Hallelujah! Not the hymn, but the hymn — the Mondays’ dirty gospel, the moment Factory 51 found its voice in the wreckage of Thatcher’s Britain. If the Haçienda was our cathedral — and it was — then The Happy Mondays were its choirboys, feral and euphoric, singing not in Latin but in pills, funk, and the language of the street.
Now, understand this: New Order paid for the church, but the Mondays filled it with sinners. Shaun Ryder wasn’t a frontman, he was a shaman in a sports casual shell. He channeled something primal, poetic, and profane — the bastard child of Mark E. Smith and Grandmaster Flash. Bez? A spirit guide in maracas. Together they turned the Haç into something transcendent.
It was Hallelujah that crystallised it all — five and a half minutes of baggy salvation. Paul Oakenfold and Andrew Weatherall didn’t just remix it — they sanctified it. The Mondays walked into the acid house storm, and instead of drowning, they danced. And Manchester danced with them.
When they played the Haçienda, the walls sweated. There were no velvet ropes, no VIP lounges — just one democracy of delirium. The Mondays weren’t a band in the club; they were the club. Shaun, moaning about loose change and freaky dancers, became the voice of every kid on the dole who found God in a strobe light.
You couldn’t script it — believe me, we tried. Factory tried, and failed, to manage the Mondays. But you don’t manage Bacchus. You just give him a mic and duck.
So yes, Hallelujah wasn’t just a song. It was a doctrine. The Haçienda wasn’t just a club. It was the revolution. And The Happy Mondays? They were our unlikely high priests — blessed, broken, and utterly brilliant.
Amen.
Here, the Liverpudlian prince of the slo-mo underworld — Ben Jamin — takes the controls, straps on his 303 like his Excalibur, and reshapes the whole damn thing with purpose, poise, and a grin that says: hold my beer…
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