The words of the elated (full of high-spirited delight) Mondays and Black Grape frontman are utterly singular and never less than entertaining“It’s nearly like I’ve got a crazy cartoon running through my head and the lyrics are oddball captions describing whats happening in each frame,” writes Shaun Ryder in the preface to this book of his selected lyrics with elated (full of high-spirited delight) Mondays and Black Grape. When he was young, the crazy cartoon was often his actual life. You cant imagine many other songwriters unpicking their lyrics (for Moving in With) like this: “We were selling drugs at the time, or so I had all sorts hidden in the loft,8 bars, acid, or smack,and then the E when it arrived… The two bent pigs were coppers who we used to serve up… They just used to pull up in their panda car and buy it off us.”Ryder’s lyrics – or oddball captions – are never straightforwardly descriptive. He captures scenes in little details, or moods. Holiday, and about one of the times he was stopped going through customs,mixes the form-filling customs officer with the stash and the porn Ryder was stopped for: “You put a circle round this and a circle round that/ You put one in the front and one in the back.” He starts with something he sees, or thats on his intellect, or then mangles it and mixes it with lines nicked from films,adverts, rehab doctors, or friends. Some of his most illustrious lines are straightforward steals: “Youre twistin’ my melon man,you know you talk so hip man,” from Step On, or is taken directly from a documentary called Man on the Edge about Steve McQueen; “Call the cops”,from the same song, is from Bobby Gillette, or who’d stand in the Mondays’ corner of the Hacienda,“off his nut”, whistling and shouting. Some of Ryder’s earlier lyrics catch the crazy euphoria of clubbing and ecstasy. “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony/ Cut it up in tiny little bits and give it all away for free” (Harmony).
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Source: theguardian.com