Shaun Ryder’s Book of Mumbo Jumbo

By This Day in Music Books and Richard Houghton

This authorised biography tells Shaun's story in the words of fans, friends and collaborators and features an exclusive interview with the man himself.

 

Packed with memorabilia, previously unseen photos and memories from over 300 fans, this is the Happy Mondays and Black Grape story as it's never been told before, with Shaun William Ryder at its heart.

Featuring contributions from Bez, Peter Hook, Johnny Marr, Paul Oakenfold, Alan McGee, Clint Boon, A Guy Called Gerald, Keith Lemon, Youth, Anne Savage, Steve Osborne, Don Letts, Mickey Avalon, Phil Saxe, Danny Saber, Mike Pickering, Howie B, John Robb, Nigel Pivaro, Jon Ronson, Shed Seven, Sherrie Hewson, Mike Sweeney, Simon Wolstencroft and Yvette Livesey, the book is packed with tales that will have you reaching for your copy of 'Step On' and pulling on your flares as you head back to the heady days of Madchester.

• Language: English
• Publisher: This Day in Music Books
• Release date: Aug 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201814489

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The right of Richard Houghton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This edition © This Day In Music Books 2021. Text ©This Day In Music Books 2021

ISBN:978-1-9196165-2-0

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Front cover design Liz Sánchez

Front cover photography Dave Hogan

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Photo: peterjwalsh.com

CONTENTS

Foreword

Prologue

Introduction

Acknowledgements

FOREWORD

BEZ

One of my earliest memories of being a Happy Monday is one of starvation.

Shaun had a flat in Boothstown. He shared it with me and his brother Paul and when I first moved in it was chaotic scenes. It was ‘first up, best dressed’ so whoever was first up got the clean underpants.

We used to be that skint we’d go to the Haçienda every night it was open. We were on an amphetamine diet, living on speed. We were like rakes and always really hungry, so after we came out of the Haçienda we always used to go to Piccadilly and get a bag of Wheels, which was like a big bag of crisps, and fill it with tomato ketchup.

Sometimes we’d get the last bus home, but more often than not we ended up walking the 10 miles home to Boothstown eating our bag of Wheels. It was our meal of the day.

Photo: peterjwalsh.com

PROLOGUE

PETER HOOK

Shaun’s a national treasure now. On I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here he out-Rottened Johnny Rotten. His naturalness and his honesty comes across so well, and his irreverence and his piss taking is completely Northern. To me he’s a purer Manc than Liam or Noel Gallagher could ever be, because he’s got that withering sense of humour that is pitted against every one of his mates. He’s always taking the piss. I can’t say he’s a pleasure to be with but it’s a fucking entertaining moment whenever you’re with him.

Having Shaun and Bez on the Haçienda Classiçal they have become a big part of Manchester attitude and politics. The rough diamond that is Shaun comes across in everything he does. Salford and Manchester and Factory Records were good at propagating those rough diamonds. Shaun is the epitome of it. He’s a Salford version of Hugh Grant.

Peter Hook and Shaun Ryder at the The Hacienda, Manchester. peterjwalsh.com

INTRODUCTION

Shaun was born in August 1962 and grew up in Salford. His family settled in Little Hulton and at the age of 11 he went to Ambrose High School.

SHAUN

I grew up with music. My dad did music. He did the folk clubs and the Irish clubs and he was a stand-up comedian. I came from a family where the Carrolls had eleven kids of all different ages and were all into different things - Commander Cody, Elton John, the skinhead movement and all sorts. So music was always there but I’d never thought of it as a career. Then I went to watch David Essex’s Stardust. When I saw that film I thought, ‘I’m having that lifestyle. I’m gonna be in a band. But I’m not going to die of a heroin overdose.’ As Adam Faith put it - the birds, the pills and the pot.

Everything I learnt, I learnt in junior school. When I got to secondary school it was just a case of crowd control. At school we had four sets and Set 4 was the dumbest. It was crowd control. Everybody in my class had a condition – ADD, ADHD, austistic, psychopathic. You can’t keep it in. You can’t queue. You get angry. There’s all sorts going on. When I went to school, if you didn’t shut your mouth you got a smack in the gob from the teacher.

