Twisting My Melon (41 page)

A lot of people think I still live next door to Bez, but I was only there for a year, about eight years ago. They have this romanticized idea of me and Bez being neighbours and popping round to borrow a packet of skins or something. Hadfield is also where they filmed
The League of Gentlemen
, so the idea of me and Bez living there obviously greatly amused some people.

At the same time we were moving up to Glossop, I agreed to make a TV documentary with a guy called Richard Macer. He had actually been pestering me for a year or so to do it. He had just spent six months following Jordan around for a documentary called
The Truth About Me
, and he was a big Mondays and Black Grape fan and wanted me to be his next project. Half the reason I agreed was I thought I could use the documentary
to
show the Nicholls that I was on my arse, financially, because at that time they were asking every fucking week what I was up to, and what my assets were. I’m like, ‘I live in a rented cottage in Glossop with my girlfriend and little lad. What assets!? You mean my fucking helicopter and my power boat?’

I was off the gear, but I was on methadone, Valium, Temazepams and cocaine. I was seeing Dr Nick, who I’d originally met towards the end of Black Grape, and he was trying to help me straighten out, but it was a long process. I had also bought a blender and got into making vodka smoothies for a little bit – put some fresh fruit in, then top it up with vodka. I also used to get horrific heartburn and I didn’t really know what was causing it, so I started eating a phenomenal number of Zantac or Rennies to try and ease it. I had to explain to Richard that if he saw any white gunk at the side of my mouth during filming, it was Rennies, not cocaine. I don’t know what was causing the heartburn then, because I don’t get it now, but it seemed to me that if I took a lot of Zantac, it would get rid of it temporarily, but then it would come back more often and it got more severe. It took quite a while, but as I slowly reduced my intake of methadone and Valium, and stopped drinking so much, it did eventually go away.

The documentary was called
The Agony and the Ecstasy
, but there wasn’t much ecstasy in it. I don’t have many fond memories of that time. Me and Felicia weren’t getting on well, and had pretty much split up by the time the documentary came out. I had also ballooned in weight. I do believe you are what you eat and I was a pie for a long time. I’ve always been up and down with my weight. I was a bit podgy as a kid, from my mum’s cooking, then when I left home I was either on the gear or skint, so I was skinny as a rake. But since the end of the Mondays as well as being on and off the gear I’d been on methadone, and I thought that was what had caused me to put
on
weight, because there’s a lot of sugar in it, so you get that big pile on. Now I know it was probably the start of my thyroid problem, which wasn’t diagnosed until a few years later.

Looking back over that period, I think I really lost myself around 2000. I wasn’t sure who I was, what I was, or what I was about. I started the whole process of working everything out when I was up at Too Nice Tom’s in Burnley, but then I’d gone back on the gear, which had anaesthetized me and stopped the pain of thinking about it, but obviously didn’t change my situation. I didn’t have anywhere to live most of that time; I was sofa-surfing or staying in hotels. I was still on the gear, and the methadone, plus Valium and Temazepams half the time, plus cocaine and whatever else. I was only doing the gigs for the dough really, and even then I wasn’t allowed to keep any money. Everything I earned legally had to go to the Nicholls.

Felicia eventually left and went back to Barnsley, taking Joseph with her. I was living on my own and I was at a bit of a low ebb. I wasn’t on heroin anymore but I was on a concoction of other drugs. I still wasn’t able to earn money legally, and at that stage there didn’t seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel in that particular situation.

As I said earlier, I had seen a bit more of Joanne after I’d moved to Glossop because she was really friendly with Bez and Debs, my neighbours. She’d never really gone out of my life because we had quite a few mutual mates from the Haçienda and generally from going out around town, and we’d always really got on. She was a hairdresser at the time, and would pop round and cut my hair, as well as Felicia’s and Joseph’s, and would sometimes babysit for Joseph to help us out. But there was nothing going on between me and Joanne at that stage. Joanne is not the type to do that to another
woman
. She’s a big believer in monogamy and wouldn’t cheat on anyone.

