Colin and me filmed a prostitute down at the scrapyard and her answers were all really down and dark, she was a smack head. Then we asked her if she’d ever been in love and her face lit up – she was like a different person for a couple of minutes. Three months later she died.
We did one with [recently deceased] comic Frank Sidebottom [real name Chris Sievey]. He never spoke a word all the way into town and we watched him getting ready in the office, putting masking tape round his head, so he flattens his nose to get the voice. As he was putting his tape on he was starting to turn into Frank and then he changed completely – became the life and soul of the party. It was bizarre and amazing to watch at the same time.
I asked Mike Joyce of The Smiths what his most embarrassing moment was and if he’d ever been in love. We edited the films so that no one knew what the questions were. It was called Live Who You Are. It was an antidote to boring marketing. Melville never understood it.
We also made an album to go with the film. It was called 21, a mix of House music of the past twenty-one years. Toolroom Records put the album out, a Gio-Goi album mixed by Graeme Park and Mark Knight. It was us thinking of something different to do for the brand. Me and Colin made a video for [Toolroom artistes] Mark Knight and Tiesto’s ‘Beautiful World’. There’d been a documentary on Ch4 about these young kids in Leeds who came from a really tough council estate but they did pom-pom dancing. Colin got in touch. We got them on bikes, in hoodies, looking proper scally, and then they broke into a warehouse and started rummaging through boxes. Next thing they’re doing American cheerleading. We loved the video but Toolroom wanted to change it, make it grittier. They ended up with Tiesto playing in front of 100,000 people in South America with a 200-foot screen behind him showing the video.
Melville didn’t like the films or the music. They were very square and seemed to have huge egos. They wanted the company to be about them. No one really saw the anniversary film. This was when we started to think about putting our own website together, Donnelly24. Melville weren’t using any of the stuff we were doing. So we felt we had to put our portfolio out, all the work we’d done for Gio or Your Own [YO]. Our history was catching up with us. I was asked to take part in a film Cass Pennant [former infamous leading face of West Ham’s ICF hooligan firm turned author and filmmaker] made called Casuals, a documentary exploring the early ’80s terrace fashion. It was shown recently at the National Football Museum. We featured in the film They Call It Acid, named among the elite who gave birth to the Acid House movement.
Anthony: Melville bought into the brand but you don’t become the brand just because you bought into it. I might be best friends with David Bowie and hang about with David Bowie but I’m not David Bowie. Gio-Goi is intrinsically linked with Chris and me because of the ups, downs and turbulence and everything else. But Melville thought it was about them. We also heard they were falling out with Pentland – maybe they discovered finally they wasn’t what they said they was!
One day I went in to the London office and they was very hostile toward me. Gio-Goi was working and there were millions of pounds coming through the door – there were queues of people wanting to get involved from all over the world. I went in and there was this guy in the corner, the owner of Black Market Records. He’d been ringing to do a deal but he wanted to speak to us. What was happening was the phones and emails were being diverted to them instead of us. And they were trying to portray themselves as being the brand – it was never going to work. It became a constant battle. We had all this cool stuff going on and they were trying to hijack it. Superdry know how to market a brand and retain credibility. We should have become a label like them. We didn’t have the right partners. They started to do Gio watches and trainers without consulting us. I was giving them murder because, to us, they were destroying the brand.
Christopher: Melville were also putting out Gio press releases that were utter bollocks, absolute tripe. [E.g. Gio-Goi has three key DNA segments and therefore three consumers in mind. ‘Contraband’ is a premium line that fuses casualwear and denim with a rock ’n’ roll spirit. Gio-Goi’s ‘Mainline’ consists of urban casualwear and denim. The ‘Trakstar’ range is centered on the dance arena and consists of young casual sportswear with a fresh twist.] We didn’t even know who was talking this bollocks. The trainers they put out … Steve Atkinson is a great designer but Melville was putting people above him that knew jack shit. They were telling Steve what to make. Why have a great designer and then not let him design? I’ve got 600 pairs of shoes. If anybody in that business should have been doing the footwear it was me. I wasn’t even consulted. Trakstar I came up with twenty years ago. It was supposed to be a more sporty range. We did it first time round. It was in the Intellectual Properties when we did the deal.
