Shaun Ryder admits confronting killer orangutan after smoking 50 rocks of crack in a day

Happy Mondays star Shaun Ryder was well known for his wild lifestyle in his heyday and now he has admitted how his startling drug use saw him have some very close encounters

Shaun Ryder has shared how he once smoked 50 rocks of crack a day in a candid new interview. The Happy Mondays star, 63, caused controversy last month when he spoke to Jack Whitehall at the Brit Awards and told him a story of how he was almost arrested during a drugs raid at the time when his band Black Grape were up for an award in 1996.

The confession was edited out of the show but he has now explained the story again as he admitted he had gone to “score” when the police raided the house while he was there. He then shared how he told officers he was “getting a Brit Award,” and so they let him go.

Shaun struggled with substance abuse for years, having quit drugs at the age of 40 after 20 years of addiction that saw him “use up more than nine lives.” At the time when he was recording the Happy Mondays’ fourth album in 1992 he was visiting Barbados where he insists he was “smoking up to 50 rocks of crack cocaine a day.”

During that trip a bizarre incident saw him come face-to-face with a giant orangutan, which he is adamant was not a hallucination. There had been stories in the local press about a dangerous orangutan called Jack the Ripper who was on the loose.

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Shaun told The Sun: “This thing just dropped out of the trees right in front of me. It was a f***ing big orangutan.” He then admitted that he told himself “don’t show any fear,” and shouted, “Grrr, arrrgh, f*** off, just f*** right off”, at the animal, and that it obeyed his command.

Orangutans are not native in the Caribbean so Jack the Ripper seemed the likely candidate he had encountered. In his latest book, 24 Hour Party Person, Shaun also recalls how he was living in Amsterdam for a short period of time when he was held hostage by an armed robber.

He recalled: “Some nutcase we knew from Manchester, who was doing armed robberies and was then in Amsterdam, hijacked a load of people, put them in the canal and shot them and then turned up at the gaff where we were staying and held us hostage for a day or two.”

However, he claims that things worked out OK in the end as he talked the robber into letting them go. He then encountered another scary incident involving an armed assailant while on a trip to Jamaica with Kermit.

He explained how they had been trying to buy drugs when they found themselves present for a terrifying gun battle and witnessed someone getting shot. He said: “I was going scoring and someone got shot, shot in the head. We just ran for it. If you’re a junkie going scoring, that’s the sort of s**t you come across.”

Shaun eventually quit using drugs thanks to his third wife Joanne. The have been together more than 20 years and married in 2010. They share two daughters, Pearl, 17, and Lulu, 18. Shaun also has four other children with his previous partners. He admitted that Joanne “reeled me in and it’s a good job.” He said that things changed when “she didn’t let me get away with half of the stuff.”

The singer admits if it wasn’t for Joanne’s influence he would have “just carried on with crashing,” before adding, “but once I hit 40, I was determined to give up drugs anyway.”