Breaking Into Heaven: The Rise And Fall Of The Stone Roses
Mick Middles
OMNIBUS PB £9.99
There has been so much folderol about The Stone Roses in recent years that you might have thought that there is nothing more to say about them. Mick Middles does his best over nearly 250 pages but the story is all too simple: the group were the product of a moment, and once that moment had passed, so had they. It was fun while it lasted, but it didn't last long.
The Stone Roses' legacy has become so degraded - with the separate embarrassments of The Seahorses and Ian Brown - that it's easy to forget how fresh The Stone Roses and its assorted 45s sounded during 1989 and early 1990. Captured by John Leckie at their peak, the group matched often caustic, class-driven lyrics with sweet melodies and - that white rock rarity - a supple rhythm section. Fools Gold was the crossover moment but there were other, quieter achievements: the backwards sequence that went from Full Fathom Five to Don't Stop, the proud North-western perspective of Mersey Paradise.
Full of light and immanence, The Stone Roses articulated the aspirations of a new pop generation - mental and physical freedom - but were completely incapable of dealing with the attention when it came: at their pre-Spike Island press conference, they revealed themselves to be - as Middles quotes - "four dull lads". Spike Island itself was a polluted spectacle. Under duress, the Roses retreated and thus lost the audience connection: the subsequent years are a depressing story of trad rock excesses and expensive legal activity.
A decade after their breakthrough, the baggy-era groups have become today's rock establishment - all of them, from Happy Mondays through Primal Scream and sundry Roses spin-offs, endlessly trying to recapture that turn-of-the-decade inspiration. Well, I'm sorry, but they're just as bad as all the hippy leftovers I hated in 1975, and the punk leftovers that the Roses generation quite rightly hated in 1985. Middles' tale contains little critical distance and is best taken as another in the author's prodigious sequence of books on the city of Manchester.
Jon Savage
Back To Media 1999