Happy Mondays: How Thieves, Drug Dealers, and Would-Be Kidnappers Took Over Madchester’s Music Scene

0:00 Disgraceland as a production of Double Elvis.

0:12 The story about Happy Mondays might be one of the most transgressive rock and roll stories that I've ever told. The group was started by a teenage thief who, if you can believe this, once bit a dog while completely high on acid. The bandmates were nearly killed trying to score crack in Harlem in New York. They introduced ecstasy to Manchester, England, and ran the small army of dealers who sold it at the legendary Hacienda nightclub. These guys stole their own records from their record label so that they could sell them and support their drug habit, and of course they tried to kidnap both Donovan and Johnny Marr.

0:55 Happy Mondays did all of this while making great music, music that would come to define an era known as Madchester. Now, unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show. That was not great music. That was a preset loop from my mellotron called Salford's Slow Dance MK.

1:13 Two.

1:14 I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to it. Must have been love by Roxette, And why would I play you that specific slice of pretty woman's soundtracking cheese Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on June twenty second, nineteen ninety and that was the day that Happy Mondays arrived at Glastonbury for the biggest show of their career, bringing with them a level of criminality in chaos so.

1:42 Problematic that it would literally shut down the esteemed festival for a year.

1:47 On this episode, thieves, dealers, kidnappings, crack, ecstasy, transgression galore and Happy Mondays. I'm Jake Brennan and this is discrete Land. There wasn't an art to the thieving. It was never meant to be this graceful, poetic thing. It was all action and adrenaline. It was smash grab, take whatever you could sell. Here in the dirty old town of nineteen seventy Salford, that's the city directly.

2:36 Next to Manchester, England.

2:38 Easy targets for thieving were easy to find. One of the pubs kept its overstock of booze unguarded in a garage next door, so when no one was looking, you went ahead and got access to the garage by hook or by crooker, whatever was needed, and you took as many bottles as you could fit into your sticky fingers, and then you hauled ass down the cobbled street. Not just booze though, clo bikes, whatever you could get your hands on, you would steal and you would sell. He didn't do it just for the money. You did it because you might get caught. And that means your heart pound in your blood pump, and that gave the whole enterprise, meaning thinking that you could get caught, that gave you life.

3:20 Sean Ryder had been a thieving little Salford punk ever since he was a kid, and as anyone worth their salt from Salford will tell you, that's an even tougher breed of thieving little punk than they were raised across the river in Manchester. Sean's delinquent interest went beyond stealing, though He started fire as he set off smoke bombs, He dropped bricks from highway overpasses, and he imagined that he looked cool doing it, as well as cool perhaps as Steve Marriott of the Small Faces or David Bowie on Top of the Pops.

3:51 Even cooler was David Essex.

3:54 David Essex oohs.

3:55 That blue Jean baby clean rock and roll rebellion in the film That'll Be The Day and equal stardust David Xcess rocked on. But Sean Ryder was no matinee idol like David Essex, and he wasn't a rock star with a stylish mod haircut like Steve Mario. He couldn't even play an instrument at fifteen years old. He was just a high school dropout who barely knew the alphabet. He was a dropout who needed a job, a real job, because Petty Thievery wasn't going to cut it anymore. So Sean Ryder found work at the postal service. Like his father before him. It was all so predictable, so boring, and job this boring required a little outside influence to make it more tolerable, which is how Sean Ryder wound up delivering the Royal mail as a teenager while tripping

4:46 his brains out on LSD.

4:52 The acid kicked in a little earlier than usual. Not that he was complaining.

4:57 LSD made his sole sucking postal wrote that much more or bearable. Some people got paranoid on acid, not Sean, and he had plenty to be paranoid about the scam he'd been running with those yellow pages, the ones he got paid extra to deliver the thousands that he said he delivered, even though he never delivered a single one.

5:17 It put him under the microscope. And now some Internal Affairs Division or whatever the Royal Mail called it was watching him every step of the way. He was walking his route and doing his best to remain upright while a row of houses began to droop to the ground like he was in a Salvador Dolly painting. Can you imagine delivering the mail on acid, turning of stuff letters through a slot in the door while the door is talking to you. Even worse delivering the mail high on lsc was when that dog started barking at you. It was the same thing every day, that dog yapping and snarling at Sean like it wanted to kill him. He could picture the headline dog bites mail man.

