The models are dressed for a 1990 music video shoot, but no one seems to have told them it’d be a Happy Mondays video shoot. To be fair, Happy Mondays appear to have no idea that they’re at a Happy Mondays video shoot either. At least a dozen women in tasteful cocktail dresses gyrate in an empty sound studio as Happy Mondays pantomime a song called “Kinky Afro,” wearing what looks like the clothes they slept in the night before.

That is, if they slept at all. The first look Shaun Ryder gives to the camera is so far beyond “hungover” that it’s uncanny, like a still from an I Think You Should Leave sketch 30 years ahead of its time. His fly also appears to be halfway down. The only guy in the band that’s playing in sync is Mark “Bez” Berry, the mascot/dancer/occasional percussionist whose main instrument is himself, except when he starts patting Ryder’s back like a bongo after a model steals his maracas. “Kinky Afro” is all quotables, but the most important line is, “What you get is just what you see.” And what you saw in this video is exactly what you got on Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches—a Madchester masterpiece that could only come from the scene’s most functionally booted band.

“Kinky Afro” isn’t Happy Mondays’ biggest hit or defining song—that would be Pills’ rhymin’ and stealin’ lead single “Step On,” or the epochal Paul Oakenfold remix of “Wrote for Luck,” or “24 Hour Party People,” their sex, drugs, and on-the-dole anthem, and the namesake of an indispensable 2002 Factory Records magical realism biopic. After the tragic death of Ian Curtis at 23 ends the revolutionary post-punk phase of Factory, Happy Mondays appear in the film’s second act as unwitting insurgents, a signing that propels Factory founder Tony Wilson’s nightclub, the Haçienda, from a struggling warehouse venue to the locus of the ecstasy-fueled rave revolution that’s sweeping the UK. By the end of the movie, the Mondays are comic relief; with Factory in dire financial straits, they take a meeting with EMI, announce that they’re “going for a Kentucky [Fried Chicken]” when presented with a vegetable platter, and never come back. When we see them eating from an actual bucket of chicken, it’s a gag based on the open secret that “KFC” was the band’s code word for heroin.

However, “Kinky Afro” remains Happy Mondays’ biggest hit in America. It’s central to the legacy of their third album, which was released on Elektra and recorded in Los Angeles because that was where these guys were less likely to get in trouble in 1990. Then again, maybe the famed Capitol Studios was just a proper compromise; if relative sobriety was truly a priority, the Mondays wouldn’t have also floated Amsterdam and Jamaica as options.

By the time Pills was properly released in November, Happy Mondays had headlined Glastonbury, the Oakenfold-led “United States of the Hacienda” tour was a smashing success, and Madchester-lite singles from Jesus Jones and EMF had topped Billboard. American publications attempted to sum up the band’s raison d’être in a few sentences. “The new music is buoyant, almost goofy,” Newsweek proclaimed. “Scrubbed and mellow and often stoned out of their gourds, their Monkees haircuts bobbing…the fashion grafts British football gear onto American hippie glad rags—with a soupcon of the Jetsons’ futurism.” The upstart UK publication Vox singled out that passage from “Stark Raving Madchester” as proof of how poorly prepared America was to meet the Mondays on their own terms. At a 1990 music industry seminar titled “Stars of Tomorrow,” Wilson took an even more antagonistic tack towards the New York audience: “You used to know how to dance here. God knows how you fucking forgot.”

It’s hard to tell whether even the most enthusiastic UK rags shared Wilson’s beliefs, or whether or not Happy Mondays were great as opposed to merely infamous. The almost universal critical acclaim that awaited Pills didn’t change the perception that the music was happening in spite of the people who made it (“stupidly excellent,” “against all odds, this is a stunningly good record”). Details about their creative process from the time are scarce, but their drug-seeking habits are well-documented and often played for laughs, whether it’s arranging international opium deals near Marlon Brando’s house or hitting up crack dens in Harlem almost immediately after arriving in New York for their tour with the Pixies.

And so, if there was a lot riding on Pills, none of that seemed to get through to Ryder. “It’s hard to tell if the Mondays idolize anyone,” NME wondered, even as the Mondays surrounded themselves with avant-garde idols. Looking at the credits from their initial run, they could be mistaken for cred-conscious bohos trying to transcend their hardscrabble, Mancunian roots. 1987’s Squirrel and G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out) was produced by John Cale, not because it was a particularly inspired stylistic match but because, in Wilson’s cynical view, the halo effect of the Velvet Underground served as a hedge against poor initial sales of their debut. 1988’s Bummed, meanwhile, was an epic grudge match of substance issues—in one corner, the Mondays, newly enamored with ecstasy, in the other, Factory producer Martin Hannett, deep in financial turmoil and various addictions that would end his life at age 42.

Ironically, the producer most responsible for Happy Mondays’ enduring critical cachet had nothing to do with Loaded or Unknown Pleasures. Long before he became a Vegas EDM punchline, Paul Oakenfold and partner Steve Osborne were up-and-coming acid house producers who were tapped to do a remix of Bummed’s massive centerpiece “Wrote for Luck,” which they pushed out to seven minutes with the help of an N.W.A. sample (a trick that would be repeated on Oasis’ Be Here Now, one of the few ’90s UK blockbusters even more notorious for rampant drug use). The partnership continued to flower on “Step On,” a quasi-cover of John Kongos’ “He’s Gonna Step on You Again” intended for a 40th-anniversary Elektra compilation that soon became proof of concept for Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches.

“Step On” only vaguely resembles its source material: The opening piano strokes are swiped from any number of Italo disco songs, the drum loops could pass for New Jack Swing, Ryder’s verse cadence is nicked from “Come Together,” and the most famous lyric is on loan from Steve McQueen. Still, this recombinant approach honors the spirit (if not the politics) of Kongos’ original, which is credited as the first song to use sampling.

