Twisting My Melon (40 page)

Towards the end of that year, we were offered a nice cushy Admiral advert. I’d met the big kahuna at Admiral, Colin, who was also the big cheese at Kangol, because he was a big Mondays fan and we became quite pally. First of all Admiral sponsored my
Daily Sport
column, and then, when they were trying to launch Admiral as a fashion label rather than just a sportswear brand, he asked us to do a big ad campaign with
Terry
Venables, Bobby Charlton, Stuart Hall and Emlyn Hughes. We did a couple of separate ads, one on a sort of
EastEnders
set where I passed the ball to El Tel and he kicked it through the window of a baker’s that was owned by Bobby Charlton. It also had cameos by David Seaman, who was handed a brown paper bag as a joke about him being accused of accepting bribes, and Dennis Wise as a cab driver, because he’d been accused of attacking a cab driver outside El Tel’s club. Then we did an ad in Stringfellows. ‘Step On’ was the soundtrack, and the ads went out in the cinema and on Sky Sports, and they could run them separately, or together as one long ad. We had a good time filming it and all the footballers were good sports.

At the start of 2000, I was back at the
NME
Awards to receive a Godlike Genius award. They did a quick photo with Paul McCartney, which was used on the cover of the
NME
; it’s the picture I mentioned earlier. It’s pretty awful to look at, because you can tell I’m on the gear as I look a bit pasty and sweaty, and I looked older than bloody Macca. God knows what he thought. Funnily enough, I then met Nathan McGough, the old Mondays manager, at the after-party. I’d not seen him since the original split, and we had a good catch-up and reminisce about the halcyon days.

Early that year I was in the Press Club late one night with a couple of pals and I met a girl called Felicia Brookes, who worked at the Palace Theatre and the Opera House. I got her number and we started seeing each other once a week. She was living with a friend of hers off Anson Road in Longsight, where the old International venue used to be. After a little while, when I got a bit of dough together, I got myself a flat up there too. It was a new block of flats, one of those gated places that look like posh student flats, but it was only five minutes out of town.

I was then approached to do a cover version of ‘Barcelona’ with Russell Watson. He was still up and coming at the time, Russell, and just finishing his debut album,
The Voice
. Russell and his manager then, Perry Hughes, are both from Salford and they thought it might help broaden his appeal, make him look cool and help break him into a different market if he did a song with me. Perry has a limousine service in Salford, and knew my pal Muffin, and had already loaned us some limos to go to the première of
The Faculty
at the Trafford Centre. Russell had actually already recorded ‘Barcelona’ for his album before Perry came up with the idea of me guesting on it. When they suggested it to me, it was a bit of a no-brainer as I didn’t have to do much, so I was like, ‘Yeah, no problem. Bring it on.’ I just popped into the studio and laid down my vocals on the track that was already laid down, then we went to Barcelona to do the video. Obviously the video and the song weren’t totally serious – it was supposed to be a bit of a joke, playing up the juxtaposition of an opera singer against a bit of a wasted rock ’n’ roller. If you watch that video and can’t see I’m in on the joke, then you’re a bit of an idiot. I’m just hamming it up, playing up to that Shaun Ryder caricature against Russell’s clean-cut image.

Happy Mondays were booked to play Glastonbury that summer, but Our Paul wasn’t in great shape and our relationship had deteriorated even further, if that was possible. In the end, he just walked out of rehearsals. We had to rope in Stuart Fletcher, who had played bass in John Squire’s new band the Seahorses, as a replacement. The line-up of the re-formed Mondays changed quite a bit over those early noughties years, through until about 2003, when we became more settled. The 2003 line-up is pretty much the same band that I play live with now, apart from Bez and Gaz Whelan, who have both left. Gaz has been replaced on drums by Jake, Our Paul’s oldest lad.

John Warburton, the journalist who was ghosting my
Daily Sport
column, then published a book called
Hallelujah! The Extraordinary Return of Shaun Ryder and Happy Mondays
. I didn’t really have anything to do with it at all, but Warbie asked if he could write a book, and I said, ‘Look, I’m not going to write a book about my life at this stage, but if you want to come on tour and write about what happens on tour, that’s fine with me.’ So it was just about the previous year, really.

