There are countless photos of Shaun Ryder and Bez from their Happy Mondays days in the mid-to-late 80s, showing them in every state from tipsy to completely wrecked. They don’t always look happy, but when they do, they look like an absolute riot. In Ryder’s new memoir, 24 Hour Party Person, he quotes a critic who said: “The poorly educated might just call [Bez] a dancer, but he’s the proprietor of good times.” What Bez did for the band, the band did for that era: they went way too far, in the most captivating way.
Sitting in a Novotel west of Manchester, Ryder explains what brought the band together. “When you are neurodiverse, you attract other people who are,” he says. “Back then, I would have said we were all messed-up lunatics. I mean, Bez”—he launches into a lively impression—”‘I’m-not-fucking-neurodiverse’… it’s like, mate. You are. ‘I’m fucking not.’ Mate, you are. The same with all of them. None of them have been tested or gone through the process, but they are. All of them.”
“The difference between me and Our Kid [his younger brother, Paul Ryder, who died in 2022 at 58] was that he didn’t have the H in ADHD, the hyperactive part, so he just came across as lazy. Wouldn’t get out of bed. Always taking a nap. Like Brian the snail.” But it wasn’t laziness, he explains. “It’s part of his condition. He didn’t have that get-up-and-go; he wasn’t motivated.” He’ll start a sentence in the past tense and by the end, he’s talking as if his brother is still here. He fights off sentimentality like a cage fighter, though: “My brother couldn’t get anything out of his mouth except to slag me off.”
Ryder, now 63, was diagnosed with ADHD in his 50s. Paul was never diagnosed, but Shaun has been putting the pieces together from his own children: “Four daughters and two sons. My older daughters—Jael [35] is in America and had a tough time; Coco [30], she hasn’t been diagnosed, I don’t think. The two youngest were picked up early because their mum [his wife since 2010, Joanne] worked in special needs. They basically said: ‘Bring Dad in.’ One of them has ADD and is autistic, and the other has ADHD and is also autistic. Pearl is just like Our Kid, and Lulu, who’s ADHD, is just me in a skirt.”
Tony Wilson, the nightclub manager and star-maker immortalized by Steve Coogan in the film 24 Hour Party People, once compared Ryder to W.B. Yeats. Ryder didn’t know who that was, and I’m not sure it’s the perfect comparison, but there’s no arguing that, as a lyricist and just as a person, he delivers these sharp, off-the-cuff sentences like a pro.
None of this neurodiversity talk is new to Ryder, but it was a revelation. Suddenly, everything about his childhood, his early fame, his run-ins with the law, brushes with death, and his drug addiction made sense. He’s been clean from heroin for 20 years now, and the only drug he takes is Ritalin: “That’s why I can sit here without”—he mimes fidgeting—”messing with my sack.” Wait: his ball sack? He gives a slightly incredulous smile, as if to say, “Are you dumb?” Almost everything he does is funny because he’s never trying to be, and always seems surprised by it. “Ritalin is fantastic. This ‘cousin’ of methamphetamine is fantastic for me because I can concentrate. But I’m not promoting it!” Even though his whole brand is not giving a damn, a life in the spotlight has made him wary of being taken too seriously. “It’s like when I say, ‘I can’t read.’ What I mean is I can’t spend longer than a minute reading. I can literally read. But when I say, ‘I can’t read,’ people think I actually can’t read.”When we started, my thought process was: “I want to be in a band, I want to sleep with women, I want to travel around the world, I want to party all night, and I want to take drugs,” Ryder said in 2003.
The story begins with Ryder as a young child stealing toffees at the school where his mother worked, only to be caught by her and a teacher. That moment stuck with him, but it didn’t stop his rebellious streak. “My favorite things as a little kid were starting fires, dropping bricks off a motorway bridge, putting things on railway tracks, and getting chased off by the transport police. And stealing,” he recalls. At age 10, he “burned down something really big and expensive.” When asked what it was, he replied, “I’m not saying! It was really big! And expensive!”
