IN spite of the purely regional success of "Elephant Stone", it had garnered enough praise to earn them gigs at The Hacienda and London's newly opened Powerhaus. The first four months of 1989 saw them slogging round some fairly low-key venues - a gig in Cardiff pulled a mere 12 people. At Hull's Unity Club they played to just 10. I saw them for the first time in February at Middlesex Poly, an impossible-to-find college hall in Tottenham, North London. For a little known band, they had an amazing away following - the fan who stood out the most was a girl in a denim jacket with "The Stone Roses" scrawled on one arm, "The Jimi Hendrix Experience" on the other. As for the group, even in this half empty scout hut, they were obviously stars. "They sound like someone sneaked a tab into your Tizer," I blurted the following week. "They sound like maybe the best thing I ever heard." The Stone Roses tore my head off.
I was convinced I'd seen the future.
A week later, Andrew Collins of NME had this to say of their Hacienda gig:
"The Stones (and there's a clue) comprising four unassuming boy wonders and a Happy Mondays roadie acting as surf-dancing accessory, and playing thoroughly regardless brat-arsed pop, have taken four years off my age. I'm drafting a letter to my grandchildren telling them that I saw The Stone Roses at the Hacienda."
Suddenly, from nowhere, The Stone Roses were on a roll. It had only taken four years. "Made Of Stone" was released as a single in March and, although Ian Gittins unfairly compared it to Spear Of Destiny in Melody Maker, Simon Williams gave it Single Of The Week in NME. "Made Of Stone" was an ode to Ian's hitch hiking days.
"I've always been on the move. When I lived in Sale I never hung about there, I hung about with lads all over the city. I've been to every seaside resort in England and been to most cities before we toured, been to most of Europe. Moving about, it's what I'm into doing."
In retrospect, it lacked the grace and easy funk fluency of much of the Roses' set but that didn't stop it from being a classic pop song, a trad rock gem with a terrace anthem chorus of "Sometimes I fantasise". Some pointed out its proximity to Primal Scream's "Velocity Girl" but "Made Of Stone" was fine enough to outstrip any claims of theft.
"Going Down" on the flip side was a lascivious tale of summer lust set to the cutest of tunes and boasting a chorus line of "Ring a ding ding ding I'm going down" it was a major hit with their girlie fans. "Guernica" on the 12 inch was something else again. Another experiment in backwards sound-warping an A-side, "Guernica" emphasised the melancholy side of "Made Of Stone", its sense of space and its ambience.
"We go to Manchester airport in the summer," Ian Brown told the Maker in March, "and watch the planes land and take off. Your eardrums feel like they're shredding with the volume of the engines. And the fire coming out the back. It's an awesome sight, 30 feet from a plane. We want to get that sound onto record - bits of 'Guernica' sound like planes, but it's just 'Made Of Stone' backwards with forward vocals. I'd love to have done it as an A-side."
The single was a considerable success, breaching the Top 100 and climbing to Number 4 in the indie chart. The buzz on The Stone Roses was getting louder by the day.
At a prestige ICA show in May Everett True was mindblown:
"The whole fucking hype is justified," he drooled. "Oh, sweet Lord. The Stone Roses have arrived." This time no one could deny it.
THE Stone Roses' eponymous LP appeared in May 1989 and aside from a lukewarm review from Jack Barron in NME, it wiped out the opposition. "In guitar pop terms, this is a masterpiece," claimed longtime fan John Robb in Sounds, while Andy Strickland in Record Mirror saw them as "the only young band around at the moment with the potential and the balls to go all the way." Melody Maker said: "The spine of the LP is John Squire's guitar playing. Beautifully flowing, certainly psychedelic, there are elements of Hendirx ('Shoot You Down') and Marr ('Bye Bye Badman'), but the rest is the lad's own work. 'Waterfall' is a showcase switching from acoustic to wah-wah to funk without once sounding clumsy. This is a trip."
"The Stone Roses" was wrapped inside another distinctive Squire sleeve, a green-ish action painting punctuated by pieces of lemon. Ian Brown in the Maker:
"The story behind the lemons on the cover is that when we were in Paris we met this 65 year old man who told us that if you suck a lemon it cancels out the effects of CS gas. He still thought that the government in France could be overthrown one day, he'd been there in '68 and everything. So he always carried a lemon with him so that he could help out at the front. 65 - what a brilliant attitude."
Detractors screamed hype when the reviews were printed, but listening to "The Stone Roses" a year on, with the group at the very top of the tree, it still sounds like a dazzling debut. On a historical level, I would rank it very high indeed.
