In the past and long before the Mondays, a visit to the Engine Shed would have meant portly men with alarming face furniture standing around proudly with blackened faces after re-soldering a valve gear. These days the Engine Shed is a large, airy concert venue, part of the University; well situated, bright and pleasant. It’s also right next to plenty of eateries and pubs. Well, I say right next to, discounting the railway line and great big lake. Nothing not to like about the place.
Enter the legendary Happy Mondays, showcasing, in running order, all the selections from their seminal Pills ‘n’ Thrills album, minus only keyboard player Paul Davis from that 1990 line-up.
First on stage was support act Pete McLeod, an affable singer/songwriter from Glasgow; he has to be respected, he’s on the Creation label and it looks like they got it right again, as a large section of the sell-out crowd seemed to enjoy the meaty fare created by Pete and his drummer alone. Chatting backstage, he explained to me about the tracks he’s had produced by no less than Youth. On Googling his name, he’s aced by a Canadian aerobatic pilot, but going by tonight’s performance, he sounds more than capable of changing the order of things there and he’s certainly moving in the right circles.
9.30pm and it’s time for the Mondays, finally. They can still belt out the tunes; the difference these days is that they can actually remember doing it. They almost work like a good Champions League football team, with the workman-like band, being able to utilise the flair players from the bench. Rowetta still looks great and can certainly still belt out a vocal, whilst Bez is still…er…Bez. Somehow the Mondays would not be the same without his manic maracas, and he disappears and reappears with regularity. Of course, you also get Shaun Ryder. In recent times, he’s been more likely to have been seen in the celebrity jungle enduring toilet peaking and, worse, Gillian McKeith. Or UFO chasing in Chile, but thankfully, the man has lost none of his stage presence – no posturing on monitors or hand clapping above heads here. Add to this the solid backbone of Paul and Gary and the underrated playing of Mark Day, looking Richard Thompson-like in a beret/cap and a red Strat and playing some lovely slide guitar. The riff on ‘God’s Cop‘ is still a thing of beauty. These days Mark teaches music in a school – eat your heart out Mr. Schneebly
When it’s time for ‘Step On‘, Lincoln erupts almost shaking the nearby cathedral. All around me there are people old enough to know better giving it large, as we said in the nineties. The pills have now been replaced by tablets of more medicinal purposes; the bellyaches, aching in slightly larger bellies. Not the band, though; they’re pretty trim for fifty-somethings. There are also a lot of fresh faces here, certainly younger in years than the time gap we are celebrating tonight.
As a bonus, we also get ‘Hallelujah‘ and ‘Wrote For Luck‘ as an encore and with that they are off into the bracing night. Here’s to the next 25 years! Maybe we could get a 25-year tour of the next album, the criminally overlooked ‘Yes Please’, and Paul Ryder’s favourite Mondays album.
Review and photo credit: Paul Reno
