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I was like: ‘What, you think that’s really dark?’ Cos when we wrote it, me and Kermit were on our backs laughing. Shaun Ryder performs at Isle of Wight festival in 2013. “It’s funny, someone I was talking to yesterday says that when you get to the Black Grape stuff it gets really dark, like “Tramazi Parti”. He had to be persuaded to do the book, he says, but eventually relented because the lyrics are wrong on the internet, and people often misunderstand them. He says he wishes he’d called the band Oasis he also tells me that he once knew someone from Salford who shared my name – they “became a woman and now drive taxis, just for transvestites”. Gregarious and unfiltered, he has a way with an anecdote, many well-worn, others less so.
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He hobbles into the hotel completely bald: he is waiting for a hip operation, and the medication he is taking has made all his hair fall out. This afternoon he is in good spirits, if not exactly top health. Everything I do, I’d do in front of my mam.” “I was just writing about what was around me,” he says. Some of his lyrics have resonated down generations (“You’re twistin’ my melon man/call the cops!”), others display a self-aware depth he’s rarely credited with (“You used to speak the truth but now you’re clever”).Īs the Mondays fell apart amid huge hostility – “Egos split that band, not drugs” – Ryder’s resurrection with Black Grape’s No 1 1995 album It’s Great When You’re Straight… Yeah! showed he’d lost none of his madcap unorthodoxy.
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He magpied inspiration from highbrow culture and lowbrow friends, capturing the spirit of Madchester, warts and all. Ryder’s songs were a warped extension of his personality: funny and foul, absurd and alarmingly honest. Yet when the music world lasered in on Manchester in the late 80s, suddenly everything Ryder, the scene’s surrealist alchemist, represented – ecstasy, baggy clothes, working-class mischief, danceable tunes – were the shifting tectonic plates of a cultural earthquake. Read more: Keith Flint fans want to build a statue of The Prodigy legend in Braintree town centre Knocking around early 80s Salford faced with the choice of a life of drugs and crime or one fronting Happy Mondays, Ryder chose all three: his gang of scallies (including trusty lieutenant and human pill dispenser Bez) were petty thieves and small-time dealers living hand to mouth, high to high. Poet or not, at his peak Ryder chronicled his times like few pop writers before or since. When I was a kid I could sing the chippy menu or about the teacher’s sweaty minge and get it to rhyme and make everyone laugh.”
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What changed? “I realised you could write about what the fuck you wanted. I only did it cos the others tried and they were even shitter.” But I didn’t even want to do it at first. My subjects are all wacky, extreme comic-strip bollocks. The tortured artist thing? When I’m on stage I am fucking tortured.” If they’re not poems, what are they? “As a writer, my job is to write short stories. “I don’t like to make a big deal of the songs. “I’ve never gone for all that,” he says in his sandpaper Manc accent. Bez and Shaun Ryder perform as the Happy Mondays in 2004. Ryder makes the point in the preface of the book that he’s not “like f**king Morrissey” (just in case anyone was under the impression The Smiths had a song that went “Neil Armstrong, astronaut/ He had balls bigger than King Kong”). The people at Faber – who have previously published the lyrics of musicians from Kate Bush to Billy Bragg – seem to agree: they have just published a collection of Ryder’s lyrics, Wrote for Luck, complete with his annotated notes contextualising the pills and thrills (and indeed bellyaches) of a life lived on the periphery of societal norms. The tortured artist thing? When I’m on stage I am fucking tortured’ ‘I don’t like to make a big deal of the songs.