Anyone who lived in Manchester in the 90s will know that the city belonged not to Oasis, The Stones Roses or New Order but to the Happy Mondays, a borderline genial / menacing group from the badlands of Salford who looked like they might show you the best night of your life then rob you on the way out.

Sure: Oasis had the fame, The Stone Roses the legend and New Order the aura. But the Happy Mondays were the very soul of 90s Manchester, the embodiment of the city’s exuberant, slightly rough charm. 

The Happy Mondays were rarely slick, deeply flawed and they messed up a lot along the way; but they had soul and funk and grace, the kind of band who could charm the birds down from the trees on the rare occasions they wanted to. (And they often didn’t - there are some very unpleasant corners to the Happy Mondays history.) 

Oasis were too big; The Stones Roses too absent; New Order too abstract: The Happy Mondays were a band who would made things happen.

And what they made happen, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was Madchester, this one-in-a-lifetime collision of rock and dance and DJs and bands and nightclubs and gigs, birthing the most perfectly natural fusion of dance and rock music there has ever been.

OK, so New Order were the first Manchester band to mix electronic production with rock songs; and Primal Scream (from Glasgow via. London) made the best album of the indie dance era, with Screamadelica. But the Happy Mondays were the ones who kicked it all into gear, who actually made it happen, who were there, on the dance floor and in the hidden corners of the Haçienda, dancing and making people dance as the lines between rock and dance blurred.

Key to this were a series of remixes that the Happy Mondays unleashed on the world in 1989, as rave fever hit Britain, a run of remakes that are among the best and most important dance remixes of a rock act in history.

We’re talking about just two records: W.F.L, released in September 1989, and Madchester Rave On (Remixes), which came out at the tail end of December 1989, in reality only five tracks. The Happy Mondays would have bigger hits later on: but these five tracks changed the course of British musical history. They are there, in all their glory, on the recently-released Happy Mondays’ compilation, The Factory Singles, a record that finally gets to grips with the band’s actual history, between remixes and original songs, rather than simply plumping for the hits

WFL featured remixes of Wrote For Luck by Vince Clarke and Paul Oakenfold. The song was originally released on the Happy Mondays’ second studio album Bummed in 1988, a song both inspired by - and recorded on - ecstasy, which Happy Mondays vibes man Bez had been introduced to in late 1987. 

By the time it came to record Bummed, the band’s second studio album, in August 1988, both house music and ecstasy were very much part of the band’s orbit. The Mondays apparently brought 100 ecstasy pills with them to the Slaughterhouse recording studio in Driffield, a market town in Yorkshire, chosen for the occasion for its distance from the distractions of Manchester. 

But, among studio parties and feeding the pills to producer Martin Hannett in a bid to keep him from drinking, they ran out after 10 days and manager Nathan McGough had to go back to Manchester to get more. “Bummed is definitely an E album, perhaps the first full album ever made on that drug,” McGough confirmed, perhaps unnecessarily, to The Quietus.

As for house music, Mick Middles claims in his book Shaun Ryder: Happy Mondays, Black Grape & Other Traumas that Tony Wilson visited the band at the Slaughterhouse, finding the studio dark, filled with smoke and with the floor completely covered in house music records. Wrote For Luck was apparently the band’s attempt to make a record that they could play at the Haçienda, with Paul Ryder trying to recreate (not very successfully) the sequenced bass lines of Chicago house.

For all that, Wrote For Luck doesn’t, on the face of it, sound a great deal like dance music and it took a couple of remixes to really make it sing. 

Wrote For Luck’s initial release, in October 1988, included both dance and club remixes on the 12 inch, the former by mixing engineer Laurence Diana, the latter by McGough. But neither they, nor Bummed, made the club breakthrough that the Mondays might have expected. And while the second single from the album, Lazyitis, did slightly better, reaching 85 in the UK charts, this wasn’t enough for Nathan McGough, who suggested the band commission house remixes of Wrote For Luck to tap into the acid house scene then straddling the UK. 

