Stones On A Roll

Meet Stone Roses. Another year – another music sensation. Another earboggling, head-butting, mindbend of an album to change your life by. Another bid to boost the fine art of consumer spending. Finding a quality record on the top of the pop chart is like finding an American flag in Libya: in commercial terms, who sucks wins. Indie bands (“Hey DJ, Where’s The Tune???”), they’re now the losers who set themselves low standards and then fail to live up to them.

Young guns don’t necessarily go for it!
Why should Stone Roses be any different? Yet they’ve made it across the board: in Smash Hits teeny-town because they give good face; in New Musical Express because they have cult credibility; and the CD Q mindset can relate to their sweet high-gloss harmonies through re-memories of Love, Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Rain Parade, Long Ryders. So who are they?

Ian George Brown.
Born February 20, 1966. A stoned immaculate glaze to his eyes of deepest brown. Soft black barbs of basin-cut hair styling a surly Morrisonesque petulance. “Satisfied? Not really, no. Reasonably unsatisfied. ‘Cos the album’s not No.1 is it?”
The album fades in with deep bass, a tinsel of guitar, solid 4/4 drums, and this man intoning “I wanna be adored... you adore me, you adore me,” repeated like a mantra. A post-hypnotic suggestion, a subliminal command. So is getting to No.1 important? “Getting to No.1 is good. ‘Cos you’re the top selling record of the week, yes. No-one can take that away from you. But we’re not trying to get into the charts. We’re just trying to make good records.” Ian is currently reading Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus.

John Squire.
Born November 24, 1962. Plays guitar, a Stratocaster with a big clean sound (“I wash it every day”). He also paints the record sleeves. He speaks carefully with premeditation.
“Being heard by people – by a lot of people – that’s important. ‘Course it is, yes. We never wanted to be elitist, or be a cult group. We don’t aim at any particular audience. If you aim at something you limit yourself. We’re not writing for other people. We’re writing for ourselves. But we want as many people to like what we do as possible. Whether it’s a 14-year old girl, or a 35-year old man. If someone’s going to appreciate the music then that’s enough.” John is reading Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 which he thinks is “really close to the film,” adding that “most Penguin Books are good, those Orange Classic ones.”

Reni.
Born April 10, 1964. Plays drums and contributes backing vocals. Is currently reading “glossy men’s magazines” and has a fetish for old floppy hats. “There is a small element of exhibitionism in what we do as well,” he concedes.

Gary Mountfield.
Born November 16, 1962. Plays bass. Signs his autographs ‘Mani’, decorated with an Acid House Smiley. He drinks Guinness, wears his hair in a pony tail, and sometimes goes to the ‘Hacienda’ Club. “I saw Vera Duckworth there one Wednesday night. She was singing and what-have-you. She was fucking excellent. A right hit.”
So I mention the Coronation Street star as an influence on Stone Roses music? “Yeah. On me personally.” Gary is the slum-boy of the group.