"BECAUSE I DIDN’T PLAY AN INSTRUMENT IT NEVER ENTERED MY HEAD TO BE IN A BAND UNTIL I SAW STARDUST"

I was the class clown, the trouble causer, which was all to do with my ADHD that’s been diagnosed since I’ve become an adult. It explains why I’ve had such a chaotic life. I couldn’t learn anything.

I left school officially at 15 in 1978. I wasn’t 16 until August of that year, but I’d stopped going to school in the third year at 13, when you take your options. I just didn’t go in. At 13 I was working, pulling cinema streets out of the cinemas that were being turned into bingo halls. I was grafting, working on building sites, getting paid off a boss who’d get a crew together and I was paid daily. I was also knocking about on the streets robbing, doing all sorts. Thieving. Burglary. Anything.

The first day at Ambrose, I walked through the school gates and Pivaro grabbed me and tried to stick my head down the bog. I got away from him and I lost one of my shoes. On the first day! He was two years older than me and he thought he was God. He walked around with a comb in his hand, combing his fuckin’ DA. Nigel copped lucky. He got jailed for burglary and when he came out of prison our old drama teacher hooked him up and he got in Coronation Street. The only other person from our school who made the headlines had been the geezer that strangled prostitutes behind the back of the pub with their tights, so it was like, ‘Fucking hell, he’s made it!’

IF YOU MESSED ABOUT IN LESSONS THEY’D SEND YOU OUTSIDE TO CLEAR UP, SO ME AND MY TEAM OF HANDPICKED IDIOTS SPENT ALL DAY PICKING UP CRISP PACKETS. I THOUGHT IT WAS GREAT BECAUSE I COULD SMOKE AND GO OUT FOR MY DINNER

NIGEL PIVARO, ACTOR AND JOURNALIST

I’ve known Shaun for nearly 50 years, from when he started at secondary school. I was two years older. You don’t remember the younger kids in school as much as they remember you. You’d be bullied by the kids in the year above, and you’d bully the next intake. Shaun got chased around the playground, got a few thumps, his head pushed down the toilet basin – I don’t think he got the actual full flush treatment – and had his sports kit thrown on the roof so he’d get into trouble with the sports master for not bringing his kit in. He went through all that with me, the poor lad, and he’s never let me forget it!

I remember being at Swinton rugby ground with him and a little mob of freelance hooligans. It was St Helens versus Wigan. 10 or 15 of us local Swinton kids were making a nuisance of ourselves between the two sets of fans, fighting all comers and then legging it when we realised we were outnumbered by about 200 to one.

Then I didn’t see him then for ages. I became an actor and he was doing his music, and his heroin. There’s always been a drugs scene where we lived and where we went to school. You were either in the drug scene or you weren’t. There was a notorious pub called The Foresters where all the heroin addicts and the speed freaks went. I was very anti-drugs, but Shaun got into that early doors. I had an inkling of him being a bit out there with the drugs. But he became a postie, bizarrely.

APOLLO THEATRE

23 APRIL 1979, MANCHESTER, UK

PHIL MILLER

I went to the Apollo in Manchester to see Magazine supported by The Skids and Simple Minds. We knew then how big these two support bands were going to be. This was back in the day when everyone smoked weed at gigs so this made everything better. I miss that from modern day ‘fresh air, volume limited’ gigs. At work we told our mates Shaun and Paul Ryder how great our night had been and they went on to form Happy Mondays. I can remember doing our rubbish messenger boy job and riding down London Road, Manchester with Shaun on the back of my Honda 250 Super Dream, singing ‘Thank you falettinme be mice elf agin.’

SHAUN

Our Matt who does the artwork and another couple of pals got instruments. I had a set of drums. I was trying to play drums and also trying to sing but that never went anywhere. And then Matt dropped out and we got Our Kid on bass, Mark Day on guitar and Gaz Whelan – who was still at school - on drums. They all went to the right foot school, which was Mark, Bez, Whelan and Davies, and me and Our Kid went to the left foot school.

But we all lived near each other and we knew them from around where we lived. Me and Mark were the oldest at 18. PD was still at school. Our kid was 18 months younger than me.

