Missing Mondays

Nine Black Alps.

Well don’t I feel like a chump. Not only were the real Happy Mondays not booked to play the Grand Emporium last night (see yesterday’s entry), the band that was supposed to play – and canceled – was some band from Springfield-fucking-Missouri whose name no one has been able to tell me. I’ll post something here when I get to the bottom of this. Let me just state for the record that I called the office of the Grand Emp./Beaumont/Westport Beach Club yesterday and was assured, by a receptionist who asked her unidentified boss, that it was indeed THE Happy Mondays from Manchester UK who were playing that night.

One band that did play, Nine Black Alps, put on a good show, but there couldn’t have been more than 50 people in the room, including me and several others who had been expecting to see the Mondays. The Alps’ riff-heavy, Nirvana-influenced sound points to some kind of grunge revival that could be welling up in the UK. They are after all on a major label, Interscope. Or maybe it’s just that grunge is finally reaching England. Anyway, as you’ll see from the picture I took, the chicks were really into the Alps – all four of them.

But the Mondays — wha happened?