Happy Mondays - Bummed -

Should have put something after that last dash in the title, but hard to keep track of things while listening to this.

I think it's usually Wrote for Luck but I am in a Moving In With mood.

No it's still Wrote For Luck

Lazyitis

would vote for the Scottish Cowboy version

Performance. Nearly voted Mad Cyril but I prefer the Peel session. I guess the production has always been controversial. It does sound like it was recorded in a cave.

am v fond of mad cyrill but there are days when I think wfl is the greatest thing ever recorded so it gets my vote. I toe the line!

lol why did that autocorrect to 'toe' the line? oh well I don't read I just guess.

What a weird album--"Moving In With" works super-well for the production approach IMO; esp love the out-of phase synth arpeggio/sequence on that one

It got to be Lazyitis

impossible but Country Song.

Apart from the drums it's so difficult to pick out a single instrument on this album, it's such a sludgy, smeared mess. I love it.

I think I hear guitar

Love this album so much. Especially unfolding the cassette card to show unsuspecting friends -- WFL has this in walk I think. Country and Lazy after that for me.

Much as I'd like to go for something other than WFL, I can't

Excellent description from another Mondays thread:

Listened to "Bummed" for the first time in ages the other day. It was a proletarian experience akin to watching a Vauxhall Conference match, or riding in a car where everyone is smoking but you.

― Phil Knight (PhilK), Monday, February 5, 2007

This album is fantastic, though imo the length of "Wrote for Luck" drags down the second side somewhat.

Apart from the drums it's so difficult to pick out a single instrument on this album, it's such a sludgy, smeared mess. I love it.

― nate woolls, Saturday, February 10, 2024 5:25 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah it's very drunk like one drink too many gotta lean against something drunk. you're hearing sounds but they're just pinging off the inside of your ear and back into space

Everyone otm about the smeary, sludgy, druggy vibe. Martin Hannett is the rare guy where I think you can really say the drugs were essential to what he actually produced. It's hard to imagine anyone sober making this. Such a great album. Probably "Wrote for Luck" tbh but I'm going to give a good relisten before voting.

Fat Lady Wrestlers is the one that pings to mind without actually relistening to this

I mean WFL sure but they rode that horse into the ground over the subsequent versions. This album also makes me thing of the Butthole Surfers' Seaferring, as it lurches up and down but never quite throws up over the side. Also I like the "double double good" bit, also this sounds what being stuck in Driffield for a month feels like probably

Also I'm too old for this shit, my bones ache thinking about it

"Country Song" is the one I remember. Just to disagree with everybody else (it seems) I've always thought it was ruined by the production - though I haven't listened to it in more years than I want to think about.

Do it better for me. There’s a lot of great live stuff from around 88, watch the version of Performance on The Other Side of Midnight which has been uploaded to YouTube

Moving In With for me i think? might relisten

Might actually vote Do it Better here, not only does it encapsulate the whole album very quickly it's also (I think?) the inspiration for this great Datarock song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPBghPubVyY

Idk Martin Hannett’s tech-bio but his last years of recording show a marked uptick in what sounds to me like usage of “new digital tech”— Bummed to me sounds like everything is being run through an Alesis Midiverb and mixed to DAT. It doesn’t sound sludgy to me so much as it sounds like the crash of a particular digital wave

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

xp I think it was one of that short generation of albums released commercially on DAT as well

Another great find, will need to listen to this again before voting

went Fat Lady Wrestlers but it could have been most of them, I still get something new out of this record every time I listen to it

I love this, about the recording (from an old Mojo story):

That day, Ryder, McGough and Hannett travelled to the unlikely locale of Driffield, the East Yorkshire market town and “Capital Of The Wolds”. They were there to inspect the Slaughterhouse, a residential studio that the latter had recommended. Factory believed that its distance from Manchester might focus the group’s minds; it also had the added advantage of being cheap. So it was that the Mondays were ferried out of Manchester and introduced to their new producer.

“Martin was a sarcastic fucker,” says Gaz Whelan. “He sounded like he smoked 120 a day, and he wore dark glasses. He was like a neanderthal cousin of Phil Spector. When we got to Driffield, we started setting up, and I said to the engineer, as a joke, ‘You know what Martin’s like, he’ll probably want the drums setting up in the toilet.’ We just set them up in the band room, as normal, and then Martin turned up. The first thing he said was, ‘For a start, can we have the drums in the toilet?’”

As the sessions began, the Mondays’ latest drug of choice was soon offered around; according to Paul Ryder, they felt duty-bound to convert Martin Hannett to ecstasy on account of his alcoholism. “All that Wendy, his wife, said to us was, ‘Try and keep him off the beer,’” he says. “So we thought, ‘Well, we don’t drink when we take ecstasy, ‘cos there’s no need to — maybe if we give Martin this, he won’t drink.’ He said he’d tried it years before: he had a friend who was a chemist who’d made some. He said he remembered liking it back then. And he liked it this time round.”

To make his internal chemistry that bit more complicated, Hannett was also indulging a long-time heroin habit. “With ecstasy, sleeping pills, cocaine and alcohol, it must have been like a big speedball concoction,” says Paul Ryder. “Would he do it in the studio? No. He was very careful not to do it in front of us, because of the Factory connection: they were all pissed off with him for getting a heroin habit, and fucking things up. That was where his unmanageability came from. But I do remember taking him to score heroin — ‘cos years later I ended up scoring off the same girl.”

Hannett was not the only one to sample the Mondays’ latest chemical wares: on one visit to Driffield, Tony Wilson discovered that the E high had rapidly spread to some of the town’s more strait-laced residents. “The Mondays were in the pub, selling E to squaddies,” he says. “Driffield was an army town, and they were doing a rare old fucking trade. All these squaddies were just walking along the single-lane High Street of Driffield looking at everything like that [mimes awe-struck astonishment]. Very happy squaddies.”

“Then you’d go to the studio,” he continues, “and there’d be Hannett sitting at the desk with one of the band, And if you went into the band room, the lights were all out, the room was pitch black, and there was this very loud, pulsing house music, and as you walked in, you were tripping over people and vinyl. The whole floor was littered with people and records. It was like a blacked-out nightclub. They were all gone on it: this non-stop dance beat.”

https://medium.com/@johnharris_60942/like-a-blacked-out-nightclub-happy-mondays-bummed-eb91964ea954

The "Excess All Areas" biography by Simon Spence is a great read, particularly as it was based on interviews with all in the band except Shaun and Bez. (It has an unusually lengthy wikipedia article.)

Bez's book Freaky Dancing is a real fun read. dunno how 'accurate' it is per se but there's a lot of cool/bizarre stories in there. its incredible those guys survived all that.

The Shaun Ryder autobiography is also good, much better than I expected iirc

They were good characters in 24 Hour Party People, but they really need to be a psychedelic road trip epic miniseries.

Hard to pick anything but “Wrote for Luck,” although I have always liked “Mad Cyril” as well.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

OWOWOWOWOW ALL THE WAY HOME

if you can believe it, on the strength of this thread I am listening to this album for the first time ever - only knew the singles, and I chose the Roses (yawn) in the late 80s division. Pretty wild ride so far.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6OTMcCRb2c