“Like a blacked-out nightclub”: Happy Mondays’ Bummed

Originally published in MOJO, 2002. Republished here in tribute to Paul Ryder, 1964–2022

For all its recently-acquired modern sparkle, 21st century Manchester is still a city full of ghosts: not just within the warehouses and mill buildings that date from its time of industrial pre-eminence, but also in more contemporary places. On Charles Street, an unremarkable thoroughfare behind the BBC, there stands a red-brick building that houses a new nightclub called Industry; older Mancunians will always associate it with the messy demise of Factory Records. More remarkably, at the top of Whitworth Street West, a new upmarket housing development is under construction, on the site of one of the city’s most hallowed landmarks. Those responsible are well aware of all the history: the apartments are being marketed using stark graphics and the slogan “Now the party’s over”. It is one of the stranger quirks of Manchester’s recent progress that it will soon be possible to live in The Hacienda.

Of course, Manchester’s recent past is also etched in the minds of some of its more notable residents. The week MOJO arrives in town, Tony Wilson — ex-Factory head, North West Newsreader, and thanks to 24 Hour Party People, a renewed pop-cultural celebrity — is scampering around his annual In The City convention, this year based at Salford’s Lowry Hotel. In the bar lurk a handful of his old friends and co-schemers: a manager named Nathan McGough, a sometime A&R man called Phil Saxe, two musicians named Gaz Whelan and Paul Ryder. Across town lives a trailblazing guitarist called Mark Day, who has long since given up re-inventing the musical wheel, and these days makes his living selling encyclopedias.

One of their most important associates returns to town mid-way through the week. Shaun Ryder has just returned from his second lengthy spell in Australia, but despite a flurry of phone calls, he proves reluctant to talk: for him, the past perhaps throws forth too many ghosts. Over the ensuing week, however, all the aforementioned names agree to cast light on a period in their lives that stretched between 1986 and 1990, and an album that embodied both the decisive advent of a new drug, and the pivotal culture it created. For one reason and another, it was called Bummed.

In December 1986, Happy Mondays spent two weeks in London, recording the debut album that would, at Shaun Ryder’s insistence, be entitled Squirrel And G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out). The producer was John Cale, a figure much admired by those who oversaw the band’s progress: Tony Wilson, and the Mondays’ then-manager Phil Saxe. His appointment was the cause of quiet jubilation, and optimistic predictions of what might transpire: in Phil Saxe’s recollection, the fact that Cale had produced the debut albums by both Patti Smith and The Stooges suggested that a masterpiece could just be within their grasp.

“I’d always been in love with where John Cale put Patti Smith’s vocals on Horses,” says Wilson. “And [Jonathan Richman’s] Roadrunner is arguably the greatest single in history. So there you go: what a great idea. But I’d forgotten that for all the drugs, and the Velvet Underground stuff, John Cale was a musician, and he was going to find it bit difficult dealing with these utter non-musicians. There wasn’t a meeting of minds.”

“We were really excited: ’cos it was him, and ’cos we thought he’d have loads of drugs,” says Paul Ryder. “But he was fucking clean, wasn’t he?” In place of narcotics, Cale had taken to eating multiple packets of Extra Strong Mints, and eating an endless number of clementines: as the peel and wrappers piled up, the band quickly got the sense that they were the victims of a mismatch.

“He was very businesslike,” says Mark Day. “When he first walked in, we were playing, and you could see him listening, thinking, ‘Fuck, what have I got involved in here?’ He was way ahead of our musical abilities: he got impatient. And he didn’t like the smell we were generating from our cigarettes. It was, ‘Go somewhere else and do it.’ That upset Bez a bit.”

“Someone gave me a copy of that album on vinyl the other week,” says Paul Ryder, “and on the run-out groove it says, ‘Do it again’, and on the other side it says, ‘Do it faster’. That’s all I remember him saying, all the time. It was done live — he’d just say, ‘Do it again, and do it faster’. By the end of the day, we’d have done the same song thirty or forty times, doing it faster and faster and faster.”

To make life yet more vexed, after everything had been completed bar the mixing, Cale arrived at the studio announcing that the work turned in so far had not passed muster: a perplexed band were thus instructed to start again from scratch. With an admirable devotion to duty, they did as they were told, speeding through the material in a matter of days.

The resultant album was hardly a disaster, but its spindly, brittle ambience hardly served notice of the wonders to come. That said, the Mondays turned in three pearls: Kuff Dam and Tart Tart, both underpinned by guttersnipe menace — and a bug-eyed take on Northern Soul entitled Twenty Four Hour Party People. As with the stand-alone 1986 single Freaky Dancin’ (a swirling, ramshackle delight, produced by New Order’s Bernard Sumner), hindsight makes the latter song sound like a work of almost supernatural prescience.