Stone Roses. Have come here direct from Wolverhampton Court. It’s not that they’re B.A.D., it’s just that they’re drawn that way. Me? I’m apprehensive. If the hearing has gone badly for the band, perhaps they’ll take it out on journalists? “Naw. We won’t do that. It’s too easy, in’it?”
They’re as good as their word.
The album charts high. A single from it ‘She Bangs The Drum’, reaches No.36 (July 1989). The loose, naggingly repetitive ‘Fools Gold’ (not on the original UK album, but track 13 on the US release) follows it in December that same year, hits No.8 and sells 200,000 copies. As ‘Made Of Stone’ and ‘Elephant Stone’ hike their profile onto a higher plane, their former label FM/Revolver re-issue their years-back ‘Sally Cinnamon’ to catch the wave...
“It’s not so much the record that we’re bothered about,” drawls Ian. “It’s the video they made to go with it. The video, and the man himself.”
“There’s nothing wrong with him putting an old record out, ‘cos we made it, and we made it for his label. So, fair enough,” John elaborates. “But doing a video two years later without consulting us, and making one that we thought was offensive to us as people – ‘cos it was, wasn’t it?”
“It really was patronizing,” Ian answers. “It was all shots of Manchester, Moss Side, women holding babies, Cola cans, dandelions, people at fruit stalls, Stone Roses t-shirts, the Arndale Centre, the front cover of The Face, things like that. It was wrong. So we went down there and told him that we thought it was wrong. But he didn’t agree. He thought that he was in the right.”
“If you’d been there on the night you’d have seen why we fuckin’ did it. ‘Cos the guy was being a completely obnoxious character.” Gary cuts through to the essentials. “He’s making more money now than he’s ever made before, out of us! And we were saying ‘what’s going on, you’re making money out of us’, and he’s yellin ‘make an appointment, make an appointment’... so we...
“We subsequently got charged with ‘criminal damage’: £23,000. But we’re contesting that amount. We don’t think we caused that much damage. It’s just him, trying to do us over again. It was him that publicised it all. We didn’t intend doing anything further about it. It was just a matter between us and him as far as we were concerned. But ten minutes after he’s phoned the Police he put out a press release to the papers, the music magazines, everyone. ‘Cos his record was still just outside the 10 then. He was hoping to capitalise on it, that the publicity would make that critical difference. That’s the sort of tosser he is.”
It’s the Roses second hearing on the case. The first – fanwise – was like a New Kids On The Block radio-promo. Two girls engraved ‘Stone Roses’ into the paintwork of a police van parked alongside the court. Today, they explain, it was “short and sweet inside. Only ten minutes long. The courtroom was cleared, with only a few people there. We were sent up for further proceedings at Dudley Crown Court in September.” Two girl fans appeared later, charged with malicious damage to a police vehicle.
I suggest that it’s not bad thing for a band to be just a little notorious.
“Well, yes, we know that. But we didn’t expect all this to happen.”
And what do you do if a journalist gives you bad press. Do you come round and redecorate him?
“Naw. What for? You’re entitled to your opinions.”
Just thought I’d get that sorted before I reach the contentious questions.
Gary leers generously. “No. Call us what you want.”

In the beginning... was the weird. Me? I sold up and came to Manchester. Manchester is Hollies. Freddie And The Dreamers. The Dakotas (but no Billy J. Kramer). Wayne Fontana And The Mindbenders. Some of 10cc. Buzzcocks. Fall. A third of Crosby Stills And Nash. Slaughter and The Dogs. Magazine. Joy Division. A Certain Ratio. Smiths. The Savoy Holman Hunt African Orchestra. New Order. James. Happy Monsyas. Inspiral Carpet. A Guy Named Gerald... Candyflip.
Stone Roses are (largely) from Manchester’s Chorlton suburb.
Were there other bands before this one?
Ian: “No. First me.”
John: “First and last.”
Did you start doing cover versions of other people’s material?
Gary: “We don’t have any time for doing cover versions.”
Ian: “It’s best to make your own up. More fun in’it? We’ve always tried to make our own songs, cos we couldn’t play very good, so we couldn’t even learn any of the songs we liked anyway.”
Reni: “It’s very difficult drumming like another drummer. I’m not good enough to drum like someone else.”
Ian: “The first gig we ever played was in London. We didn’t play Manchester for ages. We didn’t want to play any of the venues round here. We didn’t like them. So we did Warehouse Parties in London. Hired big places underneath railway arches. Built our own stage. Hung out around the clubs, or got our mates to hang outside clubs giving out leaflets with the location where this Warehouse Party was to be. Then we’d just turn up onstage at three in the morning. That was 1985 or ‘86. We did that for a while, then graduated to playing venues.”
Did you do support spots for other bands?
Ian: “We never support. You’re joking, why support? That’s a no-ambition to want to support somebody else, to want to warm-up for somebody else. It’s a waste of time. We supported some people when we started. That Petrol Emotion at the Riverside in ‘86; a group called Mercenary Skank – first few times we ever played we supported them in London. But history doesn’t dictate that everybody has to start out doing support spots. It’s prostituting yourself. Once we’d done it, we realised we hated it. So we stopped. People just nip out of the bar to have a quick look at the support band, then nip back into the bar again. So why do it? We did a lot less gigs because of that decision, but you don’t really have to don anything that appalls you. We don’t do anything that appalls us. You do what you think is right.”
Even Guns N’ Roses play support (to the Rolling Stones on their Steel Wheels tour).
Reni: “That just shows you the limit of their am-fuckin’-bition, dunnit?”
The album was recorded at Rockfield in Wales, and The Battery in London. Why not use a Manchester studio, like Strawberry?
Reni: “We don’t like the chippies near there. Yeah, that’s important. Battery is good because they’ve got a great Afro-Caribbean food place nearby.”
Ian: “And Rockfield because it got us out of the city for a while. A bit of fresh air. You can lie on the hills and watch jet-fighters training. Waiting for one to crash. That’s the only distraction.”
Was producer John Leckie important in realising the album’s sound?
Reni: “He made sure we got up at the same time.”
Gary: “He brought an element of discipline to it. But he’s not a Phil Spector.”
Ian: “No, he’s not into that. He’s into getting the best out of what we’re giving. He did the knob-twiddling. We didn’t like any of the other groups he’d done. We didn’t know enough about music to even know whether he’d done a good production job on them or not. He maybe suggested things and we said no. The songs were already there. On this album everything was put together before we went into the studio. We did them pretty much the same as the demos we’d given him. Who wants to sit around in a studio all day pissing about? All that’s not trying to take anything away from what John Leckie did. He put his own thing on it.”
You played Europe early on.
Gary: “We played Sweden when we started. That was pretty good. We played to three people one night, four people another night. We might go back there soon. This time it’ll be a bit better.”
Reni: “Yes. This time we’re aiming for double figures.”
Ian: “We did Belfast too. We did six gigs in Northern Ireland. Belfast was excellent. Then we played Dublin, at a place called McGonagles. It was Heavy Rock night. We walked in the place, they were playing ‘Smoke On The Water’. And there were all these rockers on the floor. Then we came on stage. People were throwing things. People were running up to the stage and going ‘fuck off home, go home’. We couldn’t even get into McDonald’s later on ‘cos we had earrings in...”
John: “Our stage sound is pretty good though. Was it in Cologne? Four people walked out. They said they were disappointed that we were miming to a CD. So I think we do it alright.”
Gary: “But drugs-and-shagging tour stories – is that what your after?”
Reni: “I cut my finger once shaving, in Paris. I fell over a bottle of beer from the night before. Almost banged my head – but not quite. Bruised the palm of my hand on the radiator as I fell though. But hey – that’s rawk’n’roll for you!”

