Although The Stones Roses’ ‘Made Of Stone’ spoke to my poetic impulses to float over burning cars in a Chagallian fantasy, and Primal Scream’s ‘Higher Than The Sun’ a manifesto of how I wanted to live, the 12 inch of ‘WFL’ was another route into dance music, and a striking example of how autobiography could become fiction. Shaun Ryder bellows the abbreviated story of his life with a brevity and economy any novelist would do well to learn from, not as an outcast but as the cheerful advocate of a tribe of artful fuckheads who think they are the normal ones. Shaun would tell the story of someone else’s (his brother’s) life better elsewhere (‘Kinky Afro’), but ‘WFL’ is his song of himself and a paean to the glories of being completely out of your head, as the video, my favourite all time, is visual evidence of. In it we watch Ryder dance on the spot, not caring that he cannot control what is going on in anyone else’s head, knowing instinctively that there is nothing to be done about anything, revelling instead in the absurdity, remoteness, and unreality of everything that is not part of the present moment.
It was clear to me that Ryder wasn’t obviously exceptional in the way that Bryan Ferry or Prince were, but his cheeky volition and the belief that it doesn’t matter how unpolished you are as long as you are singular and inimitable, as after all who else can be you, helped me remain ignorant of imposter syndrome until well into my thirties.