We were trying to do stuff that was credible but it was getting harder and harder to get Melville to accept what we wanted to do. I helped Plan B out. We helped to launch the [No.1, 2x platinum] album [The Defamation of] Strickland Banks at the Café de Paris. I’d heard a snippet of a track on the radio, ‘Stay Too Long’. I phoned a pal who put us in touch with his management, Sam and Roy Eldridge, and I said I wanted to get involved. They came to the office and they were looking for a credible partner. So I said I’d help finance the album launch at the Café de Paris and we would arrange a photo shoot and content for the brand in return. They put me in touch with their stylist but he was a bit off-hand until I explained we were partners on this project. I think he thought I was going to try and plaster Gio-Goi over the back of Plan B’s suit. Anyway, I put the branding in very discreet places for the launch, we did a photo shoot and we did a few things after that. Ben Drew is a top kid. He asked me to be in [the film] Ill Manors. I play a screw in the film.
Ben Drew, aka Plan B: It was when we were launching the Strickland Banks album back in 2010. It was the first live gig we’d done and we’d hired out the Café de Paris in Soho. We were filming the gig and we wanted the crowd to be dressed correctly, we didn’t really want people turning up with hoods but we knew we couldn’t really control that. Chris and Anthony got involved and as people were coming through the door, Chris was giving out polo shirts and other items of clothing for everyone to wear. It was compulsory that people would try and dress in that old-school Northern Soul way and the clothes they had at Gio at the time really leant itself well to that. We managed to get the whole crowd looking like it was from a bygone era; it was exactly what we needed. From that we really struck up a relationship.
It’s weird in these industries to actually come across people that feel like they’re from the same place as you. I know they’re from Manchester and I’m from London, but I mean in terms of to meet a working-class person in the industry who’s doing well. I like to see that. I think that’s why we got on so well, it was instant. I felt straight away that I knew where they came from and vice versa. It was really refreshing to find people within their creative industry who weren’t stuck-up and up their arse, they’re just real and down-to-earth. And I really got that impression from Chris and Anthony.
With some of the ideas we had with Strickland Banks we had to finance our own stuff and Chris was always someone we could talk to about how we could do something with Gio-Goi which would, in turn, fit in really creatively with the Strickland Banks story. I had the support from the label with the videos but there was always extra content that we were looking to do; by hooking up with Chris and Anthony it allowed us to use that support to put those creative projects in place.
I knew about Gio-Goi before I met them because I’d seen the documentary with Pete Doherty on MTV. I was just into their stuff and it seemed perfect, if you find a brand you actually like and they want to work with you it’s always going to be a good fit. I think Chris and Anthony speak to people on a real level, there’s no bullshit. If you make an agreement with them you can be pretty sure that they’ll stick to it and I think flakey people should steer clear, really. They are completely up front and men of their
word, a bit like me. When I come across flakey people that don’t stick to their agreements it really pisses me off. I think because of where we’re from, if you haven’t got your word you’ve got nothing. I can’t speak for Chris and Anthony, but they come across as the kind of guys that don’t want to have to deal with people who can’t stick by their words, and I feel exactly the same. There were always possibilities with Gio-Goi; other brands seem to have a really rigid approach to what they’re doing and you’ve just got to fit into it. Gio always left the doors open for us to try new creative stuff and come up with ideas and that was what always made it really exciting about working with them. I put a lot of cameos in Ill Manors of friends and people that I’d met along the way. For me it was a nice gesture to put Chris in the film. I wanted to show him that he’d helped us in the past and it was a nice nod to the fact that Chris had been there from the very beginning of the Strickland Banks project right up to Ill Manors, saying, ‘Look, if you need anything I’m here’ so it was nice to have his face in the film and let people know the connection.
