He’s the wild man of rock, a guy who makes Mick and Keith look like wannabes, a star whose appetite for sex’n’drugs’n’rock’n’roll is as fulsome as an alcoholic’s desire for whisky.
Shaun Ryder, frontman of The Happy Mondays and Black Grape, and the star of more-TV-shows-than-anyone-has-a-right-to-feature-on – including Celebrity Gogglebox, and I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, among many others – redefined the sex’n’drugs’n’rock’n’roll lifestyle during the halcyon age of Madchester.
And now he’s spilling the beans, and the secrets, and the celebrity juice.
Shaun William Ryder has a hilarious new book out and will be touring this autumn. His latest venture is the cleverly-named Happy Mondays – and Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays, which is signed, boxed, limited, and close to genius. Fans can look forward to a carnival of excess, wild tales, and improbable truths, as they enjoy the talents of a unique rock’n’roll star dubbed Britpop’s answer to WB Yeats. You want battery operated chickens, UFOs and the Shaun-Ryder-Russell-Watson crossover that you didn’t realise you needed? Great. Then it’s all here. So, strap yourselves in and say ‘Hallelujah’ for Shaun.
Shaun is on good form: “Life begins at 60. It used to be 40, but not anymore.”
So tell us, Shaun: what’s it all about?
“I’ve got the attention span of a goldfish, an inability to plan too far ahead, but an opinion I’m prepared to share on pretty much everything. And thankfully we still have free speech in this country of ours, don’t we?
“My new book and tour is an epic journey from Madchester to Mastermind, Brazil to Barbados, Spanish sunburn to the sewers of Salford. I’ll tell you some truths which are so improbable you’ll know they can’t possibly have been made up.”
So who exactly is Shaun Ryder?
“Well, if you believe Wikipedia, I’m an English singer, songwriter and poet – a leading figure in the Manchester cultural scene of the late 1980s and 1990s. But that was over 30 f***ing years ago now – so there’s a lot more to this long and winding story than that. I’ve grown up… a bit!
“There used to be a time when I was just the mad rocker who went onto TV shows off my head on heroin. I’m still having great fun in the spotlight, whether that’s with the Happy Mondays, Black Grape, or as a solo performer, but these days you’re just as likely to find me blowing off the cobwebs on a bike ride, watching telly with my best mate Bez, or catching up on Corrie in my slippers.”
All night parties?
“They’re in the past. If I’m not out working, I’m tucked up in bed by 11pm these days. Well, we all have to grow up a bit sometimes, don’t we? Do I miss the old days? They were brilliant times that I certainly wouldn’t have missed for the world, but no I don’t. That was then, but this is now. I’ve been off the drugs for more than 10 years now, and I’ve never been happier.
“A lot of my pals who refused to change are either dead, or locked up in prison. Never mind twisting your melons, there are places I’ve been and things I’ve seen that will completely blow your mind.
“I’ve met and worked with some fabulous and fascinating people; many of who have become good friends, but some of who we’ve now sadly lost. I was so sorry and sad, for example, to hear about the death of the brilliant Steve Wright. He was a Happy Mondays favourite from the 80s, making us all laugh while we drove around Manchester on the dole.
“Yet another reminder of how time is ticking on. I tell it how it is; I’ve been around far too long to bother wasting time and energy beating round the bush. It’s an approach which has got me banned from TV shows and provoked hundreds of complaints to Ofcom for talking honestly about drugs.
“If people ask me for my views on the drugs scene, I’ll give it. For example, never buy drugs off Colombians you don’t know!
“Let me tell you one thing right from the outset. My new book isn’t one to read soothingly to your grandkids at bedtime. It’s a boys’ own adventure which is about as far removed from Enid Blyton as you can get. So, if you’re faint-hearted or easily offended, I’d suggest you jog on, make yourself a milky cup of cocoa, and binge the latest series of Antiques Roadshow instead.
“Because I’ll be visiting Caribbean crack dens, encountering extra-terrestrials, and leading you through my hedonistic, hectic and sometimes hell-raising life in the music and entertainment business.
“This is me at my most honest; nothing is off the table – so expect the unexpected. I might not have any hair, eyebrows or eyelashes these days. I might be on so many pills that I rattle when I walk. But I’m still brimming with energy and excitement for whatever’s coming next.
“This is my journey, my memories, my views… presented in my own unfiltered words.”
It sounds wild. And it is.
Happy Mondays… covers tomato seeds and slaves, growing up and ADHD, forming the Mondays and Zippy and Bungle. There’s stuff about egos and getting noticed, cycling and Christian Bale, WB Yates and Celebrity Mastermind.
Shaun was a one-off from the start: “School wasn’t the only place to learn important lessons about life; the local sewerage works was a very educational place too. We used to climb over fences and get into there, to poke around and see what we could find.
