Happy Mondays

During the mid 1980s, a music scene emerged out of Manchester, England that was aptly referred to as Madchester. A few bands were at the center of this counterculture movement and one of them was the Happy Mondays. The group blended psychedelic rock with electronic music (specifically house) and created some extremely innovative material. The members of the band were a motley lot and drug use was quite pervasive (ecstasy was introduced during this time and the drug is partly responsible for making bands like the Happy Mondays popular). The band was notoriously hard to work with and the group decided to call it quits in 1993. However the Happy Mondays decided to reform in 2004 and now that the group's reputation has withstood the test of time, all the members of the band are looked at as elder statesman of the modern music scene.