5:57 What a cliche.

5:59 But that wasn't gonna happ today, because as Shawn got closer and the dog got louder, Sean, in his highly altered state, he got himself a better idea. He reached down and took the dog in his hands, and as he did so, the dog didn't bite him as he would think, given how this is all played out, Instead, Sean Rider bit the dog. Yes, a teenage mail man high on acid, bit the dog that had been harassing him every day on his mail route. And so Seawan Ryder's career in the Royal Mail ended. So now, at age eighteen, Sean Rider was on the dole unemployment, sitting around board and pretending to be depressed so that his doctor would prescribe him meds.

6:44 That he could use to get high.

6:46 Even at this young age, Sean knew he was not cut out for a regular day job. On the other hand, he couldn't sink into a life of total criminality, because that was just another kind of dead end, or required an outlet where he could exercise his long held criminal impulses but do so in a socially acceptable way. You can't do that if you're working for the postal service, but you can do that if you're in a rock band.

7:14 And I'm not talking about David Essex or David Bowie.

7:17 I'm talking about something more attainable, like the local bands who had begun to make a go of it in South or to Manchester, like Joy Division, who had recently made themselves into New Order following the sudden death of the lead singer Ian Curtis. Didn't matter that Sean and his friends didn't own any instruments. They could steal those.

7:35 And it didn't matter that Sean could even play an instrument. His friend Bez Mark Berry he couldn't play for shit. Bez couldn't write his way out of a paper bag either, But Bez, like Sean, was rock and roll.

7:47 To his core.

7:48 In his autobiography Twisting My Melon, Sean Ryan wrote, Bez was actually a pretty talentless set anything apart from being Bez, but he was really fucking good at that.

7:58 Me and Bez were always rock and roll. We were rock and roll long before we were in a band. It just came naturally.

8:05 So the musically challenged Bez would become a member of the new band that Sean Ryder was creating, playing a role that only Bez could play, the guy who dances wildly and erratically on stage while shaking the moraccas. And that band, Happy Mondays, came together as naturally as rock and roll came to Sean Ryder, with Shawn's brother Paul on bass, gas, Whelan on drums, Mark Day on guitar, and Paul Davis on keyboards. Happy Mondays, with Sean Ryder as their unlikely lead singer, began rehearsing in an old mill that doubled as the site of illegal bare knuckle fighting competitions. Much later, in hindsight, Happy Mondays would be praised for how they've been ahead of the curve, for how they took the acid house music soundtracking the underground

8:51 in Detroit and Chicago and applied it.

8:53 To the British post punk at the time.

8:56 But honestly, I don't think it was that calculated at all. He had a group of guys who were unemployed and some of whom had zero musical.

9:03 Skill, but all of whom had the attitude, with.

9:07 No other prospects and no goals beyond their stated goals of one getting high, two getting laid, three partying all night, and four making music inspired by a lifetime spent listening to everything from reggae and Northern soul to led Zeppelin and James Brown. The whole affair was kind of halfway between survival instinct and doing something quote unquote on a lark.

9:32 But I don't think innovation was ever part of the equation or Happy Mondays even the name Happy Mondays was, in Sean's words, kind of a shit name, and that was intentional.

9:43 I don't agree. I think it's an awesome mame.

9:45 But anyways, all of this is not to say that Happy Mondays didn't have ambition, because they did, and that ambition soon had them pursuing the hottest spot in town.

10:01 This is the.

10:01 Legendary Hacienda nightclub in Manchester, and yes it's always this Latin here. It was opened to nineteen eighty two by New Order and their manager along with Tony Wilson, the British empresario and co founder of.

10:15 New Orders label Factory Records.

