Happy Mondays - Celebrating 35 Years Of Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches
Some bands grow old gracefully. Happy Mondays were never going to make that mistake.
Sydney had turned on one of those ridiculously pleasant early-spring days that makes staying indoors feel like poor life planning, and by the time the doors opened at the Enmore Theatre plenty of people had already decided the night should start early. The crowd felt exactly right. Old ravers. Indie kids. People who had been there the first time around, people who desperately wished they had, and more than a few who looked capable of producing a bucket hat from somewhere if circumstances required it.
Inside, the Enmore was slowly filling beneath a deep blue wash. Drinks appeared. Conversations got louder. Old friends found each other. There was already that particular little crackle you get before a gig where people have not simply come to hear some songs. They have come to reconnect with a version of themselves.
Sydney three-piece BLOKBSTR had the unenviable job of standing between us and one of Manchester’s most gloriously dysfunctional exports, and they attacked it as though somebody had told them this might be the biggest show of their lives. Which, as it turned out, it was.
Sam Barron stood stage left with guitar and vocals, Lewis Clark occupied the middle behind the drums, while Jimmy Heathwood worked the keys and lead vocal mic stage right. In front of the keys sat an old monitor, facing us, endlessly cycling BLOKBSTR across the screen in graphics that looked as if they had escaped from an early-80s computer showroom. Primitive. Slightly naff. Completely perfect.
The core of BLOKBSTR is Heathwood and Barron, old friends who eventually began making music together after years around Sydney bands, with Clark completing the live trio. They write, record and produce much of their own stuff, and you could hear the ingredients being thrown around the room: a bit of LCD Soundsystem, Talking Heads and DEVO, some grubby indie rock, synths, punk and dance music, shaken hard enough that the labels stopped mattering. They call it BLOKPOP. Fair enough. Three people really should not have made that much noise.
From Sneaky Motel through 1999, No More Celebrations, Tea Partyand Ciao!, they sounded enormous. More importantly, they looked like they were having a fucking brilliant time. This was not forty minutes of polite support-band throat-clearing. There was bouncing, instrument swapping, harmonies, synths, guitar and just enough organised chaos to make the whole thing feel slightly dangerous.
Special guests joined them for Sunshine, but Apartment was probably the point where it all properly landed for me. Jimmy was bouncing around the stage, he and Sam locked into the vocal, and the wonderfully daft “my house is an H-O-U-S-E, apartment” buried itself immediately in the brain. Catchy. Weird. Danceable. Slightly ridiculous. Not an entirely stupid combination to put in front of Happy Mondays.
At one point they looked almost disbelieving as they told us this was the biggest gig they had ever played, before announcing that afterwards they planned to have an absolute party watching possibly their favourite band of all time. “The Happy fucking Mondays. In Sydney!” They thanked the crowd again on the way out, called us “24 hour party people”, and disappeared. Nice touch. Job done. When the lights came back up, the Enmore had climbed several gears.
Then the crew started stripping the stage, and the atmosphere changed.
An enormous Ampeg 8x10 cabinet stood stage right beside the bass position and synths. Drums filled the centre. Guitars waited stage left. And over there, glowing almost radioactive beneath the black light, sat two enormous fluorescent orange maracas.
A bloke behind me spotted them. “Oh, here we fucking go.” Exactly.
By now the house was full. The chatter had become a roar. Blue light swallowed the stage again and the opening of Kinky Afro began to ooze into the room. Firouzeh Berry appeared first, her voice sliding beautifully across that familiar groove, then Shaun Ryder and Bez walked out.
There are entrances. Then there is Bez.
If you have never actually seen him perform in person, it is surprisingly difficult to explain what you are looking at. He does not really dance, certainly not according to any recognised human system of movement. He detonates. Arms flying. Knees pumping. Jaw working. Maracas shaking as if they have personally insulted him.
Imagine somebody dropping a cigarette into a box of fireworks. That. And he is 62.
There is a story behind why Bez is on that stage at all, and it might be the most Happy Mondays recruitment process imaginable. In December 1985, the Mondays were supporting New Order at Manchester’s Haçienda. Shaun and Bez had taken acid. Shaun was nervous about going onstage and decided Bez needed to come up with him.
