Twisting My Melon Read online

  As well as his various jobs, in his spare time my dad was also trying to make it as a musician and a comedian. He used to play all the working men’s clubs and pubs to earn a bit of extra dough on the side. I didn’t go with him that much, but I did see him when he used to play some of the Irish pubs and the more folky gigs. About seven o’clock most nights he’d go off to various pubs or clubs to do his thing. He once entered a talent contest and came second to Lisa Stansfield, who is from Rochdale so must have been on the same circuit. Years later, when Happy Mondays were playing the Rock in Rio festival, Lisa was also on the bill. She was on the same plane as us back from Brazil, and my old fella was with us and she remembered him from that talent contest.

  At the time I didn’t really think it was cool that my dad was out playing music, but you don’t when you’re a kid, do you? Whatever your parents do can feel embarrassing. I mean, fucking hell, as a kid sometimes you don’t even want to acknow ledge that your mam and dad exist. You want them to be invisible – every kid does. But my dad worked the pubs and clubs, so people knew who he was, and my mam worked in the nursery, so everyone knew who she was. Especially as she would sit on the top deck of the bus on the way there, smoking cigars. Not just the little thin ones, but big King Eddies, puffing away.

  By the time we were six or seven years old, we were roaming about the neighbourhood quite a bit – that’s what you did when you were kids; you weren’t kept in the house all the time. I wouldn’t let my kids out on their own now, but it was different back then. I’m not saying it was safer, because Salford could be rough as fuck, but that didn’t stop people letting their kids play out.

  There are a few incidents that stand out in my mind from this time. One day I was messing around with some mates and we went down to this park near us in Pendlebury, which had a great big slide in it. When we got there, we spotted that someone had stuck razor blades all the way down the slide, with chewing gum. Luckily we saw it before any of us got on the slide, so we told everyone who needed to be told and luckily no kids got injured. What sort of sick fucker does that, sticks razor blades on a kids’ slide?

  We would get into little scrapes and fights all the time, almost on a daily basis, but that just seemed normal. Looking back, I suppose it was quite rough, but all I had known was Salford, so I didn’t have anything to compare it to. One day when I was in Junior One I was walking home from school, through that same park in Pendlebury with the big slide, when I was jumped by three kids. Two of them held me while the other one just kept constantly kicking me in the fucking bollocks. Little bastards. I hadn’t even done anything to deserve it, which is why it sticks out in my memory. I probably did deserve a kicking sometimes, but even when I did I could usually sweet talk my way out of it, which is why this occasion stands out so vividly.

  We became quite creative as kids. We had to make our own fun. We would do stuff like constructing our own smoke bombs by getting a ping-pong ball, breaking it up into little pieces and then wrapping it inside tinfoil. We would then light a match and stick it inside the foil until it started burning, and put the smoke bomb in someone’s desk or drop it through a letterbox.

  Another of our favourite things was simply going out and getting a chase off someone. We’d do all sorts of stuff to wind people up and get a reaction. Ridiculous things. We’d try and smash a football through someone’s front-room window, or drop our trousers at the greengrocer. There were certain people who you knew you could always get a chase out of, particularly some of the shopkeepers. We loved the buzz you would get off getting chased. Sometimes we would run back to Nana’s and wait for the inevitable knock on the door, but my nana was great, as she’d cover for us and swear blind that we’d never left the house.

  Throughout my whole childhood, I was always out and about doing something, and I developed an entrepreneurial spirit at a really young age, partly because there wasn’t much money at home. I knew that if I wanted something then I was going to have to find a way to get it myself. The first real example I remember is when I was about seven years old. I borrowed some plastic bags from my mam and walked for what seemed like miles, to where I knew there was a field full of horses. I walked round the field collecting all the horse shit, then carried it back to our house and split it all up into these smaller plastic bags that my mam’s balls of wool had come in. After I’d bagged it all up, I went round all the houses on the estate, selling the manure to the housewives to use on their roses as fertilizer. I made a few bob out of that – not bad for a seven-year-old.

