this probably should not be happening, look you see. not meant to be, this, a (very) nearly 30th anniversary celebration of an album. its lyricist and singer should be either dead or serving a custodial sentence, in either eventually as a result of a penchant for drugs. he should not be revered as an amiable, cheeky grandfather figure to the nation. the novelty factor dancer is meant to be an obscure footnote reference in rock history, not some treasured "the fun uncle in the family" which a country holds a warm place in the hear for. and that groove which the band (and producers) carved out should sound dated and wonky, not remarkably fresh three decades later.
and yet here we are. if you were to read a chronology of the band the Happy Mondays, you'd assume it to be improbable that they would have been able or allowed to record a second record, and just flat impossible that they'd ever do a third. but, in the face of little critical love and less commercial success, they did, producing pills 'n' thrills and bellyaches, a record which has somehow managed to be precisely of its perfect storm of a time and remarkably perfect to this very day. well, to my ears, and i dare say to many others.
what, before we go on, exactly makes an album reach a point where it gets called a "classic" album? good question. answering it is a little better than trying to clarify what a "best" of anything is, for one is able to deal with more objective, or rather less subjective matters. in broad strokes, a "classic" album isn't necessarily the best work an artist has done, it's just one that as a complete entity could not possibly have been made better to say what it says. moving away from the turntable with it, and it's an album which either was informed by or influenced its era, or over the years came to be seen and identified as such.
under no circumstances whatsoever, in any way, shape or form, would anyone at all ever have even remotely thought to consider suggesting, not even in jest, that such a work would stem from the Happy Mondays. well, one did, and that was Tony Wilson. for everyone else, it was a band of musicians with intermittent talent, fronted by a general Manc junkie degenerate who in fairness had a quirky, clever turn of phrase with his words, with some wide eyed dancing clown, clearly and patently permanently ripped out of his mind on pills, sellotaped on the front as some form of window dressing to distract from the other (lesser) qualities.
depending on (or relative to) your level of hatred, contempt, admiration or love for the Happy Mondays, this shall seem either generous or harsh. prior to pills 'n' thrills and bellyaches it could be said that the complete works of the band consisted of three genuine great tunes, several which, via quirky lyrics or decent beat were average and a good dose of "this will do". let us trouble ourselves solely with the positive. the three greats would be twenty four hour party people from the debut album (a song only included at the last minute due to legal wrangling over another song), along with lazyitis and wrote for luck from the second (and what many reasonably expected to be last) album by the band, the charmingly named bummed.
it was those three songs which suggested there was (possibly) something more to the band just doing this for the sake of it, to fill in the time between dole payments and the subsequent squandering of that on illicit sex, copious drugs and booze to round it off. the infectious vibe and the beat was very much influenced by the burgeoning house scene, penetrating the world from American origins, and the flourishing underground "acid" scene, only it was "done with proper instruments", as would be very much part of the English way of doing things. lyrically it was all witty, acerbic and frequently profound, something made baffling as it appeared to emanate from a mind already (in)famous by this stage for being able to stretch all the way to the ceiling of poisoning pigeons to watch them fall from the sky as a form of entertainment.
musically the album is just about any (or even all) positive wording you can throw at it. astonishing, astounding, ambitious, daring, catchy, brilliant and, well loads others. the most important word you can throw at it, though, is groovy. it's all flat out, full tilt, tote tapping, infectious ear-worming bliss. maybe it's just me and several others, but it all sounds remarkably fresh and crisp (hello, Faye) to this day. it is of those halcyon days where music was meant to be expansive, a freedom to run across limitless plains, rather than today's weird, downbeat obsession with limiting sound to fit in with a wallpaper like "streamed" small box music narrative.
exactly who to credit with the audacious sound of pills 'n' thrills and bellyaches is to engage in one of them often futile mass debate things. rather than the actual band - Gary Whelan, Mark Day, Paul Ryder and Paul Davis - many would leap to say the real genius of the sound was held by visionary producers Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osborne. a little give and take, i would suggest, is needed. could the band have delivered the sound without expert producers and "engineers" (whatever the hell they do in a studio) who got the groove and knew how to refine it? and would the producers have been able to craft such a classic without the raw materials provided by the band? no and no.
