What would it be like if Bez was your granddad? “It’s kind of annoying, actually,” says Bez’s grandson Luca. He’s 10, nearly 11, and with an eye for good casualwear, like his granddad, and we’re just having a quick chat while Bez signs copies of his new memoir at Waterstones in the Trafford Centre.
Basically, the complaint is that you can’t take him anywhere. Because wherever he is, people want to talk to him. And he will always - always - want to talk to them too, have a picture, ask where they’re from, talk about the Happy Mondays, whatever they want. So getting anywhere with Bez is time-consuming.
There are upsides. Luca has been up on stage a few times at festival gigs, and has got in free to Glastonbury and Bestival. And, y’know, his granddad is Bez; rave icon, Madchester pioneer, Celebrity Big Brother winner, Calvin Klein model, freaky dancer. So it balances out.
Read more: Review - Bob Dylan at the O2 Apollo
“Meeting people comes with the territory, he says. “You can’t be moaning about it. Everyone’s really nice. They’re glad to have seen you and always generous with their words.”
Bez - also known as Mark Berry - was just visiting his old hometown last week. He lives near Hereford now with his wife Firouzeh, who he married a couple of months ago. Rowetta was his ‘best woman’.
She sang a song she’d penned specially for the couple, and the party afterwards lasted two days. He can see the Black Mountains from his back doorstep and goes walking, cycling, and heads out into the wilds on his motorbike. He loves it there, ‘wouldn’t live anywhere else’.
But there are things he’d transplant, if he could. Organic grocer Unicorn, the Barbakan bakery and fishmonger Out Of The Blue, all in Chorlton, would come with him. Dave from Out Of The Blue sends him fish deliveries sometimes. Currently to get a decent curry is a 20 mile round trip, so that would change too.
Other than that, the 58-year-old is blissfully happy, and looks in staggeringly good nick for a man who was very much in the room when the notion of ‘24 hour party people’ was conceived. So as a result, remembering some of the stories for the book was, shall we say, a challenge.
Crammed into the back of his mate Jules’s Ford Puma - Jules is a concert photographer who’s known Bez for years, and took the pictures at his wedding - we navigate the truly hideous traffic from town to the Trafford Centre thanks to his still keen knowledge of the city’s cut-throughs.
Read more: Our picks for Manchester's best small gigs in November 2022
“Eh, jib down ‘ere Jules, not on the Manc Way,” he says. “I used to think Andy Burnham was pretty cool, but all this congestion. I used to get through town like a knife through butter, but now you’ve just got to get in the queue with everyone else.” And don’t get him started on the state of the roads. “You go down Princess Parkway, they’re like canyons. They’re beyond potholes.”
“I had to do some in-depth searching of my memory banks to remember some of the stories,” he goes on, speaking about getting the book together, which is co-penned by Andrew Perry, who's co-written books for Sex Pistol John Lydon and Tricky.
One of his favourites is about his childhood neighbours coming across the young Bez, part-way down the East Lancs Road, trying to get to his nan’s house in his pedal car. The one where he leaves the flies of his beekeeping gear open and gets stung is another winner (yes, Bez keeps bees).
“That’s why I thought it would be good to get Shaun involved,” he says. Bez’s best friend of 40 years and bandmate Shaun Ryder, rave raconteur, visionary lyricist and the Mondays’ legendary frontman, appears in the book to curate a few chapters. They lived for a time with adjoining back gardens in Padfield, near Glossop.
The only thing is, their recollections of the same events don’t always match up. “We both have a different perspective of the same story,” he laughs. “They never correspond. We’d be hopeless witnesses. We see everything completely differently. We’d both sit there having long discussions, almost semi-arguments about what went on. Shaun's more of a romantic than me, he has a more romantic view of the world.”
The phone in the car rings. It’s Nick Reynolds, renowned sculptor, harmonica player in Alabama 3, son of the Great Train Robber Bruce Reynolds and an old friend. He and Bez are supposed to be working on a charity single to raise money for homeless charities. “How’s the book launch going?” Reynolds asks. They have a nice chat. “I love the Alabamas,” says Bez, once he’s hung up.
It’s indicative of the peculiar and rarified life he’s led; hanging out with Kate Moss and Johnny Depp, being invited to the Royal Box at Ascot, appearing on Bargain Hunt with Jarvis Cocker and then being disqualified for cheating, and then running for the parliamentary seat for Salford and Eccles in the 2015 general election. He lost to Rebecca Long-Bailey, despite running on a squarely popular platform of ‘free energy, free food and free anything’.
These days, he ‘does a bit of everything’, whether it’s DJing, telly appearances like Dancing On Ice, or, for example, what he’s doing after he leaves Manchester the evening we meet, which involves heading to Nottingham for an underwear shoot for Calvin Klein. Obviously.
“I’m like Yozzer Hughes, gis a job! I don’t say no to any job,” he says. “I practice saying no, but it never comes out that way. Just need to keep food on the table and the lantern burning, like everybody else.”
One thing that’s always been a constant has been the Mondays, the band signed to Factory Records, which he joined in the early 80s as a dancer. Naturally, there is some disagreement between Bez and Shaun about which gig Bez joined the band during, but both agree they’d been ‘imbibing’ somewhat the afternoon before, and Shaun insisted Bez join him on stage for moral support.
So, grabbing a pair of maracas, he did - and remains the band’s constant vibesman to this day. Say what you like, he might not write the music, nor the lyrics, but Happy Mondays without Bez would not be Happy Mondays.
Tragedy knocked them all for six when bass player Paul Ryder, Shaun's brother, died suddenly and unexpectedly in August this year. Bez had been with him in the afternoon of the day he died. He’d had his covid vaccine booster in the days before and had been complaining about feeling unwell since.
The band was set to play a festival show in Sunderland, but Bez says during a practice session the day before, Paul ‘couldn’t play his instrument, hardly recognised people, and was complaining of a banging headache’. It was also reported that he’d been having trouble hearing.
The coroner said that Ryder died of Ischaemic heart disease and diabetes, the latter he was managing with medicine, though he had never been diagnosed with any kind of heart disease prior to that.
“[Mondays drummer] Gaz [Whelan] phoned me up and said how worried he was about Paul, and he died that night,” Bez says. “The saddest thing about it is how life just rolls on without you. Time waits for no man. You just become a memory.”
Crushingly, Bez’s father, who had been battling cancer, died just a few hours after Paul. The same day, he was awarded custody of his youngest son. “It was a rollercoaster that day,” he says.
We arrive at the back door of Waterstones, where Bez promptly shakes hands with and asks the name of everyone. His daughter-in-law and Luca turn up, hiding behind a bookshelf and then creeping out to surprise him. “Have you just come here shopping have you?” he asks, and they fall about. “No, we’ve come to see granddad!”
There’s a queue of fans gathering outside, all ages, and within seconds he’s posed for photos with the security staff, the shop staff, and then with all the fans in the queue, beaming in each picture. He asks everyone where they’re from, and seems to have a tale for each place too.
“Talking about yourself is the height of vanity, you know what I mean?” he says. “I find my life really boring, to be truthful.” He might be on his own there.
Buzzin': The Nine Lives of a Happy Monday is out now.
Get the latest on Mancunian culture here.
READ NEXT:
