The Stone Roses
STONED!
In 1989, an LP was released that was to define the forthcoming decade of British music, starting a process that would lead to Britpop and beyond. Tim Worthington dons those baggy flares…
Usually, when an artist releases a ‘self titled’ album, the choice of title is intended to signify something. In the case of both Blur and The Charlatans, for example, the self-titled works were intended to signpost what their creators believed to be a moment of artistic rebirth, getting back to the core values of their music which they felt they had strayed from in recent times. In the case of The La’s, however, the refusal to attach a ‘proper’ title to their sole album was closely linked to Lee Mavers’ disgust at the way that his record label had forced him to release an unfinished version of the album that hadn’t worked out to his satisfaction. Meanwhile, if you’re someone like Mariah Carey or Celine Dion, a self-titled album (which it seems you can have more than one of during the course of your career) would appear to suggest that the people responsible for your marketing and promotion believe that your fanbase will run and hide in confusion if they aren’t given a clear reminder that the contents of the album are actually performed by the person whose photograph adorns the cover.
The Stone Roses, though, do not appear to have intended their self-titled debut as any kind of a statement. While it has certainly gone on to find itself labelled one of the most important albums of all time, the band themselves – despite their much discussed self-belief – did not ever envisage this at the time of recording or release, and just gave the album its self-titling because they couldn’t think of anything better. Nonetheless, the sense that the title gives that this is in some way the definitive document on the band, with all of their strengths and weaknesses distilled perfectly into one collection of songs, has only served to enhance its reputation. “The Stone Roses” simply sounds perfect as the name of a classic album, creating an illusion that the band delivered just one unassailable burst of genius before disappearing from view again. Needless to say, this wasn’t actually the case. “The Stone Roses” was eventually followed by a second album that baffled and confused, and was preceded by a series of false starts that fell somewhat short of ‘classic’ status. In recent times, though, some have even begun to question whether the self-titled album itself is worthy of such a tag, suggesting that its reputation rests on a combination of rose-tinted reminiscences by those who bought it when it was first released, and its luckily coincidental positioning at a moment when exciting and radical developments were taking place in music, which made it seem more important than it actually was. The immediate reaction to the above arguments would be to reject them as the smug outpourings of someone who was just trying to make themselves look clever (albeit in the Tony Parsons definition of the word). But is such an automatic dismissal enough to counteract the accusations of lazy nostalgia on the fans’ part and fortuitous timing on the band’s part? No it isn’t if we’re going to do this properly, and so it’s time to take a look at the album and assess its strengths and weaknesses in context. Which means starting with one of those aforementioned false starts…
For a band that supposedly revolutionised music at the dawn of the 1990s, The Stone Roses had a remarkably nondescript evolution. They had formed in 1985, then featuring guitarist Andy Couzens and bassist Pete Garner alongside the more familiar figures of vocalist Ian Brown, guitarist John Squire and drummer Alan 'Reni' Wren, and after launching themselves on Manchester's live circuit they were invited to make a single by the small local label Thin Line. At that point, there was little to distinguish The Stone Roses or their music from the hundreds of formulaic and undistinguished 'indie' bands that had sprung up in the UK in the wake of the success of The Smiths, and this lack of remarkability, which even the involvement of legendary genre producer Martin Hannett could not overcome, was clearly reflected in the contents of their debut single. Betraying their debt to Morrissey and his miserablist ilk from the very opening line ("In the misery dictionary, page after page after page"), 'So Young' meandered along in thoroughly unimpressive style. More promise was displayed in the brooding chord changes of the b-side 'Tell Me', but even that wasn't much of an improvement and is mainly memorable for the overdramatic delivery of the frankly ridiculous lyric "I am the garage flower". When The Stone Roses later became the hottest property on the musical block, this single became a very expensive rarity, and it's interesting to ponder on how many of the people who paid a vastly over-inflated sum for the chance to own it regretted their impulsive purchase once they heard the actual contents. Thin Line had originally intended to release a full album by The Stone Roses, and indeed the band recorded a full album's worth of material with Martin Hannett (later released in its full mediocrity as "Garage Flower"), but the label went bust before they could release it. Although this no doubt seemed like a major career threatening setback to the band at the time, it would eventually prove to be the best thing that ever happened to them.
