Amateur Night in the Big Top is the debut studio album by British singer Shaun Ryder, the former frontman of Happy Mondays and Black Grape.

[5] As Happy Mondays' reunion continued beyond its intended six-month plan, Ryder started consumed a considerable amount of alcohol and took cocaine.

Shane Norton of Kuling Bros produced and engineered the material at Spin Studios in Sydney, Australia; former Cabaret Voltaire member Stephen Mallinder acted as co-producer on "Scooter Girl", "Clowns" and "Murder".

AllMusic reviewer Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote that the music "sometimes arriv[es] at bracingly atmospheric beats equal parts dub and trip-hop".

[10] The Age writer Andrew Drever said Ryder's "meandering, stream-of-consciousness stories and loose scatting is set to the tough, dubby, electronic instrumentals" provided by Mallinder and Noron.

Unlike his earlier material, Ryder "rides the beat, never once propelling it with his exquisite bad taste and absurd pan-cultural irreverence".

[11] In a review for The Guardian, writer Alexis Petridis said Ryder mumbles "incoherently over tepid dance beats", while the music was "tuneless, [and] that's the least of its problems".

He goes on call Ryder himself the biggest issue, as he "clearly has no idea how pitiful he sounds relating ancient tales of chemical derring-do".

[15] In his book Happy Mondays – Excess All Areas: A Biography (2014), author Simon Spence called it "astonishingly warped, musically minimal, and brilliant".

[21] Matt Galloway of Now wrote that several years removed from the height of fame, Ryder "doesn’t seem to have anything else to say", adding that the "most profound moments are the curse words".

[16] Dotmusic's Dan Gennoe said on tracks such as "Long Legs (Parts 1 2 3)" and "Clowns", Ryder was "dribbling old soak talking to himself on a park bench [...] – barely conscious, never mind coherent".