By 1987 the band, now consisting of Shaun (Vocals), Paul Ryder (Bass), Gary Whelan (Drums), Mark Day (Guitars) and Paul Davis (keyboards) released their first long player, the John Cale (from The Velvet Underground) produced "Squirrel and G Man 24 Hour Party People Plastic Face Carn't Smile Whiteout". This gave the group a base and more importantly recognition from the indie press. One Melody Maker hack described the band as "just about the only justification for indie music." Grim times for indie music in the UK as The Smiths carried the flag alone against the likes of Duran Duran, T'Pau and Howard Jones, people who in the words of Paul Weller "walk around like peacocks and superstars and not one of them can play a fucking note." By the summer of 1988 all of that would have changed and the Mondays would find themselves at the forefront of an explosion of guitar bands which fused dance beats with indie guitar rock.
 

The summer of 1988 or "The Second Summer of Love" as it was quickly dubbed brought a change in British youth culture which still reverberates today. The catalysts were twofold and worked hand in hand. Firstly, Detroit house and Chicago house were breaking big in Northern England. Clubs like Manchester's "Hacienda" and "International" were starting to attract regular Manc scallies as well as students. The other side of this was ecstasy. The drug became readily available in England and kids started to believe anything was possible. Huge all night rave parties in the English countryside were attended by thousands of kids, loved up and soaking up the communal vibe.

The Mondays and fellow Mancunians the Stone Roses were soon being touted as the next big things. This was backed up by the release of the Mondays second album Bummed in 1988. The album was produced by Martin Hannet With tracks such as "Lazyitis" ( a blatant rip off of Ticket to Ride), "Mad Cyril" and the classic "Wrote for Luck", Bummed was a truly astonishing album, a real breath of fresh air in British music. The album was steeped in acid soaked guitars on top of funky dance beats. Shaun recollected : "We were dancing round the studio off our 'eads on E all the fuckin' time….. once Martin got used to our sound it was great. Cos beforehand he was all heavy on the drums so we were like 'hey, turn up the fuckin' guitars and stop acting like we're New fuckin' Order man!'…… the rest of 'em can't be arsed writin' so it's left down to me to write the fuckin' lyrics…." The album was an indie classic and many fans maintain it was the band's best work. From here on there was no turning back. For the first time since punk music had clothes (the baggy jeans and flares soon worn by half of England), a sound (christened 'Baggy') and a drug. Big things were gonna happen…….
 
 

"We're Mister Bitter (?), we'll take a bit of this and that" - Hallelujah.

By early 1989 the Mondays were the most notorious indie band. Stories abounded of the band using drugs like most people use soap. And it was true. When they visited America in late '89 they tried to shock the audience stateside. They went one further. They sickened them. Tony Wilson, head of Factory Records, was on a promotional trip to the states when he calmly announced that the Happy Mondays were drug dealers. In Britain at the time, drugs meant little more than selling a bit of Bob Hope to your mates (or so people thought). In America drugs meant gangs, shootings and wholesale urban devastation. The Mondays were big users of drugs and Shaun has admitted being a drug dealer in his younger days. Years later he said " we was doing fuckin everything we could get our 'ands on…… selling E to the crowd at gigs……official and unofficial merchandise…. You name it we was into it" The bands problems with customs officers were later chronicled in the song "Holiday".
But for the most part 1989 was another year of success for the Mondays. The press couldn't get enough of them, they were after all, a journalists dream. Shaun and Bez would turn up for interviews in their terrace clobber and insult everyone - living or dead. Nobody could really defined their sound although there was the odd comment about the Stones. The Mondays did to acid what the Stones did to Rhythm and Blues. The grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and twisted it, fucked about with it and the end result was something truly original and wonderful. Other bands (most notably U2) have tried to introduce dance beats into guitar music. And it doesn't matter how many times Bono talks of their "always being a dance element to U2's music", none of them have ever done it with quite the same style as these boys.

By the end of 1989 Manchester had become Madchester, half the nation were wearing flares and "sorted", "nice one" and "double top" had become the language of English youth. The defining moment of baggy came in November of that year. The epochal Madchester EP was riding high in the charts and songs like "Clap Your Hands" and "Rave On" had the critics foaming at the mouth. At the same time The Stone Roses were in the top ten with "Fools Gold". Both bands appeared together on Top of the Pops that November in, according to one journalist, "the moment the '90's began."