What transformed The Stone Roses from nondescript indie chancers into the most exciting band to emerge since the height of punk rock was an unlikely fusion of musical and circumstantial influences. After the Thin Line debacle, the band had embarked on a series of live dates across Europe, where they found themselves playing warehouse parties alongside DJs who were experimenting with the sparse, repetitive dance music sounds that were then emerging from America. At the same time as finding themselves taken with such music, the band were also listening to a lot of angular and experimental 1960s guitar pop, notably The Byrds, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. The twin influences were already starting to have a combined effect on their music when they returned to Manchester to find that a similarly inclined scene was in its formative stages. The local popularity of The Prisoners, a 1960s-orientated indie outfit (featuring future Acid Jazz pioneer James Taylor on Hammond Organ) who had started to play extended dancey instrumentals instead of 'proper' songs to compensate for poor PA systems in the venues where they appeared, dovetailed neatly with the adulation of longtime local heroes New Order, who had been combining guitar pop with electronic dance sounds since the early 1980s. This in turn led to a number of bands like Inspiral Carpets, Happy Mondays and The Charlatans attempting a similar fusion of indie and dance sounds. The Stone Roses fitted perfectly into this scene, and with a new set of songs in place, their popularity rapidly escalated. It's fair to say that the rise of this bizarre subgenre in Manchester did not go completely unnoticed - one early article on the scene appeared in "The Face" magazine, who decided that in the absence of an official 'name' for the movement, that they would call it 'Baldrick' in recognition of the fact that many of the key participants sported the same floppy centre-parted hairstyle as the "Blackadder" character - it was generally allowed to flourish through the late 1980s with the minimum of attention and interference from the nation's trendsetters and scenemakers, and the bands themselves were able to develop their sounds and styles without the pressure of hype.
One of the ways in which The Stone Roses developed during this time was a fairly radical change in personnel. Garner and Couzens both left, the latter going on to form his own band, The High, who enjoyed a modicum of success in the early 1990s ("box this sound and the real sound government", ran the chorus to their biggest hit 'Box Set Go' - no, me neither). In their place came Gary 'Mani' Mounfield, a longtime friend of the band who joined on bass and used his skill on the instrument to further shape their leanings towards dance music. They were also joined on stage by Paul 'Cressa' Cresser, another friend who was initially brought in to operate the mixing desk for their live shows but soon started to dance behind the desk like an overenthusiastic DJ, adding further depth to the 'crossover' feel of their music. The band's new found liking for the bush hats, hooded tops, oversized sweatshirts and flared trousers that were then being sported by dance fans emphasised their blurring of the boundaries between guitar pop and dance music, and the release of their second single 'Sally Cinnamon' on FM Revolver in 1987 brought the first substantial evidence of the strange new sound that they had been forging in endless badly-lit local venues. Despite the 'anthemic' air-punching status that it seems to have acquired in recent years, 'Sally Cinnamon' is something of a disappointment, especially when listened to next to the band's more widely known work. The song itself is a lightweight jangly indie number with some very fey and weak lyrics ("you taste of cherryade, there is something you must tell me, of what you are made, sugar and spice and all things nice" for example) that give little indication of the subtle elliptical depths that the band would subsequently aspire towards, and the overall performance sounds rather nervous and stilted in places. What is remarkable about the song, though, is the fact that it sits on top of a laid-back but insistent dance influenced drumbeat, and this was something that was applied to more interesting effect on the single's two b-sides. 'Here It Comes', which had been present in their live set since the earliest days, is a heavily structured riff-driven trackwith distinct raga-like overtones, on which John Squire's guitar drones like those heard on The Beatles' 'Paperback Writer' and the shuffling drumbeat stops and starts in tandem with the strange way that the verses seem to almost fold back on themselves. 'All Across The Sands', on the other hand, is an acoustic ballad. Or at least it starts as one, and slowly builds in intensity as the song progresses and the surprisingly busy rhythm section becomes more and more dominant. More significantly, both songs were characterised by more confident lyrics than were heard on the a-side, and while it's obvious that Ian Brown was still just playing around with 'clever' lines that rhymed, it was equally obvious that he was putting a lot of thought into it and determinedto do better. Like the debut releases by Happy Mondays ('Delightful') and Inspiral Carpets ('Keep The Circle Around') that also appeared around the same time, the single attracted little attention outside Manchester, but this low profile was tempered by fervent local adulation.
