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SHAUN RYDER: As soon as we heard the bongo drums that start the song, we said, “Right, we’ll do that; we’ll sample the bongos and everything else, and I’ll sing about three lines off it, and we’ve done it in about two seconds.” But Paul Oakenfold had different ideas.
PAUL OAKENFOLD (producer): I first met the Mondays at my club, Spectrum: they often used to come down to London and check out what I was doing, back in 1987, ’88, and they also came to my one-offs in Manchester, at Legends. A few years later, my friend Pete Tong was A&R-ing the Mondays single “Wrote For Luck”. He asked if I was interested in producing them. I was aware of what they were doing, and what I wanted to do was to take the hip hop flavour and put Shaun and his lyrical content on top. The partnership started when I remixed “Wrote For Luck” and then “Hallelujah”. That was in the early days of sampling. Do you know what? I sampled a track by Prince and a drum loop from NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” – and I didn’t clear either of them! No one really understood any of that legal stuff at the time. Anyway, those remixes went down well, and Tony Wilson asked if I wanted to produce Pills’N’Thrills And Bellyaches. But before we went to LA to record it, we had to get this one-off single out of the way…
GAZ WHELAN: We’d been travelling down to London since ’88, when Paul Oakenfold was putting on Spectrum nights at Heaven. We’d been to clubs like Shoom before then. We’d drive up on Monday morning, go out Monday night, Tuesday night, then get back to the Haçienda for Wednesday. I went back to the studio with Oakey one night, and he played me some records, and showed me how to beat-match, explained to me about grooves and how songs don’t have to change for the chorus. Completely different from what I’d grown up with. And that understanding of DJ culture changed my attitude towards drumming. I understood that your job is to hold everything in place, and that might mean playing something much simpler than you think.
SHAUN RYDER: Oakey was a top geezer. Fucking lovely fella. And he really changed the way we recorded, and the way we wrote, so it’s ironic that our first tracks together were covers. You never want to listen to things too closely when you’re doing a cover, do you? I’m pretty sure we just heard the two John Kongos songs once, in the studio, and then we did our version. Which is why it’s a bit fucking garbled. What we did was rip and run, which is what kids do today with hip-hop and sampling, you know, you take a bit of a song and make it your own.
PAUL OAKENFOLD: Me and Steve Osbourne used Eden Studios in Chiswick as our main studio. It was where we did all our remixes. So the Mondays stayed in London to record this Elektra single. I was looking for this certain sound, and for that I had to completely change the way in which they recorded. Traditionally, when you record a band, you set them up, mic them up and they play as a band. We didn’t do that. We recorded them individually: first Gaz, then Paul on bass, then Mark on guitar, then the keyboards, and finally Shaun would come, very late in the evening, to do his vocals. So we approached it like a DJ makes music. You start with the rhythm and work up. That’s the difference. That’s why it had that unique sound.
GAZ WHELAN: Oakey would play us breakbeats, tracks from old funk and soul tracks, hip hop loops. The idea was that I’d copy them, and then use them as the basis for the track, build it up from there. There was this old Northern soul track he played me, and I was shocked, because it was a track I’d loved since I was young. It was this complicated shuffle that I’d tried on lots of new songs we’d been writing, but it never worked. So when we went in to do “Step On”, I was astounded when Oakey suggested this Northern Soul track as our breakbeat. So I played it really slowly, and suddenly it worked perfectly. I only wish I could bloody remember what track it was!
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