Bez versus Barbados: inside the Happy Mondays’ drug-fuelled Yes Please! disaster
In the early months of 1992, a satellite-high Shaun Ryder was enjoying a stroll by the sea in Barbados when his path was blocked by an angry primate nicknamed Jack the Ripper. The animal, he knew, had been given the sobriquet by locals who believed it responsible for the recent bloody murder of an entire family. Reviewing his options, rather than run for his life, the 29-year old singer with the Happy Mondays opted to stand stock still while emitting a fierce growl. Suddenly doubting its status as the most feral creature on the island, his would-be assailant decided to split.
“These things can smell fear… so basically I knew I had to front it out,” Ryder writes in his autobiography Twisting My Melon. There might even have been a broader principle at work, too. After all, “that’s not the sort of thing you want, really, when you’re walking along the beach off your head on crack – a great big baboon dropping out of a tree and wanting to start a fight with you.”
It perhaps goes without saying that the decision by the Happy Mondays to make their fourth album, Yes Please!, in the sun-kissed paradise of the Caribbean was not without incident. Recorded at Blue Wave Studios, a lavish complex owned by the reggae star Eddy Grant, its towering costs helped bankrupt Factory Records, the label on which it was released. With sales of 50,000 copies – far less than a quarter of its predecessor, Pills’n’Thrills And Bellyaches - it would be its authors’ last LP for 15 years.
Certainly, if there’s a more chaotic story in all of rock’n’roll, I’ve yet to hear it. In the space of barely six weeks, the Happy Mondays revelled in a bacchanalian orgy of excess that left co-producer Tina Weymouth “staggered”. Reflecting on the group’s appetite for destruction, she would later say that “a lot of times in Barbados, [fellow producer] Chris [Frantz] and I were really scared. These guys didn’t know where the edge was. They were about to fall over a cliff.” Given that the wife and husband team made their bones as the rhythm section in Talking Heads, in the feral punk rock scene of 1970s New York, the statement is about as eye-popping as it gets.
In truth, though, things were heading south long before anyone cleared customs. After spending much of 1991 playing live, the band had little in the way of new material. Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osborne, their preferred producers, were booked up for months. Shaun Ryder and brother Paul, the group’s bassist, were addicted to heroin. Hard drugs and brittle egos had impaired the functionality of the unit as a whole. Unperturbed, upon hearing the news that his signatories were in no fit shape to make a new LP, Tony Wilson, the founder of Factory Records, said, “Well [they] need to do it”.
More to the point, he needed them to do it. With debts of £2.5 million, the label’s monetary woes were compounded by interest rates of 23 per cent on its numerous bridging loans. As gangland violence brought havoc to Manchester’s nightlife, security costs at the financially-adjacent Hacienda club had risen to an astounding £375,000 per annum. Wilson believed that sales and licensing from new albums from Happy Mondays and New Order, Factory’s two most popular groups, were his company’s best chance of survival. Duly, he ponied up a quarter of a million pounds with which to record Yes Please!
Only in rock’n’roll would a strategy as berserk as this seem to make sense. Even to the untrained eye, the Mondays’ world was losing its lustre. In 1991, performer without portfolio Mark ‘Bez’ Berry caused upset after telling the NME’s most feared provocateur, Steven Wells, that he hated “f-----s”, and that “anyone who is straight finds them disgusting”. (In a strong contender for quote of the year, Wilson likened the exchange to “a Socialist Worker meeting [an actual] worker and not knowing what the f--- had hit him”.) The mere sight of the UK’s most influential music title letting loose its attack dog was itself a sign of decline. ‘Madchester’ was out, Seattle was in.
In place of the kind of creative unity required to navigate such headwinds, the Happy Mondays had mutiny in the ranks. Reflecting on the group’s choice of producers, in Twisting My Melon, Shaun Ryder complained that “the rest of the band didn’t get it; they didn’t understand that our fans liked our sound. They thought that if we could incorporate Chris and Tina’s sound into the Mondays’ sound, then all the Talking Heads fans would get into it and we would break into a much bigger market. But it doesn’t work like that.”
Actually, very little worked. At Manchester Airport, Ryder accidentally smashed the four bottles of methadone prescribed to maintain his opium habit during his time in the Caribbean. The purchase of a pound of marijuana upon arrival in Barbados alerted the island’s drug dealers to the presence of a troupe of free-spending high-rollers in their midst. After two days drinking in the bar of his five-star digs, drummer Gary Whelan clambered onstage to physically attack members of Spice, the in-house calypso band, to whom he had taken a dislike. This was the Happy Mondays just getting started.