Anthony: Melville didn’t exactly jump for joy about the Plan B collaboration. I don’t know why. Plan B was number one. Without consulting us they had decided, in their wisdom, that they were now going to open some high street stores. [In October 2010, a store opened in Aberdeen, followed by one in Glasgow with plans for a Manchester store.] We had no say in the stores. One shop should have opened on a par with Present in London, in a location that would have allowed it to remain true to its founders’ beliefs. In these shops in Scotland, the changing rooms were all decked out in our imagery, so it was all about us and our friends wearing the brand, but there was no mention of us. I stopped talking to the partners. It seemed futile. In Glasgow, they turned up on their own and the people in the shop were looking at them like, ‘Who are these two?’ They put themselves in front of the label. They sold themselves on the imagery and history of the brand while trying to keep us out of the picture.
Now I thought that wherever we can take money from Gio, let’s take it. To me now it was just one big cash cow. I was not interested in what Melville were making, or what they were doing. My passion for Gio had gone. I turned off. I went and sat in Spain for two years instead. I was constantly on holiday. Every month I made sure my money was in the bank and I did a half a day a month.
Christopher: Gio-Goi is Anthony and me. The other people involved seemed to be very jealous of our reputation. It became difficult to do things. You had to go through a load of red tape. Something that was spontaneous, by the time it got through the red tape, the moment had gone. So you started to think, ‘Is it really worth the aggravation?’ The first store opened in Aberdeen. I was dead against it. But I asked Ben Drew to open the store. He said yes. He was on tour; I got him to do a detour and he played a full set for 200 people. It was a brilliant, intimate gig. Those were the kind of favours we could pull, but it was wasted on our partners at Melville. But we still had shares in the business. There was reason to plough on – there was an end game, an exit plan.
13
HERE WE GO AGAIN
Christopher: Through doing video stuff with Colin O’Toole and Daniel Wolfe on Plan B and Deadmau5, I got involved with doing a video for Chase & Status. The track was ‘Blind Faith’. Colin and Daniel had written a script that was based on Anthony and me putting on Acid House parties. The track was late ’80s, early ’90s sounding, so Daniel thought there was no better person to get involved than me, to authenticate it.
I gave them a video copy of my twenty-first birthday party at the farm and they based the Chase & Status video around that. The production company who was working on the video had mood boards with white gloves, flares, dungarees and dummies. I said, ‘That was where it went three or four years later, but it was not like that at the time. If that’s the video you want to make, fine, but I don’t want any involvement.’
I changed the whole thing and made it look real. I organised things for them with help from Tracey. The farm at the end of the video is where we did Joy. We shot the interior scenes in my dad’s warehouse – same place we shot the Deadmau5 video ‘I Remember’. I dressed the four or five main characters in my original clothes that I wore in 1988, clothes I’d kept. I even stood in a room and showed them how to dance to the music to make it look authentic. I also replicated all the old Gio-Goi stuff from memory. The stylist brought a load of stuff in from second-hand stores and we put a rave on in the warehouse. We gave 3,000 bottles of beer away, started it at 9 p.m. Monday night and let it roll. We didn’t stop and start; it was a full-on party.
Daniel didn’t turn up at the warehouse until three in the morning. He was filming at the farm. Colin was filming the party. It was all shot on old VHS, so it looked authentic. Chase & Status turned up and it looked like they had a buzz. They were there for a couple of hours; they got the shots that were needed and left because they were on a very tight schedule. We never got a chance to catch up on the night, as it was chaos. The party went on until ten in the morning. The video won all kinds of awards. The stylist took an award for best styling.
We had the video before anybody. It should have been there as soon as you went on the Gio-Goi website or Facebook or whatever, flashing, ‘Look at what we’ve just done.’ You couldn’t even find it on the website! Then they were questioning the marketing! I’d say you’ve just had this great video. It was the biggest-selling record of 2011 apart form Adele. Where was it on the website? We had exclusivity to use that video before it came out. It was voted in the Top Fifty videos of all time, number forty-eight, and the Deadmua5 video for ‘I Remember’ was number twenty-four. For our first couple of videos we did okay. Melville didn’t get it. I’m doing Chase & Status, one of the biggest dance bands in the world, and they want to do 2-for-1 boxer shorts.
