Twisting My Melon (42 page)

Damon Albarn then asked me to do vocals on a track on the second Gorillaz album. I’d always got on with Damon, even since his early Blur days, so I went down to the studio in London and did the track ‘D.A.R.E.’ He offered me points on the track, but I was still in the fucking situation with the Nicholls, so I just told him to keep it. I’d rather he had the dough than them. The video shoot was a bit of a nightmare. I’d put back on the weight that I’d lost, and in the video I was supposed to be this giant disembodied head, kept alive by a machine. Which meant I had to stay in this box, with just my head peeking out the top, for hours on end. It was a long day. ‘D.A.R.E.’ was a great success, it’s Gorillaz’ only No. 1 single in this country to date.

I also received an offer of a new set of teeth in 2005. Years ago I used to spend a lot of money in the Armani shop in Manchester, and I met this kid called Lance, who was working in there while he was a student, training to be a dentist. Lance used to make a hell of a lot of money off me in commission, because I was spending so much in the shop. In 2005, when he had all his qualifications, he got back in touch. He told me he now had his own practice in St Ann’s Square and he offered to give me a new set of teeth. I actually had really good teeth as a kid; they were perfect and white and everything. But because of certain drugs I’ve done, particularly smoking crack cocaine, my teeth had started going. Lance offered to
replace
them with a new set, which cost a good £20,000, in exchange for a bit of publicity. The only downside was, the whole world was going to see how bad my Newtons actually were – Newtons is Manchester slang for teeth, after Newton Heath – because Lance wanted to take some before and after shots.
Granada Reports
also came down and did a little item on my teeth.

Normally, if you were having a complete new set, you would have it done in a series of one- or two-hour sessions, but I just had it done in two stints, one of eight hours and one of four hours. I hate going to dentists more than most people, and have done since I was a kid; it’s almost a phobia with me. I remember seeing the school dentist once, when I was ten, and the anaesthetic didn’t take at first, so I had to have a few injections and it freaked me out a bit. So when I was older I didn’t go to the dentist for a long time, which is probably why my teeth got into the state that they did. I only went when I got really bad toothache and even then I would just say to the dentist, ‘Here’s £50. Can you just pull this tooth out?’ Nobody in their right mind sits in the dentist’s chair for eight hours, but Lance said he could do it in two stints if I could handle it, so I agreed. I just wanted to get it over with. I only had a local anaesthetic, but it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it might do. I thought I would need loads of Valium to get me through it, but Lance made me as comfortable as possible and it wasn’t as bad as I thought. The smell was actually the worst thing about it; when they were sawing and grinding down my old teeth, there was this horrible smell of burning flesh and bone.

By 2006 I was in a much better space, mentally, and I began to de-clutter my life by cutting out a few of the bad influences, and by that I mean people as well as substances. Elliot and Stuart suggested doing a new Happy Mondays album, the first
studio
album since
Yes Please
!, and Elliot suggested we work with Sunny Levine, because he knew him. Sunny is the grandson of Quincy Jones, which means he’s pretty much royalty when it comes to production. He has worked in studios since he was about five years old. He started as a tea boy and worked his way up. Elliot had known Sunny since he was a little kid, because his dad, Stewart Levine, had produced some albums for Simply Red, Dr John and loads more big musicians, as well as The Rumble in The Jungle concert and movie. Sunny had grown up in that great production family, and Elliot knew that the two of us would be able to work well together.

So Sunny then came over and we worked at Moulah Rouge studios in Stockport. I probably only spent a day on each track, writing the lyrics. Sunny was almost working on two different versions of the album, because he would work during the day, with Kav and Gaz chipping in their twopenn’orth. Gaz would be arguing with Sunny over production techniques, telling him he was doing it wrong. This is Sunny Levine, Quincy fucking Jones’s grandson, and Gaz Whelan from Swinton is telling him he’s doing it wrong. Thankfully, Sunny is very easygoing. We get on really well; we’re on the same wavelength and make a good team. I pretty much like everything he does, and he pretty much likes all the lyrics I come up with, and if we don’t we can tell each other.

