The Happy Mondays are releasing a new record! Yeah, Skinny, Fatty and the ones who actually make the music, aren’t content with reunion tour money anymore, so they’re putting together a new record that everyone ever is going to dismiss as shitty before it’s even out. That’s to be expected. The only post-hiatus reunion albums that have ever worked are Everything Sux by the Descendents and Blink 182’s pop-punk for grown ups comeback last year, you can tell how I spent the 90s, can’t you?It’d be easy to sit here and slam the Mondays’ decision to commit suicide by music press. But I pride myself in being sympathetic to music that most people are snobby dicks about before even listening to (my most listened to this year? Tommy Hilfiger’s son’s most recent three mixtapes and Slipknot’s DJ’s solo albums – AKA. decent Weeknd/Drake type soppy rap and classic ’94 era ragga jungle respectively, eat it, music nerds.)So I’m going to list some possible positives that might occur if this pile of fucking nonsense they’re putting together ever sees the light of day.1) Shaun’s always had a leery, nonsensical way about him, that’s more or less his thing, that’s why we enjoy his occasional presence on panel shows, but wouldn’t sit our home-counties girlfriends next to him at a dinner party. He was already gross, fat and obnoxious in 1992; so imagine that put through a filter of 20 years, a lot of painkillers, lager and broken dreams. He’s going to goose someone on breakfast television, and his lyrics are going to sound like the jovial, but revolting, insults a tramp mutters at you after you shoo him away from your pub table. I’m entertained already.2) Is Pete Doherty still a thing? If he is, I bet he guests on the record, because he’s a total cunt and he’d love to align himself with a bunch of northern hard nuts. In doing so he’ll definitely show himself up to be the beg-friend, soft southern fairy he definitely is, and then he’ll do something whingy and pathetic on tour (stealing, I bet) and Shaun will fuck him up for being a twat. That’ll be good.3) Any video interviews anyone from the band does to promote the record, might be a much needed wake up call to the 32-year-old in your life who still takes MDMA on the regs. All the slobbering and wobbly pronunciation, might just convince your self-styled ‘fun-guy’ friend that fifteen years of recreational drug use is enough for anyone, and they might finally start trying at life.4) There’ll be a chance that people will get into another Madchester revival wankfest. So BBC3 will cobble together a horrible documentary comprised of smug music journo dinosaurs screaming “I WAS THERE” and soft Oxbridge people from the Guardian pretending they’d ever have done anything as interesting as go to the Hacienda in 1989. All the while you’ll be reminded that the death of the printed word isn’t such a bad thing after all.5) Erm, did you ever think there’s a chance that this could be a really fucking good record? What if it was a weird, dark version of old Mondays, where it was clear that all the pyschedelics and alcohol had fucked them all up and it was all paranoid and frosty sounding. What if they got Bushwick Bill from Geto Boys (that’s Shaun’s favourite rap group BTW, ya knaaa) to guest on a track? Or maybe some horrible Manc grime kid who they met because he sold Shaun heroin once did 16-bars over some creepy dub thing? What if they got Jason Pierce to produce it and make it all dreamy and graceful? Could Damon Albarn do something useful on it? What if the folks at XL got to deal with it and worked some magic? There’s a chance to do something genuinely interesting here, but I bet they fuck it up and just do a load of old shit.Still, y'know, maybe sit down and give the guys a chance, music elitists. It might not be all bad?Follow Bob's tumblr here and more of his wordz here.
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