NEWS: Happy Mondays Archive website

Happy Mondays have a history reaching back to 1981 first mentioned by Simon Spence in his book Excess All Areas. According to Spence were recorded on a cassette player in the attic at Mark Day’s parents home in Swinton when the band were called either Something in the Attic or Avant-Garde and the line-up would have been: Paul Ryder on bass, Shaun Ryder on vocal and Mark Day on guitar. This is before drummer Gary Whelan joined the band in early 1982 (keyboardist Paul Davis joined the following year) and the three Mondays are still playing with a drum machine – Derek Ryder’s Korg Mini Pops.

This recording along with a treasure trove of studio outtakes, unheard tracks, live desk recordings along with a mind blowing visual archive are all on the newly constructed Happy Mondays archive site. Constructed by super fan known only as Bigg T, it was Bigg T who provided a lot of archive towards Spence book and featured a website which has long since been removed from the net.

Happy Mondays archive details everything from 1981 until the bands disbandment in 1993 following an ill-fated trip to Barbados, following the bands rise to popularity through their debut 45 EP, to the Martin Hannett sessions, the outstanding Bummed along with the multimillion Pills, Thrills and Bellyaches. The site is an outstanding historical trip showing casing many unseen photos, documents, cassette and VHS tapes along with Bigg T’s running commentary, which is fascinating.

It seems a lot of the archive was grasped from Paul Davis (PD) who following the 1993 demise of the band wanted to get rid of any memory of the band, luckily for us Bigg T has now seen fit to allow PD’s archive along with miles of other unseen archive to be enjoyed. Quite simply a breathtaking piece of work to behold of not only one of Manchester’s great bands, but one of the world’s truly great one off musical outfits.

Happy Mondays Archive can be found here