“LIFE begins at 60,” says Shaun Ryder.

These days you’re more likely to find the wild man of Madchester “catching up on Corrie in my slippers” than larging it at an all-nighter. But he adds: “I no longer have any hair, eyebrows or eyelashes. I’m on so many pills I rattle when I walk. But I’m still brimming with energy and excitement for whatever’s coming next.”

The frontman of Happy Mondays and Black Grape and, more recently, star of Celebrity Gogglebox and I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, lived the rock’n’roll lifestyle. Now he’s on the road, promoting his new book, Happy Mondays - and Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays, and spilling the beans on the carnival of excess - as well as battery chickens, UFOs and the Shaun Ryder-Russell-Watson crossover we didn’t know we needed.

“I’ve got the attention span of a goldfish, an inability to plan too far ahead, but an opinion I’m prepared to share on pretty much everything,” says Shaun. “My new book and tour is an epic journey from Madchester to Mastermind, Brazil to Barbados, Spanish sunburn to the sewers of Salford. I’ll tell some truths which are so improbable you’ll know they can’t possibly have been made up.”

He was at the forefront of the Manchester music scene in the late 1980s and early 90s. Now 62, he says all night parties are in the past: “There used to be a time when I was just the mad rocker who went onto TV shows off my head. I’m still having fun in the spotlight, whether with the Happy Mondays, Black Grape or as a solo performer, but these days you’re just as likely to find me blowing off the cobwebs on a bike ride or watching telly with my best mate Bez. If I’m not out working, I’m tucked up in bed by 11pm.

“Do I miss the old days? They were brilliant times that I wouldn’t have missed for the world, but no I don’t. I’ve been off the drugs for more than 10 years now, and I’ve never been happier. A lot of my pals who refused to change are either dead or locked up in prison. I’ve met and worked with some fabulous people; many became good friends, but some we’ve now sadly lost.

“I was so sad to hear about the death of the brilliant Steve Wright. He was a Happy Mondays favourite from the 80s, making us all laugh while we drove around Manchester on the dole.”

His new book, he says, “isn’t one to read to your grandkids at bedtime”.

“It’s a boys’ own adventure and about as far removed from Enid Blyton as you can get. If you’re faint-hearted or easily offended, I suggest you jog on. I’ll be visiting Caribbean crack dens, encountering extra-terrestrials, and leading you through my hedonistic, hectic, hell-raising life in the music business. Nothing is off the table - expect the unexpected.” Indeed. As well as reflecting on growing up and his ADHD diagnosis, his book covers “Zippy and Bungle, cycling, Christian Bale, WB Yates and Celebrity Mastermind”.

Shaun’s dad played banjo in Irish clubs and there was always music at home. “I aways got up to no good as a kid, I lost count of the times the cops would come to our house,” recalls Shaun. “I remember coming home from school one day to see cops at the front door. I see my dad on the doorstep, wearing nothing but his acrylic purple Y-fronts with swirls on. He saw me and legged it out of the house, chased me down the road, across the field. He gave me a leathering - then had to walk back through the estate in nothing but those purple undies.

“I didn’t learn anything after the fourth year of junior school. I couldn’t get into playing football or rugby either, because I could never get my head round the rules. I was always offside, and no-one wants that in their team. Me being ADHD, and not knowing back then that I was, meant that taking heroin for the first time made me feel what I can only describe as normal.”

Happy Mondays had “massive success” very quickly: “We headlined at Glastonbury in 1990, Paul McCartney told NME we reminded him of the Beatles in their ‘Strawberry Fields phase’.”

Shaun has collaborated with artists including Paul Oakenfold and Gorrilaz. “Damon Albarn invited me to try some writing with them. The legal troubles had been getting worse, money was getting cut off, it was all getting on top of me. It gave me writer’s block. I tried as much as I could to do something with Damon and it wasn’t happening. I put the headphones on, he put the track on but I couldn’t hear it. ‘Turn it up,’ I said. As he starts to increase the volume I’m shouting: ‘It’s comin’ up, it’s comin’ up, it’s comin’ up...it’s there’. Damon stopped and went: ‘Do that again.’ There’ became ‘Dare’, because that’s how I said it with my accent, and it was used for the opening of Gorillaz hit Dare. There had been no lyric at that point, no song, we were just getting started.”

Shaun has been with his wife Joanne since 2004, and says she saved his life. “She recognised straight away that I’d got some sort of condition. Her background is working as a teaching assistant with special needs children, which probably helped. I met her first at the Hacienda years earlier when she was a teenager, she binned me then because the band was just taking off and I think she thought I’d be jetting off everywhere. But we stayed in each other’s circles and I always had feelings for her.

"When I hit 40, she reeled me back in.”

* Shaun Ryder is at King’s Hall, Ilkley, on Friday. Call (01274) 432000 or visit bradford-theatres.org.uk