Still Breathing

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

  Christopher: Every night, while my mum was working at the café in Moss Side, Anthony would be waiting for me behind the front door and when I opened the door he’d blast me in the face. Every night. We’d fight and fight until you couldn’t breathe. The last fight we had was over a tin of beans. I’d cooked this half tin of beans, he came in and said it was his. He then came round the back of me and whacked me in the ear and knocked me on the floor. I got up. He was stood there. I put all my might into a punch and blasted him in the teeth. I bust all his lip. Then we had a proper fight and that’s the last fight we ever had. I was small but I got up one day like Tom Hanks in the film Big. I was big! And that was when we started collaborating together. I was fourteen. He started coming out with my mates and me. My nickname was Donzo and his was Mad Dog.

  Anthony: That was the last fight I wanted. He hit me and it came up like a bauble on my chin. We were always close, but after that fight things really started to change. I took him out for a drink and introduced him to my scene. Before that he was happy-go-lucky, doing his own thing with his friends. We were like two mad dogs. We could have a two-way conversation without talking, just by looking at each other. We would go to a pub called The Church in Northenden. I was absolutely mental on cannabis and booze. The pub had to employ twenty security. We used to smash it up every night. It was the best pub I’ve ever been in, it was like the monkey house in the zoo. It was the key to the madness. I loved it.

  Christopher: We’d all be smoking weed in there. The dad of our friend Geoff ran another pub we’d go to called The Firbank. We spiked him with acid once. He was running around looking for chickens. He barred Anthony and Anthony sent him a pig’s head in a box. The pub shut at 1am and every weekend we’d nick a car from outside or in the immediate area just to get home in. It was normal. One time we nicked this taxi and on the way home we saw a load of lads we knew. Stephen [Yates] leaned out the window and shouted, ‘Hey wankers!’ It turned out that it was one of the lad’s dad’s taxi. Stephen dropped me off and then my other best pal, Jason, went out in the taxi. He drove it through a neighbour’s garden wall and into the house. By the time he got home the police were there and he couldn’t understand why. Obviously the kid had gone home and told to his dad that Stephen had nicked his taxi.

  June: Me and Arthur were downstairs watching telly, the next thing the police came in full blast, took Chris in his pyjamas, said he’d been out robbing cars, handcuffed him and took him out. It was pretty regular – visits from the police. They’d search the house and I’d say, ‘Well there are no cars under the bed.’ At night, when the lads were out, the police used to shine these massive torches in my bedroom and then knock on my door to tell me, ‘We know they’re out and we’ll have them.’ They did give my lads a lot of hassle but there’s no smoke without fire. Another time I was sat in the living room when the police scooped up Anthony’s car, a white Ford Escort, and put it on a low loader. He never got it back.

  I lent Anthony and Stephen my car one night to go out in, a gold three-litre sport Capri. They got pulled and the police took the car. I was always at the police station. I got Anthony out and they kept me in to interview me about the car and kept it for three months. There were millions of incidents. Too many to recall.

  We used to have a lot of hassle with Anthony. When I went to work in the morning, I had to take the fuse out of the kitchen that ran all the appliances. I had to – this is before I went to work – go in the bedroom, pack up Chris’s trainers, his favourite T-shirts, whatever. I took everything to work with me so that Anthony wouldn’t wear them. I had to take the rotor arm out of the car when I came home from work so they wouldn’t pinch my car.

  Anthony: There were the good times on the estate when someone would come back with a raise from overseas. The pub would be on fire. John Sullivan, international jewel thief, absolutely mega. He used to go away grafting and you would see him walking through the estate with a £2,000 cashmere overcoat on and a pair of brogues, dressed slick like an Italian with the hair greased back – the full look. Everywhere he went he had a key that would work in one in ten jewellery cases in dealers all over Europe. He went on the Amsterdam diamond tour and took his key for this jewel box. It’s just that beautiful Mancunian thing – chancing your arm. He stuck his key in and it fitted. He rinsed the Amsterdam diamond centre and carried on with the tour. By the end of the tour he had something like twenty-seven watches. You would see him in the pub and he would have grands and grands in cash – party time. Unfortunately, like a lot of our pals, Sully passed away.

