John Squire

Riddle me this: as the guitarist and main songwriter with The Stone Rose, John Squire is responsible for some of the most thrilling and iconic music of the last fifteen years. As a solo artist, he has recorded one album that sounds so bad, you almost owe your CD player an apology after playing it.

Why then, when he plays his old material – ‘She Bangs The Drums’, ‘Made Of Stone’, ‘Fool’s Gold’, songs that have illuminated many an adolescence here tonight – does the atmosphere get so tetchy and uncomfortable?

And how come tunes with such concrete shoes as ‘Joe Louis’, ‘Transatlantic Near Death Experience’ and ’15 Days’, are welcomed with such relief?

Could it be that no one wants to see Squire revisit his old manor? Not when they can pay ten notes to hear The Complete Stone Roses every six weeks. Because Squire’s old mob weren’t so much a band, as a teenage dream - Christ fixations, Napoleonic pronouncements – a defiant fuck you to the straight workday world. “You can have it all,” they said. “Easy peasey.”

You can’t, of course. And Squire’s a case in point. Now pushing forty, he may well be one of the great mercurial guitarists, but, as tonight proves, he is also one of the most discomforting vocalists I’ve ever heard – a strangled, nasally mixture of Robert Wyatt and Ashley from Coronation Street. When he attempts an old Roses tune (you know, the ones about ruling the world while remaining spotless and pure), the effect is jarring. It’s quite an achievement trying to ’sing’ like Ian Brown, and failing so badly it makes onlookers wince. Squire manages it effortlessly.

At least on the songs from Time Changes Everything, he appears more at ease with himself. The singing isn’t any better, but somewhere in this folkish, quietly melancholy fare, are maybe the seeds of (whisper it) a possible resurrection. Maybe. But don’t bang any drums.