Twisting My Melon

by Shaun Ryder

  I went to his funeral at St Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in town, which is known as the Hidden Gem. Like I mentioned before, they played the Happy Mondays song ‘Bob’s Yer Uncle’ at the end of the service, which is not the obvious choice for a funeral, but typical Wilson. He always loved that song.

  Death is a weird one. I’ve found recently that certain members of my family have become closer to me after they’ve died. People that I would only see once a week or once a fortnight, but after they died they’ve been with me all the time. I’ll be like, ‘How are you, Mary?’, talking to them in my head when I’m thinking about them. It’s as if they’ve come into my space more now than when they were alive.

  Joanne was pregnant when we went to Tony Wilson’s funeral, and then, on 10 February 2008, we had a little girl, Pearl Emma Elizabeth Ryder. I asked Joanne if she would have Pearl in St Mary’s Hospital because all my other kids had been born there so it was important to me, and she was happy to have her there. Joanne’s really good friend Big Jo was there, which was great as she’s a big part of our life. We had Pearl christened at St Edmund’s Church which was where I was christened, and that also meant a lot to me.

  Your family and your roots mean more as you get older and, not long after Pearl was born, I saw a really nice house for sale. Finding out that Joanne was pregnant again with Lulu, we needed more bedrooms so we moved out of Glossop and back to Salford.

  I was still trying to resolve the Nicholls scenario and went to see solicitor Bryan Fugler at Elliot and Stuart, and Fugler explained he could actually get me out of the Nicholls situation, but it wouldn’t be cheap. Elliot and Stuart said, ‘Nah, we’re not paying that amount of money to get it resolved.’ So it then dragged on another couple of years. Stuart was arrogant and naïve enough to think he could resolve it himself without a solicitor or lawyer. Eventually, he and Elliot fell out and Elliot walked away from the Mondays and left Stuart managing us on his own for a while. Then they hired lawyers to sue each other, which meant I was dragged into yet another managerial legal battle, which was the last thing I needed. They were supposed to be getting me out of my court case, and they actually got me embroiled in another one. For fuck’s sake. I parted company with Stuart, and eventually decided I had to resolve the issue myself once and for all. So I went back to Bryan Fugler on my own and said, ‘Let’s get this sorted.’ It wasn’t cheap, and it took nearly two years, because it was a huge mess, but it’s finally done.

  Over recent years I’ve been offered lots of different weird reality and celebrity-type shows. It’s a bit like that Alan Partridge sketch where he’s coming up with random ideas for TV shows like ‘Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank’ and ‘Monkey Tennis’. One particular show I was offered involved me and Richard E. Grant swimming with crocodiles and sharks. God knows who comes up with these ideas. I turned it down but he went and did it with Ruby Wax and Colin Jackson. Celebrity Shark Bait, it was called. We did do Ghosthunting with Happy Mondays, with Yvette Fielding, in 2009, just for a laugh, for a bit of a nobble. I think Bez was a bit freaked out, though. It reminded me of when I was living with Suzy in Boothstown, twenty-five years before, and Bez would come round and we’d take acid and watch a vampire film or some Peter Cushing Hammer film, and then he wouldn’t want to go home on his own.

  After we filmed Ghosthunting with Happy Mondays, but before it was broadcast, we did V Festival, after which Bez left the Mondays again. He left over an issue about the guest list or something and he’s been doing his own thing since then. I’ve not fallen out with Bez at all; I just haven’t really seen him since. We’ve lived in each other’s pockets for twenty-five years, so we probably needed a bit of a break from each other. You know that feeling you get after a massive great Sunday lunch, when you feel like you can never eat again? That’s how I feel about our relationship at the moment, but you always end up eating again, don’t you?

  Bez is still living that 24 Hour Party People lifestyle we had in our twenties. He still lives every day like that, and he’s happy with it, but that’s not what I want to be doing every day now. Bez is a force of a nature; he creates this whirlwind of chaos and mither around him, and it must be exhausting just being him. But throw Bez out of a plane and he will land somewhere soft. He always manages to land on his feet in some way, and I hope he keeps managing it.

