‘Shaun Ryder in the Happy Mondays wasn’t me. He was a caricature’

The Happy Mondays frontman has survived addiction, attempts on his life and depression. But writing his autobiography has forced him to face up to even more uncomfortable truths about his past. He talks pills, thrills and bellyaches ‘ All right?” says Shaun Ryder without a hint of recognition. I last interviewed him 12 years ago . It was in his dressing room, the Happy Mondays had recently reformed and he’d just had stomach implants to make him vomit if he took drugs. Even so he was off his head. He spent most of the time cackling loudly, patting his hair obsessively (“It’s like a Hovis loaf”), handing bags of dodgy looking stuff to even more dodgy looking geezers, and being in your face. At least he didn’t pull a gun on me, as he did on a journalist from the Manchester Evening News a year later (to be fair, it wasn’t loaded). Our earlier encounter is a total blank to him. Just one of the many incidents or days or months that have been obliterated by overindulgence. This setting couldn’t be more different – posh hotel in upmarket Worsley, Greater Manchester, where premiership footballers play golf and preen their Bentleys. More disconcerting, we are in a tiny office where couples plan their weddings, sitting at a mocked-up table with all the nuptial trimmings. “I, Simon Hattenstone, take you, Shaun William Ryder, to be my lawfully wedded wife.” Well, Ryder and the Happy Mondays always did do a good line in ecstasy-inspired surrealism. They were the apogee of Madchester – a period in 1980s/90s pop music dominated by working-class lads from Manchester (though he always stresses he is a proud Salfordian) who wore baggy clothes, swallowed pills by the bucketload, and had a gift with great tunes. The Happy Mondays mixed jangly rock and house, funk and northern soul and hip-hop to produce an inspired hybrid. The most distinctive feature was Ryder’s hallucinogenic lyrics sung in a voice rough as grit. (“You’re twistin’ my melon man, you know you talk so hip man, you’re twistin’ my melon man” became a classic idiom, roughly translating as “you’re confusing me with your jargon, young man”.) And, of course, there were the album titles – the first from the Mondays was called Squirrel And G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out) . The late music impresario Tony Wilson , who signed the Happy Mondays to Factory records, compared Ryder to Yeats. Today, Ryder has got rid of the Hovis loaf for an old-fashioned suedehead. He’s clean, looks super smart in his check jacket, pink shirt and Patrick Cox loafers, and is so quiet it’s hard to believe he’s the same man. “D’you want me sat?” he asks meekly. He has just written his autobiography and it has forced him to confront many uncomfortable aspects of his life. Yes, he talks about the great times and the fun and the fame, but ultimately what you come away with is the wreckage of crack houses, bankruptcy, car crashes, attempts on his life. As the book progresses, he seems to be slowly, painfully, coming to terms with himself. Ryder rarely makes eye contact. As he talks he stares into the distance or down at his arms, and occasionally looks beseechingly at his manager Warren for help. The thing is, he says, he’s so different from his image. “The Shaun Ryder in the Happy Mondays isn’t the real Shaun Ryder. It’s a caricature. Always has been. We really wanted to be rock’n’roll, so we became rock’n’roll, and really good at it, but you pick up loads of layers and you completely forget who you are and what you are. So it’s just about getting back to being me, and being happy with me.” Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, he could have belonged to either. And there is a hint of the 12-step patter, but it doesn’t come easy to him. In fact, talking full stop doesn’t come easy to him. But the caricature is based on you? “Exactly, it’s a stretched, warped version of you.” Ryder says the music game’s changed now – these days, thanks to The X Factor , everybody wants reality, whereas in the past it was the opposite. “When I got in it was like you invented this character … it was like Alice Cooper, he took off his wigs and put back on his business suit.” The problem with Ryder is that he didn’t have a business suit – and even if he had had, he would have been too wrecked to put it on. Does he think it was good for him to escape the real Ryder? “Phooo!” He puffs his cheeks out. “Bit of both, really. Good and bad, really … what do I say here, what do I say about that … I don’t know.” He looks to Warren, and says he was actually shy and nervy. The thought of performing scared him? “Oh God, yeah, I was certainly frightened of going on stage. One of the ways to get over it was to be smashed. I deal with it a lot better now.” It’s hard to think of the gobby, aggressive vocalist as mouselike. You’re a weird mix, aren’t you? “Yeah. Yeah, proper odd mix. And for a front man, a lead singer, you’ve got to be extrovert. I’m proper schizophrenic – really, really, really shy, but also a bit of a loon.” Ryder says that from the age of 11 he didn’t learn a thing at school. By 15 he was working in Salford as a brickie, followed by a short stint as a postie, then it was music all the way. Actually, that’s not quite right. The music seemed to play second fiddle to the drugs. The way he tells it he pretty much introduced ecstasy to Britain. Even when the band was successful, he was still dealing. When the Happy Mondays split up, he went on to form another group, Black Grape. Then it was back to the Mondays again, but now he says that’s all over and it’s his solo career he’s focused on. Last year Ryder featured in the reality show I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here . For many stars, signing up to the show is a measure of how far they’ve fallen; for Ryder it was a measure of how high he had risen after those years in the gutter. He ate crocodile penis, was bitten by a snake, frequently flashed his new set of pearly teeth and showed a sweet and sensible side that surprised many of us. His nadir came just before I met him in 1999 when he found himself renting a house in Burnley, wasted on crack. After falling out with his management team, William and Gloria Nicholl, and failing to pay them, his income was confiscated by receivers for 11 years. “Terrible time,” he says. “God, yeah, terrible.” It was his current wife Joanne who helped him clean up – chemically and financially. They had known each other throughout childhood, and finally got together in 2005. By then he already had three children with three women (including Donovan’s daughter Oriole) and she had a child. Now they have two young girls together, Lulu