Mondays Are Coming Home
The first new material from the reformed Mondays in over 12 years, 'Playground Superstar' features on the soundtrack of the upcoming rags-to-riches Brit-flick 'Goal!', the type of God-awful inspirational dross that our one-legged Hyena of a film industry churns out so well. But as this is a review of the single rather than of the movie (and a pernicious critique of the British film industry in general), I'll let it lie there and tell you what I think of the single – though why you should take any notice of a man who has 'Something Deep Inside' by Billie Piper on his I-Pod is anyone's guess.
For a man who's done more drugs than I've had Sherbet Dip-Dabs, Shaun Ryder's voice sounds remarkably clear and unfettered. Musically, it's the usual Mondays tip – crashing cymbals, bouncy bass lines and grainy guitar riffs (I love alliteration me) – and they fuse together as well as you would expect. The chorus is suitably rabble-rousing stuff, though I'm still unsure if Ryder is singing "You wanna be a don" or "You wanna be a dog" and after listening to it repeatedly all morning, I'm still none the wiser.
And it's the lyrics that are the problem – "make something out of nothing" and the like are surely more applicable mantras to bands such as McFly or Westlife not the counter-culture-clashing Mondays – though I swear Ryder sneaks in a heroin reference during one of the verses.
All in all, it's one of the better movie tie-in tracks (an example of the bad being "Thunderbirds" obviously), which ain't surprising as it IS The Happy Mondays after all. It just leaves you wishing that they'd stormed back into the charts with a top-notch album rather than a single to play on the credits of a football movie soundtrack.
A home win then...on penalties...(apologies, I had to get a footie reference in here somewhere!)