by Shaun Ryder
Just after we started getting the band together, I was in the Wishing Well one night and it kicked off, as usual. Our lot were there from Salford, and there was a bunch of lads from Swinton there who wanted a ruck. Gaz was with the Swinton lot and one of them said to him, ‘You know him, don’t you? Ryder from Little Hulton?’ and Gaz said, ‘Nah, I don’t know him, I’ve never met him in my life.’ We’d been fucking rehearsing for three or four weeks already. Proper Judas. In fact, I could say Gaz has betrayed me three times. Once in the Wishing Well, once when the Mondays split up, and once more recently when he left the band again.
Our first gig was at Wardley Community Centre in Swinton, near my nana’s house. I actually remember it pretty well. I was nervous so I got a bit pissed and stoned to take the edge off it. Well, I actually got very pissed and stoned. PD didn’t play that first gig with us as he wasn’t quite ready. He was coming to rehearsals but hadn’t quite got it together to go on stage. I remember it felt pretty rammed, but it was only a small room, so there were probably about twenty-five people there. After we finished our set, these girls came up chatting to us. Our first gig and girls wanted to speak to us because we were in a band. But PD, the knobhead, came up and just blurted out, ‘We don’t want to talk to you!’, screaming, ‘Hey, fuck off,’ so the girls did one. I turned to him and said, ‘What did you say that for, you dick?’ That’s what he was like. Nice one, PD.
Denise and I got married on 22 May 1982. She was twenty-one and I was nineteen. If someone got married at nineteen nowadays, you’d think they were mad, but it wasn’t a big deal back then. That’s just what everybody did. I wasn’t pressurized into it or anything. You’d think my dad would have pulled me aside and said, ‘What you doing lad? Aren’t you a bit young?’ Certainly if one of my kids turned round to me at nineteen and said they were getting married, I’d just laugh and say, ‘You’re just a child, you’re a baby! What are you doing?!’ But it was a different world back then. Especially round our way. My mam and dad were married and had me by the time they were nineteen, and they’re still together today and have had a long and successful marriage. Ian Curtis was married at nineteen as well. Although that didn’t last, for obvious reasons. Bernard (Barney) Sumner got married pretty young when he was in Joy Division. None of my pals even said anything to me at the time, either, because most of their parents had married young, and a few other people our age were starting to get married. We thought we were really grown up at nineteen then, but we were just kids really. There’s no way I was ready for marriage. But when you left school, round our way, most people didn’t think, ‘Right, I’m going to go out and have a career and do this and do that with my life.’ They just left school, found a job and got married. That was it. I wasn’t making any grand gesture about settling down or anything. I certainly wasn’t thinking, ‘That’s it. That’s me now. I’m going to stop going out and settle down.’ Not for a minute.
On the wedding day itself I was totally embarrassed about what I was doing. We got married at St Edmunds in Little Hulton, but I wasn’t there on time. My mam had to come and drag me out of the pub for the service. I was having a pint when I should have been waiting at the altar. I was actually also tripping, all my pals were. I don’t think Denise knew I had taken acid on the day, but she knew I was on something – she wasn’t stupid. I think she just thought that I was stoned. The Mondays were all at the wedding, apart from Bez, who I’d yet to meet. Gaz and PD were only sixteen and I’m not sure if they’d even left school.
After the service, when our wedding car drove down the main road, it must have looked like there was just a bride in it. Just Denise sat there in her wedding dress on her own, because I was hiding. I was crouched down with my head below the window so no one could see me, because I was so embarrassed. Nothing to do with poor Denise – I was just embarrassed about the whole wedding thing. I can’t even remember if we had a honeymoon.
When we got married we moved into a house in Tyldesley, one of those Legoland-type semi-detached Barratt homes, which was a couple of years old and cost us £15,000. I think Denise realized quite quickly that being married to me wasn’t what she wanted. She was two years older than me, and everyone knows girls are more mature than boys at that age anyway. She also came from a big army family. Her dad and her mam were both in the army and her dad was some big sergeant who had been based all over, so she had been to boarding school. As soon as we got married she grew up and joined the real world, and went and joined the TA. I think she began to think, ‘Hang on a minute, I’m married to a kid here who’s just into his music. Now I’m a bit older what I actually want is an army type of bloke, and an army type of life.’