should for some reason they have taken the decision to release pills 'n' thrills and bellyaches purely as an instrumental record then it still would have worked, it would have filled dancefloors, it would likely still be recalled to this day as a club classic. but, there's that extra layer of poetic genius to the record. no matter how phenomenal (and it is) the sound of the album, the music (quite) remarkably sits in the shadow of the lyrics of Shaun Ryder.
quite the divisive figure, Shaun Ryder. for some, maybe apologists, at the time he was viewed as "a bit of a lad", or a "character", indeed a "good laugh". others of a different perspective would lean towards the idea of dismissing him as a sexist, obnoxious, misogynistic, uncouth, uneducated foul mouthed Manc sh!tbag junkie. every chance exists that he was (for many is) all of those and more. despite and due to it all, though, he delivered remarkable poetic genius across this record.
defining "poet" comes to be as complex and subjective as defining "classic album". how about we go with something generic, then. to be poetic is to evoke a sense of universal concepts and ideals via the conduit (or forum) of fragmented words relating to an instance which provoked the sentiment of thinking beyond a finite and to within an infinite. yes, i probably threw something like that sentence into an essay or two on my path to several qualifications.
the kind of thing i am getting at in the above oozes out, across and over pills 'n' thrills and bellyaches. and it does so in a wide range of ways. realities of working class domestic life for the less affluent areas of society are covered, to degrees which range from light hearted to hard hitting, in Kinky Afro, Grandbag's Funeral and Dennis And Lois. then you've got the individualistic resistance to oppression of expression in Loose Fit and Step On. perhaps someone suggested the band do a "love song" or ballad, hence having the dirty, perverse and sexually provocative Bob's Yer Uncle. you can also go right ahead and hear the scathing attack on the hypocrisy in society illustrated via God's Cop (for which an understanding of the copper James Anderton would be handy), or just enjoy the hysterical episode (or incident) presented in the riotously, self-depreciatingly exceedingly funny Holiday.
context of the release of the album? what feels like a now strangely, alien, impossible to comprehend how we let it go brief era of hedonistic optimism. it, for a brief while, felt like we, one generation under the same groove, were finally moving free of the shadow and the sin of all which came before us. the feared Soviet Union was reverting to Russia, the Cold War over, the threat of nuclear destruction seemingly gone. a band called The Stone Roses played Spike Island and cemented the idea that no longer was it that Beatles and Stones were a benchmark, their formidable reputations had at last been surpassed. bit by bit the Berlin wall continued to be taken apart, and it seemed like Europe could indeed just all get along without strategic or political force. rather than getting smashed on booze and starting fights there was a movement towards an idea that it was better to trip out on ecstasy or lsd and everyone just have a good time all the time, man. a man called Nelson Mandela walked free from prison, symbolic of an idea that all oppression and division was to be brought to an end everywhere. to that end, we even had a "happy" and "right" war, over in that faraway Middle East place, where former opponents like the USA, Russia, Britain and Germany deployed united forces to stop a bully. just for good measure, within days of pills 'n' thrills and bellyaches being released, Thatcher fell from power.
but that's all gone, now, we soon managed to make sure the world was the usual mess we are aware of and strangely find more comfortable. the idea of unrestrained happiness, everyone just dig what you dig and just get along and get by could not last for the population, or the band. in respect of the latter the only true direction for the Happy Mondays after this album was self-destruction. this they achieved to a spectacular, catastrophic level with crack cocaine and Yes Please!, a drug which nearly killed them and an album (which it is believed only a thousand or people bought on release) which wiped out their record label. any other ending (although they each enjoyed a strange resurrection) for both would have been to have failed.
as close as it comes to doing so, no, pills 'n' thrills and bellyaches does not cover an era entire. if for some reason you wanted to hear a comprehensive sound of how we gave up on the 80s by entering the 90s with promise of even greater to come, this record would be played alongside The Stone Roses by The Stone Roses, Some Friendly by The Charlatans and the album generally (fairly) regarded as the personification of the sound of the time, Screamadelica by Primal Scream. a session of listening to these soaring sounds of ambition can only leave one wondering where it all went wrong after, why now have we let the wheels fall off of how important creating new music should be. that sense, at least, in the sounds which dominates the airwaves and now fake charts.
yes, please, then, you should (in my humble yet considered opinion) head off and give a spin to this album.
be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment