How Happy Mondays gave Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz “grey hairs”
The making of Happy Mondays‘ fourth studio album, Yes Please!, sounds like it was an utterly chaotic experience both for the band and those involved in the project. The 1992 record, produced by Christ Frantz and Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads, was an experience nobody would forget.
The band travelled to Barbados with a budget of £150,000 to record the album. However, given Happy Mondays’ penchant for illicit partying, the sessions were marred by a number of issues – including Shaun Ryder developing a crack addiction and Bez breaking his arm, amazingly, a total of three times.
Chris Frantz later explained that working on the album gave him his “first grey hairs”. He told NME: “We were in Eddy Grant’s Blue Wave studio in Barbados. The second day we were there, Bez started doing donuts in his rented convertible jeep in the sugar cane fields, flipped it, and it landed on his arm, severely breaking it. Tina had to hold his arm because it was flopping around.”
So, that was the first time Bez broke his arm during the recording sessions. However, that was only the beginning of Frantz’s troubles, as the medication that he was given for the pain was too tempting for other band members. “He was taken to the hospital, and when he came back, he was wearing a metal contraption that looked like the Brooklyn Bridge on his arm to keep it in place,” Frantz added. “And, of course, Shaun wanted Bez’s painkillers, so they started sharing them. So day two was the indication that this was going to be trouble!”
Somehow, Bez felt that breaking his arm wasn’t enough, so he decided to break it again. Frantz added, noting Ryder’s additional difficulties: “Not long after, Bez broke his arm again. We didn’t know Shaun was a heroin addict, and he’d dropped and broken his big bottle of methadone in the airport, so he arrived strung-out, going cold turkey and not a happy person when he walked into the studio for the first time. That set the tone; then it went on like that!”
Tina Weymouth also expressed her shock at the kind of people that the band was comprised of. “It was shocking,” she said. “Some of the Happy Mondays didn’t see themselves as musicians but as purveyors of drugs. They thought that, because of them and ecstasy, they’d saved football from being banned.”
Happy Mondays had indeed been at the forefront of British music when the ecstasy scene exploded. Evidently, they thought they had brought about a new age of peace and love with the use of the drug. Weymouth added: “British soldiers and the IRA were hugging each other in bathroom toilets and saying: ‘I love you, man!’. They thought they’d saved everything, which was an interesting experience for us – though we didn’t want to repeat it!” And they never did.
