Black Grape Puts Ryder Back in Limelight

Shaun Ryder heard the stories. He remembers reading in the British music press that his career was over now that his band the Happy Mondays had finally self-destructed beneath an avalanche of drugs, booze and other excesses.

But Ryder never said a word, never granted an interview after the Mondays’ 1993 breakup, nor felt the need to contradict his reputation as an aging wild man.

“They thought that for the last three years we had been smoking crack, getting fat, growing mustaches and drinking bottles of brandy,” says Ryder, now 33. “We didn’t answer it. We didn’t get involved in the PR.”

Instead, Ryder quietly built a band called Black Grape, developing a new, sophisticated take on the Mondays’ old mix of edgy rock and euphoric dance culture. Joining him for the ride were former Mondays bandmate Bez (a.k.a. Mark Berry) and singer Paul “Kermit” Leveridge, who helped create a sound that was viable both on and off the dance floor.

The resulting debut album, “It’s Great When You’re Straight . . . Yeah,” won immediate critical acclaim and skyrocketed to the top of the British pop charts. Along the way, Ryder rediscovered the one constant to a career that was too often obscured by bad habits: the music.

“I hope you can tell by listening to this record that we had a damn good time making it. I hope the vibe comes off, so you can see we weren’t in pain for our art!” says Ryder, shouting happily into the telephone during Black Grape’s recent tour of England. The band will make its U.S. debut at the Roxy Wednesday through Friday. “Now what I really enjoy is making the music,” he says. “It’s a real [expletive] pleasure!”

If the album’s overall level of creative energy beats anything released by Ryder’s first band, the Black Grape debut still owes much to the genre-crossing precedent of the Mondays’ 1990 album “Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches.”

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The Manchester-based group was unable to keep up the momentum of that popular breakthrough, but Ryder says he has no regrets now about the band he helped start as a teenager, or of the problems that led to its breakup.

“All we wanted to do with the Happy Mondays, which was more important than music, was to get away from our boring Northern [England] lives. We wanted to live rock ‘n’ roll lives.

“We did achieve all that we wanted to do,” he says. “I never thought in my wildest hallucinations that I’d ever be playing at Wembley [Stadium] or ever be in Brazil playing for hundreds of thousands of people. This wasn’t real.”

After the Mondays fell apart, Ryder began working on music with Leveridge, who had been part of another Manchester act, the Ruthless Rap Assassins, and appeared on the ill-fated Mondays album finale, “Yes Please!” (Leveridge and Bez both had to bow out of the Grape U.S. tour because their drug transgressions prevented them from getting visas.)

Ryder and the Mondays’ lingering reputation for self-destruction meant that Black Grape had to come to the United States to find a record deal (with Radioactive/MCA), much to Ryder’s irritation. That may explain why he hopes to rent a house in Malibu when the American tour ends to spend this summer working on new music here rather than back in England.

In spite of the last three years, the success of “It’s Great When You’re Straight” didn’t actually come as a surprise to Ryder. “It was great for it to go straight to No. 1 [in England],” he says. “Maybe that was a surprise. But I’ve got to be honest, I did think it would get critical acclaim. We did make a good album.”

* Black Grape plays Wednesday and Thursday at 8 p.m. and Friday at 10 p.m. at the Roxy, 9009 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. $13.50. (Wednesday and Thursday sold out). (310) 278-9457.