Still Breathing

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

  Christopher: While all this shit was going on at Gio-Goi a book called Faces came out [Faces: A Photographic Journey Through the Underworld (Bernard O’Mahoney and Brian Anderson, True Crime Publishing). The Donnelly Brothers were featured among the Top Fifty villains, gangsters or ‘faces’ of the past fifty years. Also included were: Arthur Donnelly, Paul Ferris, Eric Mason, Frankie Fraser, Eddie Richardson and Freddie Foreman. In the book Arthur Donnelly is described as ‘the Freddie Foreman of the North’.] It was a serious book; there are some heavy faces in there. But it was about retired criminals. We’re not in there for anything other than being Acid House organisers pictured with our dad, but Melville seemed intimidated and the gap grew wider.

  My dad’s done a lot for Gio and us in general. We did a photo shoot where we blew up some cars. We did it at the yard and he got the cars. It would take someone like Diesel six months to pull that together with the health and safety. We had one of my dad’s pals in a hard hat with a hosepipe and that was it, that was our health and safety. When we worked with Brian Duffy, Brian had this crazy idea of displaying his furniture in an old caravan with Perspex sides. It had my dad written all over it. He got a caravan and took the sides off it, had it all made with Perspex so you could see right through. It’s actually in Japan now in a museum and it was in the Tate Modern. It’s got Gio-Goi wallpaper inside. He’s in the Deadmau5 video. He plays the café owner. He only had one line to say, ‘One full breakfast.’ And he kept ad-libbing, ‘One full breakfast – beautiful, beautiful.’ He sorted all the beer out for the Chase & Status video and the warehouse. He’s got his own fame with all the boys. Ian Brown loves him, all the lads do.

  Tracey: Our dad is quite a complex character. His world is at the scrapyard with all the characters that call each day to see him. Then there’s another side to him. He’s quite open to new stuff. When he was in prison he learnt how to meditate, he then made me a meditation stool and sent me some books on meditation. He has the craziest stories to tell, like the time he was locked up in Walton Prison in the ’70s pre-phone cards and televisions and he wouldn’t get rid of his nits, as he used to race them to stop himself from getting bored. The grandkids love hearing stuff like that. It’s a million miles away from anything that they know. I do think had he been steered in the right direction when he was a boy things would have been a lot different for him, he’s a clever man. Thank God all the kids are removed from the crime we were raised around and are getting a good education.

  Christopher: Gio-Goi was now totally commercial. We were getting slagged off in the press, called a ‘chav’ brand. I read one thing that talked about ‘tribes of youffs’ at Global Gathering, Ibiza and Marbella all Gio-Goi’d up to their eyeballs. When the youths of Great Britain went on the rampage in the summer of 2011 there was a noticeable amount of Gio-Goi being worn – and not just in Manchester riots. People were beginning to sneer at the label. It had become a load of corporate people trying to recreate what we did and doing it badly. They were putting shit like ‘Party Hard’ on T-shirts. We wanted to die with embarrassment.

  Anthony: The Manchester store had only been open eight months and then it got closed down. Melville closed down all three stores [in July 2012]. They’d put a load of money into the shops and lost it. The financial director they employed allegedly seemed to have lost two million. [In September 2012] I officially left Gio to pursue other projects. I have been working on Your Own [YO] with some of the biggest retailers out there. Now there are a million brands out there all saying they are rock ’n’ roll and all the other bullshit that goes with it, but not like us – we really have lived it. It took years just getting the brand YO registered, as you can imagine – YO is a great name for a brand and sounds as rock ’n’ roll as it gets. The brand is having a great reaction in the US and Canada amongst electronic and rap artists and opportunities are coming thick and fast. We have offices in Times Square in New York that we can move into when we are ready for the States but it’s all about timing and getting things right.

  We went to the V Festival with the Your Own bus. We’d hired a Winnebago that was better than the Stone Roses bus apparently, so we haven’t lost our attitude or style. We were joined by all the usual suspects … they call it networking. Wherever we go we seem to draw a crowd – maybe it’s because of the fact that people know they can trust us and they can have a laugh safe in the knowledge that they won’t end up in the paper doing something they shouldn’t be doing. We had a brilliant time but left early to follow the Stone Roses’ tour. Someone suggested giving the keys to the Winnebago to a kid who said his name was Nuts. He’d just been released from prison for arson. We asked him to return the keys to the driver. Once the beer had worn off and we had arrived at Stafford for the northern part of V, we were thinking it wasn’t one of our better ideas. After a couple of days the bus company rang us and said it was the cleanest bus they’d ever had returned. Nuts had cleaned it top to bottom, clearly not as mad as he sounds – and obviously house proud. Never judge a book by its cover, note to self.

  Christopher: It has been fun again doing Your Own. I actually feel more alive working on the new projects because it had been such a chore with Gio for the past two years. Working with people you have no respect for is not cool. With YO we can do what we want and it is working – YO is getting more and more attention. It’s being stocked in credible independents, cool stores such as Present in Shoreditch that’s run by our pals. It’s about the vibe; a lot of brands are faceless.

