They're making a film about Factory Records. Starting with the Sex Pistols' Free Trade Hall gig, it follows Tony Wilson, played by Steve Coogan, through the post-punk era, the house revolution, to the death of Factory in the early 1990s. And I'm in it.

I must point out that I'm not an actor - I'm simply an extra chosen because I have a (very slight) resemblance to Paul Davis, the Happy Mondays' keyboard player. Working on the film - entitled "24hr Party People", by the way - is really what brought me into contact with 'Bummed'. Previously, my knowledge of the Happy Mondays began with "Step On" and ended with "Kinky Afro", but after learning the songs - so I could mime them - and watching video tapes of live gigs - so I could learn the (in my case, very static) moves, I realised that some of the Mondays' earlier stuff was actually quite good. So I got Bummed from the people at the library. (Not literally, of course.)

After listening to the album - particularly to "Wrote For Luck" and "Do It Better" - a rare thing occurred: I discovered that I preferred the live recordings of the songs to the album versions. Now, live recordings are usually poorly recorded, rarely well mixed, and have loads of incessant crowd noise on them. And yet, even when listening to the live tracks on videotape, in cramped monaural sound (well, it's not spacious, is it?), I still preferred them to the album. Why? Because Martin Hannett's production is not only incredibly dated, it was also, I suspect, considered pretty awful at the time. Perhaps this is because, if the film is anything to go by, Martin Hannett was an alcoholic chain-smoking Jabba the Hut lookalike, who wanted to kill Tony Wilson. I'm not sure about the last bit but, well, it is a film. You can see why the Happy Mondays liked him, anyway.

Much of the band is drowned out by the massive gated reverb applied to more or less everything in the mix. On "Do It Better", Mark Day's brilliant guitar riff is suddenly and clumsily interrupted by what sounds like Hannett repeatedly slamming the studio door in Tony Wilson's face; it is, in fact, the drums, reverbed so heavily that they sound out of time with everything else.

It is an often used mantra among mixing engineers and producers alike that "you can't polish a turd". Perhaps not, but you can sure as hell muddy a diamond. Some people say that the Happy Mondays' songs are priceless; Martin Hannett's production certainly is.

Recommended: No

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