Pop Music : Manchester Craze Hits Critical Mass at the Palladium

In this country, the craze for Manchester’s current Summer of Love is still kind of theoretical. You’re more likely to read an article about a Manchester band than hear one on the radio; more likely to know about the fashion--bell-bottoms!--than about the sound.

Still, Manchester house-music extravaganzas have been popping up in Los Angeles with some regularity in the last few weeks, both home-grown and imported, and with the packed Happy Mondays show at the Hollywood Palladium Friday, the phenomenon may have achieved critical mass.

You entered through a lobby rigged with elaborate strobes, a bubble machine and a banner reading “The United States of Manchester”; you fought your way through a crowd of kids wearing souvenir T-shirts from last month’s Manchester shows here.

On stage around midnight (these bands follow club hours, not concert hours), the Manchester house sensation called A Guy Called Gerald--one of the two opening acts--stood behind a bank of electronic equipment, bobbing his shoulders, occasionally tweaking a knob, pushing buttons.

Or was that a guy named Gerald standing next to him, bending back and forth, playing glockenspiel-like keyboard lines? (Primarily a studio kind of guy, Gerald likes to cultivate anonymity.)

A busty woman in the tightest possible mini-dress wailed counterpoint in the genre-approved Third-World-ecstatic style, and the result was bloodless, standard-issue house music, raw.

On a screen behind the dance floor, op-art patterns shimmered, stick figures danced, and a happy face, the symbol of druggy British house music, appeared, surrounded by pulsing concentric circles. “Love Love Love” and “Acid Acid Acid” flashed onto the screen.

If you’d looked away from the stage at one point, you might have noticed the beat getting a little stronger, the musical samples more interesting, the people on the crowded dance floor actually dancing. This, of course, meant that Gerald and friends had finished their set, and one of the deejays imported from Manchester’s Hacienda club had slipped on a record . . . without missing a beat.

Happy Mondays is possibly the band most associated with the Manchester scene (Stone Roses is more a band than a Manchester band at this point)--as proud of its members’ drug-dealer pasts as it is of its No. 1 singles.

Singer Shaun Ryder stands stock-still as a Talking Head. He croons in a flat, Jim Morrison baritone and hides behind a light-filled smoke screen like that other enigmatic Manchester front man, the Fall’s Mark E. Smith. Bez, who doesn’t actually sing or play an instrument, lopes in place like a man trying to run underwater, commanding the stage, acting sort of as the Flavor Flav of Public Enemy to Ryder’s Chuck D.

Happy Mondays manages to be one of the few bands anywhere that manages to sound simultaneously powerful and cheesy. Its big builds and edgy sonorities Friday were sometimes more than a little reminiscent of primo Doors--and nearly as hypnotic, as shrieking and as self-consciously dull.

They’re the first of the recent live Manchester arrivals worth listening to--bring on the Stone Roses!--and their aggressive, danceable psychedelia may have what it takes to evolve into a solid, second-tier rock presence.

Additional reviews on Page 7 and 11.