I would come in at night to lay down my vocals, and invariably it was Sunny’s version of the track that we ended up using. It was quite similar to working with Danny Saber, in that Sunny just had a really good idea of the sort of beats I liked to write with. There were a couple of song ideas that didn’t work out, but if we spent a bit of time on something and it wasn’t working, we’d just drop it and move on to the next track. It was a really good way of working for me. We did a track called ‘Deviants’ with Mickey Avalon, an American rapper who had
just
released his debut album, and there are also a few other guests on there that we didn’t advertise. Ry Cooder is one of them, and his son Joachim, who is a drummer and best mates with Sunny. We didn’t exploit the fact at the time, because they were simply mates of Sunny’s who did it as a favour to him. Because he came from this family of production royalty, he had a wealth of talent that he could pull from. I don’t think the record company even knew Ry Cooder was on the album. Because we nailed it really quickly, I was keen to work with him again after that, and I’ve been working with him recently on my solo album.

After we finished the album
Uncle Dysfunctional
we played Coachella festival in Palm Springs. Elliot organized for Tony Wilson, who was quite ill at that stage, to introduce us and he gave a typically Wilsonesque speech about the Mondays pulling together ‘the house music of Chicago and Detroit with punk rock’ and how ‘they changed the world’. Very Tony.

By the time Tony became ill, I’d become quite close to him again. I’d been round to his place a couple of times, and we’d also done some TV and radio together, and had a couple of meetings, because Elliot was really close to him. I’ll always be grateful to him.

After the Mondays disintegrated, Tony was made up for me when I came back with Black Grape and it was such a huge success. I think he felt the success of Black Grape, after the Mondays, had vindicated anything he’d originally said about me when he used to big me up in the early days. He was also really apologetic that he’d fallen into the trap of blaming me for the Mondays’ split up and the demise of Factory. Although he’d taken enough flak himself for the way Factory went under.

I always got on with Tony and I always respected him. I first knew him as the guy on
Granada Reports
who then got his
own
music show,
So It Goes
, and even back then he was Mr Manchester. If you wanted to be taken seriously in the music game in Manchester you had to have Tony’s stamp of approval, even before Factory. I was never an inverse snob either. It never bothered me that Wilson went to Cambridge and I left school without knowing my alphabet. If someone is cool, it doesn’t matter what background they’re from.

I always appreciated having someone like Tony bigging up me and the Mondays, because I certainly wasn’t going to do it. The Mondays were never going to go round proclaiming we were the greatest band in the world, like the Stone Roses did, so it was good to have someone to do it for us. Especially Tony. But when he would say I was the greatest poet since Yeats or whatever, I just took that with a pinch of salt. He even had a public argument about me in the press with Our Paul, not long before he died, when they were both writing in to the
Evening News
, Our Paul slagging me off and Tony defending me. That was all a bit weird and unnecessary.

I never expected Tony to get ill. He was a person who had come through so much, you just presumed he was always going to be there. I went to see him in hospital just before he died, and I felt like I let him down then, really. I felt like I should have stayed strong, you know what I mean? But my eyes just went. I looked at him lying there and you could tell he was dying. He was thin and he was shaking. Tears just started flooding out of my eyes, and I had to get out of there for a minute and sort myself out before I could go back in. I still feel like shit for that. Maybe he was touched by it, but I think he might have wanted me to be strong, because even though he was frightened to death himself, he was being really brave. I was the one that crumbled.

I went to his funeral at St Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in town, which is known as the Hidden Gem. Like I mentioned
before
, they played the Happy Mondays song ‘Bob’s Yer Uncle’ at the end of the service, which is not the obvious choice for a funeral, but typical Wilson. He always loved that song.

Death is a weird one. I’ve found recently that certain members of my family have become closer to me after they’ve died. People that I would only see once a week or once a fortnight, but after they died they’ve been with me all the time. I’ll be like, ‘How are you, Mary?’, talking to them in my head when I’m thinking about them. It’s as if they’ve come into my space more now than when they were alive.

Joanne was pregnant when we went to Tony Wilson’s funeral, and then, on 10 February 2008, we had a little girl, Pearl Emma Elizabeth Ryder. I asked Joanne if she would have Pearl in St Mary’s Hospital because all my other kids had been born there so it was important to me, and she was happy to have her there. Joanne’s really good friend Big Jo was there, which was great as she’s a big part of our life. We had Pearl christened at St Edmund’s Church which was where I was christened, and that also meant a lot to me.

