Twisting My Melon

by Shaun Ryder

  We then had to go out and bloody tour Yes Please!, which was something I was not looking forward to. It was horrible. We had plenty of loyal fans out there who were still into the band, but it was a pretty dismal experience playing that album every night. We took Stereo MCs on tour as support, and they blew us away every night. They were on the up and they sounded fresher than the songs off Yes Please!

  I was still on and off the gear, but during that tour I was definitely hard at it. At that time, whenever I had to do something that I really didn’t want to do, I turned to heroin for solace. Heroin is the perfect drug if you don’t want to have any feelings, because it just masks everything and allows you to get on and do things you really don’t want to do. By the time we got to the end of the tour I would even smoke heroin at the side of the stage. I didn’t give a fuck. I’d sit in Dry Bar and pull out my tinfoil. PD, Our Kid and Mark Day had their own vices too, they were just sneaky with it. I would go round to someone’s house to score and they would say, ‘Oh, your kid’s just been here …’; or ‘Oh, you know when you left yesterday? Paul Davis came round just after …’; or ‘Oh, Mark Day’s just been …’ So they were all shouting at me, saying, ‘You’re ruining this band, ’cos you’re doing crack and you’re doing heroin.’ But they were all bang at the drugs. They just did it in secret. Or thought they were doing it in secret.

  Our Paul was still with Donovan’s daughter Astrella, so she came on the tour, and her younger sister Oriole came along for the ride as well. Oriole was only twenty and had a young kid called Sebastian, but she wasn’t with the father. I wasn’t interested during the tour because I was on gear and there were also a lot of birds around. But at the end of the tour, as we were getting back into Manchester, she said, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do now. I’ve got nowhere to go.’ Her son Sebastian was living with her mum and dad in Ireland, and Our Paul and Astrella didn’t want her at their place. Because Trish had left, I had an empty house in Didsbury, so I said she could come stay at my place, knowing full well I would end up shagging her. Which I did, within a week or so, and then we were an item.

  ‘Sunshine and Love’ was supposed to come out as a single in October, but it was delayed for a couple of weeks because Factory couldn’t find a pressing plant that would give them credit. That’s how dire the situation had got. They were so broke that Tony was scrabbling around trying to borrow money from here and there to make a video for the single. He was pissed off at me because I wasn’t really putting any effort into promoting it, but I just didn’t believe in the record, so I couldn’t do it.

  When Factory finally went under a couple of weeks later, it had become almost inevitable. It didn’t just happen one day; it was dragged out over a few weeks, and the writing had been on the wall for at least a year. When Factory went down, Nathan was trying to negotiate us a deal with EMI. That’s when we had the infamous meeting with EMI’s head of A&R, Clive Black. The myth is that I walked out of that meeting, and away from that deal, and said I was off for a KFC, meaning heroin. But, as usual, that’s not even half the story. What really happened was we had a meeting in the Mondays’ studio in Ancoats, and Clive Black came down to listen to some of the tunes we’d been working on. I’d laid down vocals on a few, only about four tracks, but enough to give them a flavour. There was an early version of ‘Kelly’s Heroes’, which ended up on the first Black Grape album, and a track called ‘Walking the Dog’ that became ‘Playground Superstar’, which we eventually released twelve years later after we’d re-formed. But the only music that was played in that meeting was instrumentals. That’s how deluded the rest of the band were. They thought they were the future, even though they’d fucked up on Yes Please!, and Si Machan, our sound guy, was trying to show off what a great producer he was.

  Clive just said, ‘Where’s the vocals, where’s Shaun’s vocals?’

  Si was like, ‘Er … I’ve lost those tracks.’

  When I walked into that meeting I was honestly up for signing the deal. It was the rest of them who pissed on the fire of that meeting, not me. They just wanted to play these instrumentals they’d written and PD was like, ‘Listen to this one I’ve got!’ and it was some plinky-plonky keyboards stuff. That’s when I just went, ‘Fuck this … I’m going to get some Kentucky.’ I just went out to the car park, sat in my car and got smashed. But me walking out of that meeting wasn’t me splitting the Mondays up, and no one who was in that meeting could have thought that. I was just fucking angry, furious, that they had turned up at the meeting with all these Trumpton instrumentals, and none of the tunes that I’d been working on. Clive Black made it crystal clear to Nathan after the meeting that that’s what he was interested in, the stuff I’d been working on with vocals, and that pissed the others off even more.

