How to Be a Rock Star

Shaun Ryder

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781838953270
• eBook ISBN: 9781838953263
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

THE TOP TEN BESTSELLER 'Candid, brilliant and bizarre' Guardian 'Stories about the frontman and his bandmates are legion... [like] Peter Kay with menaces' The Sunday Times As lead singer of Happy Mondays and Black Grape, Shaun Ryder was the Keith Richards and Mick Jagger of his generation. A true rebel, who formed and led not one but two seminal bands, he's had number-one albums, headlined Glastonbury, toured the world numerous times, taken every drug under the sun, been through rehab - and come out the other side as a national treasure. Now, for the first time, Shaun lifts the lid on the real inside story of how to be a rock star. With insights from three decades touring the world, which took him from Salford to San Francisco, from playing working men's clubs to headlining Glastonbury and playing in front of the biggest festival crowd the world has ever seen, in Brazil, in the middle of thunderstorm. From recording your first demo tape to having a number-one album, Shaun gives a fly-on-the-wall look at the rock 'n' roll lifestyle - warts and all: how to be a rock star - and also how not to be a rock star. From numerous Top of the Pops appearances to being banned from live TV, from being a figurehead of the acid-house scene to hanging out backstage with the Rolling Stones, Shaun has seen it all. In this book he pulls the curtain back on the debauchery of the tour bus, ridiculous riders, run-ins with record companies, drug dealers and the mafia, and how he forged the most remarkable comeback of all time. 'There are enough stories about Happy Mondays to keep people talking about them forever. Bands live on through the myth really, myth and legend' (Steve Lamacq)

Intro

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a rock star. It’s the first thing I ever really wanted to be. Probably the only thing I’ve ever wanted to be. I never really wanted to be an astronaut or a footballer, or any of those things that other young kids wanted to be. I wanted to be a rock star.

I can remember watching Bowie on Top of the Pops and the Small Faces and thinking how cool they looked and asking my mam if I could get my hair cut like Steve Marriott. But it was when I saw the films That’ll Be The Day and Stardust that the idea really took hold in my head. I used to bunk off school and sneak into the cinema in the afternoon. Those films came out in 1973 and 1974, so I would have been about twelve at the time. That was when I first got the idea of what it was like to be a rock star. David Essex starred in both films. In That’ll Be The Day, he was doing odd jobs and thinking about getting in a band. Then in Stardust, his band actually made it and he became a rock star. The great thing about both films was they were about more than the music; they were about the whole lifestyle and fashion that came with the music. When his manager, who was played by Adam Faith, said: ‘I supply the birds, the pills and the pot,’ I was sat there in the cinema, bunking off school, and I thought, ‘I want a bit of that!’

I had no idea how I might go about it. I couldn’t play an instrument or read music, so it was a complete pipedream really, but it was one thing I could see myself doing. It was the lifestyle as much as the music. I can’t really remember wanting to be anything else. Although I’m sure I’m not unique in that. I’m sure every kid in the cinema was thinking the same as me. It was just like the tagline in Stardust says: ‘Show me a boy who never wanted to be a rock star and I’ll show you a liar.’

I could also relate quite a bit to the David Essex character in the film, and he weirdly mirrored how my life panned out a bit. He left school without qualifications like me, nearly got settled down early like me, and then was in a job that wasn’t really going anywhere (he worked on the dodgems on a fair, and I was a postman), before he started a band and they eventually took off. I wasn’t even put off when he died of an overdose at the end. I mean, obviously I didn’t want to die of an overdose, but the possibility of that happening didn’t overshadow the attraction of becoming a rock star. I was sold. I was in.

I had no idea how I was going to do it. I loved music but couldn’t play an instrument. But I got more and more determined as time when on. I left school at fourteen and went to work as a post boy for the Post Office and that brought it home to me that I needed to find a way out. I didn’t want to wake up in forty years’ time and still be doing a post round. No disrespect to postmen, but I thought there was a bit more out there. Another way. There were only a couple of ways out for a kid like me from Salford back then: to make it as a footballer or maybe a boxer. Hopefully there’s a few more opportunities for kids from Salford nowadays, but that’s the way it was back then. Those were your routes out. I began to realize that being a rock star could be a way out too.

We were rock stars before we even had a band, in our little way. I’d always been known around our way when I was growing up. I was a bit notorious, I suppose you could say, and my reputation preceded me a bit. Same with Bez. We were both living rock’n’roll lives before we met. The sex and the drugs came before the rock’n’roll really.