The summer was to provide the big push from "underground Manchester band" to Top Of The Pops with the immaculate "She Bangs The Drums" lifted from the LP as a single in July and a prestige one-off celebration at Blackpool's Empress Ballroom in August.
"She Bangs The Drums" was supposedly remixed, but effectively only the cymbal intro was trimmed and a few of Reni's harmonies added. It was a song in love with itself, amazed at its own greatness: "I can feel the earth begin to move / I hear my needle hit the groove / And spiral through another day / I hear my song begin to say / Kiss me where the sun don't shine / The past was yours but the future's mine". If such staggering arrogance was tempting an almighty backlash it didn't come yet - "She Bangs The Drums" was Single Of The Week in three weeklies with Sounds adding "Let's call them The Stones - no one will get confused."
The 12 inch provided a value for money bonus for fans with two unreleased live favourites added. "Mersey Paradise" was sparkling pop a la "Sally Cinnamon" with a hook of "River cools where I belong" confusing many who thought Ian Brown was singing "Liverpool's where I belong". "Standing Here" was better still, a loping guitarfest that leant heavily on Jimi Hendrix's "Foxy Lady" and featured another classic Brown hook in "I really don't think you know that I'm in heaven when you smile" and tailed off into a sumptuous, aquatic coda.
The single charted at 36 but dropped out the following week and this disappointed the group: they'd expected at least a Top 10 hit. "I don't think anything's impossible," Ian Brown told Mat Smith at the time. "Things change all the time. Positive thinking brings good results. I've thought that all my life. You're born on this planet and you can either think positively or negatively. Why think negatively? I believe I'll live for 125 years. Therefore I've got a better chance of living for 125 years than if I don't believe it."
The 6,000 capacity Empress Ballroom was a breeze. As a thankyou to the fans who had followed them this far, and a show of strength that they could handle a large venue, it was faultless. Melody Maker had this to say of it:
"For most people here this has been the event on the summer calendar and it's been organised as such, set in the tinsel heart of the tackiest summer resort in the country. The atmosphere is raw E. The Salem witch trials were nothing on this. The Stone Roses appear and their appeal is instant and obvious; simultaneously they look like anyone and they look untouchable, four blokes in the Stretford End and four teenage Jesus Christs."
THE pop/House crossover, the Acid connection was a bone of contention with unbelievers in that long, hot summer. Detractors claimed, and quite rightly, that The Stone Roses did not play "Acid House" music. The reason that they were crossing over, though, lay not so much in the music as in the attitude.
"For me it's been right through the Jackson 5, Motown, Northern Soul, then discovering Parliament and Bootsy Collins," Ian Brown told Roy Wilkinson of Sounds. "Then discovering Barry White and Acid House and dance records. Over the same period we had The Beatles, the Stones, T. Rex, and the Pistols. When I've heard our songs in the studio, when they've just been bass, drums and one guitar line, I'd say they're as danceable as any House record I've ever danced to. It's just about creating a groove with space around it."
Basically this echoed Andrew McQueen's comments on "Elephant Stone". The trick was to recognise and adapt the pulsebeat of dance music without mimicking it. Ian again:
"We wouldn't say let's write a funk song. We might end up like the Stones, man. Trying to sound black. My favourite records at the moment are reggae and I wouldn't think about making a reggae record. When bands think they can do anything it's shit."
The next Stone Roses single was their boldest move to date. "Fools Gold" was a hypnotic, spacey groove, far removed from the brightly coloured, easily defined shapes of the LP. It loped and shuffled, a real fat groove underpinned by an irresistible bassline. For sure, the Roses weren't aping current dance trends, otherwise they'd have delivered a 120 BPM mock-Italian number. "Fools Gold" at once followed a line from the smokey "Shoot You Down" and the floating tailpiece of "Standing Here", while pre-empting 1990's love of all grooves mellow. After the most hectic dance summer on record, it was the perfect time to calm things down and "Fools Gold" effortlessly flattened boundaries between pop and dance fans. No doubt, it was a masterstroke.
In November the cavernous funk groove of "Fools Gold" entered the chart at 14, peaking a week later at number 8. In a particularly memorable week they made their Top Of The Pops debut along with Manchester's other psych-groove terrorists, Happy Mondays. From this point on, their success was beyond speculation. They had become Smash Hits pin-up regulars and the faithful believed that the world was about to be turned on its head. As walls came a-tumblin' down throughout Eastern Europe, could 1990 signal the downfall of the government in Britain, the end of SAW and Thatcherite pop? Could The Stone Roses walk on water?
