Authors: Shaun Ryder
Twisting My Melon
Shaun Ryder has lived a life of glorious highs and desolate lows. As lead singer of the Happy Mondays, he turned Manchester into Madchester, combining all the excesses of a true rock‘n’roll star with music and lyrics that led impresario Tony Wilson to describe him as ‘the greatest poet since Yeats’. The young scally who left school at fifteen without ever learning his alphabet had come a very long way indeed. Huge chart success and a Glastonbury headline slot followed, plus numerous arrests and world tours – then Shaun’s drug addiction reached its height, Factory Records was brought to its knees and the Mondays split.
But was this the end for Shaun Ryder? Not by a long shot. Two years later he was back with new band Black Grape, and their groundbreaking debut album topped the charts in possibly the greatest comeback of all time. Even his continuing struggle with drugs did not stem the tide of critically acclaimed tracks and collaborations as he went on to prove his musical genius time and again.
And then there was the jungle...
Rock‘n’roll legend, reality TV star, drug-dealer, poet, film star, heroin addict, son, brother, father, husband, foul-mouthed anthropologist and straight-talking survivor, Shaun Ryder has been a cultural icon and a 24-hour party person for a quarter of a century. Told in his own words, this is his story.
TWISTING MY
MELON
SHAUN RYDER
To my wife, Joanne
My thanks go to my wife, Joanne Ryder, and my children, for being there for me and being my backbone. I will always love you all.
Big thanks to my manager, Warren Askew, for seeing that I had a future beyond the old days, and special thanks to his wife, Hayley, and the kids for looking after me when I’m down south.
To my mam and dad and family
My mother-in-law, Grannybag Joan
Mama Big Jo
Amelia Ryder
Peter Diver
Leon
My personal trainer, Gavin Kelly
Muzzer
Platty
Matt, Pat, Karen and Sam
Maria Carroll
Uncle Tom and Aunty Mary, RIP
Too Nice Tom Bruggen
My current band: Mikey, Johnny, Dan, Jake Ryder, Julie and Tonn
Bryan Fugler and David Berens
Nikki Stevens
To all those who have taken time to help me remember the parts of my life that were a bit hazy.
And a big thank-you to my fans for their support over the years.
To Sarah Emsley, Polly Osborn, Richard Roper and Vivien Garrett at Transworld Publishers.
To Matthew Hamilton, my literary agent, at Aitken Alexander Associates.
And a massive thanks to Luke Bainbridge who listened to a lifetime of memories and helped me put pen to paper.
‘
I’m a simple city boy, with simple country tastes
’
PEOPLE STILL COME
up to me and say, ‘Do you feel lucky that you’re still alive?’
No, I don’t.
‘But you must have been near death …’
Maybe I was, but I never saw it like that. I never thought I was close to death. I’ve been right down to rock bottom and I’ve been in some very dark places when I almost wished I was dead. I’ve been addicted to crack cocaine in Barbados and gone cold turkey in Burnley. But, if I do see myself as lucky, it’s not because I’m still alive. It’s because I’m lucky still to be in the game, and that I even managed to get in the game in the first place. I’m a kid from Salford who had severe learning difficulties and left school at fifteen with no qualifications and without even knowing the alphabet. I could have ended up in jail or dead, like a lot of kids from round our way. Compared to that, going on a celebrity TV show and jumping out of a helicopter, or eating a crocodile’s dick, is nothing.
Not that jumping out of that fucking helicopter at the start of
I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here
! felt like nothing at the time. Mainly because I couldn’t breathe. I’ve never been
able
to breathe through my nose. Nothing to do with drugs, although I’ve put enough of them up there. It’s a hereditary condition. A lot of our family have sinus problems and my mam even had to have a bone taken out of her nose so she could breathe properly. Hanging out the side of a helicopter at twelve thousand feet, it’s almost impossible to breathe through your mouth, so I was really struggling. Not only was I jumping into one of the oddest gigs of my career, I also thought I was going to pass out live on TV like a right goon. I’ve never been as relieved as the moment I got down on the ground and sparked up a fag.
A lot of people know me as Shaun Ryder, and a lot of people know me as Shaun William Ryder, but my full name is actually Shaun William George Ryder. George is my confirmation name. I always thought that was pretty funny, years later. Named after George the dragon-slayer, and then I ended up chasing the dragon for years.
I’m from Salford. People always assume I’m from Manchester, because Happy Mondays were so closely associated with the whole Madchester scene, but I’m not, I’m from Salford. Big difference. We’re a different breed and even Mancunians are a bit wary of us. My family is a big, Irish, mostly Catholic family. All my mam’s side come from Greengate, not far from where I live now.