DJ and FFRR label boss Pete Tong suggested Paul Oakenfold, a former soul DJ then cresting the acid house wave as a DJ at the Heaven club in London, while Paul Ryder wanted Vince Clarke, once of Depeche Mode and Yazoo, then enjoying success with synth pop duo Erasure.

If the two choices were unlikely - Oakenfold had little to nothing in the way of production experience and was assisted on the mix by Terry Farley and later production partner Steve Osborne, while Erasure were certainly not an acid house act - they proved inspired.

Mondays fans will probably be discussing which remix of WFL - as Wrote For Luck was re-christened for the occasion - is better until the earth spins off into the sun. Suffice to say that both are outstanding and both, crucially, contain enough of the Happy Mondays’ DNA to make them sound  as if they belong in the lineage of the band’s own work, rather than being cynical cash ins or unlikely electronic spin offs.

Oakenfold’s Think About The Future mix starts with the recognisable thud of a drum machine, something not in the original song; but this is soon joined by a characteristic Mark Day guitar riff, lifted straight off the Bummed original, and it is these two elements that form the backbone of the remix. It is striking how well they work together.

The same is true of Shaun Ryder’s vocal, which features largely unmolested in Oakenfold’s remix of WFL. It isn’t, by any means, a typical house music vocal. It’s not even close. But when played over Day’s looped guitar riff and electronic drums, it sounds like a perfect example of a house music chant, like a call from a sweaty siren to follow them onto the dance floor, heads up and sparkling. 

There is a potent magic, which transfers the inner dance life of Wrote For Luck - the song’s spirit, maybe - into the song’s outer shell, much like Andrew Weatherall’s remix of Primal Scream’s I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have, one year later, which transformed the song into Loaded. 

WFL may be a remix of Wrote For Luck. But WFL is also its own thing entirely, a living, breathing rave classic forged from the bones of Bummed. WFL is basically the ground zero for indie dance remixes, a perfect example of the remixer’s transformative art and the latent potential for dance within the right indie song.

The Vince Clarke remix of WFL, while not quite as potent, pulls off a similar sorcery and is perhaps unfortunate to find itself overshadowed by Oakenfold’s mix. Clarke’s mix, while more obviously electronic, uses the same Mark Day guitar riff as Oakenfold’s remake, as well as another prominent sample of his slide guitar, and Shaun Ryder’s vocal. Clarke also remakes Paul Ryder’s Chicago house-influenced bass line on a synth, taking it back to its house origins, where it works brilliantly.

WFL wasn’t a massive chart hit, reaching a modest 68 in the UK charts. But it kickstarted the whole indie dance movement, becoming an anthem in the Haçienda  Perhaps its impact can be best seen, however, in what the Happy Mondays did next, returning to Oakenfold, Osborne and Farley for their next release, the Madchester Rave On EP in November 1989, a record that made their commercial break through by breaching the UK top 20 in November 1989.

Rave On is a curious record by any standards. The “standard” (rather than the “remix”) EP contains four songs - Hallelujah, Holy Ghost, Clap Your Hands and Rave On - whose names suggest the hedonistic release of the club experience; but whose sound remains a lot like the chaotic funk of Bummed, suggesting that the Mondays still hadn’t worked out a way to assimilate the sweeping possibilities of the WFL remixes. 

Or maybe they figured that they didn’t really need to, given that the EP was accompanied by a remix 12 inch that featured of reworks of Hallelujah by Andrew Weatherall / Paul Oakenfold and Steve Lillywhite; and Rave On by Paul Oakenfold with Terry Farley.

The Weatherall / Oakenfold remix of Hallelujah, in particular, is stunning. Again, the Mondays’ work - and in particular Paul Ryder’s bass line and Mark Day’s guitar - provides the backbone of the song. But from this Weatherall and Oakenfold craft a song that pushes at the limits of what rock music could be, like a dry run for Screamadelica two years later, adding a volcanic vocal sample from gospel singer Tramaine Hawkins, the sound of Gregorian chant, a rollicking Italo-house piano line and a drum machine, the musical variety a challenge to the perceived wisdom of what rock music can be. 

