Twisting My Melon (43 page)

Working with Warren for the first time in quite a while, I felt like I was back in control of my career. It felt like there was a plan for the next couple of years, rather than just playing a few gigs here and there. He’s a former footballer, he doesn’t drink or smoke, and he gets on with me and Joanne really well. She helps me stay on the right track at home, and he helps me stay on the right track professionally.

Me and Joanne, we decided to get Lulu christened at St Charles’s Church. Joanne was looking at alternative venues online one night and showed me the website of the nearby Court House and said, ‘What about here?’

‘It looks like a wedding venue,’ I said. Joanne already knew that I really wanted her to be my wife, to be Mrs Ryder, so on a bit of a spur of the moment, I added, ‘Shall we just get married the same day?’

‘What? Just surprise everyone?’ Joanne laughed. ‘How funny would that be!’

Thankfully she said yes, so that’s what we did. No one had a clue. The only people we told beforehand were Oliver, Amelia and Warren, because we wanted to make sure he and his family came up for it. Both our families just thought they were coming for Lulu’s christening, then, when we went to what they thought was the do afterwards, we sprang it on them that we were getting married. Even my mam didn’t believe me at first,
and
was telling people, ‘No, no, Shaun’s just joking.’ We just wanted a low-key affair: we’d both been married and divorced before, and we didn’t need to make a big song and dance about it. We knew how much it meant to us, and that’s all that really mattered. I even made a speech, which I don’t think I did when I first got married, although my memory of that is quite hazy.

After he took over managing me, Warren was keen to take me back to doing more television. Most of the TV offers I’d received over the years I’d turned down, not least because the Nicholls situation meant whatever big money they were offering, I could never keep it, but now that was finally resolved. The music business has completely changed since I came into it nearly thirty years ago, and nowadays you need to be doing daytime TV to sell records.

When Warren started negotiations for me to do
I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here
! I wasn’t keen at all at first. I’ve never really embraced that celebrity culture, so I was really uncomfortable about doing it, but both my record company, Warners, and Warren thought I should do it because it would be good for my profile with a new compilation and solo album on the way. When I first started,
Top of the Pops
was the important breakthrough show; now you need to do the celeb-type shows if you want to get your albums into places like Tesco. The reality shows count, that’s the reality. Joanne and the kids all watched
I’m A Celebrity
at home, so they helped persuade me to do it. Warren had also been in talks for me to do
Strictly Come Dancing
, but they were slightly more wary about having me as a contestant, because they thought I would swear on prime-time television. I didn’t want to do
Strictly
either, and with hindsight it’s a good job I ended up in the jungle, because at least that gave people time to see what
I
’m really like these days. People got to see my personality and a bit of the real Shaun Ryder, whereas on
Strictly
they would have just seen an old man who’s not a great dancer. So I’m really glad I did the jungle in the end, because it worked out great.

Ant and Dec are old Mondays and Black Grape fans, so they were made up when I agreed to go on the show. I didn’t really know what to expect when I went in there, and they don’t overly prepare you for it, because they want to see your reaction when things happen. Me and Warren had a couple of meetings with the producers, and Daisy Moore, who was the boss at ITV when it came to celebrity shows, said to me, ‘You’re going to hate me by the time you come out of the jungle.’ But I didn’t. It was nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be. The thing I was least looking forward to was being on camera twenty-four hours a day. That was my biggest nightmare. I just thought I wouldn’t be able to switch off at all, particularly as I was going to be sat with a load of people I didn’t know.

They don’t give you any idea of who the other celebrities are going to be, but I think we did all right, really, with the mix of people we ended up with. I got on reasonably okay with everyone. I’d watched it a couple of times in previous years and they had some right idiots in there – like Paul Burrell, Princess Diana’s former butler. What a knob. I was watching it one night and he was giving it, ‘You’ll never guess who rang me one night? Tom!’ and one of the others said, ‘Who’s Tom?’ and Paul said, ‘Tom Hanks!’ I just thought, ‘You prick!’

