Happy Mondays

There are gigs where everything goes smooth, the lights are perfect, the sound is clean, the crowd polite. And then there are nights like this—Happy Mondays at Visorfest 2025, Valencia—where the whole thing feels like it might fall apart at any moment, but instead takes off like a flaming shopping trolley down a hill.

From the moment Shaun Ryder cruised onto the stage—swaggering, swearing, grinning like the cat who stole the world’s last pint—you knew this wasn’t going to be nostalgia karaoke. This was Madchester chaos, reborn under the Valencian night sky. The air smelled of weed, beer, and the Mediterranean, a perfect habitat for a band that has always thrived on beautiful disorder.

Bez, ageless and elastic, was a one-man riot, shaking his maracas like a preacher of groove, working the crowd into a state somewhere between rave ecstasy and pub brawl. He didn’t dance; he convulsed, pogoed, body-popped through the band’s back catalogue like an exorcism in real time.

The Mondays ripped through “Step On” and “Kinky Afro” like they were still soundtracking warehouse raves in ’89. The beats were loose, the basslines swampy, Ryder half-talking, half-singing, always threatening to lose the thread but never letting go. Valencia’s Marina Norte lit up like it had been dropped into the middle of Factory Records’ most dangerous house party.

The crowd—a sweaty cocktail of aging ravers, curious festival-goers, and wide-eyed twenty-somethings—lost its collective mind. By the time “24 Hour Party People” rolled in, the place was a carnival of flailing limbs, beer showers, and unhinged grins.

The beauty of the Mondays has always been that they’re not tight, not polished, not professional. They’re a band that feels like life itself—messy, hilarious, broken in places, but somehow transcendent. At Visorfest, they were all of that turned up to 11.

By the end, Ryder barked something half-intelligible into the mic, Bez did one last voodoo dance, and the band lurched off stage like a victorious gang of pirates. And the crowd? Spent. Euphoric. Baptized in sweat and basslines.

The Mondays didn’t just play Visorfest 2025—they hijacked it, set it on fire, and left Valencia buzzing like it had just survived a Madchester acid storm.