The most heartfelt moments on Pills are, understandably, protest songs about the reigning political issue of the day, namely: letting Shaun Ryder take drugs in peace. Inspired by a rare instance of Ryder facing consequences at customs, “Holiday” stumbles upon a trenchant take on classist policing: “You don’t look first class/Let me look up your ass.” “God’s Cop” is a sendup of quasi-celebrity bobby James Anderton, who claimed a supernatural mandate to bust up raves. “God’s Cop” is, in some ways, a protest song, but more effective as a parody. Rattling off crude jokes about feminine hygiene and stolen credit cards, the most damning blow Ryder can land makes Anderton sound like a member of the Mondays’ entourage: “Me and the chief got soul to soul!/Me and the chief got slowly stoned!”
In America, Madchester remained a curiosity at best, but that’s no fault of Pills. In the same condescending way that innovations in hip-hop or electronic music are described as “the new punk,” the American mags were particularly guilty of comparing Happy Mondays to other guitar bands—claiming that Madchester was the “second Summer of Love,” or the second coming of the Beatles or the Sex Pistols. Perhaps that speaks to the limited imagination of rock scribes, but in the ensuing years, most of the biggest Madchester acts revealed themselves as boomer rock in baggy drag.
As for the Mondays, their reputation as a drug band with a music problem became a lot more literal. 1992’s Yes Please! is the sort of album most people encounter through “Worst Flops of All Time” lists before they ever hear it, if they hear it at all. The lore is far more fascinating: an overmatched Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz trying to wrangle a band of active drug addicts in Barbados, the unrealized desire to collab with Bushwick Bill, Ryder selling the furniture at Eddy Grant’s studio to buy crack cocaine and developing a throat infection that left him incapable of recording vocals. While Yes Please! is certainly uninspired and dated, it’s nowhere near the disaster its reputation suggests—a reputation that all but ensures its eligibility to be reappraised as a cult classic, unlike 2007’s truly inessential comeback Uncle Dysfunktional.
Ryder and Bez briefly got back into the UK press’ good graces with Black Grape’s It’s Great When You’re Straight…Yeah, a deeply mid-’90s melange of alt-rap and spiritual mumbo jumbo whose title winks at sobriety (not sexuality), even though the collective’s drug regimen was only slightly less intense than the Mondays’. Over the past 30 years, it’s become clear that fame is their greatest addiction. Whether popping up on Shameless or Shaun Ryder on UFOs or I’m a Celebrity…South Africa, it’s been difficult to keep Ryder off television; I’d say his finest role came in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, where he voiced masturbation enthusiast Maccer, a washed-up, bucket-hatted leader of an “extremely baggy” band called the Gurning Chimps. Bez likewise never stopped moving, touring the reality show circuit to pay off tax debts and winning Celebrity Big Brother in 2005. In the time since, he’s been an anti-fracking advocate and an online fitness instructor; it’s unclear whether he actually learned to play the bongos for real.