{"id":544252,"date":"2026-03-18T09:59:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-18T09:59:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/544252\/"},"modified":"2026-03-18T09:59:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T09:59:08","slug":"shaun-ryder-on-highs-lows-and-happy-mondays-heroin-isnt-a-party-drug-you-cant-just-do-it-at-the-weekend-shaun-ryder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/544252\/","title":{"rendered":"Shaun Ryder on highs, lows and Happy Mondays: \u2018Heroin isn\u2019t a party drug \u2013 you can\u2019t just do it at the weekend\u2019 | Shaun Ryder"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are thousands of pictures of Shaun Ryder and Bez in Happy Mondays<\/a>, from the mid- to late 80s, that run the gamut from mashed to wrecked. They don\u2019t always look that cheerful, but when they do, they look insanely fun. In Ryder\u2019s new memoir, 24 Hour Party Person, he quotes a critic: \u201cThe poorly educated might just call [Bez] a dancer, but he\u2019s the proprietor of good times.\u201d What Bez did for the band, the band did for the era: just went way too far, in an absolutely magnetic way.<\/p>\n

Ryder, in a Novotel hotel to the west of Manchester<\/a>, explains what drew the whole band together. \u201cWhen you are neurodiverse, you attract other people who are,\u201d he says. \u201cI would have said at the time we were all fucked-up loonies. I mean Bez [he launches into a spirited impression]: \u2018I\u2019m-not-fucking-neurodiverse\u2019\u2026 it\u2019s like, mate. You are. \u2018I\u2019m fucking not.\u2019 Mate, you are. The same with all of them. None of them have been tested and gone through the thing, but they are. All of them.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe difference between me and Our Kid [Paul Ryder, his younger brother, who died in 2022 aged 58], was that he didn\u2019t have the H in ADHD, the hyperactive bit, so he just came across as lazy. Wouldn\u2019t get out of bed. Always going for a nap. Like Brian the snail.\u201d But it\u2019s not laziness, he says. \u201cIt\u2019s part of his condition. He hasn\u2019t got that get-up-and-go, he\u2019s not motivated.\u201d He\u2019ll start a sentence in the past tense and by the end, his brother is still alive. He resists sentimentality like a cage fighter, though: \u201cMy brother couldn\u2019t get anything out of his mouth except to slag me off.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Me and Bez would just walk in and be ourselves\u2019 \u2026 Ryder, right, with Bez and Happy Mondays in 1991. Photograph: Mick Hutson\/Redferns<\/p>\n

Ryder, 63, was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in his 50s. Paul was never diagnosed, but Shaun has been piecing it together from his own children: \u201cFour daughters and two sons. My older daughters, Jael [35] is in America and had a hard ride; Coco [30], she\u2019s not been diagnosed, I don\u2019t think. The two youngest, they were picked up young because their mum [his wife since 2010, Joanne] worked in special needs. They basically said: \u2018Bring Dad in.\u2019 One of them\u2019s ADD and is autistic, and the other is ADHD, and also autistic. Pearl is just like Our Kid, and Lulu, who\u2019s ADHD, is just me in knickers.\u201d Tony Wilson, nightclub manager and star-maker, immortalised by Steve Coogan in the film 24 Hour Party People, once said Ryder was like WB Yeats. Ryder didn\u2019t know who that was, and I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s the tightest analogy, but unarguably, as a lyricist and just a person in the world, he slings out these sentences like an elite athlete.<\/p>\n

None of this neurodiversity is fresh news to Ryder, but it was a revelation. Everything about his childhood, his early fame, his brushes with the law, dicing with death and his drug addiction suddenly made sense. He\u2019s been clean of heroin for 20 years now and the only drug he takes is Ritalin: \u201cThat\u2019s why I can sit here without [he mimes squirming about] messing with my sack.\u201d Wait: his ball sack? He smiles slightly incredulously, like: \u201cAre you dumb?\u201d Almost everything he does is funny, because he\u2019s never trying, and always seems surprised. \u201cRitalin is fantastic. This \u2018cousin\u2019 of methamphetamine is fantastic, for me, because I can concentrate. But I\u2019m not pushing it!\u201d Even though his brand is not giving a shit, a life in the public eye has inevitably left him alive to the chance that he\u2019ll be taken too seriously. \u201cIt\u2019s like when I say, \u2018I can\u2019t read.\u2019 What I mean to say is I can\u2019t spend longer than a minute reading. I can literally read. But when I say, \u2018I can\u2019t read\u2019, people think I actually can\u2019t read.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018My thought process when we started was: \u201cI wanna be in a band, I wanna shag birds, I wanna travel round the world, I wanna party all night and I wanna take drugs\u201d\u2019 \u2026 Ryder in 2003. Photograph: Dan Chung\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

