Still Breathing

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

  I went with all my guys on a stag do. I was sat in my hotel room smoking a joint, waiting to go out with the boys and watching Sky News. And it came on the news that two kids have been decapitated in Manchester. I was working with these kids and they’d been bought a motorbike by somebody to do whatever they were doing. These two kids got high on amphetamines, left a club, drove into a lamppost and both lost their heads. I was on the phone to the UK, saying, ‘Is that right, the two kids we were working with have both lost their heads?’ My mate came to knock on my room. He had been downstairs in the bar scoring some weed and someone had walked in and shot another fella in the head and killed him. It was never fucking ending – a constant river of shit.

  We never made a penny from the parties. We were losing money. There was a major investigation into Joy by the police. And it was like, ‘Was it the farm owner? Was it the Donnellys? Was it the production company? Was it a promoter? Who was making the money?’ Nobody would admit to it. You can only imagine what the police were thinking: with parties come the drugs. If you’re at a rave and there are 10,000 people there, for this to work there needs to be 10,000 trips or 10,000 tablets. It was getting too much, all of it.

  Christopher: Joy was a nightmare afterwards. We were always about putting the best possible show on for the people coming to the parties, and we still are. So we never made any real money out of any of the events we were involved in. As long as our reputation was intact for putting the best party on, that’s what we were about. It was about making money when we were putting them on, but it never panned out like that. We would always over spend. We’d want it to be the bollocks – that’s the way we are. So it doesn’t matter, it’s not about the money – if it was our name it had to be the best it could be. You could have fitted 30,000 people on that field at Joy.

  Everyone from Oakenfold to Adamski, all the best DJs of the time, were there. The kid who put the light show on had done Biology and Sunrise. I went to Blackpool on the bus to sort the geezer to bring his laser show to the party and I had to use a bandana to cover my face. You couldn’t let the geezer see your face because if he got nicked he’d have stuck you in as the organisers. It was just: here’s the address, here’s the paperwork, see you then. That’s how it was done.

  With Inspector X, it was like a comedy. Everywhere we were, he’d turn up ten minutes after we’d left. He interviewed Anthony and me at my mother-in-law’s over Joy. He was three or four parties behind us. They were like, ‘Bastards, they’ve just left’ – so we became a kind of urban myth to him.

  Anthony: I have read that we did Live the Dream [a huge outdoor mega-rave that took place in Blackburn, September 1989]. Not true. We were not involved in any shape or form in promoting it, just affiliated with the people putting it on. I went down there and people were swimming in a lake. It was complete madness. At another night in Blackburn it was out and out war with the police. We were still up for parties but not the big raves with the mother ship lasers and all the monster stuff. All that was important now was the sound system and getting the thing off the ground. Everyone went back to grassroots – a generator and a sound system. We put a party on in Cheshire. You take security and you put a perimeter fence up round the marquee and funnel people in – security will monitor the perimeter of the marquee. We had booked Frankie Knuckles to DJ. We were laughing because a prison was so close the prisoners would have been able to hear the music. We were aiming for 5,000 people, a marquee in a field, a generator and lights.

  Christopher: We were in the field all ready to go. Instead of putting up the marquee we left it flat until the last minute and then the idea was ‘bang’, up it goes. Once the people are in there, the police can’t do fuck all. It was down a country lane and we’d told everyone to keep the wagon lights off. But one of the drivers of the wagons drove down with his lights on full beam and the farmer saw it. He rang the police because somebody had been nicking the farm machinery. When the police came, somebody had nicked a manhole cover and a copper fell down and broke both of his legs. And then a wagon was flying up and it nearly took his head off. It was one of the wettest and windiest nights as well. It was carnage, all the party people arriving and the police blocking the road off. The security was there – fifty men – and they all wanted paying. It was not their fault the event didn’t go ahead. The marquee man had got his tent halfway up … it was just chaos.

