down and go in for an MOT once you’re 40. If you don’t, you end up dead by 50, and I never wanted to die, you see. Was there a specific moment when you realised you couldn’t maintain your hedonistic lifestyle AND stay alive? Yeah, when I hit 40, I thought, if I carry on living how I’ve lived, to me it was a bit..you know..you can get away with it in your 30’s especially if you’re a bloke as they don’t grow up really. Women have to but we don’t. I think it’s a bit sad really, when you see blokes out when I pop into Manchester who are living the same way of life as when they were 18. So I decided it sack it all off and I did really. It took me about two years but I got there. What was your aim when started the Mondays? Fame didn’t come into it with us; we wanted to be successful and we wanted to be rock n roll. Tat was one of the
things..byt the time we were getting to make music it had become really boring. 1983 was like a repeat episode of 1976 TOTP. Te whole business seemed to have got really stale; if Bros had been caught with a spliff their record company would have dropped them. We wanted to be rock n roll. I’d grown up with Te Doors and the Stones and the Beatles and had heard about all their adventures, and the Pistols and everything and it wasn’t like that in 83. It was really crap. We wanted the whole package. Tat’s why when I get asked “was too much attention
paid to your drug use?” I say no, we
let the press into that. I didn’t want
“We wanted to be rock n roll.”
to read an interview in the NME about what amp the guitarist uses, so when we were interviewed and we’d chop out a line or roll up a spliff, the whole interview would be about that. Tat’s what me and Bez set out to do really. You only get one chance at this, like being a Premier League football player, so you have to use everything you can to make it. Alright, I developed a habit and all that, but Fleetwood Mac probably took more drugs than us lot. Well, they had a lot more money! Who were you guys listening to when you were first starting out back in the early 80’s? Everything really, the Doors, the Stones, the Velvet Underground, but then there was also Northern Soul and disco and funk and punk..everything really. Tat was something that really bonded us together as mates, because at the time, it doesn’t seem to be as much now where tribes were the thing, You were either a mod or a rocker, a casual, whatever. You had to stick to the kind of music that matched your clothing. But for us, in the band, we all had a massively wide variety of taste in music. We’d stand up and say we liked Sinatra or Te Bee Gees.
Can you remember the first time you wrote a song together? When we started we all had a go at doing the lyrics and I ended up doing it as I was the best at it, and that was it really. I was never that interested in the production side of things. We’d sit in our little rehearsal room knocking out songs and then by the time we got into a recoding studio we’d just press record and we played. But when it came to Pills and Trills it was a totally different production style. Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osborne (the producers) just threw a shitload of beats in and said “put some bass on that, put some guitar on that, now write lyrics to it”. So that was the first time we experienced that kind of production. And that was our most successful album. How did you come to adopt your own unique style of lyrics? Are they stream of consciousness? Tere has always been a subliminal message in my songs and they’ve always included some in-jokes. But basically they’re wacky stories, I Am Te Walrus type stuff. Te last bit of my process is getting some paper and a pen and structuring it. I could be stuck in the queue in the Co Op and see something or hear a conversation
outlineonline.co.uk / November 2015 / 13
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