Black Grape hit No 1 with their debut album in 1995, yet never truly felt part of the Britpop circus. For obvious reasons, you were never likely to see Shaun Ryder squinting from the cover of Vanity Fair, or shaking Tony Blair’s hand in Downing Street as a poster boy for Cool Britannia.
Two decades after the release of that album, It’s Great When You’re Straight … Yeah, Ryder has reunited with his fellow Black Grape frontman Kermit for a handful of shows. As they mooch on to the stage 30 minutes late, Ryder grumbles about having been “stuck in an eight-hour traffic jam from the north”.
Yet as soon as the five-piece fire into the glorious shambles of In the Name of the Father, it’s clear that Black Grape may be the great lost band of the 90s. They always were a grimily cosmic musical jigsaw, melding rock, hip-hop, acid house, psychedelic pop and reggae with Ryder’s gutter poetry, delivered in his inimitable shyster’s bark.
Caustic, magpie-minded numbers such as Reverend Black Grape still sound like three brilliant songs played at once, while Ryder, engaged and animated, looks far more into this than he has any of the numerous Happy Mondays reunions. There is no Bez, but livewire rapper Kermit is such a charismatic, kinetic ball of tension that it doesn’t matter.
The material from their second, lesser album Stupid Stupid Stupid falls short, but an encore of Kelly’s Heroes, with its absurdist lyrics about Jesus being Batman, is fantastic. Ryder has hinted he may write new Black Grape material. If he shakes off his lazyitis and actually does it, they could yet be wondrous.
• At the Assembly, Leamington Spa on 1 July. Box office: 0871 220 0260. Then touring.