and Pearl. Does he wish they hadn’t left it so late? No, he says, it would have been disastrous in the debauched years. It wasn’t just the drugs; at the height of his infamy he was pathologically promiscuous. “She wouldn’t have even gone near me back in the day.” Does he blame her? “No, not at all.” Would he have gone near himself back then? “No, certainly not. I wouldn’t have gone near me from when the Happy Mondays first started. A young kid getting into deals, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. No. I’m actually glad Joanne didn’t go anywhere near me because it would have ruined a relationship.” And ruined her? “She’d have probably cut me throat when I was asleep,” he says with a straight face. “Most definitely. I wouldn’t be alive now. She would have cut me throat without a word of a lie.” Because of the shagging? “The shagging, yeah. Definitely. She would be serving time in prison.” At times his behaviour has been horrendous. In a television tribute to Tony Wilson, filmed in 2008, he responded to a woman who had accused him of plagiarism, “You’re fucking dead, bitch. You’re getting fucking battered and fucking raped.” The footage was not included in the final programme. Does he think he became a monster? “Yeah, course there was a monstrous idiot side. I suppose I have been a cunt. I know I have …” He pauses. “But I’ve always tried to be fair.” It’s the thing Ryder often returns to – his innate sense of justice. The Mondays shared song royalties, even though he did the bulk of the writing. Despite that, he says, the rest of the band weren’t happy. One by one he fell out with them. He recently saw his brother Paul, who played bass with the band, at a wedding, and they nodded to each other – something of a reconciliation. The trouble is, he says, they haven’t moved on. “They’ve had a long time to think and they’re still in that mindset – they was right.” He talks about the plots to replace him, the complaints that he was holding the others back. “I was criticised all the way through the Mondays for my shit songs. They’d say, ‘Why can’t you write songs like the Stone Roses?’ Well, if I was writing songs like fucking Ian Brown we wouldn’t be anywhere because the Roses are doing it.” When researching the book, he revisited old haunts, clubs and pubs, decades on, and found the same junkies arguing about the same things they had been 20 years ago. “When you are taking copious amounts of drugs, you don’t really change from when you started taking them, at 18 or whatever, you don’t change. You could be 30 or 40, but you’re still the same you were when you started taking them.” And then when you do stop, he says, there’s a hell of a lot of catching up to do. “It’s like this fast forwarding. Vroooom! And suddenly you’re grown up.” Is that scary? “You’ve got to make decisions, you’ve got responsibilities. I’ve got kids in my 20s. It’s deep. Deep.” He looks to Warren for help. Which drug caused him the biggest problem? “Oh, the whole fucking lot of it really. I mean … oof …” He sounds as if he’s just landed one on his own jaw. “I suppose more than anything it was just me that caused myself the problems. Although drugs are bad, I’ve always managed to make things difficult for myself.” If he met his younger self today what advice would he give him? It turns out to concern his former managers: “I’d say, “Pay the Nicholls’s 130 grand. Save yourself a lot of ball ache.” When you’re a young rebellious kid, you think you can beat the system, and when you grow up you realise you can’t.” What system? “You know, just like by paying for things.” Did it take him ages to realise that? “Yeah, it took till I was about 40 years old.” The thing is, he says, he had been offered work throughout this period, either gigging or TV shows, but it was pointless taking it because anything he earned would be taken from him. “Trying to get out of that with a bunch of receivers who are making millions; they don’t want to give you your income back. It took fucking five years to get these cunts … these are bad, bad bastards. I’m sorry for swearing, but these are fucking naughty people on the gravy train. I was offered a hell of a lot of TV, but I couldn’t do it because all the money would have gone to them, plus you’ve got people parking outside your house, and you’re being followed.” He stops and smiles. “I mean it hasn’t turned me into someone who’s eaten up inside, that’s not what I’m like.” Anyway, he’s got nothing to be eaten up about now. He says he loves being nearly 50, being a father to young kids again, being woken up at six every morning. In so many ways, he’s been lucky. Even with the teeth, which he says were ravaged more by crack than smack. An old Mondays fan promised him when he was a dental student that if he qualified he’d do him a brand new set on the cheap, and was as good as his word. Now he says he can do all sorts of impressions for the girls with his new gnashers, and he shows off a burgeoning talent for ventriloquism. He hardly goes out these days – can’t be bothered, and there’s too much going on with the family. And when he does there are too many reminders of the old days. “You still get all the old crowd who want to take you off somewhere, and ‘Go on, have some of this.’” They offer him drugs? “Oh God, yeah, I could be in the middle of Asda … there are a lot of coked-up shoppers around, aren’t there? You get young kids, 18-year-olds, offering me drugs.” What does he say to them? “I just laugh. I just think, Would they do that to their dad?” What’s the most surprising thing he has discovered about himself in writing the book? Silence. “I should know the answer to this, shouldn’t I? It’s like people who say, Are you surprised you’re still alive? No.” He’s still thinking about it. “Drugs shut you down. Years later, you find yourself tripping off about things that just didn’t faze you at the time.” What like? “Deaths of family members and friends that didn’t even touch you. Drugs cut you off emotionally, don’t they?” The best thing about life now, he says, is feeling it. “You think being off your tits makes life easier, but you know what? It’s a lot easier when you’re not.” As we finish, he wipes his forehead. “That was more exhausting than the book was.” You don’t like interviews, do you? “Ones for the Daily Star and the Sun are OK – you know, tits, fannies and all that. But just speaking generally makes me feel uneasy.” Is talking to people part of his learning process? “Oh God, yeah, cos I’m not really sociable. Are we dusted? Great. Heh heh! Put me out of my misery.” Shaun Ryder Happy Mondays Celebrity Simon Hattenstone guardian.co.uk

Posted by on September 15, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.