Much vaunted as a fusion of indie and dance music, Happy Mondays' joyous version of 'Step On' is greater than the sum of its parts.
From the opening bars of its housey piano riff, loping beat and Shaun Ryder's bizarre but rousing cry of "You're twisting my melon, man... call the cops!", 'Step On' by Happy Mondays is still one of the most distinctive tracks of the '90s. The Manchester band's biggest-selling single and a number five hit in the spring of 1990, it was the result of a highly unusual creative arrangement which saw Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osborne — previously responsible for groundbreaking and influential remixes for the group — being invited to take full charge of their production.
Osborne remembers the February 1990 sessions for 'Step On', at Eden Studios in West London, as having a suitably party-like atmosphere. "That session is still my favourite," he says. "It's unbeatable. Things were happening all the time. Most of the time there was just a line of blokes at the back of the wall dancing and getting into it. That's never happened to me since then. It was a really exciting three days. An amazing time."
How Oakenfold and Osborne came to produce Happy Mondays was via a circuitous route through previously uncharted territory. The famously unruly and drug-fuelled band had already made two albums — Squirrel & G-Man... (1987) with John Cale and Bummed (1988) with Martin Hannett — and had a well-deserved reputation for operating on the edge.
Back in 2006, talking to Sound On Sound, Cale described the sessions for Squirrel & G-Man... as being "very rickety. Really hilarious. It was like holding onto a bar of soap in the bathtub." The legendary Martin Hannett (Joy Division, Magazine), with his tech-exploring, enveloping-pushing methods and warped and mischievous ways of directing bands in the studio, proved more than a match for Happy Mondays on Bummed. "He was as mad as we was, Martin," Shaun Ryder told this writer in 2016. "He was still a kid, y'know. He didn't mind getting off his face."
The Oakenfold Osborne Team
Post-Bummed, though, the UK indie rock scene was rapidly changing and by 1989, the influence of dance music and particularly acid house was creeping in. Happy Mondays and their Factory Records boss Tony Wilson were ahead of the curve in this respect, commissioning remixes of the band's tracks that would take their music out on to the dancefloor.
By 1988, Oakenfold was running the Spectrum night at Heaven in London and moving into remixes, most notably the Latin funk-influenced 'Jibaro', as a member of the band Electra. It was a record regularly played at the Hacienda in Manchester and consequently a favourite of the members of Happy Mondays.
"'Jibaro' was inspired by my visit to Ibiza," Oakenfold remembers today. "It was a true Balearic track. It was so influential because it was kind of the first true Balearic track." Soon, Oakenfold was receiving numerous commissions for remixes. "The move from DJ'ing to producing was an easy transition," he says, "as my father was a musician and I was very much around making music all my life."
Before long, Oakenfold was looking for a co-producing partner to team up with in the studio, and met Steve Osborne through a mutual friend. "Steve Osborne is a great producer in his own right," Oakenfold enthuses. "Our collaboration worked so well."
By 1988, Steve Osborne was already a highly experienced engineer, who'd started out by dabbling in recording bands on Portastudio and then eight-track, after dropping out of university in Kent where he'd been studying electronics. "I thought I might learn how to build an amp or a synth," he laughs. "I always wanted to do music really, so I was there for the wrong reasons."
The subsequent teaming up of Osborne and Oakenfold was a perfect arrangement for both, the former being not just an engineer, but also a producer, programmer and musician, while the latter contributed DJ'ing skills and a virtually unrivalled knowledge at the time of what worked and what didn't on the dancefloor.
"Paul was out there in the clubs," says Osborne. "He knew what the market was. I couldn't have been doing what I was doing without him and he couldn't have been doing what he was doing without me. He would spend a lot of time just going through 12-inches and keeping up. He'd be thinking about what was happening in the clubs. Things were changing so fast and he was on top of that.
"But even though Paul comes from a club background, he was really into bands. I come from more of a band background, but I really like grooves. If I'm producing, the groove is absolutely paramount to what I'm doing."
