THE STONE ROSES
THE ROYAL HALL, BRIDLINGTON SPA
I LIKE The Stone Roses. In the right mood, I like them quite a lot. I've never quite loved them, but that's their fault, not mine.
But the thing I have never, ever done is "believe" in them. Belief ! It's such a f***ed condition in the first place. Oasis, Weller..... This idea that if you take a certain number (four/five) of men (always men), ensure they're sufficiently straightforward (eccentricity ensures immediate disqualification), have them play very, very old-fashioned music (strictly: late-Sixties/early-Seventies rock) with particular slavish attention to detail (none of your cursed innovators !), then the end result is a band you can BELIEVE in.
How in the world did we end up here ? Rather than something honourable, isn't this some kind of betrayal ? Aren't you, in truth, countering basic pop principles, setting up this historical hegemony ? Respect, reverence .. rot I mean, am I alone up here or what ? What the f***'s going on ???
You wouldn't choose to die in Bridlington Spa, although that's what it's there for - a retirement town. All those faded pastels, the pale facades and whitewashed Thirties bungalows they're there to see you off, and they look like it, rich with the muffled tragedy of English death.
You might, however, choose to begin your tour there, if you were the kind of people for whom low-grade perversity is a preference (and has become something of a substitute for actual importance, a way of still feeling special). The Stone Roses in Bridlington is AN EVENT, though, yes, I suspect a man tripping up the library steps in Bridlington is AN EVENT. It's made the local news, and, on the way in from the station, the cab driver wants to know what brings me up from London, and, when I tell him, promises he'll buy The Maker this week "to find out what you've said about Bridlington".
Well, The Royal Hall has the atmosphere of an asteroid and you can't take your plastic glass from the bar into the main hall. Still, The Stone Roses chimp-walk onstage through a weir of blue lasers (Brown in a preposterous "where-did-you-get-that" hat), and the collected non-old people of Bridlington and its surrounding villages go bananas (raisins, coconuts, sultanas). The myth, however fuzzy, holds.
"I Wanna Be Adored" is first, which is fair enough, and it sounds fantastic. But its undoubted, undimmed brilliance (literally Squire's guitar, now more than ever, sounds like a lamplight lashing off a rotating crystal) still makes me faintly bitter; it's a nagging reminder of what the Roses could / can do when, just for a minute or two, they allow themselves to be incorrect. If things had stayed this odd and sonically succulent throughout that first LP, I'd have been up there at the crash barriers tonight. As it is as it was it dissolves into a grimly pedestrian "She Bangs The Drums", and then, unbelievably, "Waterfall".
OK,: they're playing the fist side of the first album, in sequence, at the start of the set, six years down the line, on what is to all extents and purposes a comeback tour. It's like watching The Who opening with "My Generation" or something the word is cowardice, and that's never pretty in pop. From a band so often credited with some kind of "courage", it's faintly bizarre.
Still, the crowd are comfortable, which means it's time to ROCK. Now, The Stone Roses can rock. That's irrefutable. The question is: WHY ? It feels like an admission of defeat: more than once tonight, this feels uncannily like some mid-Seventies stadium show, the indulgence and lassitude included. Has the optimism of '89 collapsed that comprehensively ? Was it that hollow, that insubstantial ?
The problem, meanwhile, is Ian Brown, a vocalist whose supposed "charisma" does nothing to balance the fact that his voice often borders on the truly excruciating (ever heard that Spike Island bootleg ?). And if there's one thing Rock requires, it's a damn good singer. Led Zeppelin, say, worked precisely because of the push-pull sonic quarrel between the peaks and plunges of Page's multi-megaton guitar panoply and Plant's preposterous, pompadoured, pseudo-orgasmic passion and he-man histrionics. As a singer, Brown is nobody's Robert Plant more of an Arthur Mullard and his doped, doleful drone, with its simultaneous sleaziness and wide-eyed innocence, fine inside the glimmering stateliness and wilful ingenuity of the first album, now just sounds a little sour, sore where it should soar.
That same echo-drenched, open-throated approach, set off against Squire's juicy, balletic Brit-blues, might have added some crucial contrast, or at least an intriguing gimmick, to "Second Coming". As it is, deep in the swamp-rock rifferama, Brown drowns. He used to sound at least a little like an angel with a broken wing; nowadays, he's more like an angel with a broken nose. Brown can't sing the blues; when he tries ("Driving South"), dogs put their paws over their ears. When he still sounds a little lost, hurt rather than simply surly, and doesn't have to deal with a tune that challenges his eight-note range (particularly "Breaking Into Heaven" and the quietly fabulous "Love Spreads"), it works, and the Roses, while never attaining Zeppelenic heights, play British blues at least as effectively as, say, Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac.
This is certainly a fine compliment, and I'm sure Squire, for one, would be happy to hear it. But it immediately begs the question: is that it ? Is that really enough for a band who, just six short years back, were supposedly going to Make Everything Alright ? Maybe those expectations were only ever a burden, a weight laid on their skinny shoulders by fans and critics, an absurd and uselessly unspecific promise they never made themselves, but that they were placed in the perilous position of having to live up to (although it did scoop them the Geffen deal, without which they'd , ummm. Not have got to take so many drugs) ? It's impossible to tell, since the band themselves are as you may have noticed hardly big talkers.
Finally, the biggest cheer of the night goes up, and it's not even for a song. It's for the silvery, spiralling, blues riff that leads down into the closing section of "I Am The Resurrection", the 10-minute jam. Maybe the crowd were just relieved to see the back of Brown's voice ? Whatever, 10-minute jams, as it goes, tend to be about as much fun as staring into a 100-watt lightbulb; "Resurrection" is absolutely scintillating, and I catch my breath and I clap and it's weird. More tension and more tingles than you'd ever believe !
Which suggests something strange; if they can make that sound like that, then The Stone Roses' future might not be in pop and pastiche after all. Pushed the right way towards a kind of Funkadelic looseness, a greater promiscuity of style, and way less emphasis on The Song the Roses could create something unique. That they have the ability is not in question; whether they have the imagination / motivation is debatable; that they'd lose the majority of their current fans is. a tricky one.
But, if they choose to cruise on the hopelessly nebulous "belief" of a few thousand cowardly classicists for the remainder of their career, then sooner or later The Stone Roses are going to have to drop that evident conviction that they are, in any way, something special. And, whether they like it or not, The Whole Thing will have been one big f***ing waste of time.
TAYLOR PARKES
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