There was a bit of an incident when I helped out Warbie by doing a signing at Waterstone’s in town. I ended up on the front page of the
Manchester Evening News
because they claimed I pulled a gun on their reporter. Which was absolutely fucking ridiculous. Talk about sensationalism. For fuck’s sake. Not only was it actually a little plastic starter pistol, it didn’t
look
like anything but a daft plastic gun. I think I found it in Waterstone’s or wherever we were before Waterstone’s. I certainly wasn’t carrying it around. It was a fucking toy; it might as well have had one of those flags that came out at the end and said ‘Bang!’ This journalist from the
Evening News
wanted to interview me and I just started having a bit of a nobble with him, winding him up, and then I pulled out this plastic gun and he fucking shit himself. That’s all that happened.

I didn’t have an issue with the
Manchester Evening News
really, even though, like I said before, they never gave us any support when we were starting out. After we had made it, every now and then we would do an interview with them and then inevitably a couple of weeks later they would stab us in the back again. I never understood why a Manchester paper couldn’t get behind a Manchester band. I certainly didn’t have any problem with the individual journalist who was there that day; I didn’t know the kid from Adam. But it must have made
his
fucking day, because he went away and wrote a front-page story crying ‘Shaun Ryder Pulled a Gun on Me’. He’s probably lived off it ever since, telling the story at dinner parties in south Manchester. I didn’t get questioned by the police or anything about the incident. If the police had seen the ‘gun’ they would have just laughed.

In July we supported Oasis on their stadium tour for
Standing on the Shoulder of Giants
. Johnny Marr and his band the Healers opened the bill, then us, then Oasis headlining. There was no Manchester date, but we did play Bolton’s Reebok Stadium, which half of Manchester came up to, and there was a bit of an unfortunate scene when Noel and Liam’s mum, Peggy, got trampled. Peggy was watching the gig from a hospitality box with a friend of hers and one of Noel or Liam’s kids. Bez then went and opened some door or fire escape that he shouldn’t have, in order to let all his mates into hospitality who didn’t have VIP passes, and the next thing there’s a load of lads in Peggy’s box. Oasis’s management were going to throw us off the tour after that, because Liam and Noel weren’t best pleased. We had to go and have a meeting with their management and at first they said, ‘That’s it – you’re off the gig.’ But it got smoothed over eventually.

Quite early on in Oasis’s career their management got rid of most of the hangers-on from Manchester around the band, which a lot of people in Manchester had a problem with – ‘Noel and Liam have turned into fucking arseholes, man.’ But I knew that, although Noel might have had a bit of a say in it, it was the management who did it really, and I can see why. I hate saying it, because I feel like a bit of a twat, but there can be a real lack of professionalism in the music game in Manchester, among the people who work in it. I’m not saying everyone is like that, but there is a bit of an attitude and a lack of professionalism at times. Everyone in the music game in
Manchester
thinks they’re Charlie big potatas. Everyone thinks they’re fucking fantastic and should be treated like VIPs, whereas in London, even if you don’t like them personally, people know what their job is, and exactly what they’ve got to do, and they get it done. I’m not in the business to make mates, never have been. I’d prefer to work with people who can get their job done.

The Mondays’ reunion tour was only supposed to last six months or so, but we kept saying yes to more gigs, and the longer it went on, I inevitably started drinking too much and taking cocaine, as well as the gear, just to get through it. I’d really had enough by the time we got to Australia at the start of 2001 to do the Big Day Out festival. I was thirty-eight and I felt about fifty-eight. I was fucked. After the Australia gigs I just decided to stay on at Our Pete’s, Our Matt and Pat’s oldest brother, who lives in Perth. He’s been out in Australia for years and all his family have grown up there. He used to be one of the heads of Sony Music out there.

I really wanted to try and come off heroin, and Perth is quite a small town, and quite quiet, so it seemed like as good a place as any to try and go cold turkey. I had no plans to do any music. I remember thinking to myself while I was there, ‘I’m never going near a microphone again.’ But Our Pete mocked up a make-do studio in his garage and thought it would be a good idea if I did some music to keep myself busy. It was a sound idea, but because I was going cold turkey I was coming down and sweating all the time, and just not very well generally and not in a great place mentally. I was quite dry artistically as well. I wasn’t writing songs at the time, so what came out were more streams of consciousness than fully realized songs. A kid called Shane Norton and Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire, who had an Australian band called Ku-ling Bros and knew Our
Pete
, came up with these electronic backing tracks, and I just told stories over the top.