We never did a gig. We didn’t even have any instruments. Our Matt was lining us up with gigs and all sorts. And I’d say to Matt, ‘We haven’t got any fucking instruments. We can’t even play cover versions. You’re getting us gigs? You’re off your fucking nut!’

THE BULL’S HEAD

1982, WALKDEN, UK

MIKE SWEENEY, RADIO DJ & BROADCASTER

Back in 1981 or 1982 I was in a band called the Salford Jets. We’d been together since 1977. We named ourselves after our hometown. We’d become quite successful nationally, and in the North West of England unbelievably successful. We were getting the same crowds and the same sort of money for gigs as bands that were in the charts and we’d had two or three minor hits.

We were doing an outside concert on the back of a flatbed truck at a massive pub in Walkden called The Bull’s Head, just down the road from Shaun in Little Hulton. On the day of the gig, or possibly the day before, this kid came up to me and asked if they could do the gig with us. It was Shaun.

I said, ‘Yeah, all right. Why not?’

He told me a little bit about the band – ‘we’re all from Little Hulton’ – and then he said, ‘We haven’t really got a lot of equipment.’

And I said, ‘Well the backline’s going to be on there. Have a word with Dave, our drummer, and you’ll be all right. If you break anything, replace it.’

To this day, neither Shaun nor I can remember whether they did the gig or not. For years he would say that was the first gig the Mondays ever did. But afterwards he said, ‘I took that much shit when I was younger maybe we didn’t.’

When the Salford Jets got together, the record company wanted us to get rid of the Salford bit. We didn’t, and they said ‘it’ll go against you’. Salford, and where we’re from, is now synonymous with rock and roll. But back then it was seen by record companies and their A and R departments as an absolute cesspit, a real rough house, and would mitigate against us. When Shaun said ‘we’re all from Little Hulton’ that was a bit of synchronicity. It resonated because of the fact that up to then they were the first band after us that said ‘we’re all from Salford’. That’s why, at the time I said, ‘Of course you can do the gig’.

Even now, the link between me and Shaun is the fact we’re from Salford. It’s got nowt to do with status. It’s got nowt to do with money. It’s got nowt to do with how successful the Mondays were and how relatively unsuccessful the Jets were. We’re all from Salford and it links us.

GIGOGRAPHY 1983

GIGOGRAPHY 1984

WARDLEY COMMUNITY CENTRE

1982, SWINTON, UK

SHAUN

We did one gig at Blackpool Postmen’s Club and came last, and then we did a gig at the Salford Community Centre, which was hilarious.

THE GALLERY

15 MARCH 1984, MANCHESTER, UK

The Mondays’ first ever gig in Manchester. The poster, designed by Matt Carroll, said, ‘Why not have Happy Mondays on Thursday 15 March at the Gallery live?’

NICK SULLIVAN

I got to know Shaun and Paul sometime in 1983 when I was working at a shop called Sportsbox, upstairs at the underground market on Market Street opposite the Arndale. My mate Simon worked there full time, and I used to work Saturdays and a couple of days in the week. We sold mainly rare Adidas trainers, which we brought over from Germany. Shaun and Paul were working for the Post Office back then and used to come in regularly - often in the week in their postie uniforms - to see Si, say ‘hello’ and of course buy trainers, Adidas Dublin/Koln being the favourites. Si was mates with Shaun and a mate of Gary Whelan’s, and that’s how I go to know them.

Nick Sullivan used to sell trainers to Shaun and Paul Ryder

Everyone was into Factory, Factory bands, music and football. Me and Simon would go out after work to Brannigan’s or Corbieres and then a group of us would often end up in the Haçienda for a late drink and see a band. We would bump into Shaun and some of the other Mondays, who would also be doing the rounds.

A bit later, in the mid-80s, Raw Power and later Temperance Club at the Haçienda were favourites - student nights, really - with cheap beer and a good mix of music. This was when a couple of hundred people in the Haçienda was a busy night! It wasn’t just the Haçienda; the Venue and Legends would have good nights too. Legends was always good for early Detroit and Chicago house.