  We had a van full of booze and soft drinks and Anthony, me, and John the Duck drove to Blackburn looking for a party there. We took an E each and spent the night driving around. I can’t remember if we went to a party we were that off our heads. Then the next day you wake up and you’ve lost loads of money and the security still want paying. You have got to go and front all this security – big geezers. I was twenty-two, about nine stone wet through and the bouncers back then had no licences. So you hoped you could come to an amicable agreement.

  Anthony: What did you achieve in your life? That’s the question you got to ask yourself. If we did have some money spare we would have a go. Every other fucker was too tight to make that attempt and that’s where we got our respect. We would at least try. We had the balls because of our upbringing to challenge the authorities and that’s what we did.

  5

  BLAGS TO RICHES

  (MADCHESTER)

  In November 1989, the Happy Mondays played their biggest gig to date at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. The same night fellow Manchester band The Stone Roses played their biggest gig to date at Alexandra Palace in London. Days later both bands appeared on the same edition of Top of the Pops. The Roses played their single ‘Fools Gold’ and the Mondays played ‘Hallelujah’ from their Madchester – Rave On EP. It was a watershed moment for both bands and precipitated an avalanche of media interest in all things Manchester. The city was declared the ‘Rave’ capital of the UK and ‘Madchester’ was born. The NME would run fifteen Manchester-related cover stories in 1990. The success stories were to be found elsewhere as hungry record labels snapped up every available Manchester band. It was a new gold rush. Some said the cloth was mightier than the chord, as Madchester quickly became as much about the look as the music. Bands’ T-shirt sales were a massive money-spinner. Eric Barker, for instance, was now making a lot of money handling 808 State’s merchandising. The Inspiral Carpets were said to sell more T-shirts than records. Leo Stanley, who owned the Identity shop in Afflecks Palace, hit pay dirt with a T-shirt that read ‘ … AND ON THE SIXTH DAY, GOD CREATED MANchester.’

  Christopher: We’d known the Mondays for years. I first met Bez when I was sat in Swing having my hair cut. He’d just robbed a fruit machine. He was off his head mid-afternoon. We went to the Mondays’ gig at Corbieres in 1985. So although we were from Wythenshawe and they were from Salford we were pally with Shaun and Bez – through our Tracey. When Shaun was arrested in Jersey for cocaine possession, Tracey was the one that went to get him out of custody; she had clearly learnt from us about bail situations. She pretty much looked after the Happy Mondays at Factory and she was there from the beginning. We’d always be at the same sort of places as the Mondays, and they were just lads like us but they were in a band. We just became pals.

  Anthony: Tracey was the bridge. She said, ‘You’ll like them and they’ll like you.’ This ‘Madchester’ scene that everybody was going on about, it was thirty people. We were asked to do the Happy Mondays T-shirts. Tony [Wilson] gave Tracey the artwork for ‘W.F.L.’ [the twelve-inch remix of ‘Wrote For Luck’ by Vince Clarke and Paul Oakenfold, released September 1989] and she’d sent it to us – we were supposed to do the official T-shirts. The artwork was by Matt and Pat Carroll [of the acclaimed and notorious Central Station Design, who did all the Happy Mondays covers]. We drove round with the artwork for a week and we did nothing with it. In the end we just sent it back. We were too busy bootlegging other bands and it seemed too corporate a thing for us to do. We stuck to doing it outside. But what we did for the Mondays was the party after the Free Trade Hall gig. />
  Christopher: We did it on the fifth floor of this broken down warehouse. I had to get the generator, the lights, the sound system, off the back of the wagon and into the lift. You’re driving on someone else’s property at night, looking out for security guards in a seven and half tonne wagon. I set up and met Natalie at the Free Trade Hall gig. She’d been to Afflecks and bought me new jogging bottoms and a top. I had oil all over my hands. I was standing on the side of the stage watching the Mondays and Nathan [McGough, Mondays’ manager] came on stage at the end and said, ‘If you all want to go to a party, come off at this junction off the motorway, third exit off the roundabout, there’s a warehouse.’ We had booked Sasha to DJ.

