Happy Mondays

So Jeff Barrett eventually sets up Heavenly, um, but he at the time is just somebody on the scene.

He's doing press for various people, including The Happy Mondays and, uh, Primal Screen, people like that.

Yeah.

And they really clicked, don't they? They actually look quite similar.

Yeah

... doesn't he? Okay, Jim, who is he doing remixes for?

Well, the first one he did was Happy Mondays.

Yeah.

So I met them and it clinched it because I said, one of them went, I think they were a bit, like, off about it at first.

And then one of them said, what have you done before? I went, oh, I'll throw in the Happy Mondays card.

I went, you know, I worked here.

I worked at Factory.

I sang Happy Mondays.

Happy Mondays? That was it.

The beginning of a beautiful friendship, you know.

And we had great success.

I mean, but the ...

I mean, were they sort of quite professional about it? 'Cause I mean, the Happy Mondays, they were not.

They were ...

Presumably they weren't 24-hour, they weren't sort of 48-hour party people or, or were they be- behind the, be ...

I don't think there was any kind of... particular way of working it was just the way I'd always worked really is um just go into a room and think really hard you know and uh yeah that was you know that was the way you always had to do it you know pressure was on in the early days because you you know you didn't have as long as you did later on uh because you had to tour you know so uh yeah

Yeah and did you at that kind of late 80s period I mean again there was a kind of another wave of young people coming through and new sounds and you know a lot of bands were splitting up in that period of 87, 88 but you know ecstasy came along and then suddenly you had a different group of 16, 18 year olds you had the Manchester sound with you know, Happy Mondays and then the Soup Dragons, Primal Scream, dance music like Orb and 808 State and a guy called Gerald.

And then in America, you know, we started getting like 4AD records, had people like the Pixies and Throwing Muses and the Seattle grunge scene.

Were you, did any of that sort of make you start to think about, you know, where you fitted into the scheme of things or were you just on your own, in your own sort of

I was getting like...

Like, and I wasn't, I'm into this album more than I was into the Happy Mondays.

But, like, some of, like, the rhythms and grooves that Happy Mondays were playing with.

Like, I hear them on this one.

Yeah,

they're very they're very song first more than band identity first like you know their song identity way more than their like the band you know

yeah and then we also had like Happy Mondays a bit of like groovy like yeah I love it a bit of Psychedelia Detroit Techno in there as well and then Placebo I'm not mad on sorry I know you said I love Placebo but I just like I find it mad there's such an American accent in this thing when they're from London yeah I know that always pisses me off music and I don't know why and then obviously we have Gomez who weren't as big but they're nice like acoustic-y banjo-y vibes and then obviously David Gray just when White Ladder album came out so I think that that here would have been absolutely amazing and there was around 95,000 people supposedly attended so yeah what a time to be alive what a gig to go to

like Robbie Williams I don't think he got any more famous than he was then yeah like he's he never got any more not to say that he wasn't like he was everywhere yeah and like that I think he was two albums in those two albums are probably his two strongest albums as well so the set list you know is going to be so good like even with David Gray opening the thing up and just playing White Ladder like oh my god little did the 95,000 people know that every single one of them would have a copy of that album in their house or car within the next 12 months at least one copy

And this kind of showed that, like, Slain kind of became, like, a finishing skill for future headliners.