Still Breathing

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

  We also did 200 T-shirts that said, ‘Dedicated to Those Dodgin’ the Rain ’n’ Bullets’. That was the company slogan. It was on our letterhead. It was always pissing down in Manchester and there were now lots of bullets flying about. We also did 200 ‘Gibraltar’ T-shirts because everyone was smoking rock [crack]. No one got it. It was an insider joke that we thought was funny. But why would you want a T-shirt with just Gibraltar on it? Some of things went down like a lead balloon but it made us laugh.

  What were a success – huge success – were the warm-up jackets we made in Leicester in fabric called Tactel. We only had that one design for a year and we’d just change the fabrics, the colours, keep the block the same. It was based on the jacket American baseball teams wore when they came out to play, a very simple jacket – two welt-pockets, a fold-over collar and press studs down the front. The knitwear brothers had their factory make a knitwear piece for the neck, so it had a nice little touch on the inside of the collar. We must have ended up selling tens of thousands of those jackets. Everybody wanted the warm-up jacket. We did it in four colours: green, blue, red and black and then we expanded it into colours like peach and indigo.

  Anthony: There was also a journalist from The Sun chasing us called Charles Yates. He’d been calling us because of the raves and we’d tip him off, send him in the wrong direction, ‘Yeah, we’re doing one in Stockport Saturday night, have your journalist there.’ It was so he could get shots of all those ‘Ecstasy monsters’. He wanted the pictures of the illegal Acid House scene. Charles got wind that we were setting up this fashion label and interviewed us. On the morning of the Gulf War, The Sun [2 August 1990] had the front page, ‘Iraq Invaded’ and we had a full page on page five. The headline was: ‘Acid House Kings become Fashion Kings’.

  Manchester was booming; The Hacienda was huge news. We were going to take over the world with this brand. Next Hooky [Peter Hook] appears on the front cover of the NME in one of the T-shirts [4 August 1990]. We started a vibe. People were saying, ‘What is this thing? Who is it?’ Then the samples come back from Lahore, and we booked MAB [Men and Boys Wear show in Earls Court Exhibition Centre, London, for September]. It’s an annual event, we just did the one – we were banned.

  Christopher: For the show, we built a stand in a church where they used to do Top of the Pops in the ’60s. I was dropping off beers and some smoke. I walked in and Matt had a clear plastic bin bag over his head and a cig through the plastic. Pat threw paint all over the bag and Matt lay on the floor. He was painting the stand with Matt. Matt was the brush. It was a weird and wonderful time.

  Anthony: We left a kid, Dave, in the church overnight finishing the stand. I got a phone call the next morning, ‘He’s freaked out!’ He was taking whizz and smoking dope to stay up all night to finish the stand in preparation for the show. He had to be taken to hospital. The stand was shipped to Earls Court where we caused mayhem. Our friends had a flat on Portland Street and they let us use that while the exhibition was on for three days. There were thousands of people from the fashion industry walking round, looking at stands and buying clothes and all of a sudden this spaceship landed in the middle of it. A bongo flew out and all these kids were wearing multi-coloured stuff. Security came over: ‘Turn the music off.’ All the beer was drunk – I’d hired some fridges, the shelves were taken out and Chris was padlocked inside the glass fridge. In the background you had one or two straight people with us. We said, ‘Please, tomorrow will be different,’ and it was no different. The smell of cannabis coming off the stand was overpowering. We had Adamski playing live. Nigel Benn came on the stand. They threatened to close us down. Happy Mondays were in London, in the recording studio [finishing Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches, released November 1990 and widely regarded as album of the year]. Matt and Pat are Shaun’s cousins and obviously the band are friends of ours and friends of our Tracey, so they came to the show. It was absolute carnage.

  Christopher: We weren’t really that familiar with Nigel Benn, he just got on the vibe of the stand. He just put himself about. But a year or two later we ended up working more closely with him. Adamski was wearing the clobber, or at that point he was wearing the samples. He was interested in doing something with us. At the show someone asked, ‘What’s your minimum order on these?’ I said 200 and he only wanted to order fifteen T-shirts. I had no concept of the business, absolutely no idea how the business ran.

