Category: Happy Mondays

I was tempted, for the second successive time in this series, to offer some question marks with the heading.

Last time round (which was away back in March) it was The Seahorses on the basis that I’m not the slightest bit enamoured by debut single Love Is The Law.  Today, it’s the turn of Happy Mondays.  I reckon not even their most diehard fan would want to claim that the three tracks which can be found The Forty Five EP, released as FAC 129 back in 1985, are their most enduring,  but I feel they all do have something about them which makes them worth a listen, albeit they give no indication of the sort of sounds that would later go on to sell in the millions.

Here’s the track which introduced them to an audience beyond the Greater Manchester fanbase:-

mp3: Happy Mondays – Delightful

And here’s the slightly lesser-known ‘filler’tracks:-

mp3: Happy Mondays – This Feeling
mp3: Happy Mondays – Oasis

You could be cruel and suggest that they are of their time and should be consigned along  other similar era indie-landfill, some of which was actually put out by other bands on the roster of Factory Records.  But I reckon that would be a very harsh judgement.   The songs certainly do show there is potential waiting to be tapped into.

JC

Regular readers will know that I’m offering up a short series dealing with the contents of the Use Hearing Protection box set.

FAC7 is a peculiar one given it was the catalogue number allocated to some stationary.  But this wasn’t just any old ordinary stationary, given that it was designed by Peter Saville.

It seems that, having gone through the rigmarole of actually releasing some records, Tony Wilson & co. decided that it would make some sense to print up some paper and envelopes to be used when issuing official correspondence.  Where most fledgling companies would likely have picked something cheap’n’cheerful from some sort of catalogue, Factory Records called on the services of its in-house designer who came up with headed paper and envelopes.   The box set did include some replicas of the envelopes (as pictured above), presumably on the basis that these did have FAC7 printed on them, but not any replicas of the official note paper, whose letterhead looked like this:-

I had to scratch my head a bit to come up with a suitable piece of music for today.  Having decided that it would need to be from the Factory Records catalogue, the little lightbulb above my head lit up.

mp3: Happy Mondays – Wrote For Luck (Dance Mix)
mp3: Happy Mondays – Wrote For Luck (Radio Mix)
mp3: Happy Mondays – Wrote For Luck (Club Mix)
mp3: Happy Mondays – Boom

The four tracks from the 12″ version of FAC212, released in October 1988 to huge indifference.  It was a different story less than a year down the line.

The mp3s today are provided today at a slightly higher level than normal, simply for the fact they deserve to be.  Play loud (and please excuse the click which crops up the very second the Dance Mix comes to a halt).

JC

Album: Bummed – Happy Mondays
Review: Guardian, 14 December 2007
Author: Alex Petrides

Earlier this year, what’s left of Happy Mondays dutifully went on the road in support of a new album that limped to No 73 in the charts. Shaun Ryder sang the hits slumped on the drum riser, a man doomed to spend the rest of his days on the touring treadmill by the kind of business deals that people on too many drugs tend to make, his glory years a distant memory.

Listening to this expanded reissue of their breakthrough album, it seems remarkable that Happy Mondays had any glory years to start with, at least commercially. Almost 20 years on, Bummed sounds extraordinary, but wildly abstruse. If you were making a list of Happy Mondays’ inspirations, you would start with the clattering, syncopated drums and wayward vocals of Tago Mago-era Can, and the phantasmagorical, chemically altered view of northern working-class life found in the Fall‘s lyrics – to which Ryder added his own distinctive spin, not least an unerring ability to make sexual intercourse sound like the most repellent activity known to man. “Come on in, grease up yer skin, bring a friend,” he leers at one juncture.

Elsewhere, you can hear the damaged sprawl of early 70s Funkadelic, Captain Beefheart‘s angular riffs and jarring slide guitars and, buried deep in the mix, the gauche synthesised stabs of early house music. It’s a bizarre stew of influences that would normally have confined a band to a netherworld of Peel Sessions and tiny gigs. Happy Mondays ended up playing stadiums and Top of the Pops.

That they did may have been testament not merely to the quality of their songs, but to the anything-goes musical climate ushered in by ecstasy use: the album was recorded with the E-fuelled “second summer of love” in full swing. But if Bummed benefited from the summer of love’s open-mindedness, it certainly didn’t share its flower-power idealism.

