Happy Mondays Go To Work

10/14/09 3:50pm

by Ian Gormely (CHARTattack)

That the Happy Mondays still exist in any form — let alone as a functioning band — is a minor miracle.

Although they were more of a foreign curiosity here in North America, in their native England the Manchunian sextet were a game-changing act who helped blur the boundaries between rock and dance music. Of course, their off-stage behavior often threatened to eclipse their musical highlights.

Drummer Gary "Gaz" Whelan, who now lives in nearby Burlington, Ont., along with lead singer Shaun Ryder and dancer Bez managed to weather that storm and continue to record and tour.

CHARTattack: So how do you make it from Manchester to Burlington?
Gaz Whelan: In the mid-'90s I left and moved to London. I lived in New York back in '99 for a year. I lived in Australia for four years. Then we planned to move here to Toronto, so we came here and went to visit a friend in Hamilton and stopped up in "Borington" Burlington on the way and saw all the kids playing and loved it. It's great. I love Canada.

The Mondays is kind of a day job now. It's just me, Shaun and Bez.

Bez does his own reality stuff. He's like Flavor Flav over in the U.K. He does his own celebrity TV show — that's what he's good at and he's says he doesn't want to be jumping around all the time at his age. He's a couple years older than me so he's about 40, so fair enough.

Shaun does all sorts of this and that. I think old Shaun's kind of clean and straight. Maybe that's what's ignited the old passion.

So it's a day job, it pays the money. But we enjoy it. We did half a new album and then shelved it while we all did our solo stuff and then next year we'll go back and revisit it.

This is a new album after the one that you did a couple years ago?
That one kind of came together by accident. I was living in Australia at the time. I'd come back to London to do a couple of one-off shows. We'd taken a break — we only split up once; people think we split up two or three times, but we just took a break — and while I was back I met up with the engineer.

Everyone else hadn't gotten back and I was stuck in London and we wrote six or seven songs and Shaun came down and put vocals down so then we had an album. We were just a couple short and then we did the rest in Manchester.

Shaun never does the music; Shaun just does lyrics. We all do the music, me and the bass player and the guitarist. We jam and get tunes that Shaun can put lyrics on.

The tour is with The Psychedelic Furs. How did you get hooked up with them?
Similar agent, but we were going to do it initially with Depeche Mode, possibly. I think they're clean again and I think Shaun's clean, but I don't think they're sure that Shaun's clean. So we thought it might not be a great idea. So we got in touch with The Psychedelic Furs.

To be honest with you, we only ever did a couple gigs in Canada, we didn't sell well in Canada. We did O.K. in the States, but when we toured the States we were younger and we were pretty ignorant. We just put on a party. We did Madison Square Garden opening for Jane's Addiction.

So we were staying in a hotel and me and Shaun are late. We jump in a cab and couldn't get in [to the venue]. We were supposed to go on stage at 8:00 and by the time we got there it was a quarter past 8. We went to the dressing room to apologize and no one else was there. We ended up doing one fucking song.

So we didn't do ourselves any favours like a lot of British bands don't in North America. It wasn't an attitude thing. We did O.K., especially on the coasts. To be fair we couldn't fill big venues on our own so to be honest that's why we're doing it with Psychedelic Furs.

What is it about North America that's so daunting to British bands?
In Britain it's seen as an art form, whereas in North America it's seen as a job or a profession. So when the first tours of British rock 'n' rollers took place in the 1950s, the only places that would put them up were art colleges. So the people who got into rock 'n' roll — The Beatles, Clapton or whoever — were artists.

In America, all the art colleges were for architects. American bands kind of work it like a business, they know how it works, they play the game, which is I think the right way to do it. But you play the game. I don't think it's resentment, but British bands don't really play the game as well. Oasis maybe did it the first time. And you've got to watch what you say [in America]. You can be as controversial as you want in the U.K.

You helped run an electronic/dance label when you were living in Australia. Were you the one pushing the dancier side of the Monday's music?
No, it was just the time. We were all into it, we all loved funk, soul, punk and The Beatles and Stones and all that. I was always championing The Beatles, Shaun was always championing the Stones. Me and Paul, the bass player, were no more into it than the rest, but maybe just by the fact we were the drummer and the bass player it shone through.

In the U.K., dance music is so big and mainstream...
It's not as big here, is it? When I got here, I was really surprised how big rock music is. I'm not a big rock fan. I don't know any of it. But there's no cross-pollinating of genres here.

There's only two types of music, there's good and there's bad. In England, there's mixing a lot. Manchester specifically is good for mixing. The immigrant set in Manchester — there was Polish, Irish, Scottish, African, West African — everyone just mixed. And there was only a few venues that played music so they had, like, Monday night would be Polish night, Tuesday night would be West African night Wednesday night would be Bangladeshi night... eventually they closed the nights down and everything was mixed.

You look at someone's record collection, it's got to be mixed. How can you have one type of music? It's a cornucopia, it's everything. I have a radio show at McMaster University and people say "Well, what do you play?" Well, music. It could be anything.