Working and knocking about with Si meant I was lucky enough to see the Mondays early on at The Gallery (Shaun brought us a few posters for the Gallery gig for us to put up in the shop), at Corbieres, Macclesfield Leisure Centre, etc. throughout the ‘80s to memorable nights like the Ritz and CBGB’s in New York and The Paradiso in Amsterdam. So many great nights and excellent live performances, sometimes chaotic, but that’s what made them such a good band.

Along with Shaun’s brilliant song writing, not many bands’ collective albums are as good as theirs and Bummed (a personal favourite) is one of the best albums of the decade. Thanks again to Shaun and the rest of them for great times and brilliant tunes.

PETER HOOK

I lived in Minton Street in Moston and Paul Ryder was my postman. One day with the letters he put a cassette through my door. It was a demo of ‘The Egg’ and the other couple of tracks they’d done. It was the first time I’d spoken to him really, other than a ‘hiya, morning’ type thing. I never knew he was a musician or a fan or anything and I listened to the tape and thought it was really good and really interesting. I took it to Tony (Wilson) and he loved it as well so he got in touch with them.

And that’s when I found out they were from Little Hulton, which was where I lived when Odsall got redeveloped. They’d also been moved, from Broughton or somewhere else in Salford, to Little Hulton. I didn’t know them there, but they must have known that I’d been in Little Hulton so I suppose you wait for your paths to cross. They were obviously music fans. They’d formed a band. They’d seen us play. They were fans of the Haçienda and fans of Factory Records.

I then found out, probably in one of Shaun’s autobiographies, that he was my mother’s postman in Little Hulton and that, whenever I sent her a postcard, the fucker was nicking it. I used to get so much shit off me mam for not writing to her, and it was because that bastard was nicking me fucking postcards.

SHAUN

Our Paul says he went around to Peter Hook’s and posted this tape in Peter Hook’s letterbox and then Peter Hook then went into Factory and said ‘you’ve got to sign these’ but that’s not how it was. A tape did go through Hooky’s door, because our Paul was also a messenger boy - he drove a mini van for the post office, and he drove to Hooky’s house and put this tape through the door - but we didn’t hear anything from that for years. We never got an iota off that. Phil Sachs made that happen, because when we hooked up with Phil he knew everybody. He gave it to whomever he gave it to and he went and talked to Tony and the next thing we were on factory. There was no signing.

We didn’t sign any deal. There was no contract. We didn’t sign anything until Pills ‘N’ Thrills and Bellyaches was coming out and the only reason we signed a deal then was because record companies were coming from London and pinching all the Manchester bands. Not that we’d have left Factory but it was a case of ‘sign this’ so we signed a contract.

NIGEL PIVARO

The next thing I remember is him shouting at me when I was driving around in my first car. I’d come back to Manchester to do some TV. These kids pulled up alongside me and this moptop stuck his head out going, ‘Hiya Nige, I thought you’d have a better car than that by now.’ I said, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ and chased him up the road.

Then the Mondays started to come good, and I started to reconnect with them through Tony Wilson. Me, Tony and a guy called Alan Erasmus used to fill three hours of train time back from London to Manchester having these mad discussions about life, the world, drugs and the Mondays. I said, ‘I know Shaun and Paul vaguely because I went to school with them and our paths have crossed a few times. You want to get them off that stuff.’ And Tony would say, ‘You don’t know anything about drugs. The bad one is cocaine because it makes you think you’re wonderful but you’re not. Heroin’s a creative drug and they’re firing on all cylinders, so I’m not going to interfere with the source of their creativity.’

I got interested in them and I saw them blossom from back street student band to national and international fame, first hand when I could. It was quite interesting for me, coming away from the acting and TV world where you had to mind your Ps and Qs. I was a naughty boy but I had to keep that supressed, being in a major national institution like Coronation Street. They had a lot more licence, and I saw them having a whale of a time and being professional naughty boys.

PHIL SAXE, HAPPY MONDAYS’ FIRST MANAGER

I used to be the marketing manager of Humbrol’s toy division in Hull but left and came to Manchester. In the centre of Manchester there were two markets. The underground market was a commercial market on the south side of Market Street, with loads of little shops and nothing to do with the council, and the council-run one was part of the Arndale Centre. My brother Leonard had a stall in the Arndale market. I was at a loose end so I took a stall on the market too. And that’s when I first met the Happy Mondays.

