Shaun Ryder: 'Our fanbase goes from seven years old up to 87 through all the TV'

Shaun Ryder is certainly not wrong when he describes his new memoir, Happy Mondays – and Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays, as a “boy’s own adventure which is about as far removed from Enid Blyton as you can get”.
Shaun Ryder. Picture: Paul Husband.Shaun Ryder. Picture: Paul Husband.
Shaun Ryder. Picture: Paul Husband.

Full of hair-raising tales and hard-won wisdom, it’s testimony to a life that has sometimes been lived on the edge. But now, at 61, the vocalist, songwriter and latterday TV personality finds himself in the unlikley position of an alternative national treasure.

Salford-born Ryder – who sprang to fame in the bands Happy Mondays and Black Grape – is refreshingly honest about the book, admitting that he “didn’t even know that he was doing” it until well into the process of talking to Carl Jones, with whom he will be doing a series of question-and-answer sessions around the country. “I thought I was talking to the guy that had set up all the Q&As that I’m doing, and we were just going through a few things talking about what we’d discuss, so I didn’t get on it until the third time of speaking to him,” he says. “Then I thought it was only to accompany the Q&As then I found out it’s going out for sale, but what I’d say is it’s a good-looking book. I’ve done about five books and this one really does look the b******s.”

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Ryder says it’s perhaps fortunate that his memories of copious drug-taking and youthful misdemeanours are today so hazy. “I really can’t remember lots of stuff – that’s partly through being off my t**s but also partly because of my condition. My ADHD didn’t get diagnosed until I was 59 years old, but that explains a lot of stuff,” he says. “I don’t retain stuff and when someone’s talking to me I’m away with the fairies. One of the good things about that is a lot of the embarrassing stuff that you wouldn’t want to remember, I can’t remember it. When I’m doing one of these books, I have to have someone with me – one of of the road crew or one of my pals that was there when all this stuff was going on to jog my memory. Someone will say something and I’ll go, no, it wasn’t like that and then they remind me. So I need a lot of help.”

In the book, Ryder describes his childhood in Salford as a “pretty normal working-class upbringing”; his mother was a nursery nurse and his father tried various jobs before ending up working at the post office for 30 years. Ryder, who left school aged 15, followed him into the post office as a messenger. He believes his schooling was significantly affected by the undiagnosed attention deficity hyperactivity disorder. “When I was at school, I don’t think we’d even heard of dyslexia, never mind ADHD,” he says. “I left in 1978 and we just had nothing at our school, I was just a naughty kid.”

He only learnt the alphabet in his twenties and got diagnosed with ADHD himself because five of his six children are neurodivergent.

“My eldest are in their thirties and I didn’t grow up with them in the same house because I was separated from their mother so I wasn’t really close with them, but my two teenage girls I’ve been with them from birth and we started noticing things, and when they got diagnosed it had to come from somewhere and it wasn’t their mother, it was me. So I ended up going to a specialist and getting diagnosed. They’ve both got autism and well as ADHD. Out of the six kids I’ve got, there’s only one of them without a condition.”

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Although sacked from being a postman at 18, music provided an alternative career with the formation of the band Happy Mondays. At school, Ryder had found his contemporaries’ listening habits too ‘clanny’; his tastes were always broader. “One of the good things about the lads in the band, they liked soul music, funk music, the Sex Pistols at the same time as appreciating Chas and Dave or Showaddywaddy… With my pals, we were just into music, anything.”

Ryder became the band’s lyricist and focal point. “The reason I ended up writing songs was because I was better than everybody else,” he says. “Some of the early stuff that I’ve got on vinyl is terrible, I’m sort of embarrassed by the lyrics, but it’s learning.”

Rapidly signed to Factory Records, thanks to their then manager Nathan McGough’s friendship with Tony Wilson, Rob Gretton and Mike Pickering, Ryder believes they “started making records way before we should have, they were only just learning to play the instruments and I was only starting to get to grips with writing songs”. Nevertheless he is proud of their debut album, Squirrel and G-Man, which was produced by John Cale of The Velvet Underground. “What John Cale did really was just record us live. Basically, what you get on that first album is really how we were. He didn’t do a lot of overdubbing or bringing people in. It was plug in and go. We were fans of The Velvet Underground and we wanted to be raw.”

