Twisting My Melon

by Shaun Ryder

  As I said earlier, I had seen a bit more of Joanne after I’d moved to Glossop because she was really friendly with Bez and Debs, my neighbours. She’d never really gone out of my life because we had quite a few mutual mates from the Haçienda and generally from going out around town, and we’d always really got on. She was a hairdresser at the time, and would pop round and cut my hair, as well as Felicia’s and Joseph’s, and would sometimes babysit for Joseph to help us out. But there was nothing going on between me and Joanne at that stage. Joanne is not the type to do that to another woman. She’s a big believer in monogamy and wouldn’t cheat on anyone.

  After Felicia left, Joanne would pop round now and then to see if I was alright and would often bring some home-cooked food up; comfort food, like homemade potato hash. She’s a really good cook, like my mum. There wasn’t even anything romantic between us at first, we were just really good friends who were getting to know each other a bit more. The older you get, the more you appreciate friends who have known you a long time. But then I asked her out on what I suppose was a date, although I’m not sure either of us would have called it that. I took her out to the Palantine Pub in Hadfield and we had a nice meal and a laugh. We just got on really well and enjoyed each other’s company, which is something I realized I’d not experienced for quite a while.

  I think Joanne was quite apprehensive about getting involved with me at first. In fact I know she was, because she told me. Joanne had known me for a long time and had seen me when I was a bit out of control, and she didn’t really want any of that madness in her life, particularly as she had a young nine-year-old son, Oliver, in the house as well. Joanne had done her fair share of partying when she was younger – that’s how we met originally – but she had pretty much retired from that scene when she become a mother. She was also a big believer in your home as your sanctuary; that your home should be a place that is sacred, where you can escape from the madness. Whatever you did when you went out partying, you made sure you didn’t bring that home with you.

  Basically, Joanne wanted to make sure that if we did get involved then what she was getting was Shaun Ryder the person and not Shaun Ryder the rock ’n’ roll caricature.

  But by this stage, I was more than ready to change myself.

  The heroin had gone, but I was still taking other drugs and drinking more than was healthy. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy to completely separate myself from my old lifestyle and leave it behind, and I knew it wasn’t going to happen overnight. Old drug habits die hard. But I really did feel ready for the challenge. I think it’s fine to party hard through your twenties and thirties but when you get into your forties you can’t be living that same 24 Hour Party People lifestyle anymore, or you’re in danger of looking a bit sad. No one wants to be the last person left at the party, no matter how fucking brilliant the party has been. I knew a change had to come.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ‘Kiss me for old times’ sake, kiss me for making a big mistake, kiss me for always being late, kiss me for making you wait, kiss me … good night’

  TIME MOVES MUCH slower when you’re a kid. A year or even a summer seemed to go on for ever when I was younger. The 1970s felt like a century, whereas the noughties seemed like five minutes. As you get older time just seems to vanish.

  A lot of people think the Mondays re-formed again in 2004, but the truth is we had never split up since the first re-formation; we’d just been away for a little while. We didn’t have a manager for a time, so me and Gaz were handling things between us, and if we needed any advice, Gaz would phone Elliot Rashman, Simply Red’s old manager. So eventually Elliot and his friend Stuart Worthington took over as joint managers. For personal reasons, Elliot had taken some time out from the music business in the nineties, and I’m not sure how good a decision it was to come back from that to managing the Mondays. I’m not actually that difficult to work with on a day-to-day basis but Gaz and Bez were harder for him and he almost gave himself a breakdown working with us.

  *

  After we got together me and Joanne did a lot of talking, her more than me at first, probably. She tried to get me to talk about why I felt the compulsion to do various things; tried to get me to see that, if you’re still partying hard when you get to a certain age, you’re missing out on a lot in life.

  I remember her saying to me, ‘You know that kind of floating fluffy cloud feeling that makes you feel like you’re on top of the world, Shaun? You know you can get that from real life as well as drugs?’ But when you’ve been taking drugs for as long as I had, it can be hard to envisage that normal life can offer a natural high to match them.