But nothing really changed for me when we got married. I was still going out boozing and to nightclubs and trying to get the band sorted. Denise was into music, so she had liked the idea of me being in a band at first, but she just thought it was a temporary thing. When we got married and got a house, I was supposed to forget all that and ‘grow up’. The band was now just childish and a bit wank to her. She thought we were a load of shite. I was also smoking a hell of a lot of weed, which she didn’t like.
Denise and I were both children when we met, but when we married she became an adult and I almost regressed. I was getting more into the band, and I got the sack from the post office not long after that. It had been coming for a while. They knew I was robbing stuff and pulling all sorts of scams, so they sent the Investigations Branch after me. The IB were ex-police detectives who were employed by the post office. I’d been there for a few years by now, and I’d seen plenty of people join the post office just so they could rob stuff. But most of the mugs were so thick they just nicked stuff on their own patch and got caught within a couple of weeks and carted off. Robbing from the Royal Mail was an automatic prison sentence back then. You had to sign the Official Secrets Act when you joined and if you got caught there was no fannying about like there is now, when you can get a twelve-month conditional sentence and go and do some community service. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred you got sent down. Since I first started as a messenger boy, I’d picked up on every trick that the IB had to catch people out, and how they worked.
If you got to eighteen and you weren’t driving, you became a real postman. You didn’t necessarily have a round; you could be on indoor sorting. I did a bit of time in Newton Street, bit of time on Kings Road in Old Trafford, and then I ended up in Walkden, which was where I got the sack. I had a round then, and one day I clocked the IB following me. They knew I was pulling scams and were determined to catch me. So when I got to the end of a cul de sac I knocked on the door of a house where I knew the owners, explained I was being followed, and they let me jib through the house and out the back, while the IB were still waiting for me outside.
I used to take acid before I went out on my round sometimes, and another postie had already grassed me up for that. I had a lot of enemies at the post office by this stage, people who were pissed off that I was getting away with murder. The final straw was one day when I was tripping my box off on my round again. There was a little horrible mongrel dog at a pub on my walk, and every time you tried to deliver the mail to the pub it would attack you and try and bite you, ‘Yap! Yap! Yap!’ This particular morning I was on acid, this little pissing dog tried to bite me again and I just flipped and thought, ‘You know what? I’ve had enough of you, you little fucker!’ and picked it up and bit the thing. I bit the fucking dog and it yelped, then I threw it over the fence. Someone saw it and reported me, so I was up for that and for taking drugs. They suspended me on full pay for a few weeks – it might even have been a couple of months – while I was waiting for some hearing, but I knew what was coming, and sure enough they sacked me.
After I got the sack from the post office, I decided to hustle about on the dole and spend more time on the band. Denise wasn’t too happy with that, obviously. She was working behind the counter in the post office in Swinton and she’d come home to find me and the band and
a few other pals listening to music, smoking weed and dropping acid. I was the first one of our lot to get a house, so everyone would pop round to get stoned. Denise would come home and see us all off our heads, drinking cans of beer, and go mental. She really was like a fucking raging bull, so I started calling her Bull.
Bull hated me smoking weed, and hated it even more when I used to do little deals to make a bit of extra cash. I started to go to Moss Side now and again to buy a few ounces of weed, which I’d split and then knock out in fiver bags. Once I had a mound of it on my glass coffee table when all of a sudden there’s a knock at the door and I look out the window and there’s two coppers standing there. Not bobbies on the beat, or from a Panda car – these were high-ranking bobbies. Fuck. My arse absolutely went because I thought it was coming on top. If you don’t know what ‘coming on top’ means, it’s kind of a generic saying for when you’re in the middle of a situation that is in danger of getting out of hand; either you’re about to get rumbled for something or it’s about to kick off. Either way, if things are coming on top you have to deal with it.