  I shared a room with Our Paul in our house at Cemetery Road, and my dad made us bunk beds, by hand, when I was seven and Our Paul was five. I was on the top bunk and he was on the bottom. The bunks were painted red, and underneath the mattress the bed-base was that green-diamond metal fencing, the stuff that people have round their allotments or sometimes round school playing fields. Every time I moved in bed it made this loud, creaky metal noise, ‘creak, creak’.

  We never went abroad on holiday when we were kids, but no one on our estate did, really. The first time my dad ever left the country was when he came to New York when the Mondays first played there. When we were kids we went on holiday to places like Blackpool, Southport, Bournemouth or Cornwall. That was normal for working-class folk. My nana and grandad were some of the first to go abroad from round our way. They went to Spain in the late 60s, and then they used to go to Jersey quite a bit, which seemed quite flash at the time.

  The first kids I remember knocking about with were my cousins the Carrolls, and then other kids round our way, like the Doyles, the Callahans, the Murphys, the Coxes, the Joneses, the Lenahans and the Healeys. There were actually two sets of Carrolls, because both my nana and her sister married blokes from Salford whose surname was Carroll. The two fellas weren’t related – well, not until they married my nana and her sister; they were after that, obviously – but to us they were all part of one family. There was just this huge mass of Carrolls. So although Our Paul was my only sibling, we were very much part of this massive extended family and we had loads of cousins about our age, which meant there was always a big gang of us at birthdays and other occasions.

  I would go round to my Aunty Mary’s quite a lot. She had nine kids in a four-bedroom house. Our Matt and Pat were the ones that I would hang about with the most, because they were a similar age to me. I would often crash over at Aunty Mary’s. If you were round there and it was getting late, you would just sleep in one of their beds. There were about three or four of them in a room anyway, so one more didn’t make a difference. It was like the Waltons, but in a small council house in Salford. I also spent a lot of time at my nana’s, as she lived quite close to my school and I got on so well with her.

  Round our estate everyone knew our set of Carrolls, especially because my grandad was well known and well liked. He used to take us to the rugby, to watch Salford Reds at the Willows or to Swinton Rugby Club, and later we would go on our own. Our Paul actually went on to play for Salford rugby youth team. When it came to football, all our family were Manchester United fans. Everyone from Salford supports United. If you see a City fan in Salford, they must be lost. I used to go to the match now and again, but I wasn’t fanatical about it. I was one of those kids who was more likely to be found fannying around outside Old Trafford while the game was on, getting into mischief, or looking for something to rob, rather than inside watching the match. My cousin Matt and a few others in our family were mad on watching footy, but I could take it or leave it. I enjoyed playing it but I never really understood the amount of time that some people invested in it. Even at a young age, I’d rather be acting the Charlie big bollocks and going round trying to cop for girls.

  We first discovered booze through Bill, as stashes of all sorts of stuff would turn up at their house all the time. Crates of Newcy Brown off the backs of wagons or whatever. That wasn’t unusual in Salford. When there isn’t much money about, people are less likely to ask questions about where something has come
from. Bill always had loads of booze in his shed and our mission, when we got to nine or ten years old, was to try and nick it and drink it. This went on until we were about thirteen or fourteen. We were allowed a drink in my nana’s house from about the age of ten and I remember being shown how to pour a glass of beer around then.

  My mam and dad didn’t really drink when we were growing up, although they do have a drink now. My dad was usually off playing the pubs and clubs, so he would always be driving, but Bill was a big drinker and most of the Carrolls liked a drink. There was one other uncle who had a bit of a drink problem and would sometimes sell furniture from the house so he could go to the pub. We were taught about alcohol from an early age and I’ve never been an alkie. I’m forty-nine years old now and I’ve hammered drugs and I’ve had periods when I’ve drunk a lot, but I’ve never had an alcohol dependency. Obviously, like everyone, I used to like to go for a few pints and get pissed, especially as a young lad, but I’ve never really been addicted to alcohol. I don’t even drink at home nowadays, and if I did go to the pub for an interview or something I’d be half cut after four or five pints. I drink a lot of energy drinks like Red Bull or Relentless now, and could quite happily sit there all night in the pub with a Red Bull while everyone else is sinking the pints. Although, admittedly, I’ll probably stick a bit of vodka in if everyone else is boozing.

