Best Albums !: Happy Mondays. Yes, Please (1997)

Yes Please! was the last studio album that the British band Happy Mondays recorded before leaving Factory Records. Generally seen as their poorest work, it was released in 1992 and was produced by Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads. The album is most famous for sinking independent label Factory Records, costing a too-large sum to record.

It is reasoned by many that one of the reasons for the album's failure was the change of producer between 1990s Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches and this one. Paul Oakenfold, that album's producer was unavailable to produce Yes Please! The new production team, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, drastically changed the band's sound from that of the previous album. Whilst before the Happy Mondays sound had been grounded in a fusion of Rock and Acid House music, here it was changed to a rather more out-of-date style of '80s Synth Pop combined with Caribbean influences. With grunge-rock becoming more mainstream at the time, parcicularly through Nirvana, the Mondays sound was seen as becoming increasingly out of date.

While the band had previously enjoyed almost universal critical approval for their music, the change of sound on this album garnered a huge critical backlash against the band. One reviewer writes of the album: "In the hands of Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, the group's music loses much of its distinctive, thuggish edginess, as well as its reliance on current dance trends, becoming faceless, undistinguished dance-pop sludge." Even more cruelly, the now-defunct UK music paper Melody Maker gave the album a two-word review, namely: "No thanks."

The band along with their families went to Barbados to record the album. It was recorded in the studio at Eddie Grant's house where they bumped into Mick Jagger on a few occasions, who was staying nearby.