Getting High (20 page)

Tonight, no one in this room has any money. Not a penny. They have no spliff, no cocaine, no mushrooms, not even enough to buy a stick of glue to rub under their noses. One of the elder boys has already questioned everybody.

‘You sure you haven't got any spliff, Guigsy. You're fucking mad for it, you pothead. Come on, you must have some.'

‘I haven't, I swear.'

‘Don't fucking lie.'

‘Look, search me if you want.'

The TV is silently flickering in the comer, the curtains are pulled and there is music playing in the background.

The mood is depressing, claustrophobic and is only broken when this guy, the one with the disturbed eyes, suddenly comes out with this hare-brained scheme to procure some much needed cash.

‘Here are, here are, how about this? We go up to the abattoirs, break in and nick a cow. We take it away, kill the fucker and then tomorrow morning take it down to the butchers and sell it. How top is that idea? Plus,' he excitedly adds, ‘later on we can sell its skin as leather.' A couple of the guys look up eagerly. ‘Yeah, up for that one. Right, who can steal a car?'

Noel wearily raises his hands. Ten minutes later, when it's all gone silent again, Guigsy and Noel make their excuses and leave.

‘They're fucking nutcases,' Noel says as they tramp home.

‘I know,' agrees Guigsy. Then he reaches into his pocket.

‘Here, Noel.'

‘What?'

‘Got a bit of spliff, here.'

‘Top fucking man.'

Paul McGuigan was born in Manchester on 9 May 1971. His father, Gerard McGuigan, was from Belfast, and had arrived in England on the same ferry as the young footballer George Best, who was nervously returning to Manchester United.

A few weeks previously, Best had walked out of United suffering from homesickness. After a brief spell in Belfast, Matt Busby, the United manager who signed him, had persuaded him to return.

Guigsy's father knew the brilliant winger but, as a fully paid-up Manchester City supporter, he wasn't overawed by Best's mercurial talents. But the men were friends. Indeed, some Sunday afternoons when Guigsy was a small child, Best would occasionally visit the McGuigan household where he would try to give Guigsy his United shirt, but Gerard would have none of it. He saw Best's ‘kindness' for what it was, a wind-up.

‘Best was always trying to get my dad at it,' Guigsy recalls. ‘But,' he regretfully adds, ‘I could have had his shirt.'

One time, Best gave Gerard a leather football signed by all the Manchester United players. Guigsy was told to take it outside and kick it against a brick wall until the leather became so scuffed, the autographs were illegible. Only then was the ball allowed to stay in the house.

On his arrival in Manchester, Gerard had met a young girl called Teresa.

They married and settled down in the Levenshulme area. Guigsy was their first child; a sister, Mary, following two and a half years later.

When Guigsy was but three and a half years old, Gerard took his son to see Manchester City play. ‘There you are, son,' Gerard said, ‘that's your team.'

Gerard's ambition for his son was simple. He wanted him to play professional football.

To that end, he would take his naturally right-footed son to the park and tie his right leg in three different places to a young sapling tree. Then he would pass a ball to his son. The point of this exercise was two-fold; to shape Guigsy into a complete footballer by becoming two-footed, and thereby emulate the playing style of Rivelino, the great Brazilian player that Gerard idolised.

When Guigsy started playing in football matches, he played left midfield. And he was good. Very good. He had balance, skill with both feet and instinctively knew how to read the game.

He also excelled at other sports, all of them ball games, such as squash, badminton, tennis and basketball. He represented his primary school, Chapel Street, at badminton and went on to play for Manchester.

At nine years of age he started boxing. Being short and stocky, he found it hard to box taller opponents who could keep him at bay with their longer reach. But the sport taught him how to land effective punches. It was a skill that would prove to be very useful in his later years with Oasis.

His secondary school was Burnage High School. This was an all-boys school, one of the biggest in the Northwest. There were about 1,500 pupils and the school was divided into two sites.

But a family tragedy interrupted Guigsy's schooling. When he was eight years old his father was diagnosed as having cancer of the stomach. The doctor gave him six months to live. Gerard died four years later.

