Shaun Ryder says during his misspent youth he burnt down “something really big and expensive”.
Call the cops, Shaun Ryder has admitted to burning down “something really big and expensive” as a delinquent youth. The Happy Mondays legend was a bit of a scoundrel growing up in Manchester and was famously caught stealing toffees as a reception-age school kid.
Now 63, Shaun has confessed to doing something far worse as a 10 year-old when he “burned down something really big and expensive.” Industrial fires and vandalism were regularly reported by the Manchester Evening News in 1953, so what was it that Ryder set fire to exactly?
“I’m not saying! It was really big! And expensive!”
Despite the scrapes and run-ins with the Police the Madchester hero looks back fondly on his misspent youth.
He explained: “My favourite things, as a little kid, were starting fires, dropping bricks off a motorway bridge, putting stuff on railway lines and getting chased off by the transport police. And thieving.”
When he was 15 Ryder got a job running telegrams including a stint making deliveries for the Daily Star.
He recalled: “I was there when the Daily Star first came out on Ancoat street ‘cos I was a telegram boy and I had to take the telegrams all over the place for the ‘Star.”
But he took his life in his own hands being a telegram boy: “It was like an episode of The Sweeney.
“Strippers on at dinner time when we’re taking telegrams, Bernard Manning doing a spot, taking telegrams to people who are getting their electric cut off and they’re hiding behind the settee.
“With a gang of lads the same age, delivering telegrams and f**king about, robbing parcels.”
Find more Shaun Ryder stories in his new book 24 Hour Party Person available from awaywithmedia.com.
Shaun Ryder’s Q&A tour returns to theatres this autumn from October 1.
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