An anecdote. Round about the mid-Eighties the place to go if you wanted to see Indie, Goth or Rock and Roll combos and lived in South West London as I did was The Hammersmith Clarendon. For bands who didn't trouble the charts but had a certain constituency, that you'd read about in the music press or heard on evening radio it was a great venue. I was there some time in 1987 to see The Weather Prophets. A clean-cut approachable Indie band on Creation Records with leather trousers and Chelsea boots. They ticked the boxes of my developing tastes, Velvet Underground, Television, The Byrds. They also mentioned the likes of Al Green in interviews but frankly it was difficult if not impossible to hear on their records. They were sliced white bread.They briefly gathered a bit of press attention round about the time I saw them and had signed, along with Primal Scream to an offshoot of WEA and managed an NME cover before sliding back into the second division over the next year.
The support band that night was one of the oddest things I'd ever seen. A rough and ready bunch of lairy blokes who were obviously as tough as nails and you wouldn't mess with under any circumstances if you saw them offstage. They sounded as if the four instrumentalists were playing in at least four completely different bands and as if the whole thing could and probably would fall to pieces at any moment. The singer had no obvious vocal talent and there was someone else onstage who didn't play or sing and had no obvious reason to be there at all. Bez, their dancer, I later figured. I'd like to say I underwent some kind of Road to Damascus experience but frankly they were too ramshackle to give you any impression that four years later they'd be bestriding the country like the Northern Rolling Stones. I think most of the other people there that night were similarly non-plussed.
So I've seen The Happy Mondays. I missed out on most of the other bands I should have been to see in the Eighties. The Smiths, Echo & the Bunnymen, Jesus & Mary Chain, Stone Roses (I had a cold). The only problem with my Mondays live experience was that I had no idea who they were. I didn't know I was seeing them. There were no obvious reference points at this stage. They just seemed like a bunch of chancers which it turned out was exactly what they were. Chancers who got lucky. It only clicked a couple of years later that I had when they started getting more attention from the press when they released their second album Bummed which I bought at the time and the penny dropped.
The record cover is one of the absolute classics. A lurid, technicolour impression of band leader Shaun Ryder, close up and ugly, 'a garish acid-dream painting'. It's difficult to give examples of covers that give a better impression of the disorientating listening experience of the vinyl they contain. The Happy Mondays are the gatecrashers that you don't want at your party.
The inner sleeve was a couple of 70s porn images of a very naked and very physical middle aged housewife that you made a point of not leaving out in case your mother decided to tidy your room. The Happy Mondays were pretty much unprecedented. They were the drug dealers from the estate in the part of town no-one would visit unless they had to grow up there. They had a real whiff of danger at a point in time when this was exactly what was needed. They did it how they wanted to.
Bummed. great dirty uncompromising name for a record, is not a melodic album. It's a fat slab of Northern life. A full English breakfast accompanied by a huge dirty spliff before moving on to the heavy stuff. There's a slower song at the beginning, a slower song at the end and in between the band shift up the accelerator and sound like they've raving off their faces.
It's impossible and pointless to talk about this record without discussing drugs at some point. No record I can think of is so completely saturated with it. Bummed doesn't particularly make it all seem an attractive prospect. It has no compass. The band don't necessarily seem to be enjoying it themselves. It was no revelation when it came out years later that they didn't get on. Shaun Ryder particularly was so far out there he must have been pretty much impossible to work with.
The record itself. It has The Country Song which was originally entitled Some C**t From Preston. It has the song where Shaun threatens to move in with you with his mates Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Goosie Lucy, Ducky Lucky and Chicky Licky. It has excerpts, namechecks and quotations throughout for the late Sixties classic Performance which seems to be its guiding soundtrack. At the start of the second side there's a quote from the compere of the Stones concert at Altamont. There's a song about Fat Lady Wrestlers and halfway through the second side a full blown porn scenario called Bring a Friend about Shaun getting his way with two willing sisters. It's not wholesome. It doesn't apologise or make allowances like much of the music of the time did. It doesn't try to be nice.
So it's neither wholesome, nice or melodic but it is, in its own way, ground-breaking. It's the sound of a band off their faces for most of the time whether in or out of the studio, getting a takeaway and some cans, lighting up, fumbling and stumbling towards a sound that will define their times. Producer Martin Hammett, a similar spirit in terms of lifestyle approach but a man capable of giving rough diamonds a sound they could sell as he'd already shown with Joy Divison, working his magic again for one of the last times before he died.
This all coalesces most obviously on Wrote For Luck which is a monster of a riff most of all, the largest song here, the one that leaps off the record. It eventually heralded their full crossover onto the dancefloor and brought them together with Paul Oakenfold who helped them break the charts.
Otherwise it can get a bit 'samey'. It's a record I don't play too often but am glad I've got because it's a bit of history. It's quite enclosed within its space and time, the scene it soundtracks, Manchester and Madchester, Acid House and The Hacienda, the Eighties becoming the Nineties. It hasn't aged too well and to be honest I don't understand the Mondays current spate of reunions except as ways of topping up their bank accounts. Still, good luck to them. They're all still here which shows they were all pretty hardened and could last the course.
For the record I'd go for Country Song, Moving In With, Fat Lady Wrestlers, Wrote For Luck, Do It Better and Lazyitis as the album picks. Lazyitis steals brazenly of course from Ticket To Ride but there's less obvious theft going on throughout the record. From Funkadelic, Sly & the Family Stone, The Stones, The Velvet Underground (one of the most interesting influences here, no coincidence that John Cale produced their first album). From pop and dance and punk and funk. They're magpies but they make it all their own. Lazyitis acts as a closer, a manifesto, proof positive that they can write songs and plan to write some more, and a soundtrack for Eighties dole culture which many of us look back on very fondly. It produced The Happy Mondays after all.
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