Bye Bye Badman



Soak me to my skin
Will you drown me in your sea
Submission ends and I begin
Choke me smoke the air
In this citrus sucking sunshine I don't care
You're not all there

Every backbone and heart you break
Will still come back for more
Submission ends in hope

Here he come
Got no question got no love
I'm throwing stones at you man
I want you black and blue and
I'm gonna make you bleed
Gonna bring you down to your knees
Bye bye badman
Bye bye

Choke me smoke the air
In this citrus sucking sunshine I don't
Care you're not all there

You've been bought and paid
You're a whore and a slave
Your dock's not a holy shrine
Come taste the end you're mine*

Here he come
Got no question got no love
I'm throwing stones at you man
I want you black and blue then
I'm gonna make you bleed
Gonna bring you down to your knees
Bye bye badman ooh bye bye

I've got bad intention
I intend to
Knock you down
These stones I throw
Oh these French kisses
Are the only way I've found

I've got bad intention
I intend to knock you down
These stones I throw
Oh these French kisses
Are the only way I've found


Lyrics by:
Squire / Brown

Music by:
Squire / Brown

Written:
1988

Personnel:
John Squire (guitar)
Ian Brown (vocals)
Gary Mounfield (bass)
Alan Wren (drums)

Producer:
John Leckie

Engineer:
Paul Schroeder

Available on:
The Stone Roses (4.00)
The Stone Roses (10th Anniversary Edition) (4.03)

First live performance:
Never performed live

Details:

In spring 1988, Channel 4 screened a series of documentaries marking the 20th anniversary of Les Evenements De Mai, the Paris riots and subsequent strikes that all but paralysed France in 1968. John Squire and Ian Brown were inspired by one of the programmes, entitled 'Revolution Revisited' and hosted by one-time student insurrectionary and French MEP Daniel Cohn-Bendit, to write Bye Bye Badman. A radical young leader in the Paris revolt, Bendit's provocative ideas and proclamations struck a chord with the youth. He was denounced by the conservative press as a "Jew, a German, and an undesirable." People were stunned by the apparent anti-Semitism of the attacks upon him, and the immediate artistic response was a poster proclaiming, "We Are All Undesirables !". Soon, millions were chanting the poster's slogan in the streets. Ian's interest in this period of history had been sparked before the airing of this programme, however. Earlier in the decade, while hitchhiking around Europe with his girlfriend, he learned about the riots from a meeting with a French man who had participated in them. Bye Bye Badman (the title can be interpreted as the rioters' feeling towards President Charles de Gaulle) is written from the perspective of the students of the May 1968 Paris riots ("I'm throwing stones at you man"), who realised that sucking on lemons negated the effects of the police CS Gas. Ian threw lemons into the crowd at Blackpool in August 1989, while saying "Suck 'em; your eyes don't water from CS gas, it's true !" Lemons and the French tricolour are to be found on the front cover artwork of The Stone Roses' debut, entitled 'Bye Bye Badman'. The lemons are not part of the picture but are in fact real lemons, nailed on because it was photographed on the wall - the photographer didn't have a rostrum camera.

In May 1968, France witnessed a series of protests and a general strike that contributed to the eventual collapse of the De Gaulle government in France. The vast majority of the protesters espoused left-wing causes, but the established leftist political institutions and labour unions distanced themselves from the movement. Many saw the events as an opportunity to shake up the 'old society' in many social aspects and traditional morality, focusing especially on the education system and employment. It began as a series of student strikes that broke out at a number of universities and high schools in Paris, following confrontations with university administrators and the police. The de Gaulle administration's attempts to quash those strikes by further police action only inflamed the situation further, leading to street battles with the police in the Latin Quarter, followed by a general strike by students and strikes throughout France by ten million French workers, approximately two-thirds of the French workforce. The protests reached the point that de Gaulle created a military operations headquarters to deal with the unrest, dissolved the National Assembly and called for new parliamentary elections for 23rd June 1968. The government was close to collapse at that point (De Gaulle had even taken temporary refuge at an airforce base in Germany), but the revolutionary situation evaporated almost as quickly as it arose. Workers went back to their jobs, after a series of deceptions carried out by the Confédération Générale du Travail, the leftist union federation, and the Parti Communiste Français (PCF), the French Communist Party. When the elections were finally held in June, the Gaullist party emerged even stronger than before.

