The New Cue #347 January 8: Black Grape
"Meeting at the smack gaff getting heroin, that’s how we came together."
Good morning!
Welcome to the first New Cue missive of 2024. We hope you had a wonderful Christmas and that our sackful of expertly-curated playlists saw you through the festive break. We’re starting the new year as we mean to go on with a cracking chin-wag with Black Grape’s Shaun Ryder and Paul ‘Kermit’ Leveridge. We guarantee you that no other interview you read this week will feature near death experiences, a Salford crack house, Lib Dem weirdo Lembit Öpik, Nigel Havers and a saucy reboot of Neighbours.
Enjoy!
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Black Grape
After the messy disintegration of Happy Mondays following 1992’s Yes Please!, Shaun Ryder quickly found a new musical fit in Black Grape alongside Paul ‘Kermit’ Leveridge from Manchester hip-hop act Ruthless Rap Assassins. Described by Ryder at the time as “like having a new bird after a divorce”, the band’s 1995 debut It’s Great When You’re Straight… Yeah supercharged the Mondays’ kaleidoscopic grooves with hip-hop beats and surrealist wordplay from Ryder and Kermit. Topping the success of Ryder’s previous outfit, the album went to number one in the UK charts and spawned three top twenty singles.
Despite, or perhaps because of, their success, the pair’s chemical habits quickly derailed the band and after 1997’s underwhelming Stupid Stupid Stupid they disbanded. However, following 2017’s excellent reunion LP Pop Voodoo, next week Paul and Kermit are releasing the fourth Black Grape album, the equally top rate Orange Head. Here’s a little taste…
Before Christmas, the pair jumped on a Zoom call with Chris to talk about the album, how they first came together in a Salford smack den, Kermit’s near-death experience from septicaemia in the 90s, Nigel Farage, an ‘X-rated’ Neighbours reboot and a whole lot more…
Alright guys, how’s it going?
Shaun Ryder: Hello! Kermit, are you there?
Kermit: I’m sick! I think I’ve got Covid again. I got back on Sunday and I was fucked. I just thought it was all the gigs we’ve done, but then on Monday morning I had the shits and on Tuesday I felt really bad, I didn’t move all day. It’s fucking horrible, man.
Thanks for raising yourself from your sick bed to talk to us. Other than having Covid, have you been alright?
K: Yeah, I have been alright. Apart from shitting myself. That’s not a good look.
And how are you, Shaun?
SR: Yeah I’m good, me. Everything is back to normal, thank fuck.
K: Normal?!?
SR: Well, as normal as normal gets. I just got asked if I feel my age. I thought, ‘Well, mentally, fuck no, I don’t feel 61’. Mentally I’m still bleeding 12.
When you take Covid and the pandemic out of the equation, the last Black Grape album in 2017 doesn’t seem that long ago. Did you think once you’d finished it that you had another one in you?
SR: Absolutely. I’ve had people say it’s been a long time since the last Black Grape album, but 2017 feels like five minutes ago. It might be six years, but it still seems like yesterday. We thought we did a great album [with Pop Voodoo], we were over the moon. On this album I’ve got to say, Paul has blown me away with his standard of writing. It’s mega stuff.
K: Thank you, brother! Aww shucks, Shaun.
Was it important for you back then to not leave Black Grape on a bad note?
K: Definitely.
SR: We thought in 2017 that we did just as good a job as on the first album. If not better for me and you, writing wise.
How did the recording of Pop Voodoo compare to the recording of It’s Great When You’re Straight… Yeah?
SR: It’s Great When You’re Straight was fucking madness. We were 25, 28 years younger. So, if I’m 12 now, 28 years ago I must have been something fucking ridiculous.
K: Minus 12!
SR: We were in a different place. We were still thinking that living in rocky road [taking crack] was more important than anything else. We had no choice, we just had to live with how we were living.
K: It was a real album. We lived it out, but Pop Voodoo was a different entity. We’re older and we’re not carrying shit on our backs anymore.