Thankfully we didn’t have too many luvvies in there, no name-droppers. I probably got on best with Nigel Havers and Dom Joly, but I thought everyone was okay. Lembit Opik was great and came up to Manchester for one of my gigs a few months after we got out. Jenny Eclair was great. I’d seen Stacey
Solomon
on
The X Factor
and thought she was good, but I wouldn’t have imagined we would particularly get on and become good friends, because she just seemed like a giggly young girl, but she was great. I did keep myself to myself a bit for the first week or so, before I came out of my shell. I think it took me about a week to say hello to Alison Hammond.

When you’re forced to spend time with people, most of them usually turn out to be okay. It did give me a kick up the arse to be a bit more sociable. I’d got to the stage where I thought to myself, ‘I’ll be as unsociable as I want.’ When you first get in the music game, you have to speak to everyone, but I’d got to the stage where I’d done all that and was happy being a bit of a grumpy old sod.

They didn’t give us any idea of the tasks we might have to perform, but we did have to have a medical, and also tests where they asked you lots of questions to make sure you were capable of doing whatever they asked you to. My only real problem, as I mentioned at the start of the book, was that I can’t breathe through my nose, only through my mouth, which was a problem when I had to jump out of the helicopter. We went to twelve thousand feet, which is the highest you can go without an oxygen mask.

I wasn’t bothered about any of the other tasks, like having to eat things. That didn’t bother me one bit. The one task I did that everyone remembers is the one where I was bitten by a snake. That really did hurt. It just sank its teeth right into my hand and the fucker wouldn’t let go. I just gritted my teeth and said, ‘
You little
…’, but managed not to swear. I could see the snake-handlers panicking, because obviously they didn’t expect it to do that, and it wasn’t letting go. It had big old teeth and it could have had my finger if I’d panicked, but my instinct told me to just keep calm, until they eventually got it off me, which
took
about forty minutes. The doctors gave me valium to calm me down.

They didn’t warn me about swearing in the jungle, because they just bleeped it out, but the one time they did have a word with me was after I had to do a task with Gillian McKeith in the freezing water and she was being a bit of an idiot. I did trip out on her and swore quite a bit. Later that night, when you have to go and speak to camera, they did say to me, ‘Shaun, this is a warning: you went a
little
bit over the top with Gillian today.’

That was the only regular contact we had with the production team, and obviously Ant and Dec came in to speak to us during the live show, when they announced who was up for nomination. I didn’t hate Gillian or anything – she just had a bit of an attitude that she was unaware of, and was a little lacking in manners. If I ask someone to do something I’ll say please and thanks, but Gillian didn’t. She bollocked Stacey and made her cry, but when I did the same thing to her, she complained. The time when she fainted was ridiculous. Bloody hell, what a fanny. Some of the others also took things a little too personally, like Lembit getting the hump when Dom Joly took the piss out of him. He couldn’t see that that’s what Dom was in there to do. It’s a game, it’s a TV show. Dom was only doing that because it made good television.

I didn’t arrive in Australia until shortly before I went in the jungle, so my body clock was still out of sync, and I was still awake at the crack of dawn at first, which is why it must have seemed like I was sleeping a lot during the day on the show. But once I settled into a routine, I was the first up. I’d be up at 5am when it was first light, then I’d go back and have another hour in bed at about 8am, before the live TV cameras came in.

I never thought I would last as long as I did in there, especially when I first got the whole ‘Shaun … it
might
be
you
’ treatment from Ant and Dec, when they were announcing who’s up for eviction. That made me think I was making a bit of an idiot of myself. I think I was the first to get ‘It
might
be you …’ and I thought that meant you had almost been voted out, so I thought, ‘Oh fuck. I’m embarrassing the missus and the kids here. Am I swearing too much? Fucking hell.’ The last thing I wanted to do was embarrass my family, so I told them I was going to leave. I decided to do one day longer than John Lydon had done and then leave. But when I was asked to go to the doctor’s hut for a check-up, he hinted I was doing okay and people were behind me outside, which helped change my mind. Me and the other celebs also worked out, after a few nominations, that the whole ‘it might be you’ thing was purely random, a red herring; it doesn’t mean you were almost nominated.

