SHAUN’S EASY RYDER ON FILM Biopic WON’T focus on sex, drugs and rock n’ roll
A FILM about rocker Shaun Ryder yder will focus on his romance with h his childhood sweetheart – as he says his hellraising will be too boring. ring.
Happy Mondays and Black Grape singer Shaun, now 57, will be played by y Jack O’connell, 29, who starred in Angelina gelina Jolie’s blockbuster movie Unbroken. n.
And Shaun insists the flick will ill be different from recent music biopics about Freddie Mercury and Elton John.
He said: “This ain’t gonna be any ny old film about sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll – that would be too predictable and boring.” ng.”
Manchester legend Shaun says after ter his autobiography Twisting My Melon n was released in 2011, he united with scriptwriter Matt Greenhalgh, who wrote Control, about Joy Division’s Ian Curtis. “We agreed we would approach h the movie as a love e story about me and d my childhood sweetheart theart and now wife wif e Joanne,” said Shaun. haun.
“It is also a look ook at my mad relationship onship with school and d education, or lack of it.”
It reveals Shaun, haun, who has been comompared to poet WB W B Yeats, had undiagiagnosed dyslexia xia and attention deficit disorder.
Shaun said: “In my day, if you had ad learning difficulties you were written en off and put in the naughty class.
“I could either have accepted that hat as my destiny or rebelled.
“I rebelled, I got into robbing and selling knock-off cigs at school. That hat gave me a degree of power.”
He met Joanne, with whom he has as two children, at school.
But she said: “He was too much h of f a Charlie big b******s in those days.”
Yet Shaun says she saved him, got him sober and rooted and settled into a comparatively normal lifestyle.
He said scriptwriter Matt has ensured the film is not sugar-coated for Hollywood.
He said: “I want people to see my story warts and all, especially kids who aren’t academic who think their only way out is drugs, or gangs, or both.
“There is another route though creativity, music, acting or painting. I want my example to give those kids hope.”