Free Twisting My Melon by Shaun Ryder Page A

door to door advising people on security because there had been a few robberies in the area, so I just listened politely to them and then they fucked off.
    I never told Bull half of what was going on in that house. Half the deposit and the mortgage payments on our house had originally come from scams at the post office. As far as she was concerned they were savings, but I never told her dick.
    After Ian Curtis had died, Joy Division had become New Order, adding Stephen Morris’s girlfriend Gillian Gilbert on keyboards. Joy Division had never made it to America, but New Order were really influenced by their early trips to New York and its dance scene, and their time there working with people like the producer Arthur Baker. Together with Factory Records, New Order decided to open a nightclub in Manchester based on New York clubs such as Danceteria and Paradise Garage. They called it The Haçienda, which they took from a situationist quote, and it opened on 21 May 1982, the night before my wedding.
    New Order were the main band on Factory at the time and a lot of the money that was spent opening the club and keeping it going in the early years came from their pocket, as Hooky never lets anyone forget. The Haçienda couldn’t have been more different to the other clubs in Manchester, like Rotters and Oscars, which were all proper old-school nightclubs. Oscars even had tablecloths on the tables. The Haçi just felt super cool in comparison. I’d never been to New York, so it felt more German or European to me at first. It was a huge futuristic warehouse space, and even though it could be quite empty and draughty some nights, you knew it was an important place; it felt like a place where things could happen.
    Our Paul went to the opening night, and probably went more than me at first – he was really into going and watching bands there. I would go with him and saw some great early gigs, like the Smiths, Orange Juice and Nico, but I was also doing other things, and I was still married.
    When I did start to go regularly, I would see musicians from Factory like Barney or Hooky from New Order in there, but I never mithered them. I thought New Order were great, but I was never one of those who went up talking to people I didn’t really know, and I certainly wasn’t going to ask anyone for an autograph. Even when we eventually joined Factory and I became a bit friendly with Barney, I would never ask him questions or advice about being in a band.
    Our next gig was a battle of the bands in Blackpool. My dad had found out about it through someone at the post office. It was in this weird venue with a kind of tinsel gold backdrop – a proper cabaret type of club, real Phoenix Nights tackle. We had put a few of our own songs in the set by then. They had terrible titles like ‘Comfort and Joy’ and ‘Red’, and they never saw the light of day, but they were a start. Someone actually emailed my manager, Warren, recently, saying, ‘I bought this demo tape off Paul Davis who said it was an early Happy Mondays demo. These are the songs on it. Is it real?’ and just by looking at the song titles I could tell it was. PD had obviously kept the early demos and photographs, then sold them to some obsessive Mondays fan.
    We actually managed to record a couple of demos in the days when we were rehearsing at All Saints primary school, because my dad had bought a four-track from Johnny Roadhouse in town, one of those four-tracks that comes in a suitcase. He helped us record those demos. ‘Comfort and Joy’ and ‘Red’ were on the first one, then the later one had songs like ‘The Egg’ and ‘Delightful’. By this stage, we were taking the band pretty seriously, practising quite religiously twice a week and beginning to think we might be able to make something of it. I think even my dad thought we were good, or at least thought we had something .
    It was when I was married to Bull that I took heroin properly for the first time. I’d had