  Because I live back in Salford now, I bump into kids from school now and again, and those who look a bit fucked have inevitably been abusing the booze. The ones that are my age but look about three hundred years old – usually they appear that way because of alcohol, not drugs. You can’t repair the damage that alcohol does to you. The weird thing about bumping into someone from school now is that I often haven’t seen them since they were about fourteen, so they’ve obviously changed a lot, but because they’ve seen me on TV or in the press for the last twenty-five years, they don’t think I’ve changed a bit.

  Over the years, Salford and Manchester have had a big problem with smack. It was about 1980, when the smokable heroin hit, that it started to get bad, but I vividly remember being at primary school in Swinton in 1969 and the police coming in to school to talk to us about heroin. They told us about the dangers of it, and about needles and all that. I was seven years old and I can actually remember thinking, ‘I’m never going to get involved with that stuff, no way am I getting involved with that … that sounds terrible.’

  When I was nine, my grandad Fred Ryder died from bowel cancer, which was horrible, as you could almost see it eat away at him. That prompted another move, back up to Farnworth. My dad had a compassionate and overwhelming urge to move nearer to his mam, because she was now on her own, so he packed in his job on the newspapers and we took over a chippy on Harper Green Road. It was a real old-school chippy, which looked pretty similar to the one the Khan family run in the film East Is East, which I thought was a pretty realistic depiction of what it was like growing up in Salford in the 70s. Certainly more realistic than most I’ve seen on screen, although the reality was a bit rougher. There wasn’t much racism though. I was about ten before I even realized that people at school were different races – it just wasn’t an issue.

  We used to have chips for tea almost every night while we were living here, which I didn’t complain about, and I can still remember the smell of the freshly baked pies being delivered at six o’clock in the morning. It was actually a good chippy, and my mam and dad were a bit more forward-thinking than most, because they served curry sauce, which not many places did back then, not round our way. I didn’t have to help out in the chippy, but I would sometimes rob them a bag of potatoes from round the back of the greengrocer’s or somewhere. They didn’t ask me to do it, I just did. They had the chippy for a year, which coincided with the power cuts of the early 70s, so often there would be a couple of times a week when they couldn’t open because there was no electricity. They found it hard work, and towards the end my dad got a job at the post office, and did both jobs. Eventually they decided to sack off the chippy, my dad went full time at the post office and we went back to Nana’s for a few months, before moving to Avon Close on Madam’s Wood Estate in Little Hulton, where we stayed for a few years.

  Behind our house on Madam’s Wood there was a sewage works, which was so close you could often smell it while you were eating your dinner. You could even taste it sometimes; it must have been in the air. You’d be trying to eat your Sunday roast and it would taste like it had grit in it. The only things that grew on the sewage works were tomato plants, because the human body can’t digest tomato seeds, and that put me off tomatoes for years. We would mess around up there when we were bored, just doing stupid things like throwing bricks and other stuff into the sewage works, then later, when we got an air rifle, we would shoot the rats that were scuttling about.

  There was also a train track behind our house and we would throw stones at the trains and put shopping trolleys, tree trunks and all sorts, even shit from the sewage works, on the lines. I honestly don’t know how we never injured anyone or even killed anyone, considering all the daft stuff we did as kids. But we just didn’t think. Then they would send out special trains with railway police on them, trying to get all us little urchins who were hanging round the train tracks and the sewage works, but we had loads of places to hide around there.

  I also used to love what we called ‘sneaking’ – tiptoeing into shops and sneaking behind the counters, robbing stuff, without getting caught. It was only small stuff at first, and when I started I did it as much for the buzz of not getting caught as anything else.

