MONDAYS MOTIVATION
SINGER SHAUN RYDER TELLS MARION McMULLEN HE NEEDS TO TAKE A BREAK TO GO UNDER THE KNIFE
THE Happy Mondays are keeping Shaun Ryder busy with a new tour, but he says it might be a while before they hit the road again because he needs to fit in surgery. He reels off his ailments as he says he is hoping to take five months off next year to get on top of everything.
“By the time I was coming out of the hospital after having my first hip done, I was already being told off for walking up and down the stairs normally, but I was alright,” he says.
“I’ve got trouble with my knee, as well as my other hip now, but it’s hereditary. My mum has had two hip operations. She had her first at something like 75 and the second at 80, but I’m too busy at the moment to have more surgery.
“I’ve just got to get on with it. I’ve got too much to do.
“I need to take five months off because you are laid up for several months after the op.
“I’ve also been on testosterone replacement for 15 years and when you don’t get that it really is the male menopause.
“My testosterone was taken off me because my blood was thickening and I would have had a stroke. “So they had to take the testosterone away which made me a quivering wreck. I was too scared to go out of the house. It was terrible, but it’s all back to normal now.
“I’ve got my testosterone back and I’m back on my bike.”
The 61-year-old singer continues: “I’m not overjoyed about going into hospital and having an operation, but if you’ve got to have it done you’ve got to have it done. “I also got two nonmalignant growths in my testicles, the size of frozen peas, big frozen peas, and they are pressing on a nerve. It’s like having toothache in your b **** .
“I’m on tablets for that, so sorting that out and the other hip is going to lay me up.
“I’ll get through this year, because this is the last of the Mondays tour, and once we do this tour the Mondays are going to be [away] for a while, while I concentrate on other stuff.”
The Been There Done That Tour will be the legendary Manchester band’s only shows this year and they’ll be joined by fellow 90s British music icons, Inspiral Carpets and Stereo MCs.
Happy Mondays became the pioneers of the Madchester sound after signing to Tony Wilson’s Factory Records, blending their love of funk, rock, psychedelia and house with the sounds of the UK’s emerging rave scene, and producing hits such as 24 Hour Party People, Step On and Loose Fit.
They crossed over into the mainstream with the release of their third album, 1990’s platinumselling Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches, and they were presented with the Ivor Novello Inspiration Award in 2016.
Shaun says his other band, Black Grape, has sold more records than Happy Mondays, but Happy Mondays has become iconic.
“The band is better than ever and it is a shame we are giving it a rest, but it makes sense. I’ve got a Q&A tour coming up from September, and in 2025 I will take time out and get my hip, knee and everything done.” He says appearing on Channel 4’s Celebrity Gogglebox with Happy Mondays bandmate Bez has proved to be a dream job. “It’s great,” he chuckles. “I get to watch television and get drunk with my best pal. It’s one of the best jobs. If I’d been told at school when I was 14 that I’d get paid for drinking beer with my mate and watching telly then I would have been, ‘That’s for me, that’. I wouldn’t have even bothered doing the music.”
It was Bez who did reality TV first when he won Celebrity Big Brother in 2005. Shaun says: “I got offered Big Brother back then and it was still a bit, ‘Hey, I’m an artist. I don’t do that sort of reality stuff’.
“But [I] couldn’t have done it anyway because I was under receivership and would have had all the money taken off me and not received a penny.
“It seemed right for Bez. He came out of that more well-known than b **** y Morrissey, you know what I mean? His work schedule went up
and he became the iconic Bez, so it really worked for him.
“It was 2010 when I got offered reality TV again and my lawyer said to me, ‘by the time you come out of this jungle we will have got you out of receivership’ – which I’d been in for 12 years – so I went into I’m A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here! knowing I’d be able to keep the money.
“My worst fear about going into the jungle the first time was the pretentious luvvies that I would have to be with.
“People that would probably make me skin crawl, people who would freak out because they had to sleep outside instead of being in a house in a nice bed, but when I got there I found I was with a decent bunch of people. “People like Lembit Opik, the politician, I loved the guy. He’s a mad scientist of a guy, he really is eccentric.
“It was great. I didn’t want to come home. It was a really exciting adventure for me, I was in my 40s, with good hips and everything else and I loved it.”
But Shaun says it was a different experience when we was invited to go back into the jungle.
He says: “When I was asked back 12 years later with a f ***** hip, I said yes because I wanted to go but it was only when I was in the South African jungle that I realised I wasn’t in any shape to be there.
“My hip came out and there were other issues going on. It was a pity really because I really enjoyed it. “I thought I could do it, but my body would not let me.”
The Been There Done That Tour visits the O2 Academy, Birmingham, on March 30.
It was great. I didn’t want to come home
Shaun on his time on I’m a Celebrity...