Shawn Ryder on highs, lows and happy Mondays: ‘Heroin isn’t a party drug — you can’t take it on the weekend’ | Shawn Ryder

THere are thousands of photos of Shawn Ryder and Bez in Happy Mondays, from the mid-to-late 80s, running the gamut from mashed to destroyed. They don’t always look cheerful, but when they do, they look insanely fun. In Ryder’s new memoir, 24 Hour Party Person, he quotes a critic: [Bez] Dancer, but the owner of the good times. What Biz did for the band, the band did for the era: it went very far, in a completely magnetic way.

Ryder, at the Novotel Hotel in west Manchester, explains what brought the whole band together. “When you’re neurodiverse, you attract other people as well,” he says. “I would have said at the time we were all crazy. I mean Biz [he launches into a spirited impression]: “I’m not neurodiverse”… it’s like, companion. You. “I don’t do that.” Hey mate, it’s you We are. Same with all of them. None of them have been tested and gone through it, but they are. All of them.

“The difference between me and our child [Paul Ryder, his younger brother, who died in 2022 aged 58]is that he didn’t have the H in ADHD, which is the hyperactive part, so he seemed lazy. I won’t get out of bed. Always go for a nap. Like Brian the snail.” But he says he’s not lazy. “It’s part of his condition. He doesn’t have that ability to get going, and he doesn’t have the motivation. He will start the sentence in the past tense and in the end, his brother is still alive. He fights back emotions like a cage fighter, though: “My brother couldn’t get anything out of his mouth except to hit me.”

Ryder, 63, was diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in his 50s. Paul’s condition was never diagnosed, but Sean has it together from his children: “Four daughters and two sons. My older daughters, Yael [35] He is in America and his journey was difficult. Coco [30]She hasn’t been diagnosed, I don’t think. The two youngest, they were chosen young because their mother [his wife since 2010, Joanne] I worked for people with special needs. They basically said, “Get Dad.” One has ADHD and is autistic and the other has ADHD and is also autistic. “Pearl is just like our baby, and Lulu, who has ADHD, is just me in underwear.” Tony Wilson, the nightclub impresario and star-maker immortalized by Steve Coogan in the film 24 Hour Party People, once said that Ryder was like W.B. Yeats. Ryder didn’t know who this was, and I’m not sure that’s the strictest analogy, but without a doubt, as a lyricist and just a person in the world, he delivers these sentences like an elite athlete.

None of this neurodiversity is news to Ryder, but it was a new discovery. Everything about his childhood, early fame, brushes with the law, brushes with death, and drug addiction suddenly made sense. He has been heroin-free for 20 years now and the only drug he takes is Ritalin: “That’s why I can sit here without… [he mimes squirming about] Messing with my bag.” Wait: him Ball bag? He smiles a little incredulously, like: “Are you stupid?” Almost everything he does is funny, because he never tries, and always seems surprised. “Ritalin is great. This ‘cousin’ of methamphetamine is great for me, because I can focus. But I don’t stress about it!” Although his brand doesn’t care, life in the public eye has inevitably left him alive to the prospect of being taken seriously. “It’s as if I’m saying, ‘I can’t read.’ What I mean to say is that I can’t spend more than a minute reading. I can literally He reads. But when I say, ‘I can’t read,’ people think I actually can’t read.”

24 Hour Party Person begins with Ryder stealing candy as a reception-age child, at the school where his mother worked, and is caught by her and his teacher. The scene was clearly engraved in his mind, but it did not stop him from going crazy. “My favorite things, when I was a little kid, were starting fires, dropping bricks off the highway bridge, putting things on the railroad tracks, being chased by transit police. And stealing.” When he was 10, he “burned something very big and expensive.” “What was it?” “I’m not saying that! It was really big! And expensive!” He got a job running telegrams when he was 15, just in time, because there was a charge of taking and deporting through the courts, which would have disqualified him. “It was like an episode of The Sweeney. The strippers would come in at dinnertime when we were getting telegrams, and Bernard Manning would do some place, taking telegrams to people who had lost power and they were hiding behind the sofa. With a gang of boys about the same age, they would deliver telegrams and mess around and steal packages.”

At 18, he had a foothold in the music industry, but it didn’t come too soon; He was lucky he wasn’t in the postal. It was five years before they released their first EP (Forty-Five in 1985), after signing to Factory Records. They spent that time searching for stolen items and going to the Hacienda, which opened in 1982. “When we started, none of us could play instruments. Neither could Paul Davis.” [keyboard]. sign [Day, guitarist] He was the only person who could read music and play gas [Whelan]the drummer, was still in school, it was like a punk ethic. Ryder had left school at 13, but there were other ways for like minds to meet, just by being on the Circle of Tears. “My thought process when we started The Mondays was: ‘I want to be in a band, I want to bird dance, I want to travel the world, I want to party all night, and I want to do drugs,'” Ryder wrote in his book.