As surprising as it may seem in retrospect, this local popularity did not immediately create excitement within the industry, and both Factory and Rough Trade passed on the chance to sign The Stone Roses. The only real interest in them in the late 1980s came from lesser known independent label Silvertone, and it was with them that the band - keen to get back into the studio and with an entire album's worth of material prepared - signed over the summer of 1988. Most of the songs that would end up on the band’s debut album had been written by this stage, and indeed had been recorded as demos that sound strikingly similar in arrangement and intent to the more familiar finished versions. However, the band’s first release for the label was recorded prior to the commencement of the album sessions, and none of the tracks that appeared on it would end up on the original version of the album. Possibly in an attempt to help the band perfect their ‘indie dance’ sound, Silvertone brought in New Order bassist Peter Hook to produce The Stone Roses’ first single for the label. The a-side, ‘Elephant Stone’, had already been essayed by the band as a jangly pop song with strong overtones of 1960s psychedelia, built around a hip-hop breakbeat and a funky wah-wah guitar backing. Hook adhered closely to the band’s original blueprint, but also transformed the track into a dense wall of sound, trimming the edges from the slightly sprawling demo version and giving the drums a thundering, tightly-packed quality while the wah-wah guitars were allowed to manically splutter in the style of a 1970s disco track. The overall effect was startling, and ‘Elephant Stone’ enjoyed the musical strengths of both dynamic indie guitar pop and up to the minute dancefloor sounds. From the opening distorted wail of feedback drenched guitar to the ringing fadeout, the track grabs your attention and refuses to let it go. The b-side ‘The Hardest Thing In The World’ sounded rather hurried and unprepared in comparison, the sparse arrangement and mixing and Squire’s undisciplined, sprawling guitar lines suggesting that less attention had been paid to this track in the studio, and that all concerned were just happy to have something on tape to go on the other side of ‘Elephant Stone’. However, the unspectacular (unspectacular, that is, apart from a quite impressive understated final verse delivered in whispered vocals and decorated with minimal guitar flourishes) nature of the backing allows the listener to fully appreciate Ian Brown and John Squire’s developing songwriting, and while ‘The Hardest Thing In The World’ lacked the dynamism of its a-side it certainly represented a massive leap forward from their earlier compositions. Meanwhile, the 12” of ‘Elephant Stone’ also featured a rather pointless and weak-sounding 12” mix of the a-side, ignoring the fact that the track’s sonic power derived from its compact status, and a bizarre track entitled ‘Full Fathom Five’. This was basically just the original demo of ‘Elephant Stone’ played backwards, and despite what the sleevenotes of “The Complete Stone Roses” might have had to say about its supposed ‘looping majesty’, it actually sounds as pointless as you might expect. Unfortunately, ‘Full Fathom Five’ introduced what was to become something of a recurring theme within The Stone Roses’ output. Another more welcome recurring theme that was introduced by ‘Elephant Stone’ was the use of John Squire’s artwork on the single sleeve. Squire, a talented artist who had previously been employed in that capacity by Cosgrove Hall (the makers of “Dangermouse” and “Wind In The Willows”, had a strong interest in the free-form pop art paintings produced by the likes of Jackson Pollock, and the colourful splurges that he created for the cover of the band’s records perfectly complemented the sounds that they contained, reflecting both the ‘psychedelic’ style of the guitar bands that they drew inspiration from, and the gaudy Acid House-influenced fashions that were then becoming popular in dance clubs. ‘Elephant Stone’ was not a hit at this time, but it was given some seriously enthusiastic reviews and created a wave of excitement and expectation.