The truth is there’s no fail-safe guide to being a rock star. I’ll tell you as much about my experience in this book as I can, and about what it was like for me, and hopefully some of it will be useful or at least entertaining. But I’ll let you in on a secret: most rock stars are making it up as they go along. It’s not something you can be taught really. I know there’s some Svengalis who think they can mastermind bands like they’re a puppeteer, but those are pop bands really, from The Monkees to Take That. Maybe you can teach someone to be a pop star, but I don’t think you can teach someone to be a rock star.

There are some rock stars who stride out on stage in front of 70,000 people, thinking ‘THIS is where I belong, I was BORN to do this. I deserve to have 70,000 people staring at me, cheering my every word,’ but there’s not many like that, and I’m certainly not one of them. I think most musicians and rock stars suffer from self-doubt at one stage or another. Half the time when some rock star is giving it out about being the greatest in the world, that’s just bravado covering up for their self-doubt. Or maybe it’s the drugs talking.

But if you’re going to last any distance in this game, then you have to find a way of becoming comfortable with that. You have to find a way of having a bit of an ego without being a dick and without worrying too much about it. None of it is real, and it’s important to remember that. The music is important, and you can’t last without good tunes, but a lot of the rest of it is smoke and mirrors. That’s why I find bigger gigs easier to do, which may surprise some people, but they’re easier because they just seem surreal and the huge audience is just a mass of people, so it’s easier to get in the mindset of playing the rock star. The hardest gigs are the little intimate ones. It’s hard to be a rock star and swivelling your hips when you can see the whites of everyone’s eyes staring at you.

The other thing I would say is that it’s bloody hard work. It’s a slog to get started, and to get noticed, and touring never becomes that easy. You’re away from the family and there are times when everyone wants a piece of you and you feel like you’re getting hassled all the time. But having been a postman for a few years when I was younger, I know the alternative is much more of a slog, so I’m never not grateful. There’s nothing more annoying than a rock star banging on about how hard their life is.

I never wanted to be like anyone else. I never wanted to be Mick Jagger or David Bowie or Ian Curtis. I wanted to be Shaun Ryder, but Shaun Ryder as a rock star! Of course there were bands that me and the rest of the bands were really into, but we never wanted to copy anyone else or sound like anyone else. In the very early rehearsals we used to do a few cover versions – Joy Division mainly – but that was just us learning our instruments, not because we wanted to sound like Joy Division. Why would you want to do that? I never understood that. When we first started trying to write our own songs, if Mark Day, our guitarist, or our kid on bass came up with something that sounded like someone else – even if it was a band we were really into like The Beatles or Joy Division – we’d go, ‘Nah, get rid of that, sounds too much like The Beatles,’ or ‘Sack that, it reminds me of Joy Division.’ We were all on the same page: we wanted to create our own sound that was different to everyone else. We didn’t realize how unusual that was at the time. Most bands who are starting out and first trying to make a noise and write songs would love it if they came up with something that sounded like one of their heroes, but we were the opposite. Which is why we developed our own sound that didn’t sound like anything else, and that’s what first got us noticed. Mike Pickering, who was a DJ at the Haçienda, produced one of our first singles and went on to form M People, said that Andrew Berry (the lead singer of The Weeds, who we did some early gigs with) told him that he thought we sounded ‘pure’. He said we sounded like we didn’t have any previous influences, as though we had been locked in a time capsule and not affected by anything that was around in current popular culture. That’s exactly what I wanted.

As soon as we started, I wanted us to be big. I wanted to be on Top of the Pops. I didn’t want to be a cult band who was playing to 150 people every night. I wanted to be playing huge gigs and going round the world. If you’re going to do it, do it right. I saw rock’n’roll as my ticket out of there, and I was determined to do whatever it took to make it happen. I realized pretty quickly that you needed to play the game a little bit, everybody does. Look at all the biggest bands in the world – from The Beatles and The Stones to U2 and Coldplay – and they’ve all played the game a bit, certainly in the early days when they were trying to make it. I don’t mean music-wise. Don’t go changing your sound to try and jump on the bandwagon of whatever is cool at the time, just to get noticed, that’s the last thing you should do. If you try and follow whatever music is fashionable at the time, then you’ll get left behind when the next thing comes along. There’s that saying about fashion: ‘Don’t be a peacock, because you’ll be a feather duster tomorrow.’ Same is true with music. When I say ‘play the game’, I mean all the nonsense that goes with it. All the press and the promo, the photoshoots and the videos and the TV appearances and all that stuff. Some bands make the mistake of thinking they’re too cool to promote their own music. I never understood that, not promoting your own music. I was never too precious about not doing this or that, because it wasn’t cool. Not doing an interview with that magazine or newspaper because they weren’t perceived to be cool? Fuck that. I wanted the band to get as much exposure as possible. There’s nothing less ‘cool’ than dickheads trying too hard be cool. Most of those bands from back then who would only speak to the music press and were pretentious about doing anything that wasn’t ‘cool’ have been completely forgotten about. Trust me, if you’re only considered a ‘cool’ band, that ‘cool’ crowd will quickly move on to the next thing, and before you know it you’re yesterday’s news.

