Wrote For Luck, Takes Me Higher

There was further sad news at the weekend with the announcement of the death of Paul Ryder aged fifty eight. Paul aka Horse was brother of Shaun and the bass player in Happy Mondays, and when you listen to their records you realise how much of their unearthly groove was due to his basslines. Self taught and trying to copy the basslines from Motown, Parliament and Funkadelic and house records, his basslines are the foundation on which the Mondays were able to base their chaos. I first saw them at the Mountford Hall, Liverpool University in March 1989, a gig like no other, the entire room dancing from front to back, the stage a shadowy blur with Shaun sitting on the drum riser to deliver his stream of consciousness street poetry for most of the gig, Bez appearing through the dry ice, grinning and bug eyed. Paul and guitarist Mark were left and right, shrouded in darkness churning out their weirded out funk rock grooves and noise. They finished, as they had to, with Wrote For Luck.

Wrote For Luck (Dance Mix)

This performance has the band in full flight on Club X in September 1989. Club X was on Channel 4, one of the channels late 80s, late night programmes aimed at catching the youth audience. 

RIP Paul Ryder.

Another long lost/ never seen before TV performance from the 1989/ 1990 period came my way a few days ago, this time loved up rave heroes The Beloved. The group are miming (unlike the Mondays) but this clip of them doing Your Love Takes Me Higher on Hit Studio International, recorded at Limehouse in London, is rather good and a perfect little time capsule.

Your Love Takes Me Higher is a superb piece of house- pop, encapsulating the optimism and wide eyed feel of the times. The Beloved duo Jon and Steve have expanded to a full band for TV appearances drafting in friends, everyone giving it everything, all long hair, long sleeved t-shirts and baggy jeans. 

Your Love Takes Me Higher (Demo)

Boom

Boom! Two booms today- I can't remember exactly why either of these songs came into my head recently or if one sparked the other but I thought it seemed like a decent idea for a post.

Happy Mondays released Wrote For Luck in October 1988, a record around which an entire scene could be/was built, a riot of guitars and dance beats with Shaun Ryder's surrealist swirl of words reaching a peak. The first 12" release of Wrote For Luck with the famous Central Station sleeve had a B-side called Boom, a three minute extra that didn't make the cut for Bummed. Boom opens with heavily reverbed drums and then that queasy musical stew the Mondays created in 1988, keyboards and guitars and bass all fighting over the same ground, the instruments all over each other searching for space. Shaun delivers more wisdom from the microphone, tales of cabbies and drugs and living in a box with cardboard socks. I don't know if Martin Hannett produced Boom. He produced Bummed and this song sounds like it comes from the same place (a studio in Driffield, East Yorkshire with mixing done at Strawberry in Stockport).

Boom

In 1991 The Grid released a 12" called Boom, progressive house, pianos, synth stabs and bleeps, thunderous bass and chunky drums heading for deep space. The single came with several mixes. The one here is the 707 mix, presumably named after the drum machine which powers it. Not much to say about this slice of Richard Norris and Dave Ball music other than it is very good indeed.

Boom (707 Mix)

As a postscript- and this only occurred to me while writing this post- in the same year the two came together, Happy Mondays remixed by The Grid, two tracks from their Pills 'N' Thrills And Bellyaches album. It was a 12" I didn't get at the time- you couldn't buy everything could you? I don't own either of the remixes on CD or mp3 either so it's Youtube only. One of The Grid remixes was of Bob's Yer Uncle, Shaun's dirty talking sex song (a song incidentally that Tony Wilson selected to be played at his funeral which must have caused a few sniggers). The other remix was of Loose Fit, a low slung, smokey vibe of a song with a snakey guitar line and Shaun muttering and growling about a loose fit being his way of life. The Gulf War features too- 'gonna buy an air force base, gonna wipe out your race'. The Grid's Loose Fix remix isn't hugely different for the first few minutes, reworking the drumbeat and stretching everything out, gradually departing at the half way mark and going off into the distance slowly and hazily.

You Used To Speak The Truth But Now You're Clever

When I posted Boom, a Happy Mondays B-side from 1988, a couple of weeks ago I flipped the 12" over to enjoy the A-side shortly afterwards. If I could only have one Happy Mondays song it would be Wrote For Luck, their essence distilled into a gloriously fucked up but funky racket. Shaun's lyrics are his best, full of truths and wit, and Horse's guitar part is from some other place entirely. Martin Hannett's production makes perfect sense. Shaun said of working with Hannett it was the only time the producer was more out of it than the band. You could have the album version, the various mixes, the W.F.L. Oakenfold and Vince Clarke versions, any of them. In October 1988 The Bailey Brothers shot a video for the in Legends discoteque in town. It is also a work of genius- fill a city centre club with your mates, get them refreshed and roll cameras. Shaun's facial expressions tell the story in themselves. 

Boom

I had other things planned for this week but the St Anthony single has sent me off in this direction so I'm following where it takes me. Happy Mondays second album Bummed is a unique record- it sounds like nothing else ever recorded. The follow up, their real breakthrough Pills 'n' Thrills has a more commercial sound and is more dancefloor oriented (and none the worse for it) but Bummed is something else entirely. The original Wrote For Luck single, long before the W.F.L. remixes, came out in October 1988 and had a couple of different versions of the song and also this B-side Boom, a short song that presumably just didn't make the cut for Bummed. I'm assuming it was produced by Martin Hannett. It certainly sounds like it was done at the same time. It has that swirling mess of keyboards and guitars, the loping beat and some of Shaun's stream of consciousness, straight out of Salford lyrics- 'thanks to the cabby, we love the waccy baccy, but we couldn't pay the fare, so we pinned him down, held his feet to the ground and dumped all over his hair'. Or something like that.

Boom

I've survived without a file hosting service for some time now- Mediafire has a copyright detecting thing that makes downloads almost impossible, Boxnet as we know are not playing ball. For the time being I've just signed up with Zippyshare although I don't like the way it looks very much. We'll see how we get on. To be honest, I'm not an mp3 piracy evangelist and using Soundcloud and/or Youtube hasn't seemed to affect my ability to post what I want to or the numbers of people reading- but it is nice to have a download sometimes.