8. Happy MondaysBummed
I was trying to get the band more into electronic music and house or the rave scene and stuff like that, but the only way I could really introduce it was via indie dance. I’d started reading the NME and Melody Maker and Sounds, probably in about 1989. They told me to listen to Stone Roses, so I did. Everyone was listening to Stone Roses that year, so wherever you went you would hear it. It was the last year of doing A-levels before we were all about to go to university that September. I think Bummed came out in May. So that summer we’d just left school and we were waiting for our results, and it was all Stone Roses. But I was reading about Happy Mondays in NME and I got Bummed; I was more into that than the Stone Roses. But whenever I put the tape on in the car or whatever, no one wanted to hear it.
It had such weird production on it with short delays and short reverbs all over everything, which now I realise is Martin Hannett, but I didn’t know that at the time. I was just listening to it on a cassette as I did my homework on the carpet. The songs were so weird, and Shaun Ryder’s vocal delivery… I hadn’t really heard anything like that, it was quite captivating and yeah, it was just a bit weirder than the Stone Roses. I was really surprised when they came out with ‘Hallelujah’ straight after that. I was just confused because it was nothing like Bummed. Everyone was playing that remix of it by Paul Oakenfold. I did manage to get hold of the actual ‘Hallelujah’ track, which I was more into, because it had all the guitars and everything. Music was changing very quickly at this point. Screamadelica was like the next year or so I think, and all those Andrew Weatherall remixes were coming, which seemed to be quite exciting. He was using a lot of dub in his remixes and I’d never heard that sort of thing before.