I knew that was the way we could try and make our band last, to get some longevity, by getting people talking about us. I think a lot of people think that me and the Mondays were so busy partying and living that rock’n’roll life, like an outlaw gang, that we didn’t give a fuck if we crashed and burned. Not me. No way. We had come from nothing and, even though we were determined to enjoy the rock’n’roll behaviour and party harder than anyone else, I wanted to make sure it lasted.

That said, I never dreamed we would last as long as we have. Happy Mondays have been going for nearly forty years now and The Beatles only lasted ten years, so the Mondays have been going four times as long as The Beatles! (Although we did fall out and have a couple of breaks in transmission along the way, but we’ll get to that later.) When we made our first album in 1986, it had been eighteen years since Sgt Pepper’s but that felt like ancient history as far as we were concerned – like something that happened in our mam and dad’s generation. Now our debut album is thirty-six years old: twice as old as Sgt Pepper’s was then!

It’s great that young kids are into us now, when we’ve been going nearly forty years. That’s like me as a teenager, in the seventies, being into someone who had started out in the 1930s! Me as a teenager, being bang into some big swing band like the Glenn Miller Band or something. Which is a bit mad when you think of it like that. But it’s great. People forget that if rock’n’roll was born in the fifties with Little Richard and Elvis, then it’s still only about seventy years old now, and the Mondays arrived halfway through that.

I wanted the Mondays to be original and I wanted them to be huge. What’s the point otherwise? As far as I’m concerned, if you’re making music, you want as many people as possible to hear it. That’s what it was about for me, not being worshipped as a rock god. I never saw myself like that. I was never one for making grand claims about the Mondays being the saviours of rock’n’roll or anything. I was happy to leave that to the Stone Roses or Oasis, who were always coming out with grandiose statements like that. Oasis came along after us and when they did Top of the Pops for ‘Live Forever’ Noel said, ‘It’s all about ambition… we want to be an important band. Making music for a closet full of people in Bradford doesn’t mean anything. Phil Collins has to be chased out of the charts, Wet Wet Wet and all that. The only way is to get in there amongst them, stamp the fuckers out.’ The Mondays were really ambitious as well. I just didn’t shout it from the rooftops like they did. But it was also about making a future for ourselves.

I’ve been lucky that people have always been interested in what Shaun Ryder is going to do next, even if it’s something unusual like ghost hunting, chasing UFOs, doing a duet with an opera singer like Russell Watson, trying to be a stand-up comedian for Stand Up To Cancer, or living with a tribe in the Amazonian jungle. I always get loads of mad offers, and as I get older I enjoy doing more mainstream TV and stuff that I probably would have turned down twenty years ago. It’s important as well, if we want to reach a new audience for the music. We represent a moment in time for a lot of people and we were the soundtrack to their formative years. We remind them of the halcyon days of their youth, which is great. But that’s not enough really, for a band to keep going. Those people are in their forties and fifties now and some of them still go out to gigs and festivals, but a lot don’t, so as a band you need to bring in the younger generation as well, and that’s where reality TV comes in. I’m more of an all-round entertainer now. I’m family-friendly. Or a lot more family-friendly than I used to be! Back in the nineties I was the first person to be banned from live TV by Channel 4 because of my bad language.

I do a lot more TV work now, especially after I went into the jungle for I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! I’ve always been asked to do all sorts of reality shows, but turned them all down because I never watched them at home and didn’t really see the appeal. Until Bez did Big Brother, then I realized just how big reality TV had become. When Bez came out of the Big Brother house he was the most famous man in Manchester and was getting offered all sorts. Funnily enough, it was actually me who first got the offer from Big Brother. They wanted me to go in the house but I wasn’t up for it, not least because I was still in a battle with my dickhead ex-managers, so any money I earned went straight to them. So I told Big Brother to get Bez in instead, and he only went and won it. Nowadays I do a lot more TV work, I’m more of an all-round entertainer than I was. You have to be, really. It’s come full circle in a way, back to how people like Tony Bennett or Frank Sinatra used to be. Not that I’m comparing myself to Frank Sinatra.

But these days I’m on daytime TV all the time, on shows like Loose Women. Kids might laugh at me and Bez on Gogglebox and think ‘Who are these old blokes?’ But they google us and think ‘I’ll have a listen on Spotify and see what Happy Mondays sound like,’ and next thing they’re like, ‘You know what, these lot are great.’