Manchester was a little bit in the shadow of Liverpool, fashion-wise. And music-wise, because The Beatles had such an enveloping effect. The big thing in the early 80s was very tight light blue or faded jeans and you got the Liverpool thing about the trainers – because they’d been to Europe so many times, nicking trainers from shops.

We sold clothing on the market and my brother had a knack of finding stuff that kids that would later be known as ‘scallies’ would buy, so it was quite a trendy market stall for working class kids, a lot of them from Salford. We got to know a load of them, and some of them were quite dodgy. But these were lads that used to hang around and we got pally with them and we’d chat to them.

One day, when my brother and I had the two separate stalls, three girls who must have been about 15 or 16 and from Salford said to me, ‘Do you ever get any flares in?’ I said, ‘No I don’t, but why do you want flares?’ And they said, ‘Well we’re all on the dole, we can’t afford to pay the prices for stretch tight jeans and we thought we’d be a bit different and get flares.’

We used to buy stuff from these Iranian guys who had a big warehouse in the centre of Manchester. They would buy parcels of old stock off people like Levi’s and Wrangler. We had a look through and found maybe half a dozen pairs of flared Levi’s jeans and cords with 26-inch and 28-inch waists so we picked them up for a couple of quid. The girls bought them from us. I thought ‘that’s quite strange’ but I was dead chuffed, because these kids were doing something different that was Manchester youth culture. But the strangest thing was that within two or three weeks we had hundreds of people coming to the stall asking for flares. They were copying these girls, because no one was wearing flares before and these girls set up this fashion where all these people would want to come and buy these 20-inch bottom flared jeans from us.

My brother and I used to travel around the country and buy up all the old stock in warehouses. Wrangler had tons and tons of 18-inch bottom jeans and cords they couldn’t get rid of. We bought the lot off them - thousands of pairs - and stored them above my dad’s shop in Didsbury. We bought a load of Dickie’s cords too, before anybody knew the brand Dickie’s - 20-inch bottom cords at something like £1 or £2 each - and we’d sell them on the market to all these kids.

Some of the customers we met were Shaun, Paul, Gaz and Paul Davies, who they used to call Knobhead. They would come to the stall and chat to us and they’d buy stuff. They told me they were in a band. A great friend of mine at the time, Mike Pickering, was A&R for Factory. He was also responsible for booking all the bands and the acts at the Haçienda, which had just opened, so I said, ‘Give us a tape and I’ll give it to Mike.’

The Mondays probably thought I was a bit of a businessman, although I wasn’t really, and they didn’t know anybody who had businesses. Being Jewish, and because we had a business, they must have thought I was a bit sharper than I actually am. But I was just helping out.

I remember driving to the Iranian warehouse down Oldham Street and listening to this tape in the car and thinking, ‘This is all right, I’ll give it to Mike.’ Without listening to the tape Mike said, ‘We’ll put them on our Hometown Gig.’ This was three local bands playing on a Thursday night, a little bit like a talent contest. The Mondays weren’t the most popular band that night, another band won the contest, but they were dead chuffed that they’d played.

I had been to watch them rehearse a few times in the schoolroom somewhere in Salford. I got to know them as people and I suppose it was the fact that they were some new youth cultural thing that I was really interested in. I loved the way they dressed and the way they spoke. These young kids wearing flares were actually being looked down upon by most of the other people around, certainly in the Haçienda. It’s very commonplace now – and really got popularised by people like Liam and Noel and Oasis - but at that time it was very, very different from everything else that was going on around.

All I was doing was helping out some lads I was really excited to know. I was probably 10 years or more older than most of them and I just thought, ‘These lads are great.’ But after they had played Mike Pickering said to me, ‘Oh, I know why you wanted me to put them on. It’s because you want to manage them.’ It had never even occurred to me. But I went downstairs and I just said to them, ‘Do you want me to manage you?’ And they all went, ‘We’ve been waiting for you to say that!’

To some degree, it was like I became a gang member, even though I was older than them. Maybe I had an advantage in that I was never in it for the money. I wasn’t a professional and I didn’t really know what I was doing. It was more a case of, ‘I just want to hang out with them and I like them.’