  When the show finished we took the stand down and sent it across London to a photographic studio. I built the stand myself with fucking hammer and nails so that the Happy Mondays could do a photo shoot with the stand. There are pictures of Shaun and Bez laid out on the stand in these Gio-Goi warm-up jackets – it might have been Smash Hits.

  Anthony: We created a massive stir at the show. Top Shop came and said, ‘We want to buy all your denim and spend three million quid with you.’ And we said, ‘Nah.’ We were young and didn’t give a fuck and we didn’t want to be in Top Shop. We ended up taking £500,000 worth of orders at the show and we only had twelve samples. We couldn’t fulfil the orders but that worked to our advantage because every time somebody came down we told them we’d sold out. The more you get told you can’t have something, the more you want it.

  Christopher: After the show we looked at the orders and we needed to deliver all this stuff. It was going to cost x amount to produce, in the region of £250,000 to bring the stuff in from Lahore. We didn’t have the money to do that. Everyone was ringing up for their orders and we only had the samples on a rail. So I went and got loads and loads of long-sleeve T-shirts, different colours, relabelled them and took them to a place in Plymouth Grove, Longsight, an embroidery place called Hothouse. We embroidered Gio-Goi on the front of the chest but instead of putting the placement on the left, I put it in the middle of the chest, and instead of just having Gio-Goi once I had it repeated three times. We carried on buying T-shirts in, labelling them and embroidering them right through until the stock started arriving.

  At the same time I went with John [O’Garr] and Jelly to Leicester and we had some proper long-sleeve T-shirts and sweatshirts made to our specifications with the Aztec print embossed on. We could go and buy 500 pieces of each. We now had our own little production line. In the basement someone was pressing all these T-shirts, folding them and putting them into bags. We were delivering them to Identity and Arc in Afflecks. There was shop in town called Bozo we wanted to get in but it was getting close to Christmas and they said they were fully stocked. We said, ‘Just take fifty on sale or return, to see how you get on.’ They said, ‘We’ve not really got the space but we’ll take them.’ Within two hours they rang and said, ‘We sold them all and we want another 200.’ Bozo was a new shop in the Royal Exchange. It was small but it did amazing business. It just started rolling and rolling and rolling. Bozo must have spent a million pound a year with us.

  Anthony: We did the video for ‘Unbelievable’ by EMF [September 1990], and the [reissue of] The La’s’ ‘There She Goes’ [October 1990]. We did the product placement for those videos and we might have been contributing to the funding of the videos, I can’t remember. We were systematic, we were bang at it, we product placed, we dressed them for those videos. Manchester was the centre of the universe at that time. Leo was doing ‘ … AND ON THE SIXTH DAY, GOD CREATED MANchester’ T-shirts. Madonna and Jean Paul Gaultier were wearing those. Everyone wanted to be a part of this thing. We were right in the thick of it and we were the only people making credible clothes – we weren’t corporate. We were making clothes for the lads by lads. It was real. Everyone wanted a piece of the Mondays and Roses. They were our pals and wearing our gear. Everyone was wearing Gio – New Order, Inspiral Carpets, 808 State, Charlatans, Northside, Adamski, a black kid called Ricky [Ricardo Da Force] who did stuff with KLF, The Fall – we’d pretty much cornered the market. At the same time we started doing merchandise for the Ruthless Rap Assassins. So we’re doing Gio-Goi and the merchandising for their tour – all in the basem
ent. We had the Gio-Goi stock on the floor in boxes. There were boxes and boxes of stock. People could come down like a cash and carry. What we were doing is going round the corner, getting 5,000 T-shirts and printing them in the same place – we were doing cash business and we became an in-season brand.

  Christopher: We didn’t do seasons. We just made stuff constantly, brought it in and put it on the floor. The shops loved us because they could come down and, as fast as they could buy it, they were selling it. They’d be down the next day for more gear. There were buckets of money and we were off our nut. Looking back now, we went through that whole Madchester period and never recognised what we had. The whole world was looking at us and we just thought we were going on a night out. We had all this going on around us, which was us, but we were totally oblivious. Customers were going, ‘Wow, I’ve been down there. You want to see it!’ That was what made it what it was. If we all had our heads screwed on straight, we wouldn’t be sat here now talking about it. It wasn’t just the product, the whole thing about the company was the anarchy – the lads off a council estate going out and doing this stuff and employing their mates for a buzz.

