Twisting My Melon (7 page)

That seemed like a line-up to us – vocals, guitar, bass and drums – and it began to feel like a group. But then I got approached in the street by this kid, Paul Davis. I can still remember Paul Davis as a little kid. He was a freak of a boy, with this huge big head and a dead little body. I didn’t know his name then, but I’d seen him cycling around years earlier, when he must have been about five years old. One day, a few weeks after Gaz had joined the band, Paul Davis marched up to me in the street and blurted out, in his high-pitched little voice, ‘Do you know Gaz Whelan?!’ and I said, ‘Yeah.’

‘Is he in your band!?’

‘Yeah.’

‘He’s a dick! Get ’im out! I wanna be in your band.
Get ’im out, he’s a dick! Lemme be in it
!’

I’m thinking, ‘Rrrrright. Okay. You’re fucking mad, you.’ So I said, ‘What’s your name again? Paul Davis?’ Then next time I saw Gaz I said, ‘Do you know Paul Davis?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, course I do, he’s my best fucking mate!’

We had just started renting a little school hall at a primary school in Swinton for our rehearsals. All Saints Primary, I think it was called. It’s not there any more – it’s been knocked down. I think even then people were referring to it as
my
band, even though I never did. It was just kind of obvious that I was the leader of the gang.

Paul Davis turned up at rehearsals giving it, ‘I wanna be in your band!’

He came with a bass, so I said, ‘We’ve
got
a bass.’

And he went, ‘Yeah, but I wanna play bass.’

So I explained again: ‘Look,
Our Paul
plays fucking bass.’ Jesus Christ. He was a real fucking oddball, even then. He wouldn’t take no for an answer.

He turned up at our rehearsals again the next week. ‘I really wannabe in your band. Look, I’ve brought me bass, I’ll plug in, I’ve got this now and I’ve got that!’

I’m like, ‘Listen, you dick!
We’ve. Got. A. Fucking. Bass. Player
. Can you even play bass?’

‘No, but I’ll learn!’

‘But Our Paul can
already
play bass!’ Fuck me. The kid was mental, y’know what I mean? Just wouldn’t take no for an answer.

So we said, ‘Right, okay, get a keyboard,’ because that was one instrument we didn’t have. So then PD was in.

Unfortunately, PD could not play keyboards. I’m not convinced he can even now. In the Mondays, particularly towards the end, big chunks were programmed, so basically he was just
triggering
samples and patterns. The parts that had been programmed were put into his keyboards by someone else, but he acted as if he was playing all of it.

After the Mondays split, Andy Rourke from the Smiths said to PD, ‘Right, I’m getting a new band together. Paul, you can play keyboards.’

A couple of weeks later I got a phone call from Andy saying, ‘Fucking hell, that lad can’t play a note. How the fuck did he wing it through your band?’

So, that was the original Happy Mondays line-up before Bez joined. Shaun Ryder, Paul Ryder, Mark Day, Paul Davis and Gaz Whelan. X, Horse, Cowhead, Knobhead and No Arse.

We always called each other by our nicknames; we hardly ever used our real names. I was originally called Horse because my surname’s Ryder. Horse rider. Then they started calling me X, because I was doing little drug deals here and there and it did my head in when we were in the pub or on the street and someone would blurt out, ‘Shaun, have you got any weed? Have you got any whizz?’ and I would have to take them aside and go, ‘Will you stop shouting my fucking name out! I’ll sort you out, don’t worry.’ So PD said, ‘Oh, you think you’re some sort of secret agent do you? OK we’ll call you “X”.’ So I became X, and Our Paul then became Horse, and my old fella was Horseman.

PD was just called Knobhead because that’s what he was, an absolute plum. But a nice plum, in the early days. Harmless. An idiot nutcase. A funny kid. It was only after the band took off and people started taking what he said seriously that he became annoying. He’d hit the whizz and the cocaine, which didn’t do him any favours, and he became even more of a nutcase.

Mark Day was Cowhead because he looked like a cow, and he sounded like a cow with his big dopey voice, or Moose. Gaz
Whelan
was either No Arse, because he had no arse, Ronnie, after Ronnie Whelan, or Pepe Le Pew, because he’d always fart when he walked into a room. He’d cock his leg and leave his scent everywhere.