  Anthony: We always call this one the ‘Manchester Siege’. It looked like a break-in but wasn’t. A man who had three months to live orchestrated it. He had the key and wanted some money off the ticket sales on the door but there was a siege. The police turned up. The kids that helped put on the party were off our estate and they were bricking the police. They were on the roof throwing slates at the police. The NME was there and there was a load of Dutch media. The journalists all thought this was great – a raid. We had started to get a lot of heat off the police for the parties, so we thought it wise to start to tap into other things.

  Christopher: The first parties the police came to they just let everyone go, they let the DJs go and let the equipment go. Now they had the bright idea to start confiscating decks and stuff so someone had to put their hand up and say, ‘Can I have my decks back, please?’ Then it was, ‘Well, who put the party on? Who booked you?’ That was when Inspector X started becoming a bit of a pain in the arse. At that party we were running with the decks. Sasha had a deck and I had a deck. We got bored of the police shutting us down and losing money. You’re losing money, so you put another one on, you lose a bit more, so you put on another, thinking this is going to be the one. You can only take so many knocks. We were getting kicked in the balls off the authorities shutting everything down, making it hard work.

  So we decided to open an office in Imex House [office complex on Princess Street in Manchester city centre]. You could just go in and say, ‘I need an office for a few months’ and they’d say, ‘Right, it’s £50 a week.’ There was no leases or anything. It was quite posh. They had a receptionist and our office was all glass. We had no reason to open the office whatsoever. We put two desks in and turned up on the Monday and went, ‘Right, now what?’ It was a case of if you build it they will come – and people did start to come. James Barton and Andy Carroll used to come down once a week. Dave Hardy came in with World of Twist [upcoming Madchester-era band] and they were asking us to do bits of merchandise. Then two fellas who needed finance for some video projects approached us. They were called Dat2Dat and they’d filmed the Happy Mondays gig at the Free Trade Hall but didn’t have the money to do anything with it. Factory [Records] couldn’t take it on so we did it as a bootleg but with Factory’s permission. We formed a company called D2D and we sold it to HMV as a legal bootleg. We called it ‘Madchester’.

  Anthony: We always wanted to go into business. It was easy. Because there were no leases, you had a lot of people coming through Imex House. We had our own office and then when we were doing D2D we had another office in there full of editing equipment. In our office we had record decks. During that time people used to come into the office and we’d sit there and make it up as we went along. Then the Mondays did a tour at the end of 1989 [the Rave On tour, November/December] and they wanted us to do the end-of-tour party. We booked a place called Hamiltons and called the party ‘Madchester’. At that time, nobody wanted the Happy Mondays or us, and that was the only club we could hire – some backward cowshed. It ended up kicking right off. The police shut it down and threw everyone out at midnight.

  That was the first party we did with these two Jewish geezers from London. They had been on Esther Rantzen [That’s Life!] every week for putting on these big car boot sale things, where it was a pound to get in. They open up in a town and take £100,000 out of the town and leave. They were experiencing problems and were looking for something else. We were also looking to legitimise things. They were in £2 million mansions in Wood Hill in London, very flamboyant. They financed the ‘Madchester’ party and although it got shut down we made money. I think we laid out £10,000 and made £18,000. Then we booked Silver Bullet, Orbital, Mike Pickering and Sasha for a big party in Trentham Gardens in Stoke on Trent. It was a legal party. We approached the authorities and made the necessary applications. We booked strobes, lasers, pyrotechnics, 50,000 watts of sound and video screens. The idea was we were going to do the best in legal house parties, a series of events all around the country catering for between 3,000 to 25,000.

  Christopher: We did it legally with these two Jewish kids and the police shut it down. The police were on everyone’s case so you had to do legal parties but we got stamped on. It was all legit, but it was the never-ending stigma of the name Donnelly … that’s what the undercurrent was.

  Anthony: The police went down to Trentham Gardens and said, ‘This is a load of gangsters from Manchester.’ They said, ‘If you put it on, we’ll be here and we will stop it.’ We also booked Blackpool Winter Gardens. We called ourselves Pulse, ‘with our finger on the pulse of a nation’. We also had a limited company called Movement Productions. The venues were interested in putting the events on but the police were telling them, ‘You’re linked up to an illegal Acid House thing here. You’re a corporate business and you’re going to have every E head in the country turning up at your place.’ That’s how it was then. If you said you liked to dance, you were literally guilty of being a drug addict. We’d done them illegal and been closed down; now we were trying to do them legal but we couldn’t even get through the door.

