Twisting My Melon (32 page)

I cut my head quite badly, but I wasn’t knocked out. I jumped out to check if whoever was in the Lada was OK, and it was a big bearded vicar, who was fine. The Lada was a bit knackered anyway, so it was probably only worth about £50. I had about £1,200 on me because I was going to score, so I offered him a grand in cash there and then, because I didn’t want the police involved. But he was having none of it. So I just jumped back in the car and drove home. I cleaned myself up a bit, but I was still bleeding when there was a knock on the door. I answered it and it was the police.

‘All right, Shaun?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Next time, when you do a runner from an accident, remember to pick up your number plate.’

The bloody number plate had fallen off the Peugeot and I hadn’t realized. The police were actually really good to me that night. They let me make a phone call and have a brew, and even have a joint. They then took me to the hospital to get seen to, before they took me down to the station. It must have been a couple of hours before we got to the station and I was breathalysed. I was charged, but the case took a year to come to court, and I got a three-year ban and a fine.

Not long after this I split up with Trish. I was going out in town a lot at the time, knocking about with Muzzer. We’d go out round town, go clubbing and pick up some birds, and either get a hotel room or go back to theirs, and I often wouldn’t get home until eight in the morning. Trish wasn’t stupid – she knew what was going on. Some women will put up with their boyfriends or husbands misbehaving and being unfaithful to them if they’re in a comfortable situation with a nice house and a nice car, but Trish was never going to put up with it for long; she’s too strong a woman. I remember one night I got off with a bird and went back to hers, and forgot to put my undies on when I was getting dressed afterwards. When I got home, Trish saw me undressing in the bedroom and clocked I had no undies on, and she knew exactly what I’d been up to. She’d basically had enough by then, and one day not long after that she just turned round and said, ‘I’m going. I’ve had enough.’

She left me and took Jael with her and went back to her mam’s in Stretford. I made sure she had a car and money, and she enrolled in Salford University. Then when I moved to Hampstead a couple of years later, I let Trish have the house in
Didsbury
. She ended up emigrating to New York with Jael and has done really well for herself. She now owns her own really successful photography agency in New York. I’m still in touch with her, when we need to speak about Jael.

We then had to go out and bloody tour
Yes Please
!, which was something I was not looking forward to. It was horrible. We had plenty of loyal fans out there who were still into the band, but it was a pretty dismal experience playing that album every night. We took Stereo MCs on tour as support, and they blew us away every night. They were on the up and they sounded fresher than the songs off
Yes Please
!

I was still on and off the gear, but during that tour I was definitely hard at it. At that time, whenever I had to do something that I really didn’t want to do, I turned to heroin for solace. Heroin is the perfect drug if you don’t want to have any feelings, because it just masks everything and allows you to get on and do things you really don’t want to do. By the time we got to the end of the tour I would even smoke heroin at the side of the stage. I didn’t give a fuck. I’d sit in Dry Bar and pull out my tinfoil. PD, Our Kid and Mark Day had their own vices too, they were just sneaky with it. I would go round to someone’s house to score and they would say, ‘Oh, your kid’s just been here …’; or ‘Oh, you know when you left yesterday? Paul Davis came round just after …’; or ‘Oh, Mark Day’s just been …’ So they were all shouting at me, saying, ‘
You’re
ruining this band, ’cos
you’re
doing crack and
you’re
doing heroin.’ But they were all bang at the drugs. They just did it in secret. Or thought they were doing it in secret.

Our Paul was still with Donovan’s daughter Astrella, so she came on the tour, and her younger sister Oriole came along for the ride as well. Oriole was only twenty and had a young kid called Sebastian, but she wasn’t with the father. I wasn’t
interested
during the tour because I was on gear and there were also a lot of birds around. But at the end of the tour, as we were getting back into Manchester, she said, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do now. I’ve got nowhere to go.’ Her son Sebastian was living with her mum and dad in Ireland, and Our Paul and Astrella didn’t want her at their place. Because Trish had left, I had an empty house in Didsbury, so I said she could come stay at my place, knowing full well I would end up shagging her. Which I did, within a week or so, and then we were an item.