By the time that ‘Elephant Stone’ was released, The Stone Roses were already in the studio and hard at work on their debut album. The producer chosen for the project was John Leckie, whom the band insisted on after hearing the pastiches of 1960s psychedelia that he had recently created with XTC under the pseudonym of The Dukes Of Stratosphear, while engineer Paul Schroeder had worked with the band on all of their recordings since ‘Sally Cinnamon’ and was at least partially responsible for the development of their ‘indie dance’ sound. The first results of this unusual clash of approaches appeared in the form of ‘Made Of Stone’ early in 1989. Even outside of the impressive production values, ‘Made Of Stone’ is an impressive song, admittedly indebted to The Rolling Stones’ ‘Paint It Black’ but tying its insistent and menacing atmosphere and soaring chorus to genuinely disquieting lyrics about Brown’s days spent hitch-hiking in Europe, taking in both the loneliness of life on the road and witnessing the destructive power of automobiles (“sometimes I fantasise, when the streets are cold and lonely, and the cars they burn below me”). ‘Made Of Stone’ starts off as a convincing 1960s pastiche, but is joined in the chorus by the expected dance-influenced rhythm section, incorporating a wild guitar solo that becomes drowned in phasing and some frantic drum fills. Again this single did notprovide the band with a hit, but it gained substantial critical praise and airplay, and came close to entering the industry’s top seventy five singles chart. While that might not sound particularly impressive from a modern perspective, back then it was almost unheard of for ‘indie’ acts, particularly those on a label as genuinely independent as Silvertone, to come anywhere near the singles charts, and the feeling that The Stone Roses were on the verge of a major chart assault was at that time almost as exciting as the single itself. ‘Going Down’, the b-side, is a pleasant but undistinguished number presented in its original Schroeder-produced demo form, boasting some charming mock-sitar embellishments and lyrical namechecks for many of the band’s influences including Jackson Pollock and Jimi Hendrix, while the extra track on the 12” ‘Guernica’ was merely the demo of ‘Made Of Stone’ played backwards and is as inessential as it sounds. To date, it’s the only track that Silvertone have never bothered putting on any of their fourteen million Stone Roses compilations.
The Stone Roses had in fact pretty much recorded their debut album in its entirety by the time that ‘Made Of Stone’ was released as a single, but Silvertone chose to hold back from releasing it until the middle of 1989. Various bizarre theories have been suggested as potential explanations for this decision, but their motive was probably no more outlandish than the fact that they realised that they had something significant awaiting release, and were keen to create stronger momentum and possibly even score a hit single before unleashing the album in its entirety. One of the tracks that would appear on the album, ‘She Bangs The Drums’, did indeed provide them with a hit of sorts, as it climbed to number thirty two in the singles chart. The song itself is a charming and infectious number, with Ian Brown’s verbose lyrics wrapped in a melody that would not have disgraced the more impressive side of bubblegum pop. Predictably, a number of oversensitive and self-important individuals have tried to interpret the lyrics over the years, positing pretentious theories that the song might in some way be an allegorical reference to a female-dominant relationship. However, it’s entirely possible that the song should be taken on face value and is simply describing a particularly impressive female drummer (“Have you seen her have you heard, the way she plays, there are no words to describe the way I feel”), and given that the band were so totally consumed by their collective love of music at that point it’s probably the most likely explanation. The drumming and taut bassline sounded almost as though they had been taken straight from an electronic dance record, but the guitar lines over the top were fluid and jangly, and in retrospect it’s no surprise that NME chose this forward-thinking track as their single of the year for 1989. More surprising, given their previous form, was the fact that ‘She Bangs The Drums’ came with three startlingly good tracks on its b-side. The ambitious ‘Standing Here’ combined an expanding and contracting melody with a funky Jimi Hendrix-styled rhythm section, and dissolved halfway through into an ethereal acoustic ballad that played in a repetitive mantra for the remainder of the song’s surprisingly lengthy running time. ‘Standing Here’ was impressive enough, but its companion piece ‘Mersey Paradise’ is possibly the finest recording that the band ever made. The song stays true to the template that they had followed so far in their career, but the infectious melody and confident, energetic performance (most notably towards the end when, unable to find a satisfactory musical way of bridging two repetitions of the chorus, they simply threw in a few second of silence plugged by Ian Brown murmuring “oh yeah”) make it into a genuinely outstanding performance. The final track on the 12”, ‘Simone’, was another backwards track. Most listeners who had sat through ‘Full Fathom Five’ and ‘Guernica’ would be understandably expecting this to be terrible, but in fact it works brilliantly, employing just a shimmering, spectral guitar line with the occasional intrusion from whispered vocals, heavily distorted guitar, and a gentle shuffling drum sound. ‘Simone’ succeeded where their previous experiments in the art of running tapes backwards had failed, and the fact that it was left off “The Complete Stone Roses” while ‘Full Fathom Five’ made it onto the tracklisting defies explanation. However, ‘Simone’ was not a backwards version of any of the tracks that had been released to date, and the mystery of what song it was based on was one that would not be solved until well over two years after it had been released. Overall, ‘She Bangs The Drums’ was a truly remarkable single, with b-sides that appealed to listeners every bit as much as the lead track, and the fact that it broke the top forty singles chart was both exciting and of real significance.
