Bez has both shoelaces undone and it’s making me nervous. Out walking his dogs, we’re up and over barbed wire, across streams and over gates. We bash through brambles and skid down slopes. I’m becoming fixated on the perilously trailing laces of his trainers and why he hasn’t tripped over them. Can he be such a thrill-seeker that a dog walk can be turned into an hour of jeopardy?
Of course he can. This is Bez, anarchic maraca-shaker, party person, the man Shaun Ryder, his Happy Mondays bandmate and partner in crime, says is a bad influence. Bez, whose real name is Mark Berry, has been in more scrapes than seems possible for one person. A small sample: knocking his teeth out in a motorbike crash at the age of 16, threatened with a gun when he and Ryder were trying to buy crack in New York, kidnapped and held hostage during another drug deal, smashing his body up in another motorbike crash in 1999 and then getting MRSA in hospital and ending up in a coma for a month.
Miraculously, at 62, he appears relatively unscathed by his decades of partying. Are people routinely surprised? “Yeah,” he says with a laugh. “That, for me, is the biggest compliment because it shows the steps I took, and it proves it’s never too late, because I didn’t make changes until I was 49.”
Bez lives in the middle of nowhere with his wife, Frou, and their two sausage dogs, Snoop and Yoko. He juices every day, eats only organic food, drinks filtered water and works out with weights in his garden. He grows his own vegetables, and this week took delivery of a polytunnel. When I turn up at his lovely cottage, down a rural track in Herefordshire, Frou is making soup with some homegrown courgettes. “We’ve been away a lot this year so it was one of the most unproductive years I’ve had here,” he says, when he shows me around his garden with its vegetable beds. To celebrate the 35th anniversary of their landmark Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches album, Happy Mondays have been on tour; they’re just back from Australia and New Zealand.
‘Our friendship’s probably stronger than it’s ever been’ … Shaun Ryder and Bez in 1987. Photograph: Stephen Parker/Alamy
There are other developments in Bez’s wellbeing. He gave up cocaine and sugar just after Christmas, and discovered intermittent fasting. “I had to find something else to throw myself into.” It was harder to give up sugar, he says. “The coke was quite easy because I only done it as a social thing.” He still, though, drinks tequila “like it’s going out of fashion” and hosts parties around the fire pit and bar he built.
He calls the dogs and we head out into the beautiful countryside surrounding the house. He loves it, he says. For several years around 2010 he lived on a commune, off-grid, in Wales. He moved to this cottage about 12 years ago but he brought the influence of the “Welsh aristocratic hippies”, as he calls them, with him. “I got into the permaculture lifestyle. You’ve got to look at ways to live your life when everything is corporately owned and corporately run. We’re going into more wars, threatened food shortages, and all that. You know what I mean? It’s more important than ever to take control of your own life.” He gets meat from local farmers and grows his own food. “I just like the idea of … I’m an anarchist at heart. One of the things I dream about is ending the monetary system as it is.”
While we’re at it, he’d also like to see freedom from social conditioning. In 2015, he stood for parliament in Salford and Eccles as the leader of the We Are the Reality party. Would he try it again? “I’ve got a party already set up, and if I ever so fancied I could leap back in,” he says. But he thinks what he wants is, sadly, “an impossible task”. As far as I can tell, this involves a revolution, including an end to capitalism. In his 2022 book Buzzin’, in which he comes across as not a little crankish, he writes that politics is “driven by the banking system and the International Monetary Fund and masonic forces”. At one point he urges his readers to Google the Great Reset, a Covid-era initiative that has been seized upon as proof that a secretive elite are creating a tyrannical world government. The idea has also been embraced by the far right and has associations with antisemitic tropes, as well as those on the extreme left. He writes: “I’m keeping some of my more controversial views to myself,” for fear of being cancelled, or written off as a crackpot.
He’s been a legendary drug-taker, but now he’s worried that even this is a way of controlling young people. He makes several references to MKUltra, the experimental CIA programme in the 50s and 60s to develop mind control drugs.
“There’s sheep everywhere now,” he says, which I take to be a reference to our zombified society, but he means actual sheep in the field we’ve just entered. The dogs go back on the lead. Anyway, no conspiracy theorist likes to be called a conspiracy theorist. (He’s also not the first pop star to be drawn to wild ideas.) That’s how you dismiss someone’s opinion, he says. “I can give people the books to read, and then it’s not madness, it’s not conspiracy. It’s what I’ve read.”
‘Now I say it with pride: “I’m a dancer”’ … at Glastonbury in 2000. Photograph: Hayley Madden/Madden/Redferns.
Bez is a prolific reader. He has trouble writing, but not reading. Ryder, who has been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, keeps urging him to get tested. “But I don’t really want diagnosing. I’ve got this far without knowing, so I can’t see the point. It’s going to make no difference in life now.” Reading, he says, is “my escape and I read all sorts”, adding he usually has about three books on the go. Currently, it’s one of his many esoteric books, another about the war in Ukraine and a month-by-month allotment guide. He worries about a world without books. “I’m going to build my own library. I read Samuel Pepys not long ago, and he built a great library, all these bookcases to house them, and I’ve decided now that I’ve got to build a library for my future family members, so they have access to a truth that maybe won’t be told through AI.” I follow Bez and the dogs down a path tangled with brambles. “Watch yourself there. They’re bastards when they get hold of you.”