The album is haunted by Nic Roeg‘s Performance, a film that caught the hippy dream curdling into a crepuscular world of violence and insanity. It’s not even Mick Jagger‘s faded rock star character Turner that the album identifies with, but the psychopathic gangsters who invade his home and murder him: Mad Cyril is named after one of them and samples their boss Harry Flowers, while the track Performance seems to be written through the eyes of Chas, the enforcer played by James Fox, whose psychedelic dabbling doesn’t stem his propensity for violence.

For a band usually depicted as troglodytes rendered mentally subnormal by their drug intake – perhaps a consequence of having a keyboard player called Knobhead – this seems a remarkably sharp and cynical take on the prevalent mood of saucer-eyed euphoria. Perhaps, having made his living dealing ecstasy, Ryder had a rather clearer idea of precisely what lurked further up the chain of supply than, say, the beatific denizens of London acid house club Shoom, who ended their evenings with an unironic singalong to Give Peace a Chance.

The album’s sound perfectly complements the mood. Befitting a man with a reputation as the Phil Spector of Manchester, producer Martin Hannett saturated Bummed in reverb and echo; as with Spector’s wall-of-sound productions, it’s almost impossible to make individual instruments out amid the dense swirl. The sound and the sessions that produced it were the result of the copious intake of ecstasy: Ryder later claimed that supplying the alcoholic producer with the drug was the simplest way to stop him drinking. What it captures, however, is not the hug-a-stranger euphoria of the perfect E experience, but the queasy, disorientating claustrophobia of overindulgence. Coupled with the ever-present sense of menace in the lyrics, it makes for an uneasy, but utterly gripping listen.

Among the extra tracks lurks the baffling Lazyitis (One Armed Boxer) a reworking of Bummed’s closing track featuring yodelling cabaret artist Karl Denver. The combination of his vibrato-heavy club-singer voice and Ryder’s hoarse bark makes for what you might politely call a deeply challenging listen. Those looking for evidence of Factory Records‘ celebrated maverick spirit might note that someone at the label thought this would make a good single.

Then again, the single that finally took Happy Mondays on to Top of the Pops is scarcely more radio-friendly, offering two and a half minutes of thundering Can-inspired drums and squealing guitars, a lead vocal that borders on a hoarse, desperate scream, and a variety of thumpingly unsubtle references to heroin in the lyrics. It’s a miracle that the BBC allowed Hallelujah, and the band who made it, past reception.

What happened when Happy Mondays reached the top was impossibly depressing: hard drugs, homophobia, inexorable decline. But, as Bummed proves in all its dark, weirdly prescient glory, the way they got there was unique and strangely magnificent.

JC adds…….

Alexis Petridis has long been a reviewer I’ve admired, not just for his fine taste in music but for the way he writes things up.  Bummed wasn’t ecstatically received at the time of its initial release, with far too many in the UK music press keen to sneer at the Happy Mondays and indeed the direction in which Factory Records was heading back in 1988.  It wouldn’t take that much longer, however, before everyone was proclaiming Madchester as being the greatest thing since the last musical ‘movement’ to get folk awfully excited.

mp3: Happy Mondays – Mad Cyril
mp3: Happy Mondays – Performance
mp3: Happy Mondays – Wrote For Luck
mp3: Happy Mondays – Lazy Itis

Blue Monday is probably the best-known of all the songs ever released on Factory Records. Love Will Tear Us Apart might have a counter-claim on that statement and it could well be a photo-finish at the line. I reckon the Happy Mondays take on a John Kongos song from 1970 would be the other track on the 1-2-3 podium.

I’ve featured the song before, posting the album version. I’ve been doing a bit of Discogs shopping in recent weeks, picking up a few bits’n’bobs to complete some holes in the vinyl collection that will enable a few more posts to be worked up over the next few weeks. As ever, many of the sellers offer combined postage rates when you add a few more bits of desired rather than essential vinyl, which is why I came to pick up a copy of the 12″ version of FAC272, with its two very enjoyable extended mixes:-

mp3: Happy Mondays – Step On (Stuff It In Mix) (5:53)
mp3: Happy Mondays – Step On (One Louder Mix) (6:03)

It’s a song in which over-familiarity and too much radio exposure hasn’t spoiled it for me.

JC

From July 2008

BETTER THAN W.B YEATS AS A POET?

Tony Wilson once made the claim that Shaun Ryder was a better poet than William Butler Yeats, and that in the fullness of time, he’d come to be regarded every much as talented a genius as Mozart.

I’m sure my dear friend Greer, who, in addition to making fabulous weekly contributions to the Contrast Podcast, writes an equally fabulous poetry blog called A Sweet Unrest, would be horrified at such a comparison, but I do suspect Tony’s tongue, and not for the first time, was parked right into his cheek.