In the 1990s the charts were dense with theft – direct sampled steals, cover versions, remixed reissues – or at least stylistic recreations of the past. Stone Roses reinforce the consistent powers of trad rock, the guitar-bass-drum triad that’s been constant since the dawn of time, since years BC (before cassettes).
The Roses don’t challenge, affront or startle, they pleasurably soothe and reassure. No iconoclasts they. Solid cascades and glittering flourishes of crashing guitar are laced in tight by bass figures of immaculate symmetry and flickering ghosts of colour.
The light, high harmonies are as insubstantial as cumulus, as warm as the summer of love. Class without struggle. How can the Mums and Dads of 16-year-old Stone Roses fans feint the outrage expected of their parental role when they have Little Richard, Hendrix, and probably the Sex Pistols, all wilder and more extreme, in their own private vinyl stash?
“Did you ever dance with the Devil in the pale moonlight? jeers the Joker.
“People always look to the past with every group. They’re always going to do that,” argues Ian, draped decorously across the duvet of the hotel bed, room 163. “They said the Pistols were like The Who or The Small Faces. It’s only later on that people starts thinking ‘well, maybe they were originals’. I was never that much into The Byrds or any of those bands they compare us with. I’ve only really heard the singles.”
Wrapped in John Squire’s Jackson Pollock splash-art, the Roses’ album is richly melodic, intelligently mature mainstream rock with depth, light and shade. But it’s hardly innovative.
“It could be,” says John. “In two or three years it could be seen as innovative, ‘cos you don’t know what’s going to happen. To be innovative it has to ‘innovate’ something. And those things are happening now. There are groups now being influenced by what we’re doing. I’m not saying it is innovative. I’m just saying that it’s too early to say…”
I suggest that Jesus And Mary Chain, for example, also take elements from the past. But they mutate it, disfigure it. I don’t see that confrontational ingredient in what Stones Roses do.
“We don’t want it,” retorts John.
For the creation of Stone Roses product, all the wonders of post-futurist technology are ignored too. ‘(Song For My) Sugar Spun Sister’ opens with the ‘Pretty Flamingo’/’Angel Of Harlem’ guitar riff (prompting NME’s Jack Barron to playfully dub them “U2 on E”), while the album peaks on the 8.12 minute ‘I Am The Ressurection’, with its long, fluid instrumental orgasm based on The Jam’s ‘Start’ bass-figure, building through chakka-chakka percussive dances and polite guitar distortion that runs from a fie spray to a torrent.
Exquisite – but trad. Nothing to identify it as happening now. No high-tech, no sampling.
“There’s bits of high-tech stuff in everything we do, it depends,” says John. “We utilize it to the extent that you wouldn’t notice it. And all sampling means is digital recording…”
“And anyway – sampling is hardly innovative, is it? It’s last year’s thing,” grins Reni.
But instead you use psychedlia’s most sacred totem, the reverse tape.
Gary shrugs. “Some sounds really surge, and sound excellent, if you can use them properly. We did use backward tapes on ‘Waterfall’. We were listening to the tapes over and over again but they still didn’t sound right. Until we thought ‘let’s hear it backwards’. So about right in the morning we put it on backwards and thought ‘Oh yeah, let’s go home and write some words for it’. It sounded so good.”
John’s painting illustrates ‘Waterfall’ on the CD liner booklet, stars ‘n’ daub on the Union Jack (from an oil on canvas painting 30 x 26). “You can’t always say that a riot of colour illustrates a particular song. But the flag one for ‘Waterfall’ does. It’s about Americanisation. American cultural imperialism.”
John’s vivid visualization also extends to ‘Sugar Spun Sister’, which becomes a Miro-red sun slashed by comets and vapour-trail squiffs (32 x 32), while the front cover – ‘Bye Bye Badman’ – is citrus rings on blue dribble (31 x 26.5).
The lyrics to that one bathe in ‘citrus-sucking sunshine’, but the track is also a very pointed attack on… someone in particular? (“I’ve got bad intentions/I intend to knock you down”) “No. No-one in particular. Forces of authority in general. ‘Bye Bye Badman’ – the ‘Lemon Song’. That’s the one that’s to do with CS gas. It’s nothing to do with squeezing my lemon till the juice runs down my leg.”
John’s Led Zeppelin misquote deftly shifts attention from the precise CS gas reference.
But Ian warms to it. “We met an old man in Paris who told us that if you suck lemons it stops tears when CS riot gas is sprayed at you. He’d been on the student riots in ’68 and, in fact, in 1970. But he was still looking forward to change on the street. And so that he could do something towards that, he had this lemon in his pocket at all times. He was older, but he could see longer that way, and he could carry messages back from the barricades through the CS gas without tears – by sucking this lemon. That’s the story. It was a unique experience in how to go about changing the world.”
And a handy tip for the next Poll Tax riot!