Having finally scored the chart breakthrough that they had been holding out for, Silvertone released “The Stone Roses”. Of the tracks that had been released to date, only ‘Made Of Stone’ and ‘She Bangs The Drums’ were actually present on the album, and the latter was even present as a different mix (something that appears to have escaped the attention of most fans). The opening track, ‘I Wanna Be Adored’, had been present in the band’s live set since their formation, and indeed had been recorded with Martin Hannett during the original album sessions in 1985. The song’s arrangement, however, had changed significantly. Originally propulsive and riff-driven, it had transformed into a moody, anthemic powerhouse with a deliberately understated and muted backing, and had also acquired a dramatic rumbling intro, that slowly built in volume and intensity until it reached John Squire’s first guitar line. ‘I Wanna Be Adored’ provided a memorable and truly effective and attention grabbing opening to the album, rejecting the usual tradition of starting with something loud, dynamic and immediate to hook in the listener with an unexpectedly low-key approach (possibly inspired by ‘Astronomy Domine’, the opening track from Pink Floyd’s 1967 debut album “The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn”). ‘She Bangs The Drums’ came next, followed by the remarkable ‘Waterfall’, which gave a clear representation of the band’s desire to push at the traditional structural boundaries of the three minute indie guitar pop song. Over a chiming guitar figure, melodic bassline and shuffling drumbeat, Ian Brown sings about American cultural and political dominance of Britain using the odd filter of an antique sailing ship. When he’s done the song continues for quite some time, with Squire’s guitar figures rising and falling like crashing waves, without ever seeming pointless or tedious. Although the song betrays their considerable debt to the psychedelic guitar bands of the 1960s and their habit of improvising solos for hours on end, it draws strength from the fact that its corresponding section is in comparative terms extremely brief, and Squire is only given about a minute and a half to pack in all of his dazzling guitar trickery before the song fades out.
‘Waterfall’ is, to all intents and purposes, followed by more ‘Waterfall’. ‘Don’t Stop’ is essentially the band’s original demo of that track run backwards. Legend has it that the band did not originally intend to forge a reversed track out of ‘Waterfall’, but after the tape was accidentally run backwards in the studio, John Leckie insisted that they had to rework the droning, raga-like sound into a new song. Thus the reversed version of ‘Waterfall’ was embellished with overdubs and new lyrics based on what words the band thought that they could make out from the backwards vocals (including, oddly enough, a coherent section about a “pained blues singer”), and turned it into ‘Don’t Stop’. Like ‘Simone’, this track works far better than their previous experiments with backward-running tapes, primarily because at least some attempt had been made to fashion it into something coherent and new. Incidentally, The Stone Roses often performed ‘Waterfall’ and ‘Don’t Stop’ as one track when playing live. The closing number on side one, ‘Bye Bye Badman’, was heavily inspired by a little-known obsession of the band. Since seeing a Channel 4 documentary on the 1968 student riots in France, which had very nearly resulted in the government being toppled, The Stone Roses had developed a deep interest in the subject and had drawn imagery and influence from the protestors for their own use. One notable example of this was the album’s cover artwork, which featured slices of lemon nailed to one of John Squire’s paintings in reference to the fact that the rioting students held slices of lemon against their mouths to counteract the effects of the tear gas that the police sprayed them with. The lyrics of ‘Bye Bye Badman’ were a direct reference to the students’ clashes with the police (“choke me, smoke the air, in this citrus sucking sunshine I don’t care”), set to a subtle backing of cascading guitar lines and a genuine feeling of considered and laid-back but ultimately resolute defiance.