Unfortunately, Squirrel And G-Man sold little more than 4000 copies. In its wake, the group passed time in the city-centre rehearsal room they had inherited from Simply Red. Guitarist Mark Day was still working — along with the Ryder brothers’ Dad, Derek — as a postman, while his five colleagues were beneficiaries of the Enterprise Allowance Scheme. To partake of such Thatcherite generosity, aspiring entrepreneurs needed to have £1000 in savings; Phil Saxe had paid the required cash into each of the Mondays’ bank accounts, and then withdrawn it once all the formalities were over.

Despite Saxe’s cleverness, the Mondays were soon to recruit a new manager. Nathan McGough was then in charge of The Bodines, a long-lost Mancunian band briefly signed to Creation. He was approached by Shaun Ryder one Wednesday night at the Hacienda; having seen the group in 1985 and come away fascinated, he instantly accepted the offer of a new job.

As McGough well knew, the Mondays were not the average indie-rock group, a fact confirmed by their wider circle of friends. “As my time with the band went on,” he says, “I got to meet these really clever kids, who lived all over Europe. A lot of them were illiterate: they couldn’t read or write, but they were very clever. They called themselves ‘sneaks’: they would live in these cities, case places over, and pull stings in diamond shops or travel agents. They’d cop 10 or 15 grand, and live off that for a few months, and go to Ibiza. These kids would turn up all over Europe when we were touring; they had nicknames like something out of Damon Runyan. I couldn’t separate them culturally from the Mondays: it was just that some of them were in a band, and some did other things.”

That year, Shaun Ryder had spent some time in Amsterdam. Upon his return to Manchester, he and some of his friends began to supplement their income by selling a drug favoured by his new Dutch contacts. It soon became clear that the Mondays’ camp were the first people in Manchester with large amounts of ecstasy: something reflected not only in their entrepreneurial activities, but also the band’s changed behaviour.

“They were taking it every day,” says McGough. “They weren’t doing it like kids do now: four or five Es. It was using it as a state of mind, really. Bez would get up in the morning and have a quarter, then go to town and drop a half, and mooch around the shops being nice to everybody.”

“The ecstasy arrived, through various friends of ours,” says Paul Ryder. “We were selling them at £50 a tab, which was a fucking fantastic earner. Bass strings are expensive, aren’t they? This stuff was coming through Amsterdam [laughs]. We were giving it away at first, like good drug dealers do. That was good marketing. We knew we were the only people with it. We were making money ‘cos no-one else had it.”

The knock-on effects of what had transpired in Ibiza during the summer of 1987 played directly into the Mondays’ hands. They plied their trade from an area of the Hacienda known as Acid Corner, an alcove around which they and their friends would form a protective cordon. Acid Corner quickly became the source of a new mood: the frantic, E-assisted euphoria that would turn the Hacienda into Acid House’s North-Western centre.

In addition, some of Happy Mondays were in the habit of travelling to London, to participate in the frantic scenes taking place at such trailblazing nights as Land Of Oz, Shoom, and Paul Oakenfold’s Spectrum. “Bez would do that,” says Nathan McGough. “Occasionally Shaun, too. He would drive down there on a Monday afternoon, go to Spectrum on a Monday night, and drive back at four or five in the morning. I was amazed that anyone would drive 200 miles for a night out.”

It was against this backdrop that Happy Mondays readied themselves for the creation of their second album: a record that would stand as rock music’s first collision with the ecstasy experience.

**

Martin Hannett had fallen out with Factory Records in the early ’80s, thanks to three factors: his objection to the agreement whereby he was paid as a director of the label rather than a contracted producer, the fact that his relationships with both New Order and A Certain Ratio had run their course, and his belief that the money splurged on the Hacienda would have been much better spent on studio equipment. Since then, he had fallen into a mess of drug-fuelled decline and abortive projects: with The Stone Roses, he had begun work on some of the songs that would form their debut album, only for the sessions to be brought to a halt. “It was a disaster,” Ian Brown later reflected. “He was only half there.”

Alan Erasmus, the Factory director whose contribution to the label was rather overshadowed by both Wilson and New Order manager Rob Gretton, believed that the vision Hannett had once brought to Factory’s records — among them both Unknown Pleasures and Closer — could be reawakened. In cahoots with Nathan McGough, he suggested that Hannett be brought back into the fold to produce the Mondays — to gasps of incredulity from some of the Factory mafia. “Martin was a sad character at that time,” says Phil Saxe. “He was a big, fat junkie. I used to see him around: it was like talking to a tramp. And you’re talking about a bloke who in 1979, was cool as fuck. To me, it seemed to be an enormous risk.”