Bez pointed out the obvious flaw in this plan. He was not actually in the band. Shaun’s response, according to Bez, was less artist management and more Salford playground. If Bez did not come up, he was soft.
So Bez went.
No audition. No rehearsal. No discussion of musical competence. He grabbed a pair of maracas and started shaking them while doing the mad dance that apparently came naturally under the circumstances. He shook the maracas so violently he ended up with a huge blister on his hand. Factory Records boss Tony Wilson saw the whole thing and loved it. His verdict was essentially simple. Keep him.
And they did.
More than forty years later, Shaun Ryder and Bez standing together remains one of the most instantly recognisable images in British music. There are worse recruitment strategies.
Behind that glorious lunacy, however, something else became obvious very quickly. Happy Mondays were tight. Ridiculously tight.
Gary Whelan drove the entire thing from the drums, huge and relentless without ever becoming heavy. Mikey Shine’s bass gave the music its low-end swagger. Mark Day’s guitar slashed and jabbed around the rhythm rather than sitting politely on top of it. Dan Broad moved between guitar and keys, while Firouzeh Berry’s vocals brought colour, lift and another layer of melody to songs that could easily have been delivered tonight as nostalgic facsimiles of the records.
They weren’t.
Shaun stood in the middle of everything, somehow the calmest man onstage and the centre of this completely peculiar universe. His voice has never needed to be polished. That would rather miss the point. He talks, drawls, sings and throws phrases into the groove with the same lazy authority that made these songs work in the first place.
By God’s Cop and Donovan, the machine was properly turning over. Shaun kept peering down at the setlist on the floor and reacting to what he found there like somebody being confronted with archaeological evidence of his own existence. “Bloody hell. Not that one. That’s old.” A beat. “I’m even older.” That became a running thread through the evening.
Bez took the mic early too, which always creates a brief sense that somebody has handed fireworks to a Labrador, but instead he sincerely thanked Sydney for coming out to party and for having them back after 35 years. Then he handed the microphone back. Probably for the best.
Grandbag’s Funeral andLoose Fitkept the momentum rolling, while Dennisand Lois and Bob’s Yer Uncle let the room settle into that gorgeous Mondays groove where rock band, funk band and dance act all seem to exist simultaneously. Bez occasionally disappeared from the stage for a breather, which seemed entirely reasonable. He has been doing forty years of elbows-out, knees-up cardio while apparently attempting to shake the fillings from his own teeth. At this point, the man should probably qualify for some sort of elite-athlete funding.
Then he returned. Maracas in hand. Recharged. Just in time.
Because the piano started.
There are intros where recognition moves through a crowd in stages. A few people get it, then a few more, then the room catches up. This one needed about three notes.
Step On.
The Enmore erupted.
And this song has followed me into an entirely different part of my life. In my day job, over several decades, I have attended more than my fair share of meetings. Some useful. Some necessary. Some so catastrophically dull that you begin wondering whether jumping from the window would create more paperwork than remaining in the room.
To entertain ourselves, I occasionally get people to sneak a song lyric into a meeting, delivered with complete sincerity and a straight face. My personal favourite has always been: “You’re twisting my melon, man.”
It is surprisingly versatile. Particularly useful when somebody has just made an outrageous request of you or your team.
So hearing that line coming back from a packed Enmore Theatre, thirty-five years after Step On became one of the defining songs of the era, was glorious. The whole floor moved. Bez went off. The piano hammered away. Thousands of people shouted the line back.
And for a few minutes, there was no 2026. No middle age. No Monday morning lurking somewhere in the distance. Just that riff. That groove. That ridiculous lyric. And us.
The party rolled directly into Holiday, one of those songs that could only come from a band with some very specific opinions about what you perhaps should and should not attempt to take through customs. Somewhere in the chatter Bez said something to Shaun and received the magnificent response that Shaun had not spent as much time “on the glass toilet” as Bez. No idea. Bez seemed delighted. So did everybody else.
That was the mood by now. The show had stopped feeling like an anniversary tour and started feeling like a party that happened to contain some exceptionally good songs. That distinction matters. Nostalgia shows can sometimes feel preserved behind glass. Look, but don’t touch. Remember how good this used to be.
This wasn’t that.