I’m not the type to use my platform to push my views. I’m happy to help with any charitable causes, like Stand Up to Cancer – and I do a lot of that stuff – but I’m an entertainer not a politician. I prefer not to get into the politics. Unlike Bez, who actually stood in the elections in Salford back in 2015. I wouldn’t vote for Bez. He’s too much of a loose cannon, he’d change his mind depending on how he felt when he got up each morning. We don’t need loose cannons in politics – look at what happened with Trump, the lunatic. These people shouldn’t be in power.

When you’re in the public eye, the public’s first impressions tend to stick, you know what I mean? Me and Bez became famous as the rock’n’roll hell-raisers of the acid house scene, and that’s how people still badge us now, over thirty years later. We’re known as the ultimate party heads, and that badge sticks, even if our heavy partying days are behind us. Well, my partying days are behind me. I can’t speak for Bez. He still gives it a good go, now and then.

In the sixties, Melody Maker said ‘Would you let your daughter date a Rolling Stone?’ and in the nineties the NME called us ‘the nation’s favourite outlaws’. Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones’ manager, knew all that was great for their reputation, and he was proved right. John Lennon was even a bit jealous of the Stones at that stage, because most of the public still saw The Beatles as these clean-cut lovable moptops in suits, even though they were just as badly behaved as the Stones in private. They were shagging left, right and centre, popping pills and LSD and everything. If you read about what they got up to in their Hamburg days, they were nearly as bad as the Mondays, and they were still only teenagers then. But the public perception was that the Stones were the bad boys, and The Beatles were the boys next door.

I can’t really complain about having the reputation I have, as we fuelled the fire for a long time, but I do find it a bit boring sometimes if that’s all people want to talk about. During the second lockdown in 2020, when we’d all been stuck in the house for ages and everyone was chomping at the bit to get out, there were rumours that they’d invented a vaccine that worked, so obviously everyone was excited, and Nihal Arthanayake on Radio 5 Live told his listeners, ‘If this is true, after being locked down for eight months, the whole country is going to want to go out and party like Shaun Ryder and Bez!’ That’s the first thing people think of when they think of me and Bez. Which is fine. You’d have thought some young kid would have come through and taken the ‘Biggest Caner’ title from me and Bez over the past few years, but it hasn’t happened. We’re touching sixty now and somehow we’re still seen as the poster boys for caning it. Mind you, Keith Richards is nearly eighty and people still think of him as a caner, even though he’s been off the hard stuff for decades now. He was asked about his drug use in the nineties, and he said, ‘Even though that was nearly twenty years ago, you cannot convince some people that I’m not a mad drug addict.’

I know exactly how you feel, Keith mate.

When he fell out of that coconut tree, everyone’s reaction was ‘typical Keith, off his head’ and I’m sure there would be a similar reaction if me or Bez fell out of a coconut tree, even though we were stone-cold sober. But the one thing about having a reputation is it makes you stick in people’s memory. Would Elton John still be such a huge star if it wasn’t for all his ridiculous costumes and the stories about his drug use and tantrums? No way. He had the tunes – don’t get me wrong, old Elton can bang a great tune out – but it was all those stories about him that built the Elton John myth. That’s one of the main reasons he’s bigger than someone like Billy Joel, because there’s all these stories to write about that people are fascinated with, and he knows that, and he plays up to it, and I bet he doesn’t regret a thing.

Thankfully, these days the Mondays and Black Grape and me are remembered for both things. For the music and the hell-raising. The music has stood the test of time. People still love those Mondays and Black Grape records. Or most of them. To be fair, there’s the odd one that I’m not keen on. I’m glad we’re not just remembered for caning it. A band like Mötley Crüe are only remembered for the carnage, not for the music. We’re now remembered for both, I suppose a bit like the Sex Pistols, or the Stones, although I’m not comparing the Mondays to either of them.

I do Q&As and speaking tours now, which I wouldn’t have been able to do ten years ago because my nerves were a bit shot....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Myths
• Starting a band
• Band names
• Rehearsals
• Clothes and haircuts
• Songwriting
• Lyrics
• Record labels
• Live gigs
• Riders
• Top of the Pops
• Drugs
• Rehab
• Fame
• Rivalries
• Interviews
• Video shoots
• Hotels
• Homes
• The recording studio
• Producers
• Singles
• Artwork
• Managers
• Awards
• Fans
• Festivals
• Touring the world
• The tour bus
• Musical differences
• Teeth
• Reality TV
• Social media
• Reunions
• Encore