Monster was born Hollis Monster Brown in a shotgun shack on the south side of Manchester. After being brought up on a diet of drizzly weather and long raincoats with a background of The Smiths, Joy Division and the Chameleons he wandered the bars and low dives of the world before drifting back into the North West, bringing a fusion of Blonde on Blonde era Dylan and hardcore junglist sensibilities  to the emerging Madchester scene. Burnt out  and “coming down like a bastard” in the early nineties, he found himself  playing guitar or bass in a number of pickup bands in Phnom Penh and Aleppo before finally washing up on the shores of Bill Powell’s swimming pool in KL. Apocryphally Tick greeted him there with the immortal words, “Monster I presume?”. The rest is history.