The Freedom To Party campaign was a key start in the push for the liberalisation of licensing laws, but a second reading of the Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Bill took place in March 1990 and it would become law in July. At a Love Decade rave in Leeds the police arrested 836 people. The Broadcasting Act closed down pirate radio stations. It was the end of an era. Almost. The final hurrah came courtesy of the Stone Roses. The band’s April 1990 epochal gig on Spike Island, a man-made island in Widnes, attracted in excess of 30,000 – the largest rave in the country.
Anthony: We were approached by Tim Mulryan on behalf of the Stone Roses to do the merchandising for Spike Island. We get Securicor to come to the office because we’d got delusions of grandeur and thought we were going to make a fortune. We said, ‘Right, we want De La Rue machines. We’re doing this gig and it’s going to take hundreds of thousands of pounds on merchandise.’ So we were putting a plan in place. Tim was the manager for Steve Coogan, another one of our happy Ecstasy friends who’d drop in to the office. He put us together with the Roses management.
So we go to meet Gareth [Evans, the Roses’ notorious manager] in Knutsford. Apparently this Gareth is a bit weird. So Gareth was told that the Donnellys are waiting for him to do the meeting on the merchandising. We were sat in the car and I could see Tim arguing with Gareth in the street, obviously there was a problem. Gareth was throwing his hands in the air. I got out of the car and approached him. He was shitting his pants. Then what can only be described as a Benny Hill chase ensued – we were only there to do the merchandise and this geezer won’t even speak to us. Spike Island is upon us and we’ve got to get it ready. We ended up chasing Gareth through Boots, throwing soap at him.
We spent that much time messing about trying to do it, before we knew it the gig was upon us and we missed it. I think when Spike Island came around we just went to watch the gig. Then after the gig I sat and drank a bottle of Wild Turkey with Ian [Brown] having a laugh at the after-show party at Genevieves.
Christopher: We were now looking for something to get into as a proper business. Had we not had so many bad experiences with putting events on we would have ended up in the music industry. The police were all over us like a rash even when we tried to do the legal things. Manchester was also at war. You now had people from the outside looking in, thinking there’s good money to be made here, as opposed to people doing it for the love of it.
Organised crime firms in the city were leaving behind risky activities such as armed robbery and entering the rave scene. The amount of Ecstasy coming into Britain multiplied by 4,000 per cent between 1990 and 1995. One Wythenshawe gang reputedly smuggled £5 million worth of Ecstasy from Amsterdam to Manchester in a few months. Criminal gangs could turn a vast profit from importing drugs; running clubs, operating rave security and taking protection money from clubs. There were reports of shotguns in mouths at raves. In Manchester, the Thunderdome club closed down after a drive-by shooting of a bouncer. Other clubs were burned down. The GMP began to focus their attention on The Hacienda – the city’s beacon of Acid House/Rave culture.
Anthony: We were still going out into town and we were still strong as a family, so none of that shit affected us but there was definitely a rise in the gang side. Around that time we just strengthened ourselves in numbers, took a back seat and got on with our own thing. We were just going into town, drinking in the [new Factory-owned] Dry bar and not going to The Hacienda as often, concentrating more on bands, music and festivals. We did Glastonbury 1990. [The year of the notorious battle of Glastonbury that resulted in the festival being cancelled the following year. Ecstasy usage and tent crime were rife, pitched battles broke out between travellers and security teams that ended in 235 arrests and £50,000 worth of damage. Many blamed the increased presence of organised crime gangs.] The Happy Mondays were playing and when we received our VIP passes they were just yellow Rank Xerox carbon paper in plastic laminate. We just looked at this thing and somebody went, ‘Oh my God, we can print this round the corner.’ So we get to Glastonbury with my mate, who printed copies of this ticket. That’s what caused the trouble – all the people with backstage passes. There was full-on running battles between security, police, crusties and all the ticket touts. The next time they had the festival the wall went up – because of us, allegedly.
