millionreasons | Autumn Fifty

Happy Mondays - Wrote For Luck

Similar to when I heard the Smiths for the first time, this is one of those songs where you can't quite believe your ears, this sounded so odd: the dance beat with the jangly guitars, the barely in-tune vocals, the audacity of it. I hated the Happy Mondays when they fully embraced baggy (Step On sets my teeth on edge) but Bummed was an astonishing record.

Unfortunately, youtube doesn't have this echoey original with the video shot in the Hacienda, only the beat-heavy WFL remix, which I don't like as much. I never went to the Hacienda, something which still rankles. As a teenager for whom music was more important than eating, it was a constant source of rage that I was born in a Leeds suburb that had - joy - a train station, but was moved some 18 months later to a village near a crap town, twenty miles but two public transport hours away from a city where bands played. Manchester was only fifty miles on the motorway, but it was where we visited my aunty, not where life was playing out. Whilst my 40-something friends have their London exit plans, I don't want to leave this city because even though I don't really care about bands anymore, I never want to be so far away from the centre of things.