Breaking Into Heaven

I've been casing your joint for the best years of my life
Like the look of your stuff outta sight
When I'm hungry and when I'm cold
When I'm having it rough or just getting old

Listen up sweet child of mine
Have I got news for you
Nobody leaves this place alive
They'll die here join the queue

Better man the barricades
I'm coming in tonight
Had a line of my dust - yeah - outta sight
When I wander and when I roam
I'll find a soul I can trust I'm coming home*

Listen up sweet child of mine
Have I got news for you
Nobody leaves this place alive
They'll die here join the queue
Sing it

I - I'm gonna break right into heaven
I can't wait anymore

Heaven's gates won't hold me
I'll saw those suckers down
Laughing loud at your locks when they hit the ground
Every icon in every town
Hear this, your number's up, I'm coming round

Listen up sweet child of mine
Have I got news for you
Nobody leaves this place alive
They'll die and join the queue
Sing it

I - I'm, I'm gonna break right into heaven
I can't wait anymore

How many times will I have to tell you
You don't have to wait to die
You can have it all
Any time you want it
Yeah the kingdom's all inside

Lyrics by:
Squire

Music by:
Squire

Written:
1993

Personnel:
John Squire (guitar)
Ian Brown (vocals)
Gary Mounfield (bass)
Alan Wren (drums, backing vocals)
Brown & Wren (recording of running water)

Producer:
Simon Dawson & Paul Schroeder.

Engineer:
Simon Dawson & Paul Schroeder. Intro recorded by John Leckie.

Available on:
Second Coming (11.21)
The Very Best Of The Stone Roses (7.01)
Crimson Tonight Live EP: Daybreak (8:38) / Breaking Into Heaven (7:03) / Driving South (4:50) / Tightrope (4:39) (September 1995, Geffen, catalogue number of Japanese release: MVCG-13029)

First live performance:
Oslo Rockefeller Music Hall (19 April 1995)

Details:

The gate is straight
Deep and wide
Break on through to the other side
Break on through to the other side

The Doors, Break On Through (1967)

No one here gets out alive, now
You get yours, baby
Ill get mine
Gonna make it, baby
If we try

The Doors, Five to One (1968)

The Stone Roses eventually wrangled themselves out of their contract with Silvertone and signed with Geffen Records. In late 1994, a whole five years after their debut, the band released their follow-up album, Second Coming. Mostly written by John Squire, the music now had a dark, heavy blues rock sound primarily inspired by Led Zeppelin. Overall the album was considered to have fallen well short of the standard set by their iconic debut. Second Coming, though seen as a let-down by much of the music press at the time, was not a failure by any means. During their absence, The Stone Roses had left a huge gap in the music scene and they returned to find a new wave of soundalike bands had taken their place. The Britpop scene had arrived and the Roses, along with The Smiths, The Jam, The Kinks and The Beatles, were hailed as founding fathers. The Roses were generally positive about Oasis but held most of the scene in contempt, John Squire labelling them "Kensington art-wankers". After a creative hiatus, it was imperative that the opening track of a 'comeback album' was an unwavering statement of intent to those budding contemporaries. Several challengers for their crown had emerged during those five years; The Stone Roses were back in the ring.

On the opening track of her 'Hounds Of Love' LP, 'Running up that Hill (A Deal With God)', Kate Bush wrote of using God as a medium in order to swap places with a male lover ("I'd make a deal with God and I'd get him to swap our places"), so as to understand the other's plight, but also to reach Heaven on some level, judging from the accompanying video. The subject matter of a return to the music scene has to be significant; even the original title of the song, 'A Deal With God', sparked controversy in its inclusion of the word 'God' in the title (which would have meant radio stations in the U.S. and other countries refusing to play it), with Kate relenting to record company pressure and changing the title to 'Running Up That Hill', something which she later regretted doing. Breaking Into Heaven is more assertive in its intent. Squire's lyric does not say "If only I could" - it has an air of "I will". No mention of God is made in the title or lyrics by Squire. Additional to the above problem associated with its usage, this is because the song does not use God as a medium to reach Heaven, but instead tries to usurp His power. That no mention is made of His title is illustrative of a lack of respect for His authority on the part of the author. If the album progresses thematically between Breaking Into Heaven and Driving South, (the beginning of Second Coming follows on thematically from the end of TSR, with ascension into Heaven following Resurrection) we know that following Breaking Into Heaven, Squire's character is still in possession of his soul, intimating that he won the battle in Breaking Into Heaven.

The idea for the opening may have been influenced by Can's 'Future Days', the first track of the 1973 album 'Future Days'. The intro of BIH incorporates many sounds: what sound like Giant Otters, who live in the Amazon River, at 1.56; jungle noises; tribal drumming; a recording of running water taken by Ian and Reni from a river near the studio. Producer Simon Dawson said that they wanted the intro to sound like a boat trip along the Amazon River. The drum-beat intro could be influenced by the 1992 film 'Baraka' (listen to the rhythm groove on the menu page of the DVD of Baraka), directed by Ron Fricke. Ian Brown has been quoted as saying that 'Koyaanisqatsi' (1983), on which Fricke was cinematographer, was a favourite film of his; Baraka was the first full length film directed by Fricke. The intro would make a fine soundtrack to the end of the 1972 Werner Herzog film, 'Aguirre, the Wrath of God'. The megalomaniac, Lope de Aguirre, leads a group of conquistadores down the Amazon River, in search of a lost city of gold (El Dorado). The characters become more and more mentally unstable, the deeper they go in to the jungle. The first four and a half minutes of the song sets the scene for the battle between God and His challenger. The end to the intro portrays the journey reaching a climactic, unavoidable end, with the repetitive noise creating, in my mind, the image of a waterfall. The rhythm section then kicks in 'properly', the highlight of which is a funky bassline from Mani.** Ian's hushed, threatening vocal signals the beginning of a battle which will take seven minutes to decide. The flashes of guitar we hear in the intro can be interpreted as the challenger warming up for the contest, the back to back guitar solos its crucial stages. This gargantuan song is often criticised for being too narcissistic on John's part, but for me it is exactly this that elevates it.