Tony Wilson, by contrast, was quickly persuaded that the proposal was founded on an unquestionable logic. “You had two extremely charismatic drug-takers, whose strength of character was partly built on the strength of the drugs they could take,” he says. “Hannett and Shaun Ryder were always going to hit it off.”

“Martin was big,” says Paul Ryder. “Big, with a big beard. Like, ‘Wow, he’s big.’ I’d never met him before, and me and Nathan had to pick him up and drive him to look at the studio. He said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t pick me up in a red Ford.’ We had to hire a car — and all we could get was a red Ford! It was, ‘What if he won’t get in it?’ We turned up, he opened the door and looked at the car, and he just started laughing.”

That day, Ryder, McGough and Hannett travelled to the unlikely locale of Driffield, the East Yorkshire market town and “Capital Of The Wolds”. They were there to inspect the Slaughterhouse, a residential studio that the latter had recommended. Factory believed that its distance from Manchester might focus the group’s minds; it also had the added advantage of being cheap. So it was that the Mondays were ferried out of Manchester and introduced to their new producer.

“Martin was a sarcastic fucker,” says Gaz Whelan. “He sounded like he smoked 120 a day, and he wore dark glasses. He was like a neanderthal cousin of Phil Spector. When we got to Driffield, we started setting up, and I said to the engineer, as a joke, ‘You know what Martin’s like, he’ll probably want the drums setting up in the toilet.’ We just set them up in the band room, as normal, and then Martin turned up. The first thing he said was, ‘For a start, can we have the drums in the toilet?’”

As the sessions began, the Mondays’ latest drug of choice was soon offered around; according to Paul Ryder, they felt duty-bound to convert Martin Hannett to ecstasy on account of his alcoholism. “All that Wendy, his wife, said to us was, ‘Try and keep him off the beer,’” he says. “So we thought, ‘Well, we don’t drink when we take ecstasy, ‘cos there’s no need to — maybe if we give Martin this, he won’t drink.’ He said he’d tried it years before: he had a friend who was a chemist who’d made some. He said he remembered liking it back then. And he liked it this time round.”

To make his internal chemistry that bit more complicated, Hannett was also indulging a long-time heroin habit. “With ecstasy, sleeping pills, cocaine and alcohol, it must have been like a big speedball concoction,” says Paul Ryder. “Would he do it in the studio? No. He was very careful not to do it in front of us, because of the Factory connection: they were all pissed off with him for getting a heroin habit, and fucking things up. That was where his unmanageability came from. But I do remember taking him to score heroin — ‘cos years later I ended up scoring off the same girl.”

Hannett was not the only one to sample the Mondays’ latest chemical wares: on one visit to Driffield, Tony Wilson discovered that the E high had rapidly spread to some of the town’s more strait-laced residents. “The Mondays were in the pub, selling E to squaddies,” he says. “Driffield was an army town, and they were doing a rare old fucking trade. All these squaddies were just walking along the single-lane High Street of Driffield looking at everything like that [mimes awe-struck astonishment]. Very happy squaddies.”

“Then you’d go to the studio,” he continues, “and there’d be Hannett sitting at the desk with one of the band, And if you went into the band room, the lights were all out, the room was pitch black, and there was this very loud, pulsing house music, and as you walked in, you were tripping over people and vinyl. The whole floor was littered with people and records. It was like a blacked-out nightclub. They were all gone on it: this non-stop dance beat.”

In between the E’d-up debauchery, the sessions saw Hannett’s love of reverb used to build music that was little short of hulking. Within the album’s unprecedentedly huge sound, one could discern the traces of nights spent at the Hacienda: the keyboard stabs that punctuate Mad Cyril, Do It Better’s apparent attempt to replicate the pummelling rhythms of House Music (not to mention its ludicrous coda, “On one/In one/Doing one/And two/And three”). On Wrote For Luck, the album’s incredible centrepiece, the sound’s dimensions, coupled with Mark Day’s mesmeric guitar part, conveyed the other-worldly aspect of the ecstasy high: its combination of stampeding invincibility with a very lysergic kind of transcendence. As with just about all of the album, it was impossible to reduce the song to any clearly identifiable influence: with Hannett’s assistance, the Mondays created something mind-bogglingly unique.

“Martin invented that whole kind of reverb atmospheric: that’s where his whole drug-induced state of mind came into focus,” says Nathan McGough. “That’s what he brought to Bummed. And I did have some moments when I was going, ‘I’m really not sure about the way this is sounding.’ It did sound very different to anything else at that time. But you had to go with it: that was the choice we’d made.” For many years, an apocryphal Mancunian story claimed that Bummed’s sound was down to the fact that, peaking on ecstasy, Hannett and the band had simply put everything — treble, bass, reverb — up to its maximum. Paul Ryder acknowledges that the tale contains more than a grain of truth.

