Shaun Ryder was diagnosed with ADHD in his fifties. Photo / Getty Images
The frontman of British band the Happy Mondays talks about cleaning up his act, the joys of Gogglebox and biting a dog in self-defence
Shaun Ryder is looking bemused. He is sucking on a watermelon vape (no twisting references permitted) and knocking back a can of orange Tango as he peers earnestly into the Zoom screen.
“I’ve written a book, have I? See, I didn’t know that,” he says, for the second or possibly third time in his pure, plangent Mancunian. “I thought it was just Q&A stuff for concert programmes. Mind you I’ve published loads of books I didn’t write – but somehow they all sound like me.”
Ryder grins, a guileless, bald, red-faced grin that reveals an incongruous set of £10,000 veneers. He looks a little like a chuffed toddler, and a little like the drug-addled superstar frontman of the Happy Mondays.
But the poet laureate of the Madchester generation is now off the skag, the coke, the acid and crystal meth, although later he ruefully observes that he now takes more pharmaceuticals than he ever did in his heyday. They are prescribed for (inter alia) his arthritis, his underactive thyroid “that makes me fat and lazy” and his prostate. He’s had one hip replacement and needs another. But otherwise all’s good.
“I’ve straightened meself out,” he says. “Been clean 21 years but the public still wants to hear about the drugs, drugs, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and sex. I’m not sure what it’s like for young lads entering the business now but gone are the days when a chauffeur-driven car with weighing scales in the boot for drugs would be waiting outside the Top of the Pops studio for us.”
He gives a nostalgic sigh. As for the other perquisite pleasures of the flesh, Ryder, now 61, mournfully points out that smartphones have put paid to the whole what-happens-on-tour-stays-on-tour omerta.
“If a lad – or a lass,” he adds with unexpected punctiliousness, “in a band wants to have a bit of fun with groupies it’ll be all over social media before you know it. You can’t hide nothing. Changed times.”
And a changed Ryder to boot. Back in the 90s, the Happy Mondays were huge thanks to hits like Step On, Loose Fit and Kinky Afro. The band’s unique sound combining funk, house and psychedelia topped the charts, aided and abetted by off-stage antics that were tabloid gold.
A 1992 tabloid headline memorably described one episode, which took place in Barbados while recording the LP Yes, Please, as a tale of “two crack habits, eight car crashes, a shattered arm, a dose of gangrene and a £10,000 rehab bill”. Not quite the title of a Richard Curtis movie, but the 2002 film 24 Hour Party People covered some of the highs and lows of the Mondays and their contemporaries.
His new book, titled Shaun Ryder: Happy Mondays, And Fridays, And Saturdays, And Sundays, is less an autobiography and more a scrapbook of memories. The drugs. The outrageously overt drug dealing. The lean years. The reckless, sublime insanity of world tours. Although best known for the Happy Mondays in Britain – they seem to regularly break up, then reform and go on tour – Ryder also has two other bands. There is Black Grape, a funk-rock group he formed in 1993, which proved to be his most globally successful. Meanwhile Mantra of the Cosmos, also featuring maraca player Bez as well as Zak Starkey from the Who and Andy Bell from Oasis, is billed as “psychedelic grooves from a band of misfits, outsiders, and innovators” and played Glastonbury last year.
Ryder’s roots remain very much in Salford. He has six children between the ages of 14 and 32 from four marriages. He tells me that fatherhood, and marriage to his wife of 14 years Joanne, with whom he has three children, have been the making of him.
“I love family life. Kids. Being in the countryside. Writing songs, performing. I used to get really pissed off when people on the street would yell, ‘you’re twisting my melon man’, or ‘call the cops’. I never knew how they expected me to respond. Now, I just shout back ‘aright’ and give the thumbs-up. I don’t have a young man’s ego, and that’s quite liberating.”
Ryder, whose prodigious drug habit saw him yo-yo in and out of rehab, eventually got sober aged 40 by cycling manically from dawn to dusk every day until the urge left him. He was diagnosed with ADHD in his fifties and the penny dropped – suddenly his rackety behaviour made sense.
“As a kid, I’d be constantly fiddling around, itching, twitching, struggling to concentrate, but when I took heroin it made me focused,” he says. “These days for ADHD they give you stimulants – amphetamine and methylphenidate on prescription. I’m not advising anyone to take heroin if you’re ADHD, but all I can tell you is that back then it made me feel normal.”
Five of his six offspring have ADHD, although it presents very differently in each of them, he says. His eldest daughter has sworn never to start a family because she doesn’t want to pass on the debilitating condition.
“It’s a spectrum and I’ve got the version that means I can’t remember a fookin’ thing – until autocues came along I used to stand on stage with the Mondays and start singing the third verse or whatever because I couldn’t keep track in my head.”
Tales of Ryder’s excesses were legion. He took his first amphetamines at the age of 12, then left school at 15 to become a postman. But his career was cut short when he was caught biting a dog on his very first postal round. As he made his deliveries he was attacked by a terrier at a pub, but having dropped a tab of acid before his shift (as you do), Ryder refused to give ground.
“Only fair. I did to the dog what it was trying to do to me,” he said. “I thought, ‘I am not having this’, so I grabbed it, bit it on its head, then threw it down and gave [it] a kick up the bum.”
In Ryder’s purview this makes absolute sense, so too do his unintentional malapropisms; when arrested by police in Jersey in 1989 for cocaine possession, Ryder was asked if he wanted an advocate. He replied: “I don’t want no poncy southern drinks.”
In recent years, Ryder and Bez have reinvented themselves on the reality show circuit. Bez came second in Celebrity Big Brother while Ryder twice braved the jungle on I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!. “The last time, last year, I was 60 with one false hip, another on its way out and a chipped spine. I was suffering so much I should have been put out of my misery, they should’ve got me a vet, and either put a dart in me or shocked me.”
Ryder and Bez seem most at home on the Celebrity Gogglebox sofa, where Ryder happily plays the straight man to his quick-witted best mate. “Because of Gogglebox we’ve got a whole new fan base,” says Ryder, smiling from ear to ear. The effect is rather cartoonish because his face (and the rest of him) is hairless due to the sudden onset of full-body alopecia five years ago. But he’s grown used to looking like a “fooking boiled egg”.
“These young kids watch us on the iPad and start wondering who these two old bastards are – by the time the programme ends, they’ve downloaded all our albums.” Against the odds, Ryder is having the last laugh after all.
Shaun Ryder: Happy Mondays, And Fridays, And Saturdays, And Sundays is out now. awaywithmedia.com
Ebony Lamb performs Successful Feelings. Made with funding from NZ On Air. Video / Locals Only