Shaun Ryder has written his memoir. Yes, another one – his first, Twisting My Melon came out in 2011, but, hey, that other wayward Mancunian icon, George Best, penned no less than FIVE during his lifetime.
As you’d expect, 24 Hour Party Person covers the many highs (and lows) of life in the Happy Mondays and Black Grape, as well as Ryder’s second career as a go-to character for reality TV – he’s appeared on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here and Celebrity Googlebox, amongst other things. And Ryder, who - remarkably - has now reached the age of 63, has been talking about all of this to the Guardian.
Though the Mondays were unusual in many ways (employing a dancer as a full-time member was not what indie bands did in the mid-'80s), the tension between the musicians in the band and the frontmen told a familiar story: “It was a proper cliché!” says Ryder, talking to the Guardian.
“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 (Day, guitarist) talking about strings, or Our Kid (Paul Ryder, bass) 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.”
Happy Mondays have been on and off since reforming in 1999 and the current line-up still contains four members of the original six. Ryder, though, has no qualms about berating the ex-keyboard player who left in 2015. “If Paul Davis 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.”
And the singer is candidly unsentimental about his brother, who died in 2022. “My brother couldn’t get anything out of his mouth except to slag me off,” he says. “He didn’t have the H in ADHD, the hyperactive bit (Shaun himself has now been diagnosed with ADHD) so he just came across as lazy. Wouldn’t get out of bed. Always going for a nap. Like Brian the snail.”