On top of all that, Shaun Ryder’s lyrics sketched out a web of reference points that drew on nursery rhymes, movie dialogue (Performance, as evidenced by both the track of the same name and Mad Cyril, was an oft-quoted touchstone), and a lot of in-jokes. “We never spoke about the words,” says Paul Ryder, “but I always remember when he was getting his lyrics together in rehearsal, sometimes me and Gaz would have to stop playing, ‘cos we were laughing that much. We knew exactly what he was getting at. Whether anyone else did, I don’t know. Some of them were very funny; some of them were very fucking vindictive.”

As some of Happy Mondays well knew, Ryder’s words were occasionally aimed at the member of the group who — as evidenced by his reluctance to give up his job with the Post Office — lived in an altogether more workaday place than his colleagues “I used to walk away thinking, ‘Is that twat singing about me? What’s he on about?’” says Mark Day, his face scrunching into an expression that still betrays noticeable disquiet. “When you’re coming down, you get paranoid: ‘I know what his game is. He’s trying to say my girlfriend’s a lesbian.’ There were always sub-plots: psychological games.”

“All these years, we thought Mark Day was living in blissful ignorance,” laughs Gaz Whelan. “We thought he never got any of it. No wonder he hated us.”

**

Bummed was released in November 1988. “The title was to do with our kid’s way of saying ‘Did you shag her?’” says his brother. “It was always, ‘Did you bum her?’” (in keeping with all that, its inner sleeve was emblazoned with a grim bit of ’60s porn). The cover featured a re-coloured picture of Shaun Ryder’s face that gave the impression of psychedelia being nudged towards something almost grotesque. When Factory bought new premises on Charles Street, among their first acts was to cover the building, Warhol style, in Ryder’s day-glo image: the resulting eyesore seemed an integral part of the inspired madness that was rippling out of the Hacienda.

Though the group’s profile slowly increased, by September 1989, their overlords were getting increasingly frustrated: for two consecutive summers, ecstasy had defined the cutting edge of pop-cultural developments, yet the Mondays were still to break big. “My take, and Wilson’s take, was that Bummed was an E album: the first rock album ever made on ecstasy,” says Nathan McGough. “We looked at what had exploded, and we went, ‘Well, obviously, this is the biggest youth event that’s happened since punk rock. And yet every with big cultural event, it’s always been a rock band that’s taken centre-stage. But what’s happening here is dance records: the Chicago and Detroit sound, and the DJs.’ So we made a very clear decision: we had to bring this record to the people, by explicitly making the link with ecstasy. We said, ‘We need to get Wrote For Luck remixed by a Balearic DJ; we need to do an acid house mix.’”

McGough approached Paul Oakenfold. His treatment of the song — the Think About The Future Mix, eventually coupled with a retooling by Erasure’s Vince Clark — glued Wrote For Luck to an NWA drum sample, a seven-note keyboard riff that had a touch of Close Encounters about it, and a spoken-word coda taken from Batman. The result managed to retain Bummed’s sense of murky trippiness while giving the Mondays’ music a new rhythmic drive; when the band heard it, they were stunned.

“I remember the day the remix was dropped off for us,” says Paul Ryder. “We put it on — and within the first thirty seconds, it was like, ‘That’s it — that’s where our writing’s got to go. He’s got right on what we’re trying to get.’ For me, that was a revelation.”

By early 1990, Oakenfold would have been brought in to produce the band’s reading of John Kongos’s He’s Gonna Step On You Again; that summer, he would accompany them to LA to work on the album that became Pills Thrills and Bellyaches. For now, the Mondays aimed at pushing their next recordings along the road that Oakenfold had opened up.

In September, they and Martin Hannett arrived at the Manor, near Oxford, to record the four songs — Rave On, Hallelujah, Clap Your Hands and Holy Ghost — that would form the Madchester: Rave On EP. The E-assisted atmosphere of the Bummed sessions was maintained; by now, Hannett seemed to know exactly how much ecstasy he required. “We were giving him two a day,” Shaun Ryder later recalled. “But it was worth it ‘cos he kept saying, ‘I can’t feel anything, but I’m in a fucking great frame of mind.’”

By the autumn, he would not be the only one. On November 13th 1989, during the same show that saw The Stone Roses perform Fools Gold, Happy Mondays played Hallelujah on Top Of The Pops. What was coursing around their veins was suddenly poured into the mainstream. Within twelve months, they would be pop stars.