SHAUN

We didn’t know this at the time but Phil was Mike Pickering’s friend. Tony was Phil’s friend. He knew them all. He knew Rob Gretton. Phil was a DJ at The Twisted Wheel so he knew all these people. It was Phil who got us hooked up with all those people. It wasn’t what you know. It was who you know.

MAXWELL HALL

17 APRIL 1985, SALFORD, UK

MIKE PICKERING, FACTORY A&R

From ‘82 onwards I worked at the Haçienda. I hired the DJs, the bands, everything that appeared there and basically did everything. It was pretty empty in those days. As well as having a band on Factory called Quando Quango, I was Factory’s A&R man, which was obviously quite different from being an A&R man nowadays because no bands on Factory had contracts and they did what they wanted. It was about spotting the bands.

I had a lifelong family friend called Phil Saxe who had a stall on the underground market in the Arndale Centre in Manchester. He was selling jeans and jumpers and that kind of thing and he got to know Shaun and one of the others because they used to hang around there. He really liked them. Shaun looked a bit like Shaggy out of Scooby Doo, with a little goatee beard. He wore baggy jumpers and flared jeans that were slightly too long and Adidas trainers with a shaggy haircut. They weren’t like anything that was really around and Phil immediately loved it. He was really into youth culture, and I remember him taking me to his house in Bramall and opening his up and over garage door. The garage was stacked to the top with jeans and I was like, ‘Fuck, what are you going to do with all them - apart from sell ‘em?’ and he said, ‘They’re really wide legs so I’m getting them like these lads wear. They have them tighter down to the knee and then they flare from the knee.’ He knew the exact measurements. He said, ‘This is the new thing.’

Phil said, ‘They’re really good, this band. The singer’s got a really good voice. And he gave me this rough demo.’ So I said, ‘Well give it me.’ It was on a cassette. I can’t remember which tracks were on it but when I heard it, it was like ‘this is really good.’

Shaun’s voice in those days, pre the excesses, almost had a little hint of Feargal Sharkey in it, a bit of a warble. But it was good. I don’t know what it was but there was something about it that made me say ‘I really, really like this’. So I met them and they just took the piss out of me for an hour and a half, and I thought that was great.

Then I had to get them a gig because anyone who signed to Factory you had to see live. They did a gig supporting New Order at the Maxwell Hall in Salford and they were really raw but they were great. And I think they went out supporting Colourfield, which was Terry Hall’s band.

I saw Tony Wilson and Rob Gretton. Rob said, ‘Yeah. I really like them. I think they’re all right.’ Tony’s exact words were: ‘Darling if you want to sign ‘em, you sign ‘em.’ So they signed and the next thing was, ‘Well, we’d better make a record.’

SHAUN

That’s why we got signed to Factory. We went with them because of who we knew. Tony gave us our break. Tony looked beyond the music. We were like a little fucking gang of kids that played together and fucking hung together. And Tony saw these characters in us – it was almost like being John, Paul, George and Ringo.

We weren’t the best band at the time. We couldn’t really play our instruments when we were making the first fucking record. I was only just learning to fucking write. I thought you had to write about subjects like Vietnam or fucking ‘love you scooby doo woo’ or whatever. I didn’t get the concept that you could write what you think and what’s close to you or what’s on the street or whatever. I didn’t get any of that then. That came really slow. That first record of ours that Mike produced was a million miles from where we wanted to be. But none of us was capable of getting our idea over to Mike as to what we wanted.

GIGOGRAPHY 1985

Supporting

PETER HOOK

They started playing with us, as did all the Factory bands. We were quite a happy family. Every gig we got we’d have a Factory band on. It just seemed like the right thing to do. So once the Happy Mondays joined the stable they came on the road with us. They were much more difficult to put up with than any other support band on Factory. They were a fucking pain in the arse. And they also had that Salford chip on their shoulder. Basically, like me, if it wasn’t nailed down they’d take it. It led to a lot of altercations over the years because they were proper fucking scallies. They really were the biggest fucking bunch of tea leaves I’d ever met in my life - and I thought we were bad. Not particularly Steve and Gillian, but me and Barney and the road crew were fucking terrible. We’d have anything that was worth nicking. And when the Mondays came along they put us in the shade. And once they got into drugs they were even worse, if that was humanly possible. And Shaun of course was the ringleader.

