If Shaun Ryder could go back in time to 1990 and the making of Happy Mondays’ third album, Pills ’N’ Thrills and Bellyaches, there’s one piece of advice he’d give his younger self: “Chill out, dickhead,” the band’s singer tells Apple Music Radio’s Matt Wilkinson. “You’re not a bad-looking young kid with some good ideas.” At that point, forming the Mondays had been one of his best. Two albums of vibrant chaos wrangled into indie funk had established the group as one of Manchester’s most promising and singular alternative acts during the late ’80s. By 1990, they were leading a cultural revolution. Encouraged by the emergence of acid house, and with New Order’s Haçienda nightclub as its meeting point, a group of indie bands was coalescing into the “Madchester” scene and exploring how guitar music could be synthesised with club culture. The Mondays’ place at its vanguard alongside The Stone Roses, James and The Charlatans had been helped by Ryder lobbying his initially dubious label, Factory Records, to let superstar-DJ-in-the-making Paul Oakenfold produce the band’s next album. “Paul Oakenfold wasn’t the Paul Oakenfold then,” says Ryder. “If you were outside of London and you hadn’t read DJing mags, you didn’t know who he was. But we’d been going to Ibiza and London clubs, hearing Oakenfold mixing Italian, a-million-miles-an-hour, mad tracks with The Woodentops, or something, and putting disco beats on them.” Oakenfold and his Perfecto Records remix partner Steve Osborne were eventually allowed to rework 1988 single “Wrote for Luck” and then produce “Step On”—a cover of John Kongos’ 1971 hit “He’s Gonna Step on You Again”. When that single breached the UK top five in the spring of 1990, the pair were green-lit to produce Pills…. They added cleaner grooves and bolder house influences to the Mondays, sugaring Ryder’s psychedelic invective about errant fathers, God-fearing police chiefs and physically invasive customs officers for the masses. “We were well aware of what we were doing,” says Ryder. “Cross over, you know? Get on Top of the Pops. This was our pop album.” It succeeded: Pills ’N’ Thrills and Bellyaches was a BRIT-nominated platinum-seller and within six months of its November 1990 release, the Mondays were playing football stadiums. More than that, having melted post-punk, house and funk into pop, they’d brought indie out of the underground, establishing battle plans for future guitar-led takeovers of the mainstream such as Britpop. Hear the album now in Spatial Audio and read on as Ryder talks through some of the key tracks. “Kinky Afro” “It’s about a few things. I think I was 26 when I wrote that [opening line ‘Son, I’m thirty/I only went with your mother ’cause she’s dirty/And I don’t have a decent bone in me/What you get is just what you see, yeah.’], so ‘Son, I’m 26’ wouldn’t have fit in. But all my songs are amalgamations of all sorts of little stories, you know? Couple-of-second stories, or whatever, and I just stick them all together and try and make one song that we can get some sense out of.” “God’s Cop” “[Greater Manchester Police Chief Constable] James Anderton was regularly in the newspaper or on telly, making speeches that God had told him to do this and God had told him to do that. He had a big crackdown on the E. People was getting seven-year sentences for having a few Es. And all that did was just encourage crack cocaine sales. Instead of it being happy, it went fucking nuts again.” “Loose Fit” “[With the line ‘Don’t need no skin type in my wardrobe today’], people always thought it was ‘skintights’ because of the baggy scene and all that, but it was actually ‘skin type’—[about] racists and all that lot. My songs have got three or four things going on at once—just my ADHD. One of them was racism in there, so yeah. When I go on the internet and people have wrote out my lyrics, some of the things they think I say…it’s like, ‘God, really?’” “Dennis and Lois” “When we first went to New York, think it was about ’86 or something like that, there was these two queuing outside the venue where we was playing. Dennis was a bit out there and his missus Lois looked like she could have been anything from a female serial killer to a cat burglar or something. They was really into English bands and Manchester bands. They’d seen The Smiths and whoever had gone there before us. So I think we took them in with us. And they was just really interesting, funny people. So when it came to song titles, ‘Dennis and Lois’ was still stuck in my head, so that was it. Titles don’t have anything to do with the songs, really.” “Step On” “OK, so I robbed that line [‘You’re twisting my melon, man/You know you talk so hip, man’] off a Steve McQueen documentary [Man on the Edge: Steve McQueen]. Steve McQueen has always been one of my dudes—from the way he dressed and everything. In the documentary, his manager or one of the studio execs was telling a story where McQueen’s gone in, started an argument with the movie exec, and the movie exec’s giving him a load of crap back, and so McQueen’s gone, ‘You’re twisting my melon, man. You talk so hip’ and then walked off. And then there was a kid in The Haçienda called Bobby Gillette. Bobby’s dead now, God bless him, but he was a one, Bobby. Main Manchester character. And Bobby used to run around The Haçienda going, ‘Call the cops!’. So, while we was doing the rough version, I just stuck in ‘call the cops’, ‘twisting my melon’ and all that lot, and sent it off, and Oakey made that a real focus.” “Harmony” “I think this purely came from Oakenfold. You see, when we went in [to record the album], we had ‘Kinky Afro’, we had ‘Step On’, of course, but most of the album, we just wrote in the studio with Oakenfold throwing beats at the band to play along with, and I was writing lyrics. All our albums have been different. The first one we did with John Cale, can’t remember the name of it [Squirrel and G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out)], then Bummed with Martin Hannett, and then it comes along we’re doing the next one. So we got Oakenfold, which made it totally different. The other two was really indie, but this was our pop album.”