‘Bye Bye Badman’ may have been politically motivated in the sense of celebrating rebellion that had taken place over twenty years ago, but the start of side two expressed a more genuinely radical and controversial sentiment. Although brief and somewhat ‘indebted’ to the traditional folk song ‘Scarborough Fair’, ‘Elizabeth My Dear’ was a shockingly forthright anti-royal statement (“I’ll not rest ‘till she’s lost her throne, my aim is true, my message is clear, it’s curtains for you Elizabeth My Dear”), seeming to end with the sound of a gun with a silencer being fired. This was arguably a more inflammatory statement even than The Sex Pistols’ notorious ‘God Save The Queen’, and in retrospect it’s surprising that ‘Elizabeth My Dear’ did not provoke a frenzy of tabloid newspaper outrage. ‘(Song For My) Sugar Spun Sister’ is far less dramatic and violent, being a pleasant guitar pop song that bears some superficial similarities to ‘Sally Cinnamon’, but is a far better piece of music all round. ‘Made Of Stone’ appears next, followed by the atypical ‘Shoot You Down’. Despite the dark suggestions of the title and indeed some of the lyrics (“I never wanted the love that you showed me, it started to choke me, and how I wish I’d said no, too slow”), the song itself is a pleasant and gentle number with a noticeable Hawaiian tint to the lead guitar and rhythm, and hefty doses of phasing. ‘This Is The One’, the penultimate track on the album, is something of a course of controversy. Another number that had been in their set since the Martin Hannett sessions, ‘This Is The One’ had been written as an exciting live number rather than a strong song, hinging around the repeated chorus getting louder and faster as the song progressed. Although it had been purposefully recorded with John Leckie, there was some dispute as to whether the song should actually go on the album or not, and it only made it to the tracklisting – at the expense of another never-identified track – at the very last minute. Even now, opinion is divided as to whether it is the most exciting track on the album, or just a bit boring. Not a word that could ever be applied to the album’s closing track, ‘I Am The Resurrection’. The song opens with a pounding, echoing drumbeat before being joined by a similar bassline to that heard on ‘She Bangs The Drums’. This is matched by strongly worded and vaguely threatening verses, all punctuated with dramatic surges of guitar and the lyric “don’t waste your words, I don’t need anything from you, I don’t care where you’ve been or what you plan to do”, finally leading up to a soaring chorus that proclaims “I am the resurrection and I am the light, I couldn’t ever bring myself to hate you as I’d like”. It has never been revealed who inspired the concise blast of lyrical vitriol heard in ‘I Am The Resurrection’, but whoever it was must have upset the band quite dramatically. Following the brief appearance of the chorus, the song concludes with a powerful salvo of guitar and drums, but that isn’t quite the end of the track. A funk-styled bassline the starts up, joined by guitar, drums and percussion in a remarkable instrumental jam that repeatedly breaks down only to fold back on itself and start up again. Even at the end of the track, a good four minutes later when the song fades into acoustic strumming (which itself goes through a couple of surges in intensity), a chopping chord sequence appears to be starting up just as the track disappears past the range of human hearing. Unlike ‘This Is The One’, ‘I Am The Resurrection’ was exciting both live (where it could often stretch out to well over twelve minutes) and in the studio. One of the most significant dance tracks of 1989 had been created not by a faceless DJ turned producer in a studio but by four musicians using ‘traditional’ instruments who pretty much improvised as the tapes rolled. As well as providing a fitting conclusion to the album, the second half of ‘I Am The Resurrection’ also encapsulated the musical boundaries that had been blurred and pushed past by the album as a whole.
Like ‘She Bangs The Drums’, “The Stone Roses” only just crept into the top forty of the national charts, and met with a surprisingly muted critical response. Although the album was already being talked about excitedly in both indie and dance music circles, it did not really take off until later in the year, following the release of the band’s first post-album single. ‘What The World Is Waiting For’ had been specifically written as an a-side, and although it introduced a more expansive and undisciplined sound it was still rooted in the same style as the majority of the album. Its intended b-side, ‘Fool’s Gold’, was something else altogether. This was a dense funk track which the band had built around a drum pattern borrowed from a breakbeat record as an experiment, but it was an experiment that was more successful than anyone involved had anticipated. Test pressings of the single provoked comments that ‘Fool’s Gold’ should be the a-side, and although by then it was too close to the release date for Silvertone to be able to reverse the situation, they did make the single a double a-side. Unsurprisingly, it was ‘Fool’s Gold’ that deservedly got all the attention and airplay, taking the band into the top twenty and on to “Top Of The Pops”, where they made their debut on the same edition as Happy Mondays. The album quickly leapt into the top ten, and as 1989 rolled in to 1990 the media was suddenly alive with excitement over The Stone Roses. Their sulky, assured demeanour – which saw them respond to interview questions that they didn’t like with cold silence, throw paint over employees of a former record label who had reissued an old single against their wishes, and yell “bloody amateurs” at the production team of BBC2’s “The Late Show” when the power blew about forty seconds into a live performance of ‘Made Of Stone’ – only compounded their status as confident, creative individuals with enormous potential. Fevered anticipation preceded the release of their next single ‘One Love’, a similarly inclined but equally exciting track (as indeed was its b-side, ‘Something’s Burning’), that vaulted straight into the top ten amid a series of rapturously received live shows in unlikely locations. And then, there followed a very long silence.