There are long silences clipping away the seconds. There are armed police in lines of perspex shields across the TV. The Stone Roses conspicuously lack a gob-on-legs: there’s no hypospeak, no talking the band up. Stone Roses don’t usually write about issues either.
“We do write about issues. It’s just the way we put the words together that makes that not so obvious. We don’t write rubbish. Sometimes there’s maybe ten different things all going on in the same song. We write about everything we see, and everything that we wanna see. The imagery that comes from the words pieces together in the listener’s mind – that’s what’s important, not the ideas that I’m trying to give you by talking about it afterwards. It’s the total thing.
“It’s not a poem written on a piece of paper; it’s sounds and feelings too. The imagery might just as well come from the guitar. It spoils it to break it down and describe what each line is supposed to mean. If it’s unclear then I’d prefer it to remain unclear. I know that when I like a song, sometimes I’m not too clear on the words – and then I hear the group saying it’s abut the time they did this and this and this; or maybe even ten years after they’ve written the song they trivialize it by explaining it’s about ‘this’… it ruins the mystique for me. It makes it less personal.”
Reni agrees. “Maybe sometimes the best way of describing what you feel is already there in the songs, so to go outside the boundaries of the lyric is to cheapen the song.”
But you don’t appear to deal with social or political issues.
“We do. The whole LP is full of them.”
I didn’t make those connections.
“You missed out then.”
What exactly did I miss?
“The social issue connections. Freedom is an issue. That’s what they say to me. They’re all ‘Freedom’ songs. Every one of them.”
But Freedom’s just another word from a hit record by Wham!
“We don’t sing about the Labour Party. Billy Bragg and The Clash have done that already. Writing a political manifesto within the music seems pretty shallow to us. It’s like chest-beating. I don’t think there’s a place for it in the music.”
I like ‘Made Of Stone’. I quote the lyrics “Sometimes I, fantasise/when the streets are cold and lonely/and the cars they burn below me/are you all alone? Is anybody home?” Then the line “I’m standing warm against the cold/now that the flames have taken hold” – it works as an image. But what does it mean?
“It means what it says.” A long silence in which a car explodes in a rage of flame on cue on the TV. Beirut? Belfast?
“It’s a death-wish.” A longer silence. “Sometimes it’s good if you’re not sure what the lyrics are. Some of them are fiction. Some of them aren’t. ‘Elizabeth My Dear’ is pretty direct. Most of them aren’t as direct as that one.”
Yes. The Royal Assassination song, side two track one. A sweet 59-second re-write of ‘Scarborough Fair’ that closes with “it’s curtains for you/Elizabeth my dear,” followed by a soft gunshot in the fade.
“…the sneaky sniper shot from behind the curtains, yes.”
Monarchy is the Stone Roses’ main point of media contention, thus far. Anti-Royalist comments in an earlier interview provoked a storm of tabloid Sun hacks to besiege Chorlton.
“You can’t really be in trouble with the Sun though, can you?” reasons Gary reasonably. “They’d have to have an intellect to trouble you in the first place.”
“Yeah – yes,” yawns Ian. “They were round my Mum’s, bugging her, knocking on her windows. But the press thing is inevitable in a way, that’s what we’re here for, for people like them to have a go at. The more you go up, the more they want to cut you down. But no, I’d say mine were ‘mild’ opinions as far as I’m concerned. I just said what I thought, that Royalty are the lynch-pins of most things wrong with this country. They are the ‘symbol for a nation’. The Royal Family is the symbol of health for the nation; the Mum and Dad and the kids. It’s all hypocrisy. That’s the sad thing. The lies have been pumped into people so long that they don’t know what the truth is any more.”
Already I’m warming to this band. It is insulting that Monarchy should still exist. They should get back into the history books and the fairy tales where they belong.
Again Gary cuts to essentials. “They should get straight to fucking Strangeways. To what’s left of Strangeways!”
“They’ve got the backlog of history against them,” says Reni, by way of summing up. “That’s the Royals for ya, wrong ‘uns!”

