One morning in January 1992, Shaun Ryder was leaving a crack den in Barbados when he was set upon by a passing orangutan. “This huge f**king thing jumped down with an ominous thud and was standing in front of me, staring into my eyes,” the Happy Mondays frontman recalls in his new memoir, 24 Hour Party Person. “It was about the same height as me but twice as wide.”
The orangutan, whom the local press had dubbed Jack the Ripper, had escaped from a local zoo and was on a bit of a rampage around the island.
Much the same could be said of Happy Mondays. The “Madchester” ragamuffins had been packed off to the Caribbean to record their new album, Yes Please!, in the hope that the sun and the sea – and the distance from their old stomping grounds back in northern England – would encourage the group to focus on their second-favourite pastime (making music) rather than their favourite (taking drugs).
In his crack haze, Ryder puffed himself up and yelled at Jack the Ripper, who wisely pegged it. But there was no such option for Ryder and his bandmates: they’d been marooned, given the keys to Eddy Grant’s beachside Blue Wave studios, and warned not to come back to England until they’d finished their record.
But music hardly featured in their plans. They instead busied themselves smoking crack, crashing cars, sinking boats and, in the case of Ryder’s younger brother Paul, going through the advanced stages of heroin withdrawal. Watching in horror were the expensive producers that Tony Wilson, the head of Factory Records, had flown in to oversee the project: the Talking Heads rhythm section of Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth.
“There were drugs, there was blood. There was a lot of anxiety and fear. It was not a happy experience,” Frantz (still shell-shocked) would tell me years later. “It’s remarkable any record got made, let alone that there are actually a few good tracks on it. If we’d been regular record producers we’d have walked out.
“We were totally unprepared for what went on down there. It was a big cultural difference. We always thought of music as an art form, a way to expand your mind and create something that will be remembered. Happy Mondays were from a rough part of Manchester. For them it was a job, a way to get as much money as possible. It was a whole different outlook.”
Shaun Ryder on an inflatable chair on a beach in the US in 1999, complete with England football top and a bottle of vodka. Photograph: David Tonge/Getty
Ryder recalls those delirious days of talking smack, taking smack and threatening to smack an orangutan with a degree of fondness. Down the line from his home in Salford, in Greater Manchester, he certainly does not have the air of a man crippled with regret. But he is also relaxed about having closed that chapter of his life and kicked all his bad habits. To borrow from the title of the 1995 album he made with Black Grape, his post-Happy Mondays project, it’s great when you’re straight.
“I get asked now all the time, ‘I bet you miss the old days, don’t you?’ No way would I want to be 18 or 20 again. Or 30,” the 63-year-old says. “I’m happy as I am. I’m enjoying it more than ever. The Mondays are better than ever as well. We might all be old now. The sex and drugs are gone. We’re just left with the rock’n’roll.”
In addition to publishing his book – a must-read if you’re a fan of drug-fuelled anecdotes – Ryder is preparing for a Happy Mondays tour that marks the 35th anniversary of their album Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches, and includes two nights in Dublin.
Shaun Ryder (third left) with Happy Mondays photographed this year, ahead of their latest tour.
Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches is a masterpiece. It is also an artefact from a moment in popular culture: that halcyon pre-Britpop era when bands, invariably from Greater Manchester, redirected the excess, optimism and all-round boggle-eyedness of the rave scene into fun-fuelled alternative pop.
The Mondays were in good company, alongside the likes of The Stone Roses, The Charlatans and Inspiral Carpets. All favoured wide-bottomed pants and mop-top haircuts, while their songs fused indie rock, funk and acid house, and celebrated the joy of being young, carefree and thoroughly off your rocker.
There was a genuine camaraderie between the bands – an affinity that extended to other Manchester groups, including Take That, whom Ryder refused to disparage in the press at the time despite copious invitations to do so. The glory days of the baggy scene also gave us one of the greatest moments of pre-Britpop popular culture: the episode of the BBC music show Top of the Pops, in November 1989, that featured both The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays (joined by Kirsty MacColl, who mimed backing vocals).
