“Can I ask you a question, Tony?” asks a confused looking Shaun Ryder, the
lead singer and lyricist with the Happy Mondays. He is addressing his former
record company boss over a half of Guinness in a new hotel in Manchester.
“You know all the ’Appy Mondays s*** got sold to London Records, right? Now,
I know it’s for over God knows ’ow many years, but do they still own . . .”
The brains behind one of Britain’s most influential bands of the past century
is cut off mid-flow by Anthony H. Wilson, the man behind Factory Records.
His response is swift, and to the point.
“Yes!” says Wilson with a waft of his right hand. “Roger Ames (the boss of
London Records) owns everything I did.”
“Notice, Shaun, how he says ‘What I did’, not ‘What you
did’,” interrupts the photographer Kevin Cummins. Here to take a new
portrait of the two men for THE EYE, Cummins documented both the
Mondays’ reign of dance-rock chaos and Wilson’s imperial strut across
Manchester’s music scene, so feels entitled to take an active part in the
interview.
“Why not? They’re my records!” Wilson protests. “I regard
them as mine anyway. I certainly paid for them.”
“He did his best, right?” says Ryder, coming to Wilson’s defence. “Especially
when you consider the f****** nutcases ’e ’ad to work with.”
Nutcases, maybe; mavericks, certainly. But both Shaun Ryder and Tony Wilson
played their part in defining the course of British pop. Ryder became a part
of British musical iconography when his group introduced indie to house and
established a blueprint for dance music that’s still being pored over, added
to and relied upon to this day. Wilson, a TV presenter-turned-entrepreneur
whose influence spanned several musical eras, was energised by seeing the
Sex Pistols, and set up a club which spawned a label, which in turn spawned
another club. Factory became Manchester’s most important imprint, releasing
records by Joy Division and New Order and bringing the world the glory of
the Mondays, whose sound was catalysed by Factory’s nightclub, The Hacienda.
But all too often, music is the last thing either of them get asked about.
“People don’t talk about the albums that the Mondays made,” Ryder laments.
“They don’t talk about the songs that we wrote, the music that we did. All
anyone’s wanted to do these past 20 years is just talk about drugs, drugs,
drugs.”
Ah, yes: the drugs. Ever since they were credited with instigating the scene
that the music press dubbed “Madchester” by, among other things, helping to
introduce ecstasy to The Hacienda, the Happy Mondays and drugs have gone
together like vodka and tonic. Despite Ryder’s professed desire to get away
from the subject, in the course of an hour’s back-and-forth with Wilson
there are as many pills discussed as thrills or bellyaches.
He regales us with the tale of an argument with his father over crack cocaine
(his dad didn’t want Shaun smoking it in his house, after which, Ryder Jr
says, his stash mysteriously disappeared). He talks fondly of his debut New
York performance, when he had his first row with Wilson after a pre-show
cocaine binge with the venue’s leggy female promoter rendered him incapable
of standing upright during the gig. After the interview is over and Ryder
and Wilson have left, Cummins tells a number of tales from his time
photographing the Mondays on the road, many unrepeatable, but which all
involve mind-boggling levels of pharmaceutical ingestion, always followed by
the phrase: “And by now I was sure we were going to get
arrested.”
Yet Wilson and Ryder have reconvened to talk music: specifically, about
tomorrow’s Get Loaded in the Park event in London. In a one-off Mondays
reunion gig Shaun is joined by the drummer Gaz Whelan and “freaky dancer”
and percussionist Bez in an otherwise new line-up. They’ll be introduced by
Wilson, enjoying a new lease of notoriety since being played by Steve Coogan
in the fictionalised biopic, 24 Hour Party People. Wilson will also
perform a DJ set.
Organised by Kavin “Kav” Sandhu, who plays guitar in this third incarnation of
the Mondays, Get Loaded is all about new bands, and Shaun, who admitted that
his previous decision to re-form the Mondays was to enable him to pay a
large tax bill, is delighted to be able once again to make his group’s name
synonymous with music, not drugs.
“I like the fact that it’s not going to be a big, corporate affair,” he
croaks. “We wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t feel happy and think that the
time was right. But also, kids today, if they go into a record shop to buy a
Mondays record, all they can buy is the Greatest Hits. So what we’re
doing this time is going back a little deeper. It has been years since I
listened to some of our old songs. I was listening to Mad Cyril (an
album track from 1988), and I had to ask Tony what it was! I could tell it
was us, but I’d forgotten it. It were good, too. I don’t know why I thought
it was s*** when I wrote it.”
Back then, on their second album, Bummed, the Mondays were still on the
threshold of their major stylistic breakthrough. Bummed was
essentially an indie-rock album with a brittle groove; in the hands of the
remixers Vince Clarke and Paul Oakenfold, though, the funk undertow of the
song Wrote for Luck was unleashed, and their epochal sound was born.
Accident played a huge part, and it must have been an anxious Wilson who
visited the studio in Driffield, Yorkshire, to get a look at the creative
process he was bankrolling.
“I found Martin (Hannett, the producer) in the control room working on a rock
track,” Wilson recalls, “then I went to the musicians’ chillout room, which
had no lights on, opened the door and stumbled through the darkness,
tripping over bodies on the floor. There were loads of pieces of vinyl
everywhere and house music blaring out. And since then, I’d always thought
that what was going on in that other room informed the rhythms of Bummed.