The path to eccentric cultural icon is pretty much guaranteed if you’ve lived life as fully and wildly as Bez. But he’s still too edgy – the crime, the fringe ideas – to be fully considered a cuddly national treasure. In 2010, he was convicted of assaulting his ex-partner (the mother of one of his three sons); the court did acknowledge it was “at the lower end of the scale” of assault, but still granted his ex a restraining order. When he refused to do community service, in protest at the conviction, he was sentenced to jail for four weeks.
It was perhaps a glimpse of the life he might easily have had. “The Mondays sent me in a whole different direction from the one I was living in,” he says. He grew up in Salford and had been homeless since he was 16 – he clashed with his parents, especially his dad, a senior police officer – and was in and out of young offender institutions, mainly for burglary. (His sister became a corporate lawyer.) “I have had to apologise to my mum because I just thought it was normal, and it was far from normal. I was so out of control it was unreal, but I didn’t even think it was.”
Back in Manchester, friends kept saying he had to meet Ryder, and that they would click. “When we first met, we were a bit standoffish with each other. We met in a pub car park, and went down to his house that evening and by time the morning came, we were firm friends.” What is it that works in their relationship? “We’ve got a sexless marriage. That’s what we always say. We’ve had disagreements over certain things, but the band’s always held us together as well. Our friendship’s probably stronger than it’s ever been.”
‘I have had to apologise to my mum.’ Photograph: Francesca Jones/The Guardian
The Manchester music scene was exploding. He says it was Ryder who urged him – both of them on acid – to go on stage with the band at the Hacienda, when Happy Mondays were supporting New Order. Bez grabbed some maracas, performed his wild-eyed dancing, and is still doing it 40 years later. “Honestly, I can’t believe that I’m still getting away with it,” he says. “I came on to the stage by pure chance and I’ve been on it ever since.”
In his book, he gives the impression of someone unsure of his place in the band. “I sometimes felt like a bit of a fraud, taking the glory without having much talent,” he writes. But he brought Happy Mondays credibility, and good vibes. “It took me ages to own up to it,” he says. “When people used to ask, ‘What you do for a living?’, I’d try not to say the word ‘dancer’. But now I say it with pride: ‘I’m a dancer.’” But he says it took a while for the rest of the band to recognise his contribution. Happy Mondays fell apart in 1993, partly because the band were complaining Bez and Ryder were spending too much, though they’d go on to re-form. “We’re really good mates now; the band is stronger than ever,” Bez insists. There is even talk of a new album next year, he says.
Did Manchester in the 80s and 90s feel like a big cultural moment? “I never really think of it that way, but I always say that I don’t think we’ll see the likes of it ever again because it was the end of the analogue era, moving into this digital age we’re in now. I think it’s done mankind no favours whatsoever.” The music industry has changed. “There’s not the chances now that there used to be. I remember at one time [it felt as if] nearly everybody in Manchester was signed to some label and making music. I worry about how many young bands have got lost just because that support system ain’t there any more.”
When Happy Mondays made it big in 1990, sudden fame didn’t seem a huge deal to Bez, he says – he was already well known in Manchester. When he looks back at his drug consumption in the 80s and 90s, does he ever wonder how he did it? “No, because it wasn’t me just on my own – it was a whole section of society at the time. It was just normal behaviour among me and my friends.” He was always a “social user”, he says. “I’ve never had any addictions.”
‘I never wish for more.’ Photograph: Francesca Jones/The Guardian
Unlike Ryder, who became hooked on heroin. “I moved him in across my back garden once, to keep an eye on him,” says Bez. Bez tried heroin, he says, but it wasn’t the party drug for him. “I love going out, chatting to people, and sitting there nodding off and repeating yourself over and over again was not my idea of fun.”
And now another generation has got to know Bez through reality TV. “I’m definitely known a lot more because of that. It brings you a younger audience, and people might then have a look at the Mondays.” He won Celebrity Big Brother in 2005, and has been on Celebrity MasterChef and Dancing on Ice. He and Ryder make a hilarious pairing on Gogglebox. “It’s a great show for us: we get to sit there, drink a bottle of whisky, have some Guinness and just talk shit.” He has just started the ITV show Cooking With the Stars, in which celebrities and their chef mentors compete against other celebs. He had some trouble with meringue quenelles. “When you’re in that TV kitchen, the panic sets in,” he says. It was filmed a while ago. “I can’t remember what happened now, but the great thing that came from it was I had a great chef, Kate Austen, and I’ve now got four new dishes to my repertoire that are at the next level of food.”
He never made much money from Happy Mondays, he says – “I probably made more money out of television” – and certainly not from Black Grape, the band Ryder started afterwards. “We’ve been ripped off a lot; we possibly should have been rich. But you dwell too long on it, you just end up being bitter.”
Accidentally joining Happy Mondays all those decades ago, he says, “was a life-changing moment, that day I stepped on stage. I’m always so grateful for what I’ve had. I never wish for more. I always dread the day that it’s over. But I’ve got into my 60s now, a few years away from retirement.” What’s it like when they get together? Is it being like 22 again? “Yeah. That’s the mad thing about growing old. You might physically be older, but mentally you’re stuck where you was.”
By now, we’re on our way back to the cottage, trudging uphill. Does he have any regrets? “No, not at all. I wouldn’t be the man I am now if I hadn’t lived the way I lived. All I can say is I’ve expanded my own awareness, and for me, that is the meaning of life, really.” He’s not interested in giving life advice: “You’ve got to find that out yourself. I’ve always learned all my lessons the hard way.” But he’s been pretty lucky, hasn’t he? “Yeah, but you make your own reality, don’t you?” His shoelaces remain undone, but he’s unscathed.
Cooking With the Stars is on ITV1, ITVX, STV and STV Player on Mondays at 7.30pm