Because if a “rock” song - in name at least - can incorporate gospel, monks and house piano and make them work in beautiful harmony with guitars, bass and Shaun Ryder’s urchin seer vocal, then what can’t it do? Why should there be any limits at all? We would see the fruits of this emerge in full album form on Screamadelica, which Weatherall would partly produce, two years later.

The chart success of the Madchester Rave On EP not only gave a name to a generation of Manchester bands, it also propelled the Happy Mondays to the UK’s iconic music show Top Of The Pops, where they performed alongside the Stone Roses, providing one of those baton-passing moments that seem too delicious for pop fans (and music journalists) to resist.

The Happy Mondays would work again with Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osborne on their third album Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches, resulting in a number of classic singles - notably Step On and Kinky Afro - and huge chart success in the UK.

This story is well known and I’ve written about it for DJ Mag, so we won’t dwell on it here. But what is interesting, in this context, is that the remixes from this period as nowhere near as vital as those from 1989, a consequence, perhaps, of the fact that the original songs already sound perfectly dance-floor-friendly, so no out-and-out transformation was required.

I’ve also written about Yes Please!, the Happy Mondays’ fourth studio album and a personal favourite, in this case for The Quietus. The Factory Singles compilation covers this period with Stinkin’ Thinkin’, Sunshine & Love and Angel, three brilliant singles that wildly underperformed, as both band and label struggled to keep their heads above the mud. 

Even here, though, when the Mondays’ reputation was close to an all-time low, dance music almost pulled them out of the fire: Terry Farley and Pete Heller's Junior Style dub of Stinkin’ Thinkin’, the first single to be taken from Yes Please!, was a hit in the New York clubs and made number one on the US Dance Club songs, leading the band’s US label, Elektra, to attempt to extend their deal. 

Heller and Farley also produced a couple of brilliant mixes of Sunshine And Love, the band’s follow up single, vocalist Rowetta’s vocal sitting brilliantly over a Wild Pitch-style beat. But it was not to be enough: Shaun Ryder blew off talks with EMI about a lucrative new contract and the band was done, for now.

Could this New York dance fame have been a lucrative fourth (fifth? Sixth??) act in the lives of the Happy Mondays, had they stuck around long enough? Probably not. And it’s worth mentioning that these end-of-act-one remixes were radical deconstruction of the band’s music that retained little of the original songs beyond vocals and spirit. (The band would also, of course, reform in 1999 and continue to play today to wildly diminishing returns.)

The Factory Singles ends with the bumping house remixes of Stinkin’ Thinkin’ and Sunshine And Love. It’s an oddly - and perhaps unjustly - happy ending for a band who were hitting a real low at the time. 

But it’s also appropriate that the band who more than anyone else united dance and rock music and who took remix culture to new heights, should bow out in this way, dancing away forever under the bright lights as the world fell apart before them.

Some listening

Seefeel - Ever No Way

Is Seefeel’s new single any good? Is a glass of cold water after a long desert crawl refreshing? Which is to say: of course it is; but it is also extremely good in a way I almost struggle to put critical thought to. 

Seefeel have their sound so precisely engineered, that perfect mixture of transient guitar waves, whispy angel vocals and dubbed-out bottom end, and it always feels so incredibly welcoming that I’m not sure if I would notice if they ever put out a bad song. Or perhaps they never have. All of which to say: Ever No Way, the first single from Sol.Hz, Seefeel’s first album in 15 years, is immaculate, beautiful, atmospheric and so perfectly them you’ll wonder how it somehow didn’t exist in your life a month ago.

Willem Mulder - Our Secrets ft. Jack Tyson Charles & Arlette Ntantu

Readers: are you suffering from a serious lack of Phoneline in your life? Not the actual phone line - no one ever calls me and I am quite happy with that - but Phoneline, Funkineven’s peerless 2016 single with Fatima, which was my song of the year a decade ago and remains my favourite thing that either party has ever done.