  After that meeting, it was the rest of the band that told Nathan they were splitting the Mondays. Not me. It was their decision. At that stage, Nathan himself decided he’d had enough. I tried talking to the other members, individually and collectively, to their faces and on the phone. Me and Bez begged them not to split the band. I even told them, ‘Look, if you want to go off and do your own thing for a bit, fine. Do that. But don’t split the Mondays.’ I knew how lucky we were to have got to the stage where we were, and I could see the danger of chucking it all away. We’d had a great ride, for five or six great years, and made three good albums. We’d just had one bad album that had been slagged. And rightly slagged too.

  At the time I’d have done anything for the band to stay together. Not just for me, but for the rest of them as well. As a young kid, your mates mean a lot to you. As you grow older it’s more about your family and your kids, and you put them first. But when you’re younger, your mates mean everything. Or they did to me. Perhaps I was naïve in that respect. But we had started off together and I really would have done anything for us to stay together.

  But the rest of the band were really bitter and resentful of me and Bez, and the drugs just compounded that. Any inadequacies they had they took out on me. I was on drugs and I couldn’t sing in their eyes. Guess what? They couldn’t really play. They weren’t virtuoso musicians, but that didn’t matter. That’s not what made the Mondays special, and they never seemed to fully grasp that. As a band, I thought Happy Mondays were great, but I also thought we were getting away with it to a certain extent. We were lucky that there was something in the chemistry of that bunch of lads that had turned some individually reasonably average musicians into a really great band. There are better musicians than the Mondays playing in bands all over the country, but they’re in shit bands, unoriginal bands, with no spark, no chemistry. With the Mondays, the whole was always greater than the sum of the parts.

  When the band split and the others walked away, me and Bez were saying, ‘You’re fucking mad! What the fuck are you going to do?!’ But they really thought they were musical geniuses. I tried telling them, ‘Stop deluding yourself and blagging yourself.’ Take a long hard look in the mirror. You’re fucking lucky. ‘You’re a knobhead … you’re stupid … and you’re up your own arse. Get fucking real.’ But they just couldn’t see it.

  Me and Bez were seeing it as a gang – we’re all in it together, and we all watch each other’s backs – but they didn’t have that camaraderie. I saw PD a couple of years ago when Bez’s ex, Debs, got engaged to Martin Moscrop from ACR and they had an engagement party. I thought, ‘PD’s had fifteen years to mull it over – he must have realized the mistake they made by now.’ But no. By that stage he was blaming Muzzer for not keeping some of our entourage away from the band.

  There was no dough left in the pot when we split. We’d been getting over £100,000 a show at our height, but we were spending a lot as well, on everything from huge lighting rigs to catering to flying wives and girlfriends around. Various members of the band would also be saying, ‘I need eight thousand pounds,’ ‘I need ten thousand pounds,’ and putting their hands in the Mondays’ pot, and when we were on tour we’d stick everything on
the room and run up our room bills. Mark Day was the only one who didn’t really do that, and when the Mondays finished he said, ‘Where’s my money? I never spent mine,’ but I’m afraid the answer was, ‘Well, you should have dived in like everyone else, because there ain’t anything left!’

  I even found out that the others had been having discussions amongst themselves about sacking me and replacing me with Rowetta, as Chris and Tina had suggested, or even Everton, our security guard. That’s how little they thought of me at the end. They believed that they were musical geniuses and I was just the guy who wrote the shit words.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘clean up your messes’

  WHEN I REALIZED Happy Mondays were definitely over, I was annoyed more than anything else. Annoyed at the lack of loyalty and annoyed that the others couldn’t see that the only chance we had of doing anything in this game was if we stuck together. All of them, from PD, a kid who just about taught himself to play keyboards, to Mark Day, who was a great guitarist but had no vision – what else were they going to do? When he was in the Mondays, Mark was always complaining, ‘This is not a proper job, it’s got no pension.’ Then after the split he ended up selling encyclopaedias door to door. I hope they gave him a pension.

  The others started popping up in the Manchester Evening News saying stuff like, ‘I’d rather go back on the dole than work with Shaun Ryder again.’ Words that soon came back to haunt them. All of the rest of the band, apart from Mark Day, ended up on the dole. What’s the saying? Be careful what you wish for.

