There’s a lot more to Shaun Ryder than the bloke who turns up on I’m a Celebrity and Gogglebox with his mate Bez. Twisting My Melon is where you find the rest of him.
Come on, you’re twisting my melon, man. If you were around in this country in the late ’80s and early ’90s, your style was probably based a little bit on Shaun Ryder’s. You were listening to the Happy Mondays, who fused indie with the rave scene and got DJs remixing and producing their tracks. Guitar bands and dance music had spent years ignoring each other. The Mondays got them in the same room.
I was a teenager with a set of turntables in my bedroom in Southampton back then, a long way from Manchester. It didn’t matter. That sound got everywhere.
Hopefully you weren’t doing quite as many drugs as he was. Ryder doesn’t hide any of it. The book covers growing up in Salford, Factory Records, the Haçienda, the madness of the Mondays at their height, and then Black Grape. And it covers getting clean, surviving it, and racking up a huge tax bill on top of everything else.
There are some brilliant stories in there. The Mondays signing to Factory Records. Bez, whose main job in the band was dancing, and who turned that into an art form. “Step On” and “Kinky Afro” both going top five in 1990. The infamous trip to Barbados to make a record, which went about as badly as you’d expect and helped sink Factory along the way. And then Black Grape, the comeback nobody saw coming, with a debut album that went to number one.
Told straight
It’s told straight. You can hear his voice on every page, and it’s very funny in places, even when what he’s describing is pretty bleak. He doesn’t dress himself up as a hero or a victim. He just tells you what happened, including the bits that make him look daft.
The key idea, for me, is that he survived it and came out the other side. Plenty of people from that scene didn’t. Ryder got clean later than most, and then rebuilt a career on his own terms. Doing that with everyone expecting you to fall over again takes a lot more than people give him credit for.
That’s one of the reasons there’s a whole chapter of recovery stories in my guide. I decided to get sober at a Tony Robbins event in 2014. Reading people who’ve been through their own version of it, and come back, still matters to me.
There’s another thing this book does well. People see one version of you and decide that’s all you are. The book shows you the songwriter, the survivor, and someone who knows exactly how close he came.
When he came second on I’m a Celebrity in 2010, a whole new audience met him as the funny bloke in the jungle. Gogglebox did the same thing again years later. There’s nothing wrong with that version. It’s just that if it’s all you know, you’ve missed the best bits, and the hardest ones.
Most of us get put in a box like that at some point. The class clown, the one who’s always late, the one who’ll never change. Sometimes we put ourselves in it. Ryder spent decades with people writing him off, and he’s still here, still making music, still on our screens.
I’ve talked about this before as our legend. It’s bigger than a story. It’s everything we’ve been told about ourselves, by our family, our upbringing, our culture, until it feels like the truth. It feels like truth, but that doesn’t mean it is. Most of it is other people’s opinion that we’ve allowed ourselves to accept.
He’s not just the bloke off Gogglebox. There’s a lot more to Shaun, and this book tells his story.
It’s one of six honest recovery stories in my free guide, 50 Books That Shaped Me, if you fancy reading the rest of that shelf.
Next time he pops up on your telly, I reckon you’ll watch him a bit differently.