MACCLESFIELD LEISURE CENTRE

19 APRIL 1985, MACCLESFIELD, UK

DAVID EMMERSON

Being local we went along to Macclesfield Leisure Centre to see New Order supported by the Mondays. It was two days after my 20th birthday. Because I was celebrating my birthday, the whole evening is now a bit of a blur, although I got some Instamatic photos of New Order. It was a really rowdy atmosphere and up until this gig I don’t think I’d heard of the Happy Mondays, who I do remember being fairly ramshackle... but that’s not a bad thing in my book. Hopefully someone will come up with a review of them that night and fill in the gaps for me. I do remember that we waited ages for New Order and then Hooky walked on stage to utter the immortal line, ‘All right, sheep shaggers?’

David Emmerson’s birthday celebrations were a bit of a blur, as is this photo of him and his mates

ADAM AND EVE

JULY 1985, LEEDS, UK

SIMON HORSEMAN

I spent all night in Leeds with Shaun in 1985 in a little bar. You went downstairs – it was very shady. Me and my brother sat with him. Bez was at hospital as he had broken his arm. The Leeds lads gave them shit all night, but me and my brother liked Shaun from the off. We had a good night and a spliff. We’d come from Doncaster and pinched a car to get to the gig!

‘DELIGHTFUL’/FORTY FIVE EP

RELEASED SEPTEMBER 1985

MIKE PICKERING

We did it in Square Dance Studio in Bury. Gaz Whelan had no drum kit so we had to borrow the one in the studio. I had to produce it so I roped in Tim Oliver, a mate of mine, to engineer it and we recorded three songs. That was their first EP. It was a lot of fun. They wanted to stay in the studio overnight because it had a pool table and a telly and they thought that was fucking great. I said, ‘No you can’t. It’s all going to be alarmed and locked up.’

It took off straight away from there. They got decent gigs. We put that single out. I don’t think anyone thought they were going to be big or do anything at that point, except I did an interview with i-D magazine at the same time in which I explained what I was trying to do with my Friday nights at the Haçienda, which wasn’t hip then, and that I wanted to totally reverse all door policies. Normally you could get into a club with a shirt and tie but you could be an absolute thug, a psycho. We called them thugs in ties. I said, ‘I want the little scally lads and the Perry boys, they’re the people who should be in our club.’

We reversed the whole process. We made it £1 to get in and 50p if you were on the dole. I was DJing and we had about 1,500 people on the Friday night, and it kind of grew from there. The Mondays loved that kind of music so they took to it straight away. They couldn’t believe their luck. ‘Not only can we put records out but we can get into the club we want to go in.’

On a Friday it was really eclectic, from electro to the first rumblings of House music, which was coming out of New York and Chicago, the Arthur Baker kind of stuff. But we’d also play a bit of old Northern Soul and a bit of funk and all sorts. We even had Simon Topping from A Certain Ratio come and do a little 20 minute salsa break - which cleared the dance floor but we loved it! It became a big night.

And the Mondays had their place, which they never relinquished, under the balcony in one of the alcoves. That was their little domain, and they were all really nice lads, very funny. I always got on with them right from the start.

Shaun was very driven, though. That’s shone throughout his career, even though everyone thinks he’s this mad character who does nothing. When we were recording he knew exactly what he wanted. He knew exactly what the songs should be like and how he wanted them, and he’d tell the others in no uncertain terms: ‘Get your finger out and get recording.’ He was really good.

CORBIERES

27 OCTOBER 1985, MANCHESTER, UK

JEREMY BOWERS

I went to see them at Corbieres. It was a brilliant gig. Bez wasn’t a member then, he was just dancing in the audience. The Lord Anthony Wilson signed them there and then.

NICK CARROLL

I was told we were working Sunday night. It was some band called Happy Mondays who had signed for Factory. I had never heard of them. The support band were The Weeds. Everyone in town knew The Weeds because of the lead singer Andrew Berry who was a face around town. He was also a pal of Little Anthony who worked with me in Corbieres. I arrive for work and I’m met outside by Dave, the manager of Corbieres. ‘All they’ve done since they got here is fuckin’ skin up, the cunts.’ He was talking about the Mondays. Dave didn’t like people smoking draw in Corbieres.