"The direction of the rhythm is where I would always start when remixing or producing," says Oakenfold. "And then I would bring that to Steve and that would be our starting point moving forward."
"Back then when we were remixing, it was all on tape," Osborne points out. "So, when it got to the point of doing the mix, I would be jamming on the desk and putting stuff down to half-inch. We'd kind of pick bits out and edit them together and we'd gradually make the mix. So, it would just be, like, put a bit down, edit it in, put another bit down, edit it in. Both of us together getting the arrangement right and the right feel."
Remixes
Eden Studios in Chiswick soon became their remixing HQ, with its Studio One at the time boasting a 6056 G-series SSL console. The duo's first major remix was of Happy Mondays' 'Wrote For Luck' from Bummed. "Obviously, Paul was playing in Manchester at the Hacienda all the time," says Osborne. "He'd met the band, knew the band, so it very much came through that."
One of Oakenfold's initial inspirations for what would eventually become the hugely influential 'WFL (Think About The Future)' remix was, strangely enough, a 12-inch reworking of French world music band Les Negresses Vertes' 'Zobi La Mouche' that Osborne had in fact worked on. "When we did 'Wrote For Luck', Paul came in with that," Osborne recalls. "He said, 'I really like the sequencing on that remix.' I'm like, 'Well, I did that.' So that was one of the references and I think the sequencing was quite similar."
Remixing could be a tricky business technically back in 1989 and the days of Roland MC-500 sequencers and Akai samplers. For 'Wrote For Luck', Factory sent Osborne the Martin Hannett-produced two-inch master tape, which had no click track or SMPTE code, forcing him to generate a clock using a Friendchip SRC MIDI Synchroniser.
"There was no click track on the tape so I had to sort of make a click track out of the drums," Osborne explains. "If you put the track in a computer now, you'd see that it's moving all over the place. I'd take the kick and the snare and use delays and I'd just generate enough beats to get something constant.
"I'd EQ that and gate it, so it was as tight as possible and just as much like a click as a possible. You could feed that into the SRC on one side and then feed timecode into the other and it would generate a MIDI Clock. Then I'd feed the MIDI Clock into the MC‑500.
"We had an [Akai] S950, a [Roland] Juno 106 and I hired in a Roland R‑8 drum machine. The R‑8 is solid and has much more of a sort of rock sound to it. It's more like a move on from a Linn Drum in a way.
"I would've run the vocals off tape. But I would've sampled bits of guitar into the 950 so I could loop them. I played the bass in live and the Juno bass. A lot of the stuff I'd have played in live, just back on to tape."
'WFL (Think About The Future)' also featured samples from Prince's 'The Future' and NWA's 'Express Yourself', spun in from vinyl by Paul Oakenfold. "Everything is based on the rhythm that works in the nightclub," he stresses. "So, it was based around NWA and Prince."
"Paul did that live over the mix," says Osborne. "That was literally me on the desk, Paul on the decks, going straight down to half-inch. Doing the remixes then, we weren't automating, we were playing the desk, doing a dub thing, straight to half-inch. The half-inch was the point where you made the choices."
Though released on the flip side of a 12-inch single where Vince Clarke's remix of 'Wrote For Luck' featured as the A-side, it was the Oakenfold/Osborne version that became more famous, kickstarting the 'indie dance' genre. "No disrespect to Vince," Shaun Ryder stressed. "Brilliant, right? But Vince had fucking eight records in the charts at the time, and they all sounded like Vince. What Oakenfold and Osborne did was they loosened that up and broke it down. But it ended up on the B-side, and it took the smart DJs at the time who knew Oakenfold and respected him to flip that over."
