SHAUN RYDER
DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED
Shaun Ryder, 2021. After battling COVID, the Happy Mondays frontman is now unveiling his second solo album.
© Paul Husband
BACK IN 2010 SHAUN RYDER WAS JUST ABOUT TO RELEASE HIS SECOND SOLO ALBUM. THEN I’M A CELEBRITY... HAPPENED. NOW 11 YEARS ON, WE’RE FINALLY GETTING TO HEAR VISITS FROM FUTURE TECHNOLOGY. THE HAPPY MONDAYS FRONTMAN TALKS ABOUT HIS OLD/NEW LP, AS WELL AS SURVIVING COVID, HIS BATTLES WITH ADHD AND HIS FORTHCOMING BIOPIC.
STEVE O 'BRIEN
As celebrity resurrections go, few are as remarkable as that of Shaun William Ryder. In the early 90s, the Happy Mondays frontman was almost a poster boy for bad behaviour. Remember that tale of him wheeling a sofa out of a recording studio in Barbados to sell for crack? You could never imagine Neil Tennant doing that.
Fast-forward 30 years, however, and there he is, sat next to best mate Mark ‘Bez’ Berry alongside such icons of middle-class respectability as Gyles Brandreth, Maureen Lipman and Clare Balding on Channel Four’s Celebrity Gogglebox. Back in the day, when we saw him spitting out F-bombs while gussied up as Johnny Rotten on TFI Friday, we could never have imagined we’d one day be watching him on TV talking about Blue Planet II while chomping his way through a tube of Pringles.
It all started 11 years ago in the Australian jungle. He may have lost the top prize to Stacey Solomon on that 10th series of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, but Ryder was in many ways the real winner, coming out a considerably bigger celeb than he’d been going in. It came five years after Bez triumphed on the third series of Celebrity Big Brother. Thirty years ago these drug-drenched rapscallions were the pop cultural equivalent of Bonnie and Clyde. Today, happily, they’re more like Morecambe and Wise.
“WHEN I CAME OUT OF THE JUNGLE, MY AGENT SAID, ‘WE WON’T CONCENTRATE ON [A NEW ALBUM], WE’LL BUILD UP YOUR PROFILE AND DO MORE TV.’”
“You go to one of our gigs now and our fanbase ranges from seven to 80 years old,” Ryder tells Classic Pop on the blower from his home in Manchester.
“That’s the whole point why we do these television things now, it’s because you’ve got the young lads and the young girls sat there watching you, and the next thing you know, they’re on their iPad downloading all your albums.”