Tony Wilson Was Right: Shaun Ryder Is A Poet
“Don’t talk to me about heroes / Most of these men sink like subs.”
Shaun Ryder sang that, on Black Grape’s 'Kelly’s Heroes', in 1995. And if you care to read the rest of the lyrics, and his commentary on them, you can turn to page 75 in the handsome new hardback edition of Ryder’s Wrote for Luck: Selected Lyrics, out now from Faber & Faber, fabled house of TS Eliot, WH Auden and Sylvia Plath. And, more recently, of Van Morrison, Jarvis Cocker and Kate Bush. Those three are quite self-consciously “literary” songwriters. Shaun Ryder? “I’ve never put myself forward as an anguished wordsmith,” he writes in the Preface to his new volume. “I’m not Morrissey and never will be, and never wanted to be.”
You don’t choose your teenage idols. Like your worst ever haircut, they are thrust upon you. They come with the times and the territory. A band that captures the moment when you are 16 - a band that captures your moment - is a band you will always carry a torch for, even while acknowledging its faults. I once talked at length about music to a brilliant man of impeccable taste, an American writer and editor older than me, who rued the fact that the hero musician of his own youth, in New Jersey, had been Peter Frampton, “despite that stupid tube he used to put in his mouth and that jackass wah wah thing he used to do.” Naturally, I pitied him. As I pity, in turn, those younger than me who recollect mistily their first encounter with the sounds of, I don’t know, Snow Patrol. Or - ain’t life cruel? - the 1975. But they won’t care what I think. And quite right, too. I don’t care what wrinkly Stones fans and dribbly Pistols aficionados think of Shaun Ryder.
Most of these men sink like subs. But I got lucky with my heroes. I got lucky with Shaun.
“One day he was admiring his reflection in his favourite mirror / When he realised all too clearly, what a freakin’ old beasty man he was.”
Happy Mondays’ second album, Bummed, was released in November 1988, on Factory Records. I came to it six months later, in the summer of 1989, when I was 16. I could scarcely have been more receptive to its nefarious charms, its woozy, druggy allure. It was loose and funky and amoral, groovy and baggy and weirdly chic. It felt dangerous, alien, odd. The singer - if you could call the sounds coming from his mouth singing - had a thick Mancunian accent, slurred as if he were stoned. He was stoned. He was as high as a tower block. On first hearing, Shaun Ryder’s lyrics were nonsensical. On second hearing, his lyrics were still nonsensical. On third hearing… you can see where I’m going with this. But there was something to them: they were weirdly evocative, pungent, vivid, funny, rude, aggressive.
“I wrote for luck, they sent me you / I sent for juice, you give me poison / I order a line, you form a queue / You’re trying so hard, there’s nothing else you can do.”
Entranced by Bummed, I bought the debut album, Squirrel and G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out). That was a title I could work with. I bought the singles on 12”. I played them over and over. I played nothing else. I had found my band. I booked a ticket to Manchester Piccadilly. I went there on the train from Euston with my friend Oli. We arrived with no fixed idea of what we ought to do, wandered around stoned, in the cold. Ended up dancing around on amphetamines in our flowery shirts at a student’s night at in a pub in Fallowfield. Slept top to toe in an end-of-terrace B&B - if you can call that sleep - bought jeans in Affleck’s Palace and got the train home, boggle eyed.
I was going through some stuff back then, as you do when you’re 16. I was at boarding school, which didn’t agree with me, and I’d discovered dance music and drugs, which did, at least initially. They seemed to offer a way out. They certainly offered a way out of school. That same year, 1989, halfway through my A-levels, it was mutually agreed that I would be best off pursuing my education elsewhere.
“Honey, how’s your breathing? / If it stops for good we’ll be leaving / And honey how’s your daughter?/ Did you teach her what is torture? / And if you didn’t, well you oughta, do it now.”
