Tom Tom Club (click on the picture for more)

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Chris Frantz from Tom Tom Club chatted to Skrufff this week about the ill-fated recording of Happy Mondays 1992 album Yes Please and revealed that the problems started from the very beginning.

Chris and fellow Tom Tom Club/ ex Talking Head bassist Tina Weymouth were recruited to produce the follow up to the Happy Mondays’ mega-selling Paul Oakenfold produced ‘Madchester’ album Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches’ and met for the first time at the studio, in Eddy Grant’s house in Barbados.

“The Mondays wanted to play on their own record this time and we said ‘yes, that’s a good idea, you definitely should play on your own record’,” Chris chuckled.

“This was also 1991, during the time of Nirvana, so they wanted to get away from the house music thing that Oakenfold had been doing. We think he did a great job with them (chuckling again) but that wasn’t quite what they wanted,” he continued.

“So we took them into a studio in Barbados and, er, it was very difficult. Certain members of the band were totally reliable but other members just went off the deep end down there. With crack. They were substituting crack for heroin. It was very hard work for us as producers to get even the musical tracks recorded, never mind the vocals,” he recalled.

Happy Mondays' Pills Thrills & Bellyache

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Subsequent press reports described the band ‘selling the furniture from Eddy Grant’s studio (to fund the drugs) and creating “crack dens” out of sun-loungers in Eddy’s own swimming pool’ (Wiki)”, details Chris was more oblique about.

“Shaun is a very talented guy he was just totally self destructive back then, more often than not he just wouldn’t come out of the bathroom,” he remembered.

“Eventually, Tina got him to write the lyrics but we didn’t get them recorded because he just wasn’t able to do it. We eventually got him into a rehab programme at a place called the Priory and after that we managed to record the vocals at a studio in Sussex, England.

They were just like kids. I think another factor was the whole Factory Records involvement. We have great admiration for Tony Wilson but I think the Happy Mondays had this working class idea that the record company was their boss, so they should just spend as much money as they could while the boss wasn’t looking.  It was strange to us because we were a little more knowledgeable about how business works.”

“It wasn’t all bad though,” he laughed, “We got some nice afternoons on the beach.”

Both Chris and Tina also navigated the heroin soaked environment of New York’s original punk scene of the 70s as members of future alternative rock stars Talking Heads, though were never tempted to dabble, said Chris, despite the drug’s then rampant popularity with many of the key punk figures of the time including members of the Ramones, Television and the New York Dolls..

“I was always afraid of heroin because I’d always heard how it ruined some great people and I must admit it never occurred to me to go out and buy some,” said Chris.

“And at the time when half the people on the scene were heroin addicts, I didn’t even know it. I wasn’t even aware of the fact that they were junkies. I eventually became aware of the fact that a lot of the girls on the scene were supporting the guys in the bands by either stripping or prostituting themselves. I eventually became aware of that but by that time we were already, sort of, on our way, with Talking Heads.”

Sid & Nancy Spungen on heroin (Youtube, click for more)

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“I guess there’s a heroin chic feeling and I guess Johnny Thunders had a lot to do with that, his whole mystique of being a dirty bad boy. I mean, Nancy Spungen! (Sid Vicious’ girlfriend, allegedly stabbed to death by the also dead Sex Pistol) No thank you,” he laughed.

“She was around but she would never be attracted to a band like Talking Heads,” he added. “We were too ‘different’. Those kind of girls wanted predictable black leather rock & roll bad boy stuff.”

Tom Tom Club: Genius of Live is out shortly on Nacional Records.

Jonty Skrufff

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