By 15, he got a job delivering telegrams just in time, as he was facing a charge for taking and driving away a vehicle, which would have disqualified him from the job. “It was like an episode of The Sweeney. There were strippers on at dinner time while we were delivering telegrams, Bernard Manning performing, taking telegrams to people whose electricity was being cut off while they hid behind the sofa. With a group of lads the same age, delivering telegrams and messing around, stealing parcels.”
At 18, he had a foothold in the music industry, narrowly avoiding being sent to a borstal. It took five years after signing with Factory Records for the band to release their first EP, Forty Five, in 1985. In the meantime, they spent their time experimenting with stolen equipment and hanging out at the Haçienda, which opened in 1982. “When we started, none of us could play instruments. Not Paul Davis on keyboard. Mark Day, the guitarist, was the only one who could read music and actually play. Gaz Whelan, the drummer, was still in school. It was like punk ethics,” Ryder explains. He had left school at 13 but found like-minded people on the rebellious circuit.
In his book, Ryder writes, “My thought process when we started the Mondays was: ‘I want to be in a band, I want to shag birds, I want to travel around the world, I want to party all night, and I want to take drugs.'”
Looking back, he says, “Everyone gets screwed over in the record industry. That’s part of it. One way or another, you haven’t been in it if you haven’t been messed over. But we’re making music for a living, and it’s great. I’m not doing a proper hard job, and I’m not in jail.”
Happy Mondays didn’t become mainstream right away, so their breakthrough came with their third album, Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches, in 1990. Ryder often talks about the eclectic nature of their sound—a blend of post-funk, post-punk, indie, and pop—which came to represent not just one genre but the fusion of everything. This was a Manchester thing, a Haçienda thing, an ecstasy thing. “Music before that was very cliquey,” he says. “You had your mods, your goths, your punks, your rockers. There’s no doubt about it—ecstasy collapsed all that.”
Ecstasy sparked a lot of moral panic because it was an illegal drug, but there was another side to it that wasn’t discussed until much later. In the 80s, when most people were drunk and only a few were on acid, there was a lot of fighting. By the early 90s, when MDMA became widespread, the atmosphere was filled with an unusual sense of love. Even those who weren’t taking it had to adapt. Ryder and Bez became like the sin-eaters of a post-moral age—drug-takers, silently chosen to try everything and share their experiences, proving the new world was real.There’s a story in the book where, within hours of arriving in New York for a gig in 1986, they were held up at gunpoint while trying to buy crack from a stranger. They’d heard it was so intense you’d be addicted the moment you tried it. He writes about that incident with a kind of delight that isn’t exactly surprising from a recovered addict, but you don’t expect him to be so carefree. “It’s a high-risk situation anyway, when you’re a junkie and you need to score. Wherever you are. Loads of crazy things—guns, shootings—when you’re young, that just comes with it. When you get to about 40 or 50, and you straighten up, that’s when you think: ‘Oh, fuck me.’ And PTSD sets in. You do see a lot of those insane situations differently. But I’m not trying to resolve it. That’s just what happened.”
That nonchalant, “fuck around and find out” charisma caused rifts in the band. “The others felt—and I use this as an example, it’s not literally what happened—that we’d go to Top of the Pops, and the door would be held open for me and Bez, and once we’d gone through, it would be let go. That’s because they never did press—we got the front covers, so we’d get recognized. You’d 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 drunk and stoned, roll a joint, talk nonsense 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 cliché!”
When the Mondays split in 1993, it felt premature—they’d been together 13 years, but looked pure ’90s to the untrained eye—but there was quite a bit of post-hoc rationalization from critics that not just they, but also Factory Records, had been sunk by their 1992 album Yes Please! It was recorded in Barbados, a location chosen because you couldn’t get heroin there, and Ryder was addicted by then. “You don’t fuck around with heroin,” he says solemnly. “It’s not a party drug. You start on that and you’re pretty much done until either you die or you get out of it 20 years later. There’s no doing it at the weekend.” He was meant to go cold turkey and instead developed a crack cocaine habit. When they split, he and Bez were gutted, but “the proof of the pudding was in what happened in those years afterwards,” he writes. “You heard fuck all from any of the rest of them in the public domain until the Mondays reformed.”