24 Hour Party Person opens with Ryder stealing toffees as a reception-age kid, in the school where his mother worked, and being busted by her and a teacher. The scene is emblazoned on his mind, clearly, but didn\u2019t deter his delinquency. \u201cMy favourite things, as a little kid, were starting fires, dropping bricks off a motorway bridge, putting stuff on railway lines and getting chased off by the transport police. And thieving.\u201d When he was 10, he \u201cburned down something really big and expensive\u201d. \u201cWhat was it?\u201d \u201cI\u2019m not saying! It was really big! And expensive!\u201d He got a job running telegrams when he was 15, just in the nick of time, because there was a taking and driving away charge going through the courts, which would have disqualified him. \u201cIt was like an episode of The Sweeney. Strippers on at dinner time when we\u2019re taking telegrams, Bernard Manning doing a spot, taking telegrams to people who are getting their electric cut off and they\u2019re hiding behind the settee. With a gang of lads the same age, delivering telegrams and fucking about, robbing parcels.\u201d<\/p>\n

At 18 he had a foothold in the music industry, but it didn\u2019t come a minute too soon; he was lucky not to be in a borstal. Five years passed before they released their first EP (Forty Five in 1985), having been signed to Factory Records. They spent that time noodling about on stolen stuff and going to the Ha\u00e7ienda, which opened in 1982. \u201cWhen we started, none of us could play instruments. Not Paul Davis [keyboard]. Mark [Day, guitarist] was the only person that could read music and actually play, Gaz [Whelan], the drummer, he was still at school, it was like punk ethics.\u201d Ryder had left school at 13, but there were other ways to meet like minds, just by being on the tearaway circuit. In his book, Ryder writes: \u201cMy thought process when we started the Mondays was: \u201cI wanna be in a band, I wanna shag birds, I wanna travel round the world, I wanna party all night and I wanna take drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ryder in the US in 1999. Photograph: Dave Tonge\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone gets screwed over in the record industry,\u201d he says in retrospect. \u201cThat\u2019s part of it. One way or another, you\u2019ve not been in it if you\u2019ve not been fucked over. But we\u2019re making music for a living and it\u2019s great. I\u2019m not doing a proper hard job and I\u2019m not in jail.\u201d Happy Mondays weren\u2019t mass market the minute they arrived, so the following observations will be from 1990, their third album, Pills \u2019n\u2019 Thrills and Bellyaches. Ryder talks a lot about the eclecticism of their sound, that nobody could really place them, between post-funk and post-punk at the beginning, indie where they originally charted, pop at their first crescendo, but what they came to represent wasn\u2019t any one genre so much as the melding of everything, which was a Manchester thing, a Ha\u00e7ienda thing, an ecstasy thing. \u201cMusic before that was very clanny,\u201d he says. \u201cYou had your mods, your goths, your punks, your rockers. No doubt about that, E collapsed all that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ecstasy created a lot of moral panic, because of course it was a drug and it was illegal, but there was another aspect to it, which didn\u2019t get talked about until long after: in the 80s, when everyone was drunk and just a few people were on acid, there was a lot of fighting. By the start of the 90s, when everyone was on MDMA, the love in the air was bizarre. Even people who weren\u2019t taking it had to adapt to it. Ryder and Bez<\/a> were like the sin-eaters of a post-moral age; drugs-eaters, silently nominated to try everything and tell everyone, to prove the new world was real.<\/p>\n

\u2018I\u2019m not doing a proper hard job and I\u2019m not in jail.\u2019 Photograph: Jamie Salmons\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a story in the book where, within hours of arriving in New York for a gig in 1986, they had been held up at gunpoint while trying to score crack off a stranger, because they\u2019d heard it was so intense that you would be addicted the minute you tried it. He writes that story with a kind of delight that\u2019s not exactly surprising from a recovered addict, but you don\u2019t expect him to be so carefree. \u201cIt\u2019s a high-risk situation anyway, when you\u2019re a junkie and you\u2019ve got to score. Wherever you are. Loads of mad things, guns, shooting, when you\u2019re young, that just comes with it. When you get to about 50 or 40, and you straighten up, that\u2019s when you go: \u2018Oh, fuck me.\u2019 And PTSD will set in. You do see a lot of fucking mad situations differently. But I\u2019m not trying to resolve it. That\u2019s just what happened.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

