SHAUN RYDER MADE THE ULTIMATE COMEBACK IN THE MID-90s WITH BLACK GRAPE. NOW 30 YEARS ON FROM THEIR FORMATION, SHAUN AND BANDMATE KERMIT RETURN WITH A NEW ALBUM THAT’S AS FIERY AND VITAL AS ANYTHING FROM THEIR FIRST PHASE...
STEVE O’BRIEN
It’s 1993 and Shaun Ryder, formerly of the Happy Mondays, is lost. Without a band for the first time in 13 years, he hooks up with his old Mondays comrade Bez and with Paul ‘Kermit’ Leveridge – once of Manchester’s Ruthless Rap Assassins – for a fresh musical project that few see going anywhere.
Yet Black Grape would make Shaun William Ryder Britpop’s comeback kid, with the group’s genre-warping debut album, It’s Great When You’re Straight...Yeah, hitting No.1 in the UK and its first two 45s – Reverend Black Grapeand In The Name Of The Father – going Top 10. “You know, Black Grape sold more records than the Mondays and we had bigger success than the Mondays,” Ryder tells Classic Pop from his home in Manchester. “I would spend more time doing Black Grape, but the Mondays takes up a lot of my life.”
Whereas in ‘93, Black Grape replaced the Happy Mondays as Shaun Ryder’s centre of attention, these days he juggles both, as well as a third gig with indie supergroup Mantra Of The Cosmos (with Bez again, plus Ride’s Andy Bell and Ringo Starr’s sticksman son Zak Starkey). Now in his sixties, Shaun’s busier than he ever was in his thirties and forties (“you get a lot more done when you’re not full of fucking drugs,” he laughs). It seems, though, as if Black Grape is the one that he’s most proud of. After all, since the Mondays regrouped in 2012, they’ve not put out any new material. Black Grape, on the other hand, have released two long-players since their 2015 reunion, including the upcoming Orange Head, which sees Shaun and Kermit team up with producers including Martin ‘Youth’ Glover for a record that’s as dizzily eclectic as anything from their 90s prime. “I think the album’s a real grower,” Shaun says, excitedly. “I’ve sent it out to me cousins and the first day they had it, they were like, ‘This is my favourite!’, and then over a period of a month, it had totally turned around and they had different favourites.”
Ryder’s memory is, understandably after decades of chemically-assisted hedonism, not great, and he can barely remember which tracks are on Orange Head. It’s been 12 months since he and Kermit finished the album and, he says, “All the