Anthony: Then they opened a store in Manchester [September 2011] in the Arndale Centre. Chris did an opening party [at Moho Live] and got Park, Pickering and DaSilva out, all the Ecstasy granddads. You could not move for love or money; it was a huge success. The film They Call It Acid was shown. But the actual shop? I went there maybe three times. I wasn’t made to feel welcome. The mood had got that bad between us and Melville that I didn’t even feel like I had the right to go and make myself a cup of tea in the back of the shop. They were doing anything to keep the figures up – Gio was being stocked in lots of stores we didn’t think it should be in. We felt Melville were running the label into the ground. All the top independents had dropped us.
Christopher: I didn’t want to open a store in Manchester, more so than I didn’t want to open the ones in Aberdeen and Glasgow. In the Arndale Centre – fucking shite. I’m not saying that about the Arndale, but for our brand image it was wrong. It should have been somewhere independent, a cool spot. They opened stores on Buchanan Street in Glasgow, the main street, the Arndale – the wrong locations for what the brand was about. We were now pretty sure Melville had completely lost the plot. We even heard they were trying to outmanoeuvre Pentland, get them to write off their investment. We went to Pentland and said to them, ‘You’ve got two maniacs running the business.’ We asked them to step in and sort it out. All the things that were attractive about Gio had been sucked out of it. It was becoming too much of chore and we were looking at outside ventures.
Anthony: My interest in art developed several years ago. With Gio-Goi becoming a pain in the arse I started to invest more time in Your Own [YO] and art. Does it matter about Gio? Wherever it ends up, does it matter? That history stays with us. I was going to London and booking art galleries. Howard Marks and Nick Grimshaw, Mike Pickering and hundreds more turned up at my first exhibition our Tracey organised for me. I was selling art I had accumulated on my own journey. I’d met Howard at the premier of the film Mr Nice. Rhys Ifans [who starred in the film’s lead role] was an old pal. We had a good drink with Rhys and Howard after the private screening. I started selling art for a few months – it was interesting. That’s when I decided I’d become
an artist. If Damien Hirst can cut a cow in half and some fella can sell elephant shit, why not me? I wish I didn’t have these crazy ideas always popping in my head. Rhianwen went out and bought an easel, canvases, some paint, and Scully and me got on it. We had shower caps and dressing gowns on; we were out of our brains. I’d convinced Scully we could become famous artists. My missus found us covered in paint lay under the kitchen table on our backs. We’d split a canvas and I’d painted half and he’d painted half. We called it ‘Happy Wet Piss’. You could tell two people had painted it – one side looked like it was done by a horse with a brush, and the other by some sort of creature from the swamp.
In the meantime our new brand YO was supposed to have been doing something with Damien Hirst and my mate Tommy Dunn, but it had failed to happen. We were supposed to be doing a T-shirt collection that was pretty amazing but my friend Tommy, who organised it, kind of got it wrong. It wasn’t a problem; all concerned were firm friends and still are. Damien was always there when we used to go to Glastonbury way back with Joe Stummer, Bez and Keith Allen. So I got in touch with Keith Allen when this T-shirt thing went tits up to call Damien on my behalf. We lost several thousand pounds on the project, as it wasn’t properly endorsed by Damien. I then spoke to Damien and he said, ‘Look, we’re all mates’ and we decided to gift each other. I gifted him the ‘Happy Wet Piss’ painting, all framed up off me and Scully, and he gifted me a fish in formaldehyde and a spin painting. He sent me a picture of him accepting our art. He thought it was mega because no one really did him any art like ours. Mine and Scully’s painting has got pride of place in his office, I believe. That’s something we are extremely proud of and Damien’s a top bloke, a real gentleman. I love art and aim to continue painting – even though it’s shit, what I paint is still art … right?
Still Breathing Page 24
