SHAUN RYDERHOW DID A SCRUFFY SCHOOL DROPOUT FROM SALFORD
WRITE SONGS THAT CAME TO DEFINE THE MADCHESTER ERA?
AS FABER PUBLISHES A COLLECTION OF HIS LYRICS, SHAUN RYDER
TELLS CLASSIC POP ABOUT HIS LIFE AS A WORDSMITH...
JONATHAN WRIGHTT
he late, great Tony Wilson
was not a man who
believed in understatement.
His take on Shaun William
George Ryder, lead
singer with Happy Mondays, was
a case in point. Here, declared the
boss of Factory Records loftily, was
a Mancunian wordsmith worthy of
comparison to one of Ireland’s greatest
poets, WB Yeats.
“I didn’t know who Yeats was,”
laughs Ryder today. “I had no idea
and then, ‘Oh, he’s a poet and he’s
fantastic.’ ‘Oh nice one, Tony,
thanks.’ He didn’t compare me
to a drug-addled twat living in a
box under the fucking motorway,
so I took the compliment.”
As a new collection of Ryder’s
lyrics, Wrote For Luck, makes
clear, Wilson wasn’t being entirely
fanciful. Focusing on Ryder’s lyrics
from the late 1980s to the 1990s- from the Mondays’ debut, Squirrel
And G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party
People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White
Out) through peak Madchester and
the messy comedown, and onwards
to his work with Black Grape – it’s
a reminder that Ryder is one of our
foremost songwriters, a storyteller
whose tall tales, which so often turn out
to be based on hedonistic experience,
have an immediacy that makes them
jump off the page.
None too shabby for a man who,
by his own estimation, became the
Mondays’ frontman by default.
“I wanted to be a drummer,” says
Ryder. “I’d got some drums and I
couldn’t fucking play ’em and then,
when we got everyone together, I was
the singer. We all were having a go atwriting and they were shit. And I was
the best out of the bunch, so there
we go.”MADE IN SALFORD
In truth, the story of how Shaun Ryder
came to tell his stories to the world, is
a little more convoluted than this andinvolves going back to his childhood.
Born in Little Hulton, Salford, in 1962,
the young Ryder was a kid who
delighted in wordplay. Ordering a
“chippy dinner” at the chip shop, he’d
turn the price board into a song.
“I was the class clown, so I used to
make people laugh by making up
rhymes,” he remembers.
If only school had been so easy.
“I’m dyslexic,” says Ryder. “I had real
trouble at school. I went to a Catholic
school in the 60s where every time
you picked your pen up with your
left hand, you was fucking hit by
a stick on the knuckles. So I’m
not naturally right-handed, I’m
ambidextrous. I play football with
my left leg, and play pool and so
on, and so I ended up writing in
circles. And I can’t spell for shit.”
At least at primary school, his
mum worked in the infants as “what
you’d call a teaching assistant now”
and “kept an eye on me early doors”.
At secondary school in the 1970s,
he wasn’t so lucky. “It took me a long
time to understand simple things so
you was in the crowd control class, so
I pretty much dropped out of school
and never went past the age of 13,”
he says. “The only way I learnt my
alphabet – when I was 26 years old- was my girlfriend at the time taught
it to me through singing, and I sung it
and learnt it in fi ve minutes.”
Writing his
own luck
“I WANTED TO BE A
DRUMMER. I’D GOT SOME
DRUMS AND I COULDN’T
F**KING PLAY ’EM AND
THEN, WHEN WE GOT
EVERYONE TOGETHER,
I WAS THE SINGER.”
SHAUN RYDER