  Anthony: It was Christmas Eve 1990 and everyone had gone home. There was me, a punch bag, a bit of stock in the basement, a case of Red Stripe and a bag of weed. David Evans, who went on to own Hooch and Bench, walked in. I’m smashed out of my mind and he had to write his own order out. He sat with a calculator and left with a massive box. Leo Stanley came in and did the same thing. They had to serve themselves and stuff a note on the table to tell us what they took.

  Christopher: From the profit we made from the T-shirts, we managed to buy the full range from Pakistan and started distributing that to the shops – Gio-Goi’s first proper range. It was all really well designed stuff, but the quality was horrendous. The striped T-shirts were printed stripes, not woven, and when you put them in the wash they came out plain. They hadn’t colour-fasted the stripes. But we could send anything out and they would sell it. It was ridiculous. The consumer wasn’t what they are today.

  The range had a signature ‘kangaroo’ pocket; a big looping, rounded pocket that ran from the shoulder to the side seam. We did it on the joggers as well. The joggers were purple, bright red, proper mental colours. The T-shirts were sky blue with yellow stripes. It seemed like a vast amount of gear. We had 1,000 per style, so 5,000 pairs of joggers in five different colours. At the same time we were still doing T-shirts and jackets in Leicester. We forward sold, but the beauty of the business was you could come down every day to the office and spend £200 or £2,000. We were fresh, stuff was changing constantly: as well as your main range, a kid could go into the store every two or three weeks and buy a new T-shirt. The big companies churn out seasonal ranges and we were doing new stuff weekly.

  Anthony: It was a lump of shite the first collection but there was so much hype behind the brand it was a success. The marketing, the interviews on television and the radio stations were rock ’n’ roll. All of a sudden we were the coolest things since sliced bread. We created a huge hype.

  Christopher: The business was evolving and we started to get deadlines. Matt and Pat were just too wayward and couldn’t keep to the deadlines, pure rock ’n’ roll. Plus, they had all the Factory Records stuff to do. We were moving at a rate where we needed stuff off them daily and they were more into creating art. We needed graphics to keep the stock fresh – that wasn’t their vibe. They wanted to spend two weeks creating a piece of art to put on someone’s back. They did some iconic T-shirts for us – ‘Hold On To Your Hats’ stands out for me. They also did some amazing cartoon graphics. They even did the ‘Gio-Goi All Stars’, which was cartoons of Matt and Pat, me, Anthony, John and Jelly. And, remember, in the middle of all this there was a lot of rock ’n’ roll going on. It was just the way Manchester was at the time.

  Anthony: Every time I went over to pick up the designs, I’d get off my napper with them – booze and chemicals in this little cubbyhole studio they had. It was great. Even though they’d do the artwork they wouldn’t work at the speed we needed – their art was art. We wanted to do prints; we wanted to do ten prints a week. They were used to having six weeks designing a Happy Mondays sleeve. It was never going to work but it was fun whilst it lasted with them.

  Christopher: I started using the knitwear brothers’ factory in our building for Gio-Goi. I started to produce short-sleeve knitwear. We did some with fully-fashioned collars and a zip-up front. We sold bundles of it. Knitwear was really big for us at one point. We were doing the knitwear as if they were T-shirts, so they were really bright and multi-coloured – tangerine and yellow. Relations with the knitwear brothers were great. They’ve gone from making tat for the markets, doing cash and carry, making stuff to sell at £2 a garment, to making stuff for us and probably getting £6 a garment. They can’t make it as fast as we can sell. Their factory was working non-stop. They’d bring a thousand pieces in every morning and it was gone in an hour. We could not make the gear fast enough.

  There was an article in Vogue and we’d never even spoke to Vogue – no one had done an interview. It was a half a page with headline: ‘Manchester United’.

