02 Academy Birmingham
Somewhere along the line, Shaun "William" Ryder has acquired a middle name. Most artists try to get by with just the one when they become famous beyond their immediate constituency. Since his stint in the Celebrity jungle last year, Ryder has certainly been elevated, if not quite to the status of national treasure, then at least to the position of everyone's favourite foul-mouthed relation, one undeniably damaged in the ecstasy wars (and the opium wars and the crack wars), but warmly indulged for his valorous part in them. Well, perhaps not the latter two.
The former frontman of Happy Mondays and Black Grape ? and latterly, staunch consumer of crocodile penis ? has never been a man to do things the easy way, however. He once infamously went Awol after wandering out of the Mondays' contract negotiations to get a KFC ? Ryder parlance for scoring smack. Tonight, Shaun William Ryder's drum kit and his bold, black-and-white promotional T-shirts, abbreviate him to SWR. It's snappy, it's quite dignified and it's probably intended to underline Ryder's break from the Mondays and his new, post-Celeb solo rebirth (Ryder's first solo album, Amateur Night in the Big Top, came out in 2003).
Confusingly, though, Ryder's support band tonight are the same musicians who constituted the last incarnation of the Mondays, with whom Ryder made an album, Uncle Dysfunktional, in 2008. "Angels and Whores", a rum cut from that album, comes early on in a set whose warm highs and painful lows surely mirror, after a fashion, the experience of kicking heroin.
There is still something enduringly fantastic about Black Grape's "In the Name of the Father", a tune that, lest we forget, tackles the hypocrisy of the Catholic church in abetting fugitive Nazis. The role of Kermit ? the toaster in Black Grape ? is tonight played by a man called Tonn, who, with Ryder's co-singer Julie, fleshes out Ryder's gruff wordplay. Equally durable is the Mondays' "Loose Fit", a hazy delight.
Tonight, Ryder finishes his set with a new song called "Mumbo Jumbo", whose chief promise lies in the killer line: "She likes the music in the key of death." There is a solo album tentatively scheduled for late spring, recorded with Sunny "grandson of Quincy Jones" Levine, who produced Uncle Dysfunktional. It might be called X ? another Ryder pseudonym. SWR or X, Ryder might, just about, still have a little of the magic that made him the nation's unofficial addict laureate, a wordsmith who combined previously owned lyrics, nonsense and street wisdom into a kind of soiled and addled poetry.
Ryder went on I'm a Celebrity to promote his current greatest hits album, XXX: 30 Years of Bellyaching. In contrast to other contestants, who are only ever there for "the experience", Ryder confessed he was there for the record company, to see if he could capitalise upon a repeat of the fondness that coalesced around Bez when he won Celebrity Big Brother in 2005.
Ryder left the jungle as the runner-up, having ingested pretty much everything a hungry Aborigine might have eaten when down on his luck. (A track record of ingesting pretty much anything that would make life more interesting may have helped here.) Ryder, who has been off drugs for a few years now, is now on this national tour to discover whether being rude to Gillian McKeith has rehabilitated his career.
Some signs are not promising. The initials SWR on the drum kit look as though they have been hastily applied with Letraset. The venue isn't exactly full. Judging from their enthusiastic reception, Ryder's support band the Twang, who come from Birmingham, may have drawn significant portions of the crowd. There are nagging problems with the sound, too, which means Ryder and the exuberant Julie are sometimes muted in full flow. Ryder spends a lot of time looking down at what might be a teleprompter. Brian Wilson uses one.
But Ryder looks good. He's still jungle-slim and soberly turned out, in what might be chinos. It's all in stark contrast to Ryder's worst years in the pre-jungle wilderness when, unable to work because of a legal dispute with Black Grape's former managers, Ryder survived on freebies from Adidas and handouts from friends. His chemically assisted swagger is long gone, but Ryder makes up for it with unconventional mike techniques ? horizontal, held by the tip ? and prodigious swearing.
Age, meanwhile, cannot wither the brilliant "Step on", nor custom stale its rush of nostalgia. At the end, the floor of the venue reveals no empty containers of poppers or spilt pills, but a sandwich danced into putty and some lost eyelash curlers. As with the reacquisition of his middle name, there is meaning in that, somewhere.
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