10:17 The Hacienda was modeled after dance Atteryria in New York City. In addition to featuring seminal performances from Manchester bands like The Smiths, The Stone Roses and Oasis, the Hacienda was also ground zero for house music in the UK, with DJs spinning wax from Chicago, Miami and Detroit. The Hacienda was totally home grown, just like Factory Records. In fact, when he started Factory, Tony Wilson established the record label as the antithesis of your standard label. The artists owned the music. The label owned nothing, they say. Tony Wilson wrote that down in his own blood on a napkin or some rather than drop evil corporate contracts with his band.

11:03 Fucking crazy, I know.

11:05 Anyway, Happy Mondays knew they wanted to leverage their own homegrown appeal to be a factory band, and they also knew that their way to factory was through the hacienda. So they slipped their demo to someone who is friends with one.

11:23 Of the club's DJ's up there in the booth.

11:25 And that guy, the one with the headphone, that guy you see it right it that's Mike Pickery.

11:30 He DJ nude naked.

11:32 Totally buck ass naked on Friday nights, get your head out of the gun, or not nude in that way, it was just a night, a.

11:38 Dance night called nude. Anyway, the DJ Pickering He.

11:42 Passed the tape along to Tony Wilson, and faster than the bpm of some acid house single on Hauss he had a turntable. Happy Mondays were soon on their way to making their first Hobum.

11:57 Squirrel in g Man twenty four hour party. People, plastic face, can't smile, white out. That was what Happy Monday's called their nineteen eighty seven debut album on Factory Records. It was a title as cryptic and inside jokey as many of Sean's lyrics that were on That album was produced by John Klee of Velvet Underground, and the record was a more jangly danceable take on joy division post punk meets post funk. It also established Sewan's inclination to steal not only physical things, but melodies as well.

12:32 Future pressings of the album would.

12:33 Not include the song Desmond, which sounded way too familiar to the Beatles' Obla Dee Obla Da. It would earn them a cease and desist letter from an attorney representing Michael Jackson.

12:44 Who owned the Beatles catalog at the time.

12:47 But if this album riffed on the recent and distant past alike, nothing about it could have predicted the future. Happy Mondays were about to become not only the soundtrack to the scene that was emerging at the Hacienda, they would become that scene's in house drug dealers and its resident crooks as well. Because Sean Ryder may have now become the lead singer of a band, but that did not.

13:11 Mean that he was no longer a thief.

13:36 The druggiest bands in music history seemed to defy the odds. Take the Rolling Stones, for example, Brian Jones was an early casualty, but his notorious band mate Keith Richards was a longtime user and amuser turned survivor. What's the Dennis Leary line about Keith Richards. He's done all the drugs in the world, so now the rest of us have to wait and smoke his ashes when he dies.

14:00 Something like that.

14:02 In the nineteen eighties, Happy Mondays were barely known outside of Manchester and they were.

14:07 Already defining the odds.

14:09 According to Sean Ryder, by the time they visited New York City for the first time in nineteen eighty seven, they were dropping acid on a daily basis.

14:17 But acid wasn't.

14:18 The only drug that interested them. They were self proclaimed garbage heads, and a garbage head did any and all illicit substances that were put in front of them. So when they landed at JFK Airport in nineteen eighty seven, shortly after the release of their debut album, what they wanted in front of them wasn't the Statue of Liberty or Central Park or CBGB or any other tourist trap destination of note.

14:43 They wanted to go immediately to Harlem, where they could procure the drug that was currently all the rage in America, crack cocaine.

14:55 The driver would only take them so far. The car came to.

14:58 A stop and Bez got out.

15:01 They traveled the remaining distance on foot. The dealer was waiting as advertised, and the crack was cheap thirty forty American dollars for a fistful. They returned to their hotel room at the Hotel Chelsea, where nine years prior, the blade of Sid Vicius's knife or someone's knife found its way into the abdomen of Sid's girlfriend, Nancy Sponging. Now being garbage heads and being defiers of the odds, I'm like Nancy and I'm like Sid.

15:29 God rest their souls.

15:31 Sean and Bez wanted more crack as soon as they smoked it, so it was back out onto the mean streets of Fierce City.

15:40 This time, however, they were on their own.

15:43 There was no one to drive them.

