Just another manic Monday

`OK, let's start with the truth - I'm 67 and I'm damn good-looking." Shaun Ryder, leader of The Happy Mondays, is sitting on a short stool in the Fitzwilliam Hotel, pint and packet of cigarettes before him, and he's telling porkies to the media once again. The real truth is, Ryder is nearer to 37 than 67, and though he's not all that bad-looking for an ex-heroin addict, he's certainly not going to give Brad Pitt any sleepless nights. Ryder is back on the road with his old muckers The Happy Mondays, but nobody told him he'd end up having to fly over to Dublin and give interviews to promote the band's headlining show at the Big Beat in Fisheries Field. When Shaun reformed Manchester's madcap heroes, he promised himself not to fall back into the downward spiral of touring, interviews, promotions and photocalls, because we all know where that leads. Yet here he is, sitting before another microphone, trying to explain for the umpteenth time why he decided, after six years, to bring his motley crew back together again when perhaps they would have been better off getting on with their disparate, dysfunctional lives. To him, the answer is as plain as the aquiline nose on his face.

"Well, obviously, we went in there first of all for one simple reason - to collect some dollar," says Ryder in his working-boy-made-good Mancunian drawl. "Me, Gaz, Our Kid and Paul had all remained good mates, so it was like, all right, just for the dollar. Let's just do these gigs, get the dollar, me pay me tax bill off, pay her up there in court, 'cos she's got the house. Pay all that off, get the buck out of it and me carry on doing what I like doing best at the moment."

What Shaun Ryder likes doing best these days, he says, is writing, which is a bit of a change from what he used to like doing best. The Happy Mondays were Manchester's original 24-hour party people, and Ryder and "our kid" Bez were the rave generation's own Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, necking copious amounts of drugs and running riot through their very own Summer of Love.

"I've toured since I was 18, and from 18 to 25 I had an absolute fantastic f--king time. I was in this to take the piss and go out drinking and shagging and clubbing, doing a half hour set in front of 15,000 people and then f--king off to do some more drinking and shagging and clubbing." Nice work if you can get it, but the payback came in 1993 when the Mondays collapsed amid bitter feuds, financial disarray, and a mass check-in to rehab. Ryder had developed a major heroin habit, which made him look old and bloated, and he had split from his wife, Oriole Leitch, losing a bitter, financially-crippling divorce battle. Still, Ryder bounced back with a new band, Black Grape, enjoying another dose of chart success before that band, too, disintegrated. More financial troubles followed the demise of Black Grape. Ryder was sued for £50,000 by Black Grape's original management team of Nick and Gloria Nicholls, and he was also hit by a tax bill the amount of which he won't disclose but which he assures us is "the size of Canada". When a local Manchester promoter mooted the idea of reforming the Mondays for a special one-off gig, Ryder saw his opportunity to clear his massive debts and have a good time doing it too. "The thing about that was, we started off just wanting to sell a few concerts out. And then it was like, are we going on a f-king Butlins tour, playing to a couple of hundred people? But then we played Manchester Arena, and we put 17,000 people in there, and it was like, wow."

IT shouldn't surprise Ryder that a whole new generation of rock fans would flock to see the original "Madchester" crew in action. While Noel Gallagher was still a roadie for Inspiral Carpets, the Mondays were already on the front pages of the tabloids, getting arrested, hanging out with Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs in Brazil, and being photographed in Penthouse magazine with a bevy of unclad babes. As rock 'n' roll legends go, The Happy Mondays had the right mix of excess and excellence. Their third album, Pills, Thrills And Bellyaches, produced by DJ and remixer Paul Oakenfold, captured the celebratory mood in Manchester at the time, and indie-dance hits like Step On and Kinky Afro became anthems for a generation of young ravers and rockers. In contrast, their fourth and last album, Yes Please!, reflected a nasty downturn in the drug culture. Recorded in Barbados, with Talking Heads' Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth in the production seat, Yes Please! was cobbled together in a shambolic atmosphere filled with the acrid aroma of crack cocaine.

`LET me tell you about that. I'll explain it from my point of view. When we got to Pills and Thrills, which we recorded with Paul Oakenfold - boom! Success. It was a big success, and suddenly everybody in the band had somebody following them around telling them how tall they are and how good-looking they are. And when it came time to do the next album, and we'd been out on the road touring for two years, everyone's big-headed by now. And they were like, what, we have to wait two weeks for Oakenfold to come and make us another album? No way! We made you a star - you was just a DJ before we made you famous. And I'm going, woah, woah, it's not like that at all! We're a team. But the rest of them are going, let's go with Chris and Tina. Now, no disrespect to Chris and Tina - they're great, Talking Heads, fantastic - but they're total musos. And when you put two total musos with guys who taught themselves the drums and learnt the bass by ear and then tell 'em they're great. . . "

Yes Please! proved a major flop, the sound of a band scrabbling around on the floor for the last crumbs of creativity, then dropping them again, some of them being too off their heads to care. After the Mondays finally split, no-one would have expected Shaun Ryder to come back with a blistering new band, Black Grape, and a Number One album, It's Great When You're Straight. . . Yeah! This time, Ryder worked with DJ Danny Saber, and hit another winning formula which yielded such Top Ten hits as Reverend Black Grape and In The Name Of The Father.

Looking back at photos of Ryder from this transitional phase, it was hard to believe the man with the puffy eyes and craggy features had only just turned 30. The ravages of drug-taking had left him looking more like a grizzled old gangster than a young rock star. In 1999, though, he looks leaner, healthier, and - dare I say it - cleaner. "If you want to say that," argues Ryder, "take a look at the Kinky Afro video. I'm barely in my twenties in that, I'm a raging smackhead, and I look like a pretty young boy in it."

At the ripe old age of 36, Ryder's priorities have changed a bit. He's been writing a regular column in the tabloid paper, The Sport, in which he bangs on about anything and everything which takes his fancy. In fact, it was in his column that he first put forward the idea of reforming The Happy Mondays. He's hoping to expand his literary brief to include script-writing - he's currently working on a screenplay with another colleague, a gangland thriller along the lines of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. He recently starred as a hoodlum in the movie of The Avengers, but says he hates acting more than he hates being a frontman in a band. However, he'll just have to grin and bear it for the moment, because the Mondays' calendar is filling up fast this summer. After their Galway gig on Saturday 10th, the band is lined up to do various festivals around Europe, and they'll be returning to Ireland at the end of August to support Robbie Williams at Slane.

Of course, the Mondays Mk. II could descend into drug-addled rock 'n' roll hell just like their predecessor, but for the time being, Shaun Ryder is off the smack, feeling OK, and absolutely up for it. Well, almost.

"Somedays I feel up for it, some days I don't," he concludes. "But at least I've got me sense of humour back."

The Happy Mondays play in The Big Beat in the Fisheries Field on Saturday, July 10th, doors open at 7.30 p.m.