Shaun Ryder "stayed away" from writing love songs because they would be "hard" to perform live.
The Happy Mondays and Black Grape frontman has released his own book under Faber – named ‘Wrote For Luck: Selected Lyrics’ – which contains a collection of his lyrics complete with annotated notes, and he has admitted that when he is penning songs for an album, he likes to keep his lyrics "comical" and not too serious.
Speaking to The I Paper, he said: "I don’t want to write love songs. I’ve always stayed away from that. My love songs are pure porno. I wouldn’t write that now as a grown man. It can be hard to do it live. You’ve got to keep it comic, which is what I try to do with everything. If you keep it comic, you can get away with it.
"I’ve never gone for all that. I don’t like to make a big deal of the songs. The tortured artist thing? When I’m on stage I am f**king tortured. As a writer, my job is to write short stories. My subjects are all wacky, extreme comic-strip b*****ks. But I didn’t even want to do it at first. I was s**t. Same with the singing. I only did it cos the others tried and they were even s***ter.
"I was just writing about what was around me. We had nothing to hide. We were taking drugs and partying. Everything I do, I’d do in front of my mam."
The ‘Step On’ hitmaker smoked his first cigarette aged just 10 years old before turning to hard drugs, but the 56-year-old singer admitted that he is happy to have given up his previous rock star lifestyle because he would never want to "embarrass" his daughter, Coco.
Opening up about if he misses drugs, he added: "No! Not any more. I was 40 and living like I was when I was 18. It wasn’t a health reason. I was like: ‘I’m an old c*** now, I don’t want to be embarrassing my kids.’ I just decided to knock it on the head.
"I know people my age still on it, and good luck to them… Bez is what you’d call a garbage head. He’ll take anything going. I get it all the time. I’ll turn up in places and there’ll be a load of charlie and booze and birds and: ‘We’re going off to this club’. I’m like: ‘I’m not in, mate, I’m off to bed, watching the news.’
"If you’re happy doing that, fair enough. But it’s not me any more. I’m just dead happy being how I am now. Even if I do look like a big toe."
Shaun Ryder ‘stayed away’ from love songs
