Stephen Phelan

AS THE winner of this year’s Celebrity Big Brother, Mark ‘Bez’ Berry is now £50,000 richer. So far he hasn’t seen or spent any of it. Today he’s wearing a flashy, swollen pair of experimental Adidas moon-boots, but apparently they were a gift from the label itself. “Got them yesterday, ” says Bez proudly, over lunch in London’s obnoxiously on-trend Sanderson hotel. “They’re pretty bling, eh? I am fortunate enough to be in a position where people give me stuff for free.” Fortunate indeed, given that Bez has openly admitted that he was recently made bankrupt, because of “all sorts of massive fuckin’ problems”. Having asked his press agent to lend him some cash for lunch, who in turn asks if the Sunday Herald has an expense account, Bez eats like a poor man on a rich man’s tab.

He orders a Bloody Mary, and chomps the celery stick into flying splinters like a twig thrown into a propeller. He orders a burger with blue cheese, onions, bacon and a fried egg, and spits the pieces everywhere as he talks. “Sorry man, ” he says sincerely. His front teeth are false, the originals having been knocked out in a motorbike mishap when he was 15, and they form a kind of sea wall against which his saliva crashes and sprays. This has caused problems before. During his first trip to New York with the Happy Mondays – the self-confessed “villainous low- life Beelzebubs” from Manchester, who became one of the signature bands of the late Eighties and early Nineties – they were accosted on leaving a Harlem crack den by a Puerto Rican street-gang. The leader presumed that Bez was spitting on him out of disrespect, when he was actually just trying to talk his way out of trouble.

That anecdote and many others are documented in Freaky Dancin’, his 1998 memoir. Besides the occasional DJ appearance, his only regular income in recent years has been small royalty cheques from sales of that book, and slightly bigger ones from his share of the Happy Mondays. “Not that much though, ” he says. “We never, ever, ever earned masses of money. Your average plumber earns more than the Happy Mondays ever did.”

Bez was a vital part of the band without ever having a clear job description. On tax forms and travel documents he was put down as a “percussionist” or “dancer”, because his only tangible contribution was to shake maracas and perform a swaying, boggle-eyed, back-and- forth two-step routine during the Mondays’ live shows. He threw loose shapes, like a territorial ape, embodying all the voluntary lunacy of his time and place – when ecstasy first flooded Manchester. On the sleeve notes for their defining 1990 album Pills’n’Thrills and Bellyaches, Bez was given full credit, in writing, for simply being Bez. “With the Mondays, ” says Bez, “I did what I was doing anyway at that time of my life. I just took it onto the stage. I love dancing, I love taking me Es. I been doing that dance I do since I was a young rude boy, wearing the Fred Perry gear and listening to ska music at the youth clubs and all that. And I still do it.” Two weeks ago, and 12 years after the Happy Mondays were gruesomely undone by heroin, crack cocaine, rivalry and apathy, Bez again won the attention and affection of the nation – or at least those 54 per cent of viewers who voted him the winner of Celebrity Big Brother – by being nothing more or less than himself.

“The only weapon I had in there was me honesty, ” he says. “I was totally truthful all the way. I can never be arsed bullshitting; it’s too much hard work.” Finding himself inside Channel 4’s famous artificial bungalow only a few days after a New Year’s bender, Bez thought he had no chance against the other celebrities, particularly Kenzie from Blazin’ Squad and kitsch Hollywood exile Brigitte Nielsen. He dances like a fool, but he’s not an idiot. He knew that many younger, older and “straighter” viewers might not have heard of him, and that “the papers would be out there digging the dirt”. But he came out 18 days later to victory cheers and fireworks, clutching an empty wine glass.

“I’m so glad I won it, ” he says. “Now I can walk around straight. It will get me out of all the trouble I’m in. And with all the publicity I know I’ve got a little chance to make a bit of extra money for me family.” For those reasons, he didn’t hesitate to take the Big Brother offer after Channel 4’s first choice, New Order bass player Peter Hook, declared himself unavailable. Hook had suggested they try an old friend and more problematic figure from the glory days of the Manchester music scene, the Happy Mondays’ unsmiling leader and nonsense-poet Shaun Ryder. But as Bez mutters, “You would never get Shaun in that house, ” and so the programmers were left with Bez himself – still Ryder’s best friend, and currently his next door neighbour in the rural community of Hadgate, Lancashire.

The other celebrities may well have had careers to revive or “products to promote”, as despairing highbrow contestant Germaine Greer put it when she stormed out of the house, but Bez was in it only for the money. And now, he says, his winnings are in the hands of the “whatever you call them”. The receivers?

“Yeah, the receivers have taken control of me estate. Everything I get now goes straight to them. I don’t even really owe that much. I’ve always lived my life like if I can’t afford to buy it for cash, then I don’t f**kin’ have it. But I got in trouble because I’m not clever enough to fill out tax returns. I honestly didn’t know how to. When I was in the Mondays, somebody else done it all for us. When we split up, and we had to take care of our own affairs, that’s when everything started going wrong on us.”

He says he’s also owed proceeds from Black Grape – the band of wildly proficient musical misfits that Shaun Ryder briefly assembled in the mid-Nineties – but doesn’t expect to receive any. “I’ve still got a really massive beef about that, ” says Bez. “Me and Shaun won’t talk about it even now. Black Grape could have been amazin’ if it weren’t run by such savage fuckin’ dogs, the money people who were just in it for themselves. We were getting ripped off , and I was being a bit of a trade unionist about it, sticking up for people’s rights, but nobody was backing me up.” By his own admission, Bez can “go into some proper rages sometimes”. “All my friends were saying they couldn’t wait to see me kick off in the Big Brother house. But I only did it once. Or maybe twice.”