  She also used a bit of reverse psychology on me, saying stuff like, ‘Look, if you want to just drink and take drugs all your life then you go for it, mate. Do that. It’s your life, but aren’t you getting bored of it? There’re so many other things to do in life, rather than just getting stoned and having the same conversations over and over into the small hours.’

  She also laid down the law a bit in her house. There was no drinking, smoking or swearing, and certainly no drugs, although there was a little lean-to at the back of the house, and she stuck a TV in there for me and slightly relaxed the rules in there at first. So I would chill out there and watch films and have some time out. They say every man needs a shed. If Joanne’s house was her sanctuary, then that was my own little retreat after I first moved in.

  I stopped taking cocaine, I stopped taking methadone, I stopped smoking weed, and I stopped drinking for a while. I was completely straight, and I started doing a lot of thinking. A lot of thinking. Me and Joanne would stay up talking into the early hours. Everything started to hit me, and I just became overwhelmed. My nana had died in 1988, but it was only now that I started to grieve for her. But Nana’s death was just a small part of it. All sorts of things that had happened to me since the late 60s hit me: all the things that I never let touch me when I was a kid, down to all the things I’d seen and done in Happy Mondays and Black Grape, but hadn’t really felt because I was anaesthetized by heroin. That was a lot of catching up to do. I basically had to start playing catch-up on twenty years of feelings. I didn’t really have many deep emotions for two decades, so when I finally came off the gear I felt like a ball in a pinball machine, being bounced all over the place.

  I’m not saying I sat there crying to myself or to Joanne, sobbing my heart out. But you have to process this stuff eventually, mentally. If you don’t process it at the time, then you have to process it all later when it catches up with you. I’m not naïve about the way these things affect you. I’ve read about people blocking things out, and I’ve been in rehab where they talk about how to process these things. I’d had various counsellors and professionals try and talk to me when I’d been in rehab before, but I clearly wasn’t ready to go through the process, and was usually pretty dismissive with them. There’s nothing any professional can say to you if you haven’t got the motivation yourself. And when you do find that motivation, I think you need someone who you trust and can rely on to help you through it, and talk it through with you. Or I did, anyway. I needed someone close to me, who really knew me, to actually help me make the breakthrough, and I knew Joanne was the right person to help me pull through all that. I had so many layers of baggage from the past twenty years, and I knew Joanne could help me strip back those layers to get back to the real me. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy and I knew I was going to be hit with twenty years of emotions fast-forwarding and hitting me all at once. Splat. But there’s no way round it, because it’s all in there. If it’s been blocked out it will catch up with you one day.

  I started exercising to help me come off the methadone, which I also hoped would shift the weight I’d put on. So I started spending up to eight hours a day on my mountain bike. Seriously. Eight hours a day, pedalling round Derbyshire through my cold turkey. But every time I stopped the exercise, the weight just piled back on, even though I wasn’t really eating much, and I could
n’t work out why. I had no energy at all, and I thought it might just be me getting older and nearing fifty.

  It wasn’t until a few years later, when I had to have a medical to get a visa for the States, that I finally discovered it was a problem with my thyroid and testosterone levels, which are all linked in. The doctors told me my thyroid had completely disappeared and I also had pneumonia. I’m now on Thyroxine and regular testosterone injections. But within a couple of months of starting the treatment, it had sorted me right out. I felt brilliant. Better than I had for years. I felt like a spring chicken. Born again. All those clichés. I felt like a normal human being instead of being bloated and tired the whole time. I’d been tired for years, but because I was taking methadone it had disguised what was wrong with me. Even when I was feeling like death warmed up, I would just take meth and get on with it. Which is how I wound up walking round with pneumonia, no testosterone and a thyroid problem.

  In the meantime I had met a guy called Kav Sandhu, through bits of DJ-ing I was doing, and he had a club night called Get Loaded at Turnmills with a guy there called Danny Newman. I DJ’d at the club and in 2004 they decided to do Get Loaded in the Park on Clapham Common and asked Happy Mondays to headline. Kav was a DJ and club promoter and he introduced me to Mikey and Johnny who are with me in the band. Kav joined the band for a while, then left after we released Uncle Dysfunktional in 2007 to start his own band. Good luck Kav.