I closed the living room door to try and stop the smell getting out, and answered the front door to see what they wanted. It turned out all they were doing was going from door to door advising people on security because there had been a few robberies in the area, so I just listened politely to them and then they fucked off.
I never told Bull half of what was going on in that house. Half the deposit and the mortgage payments on our house had originally come from scams at the post office. As far as she was concerned they were savings, but I never told her dick.
After Ian Curtis had died, Joy Division had become New Order, adding Stephen Morris’s girlfriend Gillian Gilbert on keyboards. Joy Division had never made it to America, but New Order were really influenced by their early trips to New York and its dance scene, and their time there working with people like the producer Arthur Baker. Together with Factory Records, New Order decided to open a nightclub in Manchester based on New York clubs such as Danceteria and Paradise Garage. They called it The Haçienda, which they took from a situationist quote, and it opened on 21 May 1982, the night before my wedding.
New Order were the main band on Factory at the time and a lot of the money that was spent opening the club and keeping it going in the early years came from their pocket, as Hooky never lets anyone forget. The Haçienda couldn’t have been more different to the other clubs in Manchester, like Rotters and Oscars, which were all proper old-school nightclubs. Oscars even had tablecloths on the tables. The Haçi just felt super cool in comparison. I’d never been to New York, so it felt more German or European to me at first. It was a huge futuristic warehouse space, and even though it could be quite empty and draughty some nights, you knew it was an important place; it felt like a place where things could happen.
Our Paul went to the opening night, and probably went more than me at first – he was really into going and watching bands there. I would go with him and saw some great early gigs, like the Smiths, Orange Juice and Nico, but I was also doing other things, and I was still married.
When I did start to go regularly, I would see musicians from Factory like Barney or Hooky from New Order in there, but I never mithered them. I thought New Order were great, but I was never one of those who went up talking to people I didn’t really know, and I certainly wasn’t going to ask anyone for an autograph. Even when we eventually joined Factory and I became a bit friendly with Barney, I would never ask him questions or advice about being in a band.
Our next gig was a battle of the bands in Blackpool. My dad had found out about it through someone at the post office. It was in this weird venue with a kind of tinsel gold backdrop – a proper cabaret type of club, real Phoenix Nights tackle. We had put a few of our own songs in the set by then. They had terrible titles like ‘Comfort and Joy’ and ‘Red’, and they never saw the light of day, but they were a start. Someone actually emailed my manager, Warren, recently, saying, ‘I bought this demo tape off Paul Davis who said it was an early Happy Mondays demo. These are the songs on it. Is it real?’ and just by looking at the song titles I could tell it was. PD had obviously kept the early demos and photographs, then sold them to some obsessive Mondays fan.
We actually managed to record a couple of demos in the days when we were rehearsing at All Saints primary school, because my dad had bought a four-track from Johnny Roadhouse in town, one of those four-tracks that comes in a suitcase. He helped us record those demos. ‘Comfort and Joy’ and ‘Red’ were on the first one, then the later one had songs like ‘The Egg’ and ‘Delightful’. By this stage, we were taking the band pretty seriously, practising quite religiously twice a week and beginning to think we might be able to make something of it. I think even my dad thought we were good, or at least thought we had something.
It was when I was married to Bull that I took heroin properly for the first time. I’d had my first taste of it in blowbacks, just round at people’s houses at a party or whatever. The other person would smoke it, sucking it in through a tube, and then blow it back into your mouth through the tube. It’s not as strong a buzz. It’s like a second-hand heroin buzz.
The first time I smoked it myself properly was one night when Bull had gone to bingo with her mam. Me and a mate decided to get some gear that night, and we didn’t have that much dough, so we only got a fiver’s worth each. We were both up for it, neither of us pushed the other one into it. Smack then, in late 1982, was actually easier to get than weed or hash at some points, because it had come flooding in. Sometimes it seemed like everyone had heroin but hardly anyone had hash.