15:45 High on crack and taking swigs from forty ounce bottles of malt liquor, they stumbled around from corner to corner and they came to a spot that looked familiar. In fact, they were in a completely different neighborhood than before. Standing before them was a different dealer, but that didn't matter. This guy had the crack and they had the cash, and so the deal went down. And that's when they heard a voice from behind them.

16:08 Hey you hey.

16:12 Six teenage boys emerged confidently from the shadows. Sean and Bez were surrounded.

16:19 The lead kid doing the talking.

16:20 Was bug eyed, as bug eyed as Bez was when he was on stage, dancing like a lunatic with his moroccas. But this kid wasn't holding maraccas. He was holding a pistol, and Bez frantically said.

16:33 Something to try to break the ice. He was fucked up and drunk.

16:36 He basically spat his words at the kid with a gun, and this pissed the kid off.

16:41 No one likes to be spit on, even.

16:43 By accident, so the kid raised his gun and Sean and Bez were both panicking.

16:48 Now.

16:48 Sean gripped the forty outs tightly and did the math and his crack app of brain to figure out where and how hard to swing the bottle.

16:54 At this kid's head. Thankfully he didn't have to.

16:58 The dealer was suddenly back making the piece, telling everyone to chill out. The standoff was bad for business. Soon Sean and Bez were back to the safety of their room at the Chelsea, and shortly thereafter back on a plane home to Manchester where they sought out another drug baby yet to try, but this one wouldn't nearly end their lives. This one they changed their lives. In nineteen eighty eight, Happy Mondays recorded new songs with Factory Records of Steam producer Martin Hannett. In the album that came out of those sessions, Bombed, was released on Factory in November of that year. It was a major step forward for the band. The Happy Mondays were no longer replicating their influences. They were now using those influences to create

17:45 a new sound. Bombed was an early example of what would become known as the baggy sound, which is to say indie dance music characterized by an intoxicating mixture of psychedelia and acid house. And if their label mates knew Order were tight as a metronome, Happy Mondays were the opposite. They were as loose as those clothes that people were now wearing while dancing to this so called baggy sound.

18:09 Bummed in particular, was heavily influenced by the American house music being spawn regularly at the Hacienda nightclub, as well as the music of talking heads, pornographic magazines, porno music from Amsterdam, and crime films, and specifically the nineteen seventy film Performance starring Mick Jagger. But most of all, the new album was influenced by the drug ecstasy. Ecstasy, or E as it was known, found its way into Manchester via Amsterdam. Happy Mondays were not only the first ones in town to do this drug, they were also the.

18:44 Ones dealing it at the Hacienda.

18:47 And if you partied at the Hacienda club back around nineteen eighty seven or eighty eight and someone slipped you some ecstasy, that someone was most likely Sean Ryder or Bez or another member of the Happy Monday's small army of dealers, and the Happy Mondays were fiends per E. They ate it around the clock, and they sold it for twenty five pounds of pop. And when money got tight, Sean stole copies of his own band's records from the Factory Record label offices and sold them to local stores and used the money to buy more ecstasy. I don't think it's hyperbolic to say this, but without Happy Mondays acting as Manchester's unofficial ecstasy supply, the sweaty, baggy era defining scene at the heart of the Hacienda would not

19:30 have been the same, plain and simple, even if some of their contemporaries, like New Orders Peter Hook regarded them as shifty eyed street punks who would just as soon steal from your wallet as it would get you high. And Peter Hook wasn't wrong, That's exactly what they were. The confluence of psychedelic rave music with the Happy Monday's NonStop supply of ecstasy was clutch, and the Happy Mondays were so crucial to this whole thing that when the Hacienda shut down at two in the morning every night, Sean Ryd would return home to his flat only to find a line of people at his door stretching around the block waiting to buy more ecstasy. Eventually, Sewn Ryder had assembled a crew of twelve people to move the

20:12 drug in the club and keep Manchester rolling. And when the cops got wind of what he was doing and tried to crack down because club owners had complained about the drop in alcohol sales, because people who were high on ecstasy only drank water nut booz. Seawan Ryder kept rolling, kept dealing, kept slinging that ecstasy. Even when a sixteen year old girl named Claire Layton collapsed on the floor at the Hacienda and died because of a rare reaction to the drug. None of this dampened attendance at the Hacienda, nor did news of Seawan riders bus on the Island of Jersey.