  In the aftermath of the split, I was just holed up at home in Didsbury. I didn’t go spouting my mouth off like everyone else, although it would have been so easy to do. I didn’t rise to the bait, and I stayed out of the press. I had various people knocking on my door, saying that I had blown it, and I had various offers from different people to work with them, but I knew I wanted to do my own thing.

  I also decided to try Prozac after the split. Not because I was distraught about the band or in the depths of depression. It was more because it was being heralded as this new wonder drug, and being naturally curious about new drugs, I decided I wanted to try it. It wasn’t too hard to get it on prescription at that stage. If you went to the doctors and told them you were stressed out and down and depressed, they’d usually give you Prozac. I was on and off heroin then; I would go through phases with it. I thought Prozac was great at first. It felt like someone had taken my brain out and washed it and put it back again. I grew my hair again, put a bit of weight on and even grew a moustache. I felt like being incognito for a bit.

  I soon discovered you couldn’t take too much Prozac without it having side effects. One of them was it could give you suicidal thoughts. Now I never get suicidal thoughts, but after I had been on Prozac for a while I did start thinking about it, and almost rationalized the idea of the act in my head. It was almost as if I was tripping out on Prozac, and thinking about it a little too much, half convincing myself that it really didn’t matter if I was alive or dead because we’re all connected in this big universe, and your soul carries on living. My brain really began to think like that, until I had a moment of clarity and pulled myself together and went, ‘Woaah – hang on a fucking minute!’ That’s when I decided I’d better stop taking the Prozac.

  I was reminded of that a couple of years later when Michael Hutchence died. Most people presumed it was a sex act gone wrong, but I knew Hutchence – I’d met him a few times and I really liked him, and I knew he was taking ridiculous amounts of Prozac, silly amounts, which there was no need to take. So bearing in mind the effect it had on me, it did make me doubt that it was just a sex act gone wrong.

  Inevitably, I had got together with Oriole when she was staying in my house in Didsbury. I was still with Trish when I had crashed into the vicar’s Lada, but by the time it came to court I was with Oriole, and that was our first public appearance together.

  I got on well with Donovan when I was with Oriole. I saw Johnny Marr recently and he reminded me how I invited him round to my house in Didsbury because he wanted to meet Donovan and he was over staying with us. Johnny came round and Don was sat there with his famous guitar, the one with the moons and the stars on it. Johnny said I was off my nut and said, ‘You two have got to jam together!’ and found some old battered guitar that the kids had been playing with that was fucked – the sort of guitar that you needed fingers like fat chips to play anything on, and gave that to Johnny. He said he and Don were jamming for two hours, but I must admit I’ve only got a hazy memory of that happening.

  I was still getting asked to do a lot of TV appearances after the Mondays split, most of which I turned down, but just after the court appearance I went on The Word. I was interviewed by Mark Lamarr, with Oriole sitting next to me on the couch, and it was pretty obvious to everyone watching that I was high on gear. It wasn’t the greatest interview, not helped by Mark being slightly sly and trying to be a bit arch, as if I didn’t know what he was doing. I talked about getting a new line-up together and mentioned they might be called ‘The Mondays’ rather than Happy Mondays. But it’s not the interview that people remember from my appearance on The Word; it’s the fact that at the end I got up and danced with Zippy and Bungle from the children’s TV programme Rainbow. There was a cheesy rave version of the Rainbow theme out at the time by some band called Eurobop and the Rainbow Crew, and they were performing at the end of the show. Lots of people saw that as evidence of how low I’d sunk, dancing with Zippy and Bungle on The Word, but that didn’t bother me. I think people presumed I was a bit wasted and jumped up on stage of my own accord, but actually the producers of the show had mithered and cajoled me into doing it. They would often do that on The Word – wind up the guests or try and embarrass them if they thought it would turn into a talking point and get publicity for the show. I think Our Paul said something like, ‘Look at Our Kid – he’s reduced to dancing with Zippy and Bungle.’ You could say that. But another way of looking at it was that I was still being invited as a guest on TV shows, while the rest of the band were sat at home and signing on the dole, waiting for the phone to ring.

