by Shaun Ryder
We went to see the Ramones at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester when I was seventeen, which was great. Afterwards we got on the bus home to Salford and were on the top deck at the back. You could smoke on buses then. On the bus I met a girl called Denise Lomax, so I started chatting her up, and we arranged a date and I got her number. She was a really cool girl and we started seeing each other. She was two years older than me, at nineteen, and really into her music. It was actually Denise who first introduced me to Joy Division, when she lent me her copy of Unknown Pleasures.
At that stage I loved David Bowie and Tamla Motown and all sorts of music. The Man Who Fell to Earth, in 1976, had been another big influence on me, more in fashion than music. David Bowie with his duffel coat on and that wedged centre parting, like a mushroom centre parting, had a great effect on what became terrace fashion. But the two biggest influences, ones that made me want to form a band and be in the music business, were David Essex and Joy Division.
I never saw Joy Division live, but my Denise did. The fact that they were a local band made a huge difference to me. They also had side partings and dressed almost like we did; they had a slight Perry Boy thing going on. They looked cool.
I remember Ian Curtis dying. I was working at the post office and one of the older posties said, ‘I see your mate’s dead …’ I thought he was talking about a fellow postie who was a mate of mine and a bit mental, but he actually meant Ian.
As I’ve already said That’ll Be the Day and Stardust were important influences on me because they were about the whole lifestyle and fashion and everything that came with music. They made me think, ‘I’m having some of that.’ But it was Joy Division that made the whole thing seem like a more realistic prospect. They had a big effect on me. By the end of the 70s I knew I wanted to be in a band, and it didn’t seem quite such a ridiculous proposition any more.
CHAPTER THREE
‘If you’ve got to be told by someone, then it’s got to be me’
BEFORE WE STARTED Happy Mondays, it sometimes seemed that all we ever did was talk about being in a band. It was mainly me and Our Matt, and two other kids from Little Hulton – Martin Langford, who we called Langy, and John Jordan, who we called Jordy. Langy was a mate of Our Matt’s who joined the post office after me. In fact, he still works for the post office now. I saw him just recently at my Uncle Tom’s funeral and reminded him, ‘Fucking hell, Langy, you were in the band before we were a band, when we were just pretending we were a band, before we had any instruments!’ He was never very musical, though. He was a music-lover, but he wasn’t a musician, so I don’t think he worries that he missed his vocation in life.
We got our first gig before we had any instruments or had even played a note. Our Matt, the daft bastard, managed to blag us a gig supporting the punk rock band Salford Jets. We used to go and watch the Jets all the time, from about 1977 onwards, at the pubs on the top road near our house. They played all those places, right up to 1979, when they played the Bulls Head in Walkden. We used to talk to the singer, Mike Sweeney, after the gigs and one night Our Matt said, ‘Come on, Mike, give us a gig. We’re called No Exit,’ and Mike said, ‘All right, get your gear and come down on Saturday.’
After we left we were like, ‘Matt, you fucking knob, what are you doing? We haven’t got any instruments, and none of us can play anything even if we did. We’ve got no songs, apart from these stupid little rhymes we’ve made up, and yet you’ve got us a gig!’ So it never happened in the end.
Years later, when the Mondays had made it, Mike Sweeney said to me, ‘Yeah, I remember when we gave you a support slot and you played with us,’ and I had to correct him and say, ‘Mike, we didn’t!’
After that, we decided we would actually try and start a band, because it looked like we would be able to get a gig. I pushed the others into it, really. Someone gave Our Matt an old battered acoustic guitar that only had two strings on it, and I fancied being a drummer so I got myself a drum kit from a music shop in town. I can remember one afternoon trying to bang something out with Our Matt in the front room of Lanky’s house. Lanky got hold of an old guitar as well, and I can’t even remember what Jordy had.
I quite quickly sacked off my drum kit, because I couldn’t get into it. I sold it to a kid called Tony Martin, who is actually still gigging around Manchester in some sort of Blues Brothers tribute act, although he’s not still using my old kit, obviously, as it would be over thirty years old now. After that we picked up a little drum machine, one of the first ones that came out, and used that instead. I think my dad’s still got it somewhere.
