There are bands who sound like nobody else, there are bands who act like nobody else, and there are bands who just aren’t like anyone else. Very high on that list are the Happy Mondays. They emerged as if from nowhere in the mid-to-late 1980s with a series of songs and records that seemed to have been assembled from the smashed-up fragments of – well, pretty much everything really: drugs, dance music, banned videos, catchphrases, bits of tunes, bits of other people’s lyrics, and slang – especially slang, most of it made up by the Mondays’ astonishing singer Shaun Ryder, who spoke like he sang and sang like he spoke, in an argot of his own that sounded like bits of Clockwork Orange and 1984 mixed in with an arsenal of Manchester catchphrases all his own. 

As an individual and as an interviewee, Ryder was only marginally less charismatic than his friend Bez, the band’s dancer and maraca player, whose boggled-eyed demeanour and general pleasure at life made him the vocal Harpo to Shaun’s anarchic Groucho. The rest of the band, who all seemed to be named after farm animals, were less in the foreground in press interviews, but more than made up for it by being musicians who played their instruments like they had just found them, and in doing so creating a sound that came seemingly from and out of nowhere: this was particularly the case with Mark Day’s guitar playing which was funky in a way no funk guitarist had ever played previously, avant-garde in a punk way, and entirely at odd with the weak jangle that had swamped indie music in 1986. They were signed to Manchester’s Factory Records but, while they sounded like Manchester, they didn’t sound like Factory.

Happy Mondays’ early material was so odd, so idiosyncratic, that it didn’t so much exist in isolation as build a lighthouse on top of isolation and hide at the top. Their most commercial release at the time was ‘Freaky Dancin’, which was less of a dance single and more of a echoing dirge from a deep dark dungeon: it sounded like moss. Then there was the snappier ’24 Hour Party People’, which hinted at things to come and was the title track to the Mondays’ debut album – full title: Squirrel and G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out).

It was on the second album – Bummed, produced by Factory genius and regular producer Martin Hannett – that it came together. Not for the Mondays the glacial sound of New Order or the dated Goth mod of The Stone Roses: Bummed is a brilliant and unique album, fuelled by late nights, more drugs, a lot of viewings of Nic Roeg’s Performance (Mad Cyril! “We’ve BEEN courteous!”) and a general wooziness, like Funkadelic heard through a broken speaker or Can floating in a swimming pool filled with Benylin. It established the Mondays as the most eccentric, most engaging, and most original band around – and it coincided with the most thrilling and consequential moment in 1980s popular culture: the arrival of house music, specifically acid house, and ecstasy.

Bummed has a general wooziness, like Can floating in a swimming pool filled with Benylin

David Quantick

The Mondays responded to the new dance culture with enthusiasm: they were after all quite fond of drugs and Bez definitely liked dancing. And now they had a context: the “baggy” scene – Joe Bloggs clothes, flared trousers and bucket hats, dancing at the Hacienda, nice one top one sorted, nish clish – where everyone from The Farm to Blur, from Primal Scream to The Soup Dragons – most of whom had been jangly C86 alumni until very, very recently – found that there had always been a dance element to their music. But with the Mondays it was different: there had always been a dance element to their music, albeit a very odd one. The key moment – the hinge that bent them into a new career, into the charts, and into an eventual future for two of the band as national treasures – was the song ‘Wrote For Luck’, whose clanging guitars, relentless beat and fantastically memorable lyrics (“You used to speak the truth but now you’re liar / you used to speak the truth but now you’re clever”) made for an astonishing song that a) begged to be a single and b) might even be a hit with a remix: and so it came to be as ‘WFL’ (new title was released as a single with a Vince Clarke remix. 

Now the Mondays had a hit, and a new sound, a more conventional but still powerful one – and a new look. Where Bummed had sported a terrifying cover – a retouched face from a pack of dirty playing cards – the new album looked like a bubblegum wrapper: which in a way it was, at least by the band’s previous standards. Pills ‘n’ Thrills And Bellyaches was the Happy Mondays’ pop album. The recent success of a John Kongo’s cover, ‘Step On’ (“You’re twistin’ my melon, man”), originally recorded for an Electra Records tribute album, had cemented in place the new direction, and most of Pills ‘n’ Thrills followed suit, from the fantastic opener, ‘Kinky Afro’ (“Son, I’m 30, I only went with your mother cos she’s dirty” is the opening line); via the aptly-named ‘Loose Fit’; all the way to the more old-school-Mondays wooze of ‘Harmony’; Pills ‘n’ Thrills is the most commercial but also most determinedly itself record of its time: it’s full of hits and you can dance to it, but it was made entirely on its own terms by the blessed combination of the band, producer Steve Osborne and producer-DJ Paul Oakenfold. There are smaller nuggets of gold like the catchy ‘Dennis and Lois’ and the entirely aptly-named ‘Holiday’: but throughout there’s a big pop confidence that’s entirely justified by the songs and the sound.

4CD deluxe reissue of Pill ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches

The future would soon become troubled for the band; the disastrous Yes Please! album saw the band descend into excessive (for them) drug use, personality changes and an end to their early brilliance. Yet somehow they persisted: Ryder and Bez’s Black Grape project managed to re-evoke the glory days, before that too dissolved into a revolving door of reunion tours and – most unlikely of all – Shaun and Bez’ reinvention as much-loved British institutions, with regular appearances on clip shows and reality shows (if you can find the band’s appearance on the TV show Ghostwatch, please watch it, it is the funniest thing of all time).

But their legacy isn’t being daft on TV, nor is it being poster men for drug life, it’s a series of extraordinary, unique records of which this is one, now re-released with additional tracks including a live concert from back in the day. An essential purchase, if you ask me.

By David Quantick. Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches is reissued on Friday 21 August 2026 via London Records.

Happy Mondays Official Shop – highlights

Tracklisting

5LP vinyl super deluxe

LP 1: Album Remastered
Side One

Kinky Afro
God’s Cop
Donovan
Grandbag’s Funeral
Loose Fit

Side Two

Dennis And Lois
Bob’s Yer Uncle
Step On
Holiday
Harmony

LP 2: Madchester / Rave On
Side Three

Hallelujah
Holy Ghost
Clap Your Hands
Rave On

Side Four

Hallelujah (MacColl Mix)
Hallelujah (Club Mix)
Rave On (Club Mix)
W.F.L. (Think About The Future Mix)

LP 3: Baby Bighead Bootleg
Side Five

Hallelujah (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
Donovan (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
Kinky Afro (Live at Elland Road, 1991)

Side Six

Clap Your Hands (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
Loose Fit (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
Holiday (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
Rave On (Live at Elland Road, 1991)

LP 4: Baby Bighead Bootleg
Side Seven

E (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
Tokoloshe Man (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
Dennis And Lois (Live at Elland Road, 1991)

Side Eight

God’s Cop (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
Step On (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
Bob’s Yer Uncle (Live at Elland Road, 1991)

LP 5: Remixes
Side Nine

Step On (Stuff It In Mix)
Kinky Groovy Afro Remix (12″)
Loose Fit (Perfecto 12″ Mix)
Tokoloshe Man

Side Ten

Hallelujah (Daniel Avery Edit)
Loose Fit (Shadow Child Edit)
Gods Cop (Anna Prior Edit)
Step On (Paul Oakenfold Edit)
Hallelujah (Ewan Pearson Remix)

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