20:47 When customs found cocaine in his luggage.

20:50 It was all part of an outlaw culture that was growing in and around Manchester, an outlaw culture than in the fall of.

20:58 Nineteen eighty nine was fine given a name with the release of their Madchester ravon EP. Happy Mondays unwittingly coined the Madchester term, though no one in that scene at that time ever called it that. The Madchester EP contained the excellent track Hallelujah, which became the Monday's biggest hit to date, cracking the top twenty in the UK and landing them in appearance on Top of the Pops where Sean Ryder had watched David Bowie perform all those years ago.

21:27 Soon the group was no longer playing smaller venues like the Hacienda. By nineteen ninety, Happy Mondays were performing to sold out crowds at Wembley Arena and even headlining the Glastonbury Festival, all of which coincided was Sean Ryder's first foray into Herod. Sean Ryder, Bez and the entire Manchester movement was high as fuck and about to get even higher.

21:58 We'll be right back after this.

22:00 We're, we're, we're.

22:09 There was always a scheme.

22:11 There was the pub hoping scheme that was a pre fame scheme, one that took place during the eight mile walk Sean.

22:17 And Bez made from their place to the Hacienda.

22:20 Every day, they would stop at pubs along the route, and inside each pub they'd locate a single woman nursing or drink.

22:28 Bez would then talk.

22:30 Her ear off while Sean rooted around in her purse and took whatever cash he could find. And there was the Kidnapped Donovan's scheme that was a post fame scheme that was done because well, I don't know what to tell you. Sean Ryder and the guy's in Happy Mondays just really loved Donovan and wanted to, in their words, capture him and take him to the Hacienda party. This is how it went down. The tour manager pokes his head into Donovan's dressing room and the tour manager says, excuse me, Donovan, there's some guys from Manchester who just watched your show and they wanted me to tell you.

23:09 They're waiting for you out back with a van.

23:12 A van.

23:12 Donovan asked, what is it that they want. The tour manager explains that.

23:17 They'd like to capture you and take you to the Hacienda nightclub in Manchester. Capture the tour manager says, well, that was the word they used. Yes, Donovan wants to know why, so the tour manager explains they didn't give a reason. Good lord, Donovan says, is there another way out of this place?

23:38 Okay?

23:39 So that scheme didn't go quite as planned. The Happy Mondays were not able to successfully kidnap Donovan. They did name a song after him, though, and obviously their failure to learn aging folk star and to their van did not dampen their spirits, because they soon rebounded with their epic Glastonbury scheme.

23:57 And this is.

23:58 Actually a multi layered scheme which handsomely demonstrates just how dangerous, reckless, and transgressive Happy Mondays had become by nineteen ninety. Now, first you got to remember, for a van like Happy Mondays, Glastonbury was a huge deal.

24:13 Seventy thousand people.

24:15 It was the biggest show of their career to date.

24:17 So naturally, Happy Mondays wanted their friends there with them to celebrate, so they requested over two hundred complimentary passes for friends from Manchester. But even that wasn't enough, so they packed a computer printer along with all of their instruments and all their drug paraphernalia, and then they used that printer to print out extra complimentary passes on site.

24:39 We're talking like another thousand passes. Many of the holders of these passes were like Happy Mondays themselves, living completely outside the law. So when they got to Glastonbury, they did what criminals do. They robbed tents on site, they sold drugs, They shook down vendors to collect some bogus tax as though they were mafia members, which I guess in a way they kind of were. But this whole thing, all this activity it would directly result in a record two hundred and thirty five arrests at Glastonbury, fifty thousand pounds in damages, and to Glastonbury getting canceled the following year.

25:15 Let me say that again, Happy Mondays were the reason that there was no Glastonbury Festival in nineteen ninety one, and when it did return in nineteen ninety two, a ten foot fence had been built around the entire festival site.

25:28 Thank you, Happy Mondays.

25:30 But back to nineteen ninety The next part of Happy Monday's multi layered Glastonbury scheme was selling counterfeit merchandise.

25:38 Yes, in addition to selling.

