COME GATHER round children, you are about to witness pop eating itself for the nth time. See, rock n roll never really dies, it just clones parts of its own carcass and then cannibalises those spares for sustenance, and in 1999, this self-regeneration is more prevalent than ever, with acts like New Order, Echo And The Bunnymen and Blondie are doing the resurrection shuffle down at the karaoke corral.
When such revivals get out of hand, rock n roll seems like the oldest profession in the world, and all we can do is hope The Clash and The Smiths stay gone, for our sakes, not theirs. With dubious comebacks from the likes of the Velvets and The Pistols still fresh in the collective memory, many folk are shuddering rather than salivating at the prospect of the return of Happy Mondays.
The party line in 1989 held that if The Stone Roses were The Beatles, then Happy Mondays were the Stones. The analogy turned out to be all too tailor-made. The former act were, like the moptops, an occasionally great but mostly overrated group who got scuppered by studio-bound inertia, while the Mondays, after a good half decade of making brilliantly sleazy feelgood records, became toxic cartoons of themselves, lost in an exiled haze of drug abuse and in-fighting.
And now, Ryder and friends have reformed amidst tales of multiple lawsuits and crippling tax bills (the frontman alone allegedly owes the Inland Revenue #400,000). But despite all the logrolling, cheerleading and trotting out of those tired Last Gang In Town cliches, it s hard to hear anything in the Mondays new single a rewrite of Thin Lizzy s The Boys Are Back In Town but the pained lowing of a cash cow being vigorously milked. Still, the band never made any bones about being in it for the money, and for this we thank them; the sight of Shaun, Bez and the boys pleading artistic integrity would ve been pretty hard to take with a straight face.
All the same, this writer loved the fuck- em-if-they-can t-take-a-joke bravado of the Mondays in their prime. You didn t need a degree in physics to understand albums like Bummed and Pills n Thrills And Bellyaches great slabs of loin-lubricating, groin-liberating noise. And while I wouldn t exactly consider Ryder a hero or anything (and it pays to be wary of those who do), I do get a kick out of the guy s cavalier attitude to life, love and death. That said, the prospect of his old band touring again with scant new product to promote does set the alarm bells ringing.
If anyone can carry it off though, it s the Mondays.
I never wanted to be a frontman. If I could ve been the drummer I would ve. If someone was better, had a faster mouth, was better at fuckin about with words than me, they d have done it. Really, I never wanted to move out of that room where we just jammed.
It s the easy Ryder himself, sitting in a booth in the bar of the Fitzwilliam Hotel. Earlier, he d come across like some barmy Mancunian crossbreed of Steptoe Sr., John Lydon and a pervy Uncle Ernie, chuckling over Ding Dong Denny O Reilly s newsletter An Publocked and cracking off-colour jokes about paedophiles and headless bodies, but now he s relatively serious, eager to tell his story. Downing vodkas and lager, decked out in leisure gear and fielding phone calls from his editor re his Daily Sport column It s Great Talkin Straight , the singer comes across as a singularly unpretentious individual.
Then again, he s at home on this side of the water, having once lived in Cork with his estranged partner Oriole Leitch, daughter of Donovan. ( I still have me gaff there, Ryder remarks, as if he s just remembered that he owns the property. I m a snug pipe and slippers man if I m not kicked up the arse. ). And despite a reputation for being out of it, he seems in good nick. A mite pissed maybe, prone to rambling and repeating himself, but more robust-looking than you d expect.
The Mondays were never what you could call a political band, but their unbridled hedonism was perhaps the only sane response to the oppressiveness of late 80s Tory Britain. The fact that these guttersnipes had subsisted on the black economy for most of their lives only lent more weight to their party-time-for-the-proles manifestos. And the band certainly had a far more lasting impact on British youth culture (not to mention the likes of U2 and Oasis) than The Redskins or Billy Bragg. It wasn t the incomprehensible gobbledegook Ryder was spouting so much as the insolent nature of his delivery: in a dispirited climate, records like Hallelujah made it alright for people to feel alright.
We couldn t give a fuck about being musicians , Ryder once admitted. We were more like a pack of dogs. Nevertheless, the ensemble were pretty sussed, splicing the influence of fellow Factory acts like New Order and Joy Division with other elements filched from A Certain Ratio, Talking Heads and Funkadelic.
