Happy Mondays bring the thrills back to Manc

Happy Mondays | The Farm 
Victoria Warehouse, Manchester
11th April 2026

It’s been thirty-five years since the Happy Mondays headlined to 30 000 people at Elland Road, a year after releasing their best-selling Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches album. To celebrate, they return to play the album on a sell-out tour with one of the support bands of that big day out, The Farm, but missing Northside, who were meant to be opening but had to pull out (get well soon Dermo).

It would have been hard to imagine all those years ago at the Happy Mondays’ huge show in Leeds that there would be any kind of longevity in this. Those were madcap times, and everyone was living pretty loose fit, and the future didn’t exist. There were no pension plans or long-term thinking, and the very nature of the gig and the music was of a fleeting and brilliant moment of technicoloured intensity. 

That year, the most unlikely of huge success stories, the Happy Mondays, who had started the whole thing and had been chemical pioneers with a music to match, had become pied pipers of a new kind of kick and were swept away to the toppermost of the poppermost when the UK public finally caught up with them. Decades later, somehow they return to celebrate that high water mark and play the Pills n Thrills album in full, supported by the Farm, who were also fellow pioneers of the new sound in their own right and draw.

After adding a dance chassis to their Jam/Clash/Specials modus operandi, the Liverpool band had been catapulted to huge success in the same period. A few years into their career, they had already been Peel faves whose singer, Peter Hooton’s fanzine, The End, that perfectly documented the fast-changing terrace culture better than anyone else in hilarious detail. Post the great shake-up of acid house and its catalytic effect on guitar bands, they now had hits of their own like Groovy Train and the timeless classic All Together Now, which are celebrated tonight with the same kind of positive energy and joy de vivre as ever. Newer cuts like the title track of their 2025 album Let The Music (Take Control) slot comfortably into the set as a reminder that the band have not lost their knack for catchy songs that make a lyrical point. It’s just like one of their prime influences, The Clash, whose Bankrobber they cover as a nod to their 2012 Justice Tonight tour, where it was one of the key songs played to raise consciousness of the victims of the Hillsborough disaster. The Farm were always thoughtful and brought a consciousness to the madness…if the Mondays were making a glorious art out of the Pistols’ cash from chaos template, then the Farm were more Clash from chaos, adding a social context without losing the party vibe.

Much has been said about the madness of the Happy Mondays over the years, and most of it has been true. There have been acres of print about the rock and the roll, and the tabloid frenzy has been forever cranked and has somehow ended up with the band’s core members, Shaun and Bez, becoming unlikely national treasures. Yet behind the headlines, they still remain a fascinating musical force that is underlined tonight when they play the whole of the Pills Thrills and Bellyache’s album. It may be an exercise in nostalgia, but the music is timeless, with the band’s weird knack of turning off kilter weirdness into bubblegum pop and huge grooves hitting paydirt with that album. 

Their shenanigans may have hidden their instinctive and brilliant creativity over the years, but listening to the album played in full tonight is a reminder that there is nothing like the Happy Mondays. From day one back in the Boardwalk, when you could hear them rehearsing a couple of rooms up they had that wonk groove thing nailed – that lopsided mix of the late Paul Ryder’s northern soul bass lines and Funkadelic grooves that locked in tight with Gaz Whelan’s unique rolling and eminently danceable drums saw the band of disparate characters fall into their own wonk groove. There was nothing like them then, and there is nothing like them now.

Dig deeper into their sound, and there is a genuine originality verging on virtuoso. As Bez bounces across the stage, still the charismatic ringleader, guitarist Mark Day is content to lean back in the shadows. Yet his killer guitar lines are a constituent part of the sound as they collapse in and out of the songs like the kind of zig-zag wandering riffs of Beefheart, adding an element of surprise and edge to the songs’ perpetual motion. Day always plays the unexpected and eccentric, yet it’s always wonderfully catchy and a core part of the band’s off-kilter and startlingly original sound, which became part and parcel of the soundtrack of those times.  

Of course, Shaun and Bez are still the focal points with the maraca shaking crowd cajoling Bez, moving from one side of the stage to the other. He is still the totemic totem pole and rabble-rousing roustabout that somehow is a physical manifestation of the music the band plays. Meanwhile, Shaun is hunched up over the mic, delivering the poetic madness of his lyrical gems with an added level of glee to his voice that gives everything an unlikely urgency. He seems more relaxed than usual and trades one-liners with Bez as the whole band celebrates their genius. Of course, Rowetta’s powerful vocals are missed, but Bez’s wife, Firouzeh, brings her own dynamic vocals to the band with her own voice honed by years of singing in her own metal band, Control The Storm.

The 36 minute long album doesn’t quite make a headline set for a sold out 3000 cap venue, so the triumphant end of the night is a romp through the much loved hits that have become so entwined in a generational DNA, especially here so near the band’s Salford roots. 

They end the night on the throbbing, grooving masterpiece of Wrote For Luck and the song has lost none of its chemical warmth and transcendental lolloping rhythmic landslide. It brings back shimmering and strange memories of daze gone by as its huge enveloping loping rhythms turn the room into a pulping jelly mass, making the mass of flailing limbs into one nation under a groove. It remains a masterpiece of wonk genius and the perfect rhythmic pulse with its mantra like lyrics, and as the band exits the stage, they leave the room in a glorious chaos of aching bones and old school Madchester joy with zero bellyaches…