REAL GONE
A Man Called Horse
Happy Mondays bassist Paul Ryder left us on July 15.
For the thrills: Paul Ryder in New York, June 1992, working on Happy Mondays’ …Yes Please!.
WHEN HAPPY MONDAYS played 1990’s Rock In Rio II festival in front of 198,000 people, a torrential downpour threatened to stop the show and, worse, electrocute the band. Unfazed, Paul ‘Horse’ Ryder began the next song’s bass intro. “Rain,” he later mused to Mondays biographer Simon Spence. “No big deal to us, we’re from Manchester.”
Born on April 24, 1964, and raised in the Salford suburb of Worsley, he drove the band in other ways. His father Derek was a postman and played the clubs as half of a music and comedy duo; his mum Linda was a school nurse. After he and his elder brother Shaun obsessed over the Stones, The Beatles, Bowie, Motown and Joy Division, Paul got his first bass in 1980. He said he learned using a plectrum thrown into the crowd by Scott Gorham at a Thin Lizzy gig; the band he formed with Shaun would, like Thin Lizzy, enjoy an outlaw reputation and huge success, and be derailed by excess.
Alongside brother Shaun’s pungent glossolalia and the wah wah geometries of guitarist Mark ‘Cow’ Day, Paul’s James Jamerson-indebted, stink-funk basslines were an essential dimension of the Happy Mondays’ mutant sound. Signing to Factory, after two sui generis LPs (1987’s Squirrel And G-Man… and ’88’s Bummed), they led the Madchester boom of the late ’80s, reaching their apex with 1990’s Top 5 Pills’N’Thrills And Bellyaches and singles Kinky Afro and Step On. Drugs and chaos destroyed the band after 1992’s underwhelming …Yes Please!, with Paul’s heroin addiction leading to stints in rehab and under section. He rejoined the band for an ill-fated, Admiral sports-wear-sponsored 1999 reunion, but left after clashes with Shaun.
Later activities included guesting with Ian Brown, playing with Big Arm and Buffalo 66, and being cast as a Haçienda club bouncer in Factory biopic 24 Hour Party People. Latterly a resident of California, since 2012 he had taken part in Happy Mondays reunions, and was planning to write his memoirs. He died hours before a Happy Mondays gig in Sunderland. “Long live his funk,” said his bandmates in tribute.
Ian Harrison
Barbara Thompson
British jazz eminence BORN 1944
AN IMPASSIONED saxophonist and flautist at the forefront of the European jazz-rock scene in the ’70s and ’80s, Barbara Thompson MBE was also a prodigious, versatile and expansive composer whose work included pieces for big band, chamber orchestra and 100-piece choir.