Altered State by Matthew Collin

Author:Matthew Collin
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2010-03-13T05:00:00+00:00

salford and cheetham hill

1990 was the year the Happy Mondays peaked. The Stone Roses were caught up in contractual wrangles with their record company; the Inspiral Carpets were worthily plodding around the country, selling records but signifying little, while the ‘baggy’ rock bands which sprang up in their wake, like Northside and the Paris Angels, seemed to owe more to the laddish ‘Madchester’ caricature than the spirit of Ecstasy. The Mondays were heroes, walking on the wild side and coming back to tell the tales, week after week, in an endless series of music press front covers and lurid exclusives which they often sold to tabloid newspapers themselves.

The band had something genuinely new to offer, not just a reworking of old formulae. The Roses and Carpets were essentially warming over the four-man beat-group blueprint which had been the basis of every British rock boom since the early sixties. The Mondays, on the other hand, were fusing all Ryder’s influences – Northern Soul, Motown, Bowie, Roxy Music, Funkadelic, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, New Order, hip hop, house music – and had a refreshingly irreverent attitude to rock heritage; hence they embraced dance culture while others were sceptical. While their albums were ragged and imperfectly formed – the instinctive chaos of their gigs far better represented what made them special – their self-made myths placed them in the tradition of iconic British pop groups like The Rolling Stones and the Sex Pistols. They were an archetype of Ecstasy culture; working class refuseniks, delinquent bohemians – ‘Thatcher’s children,’ insisted Ryder.

‘Thatcher turned straight people into criminals,’ he explained later. ‘We dealt. They called us criminals, but the way we saw it, we were enterprising business people. She laid the cards out and people had no choice but to play her game. Me and millions of others. But I never voted Tory. I tell people I vote Tory because it winds them up, but I’ve never voted in my life.’12

The other key element which set the Mondays apart was Ryder’s surreal lyricism. He would steal phrases from classic songs, twist them, lace them with lascivious slang, then slur them out in his obscene groan of a voice. In print, however, Ryder was often painted as a stupid Northern oik, his Mancunian accent mimicked and, by implication, mocked: ‘fuck’ written as ‘fook’, as if he was a retard from the provinces who had barely learned to speak. ‘I always come over double thick, I sound brainless in a lot of interviews. How they’re written makes me sound thick,’ he says. ‘If they’re interviewing a black guy, they don’t start writing in patois, do they? It’s just how we talk.’

Yet when speaking with journalists he would play up to the stereotype, disingenuously claiming that his lyrics were meaningless nonsense, exaggerating or making up stories, retelling them over and over but slightly differently each time, perhaps to entertain the writer but more likely to entertain himself. He may have been, as he has said himself, a working-class

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