  With the Blackpool one, I was with a girl at the time. I didn’t know but her dad was a senior policeman. She went home and told him she was seeing this fella from Manchester and he was doing a rave at the Winter Gardens. He did a police records check on us and it got into the local paper – ‘We don’t want the Donnellys here’ – and it got stopped. She confessed to me. I thought it was an informant as we were in the background on this. I was sat there smoking dope in her house when she told me, then I noticed a photo of her dad with the Queen on the mantelpiece. She then showed me his uniform and hat. I banged her all round the flat with his uniform on. It was great feeling of revenge.

  Rave organisers all over the country were losing their battles with police. On New Year’s Eve 1989, a Sunrise party for 10,000 was called off when the venue received an injunction. The Sun front page read: ‘Ecstasy! The Party’s Over’. The Donnelly Brothers were friendly with Sunrise boss Tony Colsten-Hayter. He had hired Paul Staines as a PR man as he fought back against the authorities, launching the Freedom To Party campaign. Staines was a political aide to right-wing maverick and advisor to Margaret Thatcher, David Hart. Today Staines runs the influential Guido Fawkes political blog.

  The Freedom To Party campaign was a loose alliance of all the main rave organisers: Sunrise, Energy, Biology and the Donnelly Brothers. They pointed out that in Europe clubbers could legally dance all night. In the UK Graham Bright’s Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Bill proposed to raise fines for organising an unlicensed party from £2,000 to £20,000 and six months in prison. Parliament was also implementing the 1988 Criminal Justice Act that allowed for confiscation of ‘criminal proceeds’ from illegal parties. Ten- and six-year sentences were handed out to organisers of a Thames boat party rave under the Misuse of Drugs Act. Freedom To Party protests in Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park attracted thousands.

  Christopher: Paul Staines came up and stayed at my mum and dad’s farm. They were in the process of bringing a law out that said if you were in your living room with more than eight people it was considered as a rave. So we said we’d set a protest up in Manchester. The one in London attracted about 20,000 people so we did one outside the Town Hall in Albert Square [
February 1990]. Three thousand people turned up. I took the generator on the back of my dad’s wagon and rigged the DJ up. I did an interview for Granada TV. They asked me what it was all about and I said, ‘All we wanna do is dance.’

  Anthony: I was a revolutionary. I was part of something. The country was tipped upside down and shook by Acid House. Look at what punk did, and that was a gang of thousands. With Acid House you’re talking hundreds of thousands of people closing towns down, no wonder they wanted to stop it. The same night as Freedom To Party in Albert Square there was a warehouse party in Haslingden, Rossendale, near Blackburn. We did an amalgamation with the Blackburn firm – we had become good friends with them. They came to the office. Tony Wilson did a thing about illegal raves [on Granada TV]. We were asked to appear on that programme but we declined. The Blackburn firm did it instead. We always wanted to sit in the background.

  Christopher: We were all about putting an amazing light show on … the Blackburn firm were quite militant, do anything to get their party off but they didn’t go to much expense – just get into a warehouse, put the system up and not really have many lights as such. But they were getting huge crowds, and on a weekly basis. To drive over there and just see car after car after car was pretty phenomenal. It was an industrial town; Thatcher had destroyed it, empty warehouses everywhere. What better place to start a party? They were nice kids all of them, the whole Blackburn firm.

  Anthony: The party in Haslingden got raided – there was a police helicopter hovering overhead. Even though you wanted to advertise the party you didn’t want to advertise anything else and it seemed to be nine times out of ten that the promoters of these events were normally suspected to be linked to other ‘business’, do you understand me? That’s why people tended to want to be in the background. The Blackburn firm got nicked with thousands of trips. Everybody was guilty by association.