Next, the pair were asked to remix Happy Mondays' follow-up single, 'Hallelujah', bringing in Andrew Weatherall and turning in a thumping reworking that sampled chanting monks and a snippet of US soul singer Tramaine exclaiming "hallelujah!", lifted from her 1986 track 'In The Morning'. Once again, the remix became better-known than the group's original. "[With] the remix of 'Hallelujah'," Oakenfold remembers, "the melody of the chant and the rolling drums were key."
"It was the same process, pretty much," says Osborne. "Andy Weatherall came in with the 'hallelujah' sample." It was Osborne's idea, however, to patch Shaun Ryder's vocal through a Bel phaser for added trippy effect. "Shaun's got that really smoky sound and I just wanted to enhance that and make it as smoky as possible. It's one of those things when you're working with a band where you go, 'Ooh, that effect works on his vocal.' Then that becomes a thing you always go to."
'Step On'
In the wake of those two landmark remixes, Factory's Tony Wilson invited Oakenfold/Osborne to work directly with Happy Mondays in the studio. The band's US label Elektra were celebrating their 40th anniversary with an album of cover versions of songs from the company's back catalogue. Happy Mondays chose to record a new version of South African singer-songwriter John Kongos's 1971 single 'He's Gonna Step On You Again'.
On day one at Eden Studios, the first time he met the band, Steve Osborne was faced with the intimidating sight of Happy Mondays and their entourage, who'd taken up messy residence in the studio's lounge. "Terrifying," he laughs. "It was just a roomful of blokes. I was like, 'Alright?' Said hello and then just swiftly went straight back into the control room. I'm used to being in the studio, so if I'm in the studio, I'm comfortable. I'm in charge. So, it was fine. I never ever had any problems. It was great."
The first step was to work with drummer Gary Whelan on the rhythm track. Osborne by this stage was using an Atari ST computer and an Akai S1000, which had the ability to sample in stereo. "I got Gaz to play the basic groove," he remembers. "Then recorded onto multitrack tape, bounced it down to stereo and stuck it in the S1000. I'd get him to do other bits as well and maybe loop other bits and stick them in the sampler as well and then program it. I added a 909 with it. If you listen to it, there's a 909 kick pushing against it. There are two grooves sort of pushing against each other.
Me and Paul just looked at each other and went, 'Fucking hell, this is in the bag.' It was a hit straight away.
"At that stage, my miking would've been pretty much standard stuff. The room at Eden was a very dry room, so there wouldn't have been a lot of room mics going on. The sound of the drums sort of becomes less important because you know you're gonna program on top. Your goal is to get the vibe of someone playing, as opposed to getting the full sonics of it."
Next was added Shaun Ryder's brother Paul's bouncy, elastic bass line, using both a DI and a miked Ampeg SVT rig. "I really enjoyed working with Paul," Osborne says, "because he's got this really dubby feel. He's always slightly behind, in the right way. Just sitting slightly behind the kick. The bass went down really easy."
Elsewhere, guitarist Mark Day had worked out the guitar line from Kongos's original track. Or at least, he figured he had. "It was completely different," Osborne points out. "But it was a great riff. He played it and I was like, 'Well, that's not the part. But you've written a better one.'" Day's setup was fairly standard for the time — various Fender guitars played through a Boss pedalboard into a Mesa Boogie 1x12 combo.
"They're quite versatile, those little guitar amps," says Osborne. "He'd never done feedback before. So, when we did the power chords, I said, 'We want it to sound really raw and get feedback.' He was like, 'How'd you do that?' So, we just cranked it up super loud to get that feedback on the end of all the power chords. So that was fun, cause it was something he'd not done before and he did it really well. It's got that sort of intensity."
Keyboards-wise, Osborne relied mainly on a Roland U-220 module, working with the Mondays' Paul Davis capturing his parts as MIDI in the Atari. "So, the piano riff on 'Step On', that would have been him jamming away and I'd just have gone, 'Oop, that's the bit there.' I would've grabbed that. So, it was very much, 'Let him jam and edit the bits that we want.'"