  Chris would be going out with his group of pals and I’d heard they’d been putting each other in a bin and throwing each other through shop windows. They’d all run in and grab what they could. They’d be coming home with £20,000 of leather jackets. It was wild. Fashion was everything to us. It was all about the look. The problem was we didn’t have the money.

  Christopher: There was a bit of a trend where a few of the lads off our estate would go into town and kick the shop doors off or throw bins through the windows. They’d run in, grab the clothes, then get a taxi and go home. It happened on dozens of occasions. I got arrested for robbing Jack Crème on King Street. I was found in the street with a big pile of clothes. The police smashed me in the face. I was nicked for burglary and me mum and aunty Rita had to come and get me out because I was a minor. I told the police I’d found the stuff in the street, which I did, of course. My mum took pictures of my face and we made an official compliant. In the end I got acquitted of robbery in court and I dropped my complaint against the police.

  Tracey: My best friend Cath Berry’s brother, Andrew Berry, was setting up a hairdresser’s called Swing in the basement of The Hacienda; he’d got into Tony Wilson [the founder of Factory Records, home to Joy Division and New Order, and The Hacienda club]. I’d been going to The Hacienda since it first opened [in 1982]. Andrew offered me a job doing the reception for Swing and I started work there in 1983. It was a crazy period for me. Andrew is one of the most innovative people I have ever worked with. We’d have days where we would shut the doors to customers and do stuff like paint showroom dummies and hang them from the ceiling in Swing. It was an amazing place to be working. New Order’s Rob Gretton and Bernard Sumner, The Smiths’ Mike [Joyce], Johnny [Marr] and Andy [Rourke], Vini Reilly, The Fall – Mark E [Smith] and [his then wife] Brix … all these bands used to come in to get their hair done. Our space was also the changing room for the bands at The Hacienda, so you’d get Divine or Culture Club coming in, all the bands of the time, and some of them would wreck it. Everyone was welcome at Swing. People would turn up to hang out for the day. I met a lot of the friends I still have today at Swing. There were some casualties but a lot of them went on to do some great stuff: [Author and DJ] Dave Haslam would be there selling his fanzine, Rebecca Boulton worked at The Hacienda and went on to manage New Order, drummer Simon Wolstencroft played with many great bands … the list goes on and on. Anthony and Chris got to meet a lot of interesting people there.

  Christopher: At the time we were into football and we used to go to Brewster’s, the main club. The music they played was Jocelyn Brown, Luther Vandross-type music. All the lads from all over were in there. It was only small, very dark, a weed-smoking place. Tracey was totally into The Hacienda and that was an indie club back then. We would sometimes go over to The Hacienda dressed, for want of a better word, like terrace lads. We would be going into Swing and seeing all these weird characters. One time I’d acquired a load of leather pants from somewhere so the obvious place to take them was down there, to Andrew Berry and his crowd.

  Anthony: We’d frighten them to death. Tracey went off on a mission: she wanted something different, she wanted to be part of the music and art scene. But via her we were constantly tapping into that type of world. We’d go to The Hacienda to see gigs such as Gregory Issacs or Grace Jones. Tracey was into clothes, music, art and making these little movies with The Weeds [Andrew Berry was the band’s singer]
. She was really ‘arty’ and coming from our area that was pretty far out.

