Happy Mondays, Troxy, review: Shaun Ryder and co board the nostalgia bus
At a quarter past nine on Saturday night, three men approached the box office in the foyer of the Troxy. “Are there any tickets left for the show tonight?” The young woman behind the glass confirmed there were, a few, up on the balcony. “And how much are they?” £65 each, came the reply. The collective response consisted of two words, the second of which was “that”. So off they trotted, into the night, content to miss a 75-minute set comprised of music that was more than 30 years old. The only thing that had changed – markedly, in fact – were the prices.
There was a time when the Happy Mondays were as dysfunctional a band as the world had ever known. One thinks of the time when vocalist Shaun Ryder happened upon a livid primate, nicknamed Jack The Ripper, during the recording of his group’s ruinously expensive fourth album, Yes Please!, in Barbados. “That’s not the sort of thing you want, really, when you’re walking along the beach off your head on crack,” he wrote in his memoir Twisting My Melon, “a great big baboon dropping out of a tree and wanting to start a fight with you.” But 32 years later, in east London, the singer resembled a comedian telling jokes in need of punchlines. “I’ve forgotten the f---ing words,” he said, early in the set. “I don’t know who the f--- I am. Where am I?”
The answer, as he well knows, is on the nostalgia circuit. Out here, the pay is good and the once-sharp edges of his group’s radical sound – still exquisitely arranged, still pulverising after all these years – have been smoothed into cosy remembrance in a marriage of convenience between performers and audience. By his side, or else in front of him or behind him, strode performer-without-portfolio Mark “Bez” Berry, a man now into his fifth decade chiselling a living from playing maracas while dancing like a concussed giraffe. Again and again, Bez raised his arm as if seeking to answer a question. Hands up if you’ve taken every drug in the world, perhaps.
The show, of course, was a proper northern uproar. After all, when it comes to Mancunian credentials, the Mondays make Oasis look like the Grateful Dead. But while gilded material such as Kinky Afro, Hallelujah and (of course) Step On had people dancing up at the bar at the top of the Troxy’s curved balcony, the band onstage were perhaps, in their own likably entertaining way, drifting through the motions. By the end of the set, Shaun Ryder’s sore throat saw him – quote unquote – singing in a voice that could crack a urinal at 60-feet. “I need some f---ing acid,” he said, “that’d sort me out.”
Not really, though. Not these days. At 11pm, as 3000 ticketholders shuffled home, on Caroline Street the band’s tour bus idled by the stage door, ready to take its formerly unruly passengers to their next gig. But whereas life in the Happy Mondays was once a wild and dangerous adventure, these days it’s all business.
Happy Mondays are on tour in the UK until April 14 (happymondaysofficial.co.uk)