By Christmas 1990, and the release of the Mondays’ masterpiece, Pills’n’Thrills and Bellyaches, I was a full-fledged acid ted, a cheesy quaver, a rave scene arriviste. Notionally studying for my A-levels at a crammer in Kensington, with the other underachieving children of the overprivileged, I spent more time handing out flyers for raves - Energy, Raindance - in return for entry, than I did on my coursework.
Pills’n’Thrills and Bellyaches was a hit. The single, 'Step On', a cover of a song by John Kongos, with added melon twistin’, was ubiquitous. Happy Mondays became pop stars. At least Shaun did, alongside his partner in petty crime, Bez, the band’s freaky dancer. They were on TV, and the cover of the NME. I saw them play at GMex and Wembley Arena. They were massive: folk heroes to a generation of saucer eyed kids like me, public enemies to the tabloids. Then they imploded. Heroin, hubris, the usual. I met Bez, in 1992, in the Hacienda. He had a broken arm. I lit his cigarette for him. “Keep the spirit alive,” he whispered to me, before dematerialising into dry ice. That really fucking happened.
Ryder reappeared in 1995, with Bez alongside him, fronting a new band, Black Grape, sharing vocal duties with a rapper called Kermit, previously of Ruthless Rap Assassins. I was working by then, a reporter for my local paper. My musical intake was now almost exclusively bleeps and beeps. Britpop was for roundheads, that was my feeling. Black Grape were great, though. Tough and funny and crude and with tunes you could dance to.
The returns thereafter were diminishing, at least they were for me. Like many a hell-raising reprobate before him, like Johnny Rotten, say, or Ozzy Osborne, reality TV made Ryder an unlikely national treasure. And now he and the Mondays and Black Grape tour the nostalgia circuit. I went to a Mondays comeback once, at the Astoria, in London in 2007. It was fun to hear the hits again. But you can’t repeat the past. The crowd was full of thirtysomething beer bellies peeking out from the bottom of tracksuit tops. Mine among them. It wasn’t how I wish to remember us.
“My father’s father’s father’s father / By nature he was bendy / We are the chi-chi tribe / And we are overfriendly”
A slim, handsome hardback, with the familiar, Justus Oehler-designed dust jacket, now in the acid house colours of day-glo yellow, lime green and purple-pink, Wrote for Luck is an unlikely document of an electrifying moment in British youth culture, the moment when acid house went overground and when everything started with an E.
Do the lyrics stand up as poems? I can’t unhear the songs now, and judge them in isolation. But I can tell you that the experience of listening the Happy Mondays and Black Grape is superior to the experience of reading Ryder’s lyrics in a book. Is there much in the way of enlightenment to be found in the extensive notes and annotations, supplied by Ryder himself, in concert with Wrote for Luck’s editor, Luke Bainbridge? Not really, no. “This is another drugs reference,” explains Ryder, over and over again. Is the project possibly a bit silly? Perhaps.
But Mondays fans will be tickled by it, all the same. I know I am. And we will, all of us, flicking through the pages, think immediately of the late Tony Wilson, the Madchester impresario, who famously compared Ryder’s lyrics to the poetry of WB Yeats. Wilson was being mischievous, but he also meant it.
I had dinner with him once. My friend and Esquire colleague Simon Mills tackled him on this point. Come on Tony, we said. We love the Mondays, but Shaun William Ryder as a latter day WB Yeats? You’re having a giggle, aren’t you?
Wilson was absolutely firm: Ryder, he said, was a pop savant. He was touched by genius. And at his best, as on 'Kinky Afro', he was a poet. He quoted at length from that song.
“Son, I’m 30, I only went with your mother ‘cause she’s dirty / And I don’t have a decent bone in me / What you get is just what you see yeah”
“Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.” TS Eliot wrote that. “Tramazi! Yer Spazzy! / I’m loving the party / Passed round the eggs / And forgot everybody.” Shaun Ryder wrote that. (It’s a drugs reference.)
Somewhere in the afterlife Tony Wilson is giggling like a loon. He told us so.
Shaun Ryder’s Wrote for Luck: Selected Lyrics is published by Faber & Faber, £14.99.
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