“you all forgot black grape”

Wilson was a Cambridge-educated intellectual, trade unionist, Situationist, Granada TV star and post-punk record-label co-founder.

Ryder was a street urchin singer and songwriter with an appetite for drugs so ferocious he once infamously sold his clothes to buy crack (he’s now several years clean).

Despite both hailing from Salford, the two should probably never have crossed paths, much less worked together and formed a deep and long-lasting bond which once saw Wilson describe Ryder’s slice-of-life, vernacular-heavy lyrics as being “on a par with WB Yeats”.

— Malcolm Jack

carols and rodeo candy

veteran alpine snow motion stop stop stop
you and your veteran status full motion block block
wide open winter jade alpine glow
the moon you see it moving across the setting snow

january full luna looming down through the shivery fir
cats hunched in the window through the frosted blur
incandescent warming in the yellowed room, wallpaper parched
porcelain chipped on shelves turned just so, that tungsten glow

above and about, strained in the frigid night
there are valentines on the floor, crayons beside them, unfinished
these valentines on the floor, unmeant
like that top class sleeping in another day that’s never been

next stop
come here, hold my hand
let me see
carols and rodeo candy

Battery Acid (1986)

Battery Acid

Shivering still can’t break from this false faith
You and your lies that once kept me safe
The time I saw you holding loving hands
Not with me — it was with some better man

Give me a chance

Battery Acid is in my veins
It was the cure to all this pain

Battery Acid
It’s in my veins now

Mason’s Stoup 9 – Fall 1992

Mason’s Stoup 9

Chez Depot

Chez Depot