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Happy Mondays Drummer Prepares To Work With Ex Oasis Man















Manchester, England's Happy Mondays may still be together (but with a truncated line-up) but drummer Gary "Gaz" Whelan has his priorities elsewhere at the moment.

As he told us last summer, Whelan, who's now a resident of Burlington, Ont, has formed a new group with some of his Mancunian friends, and they're going by the name Hippy Mafia.

The band will make their live debut in Toronto during Canadian Music Week when they play with Hamilton, Ont.'s Spirits at Bread & Circus on Wednesday.

CHARTattack caught up with Whelan to talk about the new band and life as in southern Ontario.
CHARTattack: Hippy Mafia are playing their first Toronto gig on the opening day of Canadian Music Week. Do you have an album coming out as well? ?
Gaz: Yes and no. All the songs are demos at the moment. There's no live drums on any of them yet.

We keep having all these stupid ideas. We've got two albums worth of songs. We could do a double album and be all 1970s, but the days of the album is gone. It's sad, really, because the bands that you really like growing up, it's the album tracks that you remember. The song that you like immediately, you hate after a month. So we're thinking maybe four EPs.

Are the rest of the band friends from Manchester?
Yes.

And they're all living in Canada?

I moved over here and another guy did, too. One's in the process. It's three Mancunians and one Canadian. We just got a new rapper/poet from Kitchener. He's in Manchester now, being Mancunified. They're all in Manchester as we speak, recording. Everyone but me.

Bonehead's in there from Oasis putting bass down. He may come over for Canadian Music Week. The band's about the message, not the messenger. Bonehead might play, he might not. Five or six of us might play or maybe just four. It doesn't really matter who we are.

It's about the music. I know that sounds pompous and self-righteous, but really, I'm not self-righteous.

It's sort of like that Broken Social Scene mentality. Who knows who's playing on each song.

It doesn't matter does, it? That Rolling Stones song, "We Love You," it's John Lennon singing all the high falsetto. I never knew that. And it's great to know now, but it doesn't make the song any better.

Read the full interview by clicking here.

Source: www.chartattack.com

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