SR: We took the writing more seriously than we did first time around.
You had more clarity?
SR: Yeah, we had a lot more clarity.
K: Getting diagnosed with ADHD helped. It makes you forgive yourself for the shit you did it the past.
SR: It certainly makes you understand yourself. It’s made me understand why I could never retain anything, why I could never keep hold of any knowledge, because I just couldn’t. I had fucking learning difficulties. [‘simpleton’ voice] My name is Shaun and I have learning difficulties.
K: He’s neurodivergent! And so am I!
The lyrics on the new album do still seem to be dealing with some quite dark stuff.
SR: Well, we still get our inspirations from the same old shit. Comic books and news articles, things that I’ve heard have happened to other people.
You’ve got songs on the new album like Pimp Wars that have what you might think of as a classic Black Grape sound, but on stuff like Dirt there’s a chilliness to it that makes it sound much more like a contemporary UK rap record.
K: Well, that’s what we are!
SR: If we were in charge of that first album now, a lot of the songs on there would sound like Dirt. There would have been a lot more hip-hop on there. Our American manager at the time wanted more rock and roll songs on it. At the time there wasn’t that many guys doing that sort of thing. You had the Beastie Boys and couple of others but that was sort of it and he was worried that we were going to be a bit too much like that for the American market, so he made sure there was a few rock and roll type things on there. Kelly’s Heroes was a pure hip-hop song and he made us go back three times and make it more rock-based.
Did you always consider yourself more of a rapper than a singer?
SR: I never considered myself a singer. I was more Bob Dylan-esque, that was my way of thinking. And then rap and hip-hop came along and what I was doing in the Mondays was more like that than being a singer. That wasn’t really that acceptable within the Mondays. I got told load of times, ‘Oh you need to sing proper.’ They wanted me to sing more like Ian Brown and write songs like The Stone Roses and I’m going. ‘You dickhead, we’d just be like The Stone Roses then! What’s the point of that!?’ I think that’s why Tony Wilson called me a poet, because I wasn’t really a singer.
K: Dude, you are a poet.
Kermit, how did you know Shaun?
K: I knew Bez and Bez introduced me to Shaun. We were like, ‘Oh we should do a tune together…’ but it never happened.
SR: We ended up doing heroin together. We became smack buddies first. Meeting at the smack gaff getting heroin, that’s how we came together.
K: And listening to a lot of rap at the time like Gravediggaz, Geto Boys. We were just listening to tunes and getting high as fuck.
Were you living together at the time?
K: He had a big house!
SR: Which once my missus left me turned into a crack and heroin house.
K: It’s a good thing the album went to number one otherwise we’d still be there.
After Happy Mondays had finished, was meeting Kermit and getting Black Grape together your chance to really indulge your love of hip-hop more?
SR: Even when the Mondays started I was more into Public Enemy than any jingly, jangly bands. You forget that Paul actually was on the last Happy Mondays album. The first Black Grape album should have been the last Mondays album, had we gone with Paul Oakenfold. I had ideas for that in terms of my writing that came out with Black Grape.
It was just a freedom to do what we wanted to do. When we started the Mondays we knew absolutely fucking nothing about making music. We’d never been in the studio. None of the musicians could play. It was only [guitarist] Mark Day that knew what key we were in. We didn’t have a fucking clue what we were doing. But by the time the Mondays finished, I’d had ten years’ experience of doing it.
Black Grape’s success eclipsed Happy Monday commercially. Did that catch you by surprise?
SR: Absolutely. We never had a number one with the Mondays. Black Grape went straight to number one which shut up everybody’s gob. It was brilliant. We did have a major label behind us to give us a push.
Was that a bit of a head-fuck for you, Kermit?
K: There was no internet then. I got a copy of the NME and was on the bus and was looking through the NME and saw in the charts that it was number one. That’s how I found out. It was a real eye-opener. It was fucking intense. Plus, we were doing a lot of drugs at the time.
