To look at that another way, maybe
Ryder’s problem wasn’t so much that he
wasn’t paying attention, but that other
people weren’t paying attention to him.
Yet one of the strengths of his writing
arguably lies here. With no template to
follow beyond the idea of fronting a band,
he had to invent himself as a writer.
“It’s like [Mondays guitarist]
Mark Day,” says Ryder. “Mark
was the only one who could
read music out of us lot. I didn’t
play a guitar, and I would say to
him, ‘Can you do this? Do this.’
And Mark would go, ‘Can’t do
that, you just don’t.’ And I’d say.
‘Fucking do it.’ So Mark ended
up playing lead and rhythm
guitar at the same time, do you
know what I mean? He was
doing things I thought you should
be able to do, but musically on
paper you couldn’t do.”GROWING UP IN PUBLIC
This process would culminate in the
shimmering Pills ’N’ Thrills And Bellyaches,
but other Mondays’ records sound far
rougher. In part, says Ryder, that’s because,
thanks to having northern soul DJ Phil
Saxe as manager, a man “who grew upBRING A FRIEND
So how did Faber, the eseteemed
London publishing house whose
history dates back 90 years and
where the editors once numbered TS
Eliot, come to be releasing a collection
of Shaun Ryder’s lyrics? “Well you see
it was really nothing to do with me,”
says Shaun.
“It was Luke Brainslush [Bainbridge
to his mum], it’s all Luke Brainslush
who sorted all that out. I just let Luke
pick what fucking songs he wanted
to put in there and I just wrote the
fucking things. Basically, I let Luke do
all of that.”
What did you make of his choices?
Were there things where you said no?
“There were a couple of things where
I said I don’t really want that in there,
but you know what, we talked, and
sometimes he persuaded me round
and sometimes he didn’t. That’s just
how it works.”
with [Hacienda DJ and Factory A&R man]
Mike Pickering and [Joy Division manager]
Rob Gretton, and knew Tony Wilson”,
the Mondays “got on vinyl too early” at
a time the band “couldn’t even play our
fucking instruments”.
So what did Wilson see in the band?
Shortly before Factory went belly up, I
interviewed Tony and he quoted
with approval George Martin’s
story of signing The Beatles. It
wasn’t that the Fab Four were
especially fantastic at this point,
but there was something about
them, the way they carried
themselves. Record company
executives, said Wilson, too
often worry about not hearing
the hit singles that a band hasn’t
written yet. Ryder’s memories of
Wilson tally with this. For all that
the Mondays were, circa the fi rst
LP, “drugged-up” and “running
around like knobheads”, Wilson saw
something in them.
“He was all for us, he really, really was,
he was totally behind us,” says Ryder.
“I mean, Peter Hook fucking hated us lot.
When we fi rst came on the scene, Hooky
hated us, cos we was from round his way,
we was just fucking ill-mannered scroats.Left: The current-day Happy Mondays (the
original line-up reformed in 2012); Above:
With bandmate Kermit in Black Grape (who
themselves reformed in 2010); Below: Happy
Mondays have toured extensively since 2012
and are planning more live dates in 2019© Paul Husband© Paul Husband