Christopher: We would go to The Hacienda from time to time but now there were different factions in the club. We were just another firm in there. We were still doing the merchandising in Europe. Just before the Mondays played G-Mex [for two nights in the 10,000 capacity Manchester venue, 16/17 March] Bez came with me to do the swag for Pink Floyd and Simple Minds in Denmark and Sweden. Why? I have no idea; he was doing well with the Mondays. Guess it was just for fun. He was part of our firm driving about. Bez was pretty recognisable and the Mondays were famous then. We got on a boat crossing from Rotterdam, and it was a cheesy disco boat with a cheesy DJ with a load of truck drivers and stuff. We took an E each and there was me, Bez and a couple of other kids on the dance floor in the club lounge dancing away to Acid House hits on this car ferry.
Anthony: At this point we’re thinking, ‘Fuck it, we’re going to do something else.’ We were burned out with it. But it doesn’t matter what goes on now because we get tarred with everything. We were becoming more withdrawn. We thought the rave scene was over by the time it had hit the mainstream. We loved it but it wasn’t for us. We were beyond that now. We’d done it. Time to move on. We just didn’t want to be associated with all that shit, but then three years later when our friends were doing fortunes every week with Cream, of course you were thinking we should have stuck with it because we were at the top of the game doing the parties – we were the best.
Christopher: I’d already had the idea of clothing. When the Acid House thing happened, I knew that I wanted to do something that didn’t involved nine to five. Ideally I would have gone into music. Mike [Pickering] was kicking it, 808 State were kicking, but I couldn’t play anything. I used to play guitar but I was never one to sit at home strumming my guitar waiting for someone to knock on my door. We were out grafting. The clothing thing seemed more achievable and I’ve always loved clothes anyway so it seemed more natural too. And all the other people in the clothing game at the time were capitalising on the vibe and weren’t what it was about. So I thought we should do the real version, instead of the outside looking in, do it from the inside outwards.
Then I started taking to Matt and Pat [Carroll at Central Station Design]. I’d become good friends with them. They were talking about putting art onto people’s backs – that’s how we spoke about it at the time. It wasn’t about putting a graphic onto a T-shirt. I had a couple of meetings with them and it became a focus. We were working with Central Station on different things like the [Happy Mondays’] merchandise and they were our pals. If we were doing anything, flyers for parties and stuff, Central Station would do it. They’d actually done the invite for my twenty-first birthday; it was a pink banana on a trippy background.
Anthony: We’re starting to build all these connections but we weren’t going to become a band, so the next best thing was to become was a rock ’n’ roll brand. There were companies out there cashing in on the commerciality of our scene, so that was a factor in us deciding to do clothes. You know what, it’s not about bucket hats and Kickers and Wallabees, it’s a real scene for the people who know and that was a catalyst for us – to right a wrong.
There were people dropping out, the original people, the pioneers were dropping out and it was going mainstream. People were walking round with skullcaps on, bucket hats and long-sleeve T-shirts. Originally Eric [Barker] used to wear one of those hats and that was like Eric’s thing, but when people started making them and selling that look in the shops as ‘this is the thing’, it was over. The ‘look’ became a long-sleeved white T-shirt, a pair of flares and a pair of Kickers, and that was a million, million miles away from what it really was. All these people were saying, ‘It’s like
this,’ and it was for us to say, ‘No it’s not like that, it’s like this.’ We turned our back on the Acid House thing and moved more into the clothes to right the wrongs. We drifted into clothes but we were known for parties.
In the summer of 1990 New Order took their World Cup song, ‘E for England’ to the top of the charts and ‘Madchester’ made it to the cover of Newsweek, dubbed ‘Britain’s Feel-Good Music Movement’. Local clothing company Joe Bloggs had been the main financial benefactor of the Madchester fashion boom – reputedly turning over £60 million selling baggy or flared jeans and heavily logo’d hooded tops. The Happy Mondays, New Order, Inspiral Carpets and The Charlatans had all appeared in a number of music press articles, and on TV, sporting Bloggs – and for many it appeared Bloggs had invented the ‘baggy’ rave look. The Mondays, in fact, did not really like Bloggs but had been led to the company by Tony Wilson for a segment in a Madchester documentary being made by Granada TV. Bloggs told the Mondays to help themselves, and their whole crew turned up and walked out with a vanful of the clobber.