My dad helped us out quite a bit in the early days. Just before we started he had stopped going out and playing gigs himself, so I suppose he transferred his enthusiasm and energy to us. From then on he was living his fantasy through us. He was just as enthusiastic about the band as we were, if not more so. He wanted to drive the van, set the equipment up, tune the guitars and do everything. It would have been a lot harder in the early years without his help. He even ‘acquired’ some of our equipment. It wasn’t unknown for him to walk into some working men’s club or venue, unscrew the speakers and walk out with them. Or part of an amplifier, or a mic stand. We got our equipment from wherever we could in the early days.

Horseman would come down and set everything up for us at rehearsals. I didn’t want to sound ungrateful, but what we really wanted him to do was set everything up for us, make sure it was working and then leave. You don’t want your dad around when it’s your little gang trying to make music, do you? ‘Will you just leave us to it, Dad?’ It was nothing personal – no one would ideally want their dad around in that situation. But he would be like, ‘It’s my bloody equipment, so I’m staying!’ He even got the name Happy Mondays put on a sticker across the windscreen of his old Renault 5. You know when couples would have ‘Daz and Sharon’, or whatever? Horseman had ‘Happy Mondays’.

He really helped us out in the early years, but it affected our relationship for a long time. As I say, when we first started out he would do everything, hump gear and do the soundcheck and the monitors, but when you reach a certain level with a band you can’t have one person doing everything, and he never got
that
. You need specialists. My old fella was still doing the sound on stage, mixing the monitors, when we played Wembley Arena for the first time, years later. I couldn’t hear myself properly and I was trying to tell him, and he just went, ‘It sounds fine to me,’ and I’m going, ‘I can’t fucking hear myself!’ We got into a row during the gig and he ended up coming across the stage and punching me, in front of ten thousand people.

Because my dad had been a singer, but never really made it past the local pubs and club scene, there was a little bit of rivalry between us, simmering underneath. He was also still quite young when the Mondays kicked off, as he was only a teenager when he had me. It’s not healthy to be in competition with your dad, or your son, and it affected our relationship for a long time. We’ve got on much better over the last ten years or so, but it was only when I reached about forty that we stopped trying to be in competition.

When we first started writing our own songs, they were just full of in-jokes, because we didn’t really think about anyone else hearing them. We were just writing songs for us, so they were full of our little catchphrases, observations, nicknames and references to films we liked. We did take the band quite seriously from the off, though. No one else would be allowed into rehearsals, it was just us. In a way it was the first thing in my life I had taken seriously, or at least the first thing I had put as much effort into as I did into stealing and making money. I suppose subconsciously we were beginning to think it might be a way out for us. None of us had a trade, or any great prospects.

Not that Mark Day ever saw rock ’n’ roll as a great prospect. Mark is a very good guitarist, but he was never cut out to be in rock ’n’ roll – he’s just too square. Even back then, when he was nineteen and we’d only just started the band, he’d
complain
, in his dopey cow voice, that ‘Rock ’n’ roll’s not a proper job. You don’t get a pension with it.’ That’s the
whole point
, mate. That’s why you get into rock ’n’ roll. Because you don’t want a proper job. You don’t get into rock ’n’ roll if you’re worried about your final salary pension. For fuck’s sake. Mark didn’t even give up his job as a postie until we had been on
Top of the Pops
a couple of times. The first time we did
To p of the Pops
, with the Stone Roses in 1989, Mark had to get back up to Manchester afterwards so he could do his fucking post round the next morning.

Just after we started getting the band together, I was in the Wishing Well one night and it kicked off, as usual. Our lot were there from Salford, and there was a bunch of lads from Swinton there who wanted a ruck. Gaz was with the Swinton lot and one of them said to him, ‘You know him, don’t you? Ryder from Little Hulton?’ and Gaz said, ‘Nah, I don’t know him, I’ve never met him in my life.’ We’d been fucking rehearsing for three or four weeks already. Proper Judas. In fact, I could say Gaz has betrayed me three times. Once in the Wishing Well, once when the Mondays split up, and once more recently when he left the band again.

Our first gig was at Wardley Community Centre in Swinton, near my nana’s house. I actually remember it pretty well. I was nervous so I got a bit pissed and stoned to take the edge off it. Well, I actually got
very
pissed and stoned. PD didn’t play that first gig with us as he wasn’t quite ready. He was coming to rehearsals but hadn’t quite got it together to go on stage. I remember it felt pretty rammed, but it was only a small room, so there were probably about twenty-five people there. After we finished our set, these girls came up chatting to us. Our first gig and girls wanted to speak to us because we were in a band. But PD, the knobhead, came up and just blurted out, ‘We don’t want to talk to you!’, screaming, ‘Hey, fuck off,’ so the girls did
one
. I turned to him and said, ‘What did you say that for, you dick?’ That’s what he was like. Nice one, PD.

