Shaun Ryder - Wrote For Luck: Selected Lyrics

I was a postie before the band took off, and that was torture, trust me getting up at 4 a.m. and having to walk miles on your round and getting attacked by dogs. Once youve done that, you can hardly say being in a band, going on tour and seeing the world is torture. Whatever pressure I did feel as a frontman, I used heroin to cope with it. That was my coping mechanism for a long time. So I didnt need to wear my heart on my sleeve like fucking Morrissey.

That worked for him and good on him, but Im not Morrissey and never will be, and never wanted to be. Not for a minute. I wanted to find my voice as Shaun Ryder. Ive never really read anyone elses lyrics for inspiration. I would listen out for lyrics in songs, but you know how it is, no matter how much you think youve heard the words correctly, when you see them written down you realise youve been singing the wrong fucking words for twenty-five years. I do have a bit of attention deficit disorder as well, so I have to try really hard to concentrate and focus if Im listening to lyrics.

Otherwise Ill find myself drifting off and following the bass line instead. Very few of my songs are about one single thing. Most of them are a collection of different incidents or scenes. I write in pictures. I will get a scene in my head and Im just painting the picture of that story. Its almost like Ive got a mad cartoon running through my head and the lyrics are oddball captions describing what is happening in each frame thats in my head.

When the Mondays started, we knew there was nobody out there in the music business like us. There was no one coming from the same place as us, who lived the same lifestyle as us, or who looked like us. I remember a couple of industry people coming up from London in the mid-80s saying stuff like, You need to get an image. Look at Boy George, hes got an image, and wed be like, This is us, this is our image. But they totally didnt get it. I mean, imagine telling Bez he should be dressing like Boy George, for fucks sake.

We knew we didnt want the music to sounds like anyone else, and I also wanted to find my own voice. I wanted to sound like Shaun William Ryder. The music industry and the media are always trying to resurrect old scenes, like mods are coming back, or something like that. So when something that is really new comes along it takes them a good few years to catch up. Not only did we know there wasnt anyone like us in the industry, we also knew that there were a lot of people out there, on the estates, in the pubs, in the clubs and down the Arndale centres or at the match, that would get us. We knew we didnt sound like anyone else, and we made sure of that.

We wanted to be original, but we didnt want to be some left-field band only playing to a handful of blokes on a Thursday night in some shit venue, or a student band that never gets covered outside the NME. We wanted to be big and we wanted people to hear our music. We wanted to be on Top of the Pops. If I was interviewed back in the day, depending on what mood I was in, I might say a song was about something more specific, about this or that, when it wasnt really. Sometimes the songs were a little more abstract or surreal, just words that sounded good and created an image in my brain when I was stringing them together. Half the time I was more concerned with how the words sounded than with what they actually meant.

I actually used to change the words quite a lot, when we were writing songs and first rehearsing them and playing them. I would sing slightly different lyrics each night and what ended up on record was only the version that I sang that day. With Happy Mondays, the way we wrote songs changed over the years. At first, a lot of the songs would come out of jamming in rehearsals and studios. Quite often the band would get into a loop, possibly because they were off their tits, or sometimes because they knew how to start a song and get into a groove, but then couldnt finish it, and I would just freestyle over the top, and a song would emerge from the best bits of that process. Later, with the acid house influence and with different remixers and producers like Paul Oakenfold, we started working more around beats in the studio.

Then on the last Mondays album, the whole process collapsed, and I struggled to write anything to the music they were coming up with, which really showed. After the Mondays finished and I started Black Grape, the writing process changed again, as I was bouncing off Kermit and it was really refreshing to have someone else to trade with lyrically, and I think you can tell that when you listen to the tunes now. Listen to the first Black Grape album and I sound completely re-energised, compared to the last Mondays album, on which you can tell Im lacking enthusiasm and inspiration. I didnt listen to a lot of these songs for twenty years after we recorded them, as I was always one for looking forward, rather than backward. But a few years ago I was sent a remastered copy of Bummed and I sat down and listened to it and I thought, Thats fucking great! and as weve toured them over the last few years, as Happy Mondays and Black Grape, Ive actually begun to appreciate them a lot more. I still wouldnt call myself a poet though.

Shaun William Ryder