First, I wanted to be a historian, then a drummer, and after that I just wanted to be employed. And I still do.
Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 5 April 2025 source ↗
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Question
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
Failure & regret
Question
What song would you like played at your funeral?
Death & what remains
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
This is a standing question in The Guardian's decades-long The Q&A and also recurs independently in career and life interviews.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
In 1975, I watched the film Stardust, and Adam Faith said, “I supply the birds, the pills and the pot.” And I thought, “I want that.”
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 5 August 2017 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 191 →
Patricia Hodge
English actress
A ballet dancer, but it changed to being an actress when I got put in a school play.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 8 September 2018 source ↗
Katherine Parkinson
English actor
An astronaut. I still do.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 12 September 2020 source ↗
Salman Rushdie
Indian-British-American novelist
A writer, I’m sorry to say. Boring, I know, but true.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 18 July 2020 source ↗
More from Shaun Ryder
View profile →The 12 years I spent in receivership. That was me being a dick. I lost the court case when I wanted to sack my management and had to pay them £120,000. I said, “I am not paying you, because I should have won.”
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 5 August 2017 source ↗
One Nation Under a Groove, by Funkadelic.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 5 August 2017 source ↗
I had a gun shoved in my eyeball in New York by a crack dealer in the 1980s. I have also watched somebody next to me get shot in the head in a gun battle – that was in Jamaica in the early 1990s.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 5 August 2017 source ↗
When I was 15 and starting my first job as a messenger boy at the post office, delivering telegrams.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 5 August 2017 source ↗
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