Your family and your roots mean more as you get older and, not long after Pearl was born, I saw a really nice house for sale. Finding out that Joanne was pregnant again with Lulu, we needed more bedrooms so we moved out of Glossop and back to Salford.

I was still trying to resolve the Nicholls scenario and went to see solicitor Bryan Fugler at Elliot and Stuart, and Fugler explained he could actually get me out of the Nicholls situation, but it wouldn’t be cheap. Elliot and Stuart said, ‘Nah, we’re not paying that amount of money to get it resolved.’ So it then dragged on another couple of years. Stuart was arrogant and naïve enough to think he could resolve it himself without a
solicitor
or lawyer. Eventually, he and Elliot fell out and Elliot walked away from the Mondays and left Stuart managing us on his own for a while. Then they hired lawyers to sue each other, which meant I was dragged into yet another managerial legal battle, which was the last thing I needed. They were supposed to be getting me out of my court case, and they actually got me embroiled in another one. For fuck’s sake. I parted company with Stuart, and eventually decided I had to resolve the issue myself once and for all. So I went back to Bryan Fugler on my own and said, ‘Let’s get this sorted.’ It wasn’t cheap, and it took nearly two years, because it was a huge mess, but it’s finally done.

Over recent years I’ve been offered lots of different weird reality and celebrity-type shows. It’s a bit like that Alan Partridge sketch where he’s coming up with random ideas for TV shows like ‘Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank’ and ‘Monkey Tennis’. One particular show I was offered involved me and Richard E. Grant swimming with crocodiles and sharks. God knows who comes up with these ideas. I turned it down but he went and did it with Ruby Wax and Colin Jackson.
Celebrity Shark Bait
, it was called. We did do
Ghosthunting with Happy Mondays
, with Yvette Fielding, in 2009, just for a laugh, for a bit of a nobble. I think Bez was a bit freaked out, though. It reminded me of when I was living with Suzy in Boothstown, twenty-five years before, and Bez would come round and we’d take acid and watch a vampire film or some Peter Cushing Hammer film, and then he wouldn’t want to go home on his own.

After we filmed
Ghosthunting with Happy Mondays
, but before it was broadcast, we did V Festival, after which Bez left the Mondays again. He left over an issue about the guest list or
something
and he’s been doing his own thing since then. I’ve not fallen out with Bez at all; I just haven’t really seen him since. We’ve lived in each other’s pockets for twenty-five years, so we probably needed a bit of a break from each other. You know that feeling you get after a massive great Sunday lunch, when you feel like you can never eat again? That’s how I feel about our relationship at the moment, but you always end up eating again, don’t you?

Bez is still living that
24 Hour Party People
lifestyle we had in our twenties. He still lives every day like that, and he’s happy with it, but that’s not what I want to be doing every day now. Bez is a force of a nature; he creates this whirlwind of chaos and mither around him, and it must be exhausting just being him. But throw Bez out of a plane and he will land somewhere soft. He always manages to land on his feet in some way, and I hope he keeps managing it.

On 1 May 2009, me and Joanne had our second daughter, Lulu Margaret Annie Ryder, born in Hope Hospital. Good old Big Jo was there with us again as support. So now there’re five of us at home in Salford, and Joseph also comes and stays with us regularly.

Towards the end of 2009 I met my current manager, Warren Askew, who agreed to take over and help me finally make sense of the chaos. He was also instrumental in finally resolving the Nicholls situation, which I can’t thank him for enough. I think he was a little bit wary about taking me on at first, because he didn’t want to have to deal with the old wild Shaun Ryder that he’d read about, so I had to stress to him that I wasn’t really like that anymore.

For the last couple of years I’ve gigged as either Happy Mondays or Black Grape, with the same band – my band – but
I
’m finally ready to be Shaun William Ryder. Kurfirst wanted to sign me as a solo artist nearly twenty years ago, after the Mondays split, but I wasn’t ready to just be me at that stage. I needed to be in a band, so I created Black Grape. When Warren took over, he finally made me see that I was ready to be Shaun William Ryder. We put together a new ‘best of’ compilation called
XXX: Thirty Years of Bellyaching
, and there will be the new solo album next year.