  Although my mam and dad were both still working, they weren’t on great wages and were still stretching themselves to pay the mortgage. When I was fourteen, we moved to Kent Close, facing the sewage works and me and Our Paul got our own bedrooms and my dad sawed the bunk beds that he’d made out of wire fencing in two to make single beds, but they still creaked. I could never have a wank as a kid, because the bed made such a fucking noise. Our Paul whinged and whinged about his, and eventually broke it on purpose, so my mam and dad bought him a new single bed, but they couldn’t afford to get me one as well. I was now fourteen and I was still in this creaky bed that I’d been in since I was seven, and it was impossible. So when Granny Ryder got a new settee, I was given her old battered one to use as a bed. It was really knackered and had bloody springs sticking out of it.

  That’s all I had in my bedroom when I was fourteen – Granny Ryder’s tired old settee for a bed, and a chest of drawers. Our Paul had cabinets with a fitted Binatone stereo system – a record player, a tuner, an amp and everything – which my mam and dad had bought him. Even though I was the eldest, he got everything, partly because he was the baby, and probably partly because I was a bit of a tearaway. It didn’t really bother me at the time, because I knew they couldn’t always afford to buy for two, and I just thought, ‘He’s my younger brother, fine, let him have it.’ You don’t necessarily think anything like that is unusual when you’re a kid; whatever situation you’re in seems normal. The way I saw it, there was only enough for one, so the kid brother gets it and the older brother is left to fend for himself a bit. That was probably one of the reasons I started robbing. I would just go out and get my own gear.

  The other thing that I felt counted against me in other people’s eyes was that I wasn’t very good with my hands. I’ve never been the sort of person who’s good with mechanical things. Even now, I’m useless at working out what’s wrong with a car engine. I struggle to change a lightbulb. But I always had that entrepreneurial spirit and I could always find or make money, even then.

  To some extent, I was seen as the stupid one. Our Paul was the bright one who was going to go to college. I was never going to amount to dick: ‘Just leave Shaun, he’s never going to do owt.’ But that wasn’t something that ate away at me, and it’s really important to me that people understand that. I didn’t hold anything against Our Paul. We were really close when we were young, and through
out most of our time in the Happy Mondays. I don’t have a chip on my shoulder. Through rehab and cold turkey I’ve had to do so much self-analysing and reflecting that I’m pretty sure of who I am and how I got here. If anything is eating away at you inside, it’s going to come out eventually, but I really don’t have this massive hang-up that I wasn’t appreciated or anything like that. I just thought, fine, I’ll sort myself out. That was the real lasting effect it had on me. It made me independent.

  This might seem like a slightly odd comparison, but a few years later I watched this film called Quest for Fire. It’s about a group of Neanderthals who have one fire that they have to keep going at all times, because they don’t know how to start another fire from scratch. They end up on this marsh after a battle with another tribe, and their fire dies, so they send three of the tribe off on a quest to find another. These Neanderthal geezers go off roaming the land, having all these adventures, and find fire and bring it back to the marsh. The other motherfuckers are still there grunting, ‘Fire! Grunt grunt fire!’ and they haven’t built a house or shelter or anything. Weirdly, this reminds me a bit of my situation growing up. I sometimes felt like I was the geezer who was sent off to get fire while the rest of them were waiting back on the marsh.

  By the early 70s I was beginning to get more into music. There was always music on in our house and when I was round at my Aunty Mary’s I was exposed to all different music and influences because there were nine kids who were all into slightly different scenes. Our Pete was the oldest and he had a huge collection of thousands of albums that were leaning against every wall in the front room, about a yard deep. He was into stuff like the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Byrds, Captain Beefheart and Link Wray. Our Joe was an early skinhead, and into soul stuff like James Brown, Billy Preston and a bit of ska. Our Mag was into soul and the Tams. She was a long-hair skin girl at one point, which is a girl skinhead who doesn’t have a fully shaved head, and then she got into stuff like early Elton John, Gram Parsons and Townes Van Zandt. Our Gel was into her reggae, U-Roy, Bunny Wailer and Gregory Isaacs (who I got into a bit of trouble with, years later, when we played on the same bill and were misbehaving together backstage). Our Pat had a load of soul records that he used to buy on import from Robinsons Records in Salford or Yanks Records in town, as did Our Matt, and all of them were into Northern Soul. They were all a few years older than me, so I was exposed to all these great, diverse music styles and scenes at an early age.