Manchester. As I expected, the trip was no picnic. Stone Roses; another year – another music sensation. The rest is hysteria.
Top Of The Pops dribbles anaemically onto the TV screen.
“Who’s the token indie band this week?”
“Oh no, Pat and Mick.”
“I love Pat, he’s great. Not so sure about Mick, he’s a bit dodgy.”
It’s not so long since Stone Roses were miming ‘Fool’s Gold’ on this very show, vamping the camera, giving good face, hair shimmering and slip-slithering telegenically. Success has been a seamless glide thus far. Even Shaun Ryder (of Happy Mondays) concedes “The Roses are a top band. Their album is brilliant. I play it at home all the time. I wish we’d made it” (NME, April 21, 1990)
Manchester…? “We don’t feel part of no scene,” protests Reni. “’Scenes’ are created by lazy bastards who try to contain everything inside one term. It’s just a strange coincidence when lots of different creative things start happening in the same city.”
“I don’t feel a common spirit with them. But we respect them for what they do,” adds Ian. “We feel a lot of rivalry between us and everyone else. And between each other.”
Does the media create ‘scenes’?
“No. They’re usually trailing six months behind what’s happening.”
But the press has been good to you, with Stone Roses splash covers everywhere.
“We’ve been good to them. We allowed them to put us on their covers. Anyway, Phil Collins never gets good press. But he does pretty well.”
I’ve never interviewed Phil Collins. What questions could you ask him?
“Ask him why he’s such a prat.”
“Ask him why he doesn’t give the royalties from ‘Another Day In Paradise’ to the homeless.”
“Tell him he looks shorter than he does on television.”
“Ask to borrow his comb…”
But writing about Phil Collings from the point of view of receding hairlines is like writing a critique of Stone Roses’ use of flares. Cheap trend journalism.
“Yes. You’re right. It’s juvenile.”
And trends are like drugs. When you’re vertigo high, you can only come down. What happens in six months when Manchester is no longer news?
“Ambient skiffle,” says Gary, unphased by the prospect.
“The great skiffle revival. Lonnie Donnegan. Derek Guyler on washboard. It could happen!”
“We’ll go on for as long as it’s still good. Could be three years. Could be thirty. We could be Francis Rossi. The Status Quo of the year 2012. I want to live till I’m a hundred…”

First published in Hot Press Volume 14, Issue 14, July 1990.