Goin' In, Out, Goin' In, Not Out

I know it's Friday but pre-empting the week ahead, here's the Happy Mondays with - what else? - Hallelujah.

 

I have a stupidly early start for work, and slightly more so this morning, as I'm typing this post whilst it's still dark (& raining outside) so I didn't stay up all night to watch the election results coming in.

Even so, it was hard to imagine waking up to a nightmare scenario where somehow, impossibly, the Tories had managed to cling onto government. At the time of writing, we're still some way to go but it's clear that the reality and long-held hope is that they are out, out, out. Labour have a lot to do, and to prove, especially in the next year or so, but at the very least we have change and we have hope.

Thankfully, my patch is no longer blue and we have a Lib Dem MP for the first time since 2015. In a marked contrast to scenes elsewhere shown on TV, when I arrived at my local polling station on my way home from work, there was one other person at a voting booth, so we were outnumbered 3:1 by the election volunteers. Numbers of voters who turned up yesterday was 2% up on 2019.

A more worrying statistic - yet, having lived here long enough, not entirely surprising - is that a large chunk of the Tory vote appears to have shifted to the Reform candidate, who comfortably came in third with nearly 50% more votes than Labour (though their candidate did improve on 2019). Farage is now an MP, so we'll no doubt be subject to even more of his smug mug and hate-filled hyperbole on screen, but...we also have change and we have hope of something better.

Back to Happy Mondays, I was always tickled by the video for the single, mostly Shaun, Bez and the band in slo mo, with a hint of the chaos that underpinned pretty much everything that they did. 

 

Given the song is two minutes and forty three seconds long, I have to feel for the video directors and editor, who I suspect may have had a substantial amount of footage yet very little that they could actually use! Opting for slow motion to eke out the precious few seconds may have been a reactive measure out of necessity perhaps, but somehow it works.

What I hadn't realised before now was that Richard Heslop and the Bailey Brothers (Phil Shotton & Keith Jobling) were in fact sent the extended Club Mix by Andrew Weatherall and Paul Oakenfold to shoot the video too, so in fact they had nearly seven minutes of music to work with. I think they did a pretty good job.

When Ewan Pearson remixed the song in 2020, a couple of official videos were commissioned to assist with promotion. I've opted here for the Dub Remix version, which stretches the song out to nine and half minutes of mind-bending bliss, with video director Glenn Kitson pushing elements of the original video through a psychedelic rinser.

And I think it's a mandatory requirement (or if it's not, it should be) that any post about Hallelujah must include Happy Mondays appearance on Top Of The Pops, joined on stage by the wonderful and much-missed Kirsty MacColl.