On 22 March far-left groups and a small number of prominent poets and musicians, along with 150 students, invaded an administration building at Nanterre University and held a meeting in the university council room dealing with class discrimination in French society and the political bureaucracy that controlled the school's funding. Students called for an overhaul of French society. René Riesel demanded the expulsion of two Stalin supporters from the meeting when they attempted to disrupt a speaker. This led to great unrest and the meeting became increasingly hostile. The school's administration called the police, who surrounded the university. They initially agreed to let students go in groups of 25, first women and then men. When the men began to emerge however, they were arrested. When other students gathered to stop the police vans from taking away the arrested students, the riot police responded by launching tear gas into the crowd. Rather than dispersing the students, the tear gas only brought more students to the scene, where they blocked the exit of the vans. The police finally prevailed, but only after arresting hundreds of students.

Following months of conflicts between students and authorities at the University of Paris at Nanterre, the administration shut down the university on 2nd May 1968. Students at the University of the Sorbonne in Paris met on 3rd May to protest against the closure and the threatened expulsion of several students at Nanterre. On Monday 6th May, the national student union, the UNEF, and the union of university teachers called a march to protest against the police invasion of the Sorbonne. More than 20,000 students, teachers and supporters marched towards the Sorbonne, still sealed off by the police, who charged, wielding their batons, as soon as the marchers approached. While the crowd dispersed, some began to create barricades out of whatever was at hand, while others threw paving stones, forcing the police to retreat for a time. The police then responded with tear gas and charged the crowd again. Hundreds more students were arrested. High school student unions spoke in support of the riots and joined the students, teachers and increasing numbers of young workers who gathered at the Arc de Triomphe to demand that: (1) all criminal charges against arrested students be dropped, (2) the police leave the university, and (3) the authorities reopen Nanterre and the Sorbonne. Negotiations broke down after students returned to their campuses, after a false report that the government had agreed to reopen them, only to discover the police still occupying the schools. The students now had a near revolutionary fervour. On Friday 10th May, another huge crowd congregated on the Rive Gauche. When the riot police again blocked them from crossing the river, the crowd again threw up barricades, which the police then attacked at 2:15 in the morning after negotiations once again floundered. The confrontation, which produced hundreds of arrests and injuries, lasted until dawn of the following day. The events were broadcast on radio as they occurred and the aftermath was shown on television the following day. The government's heavy-handed reaction provoked a wave of sympathy for the strikers and subsequently, many of the nation's more mainstream singers and poets joined the movement. American artists also began voicing support of the strikers. The Parti Communiste Français (PCF) reluctantly supported the students, whom it regarded as adventurists and anarchists, and the major left union federations, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and the Force Ouvrière (CGT-FO) called a one-day general strike and demonstration for Monday 13th May. Over one million people marched through Paris on that day, with police mainly staying out of sight. Prime Minister Georges Pompidou personally announced the release of the prisoners and the reopening of the Sorbonne. The surge of strikes did not, however, recede and in fact, the protesters became even more enraged.

