Forget rehab: Maybe Brit and Robbie need ET?

With so many stars, former stars and social irritants checking into the white uniforms and regulated regimes of rehab these days, and then crashing out a few days later, it's becoming clear that simply "going to rehab" isn't even part of a solution. So, what to do when your addiction becomes too big to handle (and by "handle", of course, we mean "keep out the tabloids.")

Shaun Ryder could provide a way forward: he's quit methadone. And, you'd have to say, something which could separate Ryder from his methadone must be quite a good cure. So, how did you do it, Shaun? Miranda Sawyer suggests it was a slightly unorthodox approach:

He tells me, with glee, about the event that caused him to quit methadone. Shaun was, he announces, 'kidnapped by aliens'. He isn't joking. Shaun saw a UFO when he was 15 ('And once they see you, they do keep a check on you'), and it was after a Happy Mondays gig in Denmark last year that he and two other band members, Kav and Johnny, had out-of-body experiences.

I spend quite some time insisting to Shaun that he, Kav and Johnny must have been out of it, that someone must have spiked their drink, until Shaun just shouts: 'Or we was visited by aliens! I've had all sorts, I've had stuff from the Amazonian rain forest, but that doesn't explain the telepathy!' So I stop. Anyway, they asked the aliens some questions - 'they was a bit shady about [his kid] Jael' - and the whole experience got him off methadone, so well done to the ETs.

So, Shaun Ryder is, finally, apparently, straight, and setting to sorting his life out - and there's a lot of sorting to be done. Sawyer explains the way he's got stuck into having to send every penny he earns to his former manager to pay off a legally unenforceable contract - the courts said that even though it was unenforceable, he had to honour it because he'd previously managed to allow to be enforced; he's trying to do right by his kids, but he's got a lot of bad to undo there.

If Ryder can be sorted out, then there's hope for us all. It might just be a slower process than some newspaper reports of celebrity cures likes to suggest.

[Thanks to Jim McCabe for the link]