25:39 Shirts at official merch stations on the festival grounds, the Happy Mondays had their people out there slinging bootleg goods as well. One of their promoters, this guy they called John the Phone, was in charge of the bootleg merch money.

25:53 He kept it stash safely out of sight.

25:55 A biker crew caught wind of this buried treasure and they kidnapped John the Phone to find out where the money was hidden.

26:01 They took John to a dilapidated farmhouse. They tied John.

26:05 Up and they tried to beat it out of him, but John the Phone wasn't talking. John the Phone held the line all weekend long. Sean Ryder was unaware of John the Phone's dire situation because Sean Ryder spent the majority of the Glastonbury weekend lying in the luggage compartment of the Happy Monday's tour bus smoking heroin. He had started using the drug back when he got a brutal sunburn at a gig in Spain. The pain was unbearable, so someone suggested he smoke some heroin and now here.

26:36 He was a so called garbage head, an indiscriminate drug user who does everything yet gets addicted to nothing, slowly but surely getting addicted to heroin. Sean Ryder was using dope when Happy Monday's made their next record, Pills and Thrills and Belly Aches, with English DJ Paul Oakenfold producing with songs like Kinky Afro, Bob's Your Uncle and Step Up on. The album was Happy Monday's most assured and musically rich to date. It was also their first to feature backing vocals by new member Rowetta, who brought a classic soul vibe that perfectly complimented Shawn's untrained Everyman Vocal Cadence.

27:16 The album peaked at number four on the UK Album Chart, where it was certified platinum. In the United States, it broke into the top one hundred of the Billboard Album Chart. The Happy Monday's decision to work with Oakenfold would reportedly inspire U two to incorporate electronic music into Octang Baby the following year, and likewise for Blur to work with electronic producer William Orbit for their album. Thirteen Pills and Thrills and Belly Aches was released on Factory Records in November of nineteen ninety, and with it the legend of Happy Monday's those chaotic thugs who literally shut down Glastonbury was exploding.

27:56 This meant an appearance.

27:57 On MTV in which Sean Ryd joke that he used to make money working as a male prostitute. It was typical rock and roll fuckery, but the British tabloid News of the World ran with it as if it were actually true. Sean was so pissed off that he showed up to a Manchester bar wielding a three fifty seven magnet.

28:14 His intention had been to shoot a hole in the roof in order to fully demonstrate his anger. Instead, a cooler had prevailed and he simply smashed a mirror with a bottle instead. The violent outburst only made what should have been a celebratory time more tense. Sean's brother Paul, along with the other guys in the band, were finding it difficult to enjoy their newfound success because the press only cared about Sean and Bez. In fact, their guitarist, Mark Day, was ready to quit altogether. Factory Records, meanwhile, a label built on idealism rather than capitalism, was hemorrhaging money, as was the Hacienda, the club that Factory had a stake in. Too much cash wasted on drugs and frivolous things like the infamous boardroom table that was suspended from

28:59 the ceiling of Factory's offices, and because of this, Factory desperately needed Happy Mondays to record their next album as soon as possible in order to leverage the group's current success and help keep the whole operation aflow.

29:15 But there was the little issue of Seawan's heroin habit.

29:19 One concern was that the album would never get made if he wasn't moved far away from where he could score that particular drug, and this is why a plan was put into motion for Happy Mondays to travel to Barbados, where they would record their fourth album at Blue Wave, a studio owned by Eddie Grant from The Equals Eddie Grant, the guy with the Electric Avenue Hit, Chris Franz, and Tina Weymouth from Talking Heads. They were going to produce the Happy Monday's next record at Eddie Grant's place. In the group's outgoing guitar player, Mark Day would be replaced by Johnny Marr from The Smiths. The smith This had been broken up for about four years. When Johnny Marr walked into Seawan Ryder's flat, he found himself face to

30:06 face not just with Sean, but with Happy Monday's manager and the rest of the group as well, minus the guitarist Mark Day. Johnny Marr quickly learned he was there to be coerced into traveling to Barbados, where he would perform on The Monday's new album in place of Mark Wait, did I say coerced?

30:26 Actually the word Johnny used when.

