As in ex-colleagues of a departed drummer. Ex-snorters of the old "nose ningle". Ex-men of leisure who finally made their second album and strolled back to the live stage after a five-year absence. Yes, it's The Stone Roses. "We've got the X Factor," they tell John Harris.
This, in the words of one of Manchester's more noteworthy sages, must be the coastal town they forgot to close down: a pinched, greying place, where the cafes serve an endless array of crushingly English cuisine, the streets have no people - during most waking hours anyway - and the hotels are unacquainted with the free-thinking ways of the musical touring parties who occasionally pass through their peeling portals.
This month's example is particularly notable, for visiting the far-flung town of Bridlington (population 30,000) are a troupe and entourage who many thought would never engage in such manoeuvres again. They walk with the kind of flamboyant self-assurance that may well be the sole preserve of the Mancunian male. They occasionally ooze an empathy that is utterly impenetrable. Most noticeably, they carry themselves with an ease that belies the gravity of tonight's ever-so-slightly epochal occasion.
On this rain-lashed Yorkshire Tuesday, so charged with expectation that the local burghers have seen fit to employ a sprinkling of mounted police, The Stone Roses are booked to make their British return to what masters of the rock vernacular term "the live stage", after a much documented five-year absence. That they have come back at all is remarkable enough; that they have done so after a year peppered with illness, accident and the loss of a founder member is surely the stuff of true drama.
Cue gravely, Orson Welles-esque voice: "Their enemies thought they'd been vanquished, they'd gone through enough to kill them, and yet these desperadoes knew they must return…"
One more rather filmic factoid confirms tonight's fairytale aura: despite the five-year disappearance, regardless of the odd outbreak of serious critical hostility and irrespective of their integral association with a far flung cultural upsurge, the Roses' audience seemingly remains as loyal as ever.
"We always knew people were still there," says bassist Gary "Mani" Mounfield, a man whose accent was once described in these pages as chewy. "Just from walking down the street, meeting them… people were saying, We're still with you, we want you to do it, great second album, do some shows for us. People aren't as impatient as you think. If they like you they'll stay with you forever.
"The thing is," he continues, launching another one of his trademark statements of striking confidence, "We've always felt unstoppable, ever since we were playing those first gigs in Manchester. You can't help it. It's just… we've got each other, and we won't be stopped. No matter what anyone writes or says, it doesn't matter. We've got the X Factor."
He's right of course. Ever since the mid-to-late '80's when The Stone Roses' career curve slowly took an upward turn, they have positively dripped with the stuff of archetypal rock legend. The haircuts ! The clothes ! The confidence ! The songs ! All of which eventually conspired to alchemise that largely unfathomable quality that confirms the difference between kings and mere princes. By the time the first phase of their career drew to its vexed conclusion (more of which later), onlookers were still quite rationally whispering phrases like "New Beatles".
In a rather laboured nutshell, the story unfolded as follows: band appear wearing leather trousers and making inauspicious indie rock but slowly find feet with exhilarating variety of melodic, '60s-tinged guitar-pop; rapidly prove to have a fine grasp of music that is brilliantly anthemic without being bombastic; release debut album that is eventually hailed as generational touchstone; reveal expertise at fusing rock with "the funk" and thereby embody zeitgeist-grabbing "baggy" cult; climax career playing to 30,000 disciples at Spike Island, Widnes - an event described as "the Woodstock Of A Generation".
Unfortunately no sooner had the Roses ascended to their lofty career peak than they felt the entirely justified need to extricate themselves from their rather feudal contract with the Silvertone label. So labyrinthine was this task that it halted their progress for nigh-on a year - whereupon, having signed to Geffen for an astronomical sum and ditched their first manager Gareth Evans, they disappeared to craft the second album that would, it was said, spearhead a global campaign whose success had an almost cosmic inevitability.
For one reason and another, and much to the chagrin of their evangelical following, this task took them longer than expected. What with child-rearing, home-building, and a reduction in momentum whose reasons are still the subject of fevered gossip, The Stone Roses waited over four years to release a wittily-titled album called Second Coming - and them embarked upon comeback duties that, in Britain at least, were marked by a welter of mishap.
But first, Love Spreads, the tasty single that fair throbbed with doomy, Zep-esque majesty, charted at Number 2. The album, unleashed in December 1994, quickly went platinum. The first chapter of their press campaign found them refusing to talk to anyone but homeless-helping street-zine The Big Issue, only heightening their reputation for being high-minded outlaws. They seemed, in all honesty, to be endowed with most of the qualities that had made them so special in the first place.
Second Coming, meanwhile, was proving to be the subject of frantic saloon bar debate. As the critical fraternity staggered home for Christmas, the final verdict was still clouded in doubt: many people lamented the deficit in the steely rallying calls (cf She Bangs The Drums, I Am The Resurrection) that had been the first album's mainstay, and rued the band's apparent detour into pastures that were characterised by a new, strikingly trad love of, "ver blues". Others (probably more now; the album, predictably, proved to be a "grower"), celebrated a record whose lyrical breadth - from black female messiahs to nightmarish revenge fantasies, via tear-stained declarations of life-long commitment - and goggle-eyed eclecticism spoke volumes about its authors' maturity.
Whatever, come the New Year, the Roses' existence slowly began to assume the figurative characteristics of a pear. In February, a hushed-up plan to crash-land in British club venues was abandoned after the music papers sniffed out the story. Soon after, guitarist and band chief John Squire fell victim to pneumonia. Not long after that, drummer Alan "Reni" Wren scooted out of the band, for reasons (finance ? apathy ? his rumoured "mystery illness" ?) that were worryingly unclear. Finally, having recruited new homme de batterie Robbie Maddix, and visited Europe and America, they cancelled their splashdown appearance at last year's Glastonbury Festival after Squire tumbled from his mountain bike in San Francisco.
"Bastards !" said some. "Boundahs !" cried others. "Hapless victims of some unmentionable Northern curse !" surmised more cosmic onlookers. Unperturbed, the Roses waited for Squire to recover, hopped off to Australasia (after playing one secret show at a quiet, rural wing-ding, organised by "Mr Glastonbury" Michael Eavis, as apology for their earlier cancellation), then announced their official return to Britain's auditoria.
And here most of them are, breaking off from a striking soundcheck to perch in a backstage enclosure, and have a quick "natter": Mani, Ian Brown, Maddix, and understandably quiet silent new boy, keyboard-stroker, Nigel Ipinson. John Squire is elsewhere.
They are, without doubt, a rum bunch. Mani is an expert in making even the most apparently disastrous episode sound like either the product of deliberate contrivance, or so much harmless existential buckshot. Maddix and Ipinson tend to keep themselves to themselves. Brown, a man whose behavioural patterns are renowned for being rather quixotic, spends most of the time blowing bluesy currents of air into a mouth organ, and making the odd hostile interjection about your Q correspondent's review of Second Coming.
"We weren't letting anybody down," says Mani of their era-long absence