After Felicia left, Joanne would pop round now and then to see if I was alright and would often bring some home-cooked food up; comfort food, like homemade potato hash. She’s a really good cook, like my mum. There wasn’t even anything romantic between us at first, we were just really good friends who were getting to know each other a bit more. The older you get, the more you appreciate friends who have known you a long time. But then I asked her out on what I suppose was a date, although I’m not sure either of us would have called it that. I took her out to the Palantine Pub in Hadfield and we had a nice meal and a laugh. We just got on really well and enjoyed each other’s company, which is something I realized I’d not experienced for quite a while.

I think Joanne was quite apprehensive about getting involved with me at first. In fact I know she was, because she told me. Joanne had known me for a long time and had seen me when I was a bit out of control, and she didn’t really want any of that madness in her life, particularly as she had a young nine-year-old son, Oliver, in the house as well. Joanne had done her fair share of partying when she was younger – that’s how we met originally – but she had pretty much retired from that scene when she become a mother. She was also a big believer in your home as your sanctuary; that your home should be a place that is sacred, where you can escape from the madness. Whatever you did when you went out partying, you made sure you didn’t bring that home with you.

Basically, Joanne wanted to make sure that if we did get involved then what she was getting was Shaun Ryder the person and not Shaun Ryder the rock ’n’ roll caricature.

But by this stage, I was more than ready to change myself.

The heroin had gone, but I was still taking other drugs and
drinking
more than was healthy. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy to completely separate myself from my old lifestyle and leave it behind, and I knew it wasn’t going to happen overnight. Old drug habits die hard. But I really did feel ready for the challenge. I think it’s fine to party hard through your twenties and thirties but when you get into your forties you can’t be living that same
24 Hour Party People
lifestyle anymore, or you’re in danger of looking a bit sad. No one wants to be the last person left at the party, no matter how fucking brilliant the party has been. I knew a change had to come.

TIME MOVES MUCH
slower when you’re a kid. A year or even a summer seemed to go on for ever when I was younger. The 1970s felt like a century, whereas the noughties seemed like five minutes. As you get older time just seems to vanish.

A lot of people think the Mondays re-formed again in 2004, but the truth is we had never split up since the first re-formation; we’d just been away for a little while. We didn’t have a manager for a time, so me and Gaz were handling things between us, and if we needed any advice, Gaz would phone Elliot Rashman, Simply Red’s old manager. So eventually Elliot and his friend Stuart Worthington took over as joint managers. For personal reasons, Elliot had taken some time out from the music business in the nineties, and I’m not sure how good a decision it was to come back from that to managing the Mondays. I’m not actually that difficult to work with on a day-to-day basis but Gaz and Bez were harder for him and he almost gave himself a breakdown working with us.

After we got together me and Joanne did a lot of talking, her more than me at first, probably. She tried to get me to talk about why I felt the compulsion to do various things; tried to get me to see that, if you’re still partying hard when you get to a certain age, you’re missing out on a lot in life.

I remember her saying to me, ‘You know that kind of floating fluffy cloud feeling that makes you feel like you’re on top of the world, Shaun? You know you can get that from
real life
as well as drugs?’ But when you’ve been taking drugs for as long as I had, it can be hard to envisage that normal life can offer a natural high to match them.

She also used a bit of reverse psychology on me, saying stuff like, ‘Look, if you want to just drink and take drugs all your life then you go for it, mate. Do that. It’s your life, but aren’t you getting bored of it? There’re so many other things to do in life, rather than just getting stoned and having the same conversations over and over into the small hours.’

She also laid down the law a bit in her house. There was no drinking, smoking or swearing, and certainly no drugs, although there was a little lean-to at the back of the house, and she stuck a TV in there for me and slightly relaxed the rules in there at first. So I would chill out there and watch films and have some time out. They say every man needs a shed. If Joanne’s house was her sanctuary, then that was my own little retreat after I first moved in.

