This is John Squire speaking to Melody Maker on 3rd June 1989:
John: "Learnt what it's like to run around with a gang. History was alright, I didn't listen to most of the stuff."
The above piece reveals an embryonic interest in History at school and later, John's music and art draw upon the subject significantly. This essay is structured chronologically in analysis of this.
The lyrics at the end of John Squire's 15 Days are an excerpt from a prayer by Archbishop Alexander, taken from The British Soldiers' Testament (1929).
LZ 129 Hindenburg, named after Paul von Hindenburg (1847 - 1934), German President from 1925 to 1934, was a German zeppelin. Together with its sister-ship LZ 130 Graf Zeppelin II it was the largest aircraft ever built. In its second year of service it was destroyed by a fire while attempting to land at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey on 6th May 1937. A total of 36 people perished in the accident, which was widely reported by film, photographic, and radio media. The footage is played on a giant screen in the Ten Storey Love Song video. The crush of journalists was in response to a heavy publicity push about the first trans-Atlantic Zeppelin passenger flight to the US of the year (the ship had already made one round trip from Germany to Brazil that year). Herbert Morrison's broadcast remains one of the most famous in history; his plaintive words "Oh, the humanity !" resonate with the impact of the disaster. His recording was not broadcast until the next day - parts of his report were later dubbed onto the newsreel footage (giving an incorrect impression to some modern eyes accustomed to live television that the words and film had always been together).
John Squire named a Stone Roses track, Guernica, after the Picasso painting which encoded the horrors of the Spanish Civil War within it:
After Scholl's six months in the National Labor Service, in May 1942, she enrolled at the University of Munich as a student of biology and philosophy. Her brother Hans, who was studying medicine there, introduced her to his friends. Although this group of friends was eventually known for their political views, they were initially drawn together by a shared love of art, music, literature, philosophy and theology. Another piece from 2006 by Squire entitled 'The White Rose' relates to the White Rose resistance movement. In the early summer of 1942, Sophie participated in the production and distribution of the leaflets of the White Rose. She was arrested on 18th February 1943, while distributing the sixth leaflet at the University of Munich. In court on 21st February 1943, Sophie was recorded as saying "Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don't dare express themselves as we did." On 22nd February 1943, Sophie, her brother Hans and their friend Christoph Probst were found guilty of treason and condemned to death by head judge of the court Roland Freisler. They were executed by guillotine in the Munich-Stadelheim prison only a few hours later. The execution was supervised by Dr. Walter Roemer, the enforcement chief of the Munich district court. Prison officials emphasized the courage with which she walked to her execution. In February 2005, the year previous to the date of Squire's works relating to Scholl, a movie about her last days, based on the transcripts of her interrogations, 'Sophie Scholl – Die letzten Tage' ('Sophie Scholl - The Last Days') was released.
Another work by Squire from 2006 is entitled 'Rasputitsa'. The rasputitsa (which translates as 'mud season') is the twice annual flooding of Belarus, western Russia and Ukraine. Russia's winters are well known as a great defensive advantage in wartime, and the rasputitsa has played a crucial role in Russian history. During the Second World War the blitzkrieg of Germany was almost wholly halted by the mud that left even the most powerful tanks unusable. Writing a piece for New Statesman Magazine in December 2004, a part reads "I'd rather play a round of golf with Josef Mengele than suffer another video installation (if you've seen one desperately naked individual cavorting on a carpet of ball bearings you've seen them all) but it takes all sorts." Josef Mengele (1911 - 1979) was a Nazi German military officer and physician who performed experiments that were condemned as murderously sadistic on prisoners in Auschwitz during World War II. He personally selected over 400,000 prisoners to die in gas chambers in Auschwitz. After the war he escaped Germany and lived covertly abroad until his eventual accidental death in Brazil, which was later confirmed using DNA testing on his remains. One quote attributed to him was "the more we do to you, the less you believe we're doing it".
A John Squire artistic piece from 2006, 'First Impressions Of The Magdeburg Sewage System', could have relation to a former burial site of Adolf Hitler; when Russian forces reached the Chancellory they found his body and an autopsy was performed using dental records to confirm the identification. To avoid potential for the creation of a shrine, the remains of Hitler and Eva Braun were repeatedly moved, then secretly buried by SMERSH (a Soviet Union counterintelligence unit formed in 1943) at their new headquarters in Magdeburg, East Germany. In April 1970, when the facility was about to be turned over to the East German government, the remains were reportedly exhumed from the parade ground in Magdeburg, thoroughly cremated, and the ashes finally dumped unceremoniously into the town's sewage system.
