It’s not the Happy Mondays’ biggest hit. It’s arguably not their best song. It’s certainly not their most polished. But 24 Hour Party People is nevertheless the defining Mondays tune.
Step On gave them their radio hit, Wrote For Luck (in its original pre-WFL remix form) perfected their hypnotic, trippy, looped guitars and nonsense/genius lyricism, and Hallelujah was a groundbreaking coming together of indie rock, post-punk funk and rave… but 24 Hour Party People, released in 1987 as the band’s third single, remains the Happy Mondays at their purest, most exhilarating, most essential.
The Mondays’ backstory has been well-told and over-romanticised (cheeky Salford scallies stumbling upon pop stardom in between robbing sprees and industrial drug consumption) but sometimes cliches are cliches because they’re true. The band was born out of poverty and low-level crime, music was a means of escape, and they did (or some of them at least) take an awful lot of drugs…
But it’s not the only story. Early Mondays may have sounded musically “loose” (read shambolic) but from that came a sound that blended rock and dance in a truly revolutionary way – and Shaun Ryder’s lyrics, often improvised on the spot and forgotten himself by the end of the song, do touch more genius than nonsense. Factory Records boss Tony Wilson, admittedly prone to hyperbole but an undoubtedly smart cookie, described Shaun as the greatest poet since W.B. Yeats. Make of that what you will.
And it’s in 24 Hour Party People that the music, the attitude and those lopsided poetics come together in exhilarating harmony. Big drums, an infectiously funky bassline straight out of Studio 54, joyous keyboard stabs and a swirling indie guitar… and on top of it all, lyrics veering between aggression and inclusion (“How old are you? Are you old enough? Should you be in here, watching that?”), a celebration of hedonism and self-destruction, of escape and communion in the bright, artificial, seductive nether world of dirty/beautiful dancefloors.
It's a song that captures everything about the Happy Mondays that made them the coolest gang in town. It’s a shout of defiance, a declaration of intent, a statement of belief. It’s a whole scene, a whole lifestyle captured in three and a half minutes… and in the classic literary tradition, in its greatness it holds the seeds of its own destruction.
The 24 hour party would end for the Happy Mondays. It had to. But the song remains – and it remains the perfect Happy Mondays song.
Three-six-five, all the time. No days off.