Songfacts®:

• The story behind this song will twist your melon, man. It's a barely recognizable cover of a 1971 song by John Kongos called "He's Gonna Step On You Again." The Happy Mondays raved it up and infused it with spoken interludes, most famously the line, "You're twistin' my melon man."
  
  All that's left from the John Kongos original is the verse lyrics, which deal with the plight of indigenous people. For instance:
  
  Hey rainmaker, come away from that man
  You know he's gonna take away your promised land
  
  The title, "Step On," is repeated in the original but never shows up in the Happy Mondays reworking, so many listeners just call it "that twisting melon song."
• "Step On" is the most popular song by the Happy Mondays, who were a big part of the "Madchester" music scene in Manchester, England in the '80s and '90s. They had several hits in the UK (notably "Kinky Afro," also released in 1990), but "Step On" is their only song to make much of an impact in America and their only one to chart there.
• John Kongos wrote this as a protest song against white man's appropriation of native territory in Africa. His original version was built around a riff lifted from an African tribal dance recorded in a jungle, and it is cited by the Guinness Book of Records as the first ever sample used on a record.
  
  Kongos is a South African singer/multi instrumentalist who settled in the UK in 1966. In 1971 he recorded his debut album Kongos, which was produced by Gus Dudgeon and includes both this and his other hit single, "Tokolshe Man." Kongos was later a top session musician (he produced and played keyboards on Def Leppard's 1983 album Pyromania) and also scored the 1978 film The Greek Tycoon.
• The Happy Mondays recorded "Step On" just to get their record label to step off. In the UK they signed with Factory Records, but they didn't get an American deal until Elektra signed them in 1989. Elektra asked their new signings to record cover versions of older catalogue songs for a compilation, which didn't exactly thrill the Mondays. "We didn't even want to do it, because we don't do cover versions," frontman Shaun Ryder said on The Chris Moyles Show on Radio X.
  
  The label handed the band a C90 cassette filled with potential tracks, and they chose John Kongos' 1971 song "He's Gonna Step On You Again" largely because it sounded, in Ryder's words, "dead easy."
  
  After they recorded the song, Elektra decided it was a hit, so they left it off the compilation album, released it as a single and included it on their 1990 album Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches.
• The song was produced by Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osborne, who like the Mondays were up-and-comers on the dance music scene. They went on to do productions or remixes for U2, Placebo, Duran Duran and many others.
  
  Oakenfold and Steve Osborne made various remixes of "Step On." The version that was a hit in America is called "Remix '91."
• Shaun Ryder heard the line "You're twistin' my melon man" in a 1990 documentary called The Steve McQueen: Man on the Edge, where the filmmaker Norman Jewison explains that McQueen once said to him, "You're twisting my melon, man. You're getting me all mixed up."
• The shouted "Call the cops!" was a nod to a regular character at Manchester's Haçienda nightclub who wandered around yelling the phrase.
  
  "We just went, 'We'll do that one... put a bass line to it, guitar on it, send it off to Oakey,'" Ryder said, referring to producer Paul Oakenfold. The recording came together with the same loose, instinctive energy that defined the band.