Twisting My Melon

by Shaun Ryder

  Our Paul didn’t last very long. I could tell that he didn’t really have any enthusiasm for the new band and still had this resentment towards me for the Mondays’ split, and he thought this new band was nonsense. He came round for a rehearsal, but as soon as I started saying to him, ‘Can you do this, can you do that?’ it was the last straw for him, and he just flipped. He started ranting at me, ‘This is shit, and you’re shit!’ and then he started to smash my front room up. He put a window through and then he went to the kitchen and grabbed a carving knife and came at me with it, and everyone else had to jump in and calm it down. I still didn’t realize how deep his resentment or hatred towards me was at that stage. I was just putting together a new band and took it for granted that Our Paul would play bass for me, but he was obviously out after that.

  Our Paul went on to have quite a tough time of it for the next few years, wrestling with his habit, and even being sectioned at one point. I didn’t see much of him for a few years, but I would still see him when I called in at my mam’s because he was living there most of the time.

  Not long after I started pulling the band together, I got a call out of the blue from Gary Kurfirst. Kurfirst was a big influential music figure in the States. He’d organized the New York Rock Festival in 1968, with a bill including the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, which had inspired Woodstock the following year. He’d also managed the Wailers, the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, B-52s, Eurythmics and Jane’s Addiction. He knew me through Chris and Tina of Talking Heads, but he was also a real music fan, so he knew the Mondays. When he found out the band had split he just put a call in to me to see what I was doing and if I had any plans. I hadn’t been shopping myself around or trying to speak to any labels in the UK, because it was very early doors and I was still putting the band together at that stage.

  I didn’t tell anyone I was speaking to Kurfirst. The rest of the Mondays were still shouting their mouth off about what they were going to do and I just kept pretty schtum, and within a couple of weeks of starting those early jams at mine, I was on a plane to New York to sort out a deal with Kurfirst.

  I’d been asked to work with a few different artists and turned them all down, but I did do one track with the Manchester band Intastella. I didn’t really want to do it, but agreed as a favour to them. I think part of them might have thought they were doing me a favour, the cheeky fuckers, but far from it. I’d had untold artists and different bands on the phone, asking me to work with them – much bigger artists than Intastella, but had turned them all down. But I agreed to do a track with them as the two Martins were helping me out with my demos at the time.

  Because it was the first thing I had done since the Mondays split, they ended up getting the front cover of the Melody Maker out of it, just by me saying I was retiring from the game. Which was the only chance Intastella had of ever getting a front cover. I wore a suit on the cover and declared I was getting out of the music game, knowing full well that I’d already started what would become Black Grape, and thinking, ‘Just you wait and fucking see.’

  Everyone had written me off. I even had Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus and everyone knocking on my door in Didsbury, believing what the rest of the band were saying, because they were in the press claiming they were forming a supergroup, but that was just drug talk. I think they did try, but that’s when Andy Rourke rang me up in disbelief because he found out PD couldn’t really play keyboards. I just kept my mouth shut, thinking, ‘What are people like?’

  After the jamming sessions at my house in Didsbury we went into Drone studios in Chorlton to lay down some initial tracks. This was me, Kermit, Ged Lynch and the two Martins from Intastella. Basically, after I’d done them a favour and got them on the front of the Melody Maker, I said, ‘Now you’ve got to do me a favour and come in and help on these demos.’ I didn’t tell them at that stage that I had a deal in the pipeline from Gary Kurfirst; they just thought we were recording some demos and they couldn’t really be bothered. All I got from them was a series of excuses and half-hearted commitments. ‘I can do half an hour this afternoon’; ‘I can come in and do an hour tomorrow’; ‘I can’t tonight ’cos I’ve got to babysit for my girlfriend’; ‘I’ve got to take my girlfriend out for steak pie.’ I just thought, ‘Fucking hell, no wonder you lot are never going to make it in the game.’