  *

  I was asked to do Celebrity Big Brother at the start of 2005, but I’ve never liked the programme, so I passed it on to Bez. I watched a bit of it when he was on, but I don’t like the way they treat the housemates. They seem to pick people who have slight mental issues, lock them together in a little house, then just chuck booze at them and stir things up to get a reaction.

  Damon Albarn then asked me to do vocals on a track on the second Gorillaz album. I’d always got on with Damon, even since his early Blur days, so I went down to the studio in London and did the track ‘D.A.R.E.’ He offered me points on the track, but I was still in the fucking situation with the Nicholls, so I just told him to keep it. I’d rather he had the dough than them. The video shoot was a bit of a nightmare. I’d put back on the weight that I’d lost, and in the video I was supposed to be this giant disembodied head, kept alive by a machine. Which meant I had to stay in this box, with just my head peeking out the top, for hours on end. It was a long day. ‘D.A.R.E.’ was a great success, it’s Gorillaz’ only No. 1 single in this country to date.

  I also received an offer of a new set of teeth in 2005. Years ago I used to spend a lot of money in the Armani shop in Manchester, and I met this kid called Lance, who was working in there while he was a student, training to be a dentist. Lance used to make a hell of a lot of money off me in commission, because I was spending so much in the shop. In 2005, when he had all his qualifications, he got back in touch. He told me he now had his own practice in St Ann’s Square and he offered to give me a new set of teeth. I actually had really good teeth as a kid; they were perfect and white and everything. But because of certain drugs I’ve done, particularly smoking crack cocaine, my teeth had started going. Lance offered to replace them with a new set, which cost a good £20,000, in exchange for a bit of publicity. The only downside was, the whole world was going to see how bad my Newtons actually were – Newtons is Manchester slang for teeth, after Newton Heath – because Lance wanted to take some before and after shots. Granada Reports also came down and did a little item on my teeth.

  Normally, if you were having a complete new set, you would have it done in a series of one- or two-hour sessions, but I just had it done in two stints, one of eight hours and one of four hours. I hate going to dentists more than most people, and have done since I was a kid; it’s almost a phobia with me. I remember seeing the school dentist once, when I was ten, and the anaesthetic didn’t take at first, so I had to have a few injections and it freaked me out a bit. So when I was older I didn’t go to the dentist for a long time, which is probably why my teeth got into the state that they did. I only went when I got really bad toothache and even then I would just say to the dentist, ‘Here’s £50. Can you just pull this tooth out?’ Nobody in their right mind sits in the dentist’s chair for eight hours, but Lance said he could do it in two stints if I could handle it, so I agreed. I just wanted to get it over with. I only had a local anaesthetic, but it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it might do. I thought I would need loads of Valium to get me through it, but Lance made me as comfortable as possible and it wasn’t as bad as I thought. The smell was actually the worst thing about it; when they were sawing and grinding down my old teeth, there was this horrible smell of burning flesh and bone.

  By 2006 I was in a much better space, mentally, and I began to de-clutter my life by cutting out a few of the bad influences, and by that I mean people as well as substances. Elliot and Stuart suggested doing a new Happy Mondays album, the first studio album since Yes Please!, and Elliot suggested we work with Sunny Levine, because he knew him. Sunny is the grandson of Quincy Jones, which means he’s pretty much royalty when it comes to production. He has worked in studios since he was about five years old. He started as a tea boy and worked his way up. Elliot had known Sunny since he was a little kid, because his dad, Stewart Levine, had produced some albums for Simply Red, Dr John and loads more big musicians, as well as The Rumble in The Jungle concert and movie. Sunny had grown up in that great production family, and Elliot knew that the two of us would be able to work well together.

