If the band was considered by the music press, it was another example of Factory Records’ strange attitude towards A&R. their willingness to spend New Order money on oddly named Manchester bands who were clearly not going to repeat their success: Red Turns To…, Biting Tongues, Stockholm Monsters. The Happy Mondays didn’t sound like the way an indie band was supposed to sound in 1986, a time when a mid-’60s charity shop turned fan of British alternative rock. Their press manager in London was so taken aback by their appearance on their arrival in the capital – a riot of shaved heads, jeans and utility anoraks – that he insisted they take a picture of them before they even got out of their van. And neither did their debut album, Squirrel and G Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out), sound like an indie band was supposed to sound like in 1986. The prevailing trends variously included the serious left-wing politicization evidenced by the Housemartins , or low-rent recreations of the Byrds or the Buzzcocks. Frontman Shaun Ryder memorably described their sound as “funkadelic eaten by a giant sandwich… Northern soul… punk rock… Hendrix… fucking Captain Beefheart, and a load of drugs on top of that”. You might reasonably add the krautrock of experimental rock band Can to that list of influences. Above all, Ryder casually shouted lyrics that, on the rare occasions you could work out what they meant, seemed to speak of a life on the fringes of society, full of drugs and petty crime: “Everybody in this wagon likes to rob and the abuse … smoking miles and miles of hash, that’s sweet,” says the song Olive Oil. Happy Mondays performing in 1991. Photo: Frans Schellekens/Redferns That the Happy Mondays were strangely funky at a time when most British indie bands drew their influences from white rock was largely due to the bass playing of Ryder’s brother Paul, a fan of Bootsy Collins and the legendary Motown bassist. James Jamerson. It was Paul who named the band Happy Mondays – apparently after the day his unemployment checks arrived, “the day to get out of your face” as he put it – and it was Paul’s bass that anchored the Happy Mondays sound. As decidedly hedonistic as his bandmates were in his day-to-day life, there was still something steady about his playing. In an outfit whose musicianship has been questioned at times – Shaun claimed ex-Smiths bassist Andy Rourke had tried to form a band with Mondays keyboardist Paul Davis, quitting when he realized ‘this lad can’t play a note” – Paul’s bass provided an anchor, something the listener could cling to in the confusion. On their second and best album, 1988’s Bummed, Happy Mondays, producer Martin Hannett’s sound transformed into an exquisite, murky, reverberating one. It seems to reproduce the tumultuous feeling of having overdone everything to the point of double vision and minutes away from passing out. It’s often hard to tell what’s going on between Gary Wheelan’s thunderous drumming and Shaun Ryder’s voice – everything sounds indistinct, the guitars, keyboards and Hannett’s studio trickery all blur into one – but Paul’s bass is always there. Listen to the octave-hopping pattern he plays on Moving In With or his descending notes on Brain Dead. The Paul Oakenfold and Andrew Weatherall-produced Hallelujah that followed – the lead track from the Madchester Rave On EP – cleared at least some of the sonic fog, fully revealing the extent to which Ryder’s bass drove Happy Mondays. Up until the release of Madchester Rave On, Happy Mondays were rock stars. As brilliant and original as Bummed was, it didn’t look like a recipe for commercial success. But at the event, it combined with the times Happy Mondays extracurriculars helped create. Supplementing their meager music income by dealing drugs, Shaun Ryder and the band’s stage dancer Bez had been instrumental in bringing trance to Manchester, helping the rise of acid house in the process. The Happy Mondays certainly didn’t make house music, but they got it. In a move not dissimilar to the reggae-obsessed Clash, tapping Lee “Scratch” Perry to contribute to the punk single Complete Control, the Mondays were smart enough to work with top acid-related producers and DJs house. Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osbourne further refined their sound on 1990’s Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches. It went platinum in the UK, its success capping a period in which the Happy Mondays had virtually created their own musical subgenre, the baggy, which was filled with bands trying to emulate their sound or the more traditional, but still sharp house-adjacent, Stone Roses. One story has Paul Ryder so indifferent to his approach during the album sessions that he let Osbourne play bass for him, but his fingerprints were all over the album’s best-known tracks. Kinky Afro’s saga of family dysfunction was inspired by his love of Hot Chocolate’s 1974 single Brother Louie, and Loose Fit arose from a jam between Ryder and Oakenfold. It was their commercial zenith. Their unrepentant hedonism had helped make Happy Mondays famous, but it was also to be their undoing. Paul Ryder was among the band members who succumbed to heroin addiction, while the sessions for the 1992 album Yes Please! they were devastated by his brother’s growing addiction to crack. The album was a commercial and artistic disappointment, and the band broke up shortly thereafter. A far better epitaph to their career is the incredible cover of the Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive they recorded for Malcolm McLaren’s TV special The Ghosts of Oxford Street, which dug into the song’s often-neglected wail. I was born’ – and performed in the show by costumed 17th-century criminals on their way to the gallows at Tyburn. From 1999 onwards, various line-ups toured intermittently and recorded as a reformed Happy Mondays. An audience thirsty for nostalgia seemed unfazed by who was in the band as long as Shaun Ryder and Bez were visible at the front of the stage. But the reality was less clear. If you want the clearest proof of Paul Ryder’s contribution, we’d advise you to play Unkle Dysfunctional, the album they calmly put out without him and guitarist Mark Day in 2007. It’s not a terrible record, but somehow it doesn’t sound like Happy Mondays.
