Twisting My Melon – Shaun Ryder
In the late eighties, The Weather Prophets were hotly tipped to break big. But it never happened. And Happy Mondays man Shaun Ryder knows why. “When I look back at a band like The Weather Prophets, it reminds me what we had in the Mondays, what we built up over the years, and what the rest of the band threw away so lightly when the Mondays ended,” he declares in this memoir, deftly mediated by Guardian scribe Luke Bainbridge. “The Weather Prophets didn’t make it, but they were a great band. They wrote far better songs than I could at the time… but when I compared them to us I could also see early doors that success wasn’t just about music. I could see something that they didn’t, even though they were better musicians. I understood that from the start. If it was just about the music, we would never have made it.”
This simple epiphany led Ryder to make a boggle-eyed, maraca-shaking dancer named Bez the public face of Happy Mondays, and sell the media a crude caricature of the band as thieving, drug-munching hoodlums. The media were keen buyers.
Mind you, there was plenty of material with which to work. This book is an absorbing, hilarious catalogue of Ryder’s unwholesome adventures as he graduates from scamming post-office worker to industrious, entrepreneurial drug dealer. He seems altogether prouder of having introduced E to the Haçienda than of the several epochal records he masterminded as the dour eighties gave way to the brash nineties.
Naturally, his own E consumption was Herculean. Casting his mind back to the making of the Bummed LP in Yorkshire, he recalls: “We would be in the car at traffic lights on the high street, in broad daylight, then next thing a top tune would come on the car stereo, and we’d all jump out the car and start dancing round it… Then when the tune finished, we’d get back in the car and drive off.”
Later, the drug stories take a darker hue, as heroin addiction grips Ryder and a recording session in Barbados descends into farce: “Every time I wrote off a car I would take the car battery out and swap it for crack.”
But as this book repeatedly makes clear, Ryder’s too smart to ever become a cliché or has-been. When the Mondays split and everyone expects him to disappear or die, he embraces hip hop and makes a chart-topping party record. Later he kick-starts the nostalgia boom by reforming the Mondays, lends his vocals to an international hit single by Gorillaz, and introduces himself to a new generation via reality TV.
Throughout, indie credibility remains low in his priorities. “It does my head in a bit when fans get over-protective about ‘their band’,” he writes. “You’re watching the band; you’re not in it… People say what about the ‘legacy’ of the band? Please. The legacy? Bollocks.”
Shaun Ryder’s never going to slide into obscurity. Hallelujah. Niall O’Keefe
