Joanna, the forgotten Madchester band fighting back: “This is just the beginning”
Could you imagine being at the heart of the Madchester scene, potentially within reach of the chance that could change everything?
Then you wake up. It’s over three decades later, and nothing ever happened except the memories of your band being left to those heady halcyon days. Surely that ship for the shot at redemption has sailed long ago. But now Joanna are back where they were always meant to belong.
To all intents and purposes, the Manchester band should have been the next in a line-up alongside the likes of The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays. Yet here they are, having only just released their debut album Hello Flower at the tail end of 2025, which is based on a bunch of demos originally recorded in 1989. So what exactly has happened in between?
Lapping up the electricity of the Madchester scene at the time, vocalist Neil Holliday, bassist Terry Lloyd, guitarist Tyrone Holt and drummer Carl Alty came together in the late ‘80s and were vaunted as the next big thing, after a series of demo tapes lit up the local gigging circuit and pricked the ears of critics and labels alike.
But a series of sliding doors moments and a chance at professional recording that didn’t live up to the expectations of the demos meant that Joanna lost steam before they could ever really get started, and their old tapes, thought for many years to be lost, were consigned to the graveyard of a former sonic life. Until, that is, a mutual friend found them in his attic in Manchester a year ago, and now a new story has begun.
36 years after first recording them, Joanna’s demos have been transformed into the record Hello Flower, released on December 5th via the US label New Feelings. According to singer Holliday, “We just can’t believe it.”
“It sounds like a made-up story,” he laughed, recounting the tale of Holt’s friend rediscovering the tapes, passing them to the former band, Alty playing them for a music industry workmate in LA, and him deciding to launch Joanna via his fledgling record company. “It sort of happened by accident, but once the accident happened, it’s all been quite natural. There’s no great master plan, and we need to do it now,” Holliday added.
From a WhatsApp group to the stage, the singer spoke to me on the eve of Joanna’s great comeback performance in December, being held in Deansgate in Manchester. It was evidently a night of celebration rather than pressure, but it is striking that the band’s sound, so evocative of Madchester and the subsequent Britpop scene, has happened in a year when that very same thing is back in the zeitgeist.
Explaining, “It doesn’t matter what banner you put it under, everyone’s made good songs, and Oasis have got albums’ worth and years’ worth of good songs. We preceded them. We were more like the Mondays and Stone Roses, when it was Manchester, but before it was the Manchester scene.”
But how does it feel to receive such similar comparisons now, albeit later down the line? “We’re not really too pissed off that we didn’t get recognised at the time,” Holliday admits. It’s just validation that we thought we were OK. I don’t think we’re ever going to be regarded as part of that scene, because we missed that boat, but we’re more than happy to tag along with it now that it’s back in vogue.”
In many ways, he is being humble about what the band cultivated at the time, because although it may not have constituted number ones and sold out arena shows, Joanna were the exact epitome of unbridled angst coupled with frenetic energy that the scene fizzled with. It makes listening to their eventual album an absolute breath of fresh air now.
The final track of ‘Gardener’s World’ gets that notion down to a tee, lamenting the plights of social injustice and poverty, the out-of-touch rulers and the incompetent government, but “you wouldn’t see it happen in England/ ‘Cause we’re all civilised.” The eerie prescience of the song has always struck me from my very first listen, knowing it was written three decades ago, but with the realisation that it could resonate at any point since then.
“It’s crazy, because when we were talking about what we wanted to put on the album, I didn’t want that to go on because it was different,” Holliday recalled. Perhaps he thought it was too jaded with pretension, explaining that the band had been knocked back from various record labels at the time and had received feedback to take themselves more seriously.
Adding, “I took that to mean, ‘I need to write serious lyrics that were not about girls and smoking weed’. It was stuff on the telly at the time that just prompted me. We gloat and think, ‘Look at them, in countries in Africa and Eastern Europe and all that struggling’, but we’re no better here. I thought it was a little bit cheesy, listening for the first time. But doing it live has sort of reinvigorated me, definitely.”
He continued, “It’s 35 years old, it’s strange how it has spanned all those years. And it wasn’t me being particularly perceptive about what was going on at the time. It was just trying to write a song with semi-serious lyrics. But yet, it is strangely relevant now. It’s quite eerie, really, and I suppose it’s a little bit sad – 35 years old, and we’re no better off, probably worse.”
There are, of course, vivid memories from those halcyon days of the late ‘80s, particularly when it came to an anecdote about playing the then-recently refurbished Boardwalk in Manchester, seeing people queued round the street to get into the venue, and then spotting a young fan wearing a bespoke Joanna T-shirt.
But it also goes without saying that this was a time filled with the intoxicating highs of seeing frontmen like Ian Brown and Shaun Ryder cut through the noise and make it to the big leagues with their bands. “We were kids, basically,” Holliday said, so chances of watching The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays were more as fans than they were as rising contemporaries.
Elaborating, “For both of them in particular, it was about performance. I was sort of besotted with The Stone Roses, and the first album was amazing. But going to see them, and seeing how they went about things – the dynamics of John Squire standing there, not doing very much, but getting these amazing sounds out of his guitar, and then Ian Brown being like a magnet for everyone’s attention. We saw The Stone Roses a lot in the early days. But then, contrasting that with The Happy Mondays and how it was a little bit more chaotic on stage, the focus was Shaun Ryder belting out fantastic tune after fantastic tune.”
Joanna may not have captured the same heights that those bands went on to dominate, but according to Holliday, there is no point in looking back and soul-searching into the past: “I’ve never overly reminisced or felt moody about missing out. I enjoyed Britpop and all that kind of thing, but I never thought we could have done that. I think we probably would have burnt out or run out of ideas sooner or later. I’ve never been resentful or remorseful that we didn’t get a little bit of success or glory.”
There’s no avoiding the obvious statement that, given the band have already beaten the odds of getting back together after all this time, there is no chance like the present. “They’re saying this is just the beginning,” Holliday reveals, with talk of heading Stateside to Alty’s home in LA for gigs in 2026. “We’ve all got day jobs and families to worry about, but nine months ago, we didn’t think we’d be rehearsing for a gig in Manchester on a Saturday night. So in another nine months, who knows?”
Joanna are ready to go all guns blazing second time around: “We’ve got to go with the flow, because we’ve missed out on too much. So whatever comes up now, we just need to go for it. Make it up on ourselves if we can, let’s just try this one out and see what happens.”
