The Purity Testing Kit

Happy Mondays' biggest album just got reissued as an actual gold pill. The label that put it out didn't survive what came after.

London Records reissued Happy Mondays' Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches last week — the version worth knowing about is the "Pill Edition": a single capsule, 3D-printed in gold-tinted filament to look like a cast gold bar, packed alongside a rave whistle, acid-blotter artwork, and an actual purity testing kit. One buyer gets the real gold pill and their name laser-engraved on a metal credit card. Everyone else gets the regular formats — 5LP box, 4CD, or a plain black vinyl remaster cut from the original Factory Records tapes.

The album earned that kind of nostalgia treatment honestly. It was Factory's one real crossover hit — "Step On" (itself a cover, re-titled from a 1971 John Kongos song nobody remembers now) put Happy Mondays at No. 5 on the UK singles chart, the safest bet Factory Records ever made. So two years later the label sent the band to record the follow-up at Eddy Grant's studio in Barbados, hoping the distance from Manchester might get Shaun Ryder off heroin. Barbados had crack instead. The band burned through a £150,000 budget, then another £230,000 on top of it, and came back with an album called Yes Please! that nobody wanted. Factory Communications filed for bankruptcy that November.

Factory never signed contracts with its artists — Tony Wilson's whole thing was that the label owned nothing and the musicians owned everything, on a handshake. Which is also, structurally, why there was nothing built into the label to survive one very expensive trip to Barbados.