  Christopher and me were more terrace – that’s the word our friends used to describe us. Britain was getting a touch more switched on to the new type of sneak thief and thievery. So we would spend more time in Europe, where they were a bit more backward, and end up having grands in our back pocket. We’d live a real, real good life. No complaints. We were having bang-on holidays all over the world. Going abroad – there were always trips grafting. We all went to Eindhoven with United. On the ferry I was arrested for theft on the boat and was put in the brig. On another trip to Amsterdam we went with this nutcase. He had a dog back home and they cut its ears off. One time he threw it in the back of a post office van with a goat. You could hear the goat running round while the dog was trying to kill it. They used to feed the dog sheep’s heads. These kids were nutters. One of the lads was shagging a bird from our estate. She had a flat in Stockholm. We stayed there and went into a jeweller’s and copped for a parcel of diamonds, a big parcel. Then we went on the piss. On the way to Germany, on the twenty-four-hour Love Boat, this nutcase goes missing. I heard loads of clapping, loads of Germans, Swedish and Dutch people, all round the fast food alcove section of the boat. My mate is sat there setting his balls on fire with 100% Vodka. He pulled his knob out, put 100% Vodka on it and set his knob on fire. He kept getting standing ovations.

  So we’re on the boat, each with about twenty women’s necklaces, diamonds and pearls, and he’s setting himself on fire. He was that drunk, he was uncontrollable, so we put him in the boot of the car. At customs, he’s kicking the boot, shouting, ‘I’ve got ten kilos of coke,’ but the custom officer was laughing. He walked round the back and said, ‘Now, what’ve we got here then?’ We said, ‘He’s just double pissed, we just need to get him home. He’s been a nuisance in the car so we’ve put him in the boot.’ Customs told us to get on our way. It actually worked in our favour.

  Christopher: There was a period where a lot of post office vans were getting robbed. They used to carry a green bag and everyone found out the green bags were full of money. It was the worst kept secret. You’d just hear random stories: someone’s had a post office van off and copped for however much. [Overall, crime in the North-West rose by 40 per cent between 1981 and 1986. Armed robberies almost doubled. Manchester was dubbed the crime capital of the UK.]

  Anthony: I was nicked for a robbery on a post office van. I was arrested and identified as being the person who took the bag. I was arrested in Manchester on another charge and Staffordshire police came and picked me up and took me back to Stoke. They kept me there for three days. It was on a post office van in Hanley, Stoke on Trent. I think I did seven or eight ID parades and only one person picked me out and that was the bus driver who had allegedly seen me take the bag. The Crown Prosecution decided not to charge me because there was only one witness. My mate got three years. There were all kinds of innuendo and accusations about what we were and were not doing. You’d get pulled in for questioning for all sorts of offences.

  Christopher: Six of us went up to Newcastle for the football. The kid driving had just passed his test so he was driving in the slow lane all the way there. Another kid had this Newcastle scarf that he said had belonged to his great-granddad, like a family heirloom, and he was flying it out of the car window. Anthony was smoking a joint and went to open the window to throw the roach out and somehow the scarf was blown away. One hundred years that scarf had been in the family and we were all too stoned to notice it had gone. Then we got to Newcastle and it was snowing – we were all in sheepskins, whereas the Newcastle fans were just in their Newcastle shirts. There was a firm of about 200 lads and one of them copped our accent. We started to walk away, faster and faster, and then broke into a jog. This whole mob started chasing us, hundreds of them, it was like a scene from Braveheart. We legged it toward the car but the kid couldn’t get it started. This mob was charging towards us and we were shitting ourselves. We thought they would eat us alive we were that far north … finally the car started and we got away.

  Anthony: Another time I organised a van to go to the Charity Shield final. I borrowed it off my dad and it had up the side of it ‘The Smugglers’. We went to the supermarket and stocked up on beer, loaded it into the van. By the time we’d got to Coventry we’d drank it, seventeen of us. We went from the motorway into an area of Coventry town centre to get a wine shop and to have a drink in a pub. We walked into the toughest boozer and we were in there singing United songs. They rang all the other pubs in the area and the main crew from Coventry came down. They gave us a proper fight. Chris got stabbed, somebody ended up with a fractured skull. We were fighting for our lives in this pub. We gave them the best fight they’ve ever had. Then the police came and arrested us all. They kept us in custody until the following day because they reckoned we were too violent and pissed to be let out. The next day they released us and the press were outside. We were the first people to be arrested after Lord Popplewell began his investigation into hooliganism. It was front-page news. We had to drive out of Coventry with police motorbikes escorting us.