Anthony: When the Mondays watched that [Granada documentary – Celebration: Madchester – Sound of the North, broadcast 1990] they went mental. They were not happy. Bloggs had cleverly said, ‘Let’s get the Mondays in and get them in all the Madchester gear to endorse our product.’ Power to them – if we were as switched on, business-wise, as they were, watching loads of kids create something, and we had the power to rinse it … I’m not saying we would do it, but if they made millions of pounds from it, fair play. But we were the scene – Bloggs was just following the scene. [Joe Bloggs founder] Shami Ahmed was saying he was at the forefront of fashion with the Acid House scene and he was linked to ‘Madchester’. We knew ‘Madchester’ didn’t exist and we knew he was full of shit because the gear he was producing was absolutely nothing like the lads would wear! I’d met this fella clubbing who worked for a large clothing brand. He started talking about setting up a clothing label with us. He worked in marketing. We suggested that he acquire the database of shops that the brand he worked for supplied. He did and there were about 8,000 shops on it. Now we’re talking with this lad about how we can structure this new thing. How do we get it to work? Well, out friends at Central Station make art, but we need a designer … we start to bring in all the different aspects. We were learning. The database was no good – it was just people that sold lower-end clothes. We needed a better class of stores that sold mid-range product to sit next to ours.
Then Chris said to me, ‘I’ve just got some space in one of my dad’s mate’s buildings if we want to take it,’ some place that made knitwear. That was the first sign that we were going to do it. We had meetings at Imex House but when we were there we looked more like gangsters with just an office as a front and we had no control over the door, who came in – it had become a meeting place for a gallery of rogues. We were not getting any work done.
So we go over and take the space in my dad’s mate’s building. The place is free, we can monitor the cameras, we can vet who comes to see us. We were starting to take it a little more seriously and the whole rollercoaster started.
Christopher: I was having meetings with manufactures and people in the clothing game. I met a geezer called Billy who was using manufacturers in different countries. Me, Matt and Pat [from Central Station Design] went and said, ‘This is the idea, this is what we want to do, put art on people’s backs.’ That was one of the initial conversations. He seemed quite up for it and we tried to do some stuff but never got off the ground and we ended up setting up on our own in that building. That was when Anthony got with the idea.
The whole building belonged to these brothers who had a knitwear manufacturing company in there. They’d been doing it for years. My dad knew them. The building was close to his scrapyard. They had this shitty building and they tried to make it tricky by putting these massive big glass windows in. The building was on a road with all these other knitwear manufacturers and you had their building that looked quite trendy. They were a wealthy family. They had expensive knitting machines. They were on the top floor and we moved into the basement where there were no windows. We had a punch bag up and one desk … that was it. I loved clothes but I’d had no training in clothes design.
Anthony: We thought we were now in the fashion industry. If they were producing a piece of knitwear, we thought automatically that they could make socks or jeans or T-shirts. We thought they could make everything for us. Simple. But it doesn’t work like that. We’d invested a certain amount of money in orchestrating this business and we’d set up an office. It was the kid from the large wholesalers who had the knowledge that was going to kick it all off but he didn’t deliver. He moved from his job onto another company and then just went off the radar. He was a sales rep. We’d given him a car to run about in, and he fucking smashed the car up. It was parked up at our office all banged up. It took us a few weeks to find him but we found him. He ended up getting a slap and then we moved on. That was that one dealt with.