When the Sorbonne reopened, students occupied it and declared it an autonomous "people's university". Approximately 401 popular "action committees" were set up in Paris and elsewhere in the weeks following, to take up grievances against the government and French society. Workers began occupying factories, starting with a sit-down strike at the Sud Aviation plant near the city of Nantes on 14th May, followed by another strike at a Renault parts plant near Rouen, which spread to the Renault manufacturing complexes at Flins in the Seine Valley and the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. By 16th May, workers had occupied roughly fifty factories and by 17th May, 200,000 workers were on strike. That figure snowballed to two million the following day and then ten million (roughly two-thirds of the French workforce) the following week. These strikes were not led by the union movement; on the contrary, the CGT tried to contain this spontaneous outbreak of militancy by channeling it into a struggle for higher wages and other economic demands. Workers put forward a broader, more political and more radical agenda, demanding the ousting of the government and President de Gaulle and attempting, in some cases, to run their factories. When the trade union leadership negotiated a 35% increase in the minimum wage, a 7% wage increase for other workers, and half normal pay for the time on strike with the major employers' associations, the workers occupying their factories refused to return to work and jeered their union leaders, even though this deal was better than what they could have obtained only a month earlier. On 25th and 26th May, the Grenelle agreements were signed at the Ministry of Social Affairs. They provide for an increase of the minimum wages by 25% and of the average salaries by 10%. These offers were rejected and the strike continued. On 27th May, the Union Nationale des Étudiants de France (national Union of the students of France) met. 30,000 to 50,000 people gathered in the Stade Sebastien Charlety. The meeting was extremely militant with speakers demanded the overthrow of government, and elections to be held.

On 30th May, several hundred thousand protesters (400,000 to 500,000, many more than the 50,000 expected by police) led by the CGT marched through Paris, chanting, "Adieu, de Gaulle !" ("Farewell, De Gaulle !"). While the government appeared to be close to collapsing, de Gaulle remained firm, though had to go into hiding. After ensuring that he had sufficient loyal military units mobilized to back him, he went on the radio the following day (the national television service was on strike) to announce the dissolution of the National Assembly, with elections to follow on 23rd June. He ordered workers to return to work, threatening to institute a state of emergency if they did not. From that point, the revolutionary feeling of the students and workers faded away, and workers gradually returned to work or were ousted from their plants by the police. The national student union called off street demonstrations and the government banned a number of leftist organizations. The police retook the Sorbonne on 16th June. De Gaulle triumphed in the legislative elections held in June and the crisis came to an end.

The Notorious Byrd Brothers  Street Fighting Man, released 30th August 1968.

Bye Bye Badman was the Roses' equivalent of the Rolling Stones' 'Street Fighting Man'. Mick Jagger penned this protest song after marching on an anti-war rally at London's U.S. embassy in March 1968, during which mounted police attempted to control a crowd of 25,000. He also found inspiration in the rising violence among student rioters on Paris's Left Bank, the precursor to May 1968. The Beatles' 'Revolution 1' was based on the May 1968 uprising, while the experimental 'Revolution 9' was intended to show the violence of a revolution in progress. Vangelis released an LP, dubbed a poème symphonique, entitled 'Fais Que Ton Rêve Soit Plus Lang Que La Nuit' which was a musique concrète/folk recording collage, reflecting the May 1968 strikes. Vangelis was in Paris at the time recording with Aphrodite's Child. The LP was limited in release to France and Greece and only on vinyl.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, May 1968.  Posters from 1968.  'We Are All Undesirables!', reads the poster on the left.

Students defiantly waving a red flag at the Sorbonne, 3rd May 1968  (l - r) Guy Debord, Michele Bernstein and Asger Jorn (Paris, 1961)

Student demonstration in Paris, May 1968  State Portrait of President de Gaulle

Interestingly, from Chapter 21 - "Masters Without Slaves" - of The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem (1934 - ), a text which Ian Brown drew inspiration from in his solo career, is the following passage, in which the term 'grand seigneur badman' features:

