Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Happy Mondays were Manchester lads who mixed grit and wit with a pilferer’s ear for a tune – Oasis started out getting compared to them, but the similarities really aren’t that great. Noel Gallagher built a reputation on his ordinariness, on being straight-talking and down-to-earth (great qualities to have in a mate but not necessarily what you look for in a pop star), whereas Shaun Ryder was both a lot rougher-edged and a lot further out. His drugs of choice were a bit too authentic and he seemed rather keen on actually sticking to whatever straggly roots he had, rather than just bolshily talking them up while living the high life. And then there were the songs he wrote – a lot of nonsense has been talked about Ryder being a lyrical genius, but you can see what’s being got at: his patchwork of grimy couplets, stoner exhortations, half-remembered nursery rhymes and pop songs and aggressive babble is touched by the special in a way none of the bands that followed the Happy Mondays quite were.
The one thing the Monday’s couldn’t do was pathos, or so you’d have thought. Their music was catchy and shot through with a vicious, off-kilter funk, and they knitted together all the stuff they drew on (70s soul, 80s jangle, 90s club music) with smartness and ease. But the records were very much front – they might get dark but they’d never, surely, get tender. Well, the band never posed much of a threat to the Field Mice’s fanbase, it’s true, but “Kinky Afro” is as introspective, and as remarkable, as they ever got.
“Son, I’m thirty / I only went with your mother ‘cos she’s dirty” it begins. No, wrong: how it begins is with maybe the crispest, loveliest rush of quick-strummed pop guitar that’s ever graced a single. The intro of “Kinky Afro” serves notice of greatness, tells you that what’s coming isn’t going to be another Mondays jam but is going to be something sentimental, heartbreaking and gorgeous. This instinct isn’t wrong: maybe on paper that lyric looks dumb or just funny, but the way Ryder sings it sounds like a man not used to the truth but with no choice but to tell it. “Kinky Afro”‘s father-son dialogue crackles with self-disgust and exhaustion, but also, every time the song swings into its borrowed and scuffed-up chorus, with pride. Maybe it’s the way the music keeps reaching out and up, a soup of strings and Mark Day’s woozy glam guitar, but no matter how dead-end the lyrics, “Kinky Afro” ends up hopeful. “Yippie-ippie-iy-iy-ay-ay-ay” snarls Ryder, and whatever he means you believe it.
From the middle of the decade onward half of Britain seemed to be looking for songs with this kind of sweep, songs which they could pretend were saying something more honest or truer than the rest of pop. And they found lots of tracks which fitted the bill nicely, but after “Kinky Afro”‘s kitchen-sink funk they all sounded like compromise and talking-down to me.