However it wasn’t until dance music producer Paul Oakenfold was drafted in to remix their song Wrote For Luck – at Ryder’s behest – that Happy Mondays really took off. The singer explains: “Tony Wilson and Nathan McGough didn’t have a clue who he was, and then when they researched him, he was a DJ which didn’t go down too well...I had to prove Oakenfold to them. I got into him because of his DJ-ing, he was the coolest DJ in Ibiza, mixing The Woodentops with dance music.”

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Oakenfold’s mix of Happy Mondays’ version of the Johnny Kongos song Step On – originally earmarked for an Elektra covers album – took them into the top five of the UK charts. Its parent album, Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches, sold 400,000 copies. “Oakenfold’s production sound at the time was great,” Ryder recalls. “He was doing a lot of mixing stuff with beats and sequencers, it wasn’t spending 20 hours on a drum sound or playing the guitar for hours and hours.”

Alongside their contemporaries The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays were at the forefront of the ‘Madchester’ explosion, with their colourful exploits filling many column inches in the national press. It all came crashing down with their 1992 album Yes Please!, recorded at vast expense in Barbados with Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz of Talking Heads as producers. In this book, Ryder suggests that jealousy was what really “killed” the band.

“Nobody really wanted to do press, so me and Bez (Ryder’s best friend Mark Berry, who became the Mondays’ long-time dancer) did it, and when the results of that started showing up on the front pages of the Melody Maker or the NME or the magazines, that’s when the jealousy came in,” Ryder says. “We’d go down to Top of the Pops and nobody in the band would be recognised except me and Bez, so the door was held open for us and then it was let go when the rest of the band came in. Then they wanted to do press but they weren’t good at it. Me and Bez would just roll in and be ourselves, light up a joint or pop a pill and that was it.”

Although the Mondays have reformed several times since 1999 for tours, no new music has been forthcoming. Instead, Ryder has focused on his other band, Black Grape, which he formed with the rapper Paul ‘Kermit’ Leveridge. Ryder says that before his brother Paul died in 2022, the Mondays had been “like having five cooks all trying to be in the kitchen at the same time”, and that with Black Grape it’s much simpler. “Still to this day with Black Grape it’s me and Kermit, if I went to make a Mondays record it’s not like I can just get on with doing it, it would be a hell of a lot of bull**** even now.”

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Since being runner-up in I’m A Celebrity in 2010, Ryder has become a familiar face on television. He and Bez regularly appear in Celebrity Gogglebox, and the singer believes it has helped change the audience demographic at Happy Mondays and Black Grape gigs. “We’re really lucky because for Black Grape and the Mondays our fanbase goes from seven years old up to 87 through all the TV,” he says. “Bez brought a load of new fans in when he did Big Brother (in 2005) and I did when I was in the jungle​​​​​​​. You get kids now and they watch a show that we’re in on iPads or they sit still for 10 minutes and watch us on Gogglebox​​​​​​​ and by the time the show has ended they’ve downloaded most of our albums​​​​​​​ then start turning up at the gigs and festivals, so that is the main reason for doing television.”

Having embraced sobriety for 20 years, Ryder feels it has transformed his life. “The two girls that I’ve got at home are 15 and 16 and they’ve never seen that (intoxicated) side of me,” he says. “They just see dad who’s in the band or does telly, boring old dad.”

He says he is looking forward to the spoken word tour. “One of the reasons why I started doing the Q&As was because I stopped doing the DJ-ing,” he says. “The thing about the DJ-ing is you’re not going to work until 12 o’clock at night. I could be on until 2am and the older I’m getting I just didn’t want ​​​​​​​to be there. The good thing about doing the Q&As is we start work at 8pm, so it’s great, it sort of suits the age that I’m at now.”

Musically, Ryder remains busy, with another Black Grape album in the works; he has also been working with Zak Starkey, son of former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr, in an outfit called Mantras of the Cosmos. “We’ve probably got almost a full album now,” he reports. “So as soon as we finish that we’ll be getting that out.”

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As he says in his new book, Ryder feels that he simply cannot retire. Today he cites the examples of Tommy Cooper and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. “If you’re not enjoying it then don’t do it,” he says, “but I’ve been through the phase of ‘have I got to do Step On again?’ and now I really enjoy it more than ever. I’m comfortable with me now. I was an undiagnosed misfit but now I’m a lot easier on myself, I know the score and I do enjoy it more than ever.”

Shaun Ryder: Happy Mondays – and Fridays, and Saturdays, and Sundays tour visits Ilkley Kings Hall on September 20, Barnsley Civic on November 2, and Leeds City Varieties on November 13. https://www.awaywithmedia.com/tours/shaun-ryder

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