30:28 Talking about this was kidnapped, just like Donovan, because in addition to everyone standing in front of him making demands behind him, flanking the single exit out of Sean Ryders' flat were two very capable, very qualified, very large men, and no doubt, from Johnny Marr's estimation, their one job was to not let him leave until he agreed to go to Barbados. Johnny had to admit that Barbados sounded like a good time. But Barbados with Happy Mondays the most transgressive rock and roll band on the planet at the moment, would they even get out alive?

31:07 It didn't matter.

31:08 Because Johnny's wife was about to give birth to their first child any day now, and he wasn't going anywhere. But Sean Ryder dug in in the moment Johnny's wife went into labor, he said they'd put Johnny on the first plane back to Manchester. In Sean's eyes, it really was that simple. Life really was that uncomplicated. You wanted something, you took it. You wanted money, drugs.

31:32 You wanted Donovan to go party with you at the hacienda, you wanted Johnny Mar to become your guitar player.

31:38 You just made it happen.

31:40 But Johnny Marr wasn't going anywhere besides Mark Day, their original guitarist would quickly return to the fold, perhaps feeling threatened by the whole getting replaced by Johnny Marrthing so Happy Mondays were soon on a plane without Johnny, en route to Barbados, where they'd find no heroin, but where they would find plenty of crack cocaine, as well as the beginning of the end a truly mad era. From the start Happy Mondays Factory Records, the Hacienda Madchester. It was all supposed to be big fun, even if Tony Wilson would tell you that there was at one time a larger goal of musical revolution with an impact that rivaled punk rock or hip hop for those on the front lines. However, like Sean Ryder, fun was the endgame.

32:51 The more hedonistic and debauched the better. Just earlier this year twenty twenty six, in an interview with The Guardian, Sean Ryder said, quote, my thought process when we started The Mondays was I want to be in a band, I want to shag birds, I want to travel around the world, I want to party all night, and I want to take drugs.

33:10 Unquote.

33:12 It's fair to say that he accomplished what he set out to do, and he was really good at it, just like Bez was really good at being Bez. But on January seventeenth, nineteen ninety two, when a plane carrying Sean and the rest of Happy Mondays landed in Barbados to begin sessions for their fourth studio album, Fun, was at a premium. Everything was work, everything was maximum effort.

33:37 The bliss out baggy grooves that were the Monday's bread and butter refused to flow forth. Sean was too busy jonesing for a fix to focus on their music, and Bez's lack of musical talent disinterested the album's producers, Chris Franz and Tina Weymouth, so.

33:53 Sean and Bez struck out on their own. They scoured the island for drugs.

33:58 First they found weed, Then they found crack, and since they required copious quantities of this stuff, the money quickly ran out. Buying drugs now became as much work as coming up with new songs. They traded Armani jeans and Hugo Boss shirts for crack. They rented multiple cars on factories dime just so they could remove the batteries and trade those for crack, And while the rest of the band labored away with Chris and Tina and Eddie Grant's studio.

34:25 Sean and Bez slipped outside to Eddie Grant's pool, stole a plastic sunludger, carried it down to the street and traded it for crack. Sean even lied to Tony Wilson and said he was going to burn the master tapes from the sessions thus far if Tony didn't wire the money. The money Tony sent was for the band members per deems, as well as some of Chris and Tina's producing fees.

34:48 But according to Sean, it was Chris and Tina's idea to shake down Tony in the first place. They were worried about getting paid at all. Knowing what they knew about Factory's financial troubles. It was of a big secret that they were all here of Barbados on some doomed Hail Mary mission to save the record label and the club.

35:07 The very fate of Factory could well rest on how good this Happy Monday's album turned out to be and how it performed commercially. The writing was on the wall, but someone has impaired, as Sean Ryder at the time simply couldn't read what the writing said his girlfriend found him on the floor of his flat and burnage, lying in a pool of his own blood with an axe in his head. The papers called it an axe type hammer, a plasterer's hammer, which had been forcefully thrust into his head five times.

35:43 Details aside, the fact.

