THE HAPPY MONDAYS
Being a Mancunian and living the majority of my teen years during the height of “Madchester”, it would have been so easy to have actually liked The Happy Mondays. With Mark Goodier spinning a healthy diet of Madchester bands whilst he hosted the “Evening Session” and Indie Discos being a parallel universe of sorts to his show, you could hardly escape the scene. And, unfortunately for me, The Happy Mondays were at the forefront of this scene.
It was really “Step On” that did all this – that plodding intro, and some crap about twisting his melon, man. My face was not a pretty sight when it came on, and that had nothing to do with the pubescent acne that came with those tender years. That was it, they were officially big. The 4 by 3 band logo appeared on desks in etched biro scrapings – my schoolmates going to great lengths to ignore the likes of “Big Jim”, “Stumpy”, “Mad Gav” and others who were trying their best to teach them in order to leave a permanent mark of Madchester on the desks of Hulme Grammar School.
Seemingly being the only one to be going against this trend, I had to fightback. Each time I spotted the 4 by 3, I’d let my feelings be known by changing the “H” in the top left to a cunning “CR”. I’d open the NME each week with bated breath to see if Shaun Ryder had gone one fix too far. I’d turn the radio off in silent protest when anything of theirs came on. And the denouement and nadir of 1990 came when the recent bastion of pro-American psychedelia announced that “Pills’n’Thrills And Bellyaches” was album of the year. The knives came out, and a letter brimful of schoolboy vitriol was quickly on its way to Kings Reach Tower in complaint – alas, never to be published.
It was a hatred born out of sheer dislike of the music, and to a lesser extent, Shaun Ryder’s plug ugliness. Don’t even get me started on fucking Black Grape……….