Happy Mondays ’88

Our man in Manchester, Mr Dave Rofe, sent me this you tube link yes­ter­day. The head­ing in the e mail read “Fox ‘ead”, a nick­name given to me twenty odd years ago by Bez, when, whilst sport­ing way too much hair, I was pub­li­cist for Happy Mondays.

I got around a bit back then and the down­side of the digital boom is the amount of times the words ‘Fox ‘ead’ appear in my in box. I’m not embar­rassed but I do open the link with a little trep­id­a­tion know­ing that someone is gonna say, “Is that really you, fuck­ing hell!”. Well, this is one of them.
It’s an edu­ca­tional TV pro­gramme (up on here in two parts) that was made in 1988 to enlighten young people into the busi­ness work­ings of a record label as they make and release a record. So far, so what. The good bit is that the label they chose as the sub­ject was Fact­ory and the record they chose was ‘Bummed’ by Happy Mondays. Genius.

I’d not been in the job long, in fact ‘Bummed’ was the first record I worked (I was press guy for the whole Fact­ory label) though I did have pre­vi­ous with the band as a fan (and Lon­don gig pro­moter) and I knew their man­ager, Nathan McGough, from when he man­aged The Bod­ines, a band that had been signed to Cre­ation when I worked there in the mid eighties. A big thing to point out here is that what you are gonna watch is PRE ‘Madchester’. This is very important.

Those in the know were already aware that the the Mondays had ‘it’. Tony Wilson cer­tainly knew that they were an import­ant group and you can see it in the film as you fol­low him from record­ing stu­dio to pro­duc­tion meet­ing to launch party (the bit where he pre­tends to be inter­ested in the pro­duc­tion costs is funny). What struck me while watch­ing it is how inno­cent things were at that time and it brought back to me just how fuck­ing great a band the Mondays were. Look at the live foot­age — from Ding­walls, Lon­don — incred­ible. We were so lucky to have them.

A year later, as we now know, things went men­tal. The city was re-branded. A cul­ture was sold and inno­cence got lost. It got dark and greedy and before long it got bor­ing. The sad thing is that now the Mondays get seen as a joke turn on the revival cir­cuit instead of a very import­ant group. It’s prob­ably their own fault and they prob­ably don’t care but I do. It was a real hon­our to do that job and I’m proud to say I was there. Hey, I even got a nick­name off of Bez!

Part One.

Part Two