35:45 Remained thirty four year old Dave Robotham, Manchester musician, Factory Records artist, member of the Dirty Column and longtime friend of Happy Mondays, was dead. Like Sean Ryder, Dave Robotham had been using hair on the Brown, as Sean would say, a darker drug originating from some of the darker elements lurking in and around Manchester. This was becoming increasingly hard to avoid. The darkness was taking over. Gangsters were now running the Hacienda, Knives and guns had replaced ecstasy on the dance floor, and Factory had extended their credits so far that they couldn't even afford to press any new singles.

36:26 Whoever murdered Dave managed to slip back under the cover of that darkness. His killer was never found and the case remains unsolved to this day. But the memory of Dave, in the memory of that dark time, was quickly immortalized in the song Cowboy Dave, the final track on Happy Monday's fourth studio album.

36:45 Yes Please.

36:47 This was the album they tried to make in Barbados. The Mondays had returned from the island after five largely unproductive weeks with only one finished song. Upon their return, Sean checked into you Have he stayed clean long enough to finish the album at a studio and Sorry. Yes Please was released in September of nineteen ninety two to poor reviews. Just two months later, Factory declared bankruptcy. And the funny thing is that had Tony Wilson not done things the way he had, had the label own the music rather than the artists, Factory could have been saved at the last minute in an acquisition by another label, another label like London Records, But that's another story. In this story, Sean Ryder relapses one night. He drinks a

37:36 bottle of vodka and then decides it's time to go score some junk again, and he winds up crashing his car, and since he's not wearing a seat belt, he's sent flying through the windshield.

37:46 He flees the scene, but.

37:47 His car's license plate fell off in the crash. So the cops are led right.

37:51 Back to his home. In this story Happy Monday's breakup. Just weeks after Factory goes under, Sean Ryder forms a new band, and Black Great, which breaks up at the end of the nineties, paving the way for Happy Mondays to reform with a slightly altered lineup. In this story, the Darkness at the end of the Manchester Era, it never really goes away. In twenty ten, Bez is sentenced to four weeks in jail for assaulting an ex girlfriend, and in twenty twenty five, Rowetta, the Monday's longtime backing vocalists, takes to social media to accuse Sean Ryder of punching her on a ferry back in the year two thousand.

38:30 It was in the year two thousand that Sean Ryder was honored by the new musical express magazine The Enemy with one of its Godlike Genius Awards. And it was at this awards ceremony that Sean Ryder ran into one of the first people he ever stole from musically, that is Paul McCartney, author of Obla Dee, Obla Da, the song that Sean and crib from for the Happy Monday song Desmond, which had to be removed from their debut album.

39:00 Cartney stood next to Sean as the cameras flashed a picture of the unlikely duo would grace the upcoming issue of NME. There was irony here, and it wasn't just about the stolen song. There was the added irony that Sean, who was born the year the Beatles released their first single yet who remained at this time a heroin user, actually looked older and more haggard than Paul McCartney. And I think it's fair to say, as Paul McCartney or a Sean Ryder or any true rock and roller will tell you, there's a fine line between godlike genius and disgrace.

39:39 I'm Jaith Brennan and this this disgrace sad. All right, guys, thanks for checking out this episode of Disgrace land on how mondays. The rockstar antics herein are just completely over the line. Total debauchery, total hedonism. With that said, question of the week this week, what's the most rockstar you've ever been?

40:14 What's the most rockstar activity you've ever taken part in that you're that you want to share?

40:21 Maybe I don't know something, Maybe you got in trouble with I don't know something. Maybe you got away with six one seven nine oh six sixty six three eight When did you act like a rockstar? Leave me a voicemail, send me a text at disgrace lampod on the socials Disgrace Lampod at.

40:34 Gmail dot com.

40:35 If you want to email me, make sure you get those auto downloads turned on on Apple Podcasts. I'll see you later. Here comes some credits. Disgraceland was created by Yours Truly. It is produced in partnership with Double Elvis, the Exactly Right Network in iHeart Podcasts.

40:51 Credits for this episode.

40:52 Can be found on the show notes page at disgracelampod dot com. If you're listening as a Disgraceland All Access member, thank you for supporting the show.

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41:19 Slash at disgracelampod rock a roller.

41:27 He's a bed band man.