There is a tangible Faustian theme to the song, of man always reaching for more than he has or can get (an original lyric in the song contained a literal impossibility - "I'm gonna leave this life alive. I'll die here join the queue" - before being changed to "Nobody leaves this place alive. They'll die here join the queue". The first of those two is from the Christmas 1993 Schroeder mix that I possess of the song and thus the lyric must have been changed during 1994. If you listen carefully 1.24 - 1.42, where a tape player playing a snippet of BIH is being swung in front of a mic (incorporated into the intro , to give you a taste of what is to come), you can hear that it's the earlier mix of the song being played, i.e., "I'm gonna leave this life alive..."). The song documents the explicit intentions of someone with extraordinary Herculean strength (or at least with the strong belief that they possess it – somewhat drug induced if the cocaine referencing line "Had a line of my dust - yeah - outta sight" is relevant). The message of the final verse appears to be influenced by the message of Jesus in Luke's Gospel, 'The Coming of the Kingdom of God':

Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, "The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, 'Here it is,' or 'There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within you."
(Luke 17: 20 - 21)

The Gnostic text, the Gospel of Thomas, also contains this message, a message that is moulded into one of existentialism by Squire (In a Melody Maker piece from 1989, the Roses list 'The Fall' and 'A Happy Death' by Albert Camus among their reading material. See also Made Of Stone):

(3) Jesus said, "If those who lead you say to you, 'See, the kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty."

A wide array of influences are drawn upon on this track. The usage of wah wah is very Hendrix, and so too are the backward slurps at 6.50 - 6.54 ('Are You Experienced ?, 0.06 - 0.13). A section resembles part of Pink Floyd's atmospheric opening album number, 'One Of These Days' from 'Meddle' (1971). Compare the voice at 1.07 - 1.21 of Breaking Into Heaven to 3.14 - 3.19 of 'One Of These Days'. There are allusions, both lyrical ("Listen up sweet child of mine" / 'Sweet Child O' Mine') and musical (the 'jungle' opening to Second Coming / album opener 'Welcome to the Jungle') to Guns N' Roses' debut album on Geffen, 'Appetite for Destruction'.***

Welcome to the jungle, we got fun 'n' games
We got everything you want, honey, we know the names
We are the people that can find whatever you may need
If you got the money, honey, we got your disease

Guns N' Roses, Welcome to the Jungle (1987)

Breaking Into Heaven is the longest Roses track, running over a minute longer than the previous longest - Fools Gold (9.53). The impressive feature is that it does not lose impetus at any point; instead it keeps building layer upon layer to dramatic effect. Live, this was among the Roses' finest tracks, the zenith performance being at Leicester 1995.**** The song merged in from Daybreak with delayed drums, bass and guitar; a plectrum slide down the top string of the guitar was the introduction to Ian's vocals. The link between the live performance of Daybreak and Breaking Into Heaven borrows from the first half minute of Led Zeppelin's 'Dazed And Confused' (from 'Led Zeppelin I').

Breaking Into Heaven's influence is strongly evident on the intro of U2's 'All Because Of You', from their 2004 album, 'How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb'. Oasis' 'D'You Know What I Mean ?', the opening track of their 'Be Here Now' album (August 1997), owes much to Breaking Into Heaven, lyrically and musically.

I met my maker, I made him cry
And on my shoulder he asked me why
His people won't fly through the storm
I said listen up man, they don't even know you're born

Oasis, D'You Know What I Mean ? (1997)

(l-r) Future Days by Can.
How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb by U2.
Be Here Now by Oasis. 'D'You Know What I Mean?', a fine opener to a bloated, overblown album, owes much to the Roses' Breaking Into Heaven. This LP, like Second Coming, was Oasis' 'cocaine LP' and suffered greatly from over-indulgence on the part of its author. Be Here Now is viewed by many as the beginning of the end for the Britpop movement, while some cultural observers regard the release of Radiohead's 'OK Computer' as the death-knell for Britpop. This, of course, is all open to interpretation; one critic notably wrote that 'Britpop died when Gareth Southgate missed his penalty in the Euro '96 football tournament in the summer of 1996', given the sport and Britpop's simultaneous appealed to many onlookers. At this tournament, the English team ran out to the strains of 'Football's coming home', a chorus penned by the Lightning Seeds. Oasis would continue to ply their trade in loud, uncomplicated rock 'n' roll, while rivals Blur (and so too Pulp) were to take a turn into darker, leftfield music.

"There's a line there where I sing 'I'll find a soul I can trust' where he (Squire) wrote 'I can't find a soul I can trust', so I changed all his negatives to positives. I wrote the chorus to Good Times, changing his negatives to positives, but I never claimed a credit for that. We just put Squire in the brackets because I don't want Brown / Squire if I've only done one sentence or if I've only done the odd word. So any of his lyrics I couldn't sing - I just changed his negatives into positives."

"I wish we'd taken him on, but at the time we were like, 'No, we hate Guns N' Roses, fuck off ! Is he going to bring his python with him ?' and all that. But now I think it would have been amazing."
(Ian Brown speaking to Uncut magazine, June 2006)

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