The first year of the new decade saw the Happy Mondays at their absolute peak. Pills, Thrills n' Bellyaches was a number one album at a time when indie albums just didn't do that. They sold out two nights at the Manchester G-Mex and also sold out Wembley Arena. Step On filled dancefloors across the UK. Fame, money and notoriety grew and it wouldn't be long before problems began to arise.

With The Roses away it was left to the Mondays to justify the Madchester hype single-handedly. Pills n' Thrills succeeded in spades. Universal critical and commercial acclaim followed rapidly. Each track on Pills is a belter. The Mondays proved any doubters wrong. Guitars were put to the forefront of the Mondays material and Mark Day's guitar work sounded like nothing else before or since. Shaun's lyrics were better than ever - lines such as
"I feel good, how's your breathing? If it stops for good we'll be leaving"

once described as 'a lyric you could retire after writing'. A glorious mess, Pills was a truly unique album and a testament to the heady days of the early '90's.

The band headlined the Glastonbury festival that summer although Shaun admits he remembers nothing of it. Foreign success also beckoned including the Rock in Rio festival. In the summer of 1991 they headlined a gig for 30,000 people at Leeds Elland Road football stadium. The gig was a triumph, closing with an eight minute version of Wrote for Luck. Then the rot started to set in. The drugs stories weren't funny anymore. Shaun was addicted to heroin. He said Sinead O'Connor needed a "good fucking" and then apologised. Feminists were described as "fat, ugly cows" and Shaun and Bez posed in Penthouse surrounded by naked girls. "We were taking the piss for fuck's sake" Bez recollected. "We'd go along to interviews out of our 'eads. They just wound us up and watched us go. Then you see the papers and it's like 'Fuck! Did I say that?' We didn't mean half of it and couldn't remember most of it." The backlash was about to begin.

In late 1991 (dates?) the band went to Barbados to record the much awaited follow up to Pill's n' Thrills. A story leaked home about Bez smashing up a fleet of buses. It was true, he broke his arm. The sessions were reported to be very tense and the music piss-poor. Shaun was now taking 20 rocks of crack a day. At one point, when they had just finished making the album, Shaun held the mastertapes of the album in his hand and shook them furiously as he screamed down the phone to Tony Wilson. He basically told Wilson that if he didn't get £40,000 wired to him that afternoon he'd smash the tapes. Factory was already in trouble and were depending on this album to bail them out so Wilson had to get the money. He re-mortgaged his house.

When the album came out in 1992 it was savaged by the English music press. While on reflection it doesn't deserve the stick it got at the time, (Sunshine & Love and Stinkin' Thinkin' in particular stand out) "Yes Please" was not up to scratch. The album was released into a radically changed environment to the one just two years earlier. The Stone Roses were involved in a court case with their record company and were banned from recording. The keyboard player from the Charlatans was in prison on armed robbery charges. The Hacienda was in serious trouble and would close within months. Manchester was being torn apart by gang violence and drug wars. Any semblance of the loved up vibes of 88 to 90 was long gone. As Ian Brown of The Stone Roses said : "You'd see kids stood at the bar of the Hacienda with an Uzi. And they were only 14 ears old."

When the Mondays toured "Yes Please", it was obvious they were a spent force. Bez, dancing with a broken arm, looked ridiculous. Shaun looked like he didn't give a fuck, strung out 24/7. And the simmering tensions within the band were barely kept under wraps. As Shaun said, "We 'ad tour buses the size of 'ouses, and we all had our own tour bus". The reviews from the gigs were less than ecstatic. "When the play the old stuff, the kids get up and dance and its nearly like old times. When they play the new stuff, everyone skins up or goes to the bar." There was always a self destructive side to the Mondays and it was exciting. Yet on that tour it wasn't exciting anymore, they had more or less self-destructed already. They were merely going through the motions. A deal with EMI was on the table which would have made the band financially secure. At negotiations Shaun got up and said, "I'm going out to get some Kentucky Fried Chicken i.e. Smack. They waited for him for three hours, they knew he wasn't coming back. Negotiations were closed. It came as no surprise to anyone when it was announced shortly afterwards that "The Happy Mondays are taking a three year break from the music business". They had split up, nobody was in any doubt about that.

At the end of the day, the split can probably be blamed on drugs. The years of Pills n' Thrills ended with one enormous bellyache. They simply hated each other. To this day Shaun has yet to repair his personal relationship with anyone other than Bez and his brother Paul. Shaun sums it up nicely :
"The Mondays were a good band with some good tunes who made a few million pounds and then pissed it all away."