‘Sunshine and Love’ was supposed to come out as a single in October, but it was delayed for a couple of weeks because Factory couldn’t find a pressing plant that would give them credit. That’s how dire the situation had got. They were so broke that Tony was scrabbling around trying to borrow money from here and there to make a video for the single. He was pissed off at me because I wasn’t really putting any effort into promoting it, but I just didn’t believe in the record, so I couldn’t do it.

When Factory finally went under a couple of weeks later, it had become almost inevitable. It didn’t just happen one day; it was dragged out over a few weeks, and the writing had been on the wall for at least a year. When Factory went down, Nathan was trying to negotiate us a deal with EMI. That’s when we had the infamous meeting with EMI’s head of A&R, Clive Black. The myth is that I walked out of that meeting, and away from that deal, and said I was off for a KFC, meaning heroin. But, as usual, that’s not even half the story. What really happened was we had a meeting in the Mondays’ studio in Ancoats, and Clive Black came down to listen to some of the tunes we’d been working on. I’d laid down vocals on a few, only about four tracks, but enough to give them a flavour. There was an early version of ‘Kelly’s Heroes’, which ended up on the first Black Grape album, and a track called ‘Walking the Dog’ that
became
‘Playground Superstar’, which we eventually released twelve years later after we’d re-formed. But the only music that was played in that meeting was instrumentals. That’s how deluded the rest of the band were. They thought they were the future, even though they’d fucked up on
Yes Please
!, and Si Machan, our sound guy, was trying to show off what a great producer he was.

Clive just said, ‘Where’s the vocals, where’s Shaun’s vocals?’

Si was like, ‘Er … I’ve lost those tracks.’

When I walked into that meeting I was honestly up for signing the deal. It was the rest of them who pissed on the fire of that meeting, not me. They just wanted to play these instrumentals they’d written and PD was like, ‘Listen to this one I’ve got!’ and it was some plinky-plonky keyboards stuff. That’s when I just went, ‘Fuck this … I’m going to get some Kentucky.’ I just went out to the car park, sat in my car and got smashed. But me walking out of that meeting wasn’t me splitting the Mondays up, and no one who was in that meeting could have thought that. I was just fucking angry, furious, that they had turned up at the meeting with all these Trumpton instrumentals, and none of the tunes that I’d been working on. Clive Black made it crystal clear to Nathan after the meeting that that’s what he was interested in, the stuff I’d been working on with vocals, and that pissed the others off even more.

After that meeting, it was the rest of the band that told Nathan they were splitting the Mondays. Not me. It was
their
decision. At that stage, Nathan himself decided he’d had enough. I tried talking to the other members, individually and collectively, to their faces and on the phone. Me and Bez begged them not to split the band. I even told them, ‘Look, if you want to go off and do your own thing for a bit, fine. Do that. But
don’t
split the Mondays.’ I knew how lucky we were to have got to the stage where we were, and I could see the
danger
of chucking it all away. We’d had a great ride, for five or six great years, and made three good albums. We’d just had one bad album that had been slagged. And rightly slagged too.

At the time I’d have done anything for the band to stay together. Not just for me, but for the rest of them as well. As a young kid, your mates mean a lot to you. As you grow older it’s more about your family and your kids, and you put them first. But when you’re younger, your mates mean everything. Or they did to me. Perhaps I was naïve in that respect. But we had started off together and I really would have done anything for us to stay together.

But the rest of the band were really bitter and resentful of me and Bez, and the drugs just compounded that. Any inadequacies they had they took out on me. I was on drugs and I couldn’t sing in their eyes. Guess what? They couldn’t really play. They weren’t virtuoso musicians, but that
didn’t matter
. That’s not what made the Mondays
special
, and they never seemed to fully grasp that. As a band, I thought Happy Mondays were great, but I also thought we were getting away with it to a certain extent. We were lucky that there was something in the chemistry of that bunch of lads that had turned some individually reasonably average musicians into a really great band. There are better musicians than the Mondays playing in bands all over the country, but they’re in shit bands, unoriginal bands, with no spark, no chemistry. With the Mondays, the whole was always greater than the sum of the parts.