This approach—stripping down a cover of everything but vibe—also worked for “Bob’s Yer Uncle.” Originally conceived as a take on Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’,” Oakenfold insisted the Mondays keep their sinister groove, as they layered the Daktari theme song, snippets from The Exorcist, and assorted porno films. And, once it became clear that Bez was in no shape to contribute proper percussion, Ryder boasted, “We got somebody who I think was called something like Fidel Castro in. Mega.” (His name was actually Tony Castro.) And since this is a band whose previous album, Bummed, was a joke about anal sex, Ryder took some liberties with the lyric, “I won’t let you leave my love behind.” “It’s our version of a Balearic love song,” Ryder told NME, “where we’re talking about fucking chicks up the arse.” This was a statement Ryder gave after 17 years of sobriety; it took him a moment to remember that Wilson had requested “Bob’s Yer Uncle” be played at his own funeral.

On past records, Happy Mondays were an inspired post-punk or punk-funk band limited by their technical proficiency. In linking up with Oakenfold and Osborne, the Mondays just had to nail a couple of bars at a time and let the producers piece it together in the studio. Pills begins with a glimmering acoustic strum reflecting their new milieu of casinos, Jacuzzis, luxury sports cars, and private jets. And, in the case of Bez, getting hit on by the star of Pretty Woman and being so loaded he didn’t recognize her. But immediately thereafter, guitarist Mark Day’s snarling, loopy riff mirrors how Happy Mondays actually appeared: misfits who’d swagger into the room, steal your wallet during a bender, and help you look for it the next day.

Day runs his signal through an ultra-premium Leslie amp on “Grandbag’s Funeral,” creating an impossible funk rhythm that sounds like Led Zeppelin’s “The Wanton Song” if its title was more truthful. The slide riff from “God’s Cop” sounds like it’s being played with the edge of a switchblade, whereas “Dennis and Lois” just sounds like U2 guitarist the Edge, a soaring tribute to a couple of NYC scene lifers that predates Achtung Baby by a year. While his brother served as the band’s mouthpiece, Paul Ryder’s basslines serve as the body and soul, the mirror image of fellow Factory bassist Peter Hook by putting groove and murk at the front rather than melody. And if drummer Gary Whelan or Bez couldn’t nail their parts (and the latter rarely could), they had no qualms about being replaced by drum machines or loops of their better takes.

In other words, Happy Mondays were the only Madchester act that truly envisioned their music as post-punk, or even post-rock, with Pills perhaps the first example of a rock band reinventing themselves as a sampledelic hip-hop act. It’s a link made all too clear as “God’s Cop” lifts the same drum loop featured on De La Soul’s “Me Myself and I.” With a presumably dim grasp of copyright and licensing law, Happy Mondays took full advantage of early hip-hop’s openness towards collage, interpolation, repurposing, and when necessary, outright theft. The hook on “Kinky Afro” was assumed to be a rip from “Lady Marmalade,” but Ryder had an ingenious alibi—he claimed he couldn’t have been stealing from Patti LaBelle because he was actually stealing from John McClane in Die Hard.

In some ways, they were ahead of the curve; Ryder bragged about never writing down his lyrics and using music as a loss leader for a lucrative drug racket when Jay-Z was still making money from ’88. “We were giving [ecstasy] away at first, like good drug dealers do. That was good marketing,” Ryder explained, less enamored with the potentially utopian impact of the drug on UK’s music scene than the fact that local police were more concerned about crack and heroin than all-night raves. “We were selling them at £50 a tab, which was a fucking fantastic earner. Bass strings are expensive, aren’t they?”

Happy Mondays’ viewpoint may have been more cynical than their peers, but hardly out of step. “The philosophy is simplistic, the politics nil,” Newsweek said of the Madchester scene, which itself was an oversimplification, if not outright wrong. The Mondays were libertines and libertarians, an approach that Ryder might describe as laissez faire, or, in less fancy terms, “Loose Fit.” Pills’ most seductive groove might have been interpreted as a cultural anthem two years prior, but by the time they could afford the top gear they used to shoplift, the Mondays didn’t seem to have much allegiance to “baggy.” “Loose Fit” is Ryder’s philosophical credo rather than a fashion statement, a call to wear life like a loose garment and not to step on anyone’s toes.

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.

Yet all of these non-musical ventures have likely done more to burnish Happy Mondays’ brand over the past 30 years as a spectacular rave’n’roll swindle. It’s why Pills manages to resonate not just with the laddish electro-rock bands that stuffed FIFA soundtracks in the 2000s, but the Tough Alliance and the Armed, subversive, high-concept projects that toy with perceptions of cultism and violence as much as they act upon them. Or basically any hardcore band that cares a lot about merch drops.

The band knew to end on a possibility—that the ’90s could have turned out much differently than they did. After years of trying to establish plausible deniability for Madchester as a scene and a sound, Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches closes on a note of peace, happiness, and love with the fittingly titled “Harmony.” “What we need is a big, big cooking pot/Big enough to cook every wonderful, beautiful, trustworthy, lovely idea we’ve got,” Ryder sings over the “Sweet Jane” chord progression, reimagining the Mad Men finale if Don Draper found self-actualization in Ibiza. In 2023’s If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, author Vincent Bevins surveyed the mass movements of the 2010s and found a common terminus point—the moment when the ultras arrive on the scene, either leftist punks or football fans who determine the ultimate course towards anarchy or tyranny. Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches imagined a third way for Madchester, one that remains eternally alluring for any musical movement trying to balance drugs, thugs, and hugs, all raving under one roof.