Happy Mondays Drummer Prepares To Unveil His Hippy Mafia (With Added Oasis Rumour)

Manchester, England's Happy Mondays may still be together (but with a truncated line-up) but drummer Gary "Gaz" Whelan has his priorities elsewhere at the moment.

As he told us last summer, Whelan, who's now a resident of Burlington, Ont., has formed a new group with some of his Mancunian friends, and they're going by the name Hippy Mafia.

The band will make their live debut in Toronto during Canadian Music Week when they play with Hamilton, Ont.'s Spirits at Bread & Circus on Wednesday.

CHARTattack caught up with Whelan to talk about the new band and life as in southern Ontario.??

CHARTattack: Hippy Mafia are playing their first Toronto gig on the opening day of Canadian Music Week. Do you have an album coming out as well? ?
Gaz: Yes and no. All the songs are demos at the moment. There's no live drums on any of them yet.

We keep having all these stupid ideas. We've got two albums worth of songs. We could do a double album and be all 1970s, but the days of the album is gone. It's sad, really, because the bands that you really like growing up, it's the album tracks that you remember. The song that you like immediately, you hate after a month. So we're thinking maybe four EPs.

Are the rest of the band friends from Manchester?
Yes.

And they're all living in Canada?
I moved over here and another guy did, too. One's in the process. It's three Mancunians and one Canadian. We just got a new rapper/poet from Kitchener. He's in Manchester now, being Mancunified. They're all in Manchester as we speak, recording. Everyone but me.

Bonehead's in there from Oasis putting bass down. He may come over for Canadian Music Week. The band's about the message, not the messenger. Bonehead might play, he might not. Five or six of us might play or maybe just four. It doesn't really matter who we are.

It's about the music. I know that sounds pompous and self-righteous, but really, I'm not self-righteous.

It's sort of like that Broken Social Scene mentality. Who knows who's playing on each song.
It doesn't matter does, it? That Rolling Stones song, "We Love You," it's John Lennon singing all the high falsetto. I never knew that. And it's great to know now, but it doesn't make the song any better.

Is that why you've created all the aliases on the MySpace page?
Yeah. If anyone fucks up in this band, we'll get somebody else. There's no big personalities. It's not about the parts — it's about the band. With vocalists, it's especially typical. Even the vocalist is replacable.

What do you mean by "Mancunified"?
Being very conscious of the cheese factor... it's kind of hard to describe. Manchester bands are very cool, tastemakers, the best bands, the best labels. But the "too cool for school" kind of thing, it doesn't always help being Mancunian.

Everything from the socks and the shoes that you wear to every lyric you speak and every note you play has got to not be cheese. People will take the piss and say "that sounds like Bon Jovi," and it's only been two notes. It's being very obsessive of not being cheesy. Treading water in a sea of sarcasm. But Mike's good and he's smart. He's very deep.

So why are a bunch of Mancunians moving to Ontario?
I don't know. Musically, it's completely different. We're definitely going to be different. But whether or not that's a bad thing remains to be seen.

It's difficult for young bands — in this band I'm the oldest, everyone else is much younger — but they haven't got a chance to be rebels anymore. I'm not saying they should be trashing hotels rooms, but now you have to kiss so much arse. Or ass I should say. They don't have a chance to develop. Every airport around the world, it's the same fucking stores. Music's the same.

It's a great time now, though, your destiny is in your own hands. You don't need a fucking proper record label. We've got major record labels already inquiring about us and we've done no promotion. We've got record labels wanting to send A&R people to the gig. Why the fuck would I want A&R people? It's bullshit.

Are there any bands that you've found recently that you're into?
There's a band in Hamilton that completely knocked us back called Young Rival. Completely blew me away. It's like the Beach Boys meet the Sex Pistols. It was brilliant. It could have been 1968 or 2010.

I really like Deadmau5. I think he's a fucking genius. I'm not a real rock fan, but those are two I can think of.

I DJed Canadian Music Week last year and there was a band from Montreal called Beast who I thought were brilliant. I live in the suburbs and everytime I go out and there's a band, they're playing Lynyrd Skynrd's "Sweet Home Alabama." There's some rock bands I like. I like Zeppelin, I like the Stones.

I just watched a great documentary on Anvil. You know what, I watched the first half-hour and I was laughing at them and by the end I loved them.