Not Fade Away

PAUL RYDER

Happy Mondays groove wrangler

(1964-2022)

INTERVIEWED for John Warburton’s Hallelujah!, which chronicled the career of Happy Mondays, Factory boss Tony Wilson claimed that bassist Paul Ryder was largely responsible for changing the complexion of British dance music. “It was [drummer] Gary Whelan and Paul Ryder who adapted the rhythms of American house music to English rock,” said Wilson. “To punk, in fact.”

If the Mondays embodied the anything-goes approach of the late ’80s and early ’90s, it was Ryder – younger brother of frontman Shaun – who anchored it to a solid groove, his punk-funk rhythms accentuated by guitarist Mark Day. The self-taught Ryder’s early inspirations were Motown and Funkadelic, superseded by the emergent sounds of Chicago house in the mid-’80s. Reflecting on Paul Oakenfold’s anthemic 1989 remix of “Wrote For Luck”, a crossover moment that helped define acid house as a cultural phenomenon, Ryder