Happy Mondays’ Ryder Tough on Competition : Pop music: The lead singer for the Manchester rock band says he wishes those other bands would stop all their bragging.

For a guy hardly short on words and opinions, Shaun Ryder sure wants others to pipe down.

The lead singer for the Manchester rock standard-bearers Happy Mondays is proud of the music that’s coming out of England now, including other Manchester bands and Jesus Jones and EMF. And as the band starts its second major U.S. tour, which comes to the Ventura Theatre on Tuesday and the Hollywood Palladium on Thursday, he’s proud to be associated with those other acts. He just wishes they’d all stop bragging about how good they are.

Even caught fresh out of a nerve-wracking traffic jam at his Manchester home, the loquacious Ryder--with little prompting--took aim and fired by phone at his band’s rivals. Here’s a sampling:

* On the Charlatans U.K., whose Tim Burgess said in a recent interview with The Times that the Charlatans are the best of the Manchester bands: “They’re the best? I’ve respect for them, but they’re just a band that plays ‘60s music. They go around saying how great they are, but they’re all just a bunch of frightened kids.”

* On Inspiral Carpets, another Manchester band: “I hate them! I don’t like the music. They make statements about how good they are and how new it is, but they’re just punk-rock Doors on . . . glue.”

* On the new crop of Manchester-influenced hit-makers, including Jesus Jones and EMF: “I’d probably have a bit more respect for them if they didn’t come out with things like, ‘we’re far ahead’ and ‘this is a new sound.’ It’s bull. How can anyone say that mixing rock and dance music is new? . . . Without the Manchester hype they wouldn’t have gotten as far ahead.”

Notice a theme here? The only band that escaped relatively unscathed was the Stone Roses, the Mondays’ fellow Manchester leaders: “Even though they sound ‘60s-ish, they’re still a good band.”

A little territorial, is he? Piqued that others have ridden the Mondays/Manchester coattails? Upset that the Mondays and the Roses haven’t stormed the American shores at the front of a new full-scale British Invasion as some had predicted?

Mainly Ryder, 28, just thinks that something that was good on its own terms got blown out of proportion--his band included.

“All the hype about Manchester originally had nothing to do with bands,” he said about the drugs and music scene that spawned the Mondays in 1988. “There was a lot of (the hallucinogenic drug) Ecstasy, and it was all in Manchester and police left everybody alone. Journalists used to come down and party and write about what a good time it was. The band thing came later.

“We never said we were going to go out and try to create something new,” he said, citing influences of the late-’70s. “You could go to a (punk) club even as a 13-year-old and get that energy. At the same time on (the TV show) ‘Top of the Pops’ there was the O’Jays mixed with things like Gary Glitter. So our music kind of evolved.”

The evolution takes a big step on the band’s recent third album, “Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches.” Its matured mix of dance-soul-psychedelia has been among the favorites at U.S. college and alternative radio since it’s release in January and is now climbing, slowly but surely, up the pop charts. It could be the foothold for the forecast U.S. success.