  I went to Dubai to do the next range. We were used to doing £2,000 a week. I went away for two weeks and when I came back, Anthony said, ‘We’ve taken £80,000 this week.’ It just went ballistic. We took this big order from a shop in the South West. The owner of the shop had a Ferrari and we wondered how he’d got it. We were slowly finding out there was a lot of money to be made in fashion and he’d obviously just treated himself. But at the time our default setting was we presumed everyone with money was a criminal.

  I think we had the front cover of the NME – it featured at least one Gio-Goi piece – for six or seven weeks on the spin at one point in 1991 with 808 State, New Order, Happy Mondays, The Charlatans, Stone Roses, MC Tunes and Electronic.

  With Gio-Goi expanding rapidly, the company moved out of the windowless basement and took over the stunning top floor that had huge windows. They kept the basement as a storeroom and the top floor became a showroom/office where the full range could be displayed, as well as furniture especially made for trade exhibitions. Matt and Pat Carroll had moved on of their own accord. O’Garr and Jelly Universe were the only real professionals amongst a staff that was largely made up of old friends such as Jeff Oughton and Donny, who worked in the warehouse. The sales reps, who went on the road and sold the clothes to shops, included Harry Franco, who the brothers had met doing swag; Joycey, who was a friend of Anthony’s; Nico; Wack; and Rob Rushy, a DJ now called Rob Tissera. Chris’s wife Natalie worked it the office, as did the brothers’ sister, Tracey, who had left Factory. Harry Franco’s girlfriend, Susy Franco, also worked in the office. She spoke five languages and was handling the international orders.

  Anthony: We had a staff of twenty and nobody over the age of twenty-five. Harry was the funny one. He’d come back with these mad tales of his trips to the shops. He got involved in a threesome with the shop owner and his wife in Glasgow and he was talking about hoovers being involved. He was very boisterous. Harry the Handbag we called him. He had been one of the official bootleggers, one of the main players from Wilmslow. I met him in a bar in Oslo on one trip bootlegging abroad and saw a beautiful woman walk up to him and get it on with him – I mean really beautiful. I saw him the next day he said, ‘She wants me to go live with her and raise reindeer with her in Lapland.’

  Nico was Tracey’s friend, so we said bring him down. We had to give him a makeover so he would fit in. Wack was another bootlegger. The people we did the Mondays’ Free Trade Hall video with introduced Rob Tissera to us. He got mugged on his first appointment. He went out with his sales range to Norfolk and got mugged off four turkeys. Joycey had been in LA taking Es. He flew back and bumped into me in my local pub, The Firbank, and he just looked the part. He’d met bands, he’d met villains and he was a good networker for the brand. He was given a car. We bought them all cars.r />
  Christopher: We hired my brother-in-law to be a sales rep. We bought him a brand new BMW so he could go round the country. But people kept saying to me, ‘I saw him the other day in Didsbury.’ I was like, ‘Nah, he’s in London.’ He was supposed to be in London all week but he’s with some bird round the corner. He’d come in on a Friday and just write a load of bogus orders and we’d send all the gear out. Because the gear was flying out, the boxes would just turn up and people would go, ‘Er, right okay,’ and put it out and sell it. He did that for months and months and months until his luck ran out.

  Jeff, who did the warehouse, was stood at a bus stop in Wythenshawe in the rain looking bedraggled. I pulled up and asked what he was doing? He was on the dole, so I said, ‘Right, do you want a job?’ I took him into Gio, gave him a job, paid for him to take his driving test. He was a top addition to the team. We looked after them all. We took them all to Paris for a trade show [SEHM, February 1991]. There was no reason to take a warehouse man to Paris but he’s my pal and we’re a team. We gave twenty friends £200 for spends and had a ball.

  At the trade show, you had the international part of the hall and then upstairs would be where all the British brands were – little booths with grey walls to put your range up in. Us being the way we were, we said, ‘Fuck that, we’re not going up there. We’re going downstairs next to Chipie and Chevignon.’ We built this massive stand and we had cactuses made – the new range we had made in Dubai featured cactuses on the chenille badges – don’t know why. We put in a stone floor, big metal, wavy wall – we had it all built bespoke. We took it to Paris on a container and then put all our clothes out downstairs with the big boys.