When Shaun Ryder was asked why he decided to re-form The Happy Mondays, his answer was brutally honest: to pay his tax bill. "I got asked to pay £400,000 and I also got caned by my old managers for £50,000," the Mancunian singer told Q Magazine. "So what the f**k could I do? I would have toured with a karaoke machine and called myself The Happy Mondays if I could've made a bit of a dollar."

Luckily for Mondays fans, the band's Irish appearance won't be limited to Ryder, a backing tape, and a little bouncy ball jumping across the lyrics. Ryder has persuaded nearly all the original members of Manchester's mad-for-it gang to hook up with him again, including the band's skeletal dancer and maracca shaker, Bez.

Bez, who made no musical contribution to the Happy Mondays, but who became an integral part of the band's image, was reported to have demanded a large fee to rejoin the group, but eventually struck a deal which will allow Ryder's skanking sidekick to take his place once again at stage left. Only two original members have passed on this second chance at notoriety: guitarist Mark Day and keyboardist Paul Davis. Those who have happily signed up for Ryder's revival roadshow are bassist Paul Ryder (Shaun's brother), drummer Gaz Whelan, backing singer Rowetta, and guitarist Paul "Wags" Wagstaff from Ryder's last band, Black Grape. There's also a new member in the gang, named Nuts.

Together again, The Happy Mondays will attempt to recreate the golden age of baggy, when Manchester was better known as Madchester, and The Stone Roses, Inspiral Carpets et al were reinjecting psychedelia into the musical mix. The story of The Happy Mondays has all the right ingredients for true rock 'n' roll legend. Formed in Manchester in the late 1980s, the Mondays were pivotal to the rise of the city's "baggy" scene, hanging out at the Hacienda, gatecrashing all the raves, and shovelling up all the available drugs. Their debut album was notable for its long-winded title, Squirrel And G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out), which weirdly sounded like the perfect Mondays' manifesto, and for its producer, a certain Welshman named John Cale. The second album, Bummed, caught the buzz of the times, with songs such as Wrote For Luck and Lazyitis becoming whacked-out indie anthems for the stoned student body. The Rave On Madchester EP was the band's first Top 20 hit, but it was their 1990 version of the 1970 John Kongos hit, He's Gonna Step On You Again, which brought the Happy Mondays right to the top of the party list. Step On hit Number 5, and is still a massive floor-filling anthem today.

The third album, Pills, Thrills & Bellyaches, hit the dance spot perfectly, and the follow-up single, Kinky Afro, followed Step On into the Top 5. Ryder and Mark Day appeared in the January 1991 issue of Penthouse magazine, posing with a bevy of nude models, the new kings of the pop world lounging in their high-society harem. It was all downhill from there, and things got badly out of hand when the Mondays went to the Caribbean to record their next album, Yes Please!, with Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth from Talking Heads at the production helm. By this time, the band had added crack cocaine to its party pharmacy, which already included marijuana, ecstasy and - in Ryder's case particularly - heroin. The band was so out of it during their disastrous Caribbean stay that they only completed one track, much to the annoyance of Frantz and Weymouth.

The Mondays finally finished Yes Please!, but they needn't have bothered, because though the album entered at Number 14, it was an overall critical and commercial flop. Baggy had already begun to seem a bit creased, and Manchester's summer of love had been replaced by a year of loathing, during which drug dealers and gangsters blighted the city, and the Hacienda shut its doors to the party people. The Mondays dispersed amid general public apathy, but when Ryder returned with his new band, Black Grape, in 1995, the fans were mad for it again. Their album, It's Great When You're Straight . . . Yeah, went straight to No 1, and the 24-hour party people were back on line again. But that's another story . . .

The Happy Mondays play the SFX on Saturday May 1st at 8 p.m.