I remember reading about Happy Mondays in an article in Blender. It's always stayed with me that these dudes were so determined to be drug addicts that they just switched up the drug. But, when I looked into it this year, the isolated details were even more fascinating and bananas.

How Happy Mondays bankrupted Factory Records on drug island:

In order to protect their assets, Factory Records decided the best plan to mitigate issues going into the recording of their fourth album would be to stow the band away on a Caribbean Island free of the heroin that had begun to besiege Shaun Ryder’s life. Even Ryder couldn’t turn down Barbados, so he happily braved withdrawal to get the album made in the luxury of white sands, coral seas, and, as it turned out, monumental amounts of crack cocaine.

However, once he heard about the spiralling crack problem, he chartered a flight straight over and as his plane was coming into land, he witnessed Ryder and Bez wheeling a sofa down to the street apparently to sell for binge funds.

Yes Please!: the drug-fuelled disaster of the Happy Mondays' most difficult album:

Reflecting on the group’s appetite for destruction, she would later say that “a lot of times in Barbados, [fellow producer] Chris [Frantz] and I were really scared. These guys didn’t know where the edge was. They were about to fall over a cliff.”

At Manchester Airport, Ryder accidentally smashed the four bottles of methadone prescribed to maintain his opium habit during his time in the Caribbean. The purchase of a pound of marijuana upon arrival in Barbados alerted the island’s drug dealers to the presence of a troupe of free-spending high-rollers in their midst. After two days drinking in the bar of his five-star digs, drummer Gary Whelan clambered onstage to physically attack members of Spice, the in-house calypso band, to whom he had taken a dislike. This was the Happy Mondays just getting started.

In what is a terrifying image, he and Bez began spending time in barren crack dens populated by teenagers listening to Reggae 45s at 78rpm. Realising he would like something on which to sit during these visits, the singer decided to remove an item of furniture from Blue Wave Studios.

“It was a plastic sun-lounger that was worth f--- all,” he recalled. “But this American kid, who was working with Chris and Tina, stuck his nose in and said, ‘Hey man, what ya doing? You can’t be taking that!’ I just said, ‘F--- off, you knob,’ and hit him. Although, as I was cracked up, I didn’t just hit him. I threatened him with a broken bottle as well, I think, which f------ terrified him.”

If the sight of a hopped-up Ryder on terra firma wasn’t alarming enough, behind the wheels of various cars both he and his bandmates were like lunatics in a video game. In the book Happy Mondays: Excess All Areas, the author Simon Spence writes that “it was common to see the band’s cars upturned at road-works on the way to [the neighbourhood] where they went to score crack. One night Whelan, who stayed off crack, was in a bar drinking rum and having a spliff when a car ploughed straight through the front of the bar. It was Shaun.” Pedal the metal, within weeks the group had written off a hire car firm’s entire fleet of vehicles.

Discovering that local dealers powered their homes by unconventional means, the group were soon swapping the batteries from their crashed cars for crack cocaine.