  On 1 May 2009, me and Joanne had our second daughter, Lulu Margaret Annie Ryder, born in Hope Hospital. Good old Big Jo was there with us again as support. So now there’re five of us at home in Salford, and Joseph also comes and stays with us regularly.

  Towards the end of 2009 I met my current manager, Warren Askew, who agreed to take over and help me finally make sense of the chaos. He was also instrumental in finally resolving the Nicholls situation, which I can’t thank him for enough. I think he was a little bit wary about taking me on at first, because he didn’t want to have to deal with the old wild Shaun Ryder that he’d read about, so I had to stress to him that I wasn’t really like that anymore.

  For the last couple of years I’ve gigged as either Happy Mondays or Black Grape, with the same band – my band – but I’m finally ready to be Shaun William Ryder. Kurfirst wanted to sign me as a solo artist nearly twenty years ago, after the Mondays split, but I wasn’t ready to just be me at that stage. I needed to be in a band, so I created Black Grape. When Warren took over, he finally made me see that I was ready to be Shaun William Ryder. We put together a new ‘best of’ compilation called XXX: Thirty Years of Bellyaching, and there will be the new solo album next year.

  Working with Warren for the first time in quite a while, I felt like I was back in control of my career. It felt like there was a plan for the next couple of years, rather than just playing a few gigs here and there. He’s a former footballer, he doesn’t drink or smoke, and he gets on with me and Joanne really well. She helps me stay on the right track at home, and he helps me stay on the right track professionally.

  Me and Joanne, we decided to get Lulu christened at St Charles’s Church. Joanne was looking at alternative venues online one night and showed me the website of the nearby Court House and said, ‘What about here?’

  ‘It looks like a wedding venue,’ I said. Joanne already knew that I really wanted her to be my wife, to be Mrs Ryder, so on a bit of a spur of the moment, I added, ‘Shall we just get married the same day?’

  ‘What? Just surprise everyone?’ Joanne laughed. ‘How funny would that be!’

  Thankfully she said yes, so that’s what we did. No one had a clue. The only people we told beforehand were Oliver, Amelia and Warren, because we wanted to make sure he and his family came up for it. Both our families just thought they were coming for Lulu’s christening, then, when we went to what they thought was the do afterwards, we sprang it on them that we were getting married. Even my mam didn’t believe me at first, and was telling people, ‘No, no, Shaun’s just joking.’ We just wanted a low-key affair: we’d both been married and divorced before, and we didn’t need to make a big song and dance about it. We knew how much it meant to us, and that’s all that really mattered. I even made a speech, which I don’t think I did when I first got married, although my memory of that is quite hazy.

  After he took over managing me, Warren was keen to take me back to doing more television. Most of the TV offers I’d received over the years I’d turned down, not least because the Nicholls situation meant whatever big money they were offering, I could never keep it, but now that was finally resolved. The music business has completely changed since I came into it nearly thirty years ago, and nowadays you need to be doing daytime TV to sell records.

  When Warren started negotiations for me to do I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! I wasn’t keen at all at first. I’ve never really embraced that celebrity culture, so I was really uncomfortable about doing it, but both my record company, Warners, and Warren thought I should do it because it would be good for my profile with a new compilation and solo album on the way. When I first started, Top of t
he Pops was the important breakthrough show; now you need to do the celeb-type shows if you want to get your albums into places like Tesco. The reality shows count, that’s the reality. Joanne and the kids all watched I’m A Celebrity at home, so they helped persuade me to do it. Warren had also been in talks for me to do Strictly Come Dancing, but they were slightly more wary about having me as a contestant, because they thought I would swear on prime-time television. I didn’t want to do Strictly either, and with hindsight it’s a good job I ended up in the jungle, because at least that gave people time to see what I’m really like these days. People got to see my personality and a bit of the real Shaun Ryder, whereas on Strictly they would have just seen an old man who’s not a great dancer. So I’m really glad I did the jungle in the end, because it worked out great.

