Mancs For The Memories

Hot Press got its first sighting of Stone Roses on October 7, 1991 when they played McGonagle’s, a metal-loving venue that didn’t take too kindly to either them or support act Blur.

“There was about a dozen people in to see us,” John Squire winced when reminded of this by Hot Press a few years later. “Most of them wanted to beat the shit out of us. (Roses driver) Steve Adge came into our dressing room after the gig and said that we’d have to fight our way out. This was prior to any recording and before Mani joined. It really gelled when he did. It’s got to be something more than just the sum of the parts. He was the missing piece of the puzzle and there was a tangible sense of that happening when he joined.”
The Roses were rather more warmly received when they returned a year later and, courtesy of a trip to the Antrim coast, decided on the cover artwork for their debut album.
“I remember Coleraine being excellent,” John enthuses. “We seemed to get the run of the place. It was a university and we spent the day before the show in the swimming pool getting the canoes out and using the high-diving board. We went to the Giant’s Causeway as well, which inspired the cover for the first album – trying to capture that effect when the sea seems to be green. The sea round there was boiling with waves smashing against the rocks and full of bubbles. I remember it as a pale green with white foam splattered across the top. That was the effect I was trying to capture for the cover.”
Mani, who lest we forget is of Castledermot, County Kildare extraction, has fond memories of their 1995 Féile show in Pairc Ui Choimh.
“For me, it was one of my top two Stone Roses moments,” he affirmed. “We recorded the entire show and no doubt it will come out as a live gig. What made it for us was the crowd singing every note from every song.”
“That was special,” Squire agrees. “We did do some good shows with that band. There seems to be some mistaken idea that after Reni left the band was shite.”
It may never have made it as a live album, but the killer Cork version of ‘Love Spreads’ has been preserved for all to see at www.youtube.com/watch?v=31azcNJi1LA.
A man who kept a close eye on them throughout their career is Noel Gallagher, who admits that without the Roses there would have been no Oasis.
“Seeing them for the first time when I didn’t have a clue who they were – that was the moment!” he told us at Christmas. “Their manager, Gareth Evans, had come up to me in the street and given me a ticket for their gig in the International 2. I went in – it was empty by the way – on they came and I was like, ‘Wow, what the fuck?’ I bought a vinyl copy of ‘Sally Cinnamon’ on the way out, and that was it. I’d seen The Smiths before and in hindsight was searching for some sort of musical direction, but I could never be a Morrissey or a Johnny Marr. As soon as I heard ‘Sally Cinnamon’ though, it was, ‘Ah, but I can do that!’ That was the start of my musical journey.”
One of the few things the Gallaghers have ever agreed on is how much of a game-changer seeing the Roses was.
“My first big gig was Spike Island, which was shit but it didn’t matter ‘cause it was a celebration of how far our band had come,” Liam informed HP’s Stuart Clark backstage at the Late Late. “‘Our band’ being the Stone Roses who we’d followed pretty much from day one and were in a different league to everybody else in Manchester, the Mondays included.”
He’s especially fond of the singer.
“Ian Brown – he’s absolute fucking dynamite. Just fucking mysterious, just not fucking really there. But completely there.”
Noel’s admiration for the Roses didn’t impress their Madchester rivals Inspiral Carpets who he was then crewing for.
“The one time I wore a t-shirt, they told me to take it off because it had the Stone Roses on it and they were jealous of their success,” he chuckled.
Noel was aware the Roses were giving it another whirl a good few months before the rest of us.
“I caught wind of it last summer,” he explained. “There was a lot of, ‘You know that thing? Well, it might be happening’. Then it was, ‘That thing’s definitely on’. It was like a drug deal taking place over the phone - nobody actually said the words, ‘The Stone Roses are getting back together again’.”
But, in what is the rock’n’roll story of the year, they were – and they have. Phoenix Park, here they come....