The original version of Wrote for Luck is a rock track by them and
Hannett, but in the hands of Clarke it becomes a pop-house track, and in the
hands of Oakenfold and (his remix partner Steve) Osbourne it becomes the
acid house anthem.
“It was just those rhythms,” Wilson continued, “those rolling rhythms, which
were invented by Shaun, his brother (the Mondays bassist Paul Ryder) and
Gaz. The Stone Roses and Guns ’N Roses were the great rock bands of the
1980s; yet we remember the Stone Roses for Fool’s Gold, and
they didn’t do Fool’s Gold until the Mondays did what
they did. After Wrote for Luck, everybody else had to copy.
“There’s something still real about you lot,” he says, turning to Shaun, “that
you can make that rolling rhythm get through. Those rhythms were there then,
and I’m sure they are there now. And they’ll be there on Clapham Common.”
“Isn’t ’e great?” Ryder cackles, before half-apologetically dismissing his
band’s creativity. “They’re actually rip-offs of Motown,” he shrugs of the
rumbling basslines and rolling rhythms his former patron has just been
eulogising.
Ryder has been involved with Get Loaded since agreeing to a spot as a guest DJ
at the club’s London home, Turnmills, though history does not record which
Motown records, if any, he has spun there. Since his first set there he has
brought several friends, including Wilson, along to play, too. “For me,
suddenly, I find myself doing what I like to do, which is being your iPod
for an hour and a half,” Wilson smiles. “I find it fascinating to sequence a
bunch of tracks.”
The idea behind tomorrow’s bash is simple and clear-cut. The Mondays’ name
will help get as many people together as possible to hear a support bill
comprising the cream of Britain’s unknown bands.
“I can’t say that all the music is what I’m personally into ’cos I’m not,” Kav
explains. “Some of the music I think is great, some I wouldn’t listen to.
But these are all bands who have been working extremely hard over the past
couple of years but haven’t had a look-in. If we can help them develop their
own style, then we’ll have done a good job.”
A compilation album, the first release on Get Loaded’s label, follows the
festival; if all goes well — and the event is close to a sell-out as THE
EYE goes to press — they plan to do it all again next year. It’s easy to
see why Ryder and Wilson are interested: this seems just the sort of thing
that Factory would have done in its day.
“We’re tryin’ to do what Tony did, in a way,” offers Ryder. “To do nice things
for people, for great bands. When the Mondays started, we didn’t ’ave a clue
how this business was run. It’s only when I’d left Factory that I realised
just what Tony had done for us. It was more sort of like a friend thing than
a business. We didn’t know ’ow it was supposed to work. We just thought ’e
was a f****** millionaire!
” Although things came to a sticky end, the protracted, crack-fuelled sessions
in Barbados for the Mondays’ Yes Please album helping bring
Factory to its knees as Shaun reportedly held the master tapes to ransom,
Wilson only sees the positive parts of his and Ryder’s shared history. He
considers Shaun a genius, and has compared his lyrics for Kinky Afro
to W. B. Yeats’s Prayer for My Daughter.
“One of the jokes in the movie,” Wilson says of 24 Hour Party
People, “is that I go on and on about how I think Shaun is one of the
great lyricists of all time, and the question is, does he know it or not?
And I’ve never asked him.”
“I know ’e loves me, but what ’e says about me bein’ this great writer . . .”
Ryder pauses as he gurgles down a mouthful of Guinness and indigestion
tablets. “Well, it’s crap. I agree I’ve wrote some great lyrics, but I
cannot be put in boxes with Dylan and Richards and Jagger and any o’ those
people. I just cannot be. It’s ridiculous.”
“I wouldn’t put you in the same bag as Jagger and Richards because you write
better lyrics,” says Wilson, to Shaun’s evident disagreement (“You dick!” he
snorts at the suggestion). “But there’s something that Dylan does, which is
writing phrases that explode in the brain. And Shaun has that as well, but
he doesn’t like talking about it. His dad told me that when he was a kid he
wrote this story at school. His parents were called in because the school
were really annoyed: it was so good he’d obviously copied it from somewhere.
But, of course, he’d written it himself.”
“It was a gangster story,” Shaun recalls. “I started off in the top set, but
by the time I got to the third year I was put in f*****’ remedial set
because I was dyslexic. But I thought that story were great, and that I’m
gonna get top marks. And it comes back with ‘poor’ written on. They said:
‘Well, you ’aven’t wrote it, you’ve copied it.’ And that’s when I left
school, got a job on a buildin’ site, buildin’ council ’ouses.”
“You were in the remedial set?” asks Wilson, incredulous. For the briefest of
moments, he’s lost for words. But not for long. “It’s one of the glories of
this gentleman,” Wilson says in closing tribute to his friend, “that not
only doesn’t he wallow in his own genius, he doesn’t even know it.”
The Happy Mondays headline the Get Loaded in the Park festival Aug 22,
Clapham Common, London (0870-060 1801). Anthony H. Wilson’s new label, Red
Cellars, have just signed their first band, Raw T, who release a single next
month