When the band split and the others walked away, me and Bez were saying, ‘You’re fucking mad! What the fuck are you going to do?!’ But they really thought they were musical geniuses. I tried telling them, ‘Stop deluding yourself and blagging yourself.’ Take a long hard look in the mirror. You’re
fucking lucky
. ‘You’re a knobhead … you’re stupid … and you’re up your
own
arse. Get fucking real.’ But they just couldn’t see it.

Me and Bez were seeing it as a gang – we’re all in it together, and we all watch each other’s backs – but they didn’t have that camaraderie. I saw PD a couple of years ago when Bez’s ex, Debs, got engaged to Martin Moscrop from ACR and they had an engagement party. I thought, ‘PD’s had fifteen years to mull it over – he must have realized the mistake they made by now.’ But no. By that stage he was blaming Muzzer for not keeping some of our entourage away from the band.

There was no dough left in the pot when we split. We’d been getting over £100,000 a show at our height, but we were spending a lot as well, on everything from huge lighting rigs to catering to flying wives and girlfriends around. Various members of the band would also be saying, ‘I need eight thousand pounds,’ ‘I need ten thousand pounds,’ and putting their hands in the Mondays’ pot, and when we were on tour we’d stick everything on the room and run up our room bills. Mark Day was the only one who didn’t really do that, and when the Mondays finished he said, ‘Where’s my money? I never spent mine,’ but I’m afraid the answer was, ‘Well, you should have dived in like everyone else, because there ain’t anything left!’

I even found out that the others had been having discussions amongst themselves about sacking me and replacing me with Rowetta, as Chris and Tina had suggested, or even Everton, our security guard. That’s how little they thought of me at the end. They believed that they were musical geniuses and I was just the guy who wrote the shit words.

WHEN I REALIZED
Happy Mondays were definitely over, I was annoyed more than anything else. Annoyed at the lack of loyalty and annoyed that the others couldn’t see that the only chance we had of doing anything in this game was if we stuck together. All of them, from PD, a kid who just about taught himself to play keyboards, to Mark Day, who was a great guitarist but had no vision – what else were they going to do? When he was in the Mondays, Mark was always complaining, ‘This is not a proper job, it’s got no pension.’ Then after the split he ended up selling encyclopaedias door to door. I hope they gave him a pension.

The others started popping up in the
Manchester Evening News
saying stuff like, ‘I’d rather go back on the dole than work with Shaun Ryder again.’ Words that soon came back to haunt them. All of the rest of the band, apart from Mark Day, ended up on the dole. What’s the saying? Be careful what you wish for.

In the aftermath of the split, I was just holed up at home in Didsbury. I didn’t go spouting my mouth off like everyone else, although it would have been so easy to do. I didn’t rise to the
bait
, and I stayed out of the press. I had various people knocking on my door, saying that I had blown it, and I had various offers from different people to work with them, but I knew I wanted to do my own thing.

I also decided to try Prozac after the split. Not because I was distraught about the band or in the depths of depression. It was more because it was being heralded as this new wonder drug, and being naturally curious about new drugs, I decided I wanted to try it. It wasn’t too hard to get it on prescription at that stage. If you went to the doctors and told them you were stressed out and down and depressed, they’d usually give you Prozac. I was on and off heroin then; I would go through phases with it. I thought Prozac was great at first. It felt like someone had taken my brain out and washed it and put it back again. I grew my hair again, put a bit of weight on and even grew a moustache. I felt like being incognito for a bit.

I soon discovered you couldn’t take too much Prozac without it having side effects. One of them was it could give you suicidal thoughts. Now I
never
get suicidal thoughts, but after I had been on Prozac for a while I did start thinking about it, and almost rationalized the idea of the act in my head. It was almost as if I was tripping out on Prozac, and thinking about it a little too much, half convincing myself that it really didn’t matter if I was alive or dead because we’re all connected in this big universe, and your soul carries on living. My brain really began to think like that, until I had a moment of clarity and pulled myself together and went, ‘Woaah – hang on a fucking minute!’ That’s when I decided I’d better stop taking the Prozac.