‘He had it for a long time,' Guigsy says, ‘and in the end you want if to end. He went down to six stone and he was in hospital for a long time. When he came home I didn't really want to see him in that way.'

With the passing of his father, family life changed dramatically. If there was one lesson his parents gave their children it was that in life you can do anything you want to do. All you have to do is put your mind to it because nothing in life is impossible.

Now, following her own advice, Guigsy's mother, Teresa found work as a dinner lady and also enrolled at Fielding Park college. She took a year's refresher course designed to ease people back into studying, and later studied sociology, ending up three years later with a degree. She then found employment with British Telecom.

Mary McGuigan was also academically inclined. She left school with ten 0-levels and four A-levels. She went on to university where she gained an English Literature degree.

Guigsy would pass five 0-levels. But not before he found himself suspected of murder. In 1985 a young Asian kid was stabbed to death at his school. As Burnage High was made up of predominantly Asian children, the murder was seen as racially motivated.

While the police investigated, Guigsy and six of his friends were suspended from school. They were made to sit their exams in a special building. The mothers of all the suspected children mounted a campaign, later successful, to have their children reinstated. Six months later a report, the Macmillan report, exonerated Guigsy and his friends of all wrong-doing.

Guigsy had always been a bit of an outsider at school. Through excelling at sports, he had come into contact with a lot of older boys and preferred their company. This trend carried on in his teenage years. One year, he bought a scooter, a white Vespa 50 but with a 125cc engine.

On a ride back home, it broke down. Guigsy was fixing it by the side of the road when a member of the Manchester Aces, a local scooter club, pulled up to assist him.

It was through this connection that Guigsy was exposed to Northern Soul music, Motown and Stax. The rawness of much of this music directly appealed to him.

At school most of his friends were into The Smiths or Bronski Beat. Their clothes were correspondingly quite drab. In contrast, the neatly attired Guigsy would drive into school on his scooter and enthuse about Marvin Gaye or early Who albums. Through his parents, he was also conversant with The Beatles and a lot of 1960s pop music.

They regularly received, through a mail-order scheme, a series of LPs that featured 1960s chart hits. Each year would be represented on either side of the record. There was also a copy of The Beatles' compilation
Love Songs
in the house, which Guigsy's mum played every Sunday morning while doing the housework.

But, as with Noel, music wasn't an overriding obsession at this point in his life; football took precedence.

Guigsy followed City religiously. He attended all their matches, home and away and at night, he dreamt of fulfilling his dad's ambitions.

That Guigsy was an exceptional player isn't in doubt. As a teenager, he had trials at Oldham, Stockport and Crewe. Oldham never rang back, Stockport told him that as a player he was ‘too tricky', and Crewe were impressed with the three goals he scored in three games under their watchful eye.

But it wasn't to be. Playing for his local team in a cup quarterfinal game, Guigsy jumped to head a ball and when he landed his legs gave way.

‘When I came down, I couldn't stand,' he remembers, ‘the pain was outrageous. The doctor told me that my knee was badly sprained. I didn't play in the semi-final but I played in the final.'

During that game, Guigsy' s team went 1-0 down. Then they won a corner. The ball found its way to Guigsy standing on the corner of the penalty box. He coolly volleyed it back into the goal. Later on, one of his team-mates scored the winner.

The next day Guigsy couldn't walk. Following several visits to the doctor, Guigsy was diagnosed as having a torn knee ligament, and he didn't kick a ball again for the next two and a half years. Instead, he got further into music and resumed smoking marijuana.

He had taken his first spliff at age thirteen and kept smoking until he was seventeen. He could often be found over at Erwood Park with about fifty of the other lads from Levenshulme and Burnage. It was there that they would put their fifty pences in and try to make up enough to buy an eighth of hash.

Erwood Park is where he first met Noel, although there was no formal introduction as such. As Guigsy explains, Noel was just a face you saw in the park. After a while, it was just natural that they started talking.

He remembers Noel then as a chilled-out guy who smoked a lot of weed. In fact, it was Noel who first put Guigsy on to the more rockier and experimental side of The Beatles. Through the Love Songs album Guigsy intimately knew songs such as ‘Norwegian Wood' and ‘Yesterday'. But he was unaware of tracks such as ‘I Am The Walrus', or ‘Helter Skelter'. Noel pointed him in that direction.