“It felt really special. The mad thing about it was, most of the people on Top of the Pops, the crew and all that… they didn’t know who we were,” Ryder says. “So I said, ‘Why don’t we change? I’ll go and play the drums in The Stone Roses, Mani [the Roses’ bassist] can be lead singer [in the Mondays].’ We was all going to change and no one would notice. At the last minute everyone pulled out of it. I’m glad they did, because it wouldn’t have been one of my best ideas, though it would have been funny.”
Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches is celebrated today as the ultimate baggy record, up there with the first Stone Roses album and The Charlatans’ early hit The Only One I Know. It certainly has some of the Mondays’ definitive moments, from the rollicking single Step On to the hilarious Kinky Afro, which features some of Ryder’s sharpest, funniest lyrics (“Son, I’m 30 / I only went with your mother ’cause she’s dirty”).
‘The Bummed album was the one where we were all on the ecstasy. Pills ’n’ Thrills, some other drugs had come into play by then’
— Shaun Ryder on Happy Mondays
But, despite its reputation, Ryder doesn’t look back on it as the Mondays’ “ecstasy” record. That title belongs to its predecessor, Bummed. By the time Pills ’n’ Thrills came along he had embarked on the open-ended crack bender that, come Barbados, would see the band literally push themselves to the brink (and Factory Records’ precarious finances with them).
Considering the quantities of substances consumed during its making in Los Angeles, it’s a miracle that Pills ’n’ Thrills didn’t become a debacle of Yes Please! proportions. Ryder credits the producer Paul Oakenfold with cracking the whip and keeping him, his bassist brother (who died in 2022, aged 58) and Bez – real name Mark Berry – their maracas-shaking “vibes” man, on the straight and narrow. Working out of Capitol Studios in Hollywood, Oakenfold also arranged for Ryder to record Kinky Afro with the same microphone that Frank Sinatra had used.
Bez and Shaun Ryder perform with Happy Mondays in 1990. Photograph: Stuart Mostyn/Redferns
“The Bummed album was the one where we were all on the ecstasy. Pills ’n’ Thrills, some other drugs had come into play by then. The way we were working as well was different,” Ryder says. “We were working with beats and sound. Instead of the drummer and guitarist twanging and banging away for hours and hours while we got a tune, Oakie was putting the beats down.
“And then the guitarist, Mark [Day], would put some guitar to the beats, our Paul would put some bassline to the beats, Gaz [Whelan] would put some drums on it. As quick as the beats were coming out, I was writing the songs. I’d write a song a day – it was really quick. They put us in apartments in Los Angeles. It was very glamorous, a Butlin’s sort of place. We thought it was great. Swimming pools and Jacuzzis.”
Pills ’n’ Thrills was a high point not just for the Mondays, but for Madchester. Things came crashing down almost immediately afterwards, as the pressure to follow up their debut ripped the Roses asunder, while the Mondays embarked on their self-sabotaging speed run in Barbados.
It was all over by 1993, which was when Ryder moved to Mallow, in Co Cork, with his first wife, Oriole Leitch, daughter of the folk legend Donovan (a long-term resident of the county). Ryder was only in Cork for 18 months, but he has vivid memories of his time there, including his run-ins with another party animal abroad, the late Oliver Reed.
Ryder knew how to live in the fast lane, but the actor put him thoroughly to shame, particularly when it came to his fondness for an old-fashioned pub brawl.
‘It makes you who you are. You hide stuff. I can’t concentrate long enough to read stuff. I can’t spell. It explains a lot’
— Shaun Ryder on his ADHD diagnosis
“I only went to pubs that he had been in. Every time I’d walk in a pub and Oliver had just been in, somebody [would have] kicked off, or he kicked off with somebody. And then he had Donovan round the corner as well, meditating. So it was a funny, funny old time.”
