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 (19th April 1995)

Details:

   

Top: Grunge had been and gone and The Stone Roses now returned to a flourishing Britpop scene. The band had helped lay the foundations for Britpop, but their blues-inflected rock comeback LP sat uncomfortably in a laddish, hedonistic scene. The Stone Roses distanced themselves further from the Britpop scene by criticising many of its leading lights. "I had no interest at all in any of the music of Britpop", Ian recalled, speaking to The Guardian in June 2010; instead, reggae ('Til Shiloh by Buju Banton) and hip hop (Ready to Die by The Notorious B.I.G.) dominated his listening in 1994 / 95. Speaking to Dave Simpson in February 1998, Ian recalls the main influences on himself and Squire in the late 80s: "I was listening to Prince Far I, loads of black music. There was this tune called 'War on the Bullshit' by Osiris, which I used to play all the time, along with The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Hendrix and Love's Forever Changes. John used to buy Mary Chain and Primal Scream records, but we didn't." Upon the release of Second Coming, Ian was heavily critical of bands such as Suede for trying to bring music back to the '70s Glam era. The Stone Roses themselves were in no position to criticize, given that their own 1994 offering was seemingly trying to bring music back to about 1971.
Second row: Ian and Mani in 1993. Much had changed in the five years that The Stone Roses were away.
Bottom: Oasis' June 1994 debut appearance on Top Of The Pops was the moment that The Stone Roses sat up and took notice of their Mancunian counterparts. The Gallaghers had been recording at nearby Monnow Valley, and proudly proclaiming in the music press that they were the Roses' spiritual offspring. "We all watched it," John Squire later recalled to Q magazine in February 2005. "I didn't think the tune [Shakermaker] was that great, but they just looked right. It was like archive footage of a great '60s band you'd never got round to hearing."

The Stone Roses eventually managed to extricate themselves from their Silvertone contract and signed to Geffen Records in May 1991. In December 1994, more than five years after their debut LP, the band released their follow-up LP, Second Coming. Written mostly by John Squire, the music now had a dark, heavy blues rock sound, primarily influenced by Led Zeppelin. Overall, the album was considered to have fallen well short of the standard set by their iconic debut. During their absence, The Stone Roses had left a gap in the British music scene and they returned to find it filled by a new wave of Britpop bands. The Stone Roses, along with The Smiths, The Jam, The Kinks and The Beatles, were hailed as founding fathers of this new scene. The band were generally positive about Oasis, but held most of the scene in contempt; "Oasis are real, not like Blur or any of those other Kensington art school tossers", said Mani to the NME in March 1995. Nevertheless, several challengers for their crown had emerged during those five years and The Stone Roses were now stepping back into the ring. This soaring opener to Second Coming delivers, but the first chink in the Roses' armour is glaringly evident on the following track, the woefully cliched Driving South. The theme of Breaking Into Heaven, the band's longest ever track, is man reaching for more than he can attain. 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 of the song, and thus the lyric must have been changed at some point during 1994. If you listen carefully to 1.24 - 1.42, you can hear a tape player playing a snippet of Breaking Into Heaven being swung in front of a mic, a technique developed by Steve Reich on Pendulum Music (1968). The snippet of Breaking Into Heaven incorporated into the intro - giving the listener a taste of what is to come - is the earlier mix of the song, i.e., that which has the lyric "I'm gonna leave this life alive..." The summative 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':

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 band list 'The Fall' and 'A Happy Death' by Albert Camus among their reading material. See also Made Of Stone):

The lengthy opening has echoes of Can's 'Future Days', the opening track of the 1973 album, 'Future Days'. The introduction of Breaking Into Heaven incorporates many sounds: what sound like Giant Otters, who live in the Amazon River, at 1.56; jungle noises; 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 first five 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 conjuring up the image of a waterfall. Ian's hushed, threatening vocal signals the beginning of a battle which will take seven minutes to decide. The flashes of guitar heard in the intro can be interpreted as the challenger 'warming up' for the contest, and the back to back pyrotechnic guitar solos and swaggering riffs constitute its critical stages.

