Shaun Ryder’s scene is domestic, and clean. The Happy Mondays’ founder states: “My scene at the moment, because I’ve had kids again -we’ve got a nine and ten year old. All my free time now really is doing stuff with them and being with the kids. My world’s just about those two. The first time round, with kids, it was thirty years ago. I was never there. I was just not there when my other kids grew up. So every sort of spare minute I get, it’s just with whatever the kids wanna do. It’s like when I get asked, what music do you listen to now? Well, at the moment, until these two get to teenagers and start saying ‘Dad, take us to see bands’, it’s all Miley Cyrus and Ariana Grande and all that sort of … anything that’s on radio, that’s what I’ve gotta listen to at the moment. As soon as they’re out the way, I’ll turn the radio station off and put Dean Martin on or something!” Still, “they love our music. They come to shows, they come to the festivals. We’re a lot better band now than we was in 2000. We’re a lot better band now … the band’s a lot better, we play a lot better. I just love what I do, really. I enjoy it now more than I’ve ever done in any period. I really do, I appreciate it more now.” [pullquote]The sex and drugs are gone now, and it’s just rock and roll. So, yeah. I think we’re better now than we ever was.”[/pullquote]
Without the “drugs” especially, Ryder will remember the gigs better as he laughs and says: “I can remember the 1960s better than the 90s! At one time I’d have said something like [our sound in food form is like] meat and potatoes really, with no veg. Now, we’re really exotic vegetables because we’re a lot more older now.”
Ryder feasted on a buffet of Bowie and Roxy Music from the age of eleven. “But then I was also into what was in the charts as well, you know, like Mud and Slade and all sorts of stuff.” However it wasn’t until he “went to watch David Essex in Stardust” when he was “about 13, 14” that he decided he wanted to be in a band. “[David Essex] made two movies, That’ll Be the Day and Stardust. I went to watch those, I thought yeah, I’m gonna have a bit of that.” Then within a few years, he started jamming with friends who he worked with as a Post Office messenger boy and friends from school. Happy Mondays came along soon after. 1987 saw their first album ‘Squirrel and G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile’ and this was followed by the classic album ‘Bummed’ in 1988. But it was 1990’s ‘Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches’, produced by Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osborne which saw the band break big time and set the band firmly on the map as one of the most influential bands to come out of the UK in the early 1990s. The making of these albums is still the way Ryder likes to work today – though the ‘acid’ has disappeared and only the ‘rock n roll’ remains. He explains: “Pills and Thrills, I mean even before Pills and Thrills, we all went in together and started jamming stuff out and worked it all out between us. When we did Pills and Thrills, basically the lads sort of came up with few beats, and then the rest of the band added the bass and guitar to that. With Oakenfold and Osborne, and that is the way that I still work now, that way, it’s really quick. The less people around the better!” The drugs are gone but creativity certainly hasn’t. Ryder states: “I’ve just done a new Black Grape album, and … yeah, I still feel as … that’s what I do, that’s what I like doing. I mean the Mondays is a different thing as well, like with Black Grape, it’s just me and Paul Leveridge, me and Kermit. When I made that Black Grape album last year, we should’ve made a Mondays one then, and we couldn’t get that together, so I went off and did the Black Grape album and we’re trying to get a Mondays album together, we really are. We are trying, so we will get one going sooner or later.”
Promotion is important and band members need to be on the front page to keep selling records and shows. Ryder isn’t one to shy away from the camera and the tabloids. He states: “I’ve always said this, when we started off it was the early 80s, and music, it got really boring. I grew up with rock and roll, bands like The Rolling Stones and The Doors and The Kinks and The Who. Doing rock and roll things, and that’s what we wanted to do. We wanna use what we had, and if a journalist saw us smoking a joint or having a line, then we let them see it, and that got headlines, a big page of a whole thing would just be about what drugs we took, we didn’t even have to say anything. But then you got a front page instead of a tiny little bit somewhere else in the paper at the back. It’s just what we did.”
More recently, Ryder went in to the “Jungle” and successfully revamped his career. He explains: “I was forty eight – I was being told by the record company and the management to go in there. And I’d always said no to that sort of stuff; I mean, Bez has done Big Brother. And he won that, and that was a few years before. I was like, oh, I don’t know, and then I thought you know what, I’ll go and do it. It’s good enough for Johnny Rotten, John Lyndon, I watched him in the Jungle. So I went and did it. The reaction that I got at first, well, I came up being the moody rocker that no one really knew about, and you didn’t let anybody know about you really. The image or whatever, or the mad stories of the drugs and the wildness, which you take when you’re young. It’s rock and roll. And at forty eight years old, it was … okay, let’s go and do this now, a different way with the career, you’re at a different age, and I went in and did that. We picked up a lot of different fan base. Now, our fan base goes from ten years old up to seventy odd years old, and I do a lot of TV now, so it opens you up to a whole new audience. Did I prefer the moody, laid back, not talking to media type thing, or nowadays? Two different people. I was a young kid. In your twenties and your thirties, and you’re two different people. I’m nearly sixty years old now, you’re a different person. I like both sort of sets. I had a good time. [pullquote]If I was still running around at nearly 60, off me tits, swallowing loads of drugs, and banging groupies, it’d be a pretty sorry state, wouldn’t it?[/pullquote] You know what I mean? Leave that to the younger ones, you know. I lead a really good life.”
As for touring, Ryder states: “I love playing shows now. I mean, I really do. We all get on great. I love playing, I don’t really do big tours any more. I’m doing Australia, it’s not a big tour.” Touring Australia and New Zealand next month, Ryder and band will be performing their ground-breaking album ‘Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches’ in its entirety. Ryder has fond memories of Australia though he has already “been banned from Australia once” when back in 2003 he “finished a tour there I didn’t go back for six months”. He explains: “I ended up staying six months over me visa, so I got banned for a short while! I just stayed after we finished touring!”
Ryder continues: “But I do like playing shows. It’s great! I mean, at least now you get paid for it, for going out and doing shows. Back in the day, you just toured to promote albums, it cost you to tour! So at least … you might not sell records and more, but at least you get paid for playing!”
“It’s not like I hate singing Step On or whatever”. Ryder explains: “Yeah, Step On … because I don’t get a penny for Step On. But hey, nevermind.” This is reflective of Ryder’s current carefree attitude and approach. He wouldn’t “change things” but the advice he would give his 20-year-old self would be: “Oh, for crying out loud, chill out a little bit lad. At least believe in yourself a little bit more. How can I put it … every album that I did, when we walked out I was never satisfied with it. The first album we did, I never listened to that the day after it come out of the studio. I always said right, it’s on to the next one now, and try and do something else, something better. A couple of years ago when I had to take Bummed back out on the road after twenty five, thirty years, whatever it was, I had to listen to it, and I went ‘Wow, this is pretty good’. Give yourself credit. It’s a pretty good album. I was really hard on myself as a youngster. Really hard on myself.”
Catch Ryder and Happy Mondays play this seminal album on their upcoming Australian/NewZealand tour.
Happy Mondays 2019 Australian and New Zealand Tour Dates
Wed 27 Feb Powerstation, Auckland
Thu 28 Feb, Powerstation, Auckland SOLD OUT
Sat 2 March, Astor Theatre, Perth SOLD OUT
Sun 3 March, HQ Adelaide
Thu 7 March, Eatons Hill Hotel, Brisbane
Fri 8 March, Enmore Theatre, Sydney
Sat 9 March, The Forum, Melbourne
Grab you tickets here!
* Also appearing on Golden Plains Festival