Yet when Factory supremo Tony Wilson concluded that they needed a producer with a firm hand, it was John Cale he sought out, not so much for his work with the Velvets as a track record of overseeing classic debuts by Patti Smith, Jonathan Richman and The Stooges. The product of this unlikely coupling was Squirrel And G-Man 24 Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out), in which the band s natural ebullience was slightly tempered by the Welshman s impassive manner.
Cale didn t really speak, Ryder says, when pressed. He was just Mr 12 Step at the time the man ate tangerines all day and he was quiet. And I think we was like highly privileged for him to even smile and think we were half alright. We didn t really touch him or get to know him or anything, he was distant.
The following year saw the release of the follow-up, the classic Bummed, midwifed by another charismatic but troubled producer, Martin Hannett, the man behind records by Joy Division, U2 and New Order.
Hannett was brilliant, Ryder pronounces, but fuck me, I thought we had problems gettin stoned. Martin showed us how to fuckin teach our granny to suck eggs. We was lucky to work with them people in a way. We met some characters. I mean we had to work a long time for the right to pick who we wanted to work with.
Of course, it was the Madchester Rave On EP that broke the band in 1989, and following Paul Oakenfold s and Steve Osborne s phenomenally successful remix of Wrote For Luck , the two were further enlisted to produce Pills n Thrills And Bellyaches. You know the rest. By the turn of the decade, the Mondays, with their partners in grime The Stone Roses, had made Manchester the centre of the universe.
But two years is an eternity in pop, and by 1992, the arse had well and truly fallen out of the Mondays world. The sessions for the band s fourth album Yes, Please!, recorded with ex-Tom Tom Club/Talking Heads members Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth at the controls, came to be regarded as amongst the most disastrous in history, a mess of crack addiction, heroin withdrawal, spilled methadone, crashed cars, and in Bez s case, multiple fractures. The cost of the recordings, compounded by a series of bad investment deals, sank Factory Records. And the music sucked.
We shouldn t have gone to Barbados and made that last album, is Ryder s verdict. Chris and Tina are great people, but to me, it just didn t work. It was a power thing. The way some people in the organisation looked at it was, We made Okie and Osborne a name for themselves, and now they re makin us wait two weeks later than what we planned to do an album! Let s get Chris and Tina. I was like, Woah, what are you talkin about? They re not trying to take the piss, they re just booked.
We needed to fuckin get input on things, y know? he continues. We d got to a point where we d worked for seven years and we all started becoming musicians. I tried to keep that band together, and they wouldn t have it. Each person had everyone following em about telling em how great and how tall they was, and how much they should be getting per beat, and I ve got to deal with a keyboard player wanting to be a producer . . . it just became ridiculous.
To make matters worse, the band flushed all credibility down the toilet in an NME interview with Steven Wells that year, when Bez made homophobic remarks which succeeded in alienating half their fanbase. Almost overnight, the Mondays went from people s champions to being regarded as skag-addled, faggot-hatin scumbags.
Someone could ve gotten that ten years before, Ryder bristles. What was that about, Bez using the word faggot ? Everyone, between people, uses that word. It was a total fuckin stitch-up.
Furthermore, revelations of the group s hard drug problems violated the narcotic protocol of the time, which deemed it kosher to be totalled on E s and whizz, but not smack and crack.
We never really made a secret of it, the singer shrugs. My mentality was like, fuckin ell, if your Mam knows, then so fuckin what. Who gives a fuck? It s just a stupid fuckin game. It took us a while to learn it, but we played it for what it was.
Ryder maintains that the group could have been salvaged at that point there was a handsome deal on the table from EMI but the members were barely functioning as individuals, let alone as a unit.
I tried to keep the money thing together and let em all go off and do different things and widen the range, but they wanted to make it final, he recalls. And in a way I m glad that s what happened. They re all saying, We re doing this and we re doing that, and nothing happened. And we kept our mouths shut, me and Kermit and Danny Saber, and got on with doin Black Grape. And it was cool.
So, Bez and Ryder had a fruitful few years before the Grape split, drummer Gaz Whelan briefly formed a band with ex-Smith Andy Rourke, and Ryder s bassist brother Paul wrestled with his smack habit, ended up in various mental institutions, grew a beard to his chest, then slowly inched onto the road to recovery.
Which just about brings us up to date. Happy Mondays are back on the road, and there s no shortage of punters eager to see what the fuss was all about in the first place.