When you first do heroin, you either love it or hate it. Even if it makes you sick, which happens to a lot of people the first time they take it, the chances are you will probably have it again, because you enjoy it after your stomach calms down. But when I smoked it that night, I straight away had this instant sort of Ready Brek glow, this invincible ‘I don’t give a fuck’ feeling.
My mate smoked his and just completely passed out and puked while he was unconscious. Which wasn’t ideal, because watching him gurgle on his vomit was ruining my nice buzz.
I then clocked the time and realized I had to go and pick up Bull from fucking bingo, which was a right ball-ache. In the end I had to get hold of my mate, who was still passed out, drag him out to my car and stick him in the back seat while I went and picked up Bull. Her mam wasn’t with her, thank God. I was driving a 120Y Datsun at the time, which looked a bit like Starsky and Hutch’s car, except it was a Datsun and a sort of mustardy colour. So not quite as cool as Starsky and Hutch.
I don’t think Bull knew I’d done heroin that night. She clocked I was wasted, that was fucking obvious because I was still pinned the next day, but I think she just thought I’d been smoking a load of weed or hash. I was still definitely wary of getting involved with the gear. I knew it was serious tackle, because it had been set in my head as a little kid when we were told by the police when they came to our school how addictive and dangerous it was. I was like ‘Woooaahh, I’ve got to be really careful what I’m playing with here.’ Especially as I’d already seen mates sucked in. There were quite a few of my pals who were at it, big time. My best mate at the time had gone from smoking to digging in a matter of weeks and you could see the effect on him. He didn’t smile or dance any more. It was horrible to watch.
That’s what we called injecting – ‘digging’ – and people who were injecting were called ‘diggers’. I was never under the illusion that heroin wasn’t quite as bad if you smoked it – I’ve never deluded myself like that. I’m just not a needle fan. I don’t think it’s macho or sexy to stick needles in your arm, so I was never going to be a digger. But once you could smoke it, then it seemed much more doable. It seemed an easier decision: ‘OK, I’ll have a go.’ It was months before I tried heroin again, and even then I only had it a couple of times before I left it out altogether for a couple of years.
Obviously by t
he time the Mondays split most of the band had one vice or another. Eventually we were all either doing cocaine, taking heroin or smoking crack. Everyone, apart from Gaz Whelan. But at the same time they were all saying to me, ‘This band’s getting ruined because you’re taking heroin and you’re smoking crack and you’re doing this.’ All of them pointing the finger at me. But we’ll get to that later.
After the battle of the bands we played another couple of gigs that my dad sorted out in youth and working men’s clubs around Salford and Bolton. But we didn’t want to be playing those types of places for ever, as no one was going to spot us playing a youth club in Bolton. I knew we needed to be going the other direction, into town. We got our first gig in Manchester at the Gallery, which was at the corner of Peter Street and Deansgate. The Gallery could be a bit moody, but all those gaffs that were late-night joints back then were like that – places such as the Cyprus Tavern, opposite Legends on Princess Street. We used to go to the Gallery on Saturday nights, when they played a lot of black music.
Our Matt did a poster advertising the gig; it was the first artwork he ever did for the Mondays. He used a photograph of a United fan from the 50s, a kid with a side parting and an old-school short back and sides, who looked like a very early Perry Boy. Me and Our Paul, PD and Gaz fly-posted them all over town.
It was a midweek night and there were about forty people there, mostly our mates. Lloyd Cole and the Commotions were supposed to be playing that night, but they’d just had a hit, so they cancelled. That gig at the Gallery was the first time we got listed in the Manchester Evening News, which made it seem a bit more real. Not that the paper ever helped us at all when we were starting out. It made me laugh years later when the Evening News journalist Mick Middles wrote a book about me and the Mondays, as he was one of those who always ignored us. Even when ecstasy took off and they had this bloody cultural revolution on their doorstep, it took the national press to write about it first before the Evening News realized what was going on.