We recorded a very, very early demo at my nana’s house, with just three of us – me, my dad’s mate Barry and Our Matt on guitar – and a drum machine. I had tried to write some songs, but I was basically just copying Ian Curtis. Barry was playing some basic barre chords, and Our Matt was strumming alongside him, while I was singing ‘Voices in my heeaaad …’ over the top of it.
Then Our Paul got a bass, and he learned to play much quicker and better than Our Matt, Lanky or Jordy. He couldn’t read music, but pretty quickly he got to the stage where he could play something when he heard it. So Our Paul was definitely in; he was part of the band. At that time we had nowhere to rehearse, so we would go down and try and jam in the front room at Lanky’s house. This was around late summer of 1980 and we didn’t even have a name or anything.
There was a bloke at the post office called Alan Day, who was sort of my boss. He was my AI, which stands for Assistant Inspector, and he told me that his son played guitar. I’d probably caused Alan a bit of mither with my various scams, like the Yellow Pages incident. When the new editions of the Yellow Pages needed delivering, you could book yourself in to do a few rounds and you got something like 10p for each one you delivered, so I booked myself in to deliver five thousand of the fucking things. At the time, the council estates didn’t get much post, so they would have more houses on each walk (which is what we called a postman’s round). On one walk in Little Hulton there were seven hundred houses, but they only got mail once or twice a week, whereas a walk on a private estate would only deliver to 250 houses, but each house would get mail every day. So I booked myself in to deliver Yellow Pages on quite a few walks around Little Hulton and claimed the money, which was about £500 – a lot of money back then – but never actually delivered them. I just dumped them. They were turning up on wasteland, in ponds, on railway bankings. I was terrible.
Mark Day was also a postie, and by coincidence he worked with my old fella who suggested we hook up together. Me and Our Paul went round to his house one day and had a bit of a jam in his loft. Mark was all right, if a bit dull, but more importantly he could already play guitar and he could read music as well, which none of the rest of us could. In fact, none of the other Mondays ever learned to read music. Mark lived in his mam and dad’s little terraced house in Wardley. The living room was only a bit bigger than a pool table, but they had a piano in it, which looked ridiculous. Because the piano didn’t really fit in the tiny room, they’d mounted the fucking thing on the wall. So when you came in through the door, you had to edge round this piano that was sticking out of the wall. I wouldn’t mind, but I never even saw anyone playing it. Maybe it was just a fashion accessory – let’s mount this fucking piano on the wall and take up half the room. A very odd set-up.
We came up with the name Happy Mondays during those very early rehearsals in Mark’s loft. Our Paul claims it was his idea, but that’s not quite how I remember it. I remember it as more of a joint effort. I think it was Mark who actually suggested the Mondays bit. It’s a terrible name for a band, really, but we all quite liked it for that reason. It’s a bit cheesy, a bit gay and it was kind of the opposite of what we were like, so we thought it might work because of that. We always thought it was a shit name, but that was kind of the point. We didn’t want a scally type of name; we wanted a name that jarred with us.
We started to practise in Mark Day’s loft through the end o
f 1980 and into early 1981, when we could get past the piano on the wall, and also we’d get together the odd time at my nana’s. Our Matt had a second-hand electric guitar by then, so he jammed with us now and then.
Eventually we settled on me singing. All of us had a go, but I was better at it than the others, and when we started trying to write our own songs I was also better at rhyming and coming up with the words. I never demanded to be the singer; we just sort of naturally reached the conclusion in those early rehearsals that I should do it – it just felt right. We played a few cover versions at first, including a couple of Joy Division numbers, as we had to know we could actually play together before we could figure out what we sounded like and try and write our own songs.