But it was when Shaun Ryder walked into the vocal booth at Eden that the real magic of 'Step On' was created. "We had no idea what he was gonna do," says Osborne. "I remember running the tape and he just did the whole 'twisting my melon', 'call the cops' thing, all the catchphrases, straight off. It seemed like he'd figured all that out. Me and Paul just looked at each other and went, 'Fucking hell, this is in the bag.' It was a hit straight away."
Osborne chose to record Ryder with the same mic he'd have used onstage with Happy Mondays. "It would've been done with a [Shure SM]58 in the booth. With someone like Shaun, you don't want to stick up a valve mic (laughs). A 58 is a great mic."
From here, Osborne and Oakenfold moved into Studio Two at Eden to mix 'Step On'. But not before there was a crucial addition to the track, namely the gutsy vocal contributions of Manchester soul singer Rowetta, who'd been recently discovered by the band's manager Nathan McGough.
"You're like, 'Oh no... is it someone he met in a club?'" says Osborne. "But she went in and we were like, 'Wow... ok, so she's a singer.' She smashed it in one or two takes. Then there's that sustained 'ooh' at the end. I got her to do the note and then I sampled that and looped it and stuck it back in, so it kind overlays on itself. A little bit of trickery went on in there."
Before it was completed, however, 'Step On' required a second mix. "I mixed it once," Osborne recalls. "Then, Nathan McGough came back and said, 'It sounds too nice.' We definitely mixed it twice."
Pills 'N' Thrills And Bellyaches
'Step On' proved to be such a huge and instant hit that Steve Osborne and Paul Oakenfold were then brought in to produce Happy Mondays's next album, Pills 'N' Thrills And Bellyaches. The sessions were conducted in the fabled Capitol Studios in Los Angeles. "It was a big room," says Osborne, "and we had an engineer [Ray Blair] with us who was a bit older. I think he thought the whole thing was crazy."
"In terms of how we worked," says Oakenfold, "based on the demos the band gave us, me and Steve would figure out what would work and what wouldn't." In addition, Oakenfold would sometimes suggest grooves to the band by playing them records from his DJ box. "I did have decks set up in the studio," he says, "and everything would start with the rhythm upwards, which is a different way of producing. It was a unique way but worked for the band."
This time around, though, apart from the odd track such as 'God's Cop', where the groove was built around a loop, Osborne wanted to craft the album entirely from the band's performances. "I had this idea in my head that everything had to be done by the band," he says. "I hate the idea of producer records. So, everything is the band. I did a lot tape editing. All the drums. With Gary, I'd run the tape for, say, six minutes on the verse groove, and then I'd do the same for a chorus groove, and then I'd do another setup and he'd put fills in. And I literally chopped arrangements together on tape. No sampling, it's all drum edits.
"I suppose it's like when they used to do disco records, they'd have a drummer just play the groove all the way through and then they'd varispeed it up or down depending on which tune they were doing and what tempo they were using. It was sort of a similar technique, I guess.
Similar to 'Step On', Paul Ryder's bass parts were committed to tape fairly quickly, whereas Mark Day's layered and inventive guitar tracks took much more time. "I'd get him to play the verse guitar part," Osborne explains, "and then I'd just drop him in where I wanted it. Then I'd get him to do something else and I'd drop that in where I wanted it. 'Cause he would just forget how the arrangement was going [laughs]. But it was brilliantly bonkers. It was just great."
Overall, Osborne remembers the Pills 'N' Thrills... sessions as being far less chaotic than Happy Mondays's reputation for mayhem might have suggested. "It was really organised," he says. "I think from their perspective, coming in and working in a slightly more structured way would've been quite nice. Capitol used to do this 24-hour thing — you could have night-time or daytime. We had 12pm til 12am, so we had to be quite structured. I had a thing with Shaun where he would come in at six o'clock every day, which meant he'd turn up about nine or 10. But it was pretty structured. It was less chaotic than you'd imagine."
