two years pass...
ten years pass...
Mr Methane had performed for a week at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, then returned home and, as he said, he came back up to perform on the Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards Show for free, paying his own expenses.
All proceeds from the show are donated to the Mama Biashara charity and no personal expenses (including mine) are reimbursed. While Mr Methane was in Edinburgh for his week-long Fringe run, he stayed in my rented Edinburgh flat and we talked of many things, including his time touring with the infamously offensive Macc Lads punk band. (Macc = Macclesfield in Cheshire)
“The ironic thing is, when I was on tour with them, I was the only one who was actually born in Macclesfield,” he told me. “The original line-up were public schoolboys taking the piss out of the homophobic, sexist and…”
“They were all public schoolboys?” I asked.
“All except Stez 2,” said Mr Methane. “He was actually a drummer in The Icicle Works. And he was also Eddie Shit, one of Malcolm Hardee’s favourite acts.”
“People took the Macc Lads too literally,” explained Mr Methane. “Jeff, the beta – the lead guitarist – he’s now a postman – he lived with a nice girl. Her family were quite well-off, because they ran one of those car and home stereo businesses. So he’s all right; he doesn’t have to do too much.
“He didn’t like it when people threw urine at him and one night he got upset because he said: Someone must have thrown a turd at me, cos me teeshirt smells of shit.
“He was only doing it for the money. His love was jazz. Back at that time, he was living in Didsbury (a well-to-do part of Manchester) and he was into jazz guitar. So, really, playing in the Macc Lads was below him. It was something he’d done at school. It was something he could still go out on the road and earn a few hundred quid a night in cash from.
“The Macc Lads used to sell out Rock City in Nottingham which is a 1,700 capacity venue. They used to do two tours a year – so, 20 years ago, they were getting a cash income of about £9,000 a year after all expenses were paid.
“Mutley was the lead singer and he was the brains behind it. He started the Macc Lads because he wanted to make a social commentary. He came from Liverpool – I think he came from Fazakerley – and he wanted to make a social comment because he came to this small town – Macclesfield – where people just drank and farted and fought and did very little else and were these strange sexist and racist stereotypes. He decided, rather than write about it, he would make a social commentary, which was the Macc Lads, and he’d take the mickey out of it. But people took them seriously.
“At the time, he was co-promoting it with Sandy Gort. Mutley eventually bought him out or they parted in some way and Sandy went to Manchester to manage various acts which became Steve Coogan, John Thomson and Caroline Aherne.
“Mutley now runs a corporate voting system. When you go to conferences and people ask Do you agree with this? and you press the keypad and you immediately see on the screen what several hundred people think… that’s him. He makes a shedload of money from that.
“But he’s also got this huge back catalogue of social commentary which he sort of shies away from. He’s a reluctant cult superstar. He’s known but he doesn’t like to be known. He’s a very complex intellectual. His house is full of books like Power of The Mind and psychology books. He’s into what goes on in your head.
“Eventually, it all became too much when somebody threw a paving slab at him in Chester and it severed a main artery in his head and, because he had to play this tough guy, he had to carry on to the end of the show.
“Afterwards, he was like something off a horror movie – just congealed blood around his face. It had pumped out of his body. He walked offstage, collapsed in the back and they carried him off to the A&E. In his own words, he said They put me on the machine that goes beep. They pumped a load of blood into him and he said, after that, he was never going to do a gig again because they’d said to him Your artery’s weak there now. You only need another bang there. I think it was near death enough for him to give up. Rock City, at one point, were offering him £6,000 to play Christmas but he said No thankyou.”
“So there will never be a reunion of the Macc Lads?” I asked.
“We had a reunion when Al O’Peesha Peter Bossley died. He’s the guy who everybody walks away from in the bar scene of the Newcy Brown video. Mutley had brought him in when Sandy Gort left because he needed a PR man and Peter came in from the South Manchester News where he was a journalist and then, when the Macc Lads finished, he went to work for The Sentinel in Stoke and won some national award for his investigative journalism.
Robbie Williams (left) in the Newcy Brown video
Robbie Williams (left) in the Macc Lads’ Newcy Brown video
“Robbie Williams is in the Newcy Brown video,” Mr Methane told me. “I think that was his first taste of the music business. He was a big Macc Lads fan. His dad was – still is – a singer called Pete Conway – a Sinatra type crooner. If you go to an over-50s hotel, he’ll be there singing Spanish Eyes or something.
“Like Amy Winehouse learned off her dad, I guess Robbie Williams learned off his dad about singing but, in the early days, it wasn’t working out for him. Robbie was struggling. I remember his dad sent him down to Stoke railway station for a job. But it was the early 1990s and there was a recession, so they weren’t taking on staff.
“So he went away and, a few months later, he got the gig with Take That. Whether he got it on the basis of being in a Macc Lads video, I wouldn’t know.
“The Newcy Brown video is a segment of a whole bigger video of different tunes. I was in a tune called Mr Methane where I solve all the world’s problems – You ring me up and I fart down the telephone.”
“You’re well known for your ring,” I said.
Mr Methane did not react.
“I sort out German unity,” he continued, “and I tell you with a fart who will win the 2 o’clock at York racecourse. At the time, it wasn’t the high point of my career but, because the Macc Lads have got such a strong fanbase and it’s so cult, people are always telling me: It must have been incredible when you were on tour with the Macc Lads. It must have been fantastic!
“At the time, I just remember we were all very young, so everyone had big strong egos and wanted to be top of the pile.
“I think their downfall was that Oasis took it to the mainstream. Oasis behaved like a real Macc Lads. They were real working class and did the whole rock carry-on, so really the Macc Lads became very tame… And then your rap artists had all these horrible, sexist lyrics contained within the culture of their whole thing. So the Macc Lads weren’t shocking any more.”
― Hector Ringtone (DJ Mencap), Friday, 18 September 2015 15:19 (ten years ago)