By 1981 I was properly seeing Denise. She was a pretty cool girl, Denise, and, as I said, it was her that first got me into Joy Division and bands like that. She knew we were trying to get a band together and her little sister Bev told her that someone in her class at school played drums. This kid was called Gary Whelan and she introduced me to him, but I actually knew who Gaz was already anyway. I’d seen him about because he lived near my nana and he was good at football. We had never really spoken to him because he was about three years younger than me and a year younger than Our Paul. I was eighteen then and Gaz was only fifteen and still at school. But when Bev introduced us he seemed all right, so I was like, ‘Okay, he’s got a drum kit and he can play the drums and he’s got a side parting, Farah trousers and a Pringle jumper … he’ll do.’
That seemed like a line-up to us – vocals, guitar, bass and drums – and it began to feel like a group. But then I got approached in the street by this kid, Paul Davis. I can still remember Paul Davis as a little kid. He was a freak of a boy, with this huge big head and a dead little body. I didn’t know his name then, but I’d seen him cycling around years earlier, when he must have been about five years old. One day, a few weeks after Gaz had joined the band, Paul Davis marched up to me in the street and blurted out, in his high-pitched little voice, ‘Do you know Gaz Whelan?!’ and I said, ‘Yeah.’
‘Is he in your band!?’
‘Yeah.’
‘He’s a dick! Get ’im out! I wanna be in your band. Get ’im out, he’s a dick! Lemme be in it!’
I’m thinking, ‘Rrrrright. Okay. You’re fucking mad, you.’ So I said, ‘What’s your name again? Paul Davis?’ Then next time I saw Gaz I said, ‘Do you know Paul Davis?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, course I do, he’s my best fucking mate!’
We had just started renting a little school hall at a primary school in Swinton for our rehearsals. All Saints Primary, I think it was called. It’s not there any more – it’s been knocked down. I think even then people were referring to it as my band, even though I never did. It was just kind of obvious that I was the leader of the gang.
Paul Davis turned up at rehearsals giving it, ‘I wanna be in your band!’
He came with a bass, so I said, ‘We’ve got a bass.’
And he went, ‘Yeah, but I wanna play bass.’
So I explained again: ‘Look, Our Paul plays fucking bass.’ Jesus Christ. He was a real fucking oddball, even then. He wouldn’t take no for an answer.
He turned up at our rehearsals again the next week. ‘I really wannabe in your band. Look, I’ve brought me bass, I’ll plug in, I’ve got this now and I’ve got that!’
I’m like, ‘Listen, you dick! We’ve. Got. A. Fucking. Bass. Player. Can you even play bass?’
‘No, but I’ll learn!’
‘But Our Paul can already play bass!’ Fuck me. The kid was mental, y’know what I mean? Just wouldn’t take no for an answer.
So we said, ‘Right, okay, get a keyboard,’ because that was one instrument we didn’t have. So then PD was in.
Unfortunately, PD could not play keyboards. I’m not convinced he can even now. In the Mondays, particularly towards the end, big chunks were programmed, so basically he was just triggering samples and patterns. The parts that had been programmed were put into his keyboards by someone else, but he acted as if he was playing all of it.
After the Mondays split, Andy Rourke from the Smiths said to PD, ‘Right, I’m getting a new band together. Paul, you can play keyboards.’
A couple of weeks later I got a phone call from Andy saying, ‘Fucking hell, that lad can’t play a note. How the fuck did he wing it through your band?’
So, that was the original Happy Mondays line-up before Bez joined. Shaun Ryder, Paul Ryder, Mark Day, Paul Davis and Gaz Whelan. X, Horse, Cowhead, Knobhead and No Arse.
We always called each other by our nicknames; we hardly ever used our real names. I was originally called Horse because my surname’s Ryder. Horse rider. Then they started calling me X, because I was doing little drug deals here and there and it did my head in when we were in the pub or on the street and someone would blurt out, ‘Shaun, have you got any weed? Have you got any whizz?’ and I would have to take them aside and go, ‘Will you stop shouting my fucking name out! I’ll sort you out, don’t worry.’ So PD said, ‘Oh, you think you’re some sort of secret agent do you? OK we’ll call you “X”.’ So I became X, and Our Paul then became Horse, and my old fella was Horseman.