But when recording began, the signs, at least at first, were not wholly discouraging. Under the guidance of Frantz and Weymouth, the Mondays’ musical core of Whelan, Paul Ryder and guitarist Mark Day began tracking powerful and coherent instrumental passages upon which their singer, the poet-laureate of the non-sequitur, might later record his distinctive vocals. Only problem was, in the meantime, both Shaun Ryder and Bez were bored. After five or six days spent waiting around, the pair decided to hit the pipe.
In the Caribbean, in 1992, crack cocaine was ruinously cheap. “You’d pay £20 for a tiny pea in England,” Ryder recalled, while “over [in Barbados] you’d get a rock the size of a conker for 20 pence.” In what is a terrifying image, he and Bez began spending time in barren crack dens populated by teenagers listening to Reggae 45s at 78rpm. Realising he would like something on which to sit during these visits, the singer decided to remove an item of furniture from Blue Wave Studios.
“It was a plastic sun-lounger that was worth f--- all,” he recalled. “But this American kid, who was working with Chris and Tina, stuck his nose in and said, ‘Hey man, what ya doing? You can’t be taking that!’ I just said, ‘F--- off, you knob,’ and hit him. Although, as I was cracked up, I didn’t just hit him. I threatened him with a broken bottle as well, I think, which f------ terrified him.”
If the sight of a hopped-up Ryder on terra firma wasn’t alarming enough, behind the wheels of various cars both he and his bandmates were like lunatics in a video game. In the book Happy Mondays: Excess All Areas, the author Simon Spence writes that “it was common to see the band’s cars upturned at road-works on the way to [the neighbourhood] where they went to score crack. One night Whelan, who stayed off crack, was in a bar drinking rum and having a spliff when a car ploughed straight through the front of the bar. It was Shaun.” Pedal the metal, within weeks the group had written off a hire car firm’s entire fleet of vehicles.
On another memorable day, it was Bez’s turn to take a spill. As recounted in the recently published memoir, Buzzin’, Shaun Ryder recalls watching his bandmate “whizzing along in one of the cars that we’ve hired, an open-top four-by-four, and then I see it go – bump! – in the air, then down, and it just disappeared in this giant crater,” he writes. “Next thing, you could see him walking towards you, and he’s dragging his leg, and his arm is just dangling down to the ground, out of its socket.” Remarkably, Bez would break the same arm again, twice, before it healed properly.
There really was no stopping them. Discovering that local dealers powered their homes by unconventional means, the group were soon swapping the batteries from their crashed cars for crack cocaine. Dispatched to a house on a distant part of the island in order to write lyrics that were – and who can say why – far from forthcoming, Ryder also learnt that even his Armani jeans and Hugo Boss T-shirt were acceptable currency. By this point, the singer was smoking as many as 20 rocks each day. By the time the group had burned through a quarter of a million quid, the Happy Mondays had recorded just one song in its entirety.
“Chris and Tina really started panicking that they weren’t going to get paid, and they asked me if they could say to Factory that ‘Shaun wants money’ and ‘Shaun has got the masters [tapes] and is threatening to burn them,” writes the singer in Twisting My Melon. “Because they knew Factory would believe them considering the stories that were coming out of Barbados. They asked me if they could say that, and I shrugged and said, ‘Yeah, go on then’.” Required to find a further £30,000, Tony Wilson told anyone who would listen that he’d re-mortgaged his home.
But it was good money after bad. In Barbados, the Happy Mondays’ determination to carve themselves a slice of rock’n’roll folklore came at the expense of making a record that contained even a tincture of the danger in which they had so brazenly placed their own lives. Months behind schedule, Shaun Ryder finally recorded his vocals at a studio in Surrey following a spell of detoxification and aversion therapy at the (expensive) Charter Clinic. By the time the group decamped to New York in order to mix their new record, its 10-tracks had cost almost £40,000 each.
Released on August 31, the lead-off single from Yes Please!, Stinkin’ Thinkin’, debuted on the UK chart at number 39. Barely a month later, its parent LP stalled at number 14. The only international chart troubled by its presence was Australia, at number 99. According to Shaun Ryder, “it was not a good album. There were no catchy grooves… it had absolutely no character. Yes Please! wasn’t the Mondays. It could have been anyone.”
Elsewhere, in a prescient review in Vox magazine, the music writer Simon Reynolds described the band’s extraordinarily difficult fourth LP as being “as good as Happy Mondays get, but perhaps not good enough to matter. To recoup [its] outlay, [the] LP has to be laden with potential hit singles or to strike some kind of chord with a sizeable faction of the populace. Yes Please!, unless I'm very much mistaken, will fail on both counts.”
In point of fact, Yes Please! enabled failure on two further counts, too. At least in their original form, by the end of 1992 Happy Mondays had ceased trading. On November 23 of the same year, Factory Records entered administration with debts of £3.5 million.