The answer came at their biggest happening to date, at the Alexandra Palace in North London. Sold out weeks in advance it was intended as a glorious ending to a remarkable year which had begun in front of 10 people in Hull. In no way was it a disaster but the acoustics at Ally Pally were notoriously poor, the PA was so bad that the guitar was inaudible for the first three songs, and the organisation - particularly at the bar which could barely cope with 800 people, let alone 8,000 - was atrocious.
"They didn't seem to be conquering the logistics of playing a large gig," commented Steve Sutherland, "let alone transcending the sum of their parts. It was OK as far as it went, which wasn't far out enough really."
Ally Pally was a minor setback with the group as disappointed as many of the fans, but it let in a chink of light for old heads who couldn't understand the fuss to have their say. It proved The Stone Roses were human after all.
As a return to form, they made their first live TV appearance on "The Late Show" an event by blowing BBC fuses after 45 seconds of "Made Of Stone", apparently because they were playing too loud. "We're wasting our time lads," shouted Ian Brown as presenter Tracey Macleod attempted to introduce the next item. "Amateurs! Amateurs!" chanted Ian behind her. It was great TV and almost made up for the disappointment of the week before.
CONSIDERING they've yet to release a new record, the Nineties have already been pretty eventful for the Roses. In January they allegedly wrecked the offices of former label FM Revolver, causing £23,000 worth of damage with cans of blue and white paint, after the label had made a tacky video to accompany their re-issue of "Sally Cinnamon" without the group's consent.
Abstract expressionism in full effect, or just plain vandalism?
A few weeks later Silvertone made their first three Roses singles available again which saw the band hogging the Top 40 - "Elephant Stone", which had been fetching £40 in some London shops, entered the chart at number 8, an astonishing feat, while "Made Of Stone" also reached the Top 20.
And there was Spike Island, the 30,000 capacity outdoor event which received mixed reactions but was generally a success. Where on earth do we go from here? asked the "Made Of Paper" fanzine at the beginning of the year. After Spike Island the question seems even more pertinent. Myself, I see them becoming the most successful band in the world, trailblazers for a new generation of groups such as The Charlatans and Inspiral Carpets, and the next generation, Northside and The High and a whole batch that have yet to surface. Pop revolution, nothing less, with the Roses ahead of the pack, always.
How can such a cosmic claim be backed up? Well, their appeal - as with all the great pop icons from Elvis to Prince - is androgynous, their clothes, their music, their looks, they appeal to both sexes equally. This appeal is universal. Happy Mondays, by comparison, are basically a lads' band and could only appeal to girls as dirty sex. Secondly, they cut across pop, dance and rock, the three major musics of today, picking up fans in all sectors with consummate ease. The only enemies they seem to have encountered en route are old heads either too scared or too cynical to come to terms with the new order. The third and least tangible point, they have a magical knack for doing The Right Thing. When they say they're going to be huge in America you believe them, don't doubt them for a minute. Happy Mondays, the only group who could conceivably challenge them, may have the loon reputation but their recent career has been carefully managed, and their rise from Dingwalls to Town & Country Club to Wembley Arena is a flawless computer printout for a successful rock group. Soon they will slog around America believing you have to before you become accepted there. The Stone Roses will turn up, expect adulation, and receive it. It's that untogether and that perfect.
The future is theirs for the taking. Apart from 1989's burst of activity, they've never managed more than one single a year - hardly prolific, I'd guess that they'll release a single every six months, their second LP won't appear until late next year (and it'll include one song at least 10 minutes long), and they'll soon become untouchable. Playing in Britain will become impossible. Eventually they'll explode, but they certainly won't tail off. As Ian Brown once said:
"I think a lot of groups are burnt out but they're scared of returning to where they've come from. I'm not scared to, cos I am where I've come from."
On the eve of "One Love", a solid gold single before it's even in the shops, this booklet signals the end of the beginning. Now they go supernova. For The Stone Roses, the fun has only just begun.
SINGLES:
So Young / Tell Me (Thin Line THIN 001) 12 inch only, 1985
Sally Cinnamon / Here It Comes / All Across The Sand (FM Revolver 12 REV 36) 12 inch only, 1987
Elephant Stone / The Hardest Thing In The World (Silvertone ORE 1) 7 inch, 1988 (12 inch included Elephant Stone (long version) and Full Fathom Five)
Made Of Stone / Going Down (Silvertone ORE 2) 7 inch, 1989 (12 inch included Guernica)
She Bangs The Drums / Standing Here (Silvertone ORE 6) 7 inch, 1989 (12 inch included Mersey Paradise)
Fools Gold / What The World Is Waiting For (Silvertone ORE 13) 7 and 12 inch, 1989
ALBUMS:
THE STONE ROSES (Silvertone ORE LP 502) 1989
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