For the benefit of those who ignorantly splutter jokes about ‘laziness’ and taking five years to make an album, here is the genuine reason for said lengthy period of inactivity. At the time that the band had signed to Silvertone, Compact Discs did not form an important share of music sales in Britain, and the contract that they signed did not cover the format. Following the success of the album post-‘Fool’s Gold’, it became obvious that Silvertone did not intend paying the band any royalties for sales on the format, and so The Stone Roses began pursuing legal avenues in the hope of extricating themselves from the contract. Silvertone’s response to this was to obtain an injunction that prevented the band from recording for any other label, and as Silvertone owned their publishing rights it prevented them from actually writing any new material too. It took well over a year for The Stone Roses to free themselves from the contract, and a further twelve months for Silvertone’s appeal to be heard, meaning that it was well into 1992 by the time that they could get on with creating a second album. “Second Coming” was released late in 1994, meaning that it actually took less than two years to write and record. Perhaps the journalists and Jamie Theakston-style ‘talking heads’ of the world would like to do a bit of research before they write their next top ten of laziest bands in the world ever.
Ahead of The Stone Roses lay the patchy and uninspiring prog rock-flavoured “Second Coming” and their eventual dissolution into a pale shadow of their former selves boasting only two original members, before they called it a day at the height of a scene that they had at least partly inspired. Silvertone, however, did their best to keep the well-deserved reputation of the band’s earlier incarnation intact through their practice of reissuing every scrap of material by the band that they had lying around as many times as was physically possible. Their first step, just after the band first announced their intention to leave the label late in 1990, was to reissue ‘Fool’s Gold’ as an a-side. The following year, they put out ‘I Wanna Be Adored’ – which had previously been issued as a single in America – as a single with two new b-sides. One of these was an unimpressive live recording of ‘Sally Cinnamon’, but the other was a genuine outtake from the album sessions, and was in fact superior to most of the tracks that had made it onto the album. ‘Where Angels Play’ has a more delicate and dense production than any of the other tracks that they recorded while at Silvertone, and is a masterstroke of arrangement, production and performance. The shimmering, spectral guitar line and Ian Brown’s soft vocals are joined on the choruses by a heavily distorted guitar and shuffling drums, and if you’re thinking that sounds slightly familiar then you’d be right – ‘Where Angels Play’ was in fact the song that had been run backwards to create ‘Simone’. What’s more impressive still about the finished forwards version of the song is the way that John Squire, clearly itching to let rip with some manic guitar improvisation throughout, actually turns in a beautifully restrained performance that constantly threatens to explode into a fireball of guitar noise but never actually does. Until, that is, he takes off in superb style just as the song is fading out! ‘Where Angels Play’ was also gifted with a particularly strong melody and an infectious chorus, and given that it was not only an established part of their live set at the time (where it was often segued straight into ‘Shoot You Down’) but also strong enough to have been a single, its failure to appear on the album is completely baffling.
