Happy Mondays bandmates Bez and Shaun Ryder have been the best of friends for years.
Tonight, they both return to TV as Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman present a special bands edition of Pointless Celebrities. Shaun and Bez will be joined by Mark Morris, Kimberly Wyatt, Kelli Young, Rick Witter, Faye Tozer and Sabrina Washington try to come up with the least likely correct answers to a series of questions posed to members of the public.
The pair don't seem to do a lot without each other, with Shaun recently supporting his friend from the audience as Bez competed on ITV's Dancing on Ice. They have also starred on Channel 4's Celebrity Gogglebox together.
READ MORE: Richard Osman quits BBC's Pointless after 13 years
We take a look at their friendship across the years, including how they rode the wave of the 'Madchester' scene in the 80s. It was a time where they toured the world and rewarded themselves by diving into a cocktail of drugs and alcohol.
Four-day parties
Bez admitted their hardcore sessions "did tend to run on a bit". He is now clean, but previously said that at the height of their fame, the band enjoyed four-day sex parties and took "every drug going". The 57-year-old said: "But after three nights and into the fourth day, I think you can become a bit dysfunctional and, if you’ve got a good mate, they’ll usually send you off home to bed."
During a gig at Manchester's legendary nightclub The Haçienda in 1989, Bez fell off the stage halfway through their performance and got a nasty cut on his forehead. Instead of getting a plaster, he grabbed some of the lead guitarist's liquid LSD and dripped it into the cut. Explaining what happened in his 2000 biography Freaky Dancin', Bez confessed he couldn't remember anything after he dashed back on stage with his maracas.
One of the Happy Mondays even claimed they once hosted a wild four-day party with sex shows and dwarfs. Rowetta, who recorded and toured with the band from 1990, admitted they lived up to the mantra of 'sex, drugs and rock and roll'.
she told Daily Star Sunday in 2019: "The lifestyle we had back then was non-stop. We really were 24-hour party people. It was every day of the year. It was too wild. It was too mad. Everything was too extreme. We used to stay out for days. When you’re young and you’re having fun that’s OK."
Happy Monday's band break-up
The group led a hedonistic, drug-fuelled life, which was part-documented in the film 24 Hour Party People, but this led to the original break-up of the band. The Happy Mondays referred to heroin by the secret codename of Kentucky Fried Chicken, which led to some awkward situations.
In a meeting with EMI in 1994, Shaun Ryder is said to have walked out just as the Mondays were about to sign a £1.7million contract, telling executives he was "going for a KFC". Shaun claimed he would be back soon but never returned and the deal fell through.
Getting clean
Bez appeared in Celebrity Big Brother in 2005 in order to pay off one of his outstanding tax bills. He then went on a ten-hour bender after winning the series.
Life has changed drastically now, as Bez started his own online fitness YouTube channel in lockdown under the title "Buzzin’ with Bez". He stopped cannabis because it was making him "too moody" and gave up smoking more than 20 years ago.
Shaun has also now been clean and sober for years, and thanks his wife Joanne for that. He said: “In the end it wasn’t any fancy rehab that got me clean. I did it on my own, with the help of Joanne. I cleaned myself up. I stopped taking cocaine, methadone and weed, and even stopped drinking for a while.
“I was completely straight, and started doing a lot of thinking . . . 20 years of life that I didn’t really have feelings about because I was anaesthetised by heroin. I then had to try and process all this s**t. It was like fast-forwarding through 20 years of feelings. I was all over the place. Up and down like a f***ing yo-yo. I felt like a ball in a mental pinball machine.”
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