It sounded pretty heavy before you started, then throw in a lot of major label cash and a number one record, that must have been quite a dangerous cocktail?
K: Oh yeah. It lead to septicaemia!
Explain how it led to septicaemia.
K: I used to use needles back in the day. I was a proper addict. We were away in Spain at a festival and I used the water out the tap to shoot up and I ended up getting septicaemia. I ended up in hospital getting the last rites. I flatlined twice.
Didn’t you get a pig’s heart valve put in?
K: Yeah, I’m not kosher.
All joking aside, you’re lucky to still be here.
SR: Me, Kermit and Bez are actually ghosts.
K: Yeah, we’re like Randall And Hopkirk.
SR: Only journalists can see us. I get asked did I ever expect to be doing this at my age back in the day? And the answer is yes. When I got into this game, whatever you want to call it, I wasn’t fucking leaving it without a struggle. There are a lot of people in the original Happy Mondays who threw away their careers, but it was too valuable for me, it was too valuable for Bez, we weren’t going anywhere.
Was going on I’m A Celebrity in 2010 a career move?
SR: Absolutely. I got offered Big Brother years before, but I was still looking at reality television in a dirty way. ‘I’m an artist and I don’t do that…’ But I saw what it did for Bez. When I got asked to go in the jungle I was in receivership and my accountant said by the time I’d get out of the jungle he’d have me out of it. It was the first time in 12 years that I could keep any money that I earned off anything. I came out of the jungle and we had a whole new fanbase of kids who had watched that show. Every time me and Bez go on Gogglebox they download our albums and turn up at our shows.
K: I’ve really noticed in the last three or four gigs the amount of young kids at the shows. It used to just be bald guys.
SR: Other bands from our time don’t get that younger audience. We get people coming because they’ve seen us on fucking Storage Hunters or something.
K: When they should be at uni!
Well now that Neighbours isn’t on any more students have got to watch something.
SR: Neighbours is coming back as an X-certificate type thing, innit.
X-certificate?
SR: Yeah, with all sex and drugs in it. It’s been in the press. They’re raunching it up. Like, what’s that one set in Cheshire?
Hollyoaks?
SR: Yeah, they’re making it more like Hollyoaks.
Do you keep up with I’m A Celebrity?
SR: I kind of have to because they’re always asking me to come on comment on what’s going on.
How would you have managed if you were in there with Nigel Farage?
SR: Just as it was with anybody, really. You can have somebody who’s the most sociopathic, nutcase cunt on the planet but it doesn’t mean that when you’re out in the pub with them that they’re not going to be alright for two hours. Anyone can seem like a human being for a short while. One of the biggest fears I had when I went into the jungle the first time was I really thought all these fucking luvvies, I wouldn’t get on with any of them. But I did. I got on really well with Nigel Havers, I got on really well with Lembit Öpik. Not only does Lembit look like Bez, he’s as fucking mad as Bez. It’s surprising who you get on with. You have to go through a lot of psychiatric work to go on one of these shows because they have to make sure you’re not going to kick the living fuck out of someone and they’re going to have to pay out millions in insurance because you just took some cunt’s eye out with a spoon.
What reality shows are going to be part of the promotional schedule for this album?
SR: There’s a few people me and Bez want to get round on Gogglebox. Paul’s one. I can’t tell you who the other one is, but we went to the same school. We grew up in the same part of Salford.
Is it John Cooper Clark?
SR: No, no, no. I was in the jungle with him in South Africa. We both went to the same school. I’m twenty years older than him though.
K: You’re twenty years older than everyone, Shaun!
SR: Apart from you, I’m 25 years younger than you! I’m twelve, mentally.
[A process of Wikipedia elimination reveals Shaun is probably referring to Andy Whyman who plays Kirk in Coronation Street]
It’s been a pleasure to chat to you both, hope you feel better soon Kermit. We normally ask people to send us a selfie to run with these interviews, but last time we asked Shaun for one he sent a picture of his arse.
K: He can’t help it! He’s got ADHD!
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