Christopher: He was the man we were looking towards to put everything in place. He was in the fashion business. We did some TV shows (as guests) and his label tried to send us clothes to wear. That’s how I got to know the kid and he came on board bringing all the sales knowledge. He brought his mate in, a man on the ground selling the gear. We had Matt and Pat to do graphics. The kid from the wholesalers introduced us to a designer, a kid called Jelly Universe who’d been at St Martin’s [College of Arts and Design]. He was the first designer. He’d been at St Martin’s with a designer called John O’Garr, who had made all the clothes for the video for Adamski’s ‘Killer’ [featuring Seal, a UK No.1 hit in May 1990]. He made Adamski this jacket and a pair of trousers with square cubes coming off them and he made a baseball cap that was twice the normal height with a towelling lining [Adamski wore a distinctive over-sized O’Garr Donald Duck baseball hat on the cover of NME]. Jelly got John involved with us. John moved back from London to Manchester to work with us. He was originally from Macclesfield. He’d been through the Acid House experience down south. He was a white Rasta, long blonde dreads, who only wanted to be smoking dope on a beach on Bali. So now you had us, known for the Acid House raves, these two proper designers, plus Matt and Pat who did amazing artwork and a couple of people who were going to be the sales side, the lad from the wholesalers and his mate – it looked like a great team. We were trying to build a co-operative so that everyone would get something out of the project. We were looking at the kid we had set all this up with, saying, ‘Now what? We’ve got all these people in this office, now what?’ And he just disappeared and we were left holding the baby.
Anthony: So we’ve moved our office and we are going to start producing clothes. We need to come up with a name. I found the name. O’Garr went to a bookstore in Chinatown, a little trinket shop, and he bought a Vietnamese dictionary. He brought it back and he randomly put a pin in and it said ‘Gio.’ I said, ‘That’s good.’ He said, ‘And underneath it says Goi.’ I said, ‘It sounds like Giorgio Armani, why don’t we just have it as Gio-Goi?’ We didn’t want to pass it off but if you put the word Gio-Goi it was kind of instantly familiar but its own word. That’s when we went to Matt and Pat and told them the name. They objected and wanted to call the brand ‘Shit Clothes’.
Christopher: We’ve told a dozen different magazines a dozen different things about the name Gio-Goi. I told someone recently that it was named after a snake in the Andes and this snake shed its skin while it was still moving. I said, ‘That’s what the company’s like, we keep evolving.’ That’s true but that story was just a load of bullshit. I told someone else we’d met these two Portuguese lads named Nuno Gio and Eduardo Goi when we went on holiday as kids and named it after them. We were looking for inspiration from different things and it just so happened O’Garr had been to Vietnam, he was into American soldiers, the GI’s and the Vietcong. We had a Zippo lighter from Vietnam that featured the famous Vietnam War quote: ‘Though I walk thro
ugh the Valley of Death, I shall fear no evil, for I am the evilest son of a bitch in the valley.’ We also liked that. It seemed to sum things up.
6
DODGIN’ THE RAIN ’N’ BULLETS
Christopher: Matt and Pat did a design based on an Aztec bird – the eagle, with Gio-Goi at the side of it. That’s the design that launched us – an Aztec bird with a red bull’s eye in the middle. That was the initial piece of artwork. We decided to use that on the labels with ‘Manchester, Paris, LA, Tokyo’ as an alternative to New York, Paris, London. Matt and Pat did a lot of designs for us – there was one with fishes on, the very first Gio-Goi garments had fishes on which they took from the ‘W.F.L.’ cover. We had them in weird placements – the swordfish tail would be up and over the shoulder so the front of the fish would go down the back.
John [O’Garr] went to Lahore, Pakistan, to put our first full range together. The knitwear brothers had contacts over there. It was all jersey material based – sweatshirts, joggers and long-sleeve T-shirts. The T-shirts had an unusual neckline shape and the pocket shapes were an unusual shape on the joggers. While John was doing that, we decided we needed to get some T-shirts out there on the streets and in the stores.
We got 200 Screen Stars T-shirts in Grey Marl and we printed the Aztec and the Gio-Goi on the front. Then we started giving them out to friends of ours – the Ruthless Rap Assassins, the Roses, Mondays, New Order. There was festival on in Manchester, a Granada festival, and we went down to give some T-shirts out. We gave them to a couple of kids who were in band called the New Fast Automatic Daffodils. The festival was on television and the lead singer was wearing an Aztec. That was the first bit of PR we ever got, they were the first people to wear our clothing as product placement. If they read this book, I’d like to say, ‘Nice one.’ It was a moment that will always stay with me.
Still Breathing Page 12
