Andy Richardson: Saddle up, rave on and enjoy the Ryde 'cos Shaun's back

None of that matters. The really BIG news of the past week or so is this: Shaun Ryder is coming to Bilston. 'Hell, yeah', as Ed Miliband might say.

The I'm A Celebrity runner-up and lead singer of Happy Mondays is bringing the mad carnival of Black Grape to The Robin 2. Expect the Madchester legends to provide a night of funky, surreal, profane and perversely joyous entertainment slap bang in the middle of the Black Country. Let me hear you say: 'Hell, yeah'.

Ryder is a one-off. When he was given a column in the Daily Star – where else? – he famously described people according to their height, rather than their age. As you do. So Jeremy Irons would be listed as Jeremy Irons, 6ft 2ins, rather than Jeremy Irons, 64. In Shaun's world, it made perfect sense.

Shaun emerged during the late 1980s. Set against the anodyne, poodle-permed, power pop muzak of the time, his band sounded like crack cocaine. Which is funny, because that's precisely what Shaun was taking. Well, that, and heroin and enough other drugs to sink a Columbian cruise liner.

Shaun's first album set the tone. It was called Squirrel and G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile. It's a title that probably makes a lot of sense if you're taking too many drugs.

I met Shaun soon after the release of the second Happy Mondays album, Bummed. His band were playing with the then-also-druggy Mancs James at the Irish Centre, in Birmingham's Digbeth. A mate took me backstage to meet Shaun and hang out. The 'Mondays had already performed and were, ahem, relaxing backstage.

Their dressing room looked like the sick ward of a field hospital in war zone. Bodies were strewn across the floor, lifeless and unanimated. There was a curious, sweet-sickly smell in the air and beer cans scattered all around. It was like the scene in an Agatha Christie whodunit. The prospects of getting an interview were somewhere below zero. Ryder and co were comatose. They'd taken a first class ride to nevernever land.

Ryder's finest hour came a couple of years later when his Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches record captured the zeitgeist. But by 1992, however, it was all over. His numerous drug addictions had got the better of him and he'd fallen off the edge of the world.

When Ryder re-emerged in 1995, at the height of Britpop, nobody was more surprised than Ryder. He was fitter, leaner and cleaner than ever. His new band was called Black Grape and the title of their first album, It's Great When You're Straight . . . Yeah, was a tongue-in-cheek reference to his new-found sobriety. He went straight to number one, a comeback that made Lazarus look like a shirker.

It didn't last, of course, and the excesses of the cocaine-enriched Britpop scene soon caught up with him. A year after the record was released, I bumped into Ryder at T In The Park, in Scotland. We'd asked him to sign autographs for fans and he'd agreed. I presented him with my copy of It's Great When You're Straight and a pen.

He had as much comprehension of where he was as a disorientated dyspraxic. Rather than writing a message to me, he wrote one to himself. It read: 'Get well soon, Shaun'.

Happily, Ryder has got well and he will be twisting his melons in Bilston in June. He's clean, lean and ready to rock. Like the man says: It's Great When You're Straight…. Yeah.