''Did the late '80s/early '90s see a fundamental shift in the nature of British popular music? Discuss. Well, did it? Maybe. Some things never change. Most pop groups are still rubbish and, well, there's always been a dance element to The Soup Dragons' music. But, by and large, things did get better. Dull indiepop withered on the vine, Top Of The Pops underwent a logarithmic increase in quality and you could switch on the radio again without risking a massive shutdown of the cerebral cortex.
But was it the new punk? Come to think of it, it probably was. And the received wisdom among my more learned colleagues and I was that if The Stone Roses were the Clash, the Happy Mondays were its Sex Pistols. The former: intense, ferociously proud of their music and destined to be remembered as an 'important' rock band. The latter: larky, unpredictable wide boys with a charismatically repellent leading man. Conceptually vital but not bound for greatness. I am delighted to tell you that with the release of the appallingly titled 'Pills 'N' Thrills And Bellyache' this theory is now defunct. This is a tremendous record, and a gauntlet chucked at the feet of all the other would-be legends in town.
I don't know what this is but it's great. Trouble is that all the things that get written about the Mondays tend to be the most boring. They wear flared trousers! They've taken the odd drug! They have centre partings! Hold the front page! Everybody in the business currently has their 'Me and the Mondays' story and it's about as enthralling as listening to some old Damned roadie's anecdotes. Plus it tends to obscure their real worth. Let's try something new. How about... 'Towards a hagiography of the Happy Mondays'? Like, for starters, what would you call this stuff? You can dance to it but does that make it 'dance' music? No. You can screw up your face and play imaginary guitar to it. Does that mean it's 'rock'? Actually, it's Rhythm & Blues. Yes, it's true. The Happy Mondays have taken the most useless and decrepit of musical genres (except maybe skiffle) and dragged it kicking and screaming into the '90s. Add some liberal swathes of the '70s rock disco and funk of the boys' mis-spent youth and there you have it. An indescribably, exciting mongrel that has suddenly become the trendiest music in the world.
'Kinky Afro' you already know. It has the best ten seconds of any single all year, and unfolds into a great drama of restrained raunch and surprisingly gleaming professionalism. Supposedly something of a tribute to Hot Chocolate, it manages to sound completely like and unlike The Mondays at the same time. This is a trick pulled many times over the course of the record. "Son, I'm 30/I only went with your mother 'cause she's dirty". Free-form prole art doggerel or forced sleaze? Ryder's hand-me-down colloquialisms, in-jokes and toilet wall graffiti have made him the Auden of the tap-room, even if the unrelenting seediness can get a little wearing. I have no idea what 'Kinky Afro' is about but the lift from Labelle's 'Lady Marmalade' is a telling one.
'God's Cop' is, as of this morning, the best thing on the record. Guitars are back on the Monday's agenda with a vengeance and Mark Day is upstage for most of the LP. A huge fractured delta blues riff runs through 'God's Cop' like a spine, and the drumbeats have the urgency of a man on hot coals. Rumour has it that the song concerns itself with Mr Silly himself, James Anderton, but I would be hard pushed to summarise Ryder's argument. Still, lines like "Me and the chief got slowly stoned/Me and the chief got Soul II Soul" do have brilliant abstract resonance. A sneering punk rock style chorus adds to the record's brisk charm.
One imagines 'Donovan' to be about Donovan but beyond that it's hard to say. A suave arrangement involving finely wrought arpeggios and accordians, the sheer proficiency of tunes like this will fuel cynics' assertions that Oakenfold is the sinister Mr Big'' NME