Denise and I got married on 22 May 1982. She was twenty-one and I was nineteen. If someone got married at nineteen nowadays, you’d think they were mad, but it wasn’t a big deal back then. That’s just what everybody did. I wasn’t pressurized into it or anything. You’d think my dad would have pulled me aside and said, ‘What you doing lad? Aren’t you a bit young?’ Certainly if one of my kids turned round to me at nineteen and said they were getting married, I’d just laugh and say, ‘You’re just a child, you’re a baby! What are you doing?!’ But it was a different world back then. Especially round our way. My mam and dad were married and had me by the time they were nineteen, and they’re still together today and have had a long and successful marriage. Ian Curtis was married at nineteen as well. Although that didn’t last, for obvious reasons. Bernard (Barney) Sumner got married pretty young when he was in Joy Division. None of my pals even said anything to me at the time, either, because most of their parents had married young, and a few other people our age were starting to get married. We thought we were really grown up at nineteen then, but we were just kids really. There’s no way I was ready for marriage. But when you left school, round our way, most people didn’t think, ‘Right, I’m going to go out and have a career and do this and do that with my life.’ They just left school, found a job and got married. That was it. I wasn’t making any grand gesture about settling down or anything. I certainly wasn’t thinking, ‘That’s it. That’s me now. I’m going to stop going out and settle down.’ Not for a minute.

On the wedding day itself I was totally embarrassed about what I was doing. We got married at St Edmunds in Little Hulton, but I wasn’t there on time. My mam had to come and
drag
me out of the pub for the service. I was having a pint when I should have been waiting at the altar. I was actually also tripping, all my pals were. I don’t think Denise knew I had taken acid on the day, but she knew I was on something – she wasn’t stupid. I think she just thought that I was stoned. The Mondays were all at the wedding, apart from Bez, who I’d yet to meet. Gaz and PD were only sixteen and I’m not sure if they’d even left school.

After the service, when our wedding car drove down the main road, it must have looked like there was just a bride in it. Just Denise sat there in her wedding dress on her own, because I was hiding. I was crouched down with my head below the window so no one could see me, because I was so embarrassed. Nothing to do with poor Denise – I was just embarrassed about the whole wedding thing. I can’t even remember if we had a honeymoon.

When we got married we moved into a house in Tyldesley, one of those Legoland-type semi-detached Barratt homes, which was a couple of years old and cost us £15,000. I think Denise realized quite quickly that being married to me wasn’t what she wanted. She was two years older than me, and everyone knows girls are more mature than boys at that age anyway. She also came from a big army family. Her dad and her mam were both in the army and her dad was some big sergeant who had been based all over, so she had been to boarding school. As soon as we got married she grew up and joined the real world, and went and joined the TA. I think she began to think, ‘Hang on a minute, I’m married to a kid here who’s just into his music. Now I’m a bit older what I actually want is an army type of bloke, and an army type of life.’

But nothing really changed for me when we got married. I was still going out boozing and to nightclubs and trying to get the band sorted. Denise was into music, so she had liked the
idea
of me being in a band at first, but she just thought it was a temporary thing. When we got married and got a house, I was supposed to forget all that and ‘grow up’. The band was now just childish and a bit wank to her. She thought we were a load of shite. I was also smoking a hell of a lot of weed, which she didn’t like.

Denise and I were both children when we met, but when we married she became an adult and I almost regressed. I was getting more into the band, and I got the sack from the post office not long after that. It had been coming for a while. They knew I was robbing stuff and pulling all sorts of scams, so they sent the Investigations Branch after me. The IB were ex-police detectives who were employed by the post office. I’d been there for a few years by now, and I’d seen plenty of people join the post office just so they could rob stuff. But most of the mugs were so thick they just nicked stuff on their own patch and got caught within a couple of weeks and carted off. Robbing from the Royal Mail was an automatic prison sentence back then. You had to sign the Official Secrets Act when you joined and if you got caught there was no fannying about like there is now, when you can get a twelve-month conditional sentence and go and do some community service. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred you got sent down. Since I first started as a messenger boy, I’d picked up on every trick that the IB had to catch people out, and how they worked.