PD was just called Knobhead because that’s what he was, an absolute plum. But a nice plum, in the early days. Harmless. An idiot nutcase. A funny kid. It was only after the band took off and people started taking what he said seriously that he became annoying. He’d hit the whizz and the cocaine, which didn’t do him any favours, and he became even more of a nutcase.
Mark Day was Cowhead because he looked like a cow, and he sounded like a cow with his big dopey voice, or Moose. Gaz Whelan was either No Arse, because he had no arse, Ronnie, after Ronnie Whelan, or Pepe Le Pew, because he’d always fart when he walked into a room. He’d cock his leg and leave his scent everywhere.
My dad helped us out quite a bit in the early days. Just before we started he had stopped going out and playing gigs himself, so I suppose he transferred his enthusiasm and energy to us. From then on he was living his fantasy through us. He was just as enthusiastic about the band as we were, if not more so. He wanted to drive the van, set the equipment up, tune the guitars and do everything. It would have been a lot harder in the early years without his help. He even ‘acquired’ some of our equipment. It wasn’t unknown for him to walk into some working men’s club or venue, unscrew the speakers and walk out with them. Or part of an amplifier, or a mic stand. We got our equipment from wherever we could in the early days.
Horseman would come down and set everything up for us at rehearsals. I didn’t want to sound ungrateful, but what we really wanted him to do was set everything up for us, make sure it was working and then leave. You don’t want your dad around when it’s your little gang trying to make music, do you? ‘Will you just leave us to it, Dad?’ It was nothing personal – no one would ideally want their dad around in that situation. But he would be like, ‘It’s my bloody equipment, so I’m staying!’ He even got the name Happy Mondays put on a sticker across the windscreen of his old Renault 5. You know when couples would have ‘Daz and Sharon’, or whatever? Horseman had ‘Happy Mondays’.
He really helped us out in the early years, but it affected our relationship for a long time. As I say, when we first started out he would do everything, hump gear and do the soundcheck and the monitors, but when you reach a certain level with a band you can’t have one person doing everything, and he never got that. You need specialists. My old fella was still doing the sound on stage, mixing the monitors, when we played Wembley Arena for the first time, years later. I couldn’t hear myself properly and I was trying to tell him, and he just went, ‘It sounds fine to me,’ and I’m going, ‘I can’t fucking hear myself!’ We got into a row during the gig and he ended up coming across the stage and punching me, in front of ten thousand people.
Because my dad had been a singer, but never really made it past the local pubs and club scene, there was a little bit of rivalry between us,
simmering underneath. He was also still quite young when the Mondays kicked off, as he was only a teenager when he had me. It’s not healthy to be in competition with your dad, or your son, and it affected our relationship for a long time. We’ve got on much better over the last ten years or so, but it was only when I reached about forty that we stopped trying to be in competition.
When we first started writing our own songs, they were just full of in-jokes, because we didn’t really think about anyone else hearing them. We were just writing songs for us, so they were full of our little catchphrases, observations, nicknames and references to films we liked. We did take the band quite seriously from the off, though. No one else would be allowed into rehearsals, it was just us. In a way it was the first thing in my life I had taken seriously, or at least the first thing I had put as much effort into as I did into stealing and making money. I suppose subconsciously we were beginning to think it might be a way out for us. None of us had a trade, or any great prospects.
Not that Mark Day ever saw rock ’n’ roll as a great prospect. Mark is a very good guitarist, but he was never cut out to be in rock ’n’ roll – he’s just too square. Even back then, when he was nineteen and we’d only just started the band, he’d complain, in his dopey cow voice, that ‘Rock ’n’ roll’s not a proper job. You don’t get a pension with it.’ That’s the whole point, mate. That’s why you get into rock ’n’ roll. Because you don’t want a proper job. You don’t get into rock ’n’ roll if you’re worried about your final salary pension. For fuck’s sake. Mark didn’t even give up his job as a postie until we had been on Top of the Pops a couple of times. The first time we did To p of the Pops, with the Stone Roses in 1989, Mark had to get back up to Manchester afterwards so he could do his fucking post round the next morning.