I stopped taking cocaine, I stopped taking methadone, I stopped smoking weed, and I stopped drinking for a while. I was completely straight, and I started doing a lot of thinking. A
lot
of thinking. Me and Joanne would stay up talking into the early hours. Everything started to hit me, and I just became overwhelmed. My nana had died in 1988, but it was only now that I started to grieve for her. But Nana’s death was just a
small
part of it. All sorts of things that had happened to me since the late 60s hit me: all the things that I never let touch me when I was a kid, down to all the things I’d seen and done in Happy Mondays and Black Grape, but hadn’t really felt because I was anaesthetized by heroin. That was a lot of catching up to do. I basically had to start playing catch-up on twenty years of feelings. I didn’t really have many deep emotions for two decades, so when I finally came off the gear I felt like a ball in a pinball machine, being bounced all over the place.

I’m not saying I sat there crying to myself or to Joanne, sobbing my heart out. But you have to process this stuff eventually, mentally. If you don’t process it at the time, then you have to process it all later when it catches up with you. I’m not naïve about the way these things affect you. I’ve read about people blocking things out, and I’ve been in rehab where they talk about how to process these things. I’d had various counsellors and professionals try and talk to me when I’d been in rehab before, but I clearly wasn’t ready to go through the process, and was usually pretty dismissive with them. There’s nothing any professional can say to you if you haven’t got the motivation yourself. And when you do find that motivation, I think you need someone who you trust and can rely on to help you through it, and talk it through with you. Or I did, anyway. I needed someone close to me, who really knew me, to actually help me make the breakthrough, and I knew Joanne was the right person to help me pull through all that. I had so many layers of baggage from the past twenty years, and I knew Joanne could help me strip back those layers to get back to the real me. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy and I knew I was going to be hit with twenty years of emotions fast-forwarding and hitting me all at once. Splat. But there’s no way round it, because it’s all in there. If it’s been blocked out it will catch up with you one day.

I started exercising to help me come off the methadone, which I also hoped would shift the weight I’d put on. So I started spending up to eight hours a day on my mountain bike. Seriously. Eight hours a day, pedalling round Derbyshire through my cold turkey. But every time I stopped the exercise, the weight just piled back on, even though I wasn’t really eating much, and I couldn’t work out why. I had no energy at all, and I thought it might just be me getting older and nearing fifty.

It wasn’t until a few years later, when I had to have a medical to get a visa for the States, that I finally discovered it was a problem with my thyroid and testosterone levels, which are all linked in. The doctors told me my thyroid had completely disappeared and I also had pneumonia. I’m now on Thyroxine and regular testosterone injections. But within a couple of months of starting the treatment, it had sorted me right out. I felt brilliant. Better than I had for years. I felt like a spring chicken. Born again. All those clichés. I felt like a normal human being instead of being bloated and tired the whole time. I’d been tired for years, but because I was taking methadone it had disguised what was wrong with me. Even when I was feeling like death warmed up, I would just take meth and get on with it. Which is how I wound up walking round with pneumonia, no testosterone and a thyroid problem.

In the meantime I had met a guy called Kav Sandhu, through bits of DJ-ing I was doing, and he had a club night called Get Loaded at Turnmills with a guy there called Danny Newman. I DJ’d at the club and in 2004 they decided to do Get Loaded in the Park on Clapham Common and asked Happy Mondays to headline. Kav was a DJ and club promoter and he introduced me to Mikey and Johnny who are with me in the band. Kav joined the band for a while, then left after we released
Uncle Dysfunktional
in 2007 to start his own band. Good luck Kav.

I was asked to do
Celebrity Big Brother
at the start of 2005, but I’ve never liked the programme, so I passed it on to Bez. I watched a bit of it when he was on, but I don’t like the way they treat the housemates. They seem to pick people who have slight mental issues, lock them together in a little house, then just chuck booze at them and stir things up to get a reaction.