James Walton

Take drugs, write songs

Wrote for Luck: Shaun Ryder’s lyrics published

If you’re unsure whether Shaun Ryder’s lyrics for Happy Mondays and Black Grape really deserve the full Faber-poetry treatment, then you’re not alone. So, it seems, is Shaun Ryder. ‘I… wouldn’t call myself a poet,’ he writes in the preface, adding characteristically that ‘I’ve never put myself forward as an anguished wordsmith… like fucking Morrissey.’

It’s also unlikely that his work would have appealed much to Faber’s original poetry editor T.S. Eliot — not when the very first lyric contains the phrase, ‘Jesus is a c***’.

In fact, though, Wrote for Luck does add up to a rich and at times arresting portrait both of the man himself and of the 1980s Manchester scene from which he emerged — with the subject matter ranging widely through such things as cannabis, LSD, heroin, cocaine, crack, ecstasy and temazepam (a shamefully underrated drug in Ryder’s opinion).

Tony Wilson, head of the Happy Mondays’ record label Factory, claimed that Ryder’s lyrics were ‘on a par with W.B. Yeats’. Yet, while this was clearly Wilson at his most provocative — or if you prefer, most bonkers — they definitely have their moments. ‘Son, I’m 30, I only went with your mother ’cause she’s dirty’ from ‘Kinky Afro’ is, in its admittedly non-Yeatsian way, one of pop’s great first lines. And as pithy pen-portraits of drug addicts go, ‘Grass-eyed, slashed-eyed, brain-dead fucker/ Rips off himself, steals from his brother,/ Loathed by everyone, but loved by his mother’ is surely hard to beat.

The trouble is, of course, that even at their most darkly lyrical, these are the words to songs — which means the best way to appreciate them is to listen to the records.

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