It’s a memory that makes Bez both shudder with fear and cackle with laughter, an occasion he describes as both “a really big turning point” and “a real comedy moment”.
It was November 1999 when the Happy Mondays legend, famed for his maraca shaking and wild dancing, thought his time was up after a horrific motorbike smash left him in intensive care with broken bones and a punctured lung, fighting for his life.
Doctors had called family and friends into hospital telling them he wasn’t going to make it through the night, and the famous hellraiser decided to make his peace with God and recite the Lord’s Prayer.
Bez – real name Mark Berry – remembers: “The problem is I couldn’t remember the Lord’s Prayer, and I got into a panic. But Cliff Richard had just brought out a Christmas single, the Millennium Prayer, in which he sang the Lord’s Prayer to the tune of Auld Lang Syne. So someone brought it in and put it on.
“And you had all my mates, quite rough-looking characters with broken noses and all that, standing around my bed singing the Lord’s prayer with Cliff Richard. It was the funniest thing.”
Quickly turning pensive again, he adds: “It really was a touch-and-go moment though, I honestly thought I was about to die.
“It makes you appreciate life. You never know when it might end.”
It wasn’t the only surreal moment from inside the Edinburgh hospital where, at the time unbeknown to fans outside, he was having multiple organ and heart failures and at one point was even given the last rites. The dancer is now revealing the drama for the first time in his new autobiography, Buzzin’.
After he contracted the MRSA superbug which plunged him into a coma for a month, one night his then girlfriend in desperation called in a New Age healer to perform a ritual on him.
The 58-year-old says: “The doctors had given me a one in four chance of making it through the night. She put all these crystals over me, doing this ‘woo-oo-ooo’ thing up and down my body. And the consultant was saying to my dad, ‘What the f*** is she doing? She’s mad’.
“But the next thing I was sat upright out of my coma, with all my broken bones and everything. The hippie woman had brought me out of the coma! I still have that crystal here at home, to remind me how how precious and short life is."
In fact Bez, once known for his wild partying, drug dealing and spells in prison, says those terrifying days staring death in the face changed his life and made him a much better person.
He says: “I grew up in a working-class family where no-one ever told each other that they loved them, you just never did did. But from that moment on I started to say it to people who were important to me. I wanted to make sure that the last words they heard from me was that I loved them.
“I know it’s a bit sentimental but I no longer worry that when I’m on my way out I hadn’t told certain people that I loved them. Because that last time they f***ing saw me that was what I told them.
“I now realise how short life is and you have to live it as impeccably and as good as I can.”
Bez’s impressive turnaround has also led to him doing something he never thought he would ever do – get married. The star, who has recently won new fans as a favourite on Big Brother and Dancing on Ice, tied the knot with long-term partner Firouzeh Razavi, 35, this summer.
He gushes: “It was to make Firouzeh happy, because she kept saying to me, ‘Come on Bez, you must know by now whether you want to be with me or not.’
“So I arranged a surprise engagement, told her we were going to a mountain to pick mushrooms, but had got my and her family waiting at the top, where I got down on one knee.
“I haven’t been romantic in the past, and never imagined myself being married because I couldn’t see the point of all the palaver. It must be because I’m getting older, I’ve finally reached for the softer, more sentimental person inside of me..
“Life is as it was but just a bit better. She’s Mrs Berry now and she’s very happy, it’s given her a little bit more licence to moan at me!”
The star, who has three sons Arlo, 30, Jack, 29, and Leo, 14, from a previous relationship, says that doesn’t mean he’s planning on having any more kids with Firouzeh. And once again it’s the fragility of life that’s most on his mind.
Bez, who suffered a double heartbreak in July with the sudden death of both his father and bandmate Paul Ryder, says: “I’m 58 and I’d be worried in case I wasn’t around to bring them up. I worry enough about my 14-year-old losing me. We just lost Paul who was the same age as me, you realise we’re in the latter years of life.”
It’s a remarkable change for the man whose reckless behaviour in the past, by his own admission, could have cut short his life on my occasions.
Born in 1964 in Bolton to an auxiliary nurse mother and a detective inspector father, Bez’s troubles began early as he rebelled against an authoritative upbringing as and fell into crime and drug taking in his teens.
It led to him being kicked out of his house aged 16 and moving to his grandparents in Wigan. But he was jailed for robbery at the age of 17 and spent three years in prison, where he got involved in fights, riots and cigarette smuggling.
After he got out he started hanging out with Shaun Ryder, who had formed the Happy Mondays with Paul and pals Mark Day and Gary Whelon.
He only joined the band because he and Ryder were high on drugs during a TV appearance filmed at the legendary Hacienda club.
One night, just before their gig was about to start, Shaun invited Bez to join them on stage, so he “grabbed a pair of maracas that were lying around, jumped up there and started shaking them, and danced right through the whole gig,” says Bez. “And that set the tone for the next 40 years.”
He says he often wonders why he – with no talent as a singer or musician – could have had such a successful career. He says: “The only conclusion I can come to is that, while everyone has their heroes in bands, not everyone can play guitar or drums. But people look at me and think, ‘I could f***ing do that’. I think that’s part of my appeal, everybody knows they could do what I do.”
But being in a successful band didn’t put Bez on the straight and narrow.
In fact, even while the Happy Mondays were topping the charts and headlining on Top Of The Pops, he was still making a squalid living dealing drugs and involved in petty crime. The band’s drug-fuelled antics, meanwhile, were as legendary as their music.
Bez’s drug dealing led to another brush with death, when he was held hostage in a derelict house by an armed gang who pistol-whipped him and held a gun to his head.
The terrifying ordeal – from which he only narrowly escaped – was another turning point, after which he left behind his life of crime for good.
Bez says that he wrote his autobiography so his kids and grandkids know “what not to do.”
He says: “If there was ever an example of not what to do I’m it. I’m really good at getting it wrong.
“Life is a roller coaster journey, it’s full of extreme highs and extreme lows, and that’s the way I’ve seemed to have lived my life. As a band, too, we’ve been like a walking car crash through most of our existence, poor lifestyle choices, poor management, the list is endless.
“But everybody has to go through life and learn through their own mistakes.”
And he is now determined his youngest son – who is at the same age he was when he was going off the rails – doesn’t go down the same path that he did. He recently brought son Leo to live with him and put him in boarding school after he “went through a bad patch and started getting into all sorts of trouble.”
He says: “It was a decision I had to make. I’ve gone down that slippery path and now I’ve got the opportunity to try to make a difference. I couldn’t afford it, but I got help with his grandparents with the cost.
“He really appreciates the fortunate position he’s in, and the steps that I’ve taken. I tell him all about my younger self and the trouble I got in, and say, ‘I’m not f***ing having it for you mate, I’m not going to allow you to go down the same path, I’m not going to allow that to happen.’
“My only regret is that I wasn’t in the same position to help with my other sons. I’m trying to make it up to them now by doing the only thing I can do, giving them all my love and my time.”
Buzzin’: The Nine Lives of a Happy Monday by Bez is published in hardback by White Rabbit at £20