We sold the shows like that, Ryder maintains. We didn t have to do any press or anything, so it s been quite easy on that front. I mean, I had great fun touring for fucking 15, 16 years, but I m 36 going on 37 in August and I hate touring now. I don t mind going out and doing the odd festival. If we re doing a gig in a castle with Robbie Williams, or if the price is right, I ll do it. But I split Black Grape because I didn t want to tour, I wanted to do something else.
Me and a partner of mine, Tom Bruggen (director of the infamous Grape Tapes), started writing scripts, it took us two years to get a movie deal, then I split up with the missus, got taxed and it was like, Alright, I got to go back and do this. So initially it s a few gigs for the dollar, and that s it. We thought it was gonna be like the reforming of Mud or Sweet, y know, but when we actually kicked into it and listened to the songs and the beats, it was like, fuckin ell man, I got a bit enthusiastic. If it was like cabaret in Butlins, I d probably have some sort of personality crisis or nervous breakdown.
I mean Bez had his crisis, Ryder elaborates, he was on the road with Black Grape doing that (imitates googly-eyed, loose limbed Bez-dance) and he s 35 years old and he felt, What a twat I look . And he went out and did his DJ-ing and his thing with Joe Strummer and his book well, his wife wrote the book, y know, I do all the shaggin and drugs and the bad things in it, and he just watched! So that made him feel better, he s sort of fulfilled himself in different ways.
What were the initial rehearsals like?
When we got rid of the two idiots who were the spanner in the works in the first place, the keyboard player and guitarist, (Paul Davis and Mark Day) it was good and fun, he admits. Our kid hadn t looked at a bass or picked it up or even smelt his fingers for six years, so he was a bit wooden, but after a few days, he was bangin back at it and enjoyin it. Gaz has been practicing his balls off for six years, I mean, I worked with some great proper musicians in Black Grape, and he s fuckin great.
Will there be an album?
I think we re gonna do one, he affirms, but it s gonna be my rules. When I worked with Black Grape, we got ideas together, then brought the people in. We got totally charged just doin that, and it was so much easier than working with a circus where everybody who hadn t a clue was talking in riddles. It s not like I m saying everybody can t put a bit of creativity in they can. If it s enjoyable and we feel fresh again, and if I get my input into it and you give me the dough, yeah.
So how does Ryder respond to those who reckon this whole reformation business is all a sham?
Obviously, we came back for one simple reason, he concedes. Money. But I don t know how anyone can say it s not as good. I actually think it s better because we all put more in, we ve a more professional way of looking at the music rather than just being interested in the party life. I looked at some of the songs when we got back into rehearsal and I was like, If only we d put a bit more into it . We did shows at G-Mex for 50,000 people for 35 minutes because we wanted to get back and party and shit. I mean, that s terrible.
Does he ever regret the amount of money they ve blown?
We ve managed to survive, he shrugs. For years, when we was kids, there was no money. It really wasn t money orientated, it was a chance to live like that. We travelled round Europe just for beer, (staying in) a bed and breakfast because it was fun, that s what we wanted to do. We was out of Manchester.
From Mancunian scallywag to columnist, scriptwriter, actor and wheeler-dealer . . . you get the feeling that, even now, Ryder can scarcely understand how he got to this point. Not that he s complaining. Indeed, the singer affects an outlandishly posh voice to describe his current position:
I m actually now becoming some sort of a poet-film-directing-intelligent-motherfucking-artist-luvvy-darling sort of guy, he hoots. I m takin this damn thing serious now and it s woooonderful! I love doin me writing, me column in The Sport, fuckin eight million or something on Friday and Saturday I get to say what the fuck I want, whether it s topical or music or whatever. You get, Sean Ryder s turned grass now! , but that isn t my style. It s wacky, funny, taking the piss, getting politics in where we can.
The press is a powerful fuckin thing. I had it all my fuckin time in the Mondays if you can t beat it, join it. I really would ve loved to have been a journalist, but I left school before I was 15, had no qualifications. I m not into no fuckin pity bollocks, but I was out workin I had to go for a pop band, get a drug problem and be praised before I got a job as a journalist. And now I m in The Sport, I can do The Guardian, y know what I mean?
And to be quite honest, he concludes, if I hadn t gotten into trouble with personal circumstances, splitting up with er, the tax, er having the house, the kid, and the film taking so long to get backers and shit, I wouldn t have done this. It was purely and simply done for the dollar. You realise one day, it s called the music business. When you get fucked up, they treat you like the PG Tips fuckin monkeys. n
Happy Mondays play The Big Beat weekend in Fisheries Field, Galway on Saturday July 10th. Greatest Hits is out now on London Records.