In this Pennie Smith photo description, we learn how she and Squire incorporated a Second World War plane into a photoshoot:
The watch belonged to Kengo Futagawa (59 at the time), who was crossing the Kannon Bridge (1,600 meters from the hypocenter) by bicycle on his way to do fire prevention work. He jumped into the river, terribly burned. He returned home, but died on 22nd August 1945. The above photo was part of a series of photographic work – ‘Hiroshima’ - by Japanese artist Hiromi Tsuchida (1939 - ). 1995 marked the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing and Second Coming was released at the close of 1994. One can be certain that the 'Second Coming watch' is the same as the one pictured above (apart from the change in time - 8.05 and not 8.15) as it has a mark almost joining the '10-minute' and '15-minute' hands. Squire had to amend all the original artworks / photographs on the front cover of Second Coming for fear of being sued by the respective owners of those images:
That explains why some versions of the cover have 8.15 (the 'actual' time) and others have 8.05. On the back of the Second Coming inlay, beside the '3', there is a blurred image of the immediate aftermath of a nuclear explosion (this artwork on the back is a blowup of the bottom right hand corner piece of the front). These are just two examples of incorporation of war imagery into the Stone Roses’ work. Others are to be found. The lyric from the third verse of Ten Storey Love Song - "No breach in the wall that they put there to keep you from me" - is strongly evocative of a period beginning in August '61, Berlin, with the erection of the wall dividing (Communist) East and (Capitalist) West Berlin. Bye Bye Badman was written from the perspective of someone in the frontline in Paris, May '68; this TSLS lyric could be written from the perspective of two lovers separated by the abrupt building of the wall. Many East Germans went to desperate lengths to gain entrance to West Germany while it was still physically possible in the summer of 1961; the most surreal of which caught by the video cameras was the tug-of-war that developed over one lady, with the East German police trying to drag her back through the window of her border tenement, while West Berlin firemen tried to pull her safely to the street below. To cheers from the onlooking crowd below, she eventually reached the Western sector. Others were not so fortunate with dozens soon being shot dead trying to escape. A famous commentary on the fall of the Berlin Wall contains the following sentence (note how close the wording of the lyric is to this):
Ten Storey Love Song was written in 1992 and thus the line was penned three years after the fall of the wall (it fell in November 1989). Thus, while it differs from The Sex Pistols’ Holidays In The Sun and David Bowie’s ”Heroes”, in having been written after the fall of the wall, the line is written from the perspective of the era of the wall's existence.
Squire's lyric highlighted above has strong precedent in "Heroes". Bowie, immersing himself in Cold War Germany, was thought to have been inspired to write "Heroes" by periodically spotting two lovers meeting by the Berlin Wall:
David Bowie, "Heroes" (1977)
Other theories regarding the inspiration for "Heroes" exist however, with the most convincing being that the painting Lovers Between Garden Walls (1916) by Otto Mueller (1874 - 1930) was prominent in Bowie's mind. Mueller was also an inspiration on the "Heroes" cover. The Sex Pistols based the opening song, Holidays In The Sun, of their 'Never Mind The Bollocks..' album, on the Berlin Wall ("I'm looking over the wall. And they're looking at me"), inspired by the band's visit there in March 1977. Remaining on the Cold War theme, on the magnified insert of the Second Coming artwork (far right, centre) is the Cuban national flag (this flag later adorned the front cover of Manic Street Preachers' single, The Masses Against The Classes (2000), a mark of the band's socialist political ideology). The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 was an episode during the Cold War where nuclear war looked imminent between the United States and the Soviet Union. Intermediate-range ballistic missiles placed in Cuba by the Soviet Union had a range of 2,200 miles and these were capable of hitting any location in the U.S. except Alaska and one small corner of the Pacific Northwest.
Hiroshima and the Berlin Wall were mentioned in the space of two lines on The Seahorses’ Sale Of The Century. Like the Second Coming front cover, this song is a journey through 20th century images ("20th century sale starts today").
Hiroshima and the fall of the Berlin Wall symbolically bookended the Cold War; neither were technically the respective first or last acts of the War. The U.S. exploded the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in a test code-named TRINITY on 16th July 1945, but Hiroshima (6th August 1945) can be viewed as the real beginning of the Cold War (it is open to interpretation; some historians cite the beginning of the Cold War as the Yalta conference in February 1945). Equally, the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989 was symbolic of the collapse of the Communist system and thus the end of the Cold War. The fall of the Berlin Wall is perhaps the definitive event of the twentieth century.
A John Squire artistic piece from 2006, 'Oppenheimer', is titled after Robert Oppenheimer, a scientist whose name has become almost synonymous with the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer was scientific director of the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort to develop the first nuclear weapons, at the secret Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico. Oppenheimer lamented the weapon's killing power after it was used to destroy the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (6th August) and Nagasaki (9th August) in 1945.
The My Lai Massacre, referenced on The Seahorses track Sale Of The Century, was a massacre committed by U.S. soldiers on hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians, mostly women and children, on 16th March 1968, in the hamlet of My Lai, during the Vietnam War. It prompted widespread outrage around the world and significantly reduced American support at home for the war in Vietnam.
'Sea.Cav.', the artwork for The Seahorses' You Can Talk To Me, is based on the 1st Cavalry Division Association badge of the US airborne division, formed on 17th July 1944. The division took part in the Vietnam war and feature in the film 'Apocalypse Now'. The Vietnam War was a conflict between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and its allies (National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China) fought against the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) and its allies (United States, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea). Its first casualty fell in 1945 and by its end in 1975, the Vietnam War had claimed between two to four million lives. America kept a watchful eye on the conflict until the Gulf Of Tonkin incident of 1964, when she ceased her advisory role to the South Vietnamese government and upon direct order of President Lyndon B Johnson, moved to targeting military installations such as naval dockyards and military airfields. Her alliance with the south proved to be disastrous and America left the country in 1973; two years later, on April 30, 1975, South Vietnam capitulated.
John has a likeness for military attire (as did many musical figues before him: Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and David Bowie):
* On the subject of Hiroshima, Ian's cover of Bob Marley's Redemption Song contains the following lines, surely a reference to the stopped watch from Hiroshima:
Bob Marley, Redemption Song (1980)
Bibliography:
Isaacs, Jeremy & Downing, Taylor. Cold War (London: Transworld publishers, 1998).
Proud, Alexander E. Rock 'n' roll years 1960 - 2000: the photographers' cut (London: Vision On, 2000).
http://www.lclark.edu/~history/HIROSHIMA
http://www.up-to-date.com/bowie/heroes/
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Paul McAuley
http://www.thisisthedaybreak.co.uk
Email: Paul@thisisthedaybreak.co.uk
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