Joyful and triumphant (It's Great When You're Straight.... Yeah! - Black Grape)

Member Name: george_lazenby

Product:	It's Great When You're Straight.... Yeah! - Black Grape
Date:	11/08/01 (641 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Exuberant, rhythmic, funny

Disadvantages: It'll never be this good again

Confined to the house with illness, I needed cheering up, and the three albums which were been on my CD player with this in mind were a James Brown compilation, Beck’s ‘Midnite Vultures’, and this, the best album ever made by a man called Shaun. A few words come to mind when I think of Shaun Ryder – tuneless scally, titantic appetite for drugs, impending premature death are just some of them – but one word which I think sums up his entire contribution to music would be 'exuberance'. Ryder has never been introspective, contemplative, controlled or even coherent. Unlike the other big Manchester band who appeared around the same time – The Stone Roses – it’s hard to imagine that anyone will be listening to Happy Mondays or Black Grape in twenty years, even if Ryder finally makes his bid for immortality by killing himself (a fate which, given his appetite for excess, it is somewhat miraculous he has not already met). His songs are hedonistic, life-affirming and exciting; they tell you little more than live fast, die young, and leave a corpse that requires two coffins.

Happy Mondays managed four albums; the first ’24-Hour Party People’ (no, that’s nothing like the proper title, which is far too long) was fun but primitive, the last ‘Yes Please’ was catastrophically self-indulgent, produced at great expense by former Talking Heads Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, and sounding the death knell for the band. The middle two were the real stuff though – ‘Bummed’ was loud, stupid, foul-mouthed and funny, like a gatecrasher who’s far more fun than the party he’s trashing, while ‘Pills ‘n’ Thrills’ was everything, the ultimate expression of that moment in history when Manchester was the centre of the universe (a moment I will forever be grateful I was around for).

When the Mondays went belly up, Ryder was probably destined f
or obscurity, but no, he had more, and this album, which should have been a total disaster, was the best thing Sean Ryder did. Coupled with a superb producer (Danny Saber), a rapper (Paul ‘Kermit’ Leveridge) who seemed like Sean’s ultimate partner in crime, and with Bez around to continue making an arse of himself at someone else’s expense, ever credited with providing ‘vibes’, ‘It’s great when you’re straight..yeah’ is the distillation of everything that Ryder has ever done – the swagger, the arrogance, the foul-mouth, the moments of wit and poetry, and the same gravelly Manc voice in the centre, almost certainly out of his mind and having a far better time of it than anyone listening in. Even the cover is fantastic, a day-glo rendering of Carlos the Jackal with the band name and title on either side of his shades – I would love to have the original, it’s one of the all-time great covers, working well even on the CD.

What the album does is develop the direction the Happy Mondays were travelling in when they had people like Paul Oakenfold remixing their tracks in the late eighties and early nineties. In effect, ‘It’s Great when you’re straight…yeah’ is the album the Mondays should have made after ‘Pills ‘n’ Thrills’, instead of larking about in the Caribbean making ‘Yes Please’. It isn’t guitar music, it’s funk, dance and jazz blending together with a fat lad and a rapper shouting over the top of it. A masterpiece, in other words.

Favourite tracks

1) Reverend Black Grape

The first time I heard this (being played by Simon Mayo on Radio One), I thought, good God, he’s not dead after all. I love this song. From the first shout of ‘Yeah!’ and the roll of bongos, it’s just deliberately provocative, offensive lyrics, wah-wah pedalled guitars and a harmonica t
hat sounds like it’s about to go mental. Ryder isn’t really singing here, he’s just wailing about the hypocrisies of organised religion, seemingly making it up as he goes along, but actually laying into a worthwhile subject with complete aplomb. A immaculately-played track with lavish layers of sound and a rocking beat at the bottom of it, I think this is the best five minutes of Ryder’s career.

2) In the name of the father

‘Neil Armstrong, astronaut, he had balls bigger than King Kong’. You can keep your ‘Eleanor Rigby’, your ‘Karma Police’, I like songs with lyrics like this. I have had long arguments with other people about what this song means, if anything, but I don’t really care. The chorus is marvellous, recalling some of ‘Pills ‘n’ Thrills’ and there are even hints of Prince in this song which return with a vengeance in track 10. The repeated use of sitar across the album bears the most infectious fruit here, and as before, it’s a very lush production.

9) Shake your money-maker

Almost sounding sad, particularly in the rather poignant opening (well, at least poignant until Shaun and Kermit start shouting), this is an incredibly laid-back song, the organ sounds incredibly cool and the beat slowed down with the distinct feel of an Eagles track – no, really, it’s there, listen to it. This is an expansive, laid back epic song with a yell-along chorus which genuinely requires you to be pissed before you can join in, and a musical in-joke when someone whistles like the start of ‘Kinky Afro’. And it is incredibly foul-mouthed, so not one to do at Karaoke. If I ever get on Desert Island Discs, I am going to request this one, and ask them to play the second half. "You're a bleeding mother****er, now aren't you?"

10) Little Bob

It’s a tribute to Ryder’s blurring of th
e genre lines that this sounds like a Prince song. A Mancunian Prince perhaps, a bit beer-stained and bleary eyed, but the bursts of genuinely jazzy brass and organ throughout the chorus puts me in mind of all the stuff The Artist did with Morris Day and The Time. Which probably makes me sound very old indeed.

As a whole, the album is incredibly lush and lavish, with layers of beats and samples stretching deep beneath every song. The musicianship on this seemingly loose and lazy album is immaculate – the sitar on ‘In the Name of the Father’, the Hammond Organ on ‘Kelly’s Heroes’. I don’t want to waffle on too much, so I won’t do all ten songs. Suffice to say that track 5 ‘Yeah yeah brother’ is the only one that really sounds like the Happy Mondays of old (though it’s none the worse for it), while Tramazi Party deserves some sort of award for being the most unapologetically pro-drugs song around. There are the coded songs about drugs (‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ – hippie shit or LSD code?; ‘There she goes’ – love song or heroin hymn?), and then there’s Shaun’s slightly more open approach – ‘you can have it if you treat it right’.

The follow-up ‘Stupid Stupid Stupid’ wasn’t quite the disaster of ‘Yes Please’, but it didn’t catch the mood of the public and flopped, leading to Black Grape’s implosion and eventually, causing Ryder to reform the Happy Mondays with quite horrible results. If you like ‘It’s Great..’, ‘Stupid Stupid Stupid’ is well worth listening for ‘Dadi was a Badi’ and the triumphant opening to the first single ‘Get higher’, where Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s awful ‘Just Say No’ speeches are gleefully re-edited to make it sound like they are advocating liberal drug use.

Will Shaun ev
er come back? I hope not, because I think he really has burned out now. But on a couple of albums, he was hitting all the targets, and on this one, he was leaving every one of them behind.

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