Drugs, drink and dancing made Bez famous. Thirty-five years on, has he really swapped it all for filtered water, intermittent fasting and walks with the dogs?
Bez has both shoelaces undone and it’s making me nervous. Out walking his dogs, we’re up and over barbed wire, across streams and over gates. We bash through brambles and skid down slopes. I’m becoming fixated on the perilously trailing laces of his trainers and why he hasn’t tripped over them. Can he be such a thrill-seeker that a dog walk can be turned into an hour of jeopardy?
Of course he can. This is Bez, anarchic maraca-shaker, party person, the man Shaun Ryder, his Happy Mondays bandmate and partner in crime, says is a bad influence. Bez, whose real name is Mark Berry, has been in more scrapes than seems possible for one person. A small sample: knocking his teeth out in a motorbike crash at the age of 16, threatened with a gun when he and Ryder were trying to buy crack in New York, kidnapped and held hostage during another drug deal, smashing his body up in another motorbike crash in 1999 and then getting MRSA in hospital and ending up in a coma for a month.
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