donnellys’ labels: Gio and Your Own [YO] until the series ended in 2013.] Our story, and I hate to say it, is Shameless. There were lots of Shameless moments for us growing up. One time my mate walked in a pub with his pitbull and the dog was going mental. My other mate asked, ‘Has it had a fuck recently?’ No. ‘Well, its balls are full. Give it here.’ My mate then gave it a wank. The dog came and it hit a bloke’s pint pot. Then a voice in the background says, ‘Give it a cig.’ I’m not proud of that but that was the sort of funny shit happening on our estate back then and no one cared and still don’t, by all accounts.

  Some of our mates wrote for Shameless too. When it first started, and it was fresh and different, we gave them a full wardrobe. For two seasons it just looked like the Gio-Goi show. You started seeing Gio everywhere. Not only did we get the money from selling the shares in the business to Melville but also we were overseeing the company marketing department.

  11

  TOO MUCH ROCK ’N’ ROLL

  Christopher: I drove up to meet our pal Max Beesley who was in Watford doing [hit BBC1 drama] Hotel Babylon. I took two big bags of clothes, one for him and one for his friend Robbie Williams. I’d had a chat with Max and he’d told me a story of how he’d been to Robbie’s house and there was loads of Gio-Goi in his wardrobe. I said, ‘We’ll get him to wear it then.’ Then we were doing an interview for The Sun and Anthony mentioned it, how Robbie had all the clobber. The interview was to accompany a photo shoot with Max in Gio-Goi but basically they bypassed everything and put the headline: ‘Robbie’s a Goi Boy’ [31 October 2005]. I was up early to get the paper and when I saw it I was shocked. I thought Max was going to go mental. It went all over the world: ‘Robbie signs fashion deal’. [Max was quoted in The Sun as saying, ‘I love the clothes and so does Robbie.’]

  Anthony: Robbie had supported us back in the day with Take That. The art
icle appeared two days before his Intensive Care album came out, so there were cameras pointing at him from all around the world – he had a global audience and an eighty million quid record deal. I’d been thinking if we could get our brand on him for nothing, surely it would be of great benefit to us. Max was close to Robbie and he was a long-standing friend of ours. Max knows us better than most. He knows how cheeky we are. We didn’t announce that Robbie was the face of the brand. We said, ‘We’re back and this week we’re doing something with Robbie’ and they misinterpreted it. We ended up with newspapers all around the world saying, ‘Robbie’s a Goi Boy’, explaining how he’d done a clothing deal to coincide with his album launch! EMI had a £20 million budget I believe to market the album but it almost became secondary to the clothing deal. Wherever Robbie went around the world, we went. I knew we were in trouble when I got a call from Australia asking if I wanted to do a licensing deal for Gio and they would buy me a Rolls-Royce immediately as a drink. A message got back to us that Robbie’s people were totally unhappy. We were in the shit. If somebody had wanted to sue us they could have collapsed us. I sent a letter apologising. One half of me was scared but the other half was jumping with joy. We touched the world with that one. It had a magical impact. Robbie was cool and forgave us.

  In the ‘Robbie’s a Gio Boy’ Sun article, Gio-Goi was described as ‘one of coolest clothes labels in the country’ and other bands wearing the label were listed as The Rolling Stones, Happy Mondays, Oasis, New Order and Primal Scream. It was also stated that Gio-Goi had provided last week’s chart toppers Artic Monkeys with their outfit for their Top of the Pops debut. The article also featured the first picture of former Libertines star Pete Doherty, now with Babyshambles, wearing Gio-Goi. Since the start of 2005, after meeting at her thirty-first birthday party, Doherty was in a highly publicised on/off relationship with supermodel Kate Moss. In September 2005, the Daily Mirror ran photos of Moss snorting cocaine at a Babyshambles recording session.