Switching your account. Search Close Search Search Search. Magazine expand. Having spent most of the late 80s and 90s stumbling around in a drunken haze as worldwide fame and hard drugs took their toll, his band Happy Mondays became one of the most iconic acts of the Madchester movement.
They merged pounding electronic beats with the more traditional indie their town was most famous for, and captured the zeitgeist alongside like-minded bands The Stone Roses and New Order. Born into a working class Salford family of Irish origin, he left school at 15 without even learning his alphabet, and three years later was addicted to heroin. He lives in Salford with his wife Joanne and their children.
Intoxicating: swaggering, cringing, furious, vulnerable, chaotic, bilious, funny, mad. A seamless, authentic, exhilarating read, without a single slack paragraph. Search books and authors. Buy from…. View all retailers. Praise for Twisting My Melon. The Sunday Times. Related titles. The Lyrics. Never Give Up. A Life on Our Planet. Mary's Last Dance. Secrets for the Mad. My Side of Life: The Autobiography.
Sure, the Mondays made music, some of it terrific. Their first three albums proffered a lairy agglomeration of funk, guitar-pop, rock and dance music, a sound that slotted in with Factory Records' second incarnation as the crucible of "Madchester".
Ryder's stream-of-semi-consciousness lyrics transformed this groovy soup into something exceptional. But the rest of the time well, most of the time, really they were party animals, petty thieves aka "sneaks" , drug dealers, touts and bootleggers often of their own tickets, gigs and merchandise with moral compasses so banjaxed they spun like Wurlitzers.
Nowadays, they might have been called feral. Needless to say, being that shameless was a huge part of the Mondays' appeal. The band updated rock'n'roll's class-defying, outlaw discourse for a new era — the ecstasy-fuelled, post-Thatcherite 90s-cusp free-for-all. There are countless accounts of this period already out there; what distinguishes Ryder's is the fact that it's finally coming out of the horse's mouth with Observer scribe Luke Bainbridge acting as horse whisperer.
Anyone coming to Ryder as the lovable rogue who tucked into crocodile penis and bickered with Gillian McKeith on I'm a Celebrity… should have some smelling salts of their own to hand when they crack the spine. As Ryder tells it, the Mondays really did deal Es from an alcove in the Hacienda until the club was full every night and an entire nation was hooked.
Loved-up hooligans have become the stuff of cliche, but Ryder enthrallingly describes the ethnography of the time, of various Mancunian criminal factions ending their blood feuds over the pills, and squaddies hugging and repudiating war.
He saves his most lyrical chemical recollections, though, for youthful night-time walks on acid with Bez, the band's dancer and, latterly, Celebrity Big Brother winner.
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