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There are thousands of pictures of Shaun Ryder and Bez in Happy Mondays, from the mid- to late 80s, that run the gamut from mashed to wrecked. They don’t always look that cheerful, but when they do, they look insanely fun. In Ryder’s new memoir, 24 Hour Party Person, he quotes a critic: “The poorly educated might just call [Bez] a dancer, but he’s the proprietor of good times.” What Bez did for the band, the band did for the era: just went way too far, in an absolutely magnetic way.
Ryder, in a Novotel hotel to the west of Manchester, explains what drew the whole band together. “When you are neurodiverse, you attract other people who are,” he says. “I would have said at the time we were all fucked-up loonies. I mean Bez [he launches into a spirited impression]: ‘I’m-not-fucking-neurodiverse’… it’s like, mate. You are. ‘I’m fucking not.’ Mate, you are. The same with all of them. None of them have been tested and gone through the thing, but they are. All of them.
“The difference between me and Our Kid [Paul Ryder, his younger brother, who died in 2022 aged 58], was that he didn’t have the H in ADHD, the hyperactive bit, so he just came across as lazy. Wouldn’t get out of bed. Always going for a nap. Like Brian the snail.” But it’s not laziness, he says. “It’s part of his condition. He hasn’t got that get-up-and-go, he’s not motivated.” He’ll start a sentence in the past tense and by the end, his brother is still alive. He resists sentimentality like a cage fighter, though: “My brother couldn’t get anything out of his mouth except to slag me off.”
Ryder, 63, was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in his 50s. Paul was never diagnosed, but Shaun has been piecing it together from his own children: “Four daughters and two sons. My older daughters, Jael [35] is in America and had a hard ride; Coco [30], she’s not been diagnosed, I don’t think. The two youngest, they were picked up young because their mum [his wife since 2010, Joanne] worked in special needs. They basically said: ‘Bring Dad in.’ One of them’s ADD and is autistic, and the other is ADHD, and also autistic. Pearl is just like Our Kid, and Lulu, who’s ADHD, is just me in knickers.” Tony Wilson, nightclub manager and star-maker, immortalised by Steve Coogan in the film 24 Hour Party People, once said Ryder was like WB Yeats. Ryder didn’t know who that was, and I’m not sure it’s the tightest analogy, but unarguably, as a lyricist and just a person in the world, he slings out these sentences like an elite athlete.
None of this neurodiversity is fresh news to Ryder, but it was a revelation. Everything about his childhood, his early fame, his brushes with the law, dicing with death and his drug addiction suddenly made sense. He’s been clean of heroin for 20 years now and the only drug he takes is Ritalin: “That’s why I can sit here without [he mimes squirming about] messing with my sack.” Wait: his ball sack? He smiles slightly incredulously, like: “Are you dumb?” Almost everything he does is funny, because he’s never trying, and always seems surprised. “Ritalin is fantastic. This ‘cousin’ of methamphetamine is fantastic, for me, because I can concentrate. But I’m not pushing it!” Even though his brand is not giving a shit, a life in the public eye has inevitably left him alive to the chance that he’ll be taken too seriously. “It’s like when I say, ‘I can’t read.’ What I mean to say is I can’t spend longer than a minute reading. I can literally read. But when I say, ‘I can’t read’, people think I actually can’t read.”
24 Hour Party Person opens with Ryder stealing toffees as a reception-age kid, in the school where his mother worked, and being busted by her and a teacher. The scene is emblazoned on his mind, clearly, but didn’t deter his delinquency. “My favourite things, as a little kid, were starting fires, dropping bricks off a motorway bridge, putting stuff on railway lines and getting chased off by the transport police. And thieving.” When he was 10, he “burned down something really big and expensive”. “What was it?” “I’m not saying! It was really big! And expensive!” He got a job running telegrams when he was 15, just in the nick of time, because there was a taking and driving away charge going through the courts, which would have disqualified him. “It was like an episode of The Sweeney. Strippers on at dinner time when we’re taking telegrams, Bernard Manning doing a spot, taking telegrams to people who are getting their electric cut off and they’re hiding behind the settee. With a gang of lads the same age, delivering telegrams and fucking about, robbing parcels.”
At 18 he had a foothold in the music industry, but it didn’t come a minute too soon; he was lucky not to be in a borstal. Five years passed before they released their first EP (Forty Five in 1985), having been signed to Factory Records. They spent that time noodling about on stolen stuff and going to the Haçienda, which opened in 1982. “When we started, none of us could play instruments. Not Paul Davis [keyboard]. Mark [Day, guitarist] was the only person that could read music and actually play, Gaz [Whelan], the drummer, he was still at school, it was like punk ethics.” Ryder had left school at 13, but there were other ways to meet like minds, just by being on the tearaway circuit. In his book, Ryder writes: “My thought process when we started the Mondays was: “I wanna be in a band, I wanna shag birds, I wanna travel round the world, I wanna party all night and I wanna take drugs.”