There were other musical favourites as well: Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, The Faces, The Kinks, as well as blues acts such as Brownie McGee and B.B. King who Guigsy had discovered through his scooter club connections. This was a tenuous link at best. Guigsy only went on one scooter run. Strangely, he travelled in a van.

‘I didn't get it until we were halfway there, then I realised what the van was for. Store any stolen scooters that might come our way.'

There was also another guy that Guigsy would see around. His nickname was Bonehead. He supported Manchester United but Guigsy soon realised that he was not as fanatical about his team or the game as people like him and Noel.

One night, at the Severe wine bar, where everyone went after the pubs shut, Bonehead and Guigsy got talking. They discovered a shared passion for music, Bonehead revealing he could play guitar.

‘Couldn't do that, me,' Guigsy said.

‘Yeah, you could,' Bonehead breezily replied, putting down his pint glass. ‘It's a piece of piss. I'll come round and show you one night.'

And that's precisely what he did.

His story has been framed and hung in the main school corridor. It makes him so proud. Fifteen pages of his imaginative writing that tells of an old barge on a canal and a little boy who discovers a ghost living on it. Every day, he walks past and slyly glances up at it with a real sense of achievement.

‘Oi! Bonehead!'

‘What?'

‘Is that your stupid fucking story on the wall?'

‘Yeah. What about it?'

‘You fucking teacher's pet!'

Paul Arthurs is eight years old. Even then, he's known as Bonehead. All his mates have quite longish hair but Bonehead has his cropped every week. It didn't take long for his schoolmates at St. Robert's in Longsight, Manchester, to bestow him with the name that he carries to this day.

He was born on 23 June 1965. His parents were Irish, his mother Delia being raised just ten miles away from Peggy Gallagher. Yet the two women never met. It was only when Bonehead met Noel and Liam that they discovered the close proximity of their families.

And, like Noel and Liam, Bonehead too spent his summers as a child in Ireland. Three weeks in the South with his mother's side of the family, three weeks in the North with his father's.

His parents had met and married in Manchester, both having left Ireland in their teens. They would raise another four children (Martin, Maria, Celine and Frances), Bonehead's father Ben supporting the family through his work in the demolition business. They were also staunch Catholics.

‘Church every Sunday,' Bonehead recalls. ‘Didn't miss it. I was an altar boy as well. You got a choice. It's either the Boy Scouts or be an altar boy. So I was like, fuck wearing a dress, gotta join the Boy Scouts. But then this woman was gassing to my mum one day and she was saying, “Don't let him join the Boy Scouts, my son was in them and he got beaten up every day.”

‘It was like, right, altar boy for you. I must have done it for about three years, met the Bishop and all that shit. But then I got kicked out for laughing and drinking the wine. They have a good rider [the part of the contract that obliges promoters to supply drinks for bands] them priests. More than we get in Oasis.'

His parents were also musically minded and at an early age they paid for their son to take accordion lessons. Bonehead took to the instrument and his playing quickly progressed. He even joined an Irish group that played traditional music.

From there, he went on to piano lessons and then, in his teens, he picked up a guitar.

Academically, Bonehead also displayed early promise. He passed his eleven-plus, winning a place at St. Peter's Grammar school in Prestwich, North Manchester. It was a prestigious establishment but Bonehead grew to hate the place. Not only was it a lengthy bus ride from his home, but it was also, to quote the man himself, ‘full of spotty middle-class bastards'. As his dislike of school grew so his studies slipped.

By the time he was thirteen, he and his friends would often stay on the bus and, using their free passes, travel on to Bolton or Liverpool to spend the hours wandering around town. Other days, he sat bored rigid in class, looking out of the window.

No doubt on such occasions his mind turned to music. Bonehead had an abiding interest in his elder brother Martin's extensive record collection. Along with all the classics that Martin possessed – The Beatles, The Kinks, The Who – Bonehead also listened to contemporary bands such as The Smiths.