Incidentally, there is a character in John Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress' called Badman, from 'The Life And Death Of Mr Badman'. The Marquis de Sade would feature in a song written soon after Bye Bye Badman, Fool's Gold. The other major figure of the Situationist movement** along with Vaneigem, was Guy Debord (1931 - 1994), whose 1967 work 'The Society of the Spectacle', was a key publication of the Situationist International. This small group were composed of international, political and artistic agitators with roots in Marxism and the early twentieth century European artistic avant garde. Debord's work attempted to provide the SI with a Marxian critical theory; the concept of 'the spectacle' expanded to all society the Marxist concept of reification drawn from the first section of Marx's 'Das Kapital', entitled 'The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof' and developed by Georg Lukács. This was an analysis of the logic of commodities whereby they achieve an ideological autonomy from the process of their production, so that "social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them." (Marx, Capital). Developing this analysis of the logic of the commodity, The Society of the Spectacle generally understood society as divided between the passive subject who consumes the spectacle and the reified spectacle itself. In 1989, he published his 'Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle', putting forward the argument that everything he wrote in 1967 was still true, with one major exception: the society of the spectacle had reached a new form, that of the integrated spectacle. The Situationist movement exerted a strong influence on the punk rock phenomenon of the 1970s, which changed the English cultural landscape during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Punk groups such as The Sex Pistols adopted the style, aesthetics and slogans employed by the Situationists. British artist Jamie Reid's artwork from the height of the punk era drew heavily upon Situationist imagery, while The Sex Pistols lyric, "No Future for you", stems from a radical French 1968 poster featuring the slogan, 'A Youth Disturbed Too Often By The Future'. Reid's artwork, which first drew John Squire towards abstraction, featured letters cut from newspaper headlines in the style of a ransom note and came closer arguably than any other to define the image of punk rock. His best known works from the era include the album cover 'Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols' LPs and the singles artwork for 'God Save The Queen', 'Anarchy in the UK', 'Pretty Vacant' and 'Holidays in the Sun'.

Twelve Inch Vinyl Sleeve of 'Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols' by Jamie Reid (1977)  The cover of the 'God Save the Queen' single, designed by Jamie Reid (1977), using an official Cecil Beaton portrait that he found in the Daily Express. 

Promotional poster (1977) for 'Anarchy in the UK', by Jamie Reid (1977).  Promotional poster (1977) produced for the 'Pretty Vacant' single release, by Jamie Reid.  Jamie explains on his official site: 'The buses were bricollaged from a bogus 'official' travel guide, which was produced by San Francisco-based Situationists (who in turn got it from Suburban Press!)' 

Seven Inch Vinyl Sleeve of 'Holidays in the Sun' (1977), by Jamie Reid.  The 'original' artwork for this was destroyed in front of lawyers representing the Belgian travel company, who had decided to sue over Jamie's artwork.  'I Hate French Cooking' by Jamie Reid (1976).  This Reid work delves much further back into French history, using a cutout of the leading figure from Eugène Delacroix's 1830 painting, 'Liberty Leading the People'.  Go to http://www.pdmcauley.co.uk/LibertyLeadingthePeople.jpg to view this painting.  'A Youth Disturbed Too Often By The Future'.  The eyes of the bandaged figure in the poster are whirlpools of pain and anguish, and a safety pin is symbolically fitted on the mouth. 

