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**★★★★☆**

In the annals of Manchester music history, few albums arrive with quite the same cocktail of ambition, chaos, and sheer bloody-minded audacity as Happy Mondays' 1987 debut, *Squirrel And G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out)*. That title alone – a rambling stream of consciousness that reads like it was scrawled on a napkin during a particularly inspired comedown – should have been warning enough that this wasn't going to be your typical indie debut.

The Mondays had been kicking around Manchester's grimy underbelly since 1980, a ragtag collective of Salford ne'er-do-wells led by the magnificently unhinged Shaun Ryder and his bass-playing brother Paul. By the mid-80s, they'd caught the attention of Tony Wilson's Factory Records, that cathedral of cool that had already given the world Joy Division and New Order. Wilson, ever the cultural provocateur, saw something in these scallywags that others might have dismissed as mere chancers – a raw, untapped energy that perfectly captured the spirit of Reagan-Thatcher era disillusionment.

What emerged was an album that sounds like it was recorded in a parallel universe where funk, post-punk, and psychedelia had been thrown into a blender with a hefty dose of working-class nihilism. Producer John Cale, the Velvet Underground legend no less, was brought in to make sense of the beautiful chaos, and his influence permeates every groove. This isn't the polished funk-rock that would later make them superstars; instead, it's a deliberately awkward, gloriously ramshackle affair that sounds like it might collapse under its own weight at any moment.

The album's opening salvo, "Kuff Dam," sets the tone with its lurching rhythm and Ryder's characteristically oblique wordplay. It's followed by "Tart Tart," a hypnotic groove that showcases the band's ability to lock into a pocket and ride it into oblivion. But it's "Freaky Dancin'" that truly announces the Mondays' arrival – a seven-minute odyssey that marries Bez's legendary maracas to a rhythm section that sounds like it's been marinated in equal parts marijuana and mischief. Ryder's vocals float over the top like a man commentating on his own fever dream, delivering lines like "Harvey's got a girlfriend and he hates her" with the deadpan delivery of a cosmic jester.

"Twenty Four Hour Party People" – which would later lend its name to Michael Winterbottom's film about the Manchester scene – is perhaps the album's most prophetic moment. Over a stuttering, almost industrial backing, Ryder paints a picture of hedonistic excess that would prove remarkably prescient of the coming Madchester explosion. The song captures that peculiarly British ability to find poetry in degradation, turning a night out in Manchester into something approaching urban mythology.

The album's experimental nature is perhaps best exemplified by "Olive Oil," a sprawling eight-minute journey that sounds like Can jamming with a gang of football hooligans. It's here that Cale's influence is most keenly felt – the song builds and deconstructs itself with the patience of a krautrock symphony, while maintaining the Mondays' essential scruffiness.

*Squirrel And G-Man* didn't trouble the charts upon release, peaking at a modest 87, but its influence has proven far more enduring than its commercial performance might suggest. The album essentially wrote the blueprint for what would become the Madchester sound – that peculiar fusion of dance rhythms, indie attitude, and pharmaceutical enthusiasm that would dominate the late 80s and early 90s. Without this record, there might have been no Stone Roses, no Inspiral Carpets, no Haçienda heyday.

More than three decades later, the album sounds remarkably fresh, its experimental nature having aged far better than the more commercial offerings that followed. While *Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches* might have been the Mondays' commercial peak, *Squirrel And G-Man* remains their artistic statement – a gloriously uncompromising vision of what British alternative music could be when it stopped trying to please anyone but itself. In an era of focus-grouped indie bands and algorithm-friendly playlists, its sheer bloody