Carnage in Barbados and the consequent delayed release of Yes Please! contributed to the financial collapse of Factory Records, the storied UK record label also behind the rise of Joy Division and New Order.
The role Ryder personally played in the demise of Factory is a point of contention, but he was painted as the villain in 24 Hour Party People, Michael Winterbottom’s riotous biopic of the label, which shows him refusing to surrender the Yes Please! master tapes until an exasperated Wilson (played by Steve Coogan) hands him a bundle of cash.
Steve Coogan and Shirley Henderson as Tony and Lindsay Wilson in 24 Hour Party People.
“If I was a punter going to watch that movie, I’d think it was really funny. It is a good film. But it’s a caricature of everybody. It’s a caricature of Tony. It’s a popular film and that.
“I suppose I was portrayed as a bit of a dickhead in it. I’ve seen worse. The film they made about Sid Vicious [Sid & Nancy], some of the portrayals of the people in that – Paul Cook [the Sex Pistols drummer] – was absolutely ridiculous. You’ve just got to expect that, haven’t you?”
He and Wilson may have had their ups and downs, but the Svengali paid Ryder the highest compliment he could when he compared his lyrics to the poetry of WB Yeats – something that continues to befuddle Ryder. “Well, I can honestly say I’ve never read Yeats. I haven’t. I can’t concentrate long enough to read anything longer than a magazine article. Tony was always very nice when he talked about me.”
In 2020 Ryder was diagnosed with ADHD – four of his six children have the condition, too – which he believes explains much of his waywardness and delinquency in his youth. “It makes you who you are. You hide stuff. I can’t concentrate long enough to read stuff. I can’t spell. It explains a lot.”
Still going strong: Mikey Shine, Bez and Shaun Ryder of Happy Mondays perform at The Barrowland Ballroom, March 2024, in Glasgow, Scotland. Photograph: Roberto Ricciuti/Redferns
Becoming a rock star was, he suspects, his way of dealing with ADHD. “When we first took off with the Mondays, Andy Rourke [The Smiths’ bassist] said to me, ‘When you’re in a band you can get away with anything. You can park your car in someone’s garden.’ I’ve had a newspaper column, I’ve written books, I’ve presented TV programmes. When you’re in a band you can do anything.”
Ryder was, of course, upset by the death of Gary “Mani” Mounfield, of The Stone Roses, in November 2025. It came as a terrible surprise to many, but not to Ryder, who was aware that the bassist was in poor health. “It didn’t shock me. He was poorly for a long time. I expected him to go before he did.”
Ryder also caught one of Oasis’s reunion shows in Manchester – and was delighted to see a comeback done properly. “Better than ever. More mature, more together. It’s still rock’n’roll but tight, really tight. Liam sounded brilliant. Some journalists were saying it was going to be a caricature of him. But it wasn’t: it was brilliant. He was better and the band was better, tighter than ever.”
In Happy Mondays, the Noel v Liam dynamic is replicated by Ryder’s friendship with Bez, the band’s dancer and spirit focus. They had a brief falling-out 20 years ago, but before and since they’ve been tight as brothers. Soon they will film their latest season of Celebrity Gogglebox for Channel 4, in which they sit on a couch and banter about Clarkson’s Farm and whatever else is on. Through the ups and downs, the bust-ups and the drug busts, they’ve always had each other. As they prepare to tour again, they remain best pals taking on the world together.
Celebrity Googlebox: Bez and Shaun Ryder on the TV show. Photograph: Channel 4
“We’ve had a sexless marriage for 32 years. It’s a marriage-business partnership. It will remain sexless. We start recording the new series of Gogglebox in about four weeks’ time. Then we’ve got the tour coming up. I’m with him all the time. It’s like being married.”
Shaun Ryder: 24 Hour Party Person is published by A Way with Media. Happy Mondays play Vicar Street, Dublin, on Wednesday, April 22nd, and Thursday, April 23rd