Having said that, the opening four lines to Kinky Afro, in which a dad directly addresses his young offspring, are as good as any representation of misogynist and unreconstructed man I’ve ever read in my life:-

Son, I’m 30
I only went with your mother cos she’s dirty
And I don’t have a decent bone in me
What you get is just what you see, yeah.

And as much as I love Kinky Afro, not just for the lyrics but the catchy tune that immediately makes me want to get off my backside and dance, there is no better Happy Mondays song than the opening track to their 1989 LP, Bummed:-

mp3 : Happy Mondays – Wrote For Luck

A truly astonishing bit of music, and the only thing that stopped it making the 45 45s at 45 rundown the other month was that I missed out on it when it originally appeared as a single. I only heard it a couple of months afterwards courtesy of it being included on a compilation tape made up for me by my old friend Jacques the Kipper (older readers might remember that JtK often left comments in the early days of TVV…he’s now too busy being a modern dad to stop by and say hi…..)

But having missed out first time around, I made sure I picked up the single when it was given the remix treatment and re-released a few months later. And as much as I love the original, produced to perfection by Martin Hannett, there are days when I prefer one or other of these mixes:-

mp3 : Happy Mondays – W.F.L. (the Vince Clarke Mix)
mp3 : Happy Mondays – W.F.L. (Think About The Future)

Vince Clarke is of course, the electro-pop superstar who had made the Top 10 with four different acts – Depeche Mode, The Assembly, Yazoo and Erasure – as well as releasing a single with the mighty Paul Quinn.

Think About The Future was a mix made by an up and coming DJ and mixer called Paul Oakenfold, who went on to become one of the biggest phenomena of the 90s – maybe ctelblog at Acid Ted can fill us all in properly….

Anyways, the inspiration for this posting is merely that on the train to work yesterday morning, feeling a bit low as I was going to be stuck indoors on one of the few warm and dry days we’ve had in Glasgow this past month or so, the original version of Wrote For Luck came round on shuffle on the i-pod.

Instant happiness without the need to ingest drugs or alcohol.

Oh and I got up from my seat, stood near the exit door and did a little dance (in my head it was a big dance – all Bez moves and shapes – but in reality I only sort of moved my head from side to side and tried hard not to sing along in case I scared the passengers).

Maybe Tony was slightly wrong about Shaun’s poetic abilities, but alongside his brother and his mates in the band, you can’t argue against the claim that he was one helluva songwriter…..

2013 Update

Shaun Ryder has since come to the attention of a much wider audience thanks to his exploits in the 2010 TV reality series ‘I’m A Celebrity….Get Me Out Of Here!’.  His autobiography. Twisting My Melon, was the published to great critical acclaim in 2011, acclaim that was entirely justified.

mp3 : Happy Mondays – Kinky Afro

Enjoy.

In November 1988, FAC 220 was unveiled to the world and just about every review in the UK weeklies and monthlies panned it.  Fourteen months later, it was high-up on all the lists of ‘Best Album of the 80s’ in the same publications….a classic example of why you should make your own mind up about music and not just go with what’s being written or said by the influential commentators.

It’s no real surprise though that Bummed got such a poor reception and not just because it was quite different from anything else which had come beforehand and there weren’t many reference points to go by.  There was a bit of a backlash at the time against Factory Records and some were getting fed up of with the never-ending proclamations from Tony Wilson. So when he said that Shaun Ryder was a poet who deserved to be looked upon in the same light as Keats and that Happy Mondays, along with a number of other Manchester bands, were making something distinctive and history-making that would see a perfect marriage of club and indie music, those in the media, particularly in London, just sneered.

I’m not going to make any huge claims on Bummed being one of the best records ever – after all it didn’t find its way into the recent Top 50 albums rundown over at TVV – but there are some songs on it which remain staggeringly brilliant more than a quarter of a century on.  Particularly this:-

mp3 : Happy Mondays – Wrote For Luck

Years after helping to make stars of Joy Division and New Order, the production genius of Martin Hannett comes to the fore as he throws the kitchen sink at the songs and proves that sometimes the drugs do work….and yet it was a couple of cleaner, less murky remixes which gave birth to Madchester as prophesied by Tony Wilson:-

mp3 : Happy Mondays – W.F.L. (the Vince Clark Mix)

mp3 : Happy Mondays – W.F.L. – Think About The Future (the Paul Oakenfold Mix)

As available on the single FACD 232.

Club classics both of them to go alongside the original version which surely has a place on every indie-disco playlist.

Enjoy!!