the happy mondays Tour and Music News

James will be joined by their Manchester contemporaries on seven dates next year.

James have detailed a UK and Ireland arena tour for the end of next year with Happy Mondays providing back-up throughout.

The re-allocated distribution of music over the last decade has been a great leveller.

Now that artists are required to release their whole back catalogues on to the various streaming services (and obviously benefit from doing so), devoted fans can get a far more comprehensive overview of their evolution as they fumbled around making mistakes before they found their groove.

The Extended Play was a key stepping stone on that path, and yet EPs were rarities thirty years ago when the compact disc was king, generally serving as a precursor to a debut album, to garner levels of interest from radio stations.

The market for a CD version of the four-track EP wasn’t huge, so the format dried up. And so in turn the re-emergence of vinyl has been a boon for it, as ever the heritage acts benefitting most by virtue of simply having more music they are able to re-release on the most popular and expensive physical format.

One suspects Happy Mondays need the money more than most: no strangers to decadence, the band were one of the (admittedly many) reasons their label Factory accumulated unsustainable debts, and have been playing catch-up ever since.

Four Happy Mondays EPs – Forty Five (1985), Freaky Dancin/The Egg (1986), Tart Tart (1987) and 24 Hour Party People (1987) – have been collected together and remastered for release on October 25th.

There’s been some big UK tours for the Happy Mondays during the past few years, and 2019 will be no different.

The Happy Mondays‘ UK and Ireland tour in celebration of Squirrel and G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out) has gone on sale today.

The Happy Mondays will spend the end of 2017 celebrating 30 years of their debut album Squirrel and G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out).

The Happy Mondays will be headlining the latest Shiiine On Weekender when it takes place at Butlin’s Arena, Minehead between November 10th-13th.

Villagers‘ ‘Darling Arithmetic‘ picked up the Album Award at the 2016 Ivor Novellos which were held in London this afternoon.

The Happy Mondays spent the final weeks of last year celebrating their generational soundtrack ‘Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches‘ 25 years on.

They’ve now announced just such a gig on Saturday, September 17th this year at the newly reopened Hastings Pier as part of a One Inch Badge run of anniversary concerts.

Stints on reality TV shows and pearly false teeth might have mitigated the uncouth image of the early days, but it didn’t stop a Happy Mondays reunion happening back in 2012, and now Madchester’s most hedonistic outburst is celebrating twenty five years since the release of their ‘Pills ‘n’ Thrill and Bellyaches‘ album by touring it in its entirety.

When Pete MacLeod, the band’s support act, appears the Brixton Academy isn’t exactly brimming with life. To his credit though, the Glaswegian indie singer/songwriter is unfazed, strumming through a couple of songs on his acoustic guitar with some brio, including the wistful ‘I Went Swimming Today‘…then out comes a man who proceeds to hunch over a laptop and pull electronic strings for the remainder of the set.

Anyone who’s heard MacLeod’s acoustic-led debut album is in for a jolt as it’s suddenly all about dominating dance beats – redoubled by the echoes of a slowly filling up venue – and flashing, fulgent lights. His vocals manage to hold up well enough throughout before the two men leave a largely unresponsive crowd to the lingering sound of a de rigueur drum and bass sample in his closing number.

A quarter of a century has been long enough for Shaun Ryder to mull over the Happy Mondays’ most ergonomically live configuration; Ryder stays still at the back clad in leather and shades while Bez, the group’s habitual totem dressed in shorts, t-shirt and hat (after all, it is a mild December), is let loose with his idiosyncratic jounces next to a colourfully garbed Rowetta who proprietarily struts across the stage.