  One of my favourite sayings about Gio-Goi was one of Pete Doherty’s. He said, ‘When I wear Gio-Goi I feel bus stop’ – as a famous person he can stand at a bus stop and no one is going to say anything. He’s accepted.

  With Your Own or any other projects we get involved in we are always going to need investment because of the scale of how we think: we think globally. We have begun negotiating with an investor based on the Gio-Goi model for YO. This time, however, we are retaining the control of the companies and the brands too – we are making sure we don’t make the same mistakes that were allowed to happen with Gio-Gio. The investor said, ‘I’m not buying into the brand, I’m buying into you two. Without you two that stuff on that rail doesn’t mean anything. I’m buying in to what you two bring to the table.’

  There are no other brands out there that approach things the way that we do. One of the first pieces of marketing for YO is we built a track around the ‘Ten Commandments of Rave’ speech by Stephen Graham from the Deadmau5 ‘I Remember’ video. We used some world-class DJs, including Marshall Jefferson, on the track.

  Anthony: A million brands now copy our Gio-Goi model. We’re constantly looking to change and do things differently; we are always one step ahead of the game, we like to think. But how can we stay ahead when so many other brands replicate what we do? That’s the challenge. We understand that we didn’t invent the wheel by doing product placement and great marketing, but our style is unique to us. We are real and we have great history and a great story to tell. All those other brands who thought by doing what we were doing that they would become like us make me laugh … all these other labels saying, ‘We are bad’, ‘We are rock ’n’ roll’, ‘We are music’ are not bad or rock ’n’ roll or music – they are just following a trend. You have to eat, sleep and shit it to claim it. I have seen one brand, in particular, doing ‘Category A’ clothing – I have been a Category A prisoner. It is neither cool nor funny looking at spending the rest of your life in prison. I find it embarrassing to even talk to these people.

  Our brand has become The Donnelly Bros. – a true adventure. There are no barriers for me and Chris, really, anymore. We have great friends in all walks of life. We are the same people we have always been, just now wearing a different label. The heritage comes with us on our journey. It doesn’t become anybody else’s just because they picked over some old bones that you left at the side of the road.

  The other day we went to London to meet Mike [McKay] and Claire [Davies] of Manumi
ssion [who had not hosted a club night since 2010]. They had flown over to discuss their new venture, Cinemission, in Ibiza that is surely going to be the most successful club night on the island when it launches in 2014. We are collaborating with them on their merchandise exclusively. This deal is born out of respect and integrity and many years of the same experiences – this is what makes our thing work. Myself and Christopher do it effortlessly and that’s why we will continue until we drop.

  Christopher: So we were making a new brand out of YO whilst Gio-Goi was being murdered by Melville. Then all of a sudden, Douglas and Kilbourn started saying, ‘We need your help.’ Whereas for four or five years before when we were doing amazing things they didn’t want nothing to do with us, now they were saying to me, ‘We need a video like Deadmau5, like Chase & Status, like Tiesto. We need the next Plan B, the next Calvin Harris.’ I was like, ‘I can’t believe it. You’ve had all that and got blasé – you didn’t realise what you had.’ The penny finally dropped with them like a ten tonne weight.

  They needed me down in London all the time. I had no respect for them as businessmen; I didn’t want to do it but I still had shares there. I did a few little bits. The gear they were making was shit. There was no soul in the business. They must have brought fifty creative staff in through the years, but it was those hard-core people who were there at the beginning and stayed loyal who really were Gio-Goi. They were the best people the business ever had, passionate people, but Melville had sucked the soul out of them all. It just wasn’t a nice place to be. I went down once a week. I went in the office to say hello and then all my meetings I had in the bar downstairs. They looked pathetic and what they had done to the brand was tragic.

  They were getting more desperate than desperate. The shops were gone. They were obviously struggling. Three years ago we had been number two in the Sunday Times Fast Track 100, the second biggest growing company in the UK. They’d now fucked it. They kept saying, ‘Wait until you see what we do when this business starts selling, watch how we take it to the next level.’ They took it down the toilet.

  The last day [January 2013] I walked in the office and I saw them walking down the stairs. Their faces were that white they were almost blue. I heard them saying, ‘He’s here. He’s here. Chris is here.’ I asked what was wrong. They said the receiver was in, ‘We’ve been put into liquidation.’ I was told later that Douglas was in tears at the realisation at what had happened to the company. From there, within an hour, I had a meeting with Nokia about doing a load of stuff for Gio.

  I went to the meeting an hour later with the Nokia marketing people and flipped it to Your Own. I was sat in my first meeting with YO an hour after Gio went under. The next day I came into our office in Manchester with a team of lads and stripped the office of anything to do with Gio and then refurbished it completely. Our shares were now worthless. That was it. Gone. We lost a good few million quid in January 2013. All that work keeping it going for twenty-five years – court cases, gang warfare, police investigations and we never lost it. We entrusted Gio-Goi to them and they ran it into the ground and fucked it. Call us what you want but we never lost the brand on our watch.