Greengate is also the home of the Salford Sioux. At the end of the nineteenth century a gang of Native Americans came over as part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Circus and they disappeared when they reached Salford. It turned out they were wanted by the US government to answer charges of war crimes after they beat General Custer, so they just vanished under the arches at Greengate and the locals hid them, because they saw them as great warriors, not war criminals. They ended up
having
loads of kids with the locals and a lot of them are buried at Pendleton Church. I often wonder if that might explain why people from Salford are a slightly different breed, why they have no fear – if it’s because they have a bit of Native American blood in them.
There’s a huge Irish community in Salford and Manchester, going back generations. My mam’s dad’s dad – my greatgrandfather – was the first of her family to come over from Ireland. He was looking for work like most of those who arrived on the boat. My mam’s family are the Carrolls – that’s her maiden name – although their surname actually used to be O’Carroll. Her grandad decided to take the O’ off when he arrived in England as he didn’t want to be so obviously Irish. Anything with O’ in it made you stand out immediately as a left-footer and at the time he was running about trying to find work, that could count against you. There were still signs saying ‘No dogs, no blacks, no Irish’, so you can understand the lingering paranoia.
On my dad’s side, my nana, Emma, was also from Salford, and my grandad, Fred Ryder, was from Farnworth, up towards Bolton.
We moved about Salford quite a bit when I was a kid, but we mostly lived in Little Hulton. Over the years it’s become fully submerged in Salford, but originally it was just this huge, sprawling overspill council estate. When they were first married my mam and dad lived at my nana’s – my mam’s mam, on Coniston Avenue, and I was born at home in the front room upstairs. My mam and dad decided to call me Shaun, but used the English spelling instead of ‘Sean’, because they too wanted to play down our Irish descent. I was their first kid. I don’t remember that house, because when I was only a few months old my nana bought her first house and moved out of Coniston Avenue, and we moved to a flat over a pub on Darley Street in Farnworth.
We seemed to move a lot when we were little kids, or it seemed a lot to me anyway. Some people, like my missus, Joanne, live in one house for their entire childhood, until they leave home and get married, but we always seemed to be flitting about. It was partly because of my dad’s jobs and partly because we were skint at times. Derek, my old fella, was a fitter originally, working on aeroplanes. Then he worked on the papers, not as a journalist but on the printing presses, and then we had a chippy for a year, before he ended up as a postman. Much later, when the Happy Mondays took off, he came on the road with us. Not many people had what you would call a career round our way back in the late 60s; most people would just find work where they could, so it wasn’t that unusual that my dad didn’t stick to one trade. Wages weren’t great, so people would change jobs if they could earn a bit more doing something else.
My mam, Linda, was a nursery nurse, a real Salford woman, and a good cook, in a traditional steak-and-veg way. We grew up on egg and bacon, pie and chips, stews, hashes, tripe and tongue, that sort of thing. I was even slightly podgy at times as a kid because my mam was such a good cook.
After the flat above the pub we moved to Canterbury Close in Atherton, which is where my little brother was born. There’s only eighteen months’ age difference between me and Our Paul. Although my mam and dad come from big extended families, where there could be nine or ten kids in a household, they were both only children and neither of them wanted a big family themselves, so they decided early doors they would just stick with the two of us. We stayed in Atherton for a couple of years, and I do have some memories from there. I remember pushing Our Paul on his trike in the street when he was only about eighteen months old, and he fell off and banged his head quite badly, so we had to take him to hospital. We had to take
him
back there again after we were playing ‘army’ one day and I threw a wooden brick which hit him on the head. Reading this back, it sounds like we must always have been hurting each other, but these incidents only stick out because we were generally pretty happy and we played together a lot.
When I was three we moved in with my nana and grandad for a few months, in their bungalow in Swinton. That’s where my memories really start. We ended up staying there quite a bit over the years, when we were in between houses. My nana, Annie Carroll, was a lovely, tough Salford woman. Her mam and dad had died when she was really young, so she had ended up raising her siblings. Her and my grandad, Big Billy, lived in their council house on Coniston Avenue, where quite a few of our family had homes, until they became some of the first people round our way to get a mortgage and bought a two-bedroom bungalow on Charlton Drive in Swinton. This was a big deal for them, coming from a family where no one had ever owned a house before. When we moved in with them, my nana and grandad had one bedroom, and my mam and dad, me and Our Paul had the other.
My grandad was a huge Irish fella with a big reputation and a deep, rough voice. There were loads of Carrolls in Salford, but everyone knew Bill,
everyone
, and everyone liked him. He was kind of cock of the estate. We didn’t find him scary; to us he was just our grandad. Bill worked on the
Daily Express
printing presses on Great Ancoats Street in town, although he seemed to spend a lot of his time in the nearby Press Club, that had extended licensing hours for those who worked in the printing game. He’d go in there and get hammered and not get home until about five in the morning. It still exists, the Press Club. It’s just off Deansgate now. You don’t really have to be in the printing game to get in; it’s also for people who work at the theatres and stuff like that, but you can just blag it in on
the
door. Or you used to be able to. We would go in there a bit ourselves later on, in the 90s, when there was fuck all else open at that time in the morning.