“Everyone has had failures in the record industry,” he says, looking back. “That’s part of it. In a way, you wouldn’t be in this if you weren’t being exploited. But we make music for a living and that’s cool. I’m not doing proper hard work and I’m not in prison.” Happy Mondays were not widely selling at the moment of their arrival, so the following notes will be from 1990, their third album, Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Belyaches. Ryder talks a lot about the eclecticism of their sound, as no one could really place them, between post-funk and post-punk at the beginning, indie where they originally charted, and pop at their first crescendo, but what they came to represent was not so much one genre as a mixture of everything, something Manchester, something Hacienda, something trance. “The music before that was very ugly,” he says. “You had your mods, goths, punks, rockers. No doubt about it, E broke it all down.”

Ecstasy created a lot of moral panic, because of course it was drugs and illegal, but there was another side to it, which wasn’t talked about until much later: in the 1980s, when everyone was drunk and few people were on acid, there was a lot of fighting. By the early ’90s, when everyone was doing MDMA, love was weird in the air. Even people who didn’t take it had to adapt to it. Ryder and Pease were like the Sin Eaters of the post-morality era; Drug users, silent candidates to try everything and tell everyone, to prove that the new world was real.

There’s a story in the book where, within hours of arriving in New York for a concert in 1986, they were held at gunpoint while trying to hit up a stranger, because they had heard it was so intense that you would become addicted the minute you tried it. He writes this story with a kind of cheerfulness that’s not exactly surprising from a recovering addict, but you wouldn’t expect him to be quite so carefree. “It’s a very dangerous situation anyway, when you’re an addict and you have to score. Wherever you are. There’s a lot of crazy stuff, guns, shooting, when you’re young, that comes with it. When you get to about 50 or 40, and you straighten out, that’s when you say, ‘Oh, fuck me’. And the PTSD will kick in. You see a lot of crazy situations differently. But I don’t try to solve it. And that’s just what happened.”

That carefree, wandering, unearthed charisma caused rifts in the band. “Other people felt – and I’m using this as an example, this is not literally what happened – that we would go to Top of the Pops, and the door would be kept open for me and Bez, and as soon as we passed, the door would be let go. That’s because they never pressed – we got the front covers, so we would be recognized. You’d have Mark talking about strings, or our kid really trying to be the pseudo-intellectual, talking about While Bez and I would walk in and be ourselves, obviously angry and petrified, talking about We laughed and laughed so no one wanted to talk to us, and it really got to them.

When the Mondays split in 1993, it seemed premature – they’d been together for 13 years, but looked quite ’90s to the untrained eye – but there was a great deal of subsequent justification from critics that not only them, but also Factory Records, had sunk with their 1992 album Yes Please! It was recorded in Barbados, a location chosen because you couldn’t get heroin there and Ryder was an addict at the time. “Don’t mess with heroin,” he says seriously. “It’s not a party drug. You start on it and you’re pretty much on it until you die or get out of it 20 years later. It can’t be done on a weekend.” He was supposed to stay away from that, and instead became habituated to using cocaine. When they broke up, he and Pease were devastated, but “the proof of that was in what happened in those ensuing years,” he writes. “I heard damn it all from any of the rest of them in the public domain until the Mondays were fixed.”

Ryder hasn’t stopped working – he started Black Grape with Wags (of Paris Angels) and Kermit (of Ruthless Rap Assassins) the same year Happy Mondays broke up, and has appeared on TV, memorably dancing to The Word with Zippy and Rainbow’s Bungle (“Why don’t I do family TV?” he says exasperatedly. “I’ve got my mum and dad, I’ve got cousins”). But the rest of the ’90s only makes sense through the prism that he was away from his breasts. He sacked two Black Grape directors. They sued and were awarded £160,000 in compensation. “I could have paid them £10 a week, but instead I did what I did – I didn’t pay them – and that £160,000 turned into a lot of money.”

For 12 years, he had no control over his money. He couldn’t even go bankrupt because he would have lost control of his copyrights—and he just had to hand everything over to the recipients. Happy Mondays reformed in 1999, had some sell-out dates and played some festivals. The lineup was chopped up and changed slightly, with the members replaced by musicians from Black Grape. It’s hard to tell who was walking away from who because Ryder makes a point of profiling each person’s musical ability any chance he gets. “So Paul Davis [keyboards] Ever take us to court and say, “You fired me from my job,” you can just bring the piano into the courtroom and say, “Play me ba, ba, black sheep.” He won’t be able to do that.”

There would be no momentum, and certainly no appearances for I’m a Celebrity… (2010, 2023) until Ryder joined NA, and it wouldn’t happen until he got back together with Joe in 2004. “She was always in our circle. She’s been my friend for years. When the band took off, she kicked me out because she knew I was going to be in it.” It was not as if he had been waiting for love all his life – he married when he was 19 but “with Denise it only lasted a year. She joined the Territorial Army.” It was more that using heroin was the only thing that made him feel normal. “This is self-treatment, isn’t it? But Jo knew how to deal with people with special needs. She’s got a special person with special needs.” It doesn’t sound as romantic as written. But he says it like he’s the luckiest man alive.

24 Hour Party Person is published by A Way With Media (£45). The Shaun Ryder Q&A Tour returns to theaters this fall from October 1 to November 21.