9. Lazyitis
– Happy Mondays
I’ve
gone for The One Armed Boxer Remix, the one on the 1999 Greatest Hits
compilation with the garish-coloured cover. The video’s here:
The
one with the rain pouring on the barbed-wire surrounded five-a-side
court, with Shaun Ryder rubbing his hands together for warmth, and
with Karl Denver, who looks more comfortable in the weather
condition, but who caught pneumonia filming the video.
The
song comes at you, and washes over you, in waves. Thick lush waves.
It isn’t typical Mondays, really, other than it revels in its own
imperfections, eccentricities, and off-beatisms. In the summer, when
I’ve been unable to escape those lawn mowing and hedge-trimming
jobs, the headphones protecting me from the engine noise I hate are
very likely to be playing this. Loud enough to drown everything out.
BLISS
and DLL know what’s going on, but I’m sure the neighbours wonder
what the occasional “k-k-k-k-khall da kops”…”you’re
twistin’ my melon man”…”that one go it alone, and that one go
wah wah wah, all the way home” are all about, when the petrol runs
out or the ladders need moving.
If
you dislike, or at least have a suspicion about manufactured, plastic
bands (and I do), whether or not you like Happy Mondays, they’re of
a totally different world. Like the best reality stories, you
couldn’t make it up. I’ve been listening to the Greatest Hits
album while writing this, and it’s so ingrained in my ear muscle
memory stuff, that I’ve had bit of a mini-crisis because I’d
unwittingly hit the @shuffle’ button and the songs weren’t coming
at me in the expected (right and proper) order.
There’s
so many great Mondays moments:
Kinky
Afro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcn4UG6Jd0s
Judge
Fudge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyZp1nm5yco
The
intros are unmistakeable, unless you were in a coma for a number of
years.
It’s
strange to think that the nearest thing to sensible, cogent politics
no longer comes from three parties all busy copying as much of UKIP’s
racist spite as they dare, but from Bez, dancer and part-time maracas
shaker. There’s a clip on one video where their American tour-bus
driver describes the state the boys were in when they got on board
that morning, and they were legendary in that respect. They also
drove music forwards, burning bridges behind them and destroying
barriers, and pigeonholes along their relentless way. How no football
runs out to a Mondays song is beyond me.
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