  Christopher: I was United but when you were abroad it didn’t matter. You’d meet all your pals from all over town over there looking for money. Everyone was doing the same sort of thing and probably still are. If you’re a man in our family you have to earn. It’s not a spoken thing but there’s a massive pressure to make the grade and to stand up and be counted. I can remember my dad saying you’d never get rich working for somebody else. When I left school at fifteen, he gave me £400 in cash and a transit van. I had two men working for me and I used to go out collecting scrap around Manchester then go and weigh it in. I did that for while. Then I had a seven and a half tonne wagon doing the same thing. I worked with my dad on a couple of houses: buying them, doing them up and selling them, but that was hard work because he was going through a mad period. He stressed me out so much I got psoriasis.

  Anthony: Chris and me we’re out one day doing the scrap and we picked up this Holland’s pie van off my dad to collect scrap engines. Chris was driving and I was sat in the passenger seat. We got to the lights and the brakes have gone. So we’re flying through the lights and Chris is messing with the gears to change down and the gear stick came off in his hands! We’ve got no brakes, no gear stick … eventually we got back to our dad’s yard and he said, ‘What’s wrong with you? Just put it back in and get on with it.’ I said fuck this. I was not suited to this type of work. My attitude was: I need money and I need it now.

  Christopher: On one occasion my dad sent me on the train to Inverness to pick up a wagon. It was one of those trips I did quite often – since I was thirteen. He used to put me on the train with fifteen grand or whatever it was to pay for the engines. Someone would meet me at the station; I’d give them the money and get the train back. I’d get fifty quid for the day’s work off my old fella. So I’ve gone up to collect this wagon. I had no licence. He told me there were a couple of animals to pick up as well – a goat and a goose. So I’m thinking it’s going to be a box van or something. I get there and it’s this flat back wagon with grass all over the roof and a bird’s nest on the engine. I rang my dad and said, ‘What do you want me to do with this goat and goose?’ He said, ‘Just put them on the back and tie them down.’ I said, ‘You can’t tie a goat and goose down to the back of a wagon and drive 400 miles. Are you mad?’ I already knew the answer to that. So he said, ‘Put them in the cab with you.’ That was an everyday occurrence, being asked to do the most ludicrous things. He had a network of scrapyards round the country that’d buy in engines for him. He’d tell them what he needed and then he’d go round and collect it. Then he’d take it to the people he was selling it to. They would then send it to the Far East to get reconditioned and the whole thing would start again. There was loads of money in it. We used to buy alternators and starter motors if they had a certain serial number. There might be 20,000 cars in the Far East that needed a
certain type of starter motor so they paid top money for them. So we’d go round the scrapyards looking for these things – pay £2 for them because it was a bit of scrap. My dad would give us £10 and to him it was worth £25.

  My mum and dad were trying to get us to go to work. We must have driven them mad because if we wanted to go off somewhere, we’d just down tools and go. We did little bits of scrap metal dealing but we were always into something else.

  We went to Ibiza in 1984. Anthony had been and came back saying how great it was, so we just booked a flight. We had some friends already there on a package tour and we jibbed in with them. Every day Anthony and me would go out and rob ten pairs of brand new espadrilles, ten pairs of shorts and ten T-shirts. We’d hand them to our friends and go out for the night and cause mayhem.

  Arthur: I worked our Chris to the fucking bone. I had him doing the houses and scrap. I sent him to Essex to meet Moaning Bob, a friend of mine, buying engines for export. Moaning Bob was on the doors. Chris lived with that crew for three weeks. Moaning Bob was a raving nutter. Chris went down there working, met them all, including Essex’s finest. Him and Anthony made lots of pals down there that they are still in touch with. I’d send Anthony to the yard we had in the Gorbals – he’d be less trouble up there than he was down here. They were a pair of villains at that time. True to form, Anthony was sent home; he was causing trouble up there as well.