Bez has both shoelaces undone and it\u2019s making me nervous. Out walking his dogs, we\u2019re up and over barbed wire, across streams and over gates. We bash through brambles and skid down slopes. I\u2019m becoming fixated on the perilously trailing laces of his trainers and why he hasn\u2019t tripped over them. Can he be such a thrill-seeker that a dog walk can be turned into an hour of jeopardy?<\/p>\n
Of course he can. This is Bez, anarchic maraca-shaker, party person, the man Shaun Ryder, his Happy Mondays<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Miraculously, at 62, he appears relatively unscathed by his decades of partying. Are people routinely surprised? \u201cYeah,\u201d he says with a laugh. \u201cThat, for me, is the biggest compliment because it shows the steps I took, and it proves it\u2019s never too late, because I didn\u2019t make changes until I was 49.\u201d<\/p>\n 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. \u201cWe\u2019ve been away a lot this year so it was one of the most unproductive years I\u2019ve had here,\u201d he says, when he shows me around his garden with its vegetable beds. To celebrate the 35th anniversary of their landmark Pills \u2018n\u2019 Thrills and Bellyaches album, Happy Mondays have been on tour; they\u2019re just back from Australia and New Zealand.<\/p>\n \u2018Our friendship\u2019s probably stronger than it\u2019s ever been\u2019 \u2026 Shaun Ryder and Bez in 1987. Photograph: Stephen Parker\/Alamy<\/p>\n There are other developments in Bez\u2019s wellbeing. He gave up cocaine and sugar just after Christmas, and discovered intermittent fasting. \u201cI had to find something else to throw myself into.\u201d It was harder to give up sugar, he says. \u201cThe coke was quite easy because I only done it as a social thing.\u201d He still, though, drinks tequila \u201clike it\u2019s going out of fashion\u201d and hosts parties around the fire pit and bar he built.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cWelsh aristocratic hippies\u201d, as he calls them, with him. \u201cI got into the permaculture lifestyle. You\u2019ve got to look at ways to live your life when everything is corporately owned and corporately run. We\u2019re going into more wars, threatened food shortages, and all that. You know what I mean? It\u2019s more important than ever to take control of your own life.\u201d He gets meat from local farmers and grows his own food. \u201cI just like the idea of \u2026 I\u2019m an anarchist at heart. One of the things I dream about is ending the monetary system as it is.\u201d<\/p>\n While we\u2019re at it, he\u2019d 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? \u201cI\u2019ve got a party already set up, and if I ever so fancied I could leap back in,\u201d he says. But he thinks what he wants is, sadly, \u201can impossible task\u201d. As far as I can tell, this involves a revolution, including an end to capitalism. In his 2022 book Buzzin\u2019, in which he comes across as not a little crankish, he writes that politics is \u201cdriven by the banking system and the International Monetary Fund and masonic forces\u201d. 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: \u201cI\u2019m keeping some of my more controversial views to myself,\u201d for fear of being cancelled, or written off as a crackpot.<\/p>\n He\u2019s been a legendary drug-taker, but now he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s sheep everywhere now,\u201d he says, which I take to be a reference to our zombified society, but he means actual sheep in the field we\u2019ve just entered. The dogs go back on the lead. Anyway, no conspiracy theorist likes to be called a conspiracy theorist. (He\u2019s also not the first pop star<\/a> to be drawn to wild ideas.) That\u2019s how you dismiss someone\u2019s opinion, he says. \u201cI can give people the books to read, and then it\u2019s not madness, it\u2019s not conspiracy. It\u2019s what I\u2019ve read.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018Now I say it with pride: \u201cI\u2019m a dancer\u201d\u2019 … at Glastonbury in 2000. Photograph: Hayley Madden\/Madden\/Redferns.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cBut I don\u2019t really want diagnosing. I\u2019ve got this far without knowing, so I can\u2019t see the point. It\u2019s going to make no difference in life now.\u201d Reading, he says, is \u201cmy escape and I read all sorts\u201d, adding he usually has about three books on the go. Currently, it\u2019s 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. \u201cI\u2019m 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\u2019ve decided now that I\u2019ve got to build a library for my future family members, so they have access to a truth that maybe won\u2019t be told through AI.\u201d I follow Bez and the dogs down a path tangled with brambles. \u201cWatch yourself there. They\u2019re bastards when they get hold of you.\u201d<\/p>\n