“Everyone gets screwed over in the record industry,” he says in retrospect. “That’s part of it. One way or another, you’ve not been in it if you’ve not been fucked over. But we’re making music for a living and it’s great. I’m not doing a proper hard job and I’m not in jail.” Happy Mondays weren’t mass market the minute they arrived, so the following observations will be from 1990, their third album, Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches. Ryder talks a lot about the eclecticism of their sound, that nobody could really place them, between post-funk and post-punk at the beginning, indie where they originally charted, pop at their first crescendo, but what they came to represent wasn’t any one genre so much as the melding of everything, which was a Manchester thing, a Haçienda thing, an ecstasy thing. “Music before that was very clanny,” he says. “You had your mods, your goths, your punks, your rockers. No doubt about that, E collapsed all that.”
Ecstasy created a lot of moral panic, because of course it was a drug and it was illegal, but there was another aspect to it, which didn’t get talked about until long after: in the 80s, when everyone was drunk and just a few people were on acid, there was a lot of fighting. By the start of the 90s, when everyone was on MDMA, the love in the air was bizarre. Even people who weren’t taking it had to adapt to it. Ryder and Bez were like the sin-eaters of a post-moral age; drugs-eaters, silently nominated to try everything and tell everyone, to prove the new world was real.
There’s a story in the book where, within hours of arriving in New York for a gig in 1986, they had been held up at gunpoint while trying to score crack off a stranger, because they’d heard it was so intense that you would be addicted the minute you tried it. He writes that story with a kind of delight that’s not exactly surprising from a recovered addict, but you don’t expect him to be so carefree. “It’s a high-risk situation anyway, when you’re a junkie and you’ve got to score. Wherever you are. Loads of mad things, guns, shooting, when you’re young, that just comes with it. When you get to about 50 or 40, and you straighten up, that’s when you go: ‘Oh, fuck me.’ And PTSD will set in. You do see a lot of fucking mad situations differently. But I’m not trying to resolve it. That’s just what happened.”
That nonchalant, fuck-around-and-find-out charisma caused rifts in the band. “The others felt – and I use this as an example, it’s not literally what happened – that we’d go to Top of the Pops, and the door would be held open for me and Bez, and once we’d gone through, the door would be let go. That’s because they never did press – we got the front covers, so we’d get recognised. You’d have Mark talking about strings, or Our Kid really trying to be the pseudo-intellectual, talking about amplifiers. Whereas me and Bez would just walk in and be ourselves, obviously pissed and stoned, skin up, talk bollocks and have a laugh. So nobody wanted to talk to them. They only wanted to talk to us, and it really got to them. But me and Bez were still doing what we were doing for the band. It was a proper cliche!”
When the Mondays split in 1993, it felt premature – they’d been together 13 years, but looked pure 90s to the untrained eye – but there was quite a bit of post-hoc rationalisation from the critics that not just they, but also Factory Records, had been sunk by their 1992 album Yes Please! It was recorded in Barbados, the location chosen because you couldn’t get heroin there and Ryder was addicted by then. “You don’t fuck around with heroin”, he says solemnly. “It’s not a party drug. You start on that and you’re pretty much done until either you die or you get out of it 20 years later. There’s no doing it at the weekend.” He was meant to go cold turkey and instead he got a crack cocaine habit. When they split, he and Bez were gutted, but “the proof of the pudding was in what happened in those years afterwards,” he writes. “You heard fuck all from any of the rest of them in the public domain until the Mondays reformed.”
Ryder didn’t stall work-wise – he started Black Grape with Wags (from Paris Angels) and Kermit (from Ruthless Rap Assassins) the same year Happy Mondays disbanded, and he cropped up on TV, memorably dancing on The Word with Zippy and Bungle from Rainbow (“Why wouldn’t I do family TV?”, he says, indignant. “I’ve got a mam and dad, I’ve got cousins”). But the rest of the 90s only make sense through the prism that he was off his tits. He sacked two managers of Black Grape; they sued and won £160,000 in damages. “I could have paid it off at £10 a week, but instead I did what I did – didn’t pay them – and that 160 grand turns into lots of money.”
For 12 years, he had no control of his money. He couldn’t even go bankrupt because he would have lost control of his publishing rights – he just had to hand everything over to receivers. Happy Mondays reformed in 1999, had some sell-out dates and did some festivals. The lineup chopped and changed a bit, with members replaced by musicians from Black Grape. It’s hard to pick apart who was walking away from whom because Ryder hares off to slate everyone’s musical ability any chance he gets. “If Paul Davis [keyboards] ever took us to court and said, ‘You sacked me from my job’, you could just bring a piano into the courtroom and say, ‘Play me Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.’ And he wouldn’t be able to.”
There wouldn’t be any momentum, and there definitely wouldn’t be any I’m a Celebrity … appearances (2010, 2023) until Ryder was in Narcotics Anonymous, and that wouldn’t happen until he was back together with Jo in 2004. “She had always been in our circle. She was my girlfriend years ago. When the band took off, she binned me because she knew that I would be at it.” It wasn’t as if he’d just been waiting for love his entire life – he married at 19 but “with Denise it only lasted a year. She joined the Territorial Army.” It was more that taking heroin had been the only thing that made him feel normal. “That’s self-medication, isn’t it? But Jo knew how to deal with people with special needs. I sort of got me own private special needs person.” It doesn’t look that romantic, written down. But he says it like he’s the luckiest man alive.
24 Hour Party Person is published by A Way With Media (£45). Shaun Ryder’s Q&A tour returns to theatres this autumn from 1 October to 21 November.
