13. Paris AngelsSundew
The first Stone Roses album is a massive album for me. Pills ’n’ Thrills And Bellyaches by Happy Mondays is a big album for me. Velvet Underground are a big band for me. And this sort of represents all of that. I reckon it’s a masterpiece. They only made this one album and then they aborted their second album and then released it just a couple of years ago on Bandcamp. There’s a cover of ‘What Goes On’ by Velvet Underground on here. Apparently they were a much more Joy Division-inspired Velvet Underground kinda band and then when Chicago house music came over and was being played in the Hacienda, they changed their sound. I chose it because I don’t think many people know this record. The people that do know it absolutely love it.
In the summer of 1990, I stayed at my gran’s house for a few weeks in the summer with my dad while my mum went on holiday. This was the music I was listening to. I wasn’t an independent person yet. I was beginning to wonder what the world was about, and all this amazing music was coming out of Manchester. It just sounded really new, really modern. But obviously drawing on all these old influences. You can’t create anything from scratch. All you can do is combine existing things in new ways. What I always loved about the Stone Roses is that they take jingly jangly guitar music like The Byrds or something and mix it with acid house. The Happy Mondays didn’t sound like anybody else – house music and P-funk and the nuts lyrics of Shaun Ryder. Or Inspiral Carpets or whatever, this big Hammond organ sound which I’d never really heard before.
But this is the album that’s stayed with me longer than anything else. Part of the reason I like it is because it’s not one of the famous ones. My mate Dano at school had a folder and he had a photo cut out of a music magazine stuck on the front. I always thought it was the Happy Mondays. This guy was dancing and I thought it was Bez. And I remember saying to him, “Oh, that picture of Happy Mondays…” “It’s not Happy Mondays.” I was like, “Yeah, it is”. He was like, “No, it’s Paris Angels”. He was saying it to me as if, “Oh, you don’t know nuthin’. This is the band, the proper band.” So I think some of that being 14 or 15 and somebody saying it to me like that has stayed with me, and I want to say to people, “Oh, yeah, you like the Roses and the Mondays? Nah, nah, nah, mate, Paris Angels, that’s the one.”
