Credit: Dangerous Minds / Original Press Cutting

The closing track of the Happy Mondays‘ fourth album, Yes Please!, is called ‘Cowboy Dave’.

Such is the case with many songs written by Shaun Ryder, a cursory glance at the lyrics will leave you none the wiser about why it has that title. Beyond the cod-funk grooves that still sound half-baked despite the band being extremely baked when they recorded them, Ryder seems to spend the song mostly mumbling “wunderbar, rumble man”. You have to look a little deeper to realise that the title is actually a tribute to a friend of theirs taken well before his time.

“Cowboy Dave” refers to Dave Rowbotham, a native of Didsbury, Manchester, born in 1958, who was one of the scene’s true nearly men. To be a nearly man in the Manchester music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s is to truly brush with greatness, and Rowbotham was there from the beginning. Old enough to have seen punk first hand and, near as dammit, get in on the ground floor. He’d been playing guitar since the age of 12 and in the 1970s, played in a band with drummer Chris Joyce called Fast Breeder.

In 1978, Rowbotham had his first true brush with greatness.

He and Joyce were called up by their manager to team up with bassist Tony Bowers, singer Phil Rainford and guitarist Vini Reilly to form a new band, a pet project of Reilly’s. Their name? The Durutti Column. This five-piece lineup didn’t last long, and Reilly eventually took the band to great success as essentially a solo project. Rowbotham spent the next few years getting close to many folks on the up and up, but was never able to join them on their way.

What happened to Cowboy Dave?

In the early 1980s, Rowbotham scraped by playing guitar and bass on releases by Factory Records that needed session musicians, but that was nowhere near enough to maintain a steady living. Eventually, Rowbotham stepped out of the spotlight and into a long period of reclusion. He retired to his flat on the suburban street of Grangethorpe Drive and lived out a quiet existence. One that came to a shockingly brutal end in 1991.

On November 2nd, Rowbotham’s girlfriend found him dead in his apartment, lying in a pool of his own blood, his head having been caved in with a plasterer’s hammer. Rowbotham had spent the last decade struggling with addiction and was involved with some seedy scenes as a result, yet despite questioning everyone involved in the Madchester music scene from a decade previous, no leads were found. To this day, the murder of Cowboy Dave remains unsolved.

Yet he was never forgotten. One of the few people to interact with him was a neighbour of his. A boy of 12 called Colin O’Toole, who used to roam the street with a bucket and sponge, asking who would like their car washed. Cowboy Dave was one of his repeat customers. In fact, he was more or less his only customer, and hearing about his death on the morning news after washing his car a week earlier shook him to his core.

So much so that when Colin grew into an adult, he became a filmmaker and won a Bafta Award for a short film he made about his neighbour and friend, Cowboy Dave.