PILLS, THRILLS & SPILLS
WHAT a joy, glittering among the dull glut of vacuous self-obsessed celebrity autobiographies, is Shaun Ryder’s Twisting My Melon. Anyone who danced in the 1990s knows the Happy Mondays, with their trippy fusion of house, funk and soul, served up by northern geezers on drugs who epitomised the Madchester scene. No other rave-era group is as synonymous with drugs as the Happy Mondays, and Shaun Ryder was their main man; his is quite a story. And he tells it with great candour.
You always hear about how musicians get into drugs. With Ryder, it was about a druggie who got into music; Ryder had been using crack and heroin long before ecstasy came along. When he finally stopped using drugs decades later, a medical test revealed he had been walking around for years with no thyroid, depleted testosterone levels, and pneumonia. He’d been wondering why he felt so tired.