  Even though I didn’t have the line-up settled at that stage, or a name for the band, I knew exactly what I wanted it to sound like. Upbeat Rolling Stones meets Cypress Hill, with a bit of Serge Gainsbourg, Stereo MCs and a bit of reggae thrown in, but all reinterpreted in my own style. Basically, a similar approach to Pills ’n’ Thrills and just as diverse, but a little less Balearic and a little more hip-hop influenced, with a deep booming bass. Which is exactly what Yes Please! would have sounded like if I’d had my way. Kermit thought pretty much the same as I did. He had the same approach to ripping records and knew exactly where I was coming from.

  I sent Kurfirst those early demos and he liked what he heard, so before I knew it I was on a plane to America to do the deal with him.

  I didn’t even really have many discussions with people or labels in the UK, because Kurfirst had got in there so quick. John Price at Warners had put a good publishing offer in after hearing the early demos, but I was already dealing with Kurfirst. That was how quick it happened.

  Kurfirst actually wanted to sign me as Shaun Ryder, as a solo artist, but I just wasn’t ready at that time to strike out on my own; I still wanted to be part of a group. Kurfirst wanted me to sign to his record label, Radioactive Records, but he also wanted my publishing and he wanted to manage me. But one person can’t do all of that, because there will be a conflict of interest. So in the end he brought in the Nicholls, Gloria and Nik, who had worked for him as tour managers, and drew up a contract to make it look like they were managing me, while the idea remained that he would still be in charge really.

  Like I said previously, I didn’t like the Nicholls when I first met them, through Chris and Tina when we were finishing Yes Please! I thought they were really obnoxious. But this was Kurfirst’s idea, so I went along with it, which was to prove a huge mistake.

  Gary Kurfirst quite quickly hooked us up with the American producer Danny Saber. I’d described my vision of the album to Kurfirst as the idea of merging the Stones with Cypress Hill, and he thought Danny would be the right man to produce it, especially because he had worked with Cypress Hill. He said, ‘This guy would be perfect for you. He’s rock and he’s hip hop,’ and he sent him over to Manchester for an initial session.

  We booked into Spirit studio on Tariff Street in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, and we got on straight away, and I could tell we could work well together. Danny could play a lot of different instruments and he was a great producer. Me and Kermit had similar approaches to ripping records, and Danny totally understood where we were coming from. In those short sessions we wrote two of the songs that would end up on the album.

  The nucleus of Black Grape from then on was me, Kermit and Danny. Plus Bez, of course. Then we also had Ged Lynch on drums, Danny played bass on the record and we brought Paul Wagstaff, or Wags as everyone calls him, on guitar. Wags had been the guitarist in the Manchester band Paris Angels. I can’t remember exactly who introduced me to him, but we were looking for a guitarist in Manchester, and Wags was a good one, and another smackhead, so he fitted in well.

  Between the sessions at my house, Drone and Spirit, we had more than half the album written when we went down to Rockfield studio in Wales to start recording proper. Coincidentally, the Stone Roses were down there at the same time, finishing Second Coming. From the demos we had already laid down, we knew we were on to something and there was a great atmosphere. We had a blast down there. The sessions were quite Guinness-fuelled at first. Well, Guinness, Es and Temazepam.

  We spent quite a bit of time in the local pub sticking things like Thin Lizzy and Rod Stewart on the jukebox, because that was the kind of upbeat party vibe
we were after. We also had a pirate copy of Pulp Fiction from the States, which hadn’t come out in this country yet, and we sometimes watched that several times a day, so that was also an influence. Some of the religious imagery on the album was influenced by Samuel L. Jackson’s character Jules in the film, and the way he quoted biblical passages. I also thought Pulp Fiction was a pretty realistic depiction of the effects of heroin. The scene where John Travolta’s character, Vincent Vega, has just seen his dealer and is driving down the road like he’s floating in his own little bubble was pretty true to how I felt when I was on heroin. Trainspotting was pretty real, but that was more the dirty digging end of the scene. The most realistic portrayal of a whole drug scene, and the way it’s run and organized, from street-level soldiers to the boss, is The Wire. From the corner boys, to the way they use burner phones, to the way money is laundered, it’s spot on.