Could Our Secrets be the moment of relief? OK, it’s not by the same people but it is getting released on Funkineven’s Apron label and the man born Steven Julien has been playing it across Asia and Latin America. More importantly, it has something of Phoneline’s ardent coolness, a mixture of soul fire and electro-beat ice, vocalist Jack Tyson Charles giving a wonderfully poised performance over Mulder’s precise, melodic keyboards and clockwork-ticking beat, before Arlette Ntantu arrives to bring the song home with her yearning and slightly mysterious tone. 

Aldous Harding - One Stop

There is something impressively rolling about Aldous Harding’s new single, which uses an undulating piano line, as comforting as a sleeper train at night, as a bass for a soaring, soulful vocal, the comforting, unchanging precision of the piano offset cleverly by a melody that seems to change chords almost at random. Later on drums comes in, the piano retreats and the effect is like waking up in a sunny Edinburgh station from your sleeper car dream.

Passarani - Meta Tool

In the early 200s, Calum Morton (AKA Spencer) and Jackmaster, then teenagers working working alternate Saturdays in Glasgow’s Rubadub shop, were so in love with the Roman techno sound that they travelled to Rome for the Bitz Festival to seek out Marco Passarani and Lory D on their home turf. Had I heard songs like Meta Tool at the time, I might have tried to join them

Passarani is celebrated on a new Numbers compilation that brings together his early 2000s work as Analog Fingerprints. In the introduction to the record, Passarani says that his goal “was to create more accessible dance-floor tracks by mixing my unconscious Italo roots with my teenage love for that early US sound” and you can hear that on Meta Tool, a melodic but tough electro number that sounds a little bit like a land-lubbed Drexciya. 

The stuttering, ever-shifting riff is the kind of thing that would guarantee at least two people in the local record shop on a Monday morning trying to recreate the sound of the incredible tune they had heard that weekend, in the pre-Shazam days. A winner, in other words.

RIP Magic - 5words (Maurice Fulton remix)

RIP Magic are, according to The Guardian, “London’s buzziest buzz band”. Well you know what? They sound even buzzier - London’s most buzzlingly buzzing-est buzz band, anyone? - when put through the house-ifier by Maurice Fulton to create a beautifully bumping piece of barrel-piano house, like Marshall Jefferson getting the hell out of Dalston. This is the kind of tune that just goes and goes and goes, an endlessly lolloping groove that wouldn’t overstay its welcome even if the USB got stuck.

Things I’ve done 

Stereolab – Five Deep Cuts

Look, there’s going to be quite a lot of this over the coming weeks, I am afraid. Anyway, to promote the forthcoming (very soon coming, actually) Stereolab book, I wrote about Five Deep Cuts from their catalogue for The Strange Brew. 

I also had a talk with Outside Left about the book.

A sample: “One of the reasons I wanted to write the book is, I've been a Stereolab fan for more than 30 years, but I realised about five years ago that they still confused me in a wonderful way. What's their best album? I have a personal answer to that. But it changes. It's not always obvious. And which album would you recommend to a beginner? Don't know. What's their best song? Not entirely sure. What's their greatest hit? Well, it might be ‘French Disko’, but there's another few ones. Basically, one of the reasons I started to do this was that I wanted to make sense of it for myself. And it’s not like I found the key or anything, but it's like, this is a kind of way of understanding them.”

Line Noise podcast - With Maya Shenfeld and Pedro Maia

For the Line Noise podcast, I spoke to Maya Shenfeld and Pedro Maia at the Mira festival in Barcelona about Under The Sun, their special - and genuinely stunning - audiovisual live show; we also talked about climate change, deep marble quarries, friendship in music and what they love about each other’s work

Things other people have done

The playlists

Another lonely Wednesday morning.

Would life be better with?

A playlist?

Music makes the world go round.

Or is that love?

But I have no playlists of fresh love.

Only playlists of new music.

Two are for 2026

On Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026.

On Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026.

Apple Music: The newest and the bestest

Spotify:  The newest and the bestest.