I wasn’t in a good state at the time but, if anything, I saw it as a side project or collaboration – I didn’t mean it to be viewed as my first solo album. I was possibly a little naïve in that respect; I perhaps should have realized that it would be perceived that way, but that wasn’t supposed to be me launching a solo career. One of the streams of consciousness was about the Mondays’ trip to Rio and what happened there. ‘The Story’ and ‘1987’ are about the early Mondays days and ‘Clowns’ is about Wags’ fear of clowns. He once told me that his worst nightmare was being beaten to death by clowns, with their big floppy shoes and big red noses. Not the sort of thing I would normally write a song about, but, as I say, I didn’t really approach it as a normal album. Like I say, I was in a bit of a state at the time, and just wasn’t thinking things through properly. I think I even thought the album might just come out in Australia, and nobody would even get to hear it back home.

I am now doing my first solo album, with Sunny Levine, which should come out in 2012, and I hope people aren’t expecting a similar album to
Amateur Night in the Big Top
, as that Australian one was called, because it will be very different, much more fully realized.

The Haçienda had closed in 1997, but the building was knocked down in 2002, just after Michael Winterbottom had finished filming
24 Hour Party People
. I was on the other side of the world while a lot of the fuss about the Haçienda was going on, and not in a good state, so a lot of it passed me by, but I wouldn’t have got as worked up as some people did about it.

I didn’t think it was a travesty when the Haçienda closed. I hadn’t been there for years anyway. I’d left it behind a long time
ago
. There was a bit of uproar when Crosby Homes bought the site to convert the Haçienda into apartments and put a sign up saying: ‘Now the party’s over you can come home’, but it didn’t bother me. It meant dick to me. It’s over. Get over it. Move on. When you’ve lived it and done it, sometimes it’s almost a relief when it’s over.

I’m all for cultural tourism. If people want to come and see where the Haçienda was, that’s fine with me. If people are into it, and it brings money into Manchester, then fair dos. If I went to Nashville or Memphis I’d be quite interested in finding out about the musical history there. I’m just not arsed about mourning the Haçienda. I was there. I don’t need to relive it.

Hooky is now involved in the new ‘Factory’ club that has opened in what used to be the Factory offices, and then later became Paradise Factory nightclub, but I’m not one of those people who will slag him off for trading on a bit of nostalgia. I’ve even played the new Factory club myself. If the kids have an appetite for it, then he might as well be making some money out of it rather than anyone else. The next generations of kids are still discovering Factory and are interested in the story.

I even liked the film
24 Hour Party People
, when I eventually saw it on DVD, despite some of the comments I’ve made here and elsewhere. I thought Steve Coogan was great as Tony Wilson. The Mondays were portrayed as pure caricatures, which is fine, because it’s just a film, but that’s not what we were like in real life. I thought the kid that played me, Danny Cunningham, was a good actor, but if I was as stupid as I was made out to be in that film I wouldn’t bother getting out of bed in the morning. The only thing that really wound me up was they had me wearing a Joe Bloggs T-shirt. Listen, I know my memory of those heady days is slightly hazy, but if there’s one thing in this book I am 100 per cent sure of, it’s that I have never worn a Joe Bloggs T-shirt.

Me and Felicia had a baby boy on 24 April 2002, Joseph Peter Ryder, and we decided to move out of the flat off Plymouth Grove and out of Manchester. Bez and Debs were living up in Hadfield, near Glossop, and a couple of places came up near them, so we ended up renting a house that backed on to theirs. Debs and Joanne, who I’d first gone out with in 1988 and is now my wife, actually took me and Felicia to see a few houses around the area as a favour, because they lived nearby and knew the area. A few times when I went up to visit Bez and Debs, Joanne would be round at their house because she was still pally with them. We had always had the same circle of friends, so I never went out of Joanne’s life, although I was that wasted sometimes I didn’t recognize her. A couple of times I ran into her, skagged off my brain, and said to her, ‘I know you, don’t I?’ and she’d sigh and say, ‘Yes, Shaun, it’s Joanne, you’ve known me for fifteen years.’ Then I would start talking to her and just mong out halfway through a sentence; my head would just drop.