  So Sunny then came over and we worked at Moulah Rouge studios in Stockport. I probably only spent a day on each track, writing the lyrics. Sunny was almost working on two different versions of the album, because he would work during the day, with Kav and Gaz chipping in their twopenn’orth. Gaz would be arguing with Sunny over production techniques, telling him he was doing it wrong. This is Sunny Levine, Quincy fucking Jones’s grandson, and Gaz Whelan from Swinton is telling him he’s doing it wrong. Thankfully, Sunny is very easygoing. We get on really well; we’re on the same wavelength and make a good team. I pretty much like everything he does, and he pretty much likes all the lyrics I come up with, and if we don’t we can tell each other.

  I would come in at night to lay down my vocals, and invariably it was Sunny’s version of the track that we ended up using. It was quite similar to working with Danny Saber, in that Sunny just had a really good idea of the sort of beats I liked to write with. There were a couple of song ideas that didn’t work out, but if we spent a bit of time on something and it wasn’t working, we’d just drop it and move on to the next track. It was a really good way of working for me. We did a track called ‘Deviants’ with Mickey Avalon, an American rapper who had just released his debut album, and there are also a few other guests on there that we didn’t advertise. Ry Cooder is one of them, and his son Joachim, who is a drummer and best mates with Sunny. We didn’t exploit the fact at the time, because they were simply mates of Sunny’s who did it as a favour to him. Because he came from this family of production royalty, he had a wealth of talent that he could pull from. I don’t think the record company even knew Ry Cooder was on the album. Because we nailed it really quickly, I was keen to work with him again after that, and I’ve been working with him recently on my solo album.

  After we finished the album Uncle Dysfunctional we played Coachella festival in Palm Springs. Elliot organized for Tony Wilson, who was quite ill at that stage, to introduce us and he gave a typically Wilsonesque speech about the Mondays pulling together ‘the house music of Chicago and Detroit with punk rock’ and how ‘they changed the world’. Very Tony.

  By the time Tony became ill, I’d become quite close to him again. I’d been round to his place a couple of times, and we’d also done some TV and radio together, and had a couple of meetings, because Elliot was really close to him. I’ll always be grateful to him.

  After the Mondays disintegrated, Tony was made up for me when I came back with Black Grape and it wa
s such a huge success. I think he felt the success of Black Grape, after the Mondays, had vindicated anything he’d originally said about me when he used to big me up in the early days. He was also really apologetic that he’d fallen into the trap of blaming me for the Mondays’ split up and the demise of Factory. Although he’d taken enough flak himself for the way Factory went under.

  I always got on with Tony and I always respected him. I first knew him as the guy on Granada Reports who then got his own music show, So It Goes, and even back then he was Mr Manchester. If you wanted to be taken seriously in the music game in Manchester you had to have Tony’s stamp of approval, even before Factory. I was never an inverse snob either. It never bothered me that Wilson went to Cambridge and I left school without knowing my alphabet. If someone is cool, it doesn’t matter what background they’re from.

  I always appreciated having someone like Tony bigging up me and the Mondays, because I certainly wasn’t going to do it. The Mondays were never going to go round proclaiming we were the greatest band in the world, like the Stone Roses did, so it was good to have someone to do it for us. Especially Tony. But when he would say I was the greatest poet since Yeats or whatever, I just took that with a pinch of salt. He even had a public argument about me in the press with Our Paul, not long before he died, when they were both writing in to the Evening News, Our Paul slagging me off and Tony defending me. That was all a bit weird and unnecessary.

  I never expected Tony to get ill. He was a person who had come through so much, you just presumed he was always going to be there. I went to see him in hospital just before he died, and I felt like I let him down then, really. I felt like I should have stayed strong, you know what I mean? But my eyes just went. I looked at him lying there and you could tell he was dying. He was thin and he was shaking. Tears just started flooding out of my eyes, and I had to get out of there for a minute and sort myself out before I could go back in. I still feel like shit for that. Maybe he was touched by it, but I think he might have wanted me to be strong, because even though he was frightened to death himself, he was being really brave. I was the one that crumbled.