Most notably and nobly, Bez supported Sylvester Stallone’s mother Jackie in her imperious demand for wine with dinner, even when all the other housemates turned on the strange old bird. “I stuck up for her, ” says Bez, “because she’s Rocky’s mam, for one. And because everyone was pickin’ on her. If you can’t be tolerant and respectful to a proper old lady who’s going a bit daft . . . imagine if it was my mam or your mam in there. You would want to kill them for talking to her like that. You’d be waiting outside the house for them. I’ve never been able to stand people who are bullies.” Stallone, for her part, nominated Bez for eviction from the programme, referring to him as “the fellow who doesn’t speak English”.

His own mother would obviously be more supportive, but she hasn’t always been able to understand him either. In 24 Hour Party People, Michael Winterbottom’s film about the rise and fall of Factory Records – the Happy Mondays’ ambitious but disorganised label – Bez (played by Chris Coghill) is shown arriving in Manchester from some other planet on an alien spaceship. “That film was quite funny I suppose, ” says Bez, “but it was much more about [Factory boss] Tony Wilson than about us.”

In reality, Bez was born 40 years ago to normal, respectable, human parents, and raised in one of the nicer detached homes in the tough Manchester satellite town of Salford. His father, in fact, was a detective inspector with the local police force. They had zero tolerance for the young hoods in the area, which eventually included Bez himself. Easily excited, easily bored, he bit teachers, fought constantly, stole cars. When Mr and Mrs Berry kicked him out of the house at age 16, he became a nocturnal animal – a house burglar and party crasher, ending up in borstal at Werrington House, and on remand in Strangeways.

“Everyone who met me when I was 16 never thought I would make it to 30. No one could tell me anything, ” he says. “I was living life by me own law, completely wild, proper out of control.”

In his book, Bez identifies himself among “the dissident youth of the Thatcher era . . . on the fast track to poverty en masse . . . with no serious expectation of gettin’ anything better out of life”. Given that he had a relatively stable, comfortable upbringing, this seems a bit disingenuous. But if his parents had been more flexible, he thinks he might have been less unmanageable.

“Yeah, they brought me up very decently. I learned good manners, I’m nice to me elders, I say please and thank you. But their standards were so high that I just couldn’t meet them. They realise that now, and they’ve actually apologised to me for not understanding my character. That was a great moment for me, to hear them say sorry, that they just didn’t get what I was about.”

His parents have since moved out of Salford. “Unfortunately, they’ve been robbed that many times that me mam couldn’t stand living there no more.” And Bez himself lives next to Shaun Ryder in a cottage on the Pennine Way. “We love it up there. It’s got it’s own rugged beauty, but it’s close to Manchester. And it’s not posh or anything, like your Cheshire set.” Most of the time, “when I’m not doing things like this”, Bez is a single parent. His two sons, Arlo and Jack, are now 14 and 12. Their mother Deborah runs her own business, “which, for a while, was looking like the only way we could send the kids to university”. It’s for their sake that Bez moved out of the city (“I didn’t want them to grow up with the city mentality”), for their sake he needs money, and for their sake he’s a “reformed” character.

By which he means that he now makes a clear distinction between the kind of drugs that make music sound better and the kind that almost wrecked Shaun Ryder, and once gave Bez himself hepatitis, pleurisy and advanced yellow jaundice through the use of unclean needles.

“I am still a recreational drug user, ” he says. “I go out at the weekend and I love me Es, I love dancing, it’s as natural as taking a drink. And I love me weed, having a spliff and putting on the first tune of the day. But I also think them drugs with a high addiction should be avoided at all costs. You are definitely running away from something when you turn to heroin. And, to me, it’s a selfish act of escapism because you’re dragging your friends and family into it.”

This plainly nuanced personal drug policy may be legally contentious, but it’s neither uncommon nor nonsensical, and if anything, it might make him slightly less of a hypocrite than most parents. “I don’t want my kids doing some of the things I’ve done, and I’ve explained to them the problems I’ve had. They’re armed to the teeth with knowledge, they’re aware of all the dangers, so I hope and pray they can make their own choices with a bit of wisdom.” On the sage advice of the late punk thinker Joe Strummer, Bez has also developed some “actual musical knowledge” since the Black Grape fiasco. He still can’t play any instruments, but he’s “bursting with ideas”.

He’s got a new band called Domino Bones, fronted by his new girlfriend Monica, and featuring Bez himself, doing what Bez does. “I do me dance and spout off with a Mancunian rant, while Mon and the rest of them do proper rock and roll shit. I honestly think Domino Bones might be what the country is waiting for.” This sounds both deluded and vaguely plausible. As the winner of Celebrity Big Brother, if Bez puts out a record soon it will probably be a hit. But consider also the reasons why he might have won. On reflection, Bez thinks he underestimated public nostalgia for the era he represents, “the unstoppable acid house explosion”.

“In a way, ” he says, “it was bigger than the Sixties, because everyone who was young at the time seemed to want a part of that lifestyle. There must be a lot of people out there now who think like I do.”

If you think like Bez does – although hopefully a little straighter – then you agree that hedonism and decency don’t contradict each other. And if every vote for Bez on Big Brother was a vote of confidence, then he might come to represent more than one generation. “What I hope I proved by winning was that we’re not all f**kin’ monsters. Taking a few drugs does not make you a bad person. And nobody can tell me that somebody who lives a straight lifestyle has got any more morals than I have. I consider my moral standards to be quite high, you know what I mean? In fact you could call me old- fashioned.”