If you’re unsure whether Shaun Ryder’s lyrics for Happy Mondays and Black Grape really deserve the full Faber-poetry treatment, then you’re not alone. So, it seems, is Shaun Ryder. ‘I… wouldn’t call myself a poet,’ he writes in the preface, adding characteristically that ‘I’ve never put myself forward as an anguished wordsmith… like fucking Morrissey.’
It’s also unlikely that his work would have appealed much to Faber’s original poetry editor T.S. Eliot — not when the very first lyric contains the phrase, ‘Jesus is a c***’.
In fact, though, Wrote for Luck does add up to a rich and at times arresting portrait both of the man himself and of the 1980s Manchester scene from which he emerged — with the subject matter ranging widely through such things as cannabis, LSD, heroin, cocaine, crack, ecstasy and temazepam (a shamefully underrated drug in Ryder’s opinion).
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