  Anthony: Melville Capital – we entrusted them with something we’d nurtured. We’d fought so hard to keep it alive and then for it to collapse like that was obviously painful – although I don’t blame Andy Rubin from Pentland. It was Douglas and Morrison and Kilbourn. The bank pulled the plug, the bank was in for a few quid, and both sets of partners were in for a few quid. [The administrators KPMG said the label was ‘another victim of the recessionary environment’. It was the fourth retailer to collapse in 2013 following Blockbuster, HMV and Jessops.]

  The bank wanted their money back and was basically selling the company to the highest bidder. Everyone lost money. We lost our share value. We got caught in the crossfire. We said in our press interviews, straight away, that we hold the rights to the images and videos linked to the brand. I got on to KPMG through my lawyers and said that I would issue proceedings. I told them all the video content, the stills imagery, the celebrity endorsement, it all belongs to us. We made it clear any bidder would have to negotiate a deal separately with us to license the imagery – and the imagery was such a part of the brand’s success. I was quoted in the paper as saying, ‘It would be fantastic if the person that buys the brand marries the two pieces and puts the brand and the history back together. With the right backing it could be back where it deserves. For a buyer at the minute it would be like taking on Rolls-Royce, but without having the image rights for the Silver Lady on the bonnet.’ Our history belongs to us. That can be evidenced beyond any doubt, that history continues with us.

  Following reports that Sports Direct were considering buying the brand from the administrators, JD Sports Fashion bought Gio-Goi in February 2013 in a deal rumoured to be in excess of £4 million. Pentland is a majority owner of JD Sports.

  Christopher: Out of the blue, we find out JD have bought it – and JD is part-owned by Pentland. From our point of view it looked a bit strange. The negotiations over Gio-Goi are still ongoing between us and Peter Cowgill [Executive Chairman JD Sports]. Hopefully there will be a happy ending. In the meantime we continue to crack on with our new brands. When all is said and done, we’ve been through more shit than most people. We have got balls of steel and tomorrow we can get up and have another go. Do you know why? We’re still breathing.

  In July 2013, the Donnelly Brothers struck up a private deal with Peter Cowgill. To be continued.

  AFTERWORD

  Working on this book has been an emotional rollercoaster, to say the least. Reliving the highs has been interesting but the lows have been low and quite difficult at times. Reading chapter after chapter almost seems like I’ve bought a book about the adventures and antics of two unruly lads from Wythenshawe who I’ve heard about – a different life and lifetime ago. But one thing I will say is that I have definitely lived all aspects of life – dark and light – and there’s something to be said for that. For any number of reasons, this book only scrapes the surface of those experiences

  Whether you like what you’ve read or not, we’re all a long time dead. There are no apologies for any of the things that have gone on and nor do I expect any apologies from anyone else. I have no regrets other than losing close friends and family.

  I have always been passionate about any projects I’ve worked on even if I’ve not seen eye to eye with my partners; the business always comes first. I have also met some amazing people along the way, some of whom I’m very proud to call my friends. I think you know in an instant how it’s going to pan out when you meet someone new – good or bad. With me, if it’s good it’s for life and if it’s bad, move on.

  If I could pass on anything from my experiences it would be: be honest with yourself and others you value. Don’t give up on your dreams no matter what – they’ll keep you going when times are bad. There is nothing more important than health, family and friends. Have as many parties as possible and laugh.

  Thank you to my wife and soul mate, Natalie. One love. Oh yeah, I can dance! ☺

  Christopher Gene Donnelly

  All my life I have worked tirelessly to achieve the best results that could be achieved from whatever I was concentrating on at any one particular time. Growing up I was a good kid. I loved my family and my friends dearly. I can say, hand on heart, I genuinely loved everyone I worked with, in whatever capacity they held within any of the work environments I was working with them in, be it crime, bootlegging, music, fashion … I put every ounce of effort into all of them. I would like to apologise for any pain I caused when I was younger and for the things I should have done that I never did, but these were the cards I was dealt and I played with what I had. I cannot help but feel that even though this book is colourful in the extreme, and there are some things I am not proud of, I never burned anyone that didn’t burn me first.

  I wouldn’t wish what my family and I have had to live through on anyon
e – even the highs as well as the lows have been a drama. But I think our story proves what I always say: If you want something, you can get anything – just do it right.

  At the end of the day you have to live with yourself, your conscience will always get you in the end.

  Anthony Donnelly

  INDEX

  808 State (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)

  Adamski (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)

  Adidas (i)

  Acid House, culture of (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii), (xiv), (xv), (xvi), (xvii), (xviii), (xix), (xx), (xxi)

  A Guy Called Gerald (i), (ii)

  Albarn, Damon (i)

  Ali, Muhammad (i)

  Allen, Keith (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)

  Allen, Lily (i)

  All Saints (i)

  Annette (i), (ii)

  Arctic Monkeys (i), (ii)

  Armani, Giorgio (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)

  Atkinson, Steve (i), (ii), (iii)

  Barat, Carl (i), (ii), (iii)

  Barnes, James (i)

  Barker, Eric (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)

  Barton, James (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)

  Barton, Mischa (i)

  Beef, Eddie (i)

  Beesley, Max (i), (ii), (iii)

  Bench, The (i),

  Benchill (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)

  Benn, Nigel (i), (ii)