I did get quite bored in there when I didn’t have a task to do, so they started sending me on little walks, just to get me out of camp. If I did have to come out of camp for some reason, they would send me on a long circuitous route to where I needed to go, anything up to an hour and a half long, just to give me some exercise and stop me being bored. That’s one of the reasons I lost a bit of weight making the show, because of all the walking.

I did actually find it hard in the jungle. When I said I was going to quit, they asked me if they could do anything to make me stay. I asked them to give me more fags as I was smoking more than I usually smoked at home, so they upped my fags for me.

Like I said, I didn’t think I was going to last that long in there, so I was as shocked as anyone when I came runner-up to Stacey. When I came out of the jungle, my feet didn’t hit the floor. I think I was given an hour to go and get a shower and get changed, and then it was straight into doing press, tele vision, photo shoots, you name it. That night there was a party, with
lots
more press, and then we flew back to the UK and it was straight into doing more press and television. It was relentless. Even when Christmas came, I only had two days off – Christmas Day and Boxing Day – and then it was back on the publicity treadmill.

I hadn’t really done much daytime telly before, particularly because I had a Channel 4 ban. There’s no way they would have had me on a show like
This Morning
before I went into the jungle. When I came out, I felt all eyes were on me to see if I could handle daytime telly, and behave myself and not swear. It’s not that difficult to not swear, really, is it? It’s not the hardest thing in the world. My language is usually pretty fucking colourful, but I don’t swear in front of my kids, so I can easily not swear on daytime telly. Me and Warren have a bit of an in-joke about this new alter-ego of mine, ‘Showbiz Shaun’. If I’m doing some big high-profile TV show he helps me prepare for it, to get in the zone as Showbiz Shaun: ‘Come on mate, we need Showbiz Shaun for this one’. After I’d done the
BBC Breakfast
and
This Morning
, which were both live, with no problems, then TV producers seemed to relax and realize Showbiz Shaun wasn’t going to get them into trouble, and I was asked to do all manner of shows.

If I’m down in London to do a TV show or a day of press, I’ll usually stay at Warren’s house the night before. He’s got a young family like me – his wife Hayley and their three lovely kids Harvey, Darcey and Winter.

Because Bez had already done that celebrity TV interview circuit when he won
Big Brother
, most interviewers and producers assumed I was exactly like him. But I’m not exactly like Bez. I never have been. That’s why I brought him into the Mondays in the first place, because I thought we needed someone who was different from me. We were never the same
person
, never two peas in a pod. They also expected the Shaun Ryder of twenty years ago to turn up, off his nut, drink whatever was around and smoke heroin in the toilets.

When you get on that celebrity treadmill you do have to deal with some right goons. I generally find it’s the ones who are C-list or Z-list but are deluded and think they’re A-list who are the worst. You get some geezer from some shitty soap opera behaving like Robert De Niro.

The jungle did make a big difference to my profile and I get recognized on the street more than I did before, especially with the younger and older generations, because that’s the demographic of the show. Before the jungle, I wouldn’t necessarily get recognized walking past a bunch of schoolgirls in the street, but I do now. I get little lads running up saying, ‘Did it hurt when the snake bit you, Shaun?’ I also get stopped by grans and grandads, respectable old couples, to tell me they thought I was great on the show.

I’m still doing more TV, but I’m wary about keeping a balance with the music. I’m a musician first and foremost, not a generic celebrity. So me and Warren, spend half our time turning down offers of TV shows and appearances. He’s pretty good at sifting through all the requests we get, so I probably don’t even hear about some of the weirder ones.

Back in the day the Mondays and Black Grape tours were pretty messy affairs, as you can imagine, but we’ve got a really tight operation when we go on the road now. I’ve had the same band for a few years – Johnny on guitar, Mikey on bass, Dan on keyboards and Our Paul’s son Jake on drums. They’re all quite young lads, but they’re good musicians rather than just garbageheads who are in it for the partying. Julie sings backing vocals and Tonn Piper comes in to sing Kermit’s parts if we do any Black Grape numbers. Warren has installed Anthony Tang as tour manager, and they make sure it remains a tight operation. It’s the
only
way I could do it now. I couldn’t go on tour for weeks on end with a bus full of hangers on.