“It’s amazing what you can learn about people’s digestive systems! This is where I discovered that one of the only things that the human body can’t digest is tomato seeds. It happened when I first saw a big 20ft wide sewerage tunnel full of tomatoes, looking like a giant bum. It was quite a sight. What was my first thought? We could take these and sell ’em… they’d make great natural fertiliser.
“I always got up to no good as a kid, and I lost count of the number of times the cops would come to our house.
“My dad was a proper old-school kind of a bloke, and I remember coming home from school one day to see the cops had knocked on the front door. I’m walking up towards the house, with my Adidas bag, and I see my dad on the front doorstep talking to them – wearing nothing but his acrylic purple Y-fronts with swirls on them. He saw me coming up the road and just legged it out of the house, chased me all the way down Madams Wood Road, across the field, and eventually got me.
“He gave me a good leathering… then had to walk all the way back through the estate in nothing but those purple undies.”
Music was always around his family. His dad played banjo in the Irish clubs while Shaun got into the Rolling Stones.
“If I’m honest, I didn’t learn anything really after the fourth year of junior school. At secondary school – when I was actually there – I learnt nothing at all. I couldn’t get into playing things like football or rugby either, because I could never get my head round the rules. I was always f***ing offside, and no-one wants someone like that in their team!
“By the time I was 13 I wasn’t really going into school. I’d get my mark in the register, then I’d just f*** off. Eventually it got to the stage when I wasn’t even bothering to go in to get my mark. Me being ADHD, and not knowing back then that I was, meant that taking heroin for the first time made me feel what I can only describe as normal.”
Shaun formed Happy Mondays and was pivotal as Madchester swept the world.
“We were a massive success. We’d headlined the Friday night at Glastonbury in 1990, and that same year Paul McCartney told NME that we reminded them of The Beatles in their Strawberry Fields phase. Things were great. But no, the egos wanted all of it. That’s why we split up.
“Everyone was doing drugs, everyone was doing mad things, so for anyone to blame me and Bez for what happened is in my opinion completely ridiculous. When you think about it, after the Mondays split up in early 1994, you didn’t hear anything from any other members of the band. None of them really did anything until we brought the original band back in 2010.
“Within months of the Mondays finishing, one of them was a door-to-door salesman, and our kid was signing on the dole. They’d all just got mortgages, so they’d put themselves at risk of losing their houses as well. They shafted themselves. When we brought the original band back in 2010, we hoped that lessons from the past might have been learned, but within a year the same stuff started happening again. They hadn’t learned a thing from first time round. If anything, this time it was even uglier.”
Shaun’s collaborated with others, including Paul Oakenfold and Gorillaz.
“I like collaborations. I’ve done loads with Oakenfold – often when he’s working with an artist on an album, he’ll ring me up and see if I wanted to do a track with them. I did something with Intastella in 1993 on the track Can You Fly Like You Mean It? and I also featured on Agent Dan, a track on the Agent Provocateur album Where the Wild Things Are.
“Then there’s the Gorillaz. Damon Albarn got in touch with me and invited me to come to London and try to do some writing with them. This was about 2002 or 2003, and I was absolutely dry. The legal troubles had been getting worse, money was getting cut off, and it was all getting on top of me. It gave me writer’s block.
“I tried as much as I could to do something with Damon and it wasn’t happening. I’d put the headphones on and he put the track on, but I couldn’t hear it. ‘Turn it up,’ I said to him, ‘I can’t hear the beat’
“As he starts to increase the volume I’m shouting: ‘It’s comin’ up, it’s comin’ up, it’s comin’ up…. it’s there.’
“Damon stopped and went: ‘Do that again.’
“‘There’ became ‘Dare’, because that’s how I said it with my accent, and it was used for the opening of the hit Gorillaz song Dare. Basically there had been no lyric at that point, there was no song, we were just getting started.”
Behind it all is a remarkably good woman: Joanne Ryder, Shaun’s wife.
“My wife Joanne is an amazing woman. I’ve been with her since 2004, and she’s definitely saved my life. She recognised straight away when we got together that I’d got some sort of condition. Her background is working as a teaching assistant with special needs children, which probably helped. But I also like the fact that she is someone who takes no nonsense.
“I met her first at the Hacienda years and years earlier when she was a teenager – she binned me then though, because the band was just starting to take off and I think she thought I’d just be jetting off everywhere and sleeping around all over the place.
“She didn’t want to risk me taking it out of her, but we stayed in each other’s circles though and I always had feelings for her. When I hit 40, she reeled me back in.”
And now he’s hitting the road, this autumn, with a tour to go with his book. Can we expect mad scenes and late nights?
“No chance. As soon as I’m off the stage I’ll be back to my hotel room to watch the news and get a good night’s sleep.”
Tickets available now at https://www.lighthousepoole.co.uk/event/shaun-ryder-happy-mondays-and-fridays-and-saturdays-and-sundays/