  I wasn’t actually on the gear when we started recording It’s Great When You’re Straight …Yeah! but I was back on it by the time we finished it, ironically. At first we were just on the Guinness, Es and Temazis, but let’s face it, if you put me, Kermit and Wags together, there’s a certain inevitability about us getting some heroin. Towards the end of recording, the sessions had to be stopped temporarily while someone nipped to Bristol to get us some gear, or we’d make a call and have someone drive it down from Manchester.

  Temazis, or ‘jellies’, were my favourite drug at the time. I loved them. I had a mate in Manchester whose girlfriend was a psychiatric nurse, and she used to rob tubs of five hundred Temazis. People had started using them to help them come down off crack or heroin, but they then became popular as a party drug. Basically, the whole recording down there was a bit of a Temazi party, which is where the song on the album ‘Tramazi Parti’ came from, although we changed the spelling to avoid legal problems.

  We had a few run-ins with the locals while we were there. It seemed like it was almost an established routine that whoever was recording down there would get pissed, do mad things, and then end up in the local court and get fined. It was almost a game for the locals. I can remember being in the pub with Mani in Monmouth and the local kids were trying to goad us, banging on the window and going, ‘Come on!’ trying to get you in a fight. Me and Kermit were nicked several times for being drunk and disorderly or something. One night we were off our heads on Temazis and E and got into another scrape, and the police turned up and I shouted at Kermit, joking, ‘Go and get the guns!’ That’s the sort of weird nights out we had down there.

  While we were making the first Black Grape album, Oriole gave birth to our daughter, Coco, on 11 April 1994. She was named after Coco Chanel, not Coco the clown. Her full name is Sean Coco Chanel Ryder. I was made up to have another daughter. Like I said earlier, after my first daughter, Jael, was born, I was quite keen on having a few kids, and me and Oriole started trying not long after we got together.

  Kurfirst and Radioactive had brought Steve Lironi in as a co-producer. I didn’t really understand why he was there at first, because Danny Saber knew exactly the sort of record that me and Kermit wanted to make. But Kurfirst and Radioactive were a little worried the album might be too hip hop, so they brought in Steve. He had been in Altered Images and was married to Clare Grogan, and they wanted him to ensure we kept a rock element to the album. Basically, they didn’t want the album to be too black.

  The most obvious example of that is ‘Kelly’s Heroes’, which I don’t think turned out as great as it could have been. I loved the song originally, but I think that huge guitar riff in the finished version that was released takes over the song. I wanted a bit of a rock lick on there, not this huge riff, but that’s what the Americans love, and that’s what Kurfirst and Radioactive wanted. When we wrote it, me and Kermit were really bouncing off each other in the song: ‘Jesus was a black man!’, ‘No, Jesus was a Batman!’, ‘No, no, no, that was Bruce Wayne!’ But when the track became a bit rockier, it lost a little bit of that energy, because it’s easier to bounce off each other when you have more of a groove than a rock riff behind you. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good track, but it could have been better. It should be punchier and funkier. It should be a bit tighter for the verbal sparring to really work. ‘Kelly’s Heroes’ was a little dig at the celebrity culture, ‘don’t talk to me about your big, big heroes’. Although one person did once say to me, ‘Why are you having a go at Serbians? Do you not like Serbians?’ Which confused me, so I asked them what they meant. ‘Why do you sing “Don’t talk to me about heroes, most of these men stink like Serbs”?’