Harmony slid beautifully into the second half before Shaun looked down again and announced that the next one was “even older than 35 years”. “This is Hallelu-JAH.”
Bez immediately corrected him. “I think it’s pronounced Hallelujah.”
Shaun paused. “Oh yeah.”
Hallelujah.
Pure Happy Mondays. A tiny exchange. Completely stupid. Completely natural. Funnier than anything somebody could have scripted for them.
Mad Cyril and Rave On pushed things onwards, that rhythm section still pounding while guitars and keys rubbed against each other in all the right places. This was also where the strange history of Happy Mondays seemed to hang in the room around them. Factory Records. Tony Wilson. The Haçienda. Manchester when guitars collided with club culture and neither side emerged quite the same. Even The Velvet Underground sit somewhere in the family tree, with John Cale producing the Mondays’ sprawling 1987 debut album.
Then the stage changed colour. The blue disappeared. Warm gold flooded across the band.
24 Hour Party People.
Perfect.
The phrase became bigger than the song itself years ago. It became shorthand for the Mondays, then for a scene, then eventually the title of the film that retold the wonderfully chaotic Factory Records and Haçienda story with Steve Coogan playing Tony Wilson. But hearing the song here, inside this old Sydney theatre, stripped all of that mythology back to something simpler.
A groove. A room. People dancing.
The gold light made everything feel warmer. Bez prowled the front of the stage. Shaun stood in the middle delivering those words with that strange laconic authority that nobody else could convincingly reproduce.
For a few minutes the Enmore became Manchester. Not Manchester the geographical place. Manchester the idea. The clubs. Factory. The Haçienda. Loose clothes. Strange rhythms. Guitars meeting dance music. Music that always sounded as if it might fall apart at any moment, but somehow never did.
Then the song finished and Shaun started wandering towards the side of the stage. Bez looked genuinely confused. He grabbed the microphone. “Where ya going?” Shaun kept moving. “Is that it? Are we done?”
Apparently not.
What followed was a wonderfully ramshackle attempt to introduce the band, assisted by several expletives, before Gary Whelan started pounding out the final rhythm of the night.
W.F.L. (Wrote for Luck).
One more surge. One more dance. One more reminder that underneath the mythology, the drugs, the fights, the interviews, the chaos, Tony Wilson, Factory Records and forty years of Bez apparently attempting to dislocate every joint in his body simultaneously, Happy Mondays made some extraordinary music.
And still know exactly what to do with it.
As the final notes crashed away, Shaun thanked everyone. “We are the Happy Mondays.” As if anyone needed reminding.
The applause continued after they disappeared. People lingered in the aisles, then gradually spilled back through the doors and onto Enmore Road, blinking into Sydney and beginning the traditional post-gig forensic analysis. Best song. Best moment. How the fuck does Bez still do that?
Then, somewhere in front of me, I heard an adult son tell his dad that he wished he had been alive to experience Happy Mondays at the Haçienda. His father thought for a moment before replying that even if he had been there, he probably wouldn’t remember exactly what happened anyway. He would just remember that he had an amazing night.
And there it was. Maybe the best review of Happy Mondays you could possibly give.
Music does something peculiar to time. A piano riff, a bass line, one ridiculous lyric about a melon, and suddenly decades disappear. Nobody inside the Enmore needed to become twenty again. We just got to reconnect for ninety minutes with whatever part of us heard this music in the first place and never quite let it go.
Because that part never really disappears. It gets buried under work and mortgages and kids and responsibilities, under routines and bad knees and calendars full of things that once seemed impossibly grown-up. But it waits. Quietly. Then the right song starts and, without asking permission, something wakes up.
The bodies may complain more now. The recovery time may be longer. Some of us have considerably less hair. But when the right song starts, apparently the important bits still remember exactly what to do.
And perhaps that is why nights like this matter more as the years roll on. Not because we are trying to get the past back. We can’t. And really, we probably wouldn’t want all of it. But every now and then, in a dark theatre with the lights down and the bass rattling your chest, you get to reach across the years and touch it again.
Just for a song.
Just for a night.
The party people went home. The party, somehow, didn’t.
Thank you to the Happy Mondays, Destroy All Lines, SBM Present, John Howarth and the Enmore Theatre for having us along.
Review and Photos By Andy Kershaw for Music Kingdom Australia