Ryder didn’t stall work-wise—he started Black Grape with Wags (from Paris Angels) and Kermit (from Ruthless Rap Assassins) the same year Happy Mondays disbanded, and he appeared on TV, memorably dancing on The Word with Zippy and Bungle from Rainbow (“Why wouldn’t I do family TV?” he says, indignant. “I’ve got a mom and dad, I’ve got cousins”). But the rest of the ’90s only make sense through the prism that he was off his head. He sacked two managers of Black Grape; they sued and won £160,000 in damages. “I could have paid it off at £10 a week, but instead I did what I did—didn’t pay them—and that 160 grand turns into lots of money.”
For 12 years, he had no control of his money. He couldn’t even go bankrupt because he would have lost control of his publishing rights—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’s hard to pick apart who was walking away from whom because Ryder hares off to slate everyone’s…He never misses a chance to poke fun at his musical ability. “If Paul Davis [keyboards] ever took us to court and said, ‘You sacked me from my job,’ you could just bring a piano into the courtroom and say, ‘Play me Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.’ And he wouldn’t be able to.”
‘When the band took off, she binned me’ … Ryder with his wife, Joanne, and children after leaving I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! in 2010.
There wouldn’t have been any momentum, and certainly no appearances on I’m a Celebrity (in 2010 and 2023), until Ryder joined Narcotics Anonymous—which didn’t happen until he and Jo got back together in 2004. “She had always been in our circle. She was my girlfriend years ago. When the band took off, she binned me because she knew what I’d be like.” It wasn’t as if he’d spent his whole life waiting for love—he married at 19, but “with Denise it only lasted a year. She joined the Territorial Army.” The truth was, heroin had been the only thing that made him feel normal. “That’s self-medication, isn’t it? But Jo knew how to deal with people with special needs. I sort of got my own private special needs person.” On paper, it might not sound romantic. But he says it like he’s the luckiest man alive.
24 Hour Party Person is published by A Way With Media (£45). Shaun Ryder’s Q&A tour returns to theatres this autumn, running from 1 October to 21 November.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs based on Shaun Ryders reflections about his life career and experiences with Happy Mondays
About Shaun Ryder Happy Mondays
Q Who is Shaun Ryder
A Shaun Ryder is a British singer and songwriter best known as the frontman of the bands Happy Mondays and Black Grape He was a central figure in the Madchester music scene of the late 80s and early 90s
Q What were Happy Mondays known for
A They were known for mixing indie rock with dance music funk and psychedelia creating a chaotic and hedonistic sound that defined the Madchester era Their live shows and public image were famously wild
Q What does Shaun Ryder mean by Heroin isnt a party drugyou cant just do it on weekends
A Hes speaking from personal experience stating that heroin is highly addictive and destructive Unlike some drugs people might use recreationally heroin quickly takes over a persons life making it impossible to control or use casually without severe consequences
About His Career The Music Scene
Q What were the highs of Shaun Ryders career
A The highs include leading Happy Mondays to massive success defining a cultural movement critical acclaim for albums like Pills n Thrills and Bellyaches and their legendary performances at the Haienda nightclub and festivals like Glastonbury
Q What were some of the lows he experienced
A The lows were deeply tied to severe drug addiction which led to financial ruin band breakups legal troubles health issues and personal chaos The bands disastrous 1992 US tour funded by a label advance spent on drugs is a famous low point
Q How did drug use affect Happy Mondays music and career
A Initially some argue it fueled their creative chaotic energy However it ultimately became destructive leading to unreliability internal strife the bands initial breakup in 1993 and nearly costing Ryder his life and career
Q Did Shaun Ryder recover from his addiction
