SHAUN RYDERWe were nice people, but he fucking didn’t
like us, he wouldn’t let us anywhere near,
but Tony loved us more as a bunch of lads
than as a band.”
SORTED FOR E’S & WIZZ
The Mondays progressed at an
extraordinary rate, not least because
Ryder began to look beyond what he
thought he should be writing and started
sketching out scenes he could see playing
in his head. “[Writing songs] is like writing
short stories,” he says. “Not poems, but
short comic-strip stories is my job as a
songwriter. A lot of the songs I write, to be
honest, there’s about three or four different
fucking subject matters going in ’em.
There’s a bit there about that, a bit about
that and something that’s come in me
conscience and I’ve made a statement
on that, and then what I do is I just fi nd a
way to piece them all together to make it
look like one fl owing continuous story.
And that’s it, that’s what I do.”
Part of fi nding the freedom to do this
was down to drugs. More specifi cally,
ecstasy came to Manchester. “I’d been
in Amsterdam and, when I was coming
back, a pal of mine put some ecstasy in his
toothpaste,” says Ryder. “And that’s how
the fi rst bit of E, as far as I know, got
into Manchester.”
If early Mondays’ songs often seem
imbued with a street-drug gnarliness,
ecstasy took the band somewhere else.
More specifi cally, in Ryder’s estimation, the
early Mondays played rock, disco, funk or
whatever, but never truly blended sounds
as they did later. “[Ecstasy] just chilled us
out, just to relax and do that,” he says.
“That’s my opinion. We was all taking E at
that time. It’s like what happened with the
Roses. I mean, you look at the Roses’ early
stuff and then look at Fools Gold. There’s
nothing like Fools Gold in what they were
doing. Again, I don’t know, is that the
result of an E or is that the result of the
changing times? I’m not too sure.”
OAKEY DOKEY
As the Mondays recorded Bummed with
Joy Division producer Martin Hannett,
Shaun and the band were inventing
Madchester, helped along by a
friend buying DJ Paul Oakenfold’s
record collection, the discs he had
been spinning in Ibiza. Even more
importantly, with Steve Osborne,
Oakenfold would produce Pills
‘N’ Thrills in Los Angeles, an album
that brought another shift in the
Mondays’ songwriting.
Oakenfold, Ryder says, “would
throw beats” over which the band
would play. To catch the change in
approach, think of Bummed as essentially
an indie album. Now think of the way
Mark Day’s guitar melodies seem to glide
over the bass in Kinky Afro.
“I’m just sat there and I don’t need
anything else except a beat or a
bassline,” says Ryder of the
recording. “That’s all I need and,
if it turns me on, I’ll write to it.
On them songs then, I’d pretty
much knock one a day out when
we was working.”
The contrast with the Mondays’
fourth album, ...Yes Please!
couldn’t have been greater.
Recording on Barbados with
Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth
of Talking Heads, the band
imploded amidst stories of
hedonistic excess. “I’ve seen a
lot of people who live life on
the edge, but I’ve never before
seen a group of people who
had no idea where the edge
is,” Weymouth noted. But the
problem, says Ryder, was less
the band’s drug intake than
the fact that they had chosen
the wrong producers. “They’re
genius but it didn’t work for us,”
he says. “It didn’t turn me on, so
all I would do was get frustrated
and angry, and I got off my nut.”
Back in Britain, Ryder entered
rehab. As Ryder remembers it – and he’s
always especially careful to specify this
is his version of events where other band
members may have a different view – he
and Bez tried to keep the band together
but egos got in the way rather than drugs.
Going to Top Of The Pops, he says, “The
door would open for me and Bez and then
they’d let it go and slam it in the face of the
rest of them. And that pissed them off.”THE COMEBACK KING
Whatever the truth here, largely
withdrawing from the public eye after
years when he had been a rent-a-quote
presence, Ryder seemed washed up.
In fact, he had signed a new deal and was
preparing to launch Black Grape. He cameback with a No.1 album, the ironically
named It’s Great When You’re Straight...
Yeah, on which Ryder
swapped ideas with rapper
Kermit, formerly of Ruthless
Rap Assassins.
“The quick version of that
is me and Kermit were smack
brothers,” says Ryder. “And
usually when the drugs stop, you
stop being friends cos you’ve got
nowt in common. Well, me and
him have got a lot in common
and it’s a great relationship.
So for me and him, bouncing off
each other, that’s what we do.”
Recording Black Grape’s Pop
Voodoo (2017), he says, the duo
“sat there like Alas Smith And
Jones”, back in the groove.
So after all these years, does
Ryder, sober these days, still
feel fi red up to write? “Oh God,
more than ever, more than ever,
because I’m 56 years old and
I’m happy with me now, me,
the person I am,” he says.
“I’m happy with that. And I’ve
got a missus who fucking loves
me, and me kids, so I’ve got a
solid base and so I’m dead, dead happy.
I love doing everything I do.”● Wrote For Luck, which features
Shaun Ryder’s is published by
Faber & Faber (£14.99). Happy
Mondays play a 29-date Greatest
Hits tour later this year in the
UK, running from October to
November. Tickets are on sale now.“I’M JUST SAT THERE
AND I DON’T NEED
ANYTHING ELSE EXCEPT
A BEAT OR A BASSLINE.
THAT’S ALL I NEED AND,
IF IT TURNS ME ON,
I’LL WRITE TO IT.”
SHAUN RYDER