  Ant and Dec are old Mondays and Black Grape fans, so they were made up when I agreed to go on the show. I didn’t really know what to expect when I went in there, and they don’t overly prepare you for it, because they want to see your reaction when things happen. Me and Warren had a couple of meetings with the producers, and Daisy Moore, who was the boss at ITV when it came to celebrity shows, said to me, ‘You’re going to hate me by the time you come out of the jungle.’ But I didn’t. It was nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be. The thing I was least looking forward to was being on camera twenty-four hours a day. That was my biggest nightmare. I just thought I wouldn’t be able to switch off at all, particularly as I was going to be sat with a load of people I didn’t know.

  They don’t give you any idea of who the other celebrities are going to be, but I think we did all right, really, with the mix of people we ended up with. I got on reasonably okay with everyone. I’d watched it a couple of times in previous years and they had some right idiots in there – like Paul Burrell, Princess Diana’s former butler. What a knob. I was watching it one night and he was giving it, ‘You’ll never guess who rang me one night? Tom!’ and one of the others said, ‘Who’s Tom?’ and Paul said, ‘Tom Hanks!’ I just thought, ‘You prick!’

  Thankfully we didn’t have too many luvvies in there, no name-droppers. I probably got on best with Nigel Havers and Dom Joly, but I thought everyone was okay. Lembit Opik was great and came up to Manchester for one of my gigs a few months after we got out. Jenny Eclair was great. I’d seen Stacey Solomon on The X Factor and thought she was good, but I wouldn’t have imagined we would particularly get on and become good friends, because she just seemed like a giggly young girl, but she was great. I did keep myself to myself a bit for the first week or so, before I came out of my shell. I think it took me about a week to say hello to Alison Hammond.

  When you’re forced to spend time with people, most of them usually turn out to be okay. It did give me a kick up the arse to be a bit more sociable. I’d got to the stage where I thought to myself, ‘I’ll be as unsociable as I want.’ When you first get in the music game, you have to speak to everyone, but I’d got to the stage where I’d done all that and was happy being a bit of a grumpy old sod.

  They didn’t give us any idea of the tasks we might have to perform, but we did have to have a medical, and also tests where they asked you lots of questions to make sure you were capable of doing whatever they asked you to. My only real problem, as I mentioned at the start of the book, was that I can’t breathe through my nose, only through my mouth, which was a problem when I had to jump out of the helicopter. We went to twelve thousand feet, which is the highest you can go without an oxygen mask.

  I wasn’t bothered about any of the other tasks, like having to eat things. That didn’t bother me one bit. The one task I did that everyone remembers is the one where I was bitten by a snake. That really did hurt. It just sank its teeth right into my hand and the fucker wouldn’t let go. I just gritted my teeth and said, ‘You little …’, but managed not to swear. I could see the snake-handlers panicking, because obviously they didn’t expect it to do that, and it wasn’t letting go. It had big old teeth and it could have had my finger if I’d panicked, but my instinct told me to just keep calm, until they eventually got it off me, which took about forty minutes. The doctors gave me valium to calm me down.

  They didn’t warn me about swearing in the jungle, because they just bleeped it out, but the one time they did have a word with me was after I had to do a task with Gillian McKeith in the freezing water and she was being a bit of an idiot. I did trip out on her and swore quite a bit. Later that night, when you have to go and speak to camera, they did say to me, ‘Shaun, this is a warning: you went a little bit over the top with Gillian today.’

  That was the only regular contact we had with the production team, and obviously Ant and Dec came in to speak to us during the live show, when they announced who was up for nomination. I didn’t hate Gillian or anything – she just had a bit of an attitude that she was unaware of, and was a little lacking in manners. If I ask someone to do something I’ll say please and thanks, but Gillian didn’t. She bollocked Stacey and made her cry, but when I did the same thing to her, she complained. The time when she fainted was ridiculous. Bloody hell, what a fanny. Some of the others also took things a little too personally, like Lembit getting the hump when Dom Joly took the piss out of him. He couldn’t see that that’s what Dom was in there to do. It’s a game, it’s a TV show. Dom was only doing that because it made good television.