I walk downstairs to find the Mondays sat about and, yes, they were all skinning up. The thing that struck me about them though was their look. They all dressed like my mates who were all match-going lads with jeans and Adidas trainers, the look that at the time didn’t have a name. Bands didn’t dress like that.

The place soon fills up. It’s not a normal Corbieres crowd. There are lots of young kids who themselves dress like the Mondays. Also in attendance is Tony Wilson and then Johnny Marr and Andy Rourke turn up, who are there to see their mates Andrew Berry and Simon ‘Funky Si’ Wolstencroft, who is playing drums for The Weeds. The Weeds are going to be the next big thing, Little Anthony tells me. They do their set and are all right, but I don’t share Anthony’s enthusiasm.

The Mondays come on and the young crowd comes to life. Every song is reacted to enthusiastically. At the end of the set the lead singer appears genuinely appreciative of the crowd and thanks them. After we close, me and Little Anthony sit at the bar arguing. He again tells me The Weeds will be massive. I disagree and say I know one day there will be a band that dress like football lads who, if the music is good enough, will be massive.

‘I think I might have just seen them.’

SIMON WOLSTENCROFT, DRUMMER WITH THE WEEDS

I was playing in a band called The Weeds in 1985 fronted by Andrew Berry who was ‘hairdresser to the stars’ and ran a salon called Swing, which was situated directly under the Haçienda stage. We were invited to play with the Mondays at the celebrated Corbieres wine bar just off St Annes Square in Manchester as a kind of showcase for Factory Records.

It was really cramped in there and I remember the Mondays arriving for the sound check. I was well aware of who this bunch were because I’d met a couple of them in the Haçienda the previous year. They looked a lot different to us fashion-wise and sounded nothing like our garage rock trio. I was watching Gaz Whelan, their drummer, most of the time. We called them Perry Boys back then - Pringle knitwear, wedge haircuts and Hush Puppies or Pod casual shoes.

I didn’t actually meet Shaun until a few years later in the Dry Bar when I was out with Mark E Smith one night. He sidled up to me at the bar and for some reason said, in a mock upper class accent, ‘Ooh, so you’re Funky Si are you? How wonderful’ before reverting to his normal Mancunian dialect and adding ‘get your gear out then’ really loudly in front of my boss from The Fall, who I don’t think heard him and was playing it cool.

Tony Wilson had signed the Happy Mondays to Factory after the gig at that sweaty Corbieres gig and had also wanted to sign The Weeds, but Andrew refused the offer saying, ‘We’ll only sign with EMI.’ The rest is history.

The Corbieres gig was reviewed by Bob Dickinson in the NME:

With perspiring, resounding frustration they thunder the sound of northern council estates… They consist of a mixture which threatens not to gel - genteel guitar, thwacking bass, twiddly organ and mule-kick drumming - with undermixed vocals… It takes a little time for ‘Delightful’ to deliver with almost gospel-edged waspishness. The Mondays find their feet with a furious happiness.

HAÇIENDA

3 DECEMBER 1985, MANCHESTER, UK

Bez appears on stage with Happy Mondays for the first time. He told The Guardian in 2017, ‘I’d scored a lot of black microdots. So me and Shaun were tripping our heads off. Shaun turned round and said, ‘I can’t go on, Bez! You’re gonna have to come on with me.’ So I ended up on stage tripping my nut off, shaking this maraca.’

MIKE PICKERING

I think Bez just happened by accident. He hung around with them and he just used to get up on stage and dance. A lot of the stages were only low anyway. My thinking is that Bez just got used to being there with them and they wanted him to be part of the band because he was one of their mates. It was very much a gang thing. But he could have been a foil for Shaun. There might be a bit of shyness in Shaun. Normally when people get that out of their minds it is partly down to shyness.

PHIL SAXE

When I first got involved with the Mondays, on the first single release, the EP ‘Delightful’ which Mike Pickering produced, Bez wasn’t in the group. As Shaun would tell it, Bez had been living in the mountains of Morocco doing drugs with a load of bandits and then he’d come back to Salford. He was Shaun’s