  Me and Oriole decided to head off to Morocco for a decent break. I needed to get out of Manchester, away from all the bullshit, and just recharge my batteries. We wanted to go to Jajouka, which is up in the Rif mountains in northern Morocco, where Bachir Attar and the Master Musicians of Jajouka are from. Oriole’s family had had links with them since the 60s. Before she met Donovan, Oriole’s mother, Linda, had a child with Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones, Julian Jones. Brian had recorded an album called Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka with Bachir’s father, Hadj Abdesalam Attar, in 1968, when he was the leader of the Master Musicians of Jajouka.

  After Linda split with Brian Jones she got together with Donovan for a while but they split and Don married an American model called Enid Karl and had two children with her – Ione Skye, who grew up to be a film star and went out with Anthony Kiedis from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and later married Adam Horovitz from the Beastie Boys; and Don Junior, who became a model. Donovan then had big success, and a big hit with ‘Sunshine Superman’, and shortly after he and Linda got back together. I thought Linda was all right – we got along OK, although she was quite contradictory. On the one hand she was this quite mystical being, but on the other hand she would have dizzy fits and strops if she had to miss a shopping trip to Harrods. Their whole family were all very mystical. Linda thought it was hugely significant that she and my mam shared the same birthday. They were also one of those couples who had brought their kids up as ‘little adults’. You know, those hippy couples who say, ‘They’re not children, they’re little adults and they should be treated as such.’ Bollocks. They’re kids. Let them be kids and enjoy life while they can. But they didn’t, which meant, ironically, that they grew up to be adults who were still kids, in a way.

  We were at Donovan’s house in Ireland one night and Linda had us all throwing these
mystical stones across the table, and then she would work out what the stones said and the significance of it. She became increasingly frustrated, though, when these mystical stones basically told her that I was the one with leadership qualities and they should listen to me. She said, ‘No, that’s not right. We must have done something wrong. Let’s try it again.’ So we threw them again and got the same result. It was hilarious. She wanted these mystical stones to confirm she was a powerful guru or something and they kept telling her that I was the chosen one and it was doing her head in.

  When me and Oriole arrived in Morocco, we had a bit of a nightmare getting up into the Rif mountains. That’s the area where a lot of Moroccan hashish comes from, or ‘kif’, as they call it, so like any area where a lot of drugs are grown, it’s quite dangerous. We were stopped several times by the army and the police at roadblocks, but it was more for our safety than anything because it was proper bandit country. We were warned that the bandits were up in the rocks, armed with guns, watching who came and went, so they took all our details and next of kin, just in case we didn’t come back.

  When we got up to Jajouka it was great. It’s only a small village of less than a hundred people, full of musicians, bandits and weed. We were actually staying in Bachir Attar’s house, which was a small walled compound, with several rooms facing this courtyard. We had a great time there. I had taken some methadone with me, so I was off heroin and just smoking weed. The only problem we had was I got really bad food poisoning. They would kill goats or other animals and cook them straight away, and I obviously ate something that had not been cooked properly, and I was really, really ill. Fortunately, that was right at the end of our stay, when we were just coming home.

  I knew I wanted to get a new band together, and within a couple of months of the Mondays splitting I pulled together a rough group at my house in Didsbury. It was quite a ramshackle crazy gang that came together for the early sessions – a mad mixture of musicians, misfits, mates and smack buddies, including, at various times, me and Our Paul; Kermit; Ged Lynch, the drummer in Kermit’s old band, Ruthless Rap Assassins; Craig Gannon, who had played second guitar with the Smiths; and the two Martins from Intastella, Wright and Mitler, who played guitar and bass; plus a mate of Cressa’s whose name I can’t even remember, a smack buddy of ours who thought he could play bongos. Bez popped round as well. Too Nice Tom was there filming most of those early rehearsals. Tom’s real name is Tom Bruggen, and I’d met him a few years earlier at a boxing match when one of my pals was fighting one of his fighters. Tom was from Burnley, but a boxing trainer at Champs Camp in Moss Side. He was also a lecturer in film and interested in pharmacology, although it was more of an academic interest with Tom, he wasn’t one for getting wasted. We got on really well, and we could talk for ages about different films. Tom had wanted to make a documentary with the Mondays, but then the band split, so he filmed the birth of my new band, which didn’t even have a name at that stage.