  I didn’t arrive in Australia until shortly before I went in the jungle, so my body clock was still out of sync, and I was still awake at the crack of dawn at first, which is why it must have seemed like I was sleeping a lot during the day on the show. But once I settled into a routine, I was the first up. I’d be up at 5am when it was first light, then I’d go back and have another hour in bed at about 8am, before the live TV cameras came in.

  I never thought I would last as long as I did in there, especially when I first got the whole ‘Shaun … it might be you’ treatment from Ant and Dec, when they were announcing who’s up for eviction. That made me think I was making a bit of an idiot of myself. I think I was the first to get ‘It might be you …’ and I thought that meant you had almost been voted out, so I thought, ‘Oh fuck. I’m embarrassing the missus and the kids here. Am I swearing too much? Fucking hell.’ The last thing I wanted to do was embarrass my family, so I told them I was going to leave. I decided to do one day longer than John Lydon had done and then leave. But when I was asked to go to the doctor’s hut for a check-up, he hinted I was doing okay and people were behind me outside, which helped change my mind. Me and the other celebs also worked out, after a few nominations, that the whole ‘it might be you’ thing was purely random, a red herring; it doesn’t mean you were almost nominated.

  I did get quite bored in there when I didn’t have a task to do, so they started sending me on little walks, just to get me out of camp. If I did have to come out of camp for some reason, they would send me on a long circuitous route to where I needed to go, anything up to an hour and a half long, just to give me some exercise and stop me being bored. That’s one of the reasons I lost a bit of weight making the show, because of all the walking.

  I did actually find it hard in the jungle. When I said I was going to quit, they asked me if they could do anything to make me stay. I asked them to give me more fags as I was smoking more than I usually smoked at home, so they upped my fags for me.

  Like I said, I didn’t think I was going to last that long in there, so I was as shocked as anyone when I came runner-up to Stacey. When I came out of the jungle, my feet didn’t hit the floor. I think I was given an hour to go and get a shower and get changed, and then it was straight into doing press, tele vision, photo shoots, you name it. That night there was a party, with lots more press, and then we flew back to the UK and it was straight into doing more press and television. It was relentless. Even when Christmas came, I only had two days off – Christmas Day and Boxing Day – and then it was back on the publicity treadmill.

  I hadn’t really done much daytime telly before, particu
larly because I had a Channel 4 ban. There’s no way they would have had me on a show like This Morning before I went into the jungle. When I came out, I felt all eyes were on me to see if I could handle daytime telly, and behave myself and not swear. It’s not that difficult to not swear, really, is it? It’s not the hardest thing in the world. My language is usually pretty fucking colourful, but I don’t swear in front of my kids, so I can easily not swear on daytime telly. Me and Warren have a bit of an in-joke about this new alter-ego of mine, ‘Showbiz Shaun’. If I’m doing some big high-profile TV show he helps me prepare for it, to get in the zone as Showbiz Shaun: ‘Come on mate, we need Showbiz Shaun for this one’. After I’d done the BBC Breakfast and This Morning, which were both live, with no problems, then TV producers seemed to relax and realize Showbiz Shaun wasn’t going to get them into trouble, and I was asked to do all manner of shows.

  If I’m down in London to do a TV show or a day of press, I’ll usually stay at Warren’s house the night before. He’s got a young family like me – his wife Hayley and their three lovely kids Harvey, Darcey and Winter.

  Because Bez had already done that celebrity TV interview circuit when he won Big Brother, most interviewers and producers assumed I was exactly like him. But I’m not exactly like Bez. I never have been. That’s why I brought him into the Mondays in the first place, because I thought we needed someone who was different from me. We were never the same person, never two peas in a pod. They also expected the Shaun Ryder of twenty years ago to turn up, off his nut, drink whatever was around and smoke heroin in the toilets.