1989 was an annus mirabilis in (especially Eastern) Europe, with the downfall of the Communist regime signalling the end of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War brought to a close what historian T. C. W. Blanning perceives as the "short twentieth century" (1914 - 1991), which began with WWI. 1789 - 1914 is viewed as the "long nineteenth century" because the developments of this era overlapped time boundaries of a 'conventional' nineteenth century (1800 - 1900).*** A thread can be woven between the years 1789, 1968 and 1989. 1989 was the 200th anniversary of the Great Revolution of 1789, the inception of the "long nineteenth century". The virtual open warfare in the streets of Paris during the May Days of 1968 shattered the old order in France more than any popular uprising since the events of 1789. Aside from the May Days, the year 1968 witnessed a distinct eruption of protest-related violence worldwide, resulting from varying contentious issues (notably Vietnam). Emboldened by events in Berlin with the fall of the Wall, the Czechs of '89 proceeded to push for reform in the full knowledge that the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was not going to intervene with Soviet tanks in Prague - as had been the case with the Prague Spring of 1968 - given the reform plans he had laid out. In 1968, students in Eastern Europe, drew inspiration from the protests in the West. In Poland and Yugoslavia, students protested against restrictions on free speech by Communist regimes, while in Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring offered a broadening of political rights until it was crushed by the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies. 1989 was a year of looking back to events of 1968 for some, notably Czechoslovakia; on 19th November 1989, the playwright / philosopher Vaclav Havel (1936 - ) formed an umbrella group for opposition groups seeking dialogue with the government. Mass demonstrations became a daily event, with students joining the protests. Havel joined with Alexander Dubcek (1921 - 1992), the hero of The Prague Spring of 1968, to greet the crowds, while posters developed the iconography of '89 as '68 turned upside down. Havel was elected President of Czechoslovakia following the fall of the Communist regime. Squire and Brown, influenced by a documentary on the 1968 Paris riots capture this link between '68 and '89, as the spiral of events developed towards the end of 1989. At the time of the release of the Roses’ debut, in April 1989, a massive demonstration by Chinese students for democratic reform was beginning on Tiananmen Square, which was later brutally repressed, on June 3rd and 4th.

A solitary Tiananmen Square demonstrator defiantly standing before tanks, 5th June 1989

With the advent of CDs, the intended effect of the debut tracklisting is somewhat lost. When viewed in the LP format, we see that the beginning of Side A references the Adoration of the Magi and the end (Track 5, Bye Bye Badman) references the crucifixion of Christ, as I will explain. The debut album is structured along the life of Christ (see I Wanna Be Adored). Jesus dying for the sins of mankind is the central message of the Bible and thus fittingly sits at the centre of the album. The apocalyptic Begging You can be seen as the embodiment of the ‘Second Coming’ and thus - like Bye Bye Badman - takes central position on the album. In interviews, Ian draws parallels between the life of Jesus and 'modern' developments. From Melody Maker - 3rd June 1989:

Brown and Squire incorporate the crucifixion of Jesus into a song about the 1968 student riots in Paris. They are using the situation of the Paris rioters to depict Jesus as a revolutionary, who similarly exposed the faults of the rigid authorities of His time. Bye Bye Badman switches between narration by Jesus and His persecutors (those who perceived Jesus as a threat - Pharisees, Essenes, Zealots and Saducees). With the submission of Jesus to the will of His Father, His everlasting life with God could begin ("Submission ends and I begin"). This submission by Jesus was vital to mankind because He died for our sins ("Submission ends in hope" - Ian vaguely pronounces this line, making it possible that he is singing "Submission ends it all". This would fit the mindset of the Parisian protestors who knew that submission to the authorities would end all that they had strived for and thus it was imperative that they continued their effort. It would also make sense in the case of Jesus - submission to His persecutors ended His life on earth, before He was resurrected). It had long been the intention of Jesus' enemies to stone Him. In 'The Claims of Jesus' (John 8: 48 - 59), they picked up stones to throw at Jesus, but He escaped from the temple grounds. And again in Chapter 10 of John's Gospel:

Note how Jesus used the word 'see', yet the Jews used the word 'taste'. This is relevant upon examination of the verse containing the line "Come taste the end, you're mine". Jesus' persecutors wanted Him to "taste the end" (i.e., die). Jesus was "bought and paid" for by His persecutors via a deal struck with Judas Iscariot, for thirty pieces of silver. Jesus associated Himself with the outcasts of society (leprosy victims, prostitutes) and thus was viewed as a "whore" by His enemies. Jesus Himself was a “slave” to the wishes and needs of His followers (e.g. washing the feet of the Disciples). To the fury of the religious leaders, Jesus preached at the docks and not in the Synagogue. Hence, they thought His dock was not a "holy shrine". At the crucifixion, the soldiers came with the intention of breaking Jesus's legs and thus bringing Him down to his knees in a figurative sense (breaking the legs of Jesus and the two at His side was intended to hasten their death. In the cruciform posture, death results from the weight of the victim's body eventually causing exhaustion and asphyxiation. The only way for Jesus to avoid suffocation was to push Himself up with His feet, to intake air). However, Jesus had already died (He was on the cross for three hours before dying - unexpectedly early for the soldiers - many of those crucified lingered for days before dying):

