Shaun Ryder: “I’m having a blast more than ever now”
“This is the fucking place! This is it!” Noel Gallagher exclaimed as he walked on stage for Oasis’ Manchester comeback.
While times have certainly changed since the 1990s, I guess you would say it is hard to argue with him. It’s a place that has produced some of music’s most iconic bands, songs and characters, all bursting through the cracks of society’s working class with a smile on their face and a tune up their sleeve. One of the most important members of that community is undoubtedly Shaun Ryder.
The poetic frontman of Happy Mondays laid the foundations of the Madchester movement a little before Oasis helped make it “the fucking place”. Hurtling towards the end of the 1980s in a sea of synthesised pastiche, Ryder and Happy Mondays in those days were less concerned with fitting into the slick aesthetic, and more inclined to lean into playfulness, to the kaleidoscopic underbelly of Britain’s partying communities.
“I’m not really the jingly jangly guitar kid, you know, I never was,” he tells me when I ask about the essence of Happy Mondays’ early sound. In fact, he doesn’t say it, he assures it to me with an overwhelming sense of self-deprecation.
But it shouldn’t be self-deprecating at all. Take a track like ‘Hallelujah’, penned in 1993 yet feeling painfully contemporary in whatever setting you place it in. Guitars do in fact jingle jangle as they attempt to keep up with the plethora of textures Happy Mondays were throwing at the wall.
“To me, our stuff still sounds like it would fit in today. To me, it does. Maybe to other people, it sounds dated or whatever,” he adds.
There’s a consistent air of uncertainty or reduction every time I ask about the musicality of Happy Mondays. Maybe, with nostalgia porn getting out of control in the modern world, Ryder is genuinely unsure as to where the band’s legacy lies within music. Or maybe, the innate sense of fun that ran through every single one of their tracks can be mistaken for apathy.
But apathetic or not, what Ryder said is completely accurate. The coalescence of dance and indie sensibilities is a trend that would perfectly soundtrack a modern generation in limbo. No longer is nightlife culture one homogenised landscape, filled with dancers craving bona fide beats.
Our kicks are now served in between the cracks of euphoria and melancholy, and while Happy Mondays were certainly masters of the former, their musical essence never abandoned the latter.
When I listen to Ryder’s vocal melodies, I find it hard to argue an innate sense of musicianship that exists within his music. Gliding the rhythms that lay behind and directing the melodies with hypnotic charm, there’s an acute understanding of how vocals and personality combine with one another. But when it comes to the success of their debut album in particular, he’s keen to remember one iconic figure in particular.
“I’m having a blast more than ever now. I mean, you get people saying, ‘Don’t you miss the old days?’ it’s like, ‘You’re having a fucking laugh!’”
Shaun Ryder
John Cale produced the band’s debut album Squirrel and G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out) and while rumours of recording difficulty ran rife, with Cale supposedly struggling to understand the band’s vision, Ryder’s respect for his involvement on the record remains.
“He must have been in his late 30s, something like that. So, he came through all the sort of, The Velvet Underground madness. And by the time we met him in London, you know, he was this chilled out mellow dude that, you know, eat lots of tangerines.”
While Cale was supposedly eating tangerines, Ryder and the rest of the Happy Mondays were in their hedonistic pomp. So for Cale to keep the creation firmly on track, he enlisted a rather unlikely tonic for himself.
Ryder explained, “We took a break every night at seven o’clock because he wanted to watch the Channel 4 News. And then, you know, he comes across, he’s working with us lot who are a bunch of fucking junkies in flares, and off our tits, you know. So, it’s like John was sort of the wise school teacher bloke and dealing with us. He was a brilliant dude.”
It set out a stall that allowed Happy Mondays to go on and achieve cultural greatness, cemented by their follow-up album Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches. For better or worse, it gave them the sort of song all bands would kill for. A song whose first bar immediately incites a universal reaction of two-step dancing and maybe even the odd exclamation of excitement at the start. ‘Step On’ outrightly typifies the band and acts as somewhat of a soundtrack for the happy-go-lucky Ryder.
But things weren’t always as rosy as the rhythm sections of the band’s greatest hits. The pressure to fulfil your role as music’s primary party goer eventually caught up with Ryder, who in the last few years, has battled growing health conditions, drug addiction and abuse allegations from former bandmates.
But in this latest life chapter, Ryder is determined to look forward and find a renewed sense of enjoyment in what his life has provided him. “Even as a person, you know, as a human being at the moment, I’m just, I’m enjoying it now. I mean, you know, I’m comfortable with myself, I’m comfortable with my own skin. I’m comfortable with what I’m doing, there’s no sort of fucking madness of youth, all the crazy bollocks that you go through. So I’m just happy with everything at the moment.”
A refreshing outlook for an artist whose legacy was made in Madchester and the unruly days of the early 1990s. Specifically, when we live in an era of fandom utterly obsessed with looking back and eulogising the halcyon days of the past. But the acts who joined Ryder and Happy Mondays on the Forwards Festival bill, will be pleased to know, looking back isn’t always the answer.
“I’m having a blast more than ever now. I mean, you get people saying, ‘Don’t you miss the old days?’, it’s like, ‘You’re having a fucking laugh!’ You know, I loved it when I was 18.
Loved it in my 20s, I fucking loved it in my 30s. It got a bit fucking strange in my 40s, I mean, I’m in my 60s now and fucking love it, you know, and it’s just a fucking pleasure just playing.”
The continued self-deprecation and diffusal of any musical greatness I try to prod it largely lends itself to a sort of disposition that is clear to see in a modern-day Ryder. He was friendly, enthusiastic and on the very borderline of mischievous as we laughed at one another’s anecdotes with multiple expletives. At times, it was easy to forget the man I was talking to was one who had put his name to some of history’s most iconic songs.
Because after all, he is just a fan too. Which is why he was keen to tell me how he’d recently come back from a three-night string of Oasis gigs, where he admitted to “dancing round like a fucking lunatic”.
So Shaun, they were good then? “I went to three nights and I thought it was better than ever. And I’m not just saying that, you know, a proper fucking professional outfit, but still rock and roll and still real, you know what I mean? And Liam’s voice is better than ever. I thought it was just better than ever.”
So, even while basking in a never-ending tide of nostalgia, and battling ongoing health problems, Ryder is concerned with nothing more than the contemporary. Because in trying times, be it personally or societally, on the good days we are reminded that it is but the present day and music that keeps us going.
So it’s fitting that when I ask what I can expect from his show at Forwards this weekend, he gives me nothing more than “we’ll all just fucking be enjoying ourselves”.