Whatever the morality of Silvertone’s persistent repackaging of the band’s back catalogue, at least it gave us the chance to hear ‘Where Angels Play’, and most fans were in fact extremely grateful for that. The same cannot be said, however, of any of the subsequent reissues. First the album was re-released with ‘Elephant Stone’ and ‘Fool’s Gold’ added to the tracklisting, followed by weak remixes of ‘Waterfall’, ‘I Am The Resurrection’ and ‘Fool’s Gold’ (on no less than three separate occasions) as singles. “Turns Into Stone” gathered together roughly two thirds of their non-album tracks, and then “The Complete Stone Roses” gathered together virtually the same two thirds. The latter album did initially come complete with some previously unreleased material, but it was hardly worth getting excited about. ‘I’m Without Shoes’ was what sounded like and aborted attempt to fashion a song out of ‘She Bangs The Drums’ played backwards, while ‘Groove (Black Magic Devil Woman)’ was an instrumental that sounded more like the band tuning up than anything else. Silvertone then went on to release the ‘definitive’ version of the album, adding bonus tracks and a CD-Rom of their promotional videos, and were last seen attempting to flog a hideous collection of remixes that made a mockery of the whole point of the music. Meanwhile, speculation rages as to whether Silvertone have any further unreleased material in their vaults. The risible nature of the ‘new’ tracks on “The Complete Stone Roses” would suggest not, but here’s an interesting point: another of Silvertone’s cash-in releases was “The Blackpool Live” video late in 1991. Release of the video was delayed by a couple of weeks for unexplained reasons, and when it finally appeared it was a track shorter than had previously been advertised. Look closely at the setlist taped to Reni’s amp during closeups of him, and you’ll notice an extra item on it that, while not exactly legible, does not appear on the video and is clearly not the name of any of the ‘known’ songs…
In addition to Silvertone’s relentless reselling of material that we all already own on two separate albums anyway, “The Stone Roses” has also been exhausted by its reputation. On the one hand there is its status as an influential and groundbreaking album. The late 1989 chart successes of The Stone Roses, along with Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets and 808 State, were the first beginnings of the huge influx of indie music into the mainstream charts, which has now reached the stage where bands who would have been consigned to John-Peel-airplay-and-NME-cover cult obscurity ten years ago can now achieve a degree of success that outstrips anything that the ‘Madchester’ bands could ever have dreamed of. However, unlike many of their contemporaries in that initial chart assault, they were not quickly forgotten about as soon as time and fashion changed. Even throughout their prolonged absence, the music press remained fascinated by the band and eagerly hopeful of hearing new material by them, and it’s not entirely unfair to suggest that the majority of bands to emerge in the ‘Britpop’ boom of the mid-1990s owed a heavy debt to The Stone Roses. On the other hand, the album and accompanying tracks have also been pushed well past the point of tiresomeness by an obsessive and unquestioning fanbase who completely fail to understand the band’s strengths and weaknesses, punching the air in time to ‘Sally Cinnamon’ and genuinely suggesting that ‘Guernica’ should be considered to be a great piece of music. Such overexposure and indeed repeated retelling of what you already know can prove to be too much for even the most enthusiastic follower of a band, and it’s partly from there that the negative reputation that some have attempted to attach to the band and their music in recent years derives.
So, is there in fact any truth in such suggestions? Has the passing of time allowed previously unseen chinks in the band’s musical armour to become apparent? Does the album’s reputation truly rest on a combination of rose-tinted reminiscences by those who bought it when it was first released, and its luckily coincidental positioning at a moment when exciting and radical developments were taking place in music, which made it seem more important than it actually was? The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is ‘no’. There are indeed some flaws in the album, namely that some tracks that should have been on there were left off (and no amount of Silvertone attempting to rewrite history by attaching them to reissues will change that), but there’s no point discussing a theoretical version of the album, and the actual released version still sounds as fresh, exciting and distinctive back in 1989. Similarly, although it can easily be argued that the album doesn’t sound as truly innovative as it did back in 1989, is there actually any point in arguing that? The wheel can’t be reinvented, so it’s only logical that it won’t necessarily sound ‘cutting edge’ over a decade on. To properly assess the worth of the album, you need to look at it on sheer face value, and consider its actual contents alone. Unlike the output of many of their contemporaries, “The Stone Roses” does not sound particularly dated. While it is inevitably tied to the indie-dance scene of the early 1990s, it does not sound like a relic from a bygone musical era at all, and in fact has a strangely timeless quality. The day is bound to come soon, if in fact it hasn’t already by the time that this article sees print, when the likes of Kate Thornton and Ricky Gervias will be invited to give nostalgic reminiscences about a band that they were doubtless only dimly aware of in the first place on some godforsaken television clip show, but that will only help to prove such shows to be the pointless exercises that they truly are. “The Stone Roses” will inevitably remind some people of the time of its release, but as a work of music it defies reminiscence. It combined what had made music great in the past with what was then making it great in the present, and used this combination to push towards the future. We’re in the future now, and it still sounds great. Although not quite as great as it would have done if they’d included ‘Where Angels Play’ instead of ‘This Is The One’. Bloody amateurs
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