  ‘No, mate, it’s “subs”, glug glug glug …’

  ‘Reverend Black Grape’ was the opener and the first single off the album, and therefore probably the first Black Grape track most people heard. It was a great introduction to the band. I wasn’t trying to be deliberately controversial with the line about the Pope and the Nazis: ‘Oh Pope he got the Nazis, to clean up their messes. In exchange for gold and paintings, he gave them new addresses’. Reverend Black Grape was just a fictional character. I suppose he’s part me, part Kermit, a character that emerged when we were riffing off each other while we were writing it. The chorus is ripped from the hymn ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, which is probably that influence from Jules in Pulp Fiction.

  ‘In the Name of the Father’ is again not really about anything. ‘Neil Armstrong, astronaut, he had balls bigger than King Kong’ – they’re just little snippets or stories that I’ve pulled together, ‘first big suit on the moon and he’s off to play golf.’ Although I do remember watching the first moon landing in 1969, back in Little Hulton, when I was six.

  ‘Yeah, Yeah, Brother’ was something that was left over from the Mondays. Not the whole song, but I had chunks of the lyrics. It’s not necessarily about Our Paul, because I wasn’t quite aware of just what a backstabber he could be at that stage, although he had walked away from the new band. It’s more about all the rest of the Mondays and backstabbers in general.

  I’d also been listening to quite a bit of Serge Gainsbourg, which you can hear on ‘A Big Day in the North’, as it’s a slight rip of his song ‘Initials B.B.’

  ‘Submarine’ is another track that is not really about anything in particular. ‘He smoked steroids, and he got me in a headlock’ isn’t about anyone – it just sounded good. That was one of the last songs we recorded in that session, which you can tell because I’m a bit more magpie with my lyrics, like ‘You paid a debt today, oh boy’ is a slight rip from the Beatles’ ‘A Day In The Life’.

  ‘Shake Your Moneymaker’ is also a bit of a rip, this time from the Stones’ ‘Fool to Cry’. It’s not a straight rip, but if you listen to the two tracks side by side you can definitely see some influence in there. That was also probably down to the feedback we were getting from Kurfirst, because he would love tracks like that, which had some rock influence, and he would reject tracks that were a bit more hip hop – those that I thought were actually more in keeping with the album we were aiming for.

  Danny would deliberately record me and Kermit adlibbing or just talking bollocks in the studio, and he added snippets of that in at the end when he was mixing tracks. Like the outro of ‘Little Bob’, where you’ve got me and Kermit just riffing off each other and talking rubbish: ‘I believe everything I read …’; ‘Speak up, speak up.’ We wanted to make the record as diverse and interesting as possible, so we added little samples and unexpected references from everything, from films to the old Cresta Bear, who used to say, ‘It’s frothy, man’ on the advert. I’d done that since Bummed, which was littered with quotes and references to films like Performance and Gimme Shelter, but we took it to another level with Black Grape.

  By the end of our time in Wales we still hadn’t settled on a name for the group, and Kurfirst had been asking me to come up with something for weeks. He then started pressurizing me for one: ‘We need a name for the band. You’ve got to come up with one now.’ Kermit had a can of black grape juice in his hand, and I j
ust thought, ‘You know what, we’ll call it Black Grape,’ and as soon as I said it, it just seemed to fit.

  While we were recording there had been a rumour going round about me signing on the dole in Salford. Piers Morgan actually rang me and said, ‘Look, we’ve got photos of you signing on,’ and I said, ‘Piers, you know me, mate. If you’ve got photos, look at them, because I’m telling you, it’s not me, mate.’ So Piers said, ‘Do you need money?’ and I said, ‘Piers, look, between you and me, I’ve already done a deal and I’ve got a great new album coming out, which will probably go to Number One. Why would I be signing on the dole, Piers, you know what I mean? Check your source and check your photographs.’ Anyway, less than two hours later, I get a phone call back from Piers agreeing it isn’t me in the photos, and it’s a load of bollocks, but apparently there was some kid in a dole office in Salford posing as Shaun Ryder. He was signing on and claiming for whatever he could claim for – his house, garden tools, anything he could get.