As we see from this passage, they did succeed in making Him bleed ("I'm gonna make you bleed"). Ian's vocal is a very serious one, conveying the intentions of a figure (French revolutionary) / (persecutor of Jesus) attempting to bring down another (de Gaulle) / (Jesus). A demonstration of 5,000 people gathered in Wenceslaus Square in August 1968, following the invasion of Prague by the Soviet Union. Marching to the National Assembly building, their chants were 'WE WANT THE FULL TRUTH' and 'WE DON'T WANT TO LIVE ON OUR KNEES'. It was the intention of protestors in Paris, Prague and other oppressed areas worldwide in 1968 not to be brought to their knees by authorities. Squire's run on guitar, a fast-paced climax, can be seen as the regenerated efforts of the Parisian protestors; his runs and Reni's beats at the end of each respective run strike me as being the surge of a concerted push from the protestors and a subsequent retreat to safety. A Romantic element enters the song at the end, with Ian's 'French kisses' subverted in the name of the Situationist youth uprising. This narrative jump from the life of Christ to twentieth century events has precedent in Sympathy for the Devil, the opening track of the Rolling Stones' 'Beggar's Banquet' album (on which 'Street Fighting Man', referenced earlier, can also be found) from 1968. On this Stones' track (on which Baudelaire and Mikhail Bulgakov's 'The Master and Margarita' are the dominant influences), the devil's narrative moves between Jesus Christ, Pontius Pilate, the Czar, Anastasia, Blitzkrieg (World War II), the assassinations of the Kennedys and the city of Bombay.

Like Squire, who used symbolism in the form of a lemon on the LP front cover artwork, Faithless used the powerful image of Parisian student riots (in their case, from 1983) for the front cover of their 'Outrospective' album. The Chemical Brothers, a band heavily influenced by The Stone Roses, used poster imagery from the May 1968 Paris riots for their 'Galvanize' single artwork (2005). Manic Street Preachers drew inspiration from the movement, for example using a Situationist slogan - "Destroy Work" - in the DIY design of their clothes. This Situationist slogan is most probably taken from the title of Alfredo M. Bonanno's book 'Let’s Destroy Work, Let’s Destroy the Economy':

Outrospective cover  May 1968 poster  Galvanize (2005)

Manic Street Preachers.  'Destroy Work' is emblazoned on Nicky Wire's shirt.

Bye Bye Badman was never performed live (due most probably to the difficulty in recreating the various guitar parts live with only one guitarist). Squire's guitar in the second half is reminiscent of The Byrds' 'The Notorious Byrd Brothers'. On their debut LP, The Stone Roses masterfully blended the punch of the early Rolling Stones with the melodic foppery of The Byrds. Reviewing the debut LP, the press cited The Byrds perhaps more than any other band, in defining the band's sound. John Squire has fond memories of recording his guitar parts for this track:

* This can be interpreted in two different ways; "Come taste the end, you're mine" could be interpreted as "Comte is the end, you're mine."

Auguste Comte

Auguste Comte (1798 - 1857), the French father of sociology, developed a theory known as Positivism, which brought a strict empirical approach to the study of society; it taught the great end of life to be the struggle to become more perfect, which implies previous imperfection. The nineteenth century was the era of popular science, when writers such as Comte, Darwin and Nietzsche threatened the established position of religion in life.
** Like Bye Bye Badman, the name of Manchester's Haçienda club was also inspired by the Situationist movement. The name of Tony Wilson's club originates from an October 1953 Situationalist manifesto by Ivan Chtcheglov (1934 - ):

*** T. C. W. Blanning, Short Oxford history of Europe: the nineteenth century 1789 - 1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 254 - 275.


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