 

 

Top: John Squire was rather obsessively viewing Francis Ford Coppola's 'Apocalypse Now' circa Second Coming (a Spin article from May 1995 finds the guitarist watching it "for the 15th time"), and its mood pervades the LP.
Second and third rows: In a May 2011 Clash magazine feature, John Leckie reveals that the tribal drumming in the song's intro was recorded from the film, Zulu (1964). This historical war epic depicted the Battle of Rorke's Drift between the British Army and the Zulus in January 1879, during the Anglo-Zulu War. Leckie and the band were congregated around the studio TV on Easter Monday, 1992 in Clwyd, and became engrossed in the Boer War saga. "It was that Sixties war film set in South Africa, with Michael Caine. And we were really getting off on the music," Leckie recalls. "It was the Zulu war dance thing, and we said, 'Hey, we should use that !'" Leckie got to work on recording the tribal drum pattern directly from the TV with a microphone. "That was the drumbeat that comes in and fades up in the introduction. No one has ever said it, but that's exactly what happened. The drums and the atmosphere are an epic thing from an epic film. We'd use anything that inspired us."
Fourth row (left): The Amazon River. The intro of Breaking Into Heaven 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 as they go deeper into the jungle.
Fourth row (right): 'Future Days' (1973) by Can.
Fifth row (left): 'Appetite for Destruction' (1987) by Guns N' Roses. Upon hearing about the new rock direction of The Stone Roses, Geffen executives would have been hopeful of another 'Appetite for Destruction', and Squire duly delivers his own 'Welcome to the Jungle' with Breaing Into Heaven. "Listen up sweet child of mine" alludes to the biggest hit from that LP, and indeed the band's career, 'Sweet Child O' Mine.' Guns N' Roses guitarist, Slash actually offered to play guitar for The Stone Roses through Doug Goldstein, following the departure of John Squire. In June 2006, Brown expressed regret that he had not given the offer more consideration: "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). This epic intro song of Second Coming witnessed The Stone Roses fully shedding the vestiges of their indie roots; they were now - to the dismay of some of their fanbase - in territory that one would associate more with Guns N' Roses or Def Leppard ('Gods Of War').
Fifth row (right): 'How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb' by U2.
Bottom: 'D'You Know What I Mean ?', the opening track of the woefully bloated 'Be Here Now' LP, owes much to Breaking Into Heaven. The Tower of Babel of the Britpop era, this was Oasis' 'cocaine LP' and - to an even stronger degree than Second Coming - suffered greatly from over-indulgence on the part of its author. Tellingly, no tracks from the LP made it on to the band's retrospective compilation, 'Stop the Clocks.' With limitless studio time and money at their disposal, the band piled guitars on top of guitars without a hint of melody or subtlety. This album is viewed by many as the beginning of the end for the Britpop movement, although this, of course, is 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 appeal to many onlookers. 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.

A wide array of influences on this track are discernible, such as the voice at 1.07 - 1.21 (Pink Floyd, 'One Of These Days'), and the backward slurps at 6.50 - 6.54 (The Jimi Hendrix Experience, 'Are You Experienced ?). Live, this was among the Roses' finest tracks, the zenith performance being at Leicester in December 1995. The song merged in from Daybreak with delayed drums, bass and guitar; a plectrum slide down the top string of the guitar signalled the introduction to Ian's vocals. The segue between the live performance of Daybreak and Breaking Into Heaven borrows from the first thrirty seconds of Led Zeppelin's 'Dazed And Confused' (from 'Led Zeppelin I'). 'D'You Know What I Mean ?', the opening track of Oasis' 'Be Here Now' album (August 1997), owes much to Breaking Into Heaven. 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'.

* This is Ian Brown speaking to Kirsten Borchardt in 1998 about the lyrics on Second Coming:


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