Shaun Ryder

As lead singer of Happy Mondays and Black Grape, Shaun Ryder was the Keith Richards and Mick Jagger of his generation. A true rebel, who formed and led not one but two seminal bands, he's had number-one albums, headlined Glastonbury, toured the world numerous times, taken every drug under the sun, been through rehab - and come out the other side as a national treasure. Now, for the first time, Shaun lifts the lid on the real inside story of how to be a rock star. With insights from three decades touring the world, which took him from Salford to San Francisco, from playing working men's clubs to headlining Glastonbury and playing in front of the biggest festival crowd the world has ever seen, in Brazil, in the middle of thunderstorm. From recording your first demo tape to having a number-one album, Shaun gives a fly-on-the-wall look at the rock 'n' roll lifestyle - warts and all: how to be a rock star - and also how not to be a rock star. From numerous Top of the Pops appearances to being banned from live TV, from being a figurehead of the acid-house scene to hanging out backstage with the Rolling Stones, Shaun has seen it all. In this book he pulls the curtain back on the debauchery of the tour bus, ridiculous riders, run-ins with record companies, drug dealers and the mafia, and how he forged the most remarkable comeback of all time. 'There are enough stories about Happy Mondays to keep people talking about them forever. Bands live on through the myth really, myth and legend' (Steve Lamacq)

In the mid-1980s the Happy Mondays emerged as the prime mischief makers on the Madchester scene. Chief protagonist was Shaun Ryder, a man whose lyrical street swagger in songs like Kinky Afro, 24 Hour Party People and Performance, would come to define a generation. Here, collected and edited for the first time, in trade and special editions, are his unforgettable lyrics with commentary by the man himself and an introduction by his literary collaborator, Luke Bainbridge. With characteristic understatement, Tony Wilson once compared Shaun William Ryder's lyrics to the poetry of W. B. Yeats. That is, if W. B. Yeats had been an inveterate drug-taker and occasional dealer, a compatriot of criminals and crazies, an aficionado of low life and high times; if he had painted artful sketches of endless parties and urban blight, of chancers, dead beats, fanatics and, always, an endless stream of pharmaceuticals; if W. B. Yeats had composed fractured, hilarious, grubby and shrewdly observed anthems for the Madchester generation. That W. B. Yeats: Shaun William Ryder.