How to Be a Rock Star

By Shaun Ryder

Shaun Ryder is a 1990s rock 'n' roll legend. Now, for the first time, comes his hilarious, swaggering, hugely entertaining account of just what it takes to be a rock star.

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, been a figurehead of the Madchester scene, headlined Glastonbury Festival, toured the world numerous times, taken every drug under the sun, been through rehab - and came 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 No.1 album, covering tour bus debauchery, ridiculous riders, record company run-ins, drug dealers and the mafia, 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Release date: Oct 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781838953263

Shaun Ryder

Shaun Ryder has been the subject of several films, written a Sunday Times bestselling autobiography, was runner-up on I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here and is a star of Celebrity Gogglebox.

Book preview

Myths

People can’t get enough of rock’n’roll myths. That’s what they want. Outrageous tales of sex and drugs and rock’n’roll. They don’t want their rock stars to be clean-living gurus, drinking green tea and doing fucking yoga and Joe Wicks. They want you to be larger than life, doing things they wouldn’t dream of doing. They want to live a rock’n’roll lifestyle through you. I was the same before I was in a band, I loved hearing all the classic rock’n’roll stories from the sixties and seventies. That’s what made me want to be in a band in the first place. So later on, when the band first started getting attention, and people wanted tales of outrageous debauchery and excess, I was always more than happy to give it to them. When we started the Mondays in the eighties it really felt like we didn’t have any true rock’n’roll figures any more. Music, like everything in the eighties, had got all polished and glossy, but it had lost something along the way. It had become boring . There was no one causing debauchery and stirring things up like the Sex Pistols, the Stones, the Faces, Led Zeppelin and all those sorts of bands had done. Top of the Pops was full of all those Blitz Kids types, like Boy George and Spandau Ballet and Gary Numan, all shiny pop, eyeliner and hairspray. But I knew that there were millions of kids out there like me who wanted some tales of rock’n’roll debauchery, who wanted to see some musicians living the full-on rock’n’roll lifestyle, and if no one else was going to do it I was well up for it. Bring it on.

Half the time it doesn’t even matter if the stories are completely true, as long as they might be. Did Keith Richards really snort the ashes of his dad after he was cremated? Nobody knows but Keith, but the thing is he might have done, and that’s enough for most people. That’s enough to add fuel to the fire of the legend of Keith Richards. Look at a band like Mötley Crüe and their reputation. Most people have heard of Mötley Crüe because of their rock’n’roll behaviour or because Tommy Lee married Pamela Anderson, but I bet they couldn’t name a single record by them. I know I couldn’t. I bet even most of the people who bought that Mötley Crüe book The Dirt don’t own any of their records. They just bought it because it literally dished the dirt on all their rock’n’roll behaviour. Black Sabbath made some great records, but most people only really remember the band because of Ozzy Osborne being off his head all the time, and his wild behaviour, like biting the head off a bat on stage or pissing on that statue. That’s what made his legend and helped cement his place in rock history. Even though they made some decent records, Black Sabbath wouldn’t have the profile they have now if it wasn’t for the myth of Ozzy Osborne.

Tony Wilson, our old boss at Factory Records, used to say, ‘When forced to pick between the truth and the legend, print the legend,’ and I’m with him on that. When it comes to rock’n’roll, never let the truth get in the way of a fucking good story. People will believe what they want to believe anyway. There would be what used to be called Chinese whispers about what happened around a band, and everyone would tell a slightly different story every time they told someone else, and it just spiralled out of control. There’s that old saying that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. That was before social media. It’s even worse now. Nowadays a myth can go round the world in a few clicks with people forwarding it on or sharing it or retweeting it or whatever. You can’t get too bothered about it.

Some of the biggest rock’n’roll myths are just ridiculous, like the one about Paul McCartney dying in the sixties and being secretly replaced by some other dude. Some people still believe that. They think Macca died in a car crash in 1966 and The Beatles secretly replaced him. These people believe The Beatles left loads of clues, like the photo on the cover of Abbey Road, when they’re all walking across the zebra crossing and ‘Paul’ is barefoot, which is a sign of him being dead, and his cigarette is in his wrong hand, and the reg plate of the car on the cover says ‘28IF’ and he would have been twenty-eight if he had lived. Just ridiculous. Even if it was true – if he had died and The Beatles had secretly replaced him – why would they then leave loads of clues about it?! I’ve met Paul McCartney a couple of times and, trust me, he’s still alive. It was me who looked half-dead when we first met at an awards ceremony, not him. This was in the nineties and I wasn’t in great shape at the time. It’s terrible looking at those pictures of me and him now. He’s twenty years older than me, so he must have been in his late fifties then and I was in my late thirties, but he looks much healthier and younger than I do. I look fucked. He must have wondered what I was on. He did once tell a journalist that ‘the Mondays remind me of The Beatles in our Magical Mystery Tour phase,’ which we were all buzzing off. Our drummer, Gaz, even stuck that quote on his wall.

So, yeah, print the myth. Look at Bob Dylan, he was always spreading mistruths and myths about himself. He arrived in New York with a made-up name, and made up his whole back story, saying he’d run away to join the circus and all that. Turned out it was all bollocks, but it’s never harmed his career. That all adds to the Dylan myth, trying to separate the truth from the nonsense. It’s all smoke and mirrors.

There’s so many outrageous stories out there about me and the Mondays and Black Grape, and most of them have an element of truth about them. The 6Music radio presenter Steve Lamacq said, ‘There are enough stories about Happy Mondays to keep people talking about them for ever. Bands live on through the myth really, myth and legend.’ He’s right, and I was always pretty aware of that, even when we were just starting out.

Quite a few of the myths about me and the Mondays and Black Grape didn’t happen exactly like people think, but I’ve long ago given up being bothered about that. Besides, there’s even worse stories that people don’t know about, trust me. There’s also some stories about me that I don’t quite understand the fascination with, like the story about me and Bez taking Bernard Sumner’s Chinese takeaway out of the bin and eating it, when he was producing one of our early singles. Bernard had only had a few mouthfuls, and we were skint at the time, so me and Bez didn’t think twice about fishing it out of the bin and sharing it. I don’t see the problem. I’m not sure why people love that story so much. When me and Bez got it out of the bin and started eating it, we certainly weren’t thinking, ‘Fucking hell, people will still be talking about this in forty years’