Nonetheless, Osborne's approach to working with the erratic Shaun Ryder was to grab vocal performances whenever he could. "I just had this thing of trying to get him to sing every day. He'd come in at whatever time and he'd say he couldn't sing today — he didn't have anything to sing or his voice wasn't right. There would be a little discussion with me saying, 'Let's give it go.' I might just get a verse or he might try something out and get an idea for something else. He'd be jamming stuff, I guess. But that's how we did it. I was just constantly chipping away and then, in the morning, I'd comp. It was just a constant updating, putting stuff together."
Sometimes, as on the track 'Dennis And Lois', Osborne would enhance Shaun Ryder's inherent cartoonishness with a harmoniser. "Yeah, I'd usually use the phaser thing, and then it's a fifth, running an AMS [DMX 15‑80S]. That was one of those things where you go, 'Hmm, not sure about the vocal.' And I just came up with that, stuck it on and it was, 'Ooh, that's interesting.'"
One funny moment in the vocal sessions came when Osborne suggested that, for the song 'Harmony', Ryder could maybe — fittingly enough — try some harmony overdubs. "He looked at me in disgust and said, 'Steve, I don't do fucking harmonies. Alright... you go and do it and then I'll copy.' So, I went in the booth, sang it and he went, 'Yeah, fucking great, done.' So, I'm singing the harmony. He basically tricked me into it [laughs]."
Tracking done, Osborne and Oakenfold returned to London and Eden Studio Two to mix Pills 'N' Thrills And Bellyaches. Factory Records had given them a tight deadline, to capitalise on the success of 'Step On', which was of course to be included in the running order. "The whole album was recorded and mixed in 10 weeks cause Factory needed it quick," Osborne remembers. "I would've liked a little bit more time. To me, some of it feels a bit unfinished. But I think with everybody in music or any kind of creative process, you always think you could do more. So, having a strict limit's probably a good thing.
"I sort of struggled with the drums sometimes, cause the kick wasn't particularly strong. I was doing some really ridiculous EQ'ing on the kick to get it how I wanted. The thing is now you stick up Slate or whatever and it's easy. Gary's got a feel but he doesn't hit very hard. Sometimes, trying to get enough weight into the kick could be a tricky area. But I don't remember there being real problems with the mixing."
Aftermath
Upon release, Pills 'N' Thrills And Bellyaches followed 'Step On' in becoming a Top Five hit, reaching number four in the UK album chart, before going platinum. Subsequent sessions with Happy Mondays and Oakenfold/Osborne at Real World Studios near Bath were less pain-free, though, as they recorded a cover of the Bee Gees' 'Staying Alive' for Malcolm McLaren's 1991 film, The Ghosts Of Oxford Street.
"It was sort of a bad period with the band," says Osborne. "The vibe wasn't so good. And that was the stage when everyone was like, 'Let's do the next album.' Me and Paul really wanted to do the next album, but at that time they didn't have the material written and Shaun wasn't in such a great place. We said, 'Yeah, well we'd really like to do the next album. But don't do it now. 'Cause it's not gonna go well. It's not the right time.'"
The next instalment in the adventures of Happy Mondays was a less than thrilling one, as they travelled to Barbados to make 1992's disappointing Yes Please! album, produced by Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz of Talking Heads/Tom Tom Club. Shaun Ryder was by then in the depths of crack addiction and sounded listless and flat (or angry) on the record.
Nevertheless, 30 years on from Pills 'N' Thrills And Bellyaches, Ryder is now drug-free and Happy Mondays remain an active touring unit. For Steve Osborne, the only time he hears the evergreen 'Step On' these days is when it's played on the radio. Which is often. "I might be driving," he says, "or I might be out somewhere and it comes on and I'm like [laughs], 'Yeah, I like that.'"
New vinyl editions of the first four Happy Mondays albums, including Pills 'N' Thrills And Bellyaches, are out now on London Records.