That nonchalant, fuck-around-and-find-out charisma caused rifts in the band. \u201cThe others felt \u2013 and I use this as an example, it\u2019s not literally what happened \u2013 that we\u2019d go to Top of the Pops, and the door would be held open for me and Bez, and once we\u2019d gone through, the door would be let go. That\u2019s because they never did press \u2013 we got the front covers, so we\u2019d get recognised. You\u2019d have Mark talking about strings, or Our Kid 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. It was a proper cliche!\u201d<\/p>\n

When the Mondays split in 1993, it felt premature \u2013 they\u2019d been together 13 years, but looked pure 90s to the untrained eye \u2013 but there was quite a bit of post-hoc rationalisation from the critics that not just they, but also Factory Records, had been sunk by their 1992 album Yes Please! It was recorded in Barbados, the location chosen because you couldn\u2019t get heroin there and Ryder was addicted by then. \u201cYou don\u2019t fuck around with heroin\u201d, he says solemnly. \u201cIt\u2019s not a party drug. You start on that and you\u2019re pretty much done until either you die or you get out of it 20 years later. There\u2019s no doing it at the weekend.\u201d He was meant to go cold turkey and instead he got a crack cocaine habit. When they split, he and Bez were gutted, but \u201cthe proof of the pudding was in what happened in those years afterwards,\u201d he writes. \u201cYou heard fuck all from any of the rest of them in the public domain until the Mondays reformed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bez and Ryder on Celebrity Gogglebox. Photograph: Channel 4<\/p>\n

Ryder didn\u2019t stall work-wise \u2013 he started Black Grape with Wags (from Paris Angels) and Kermit (from Ruthless Rap Assassins) the same year Happy Mondays disbanded, and he cropped up on TV, memorably dancing on The Word with Zippy and Bungle from Rainbow (\u201cWhy wouldn\u2019t I do family TV?\u201d, he says, indignant. \u201cI\u2019ve got a mam and dad, I\u2019ve got cousins\u201d). But the rest of the 90s only make sense through the prism that he was off his tits. He sacked two managers of Black Grape; they sued and won \u00a3160,000 in damages. \u201cI could have paid it off at \u00a310 a week, but instead I did what I did \u2013 didn\u2019t pay them \u2013 and that 160 grand turns into lots of money.\u201d<\/p>\n

For 12 years, he had no control of his money. He couldn\u2019t even go bankrupt because he would have lost control of his publishing rights \u2013 he just had to hand everything over to receivers. Happy Mondays reformed in 1999, had some sell-out dates and did some festivals. The lineup chopped and changed a bit, with members replaced by musicians from Black Grape. It\u2019s hard to pick apart who was walking away from whom because Ryder hares off to slate everyone\u2019s musical ability any chance he gets. \u201cIf Paul Davis [keyboards] ever took us to court and said, \u2018You sacked me from my job\u2019, you could just bring a piano into the courtroom and say, \u2018Play me Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.\u2019 And he wouldn\u2019t be able to.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018When the band took off, she binned me\u2019 \u2026 Ryder with his wife, Joanne, and children after leaving I\u2019m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! in 2010. Photograph: Rex Features<\/p>\n

There wouldn\u2019t be any momentum, and there definitely wouldn\u2019t be any I\u2019m a Celebrity \u2026 appearances (2010, 2023) until Ryder was in Narcotics Anonymous, and that wouldn\u2019t happen until he was back together with Jo in 2004. \u201cShe had always been in our circle. She was my girlfriend years ago. When the band took off, she binned me because she knew that I would be at it.\u201d It wasn\u2019t as if he\u2019d just been waiting for love his entire life \u2013 he married at 19 but \u201cwith Denise it only lasted a year. She joined the Territorial Army.\u201d It was more that taking heroin had been the only thing that made him feel normal. \u201cThat\u2019s self-medication, isn\u2019t it? But Jo knew how to deal with people with special needs. I sort of got me own private special needs person.\u201d It doesn\u2019t look that romantic, written down. But he says it like he\u2019s the luckiest man alive.<\/p>\n

24 Hour Party Person<\/a> is published by A Way With Media (\u00a345). Shaun Ryder\u2019s Q&A tour returns to theatres this autumn from 1 October to 21 November<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section, please click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are thousands of pictures of Shaun Ryder and Bez in Happy Mondays, from the mid- to late…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":544253,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[49,48,361,75],"class_list":["post-544252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544252\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/544253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}