Quit Your Bellyaching
"To be quite honest, if we keep getting offered more shows I’ll probably be doing this stuff for the rest of my life.”
"I'm at home in Manchester, It's all good.”
Ryder sounds exactly as expected. He's lucid and relaxed on the phone and breaks into bouts of laugher without any real warning or reason. His thick accent mirrors his singing voice and it's impossible not to visualise him on a couch taking it easy as he trudges through a full schedule of interviews for the day. Without prompting he starts to gush about Australia, a country where he has spent a lot of times both on tour and as an escape from his beloved hometown.
The story of Ryder and the Happy Mondays has been extensively documented, both in the form of the semi-fictionalised account of the rise and fall of Factory Records in the film 24 Hour Party People and Ryder's own account of the story, his autobiography Twisting My Melon. With the rights for Twisting My Melon purchased by Granada Television we may well see yet another film dealing with this highly romanticised era of British music in the near future.
“I've known Luke Bainbridge who I worked on the book with for a long time,” Ryder says of the process behind writing his autobiography. “Luke used to be the editor of a magazine in Manchester and now he works for The Guardian. When I was putting it all together we both went out did interviews with different people together. I mean there's certain times where I've forgot a lot of things, so you need to talk to people to jog your memory. So we just put it together over about six months I think, something like that. Some of it was hard to write about, especially in the beginning – the early stuff. And then it hits the 90s and I can't remember a lot of it so that's where the interviews came in. The book's done really well which is great.”
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Would he ever consider writing a follow up?
“Hmmm - maybe. Give it a few years when some more people are dead and we can get deeper into a few of the stories.” This is one of the few occasions he does not laugh after an answer.
Even though he brings it up, he's keen to quickly move away from the topic of his still unreleased solo album which he speaks about with great pride. The release date for the album has been pushed into the 'sometime in the future' category after a number of proposed release dates came and went. He says the album he recorded with Sunny Levine (producer of the Happy Mondays' Uncle Dysfunktional album in 2007) is finished and while he would love to see it released soon is happy to put solo aspirations on hold until he's finished with the current flourish of activity surrounding the Mondays' revival.
It's a shame he keeps sitting on the record, but there's a chance that the real reason is he doesn't want to rush into it because of lessons previously learnt. During a six-month stint living in Perth, he put out a very under-the-radar solo album in 2003. Amateur Night In The Big Top was a collaboration with (Ryder's cousin) Pete Carroll, Shane Norton and Stephen Mallinder from Cabaret Voltaire, released on the Offworld Sounds record label. At the time, the record received the very definition of mixed reviews. NME (predictably) called it genius, while Alexis Petridis in his scathing one star review for The Guardian said 'The biggest (problem with the record) is Ryder, a living public information film about the dangers of drug abuse' and called it 'horrible, voyeuristic listening'.
It was one of many harsh assessments of a low key project that came about because Ryder wanted to collaborate with some interesting musicians and try a different approach to storytelling as song writing. In retrospect he's clearly (yet unnecessarily) embarrassed about the project which may explain why he hasn't rushed to follow it up.
“That was a weird one. Because of what was going on at the time, I thought it would be a good idea to let everything just rattle out of me head. I shouldn't have done it – it wasn't the right time or right place. It's just a collection of mad bullshit coming out of my mouth. There was no constructive writing on it at all. Me talking shit! (laughs). I really should have just rested up at that point - I hadn't had a break for years. It's Shane who did all the music, he's an amazing producer and an amazing writer so I don't regret working with him on those tunes but I really just should have kept that all in my head at the time. He's brilliant and I haven't seen him for a while so I hope I get to catch up with him.”
He says that he's enjoying playing shows with the Mondays now more than ever before, and emphasises that the group sound better than ever which he attributes to age, experience and the thrills, spills and bellyaches of the party lifestyle well and truly behind them.
“Being an old geezer it's so much easier,” he laughs. “The way it used to be was just getting out of your brain, and groupies and partying. Now it's just so much easier. You get onstage, you do the show, you have a great time and then you go home. It's just so much easier. How we used to do it I don't know. The shows are enjoyable now, it used to just be madness, but now I really enjoy the show. I haven't been to Australia for about two or three years now. This time we're gonna be just working. We're touring all over for the next couple of years, but I feel like I never stopped really. We split up as a bunch of kids and got back together as a bunch of retarded old men. The live shows now are really great, they really are and I'm not just saying that. It's like we can do now what we thought we were doing twenty odd years ago.”
There's the inevitable question of whether the reunion of the band will result in a new album being recorded, and Ryder is very hopeful that it will but is hesitant to make any promises based on how hard it is to get everyone together. Having said that, he doesn't see the reunion as a one-off experiment.
“We will do one, I don't know when but we've said we'll do one. I mean everyone's got a lot of stuff to do and other commitments. Whenever we can all find the time we'll get it done. I really want Sunny to produce it as well so it will have to happen when he has time for that too. To be quite honest, if we keep getting offered more shows I'll probably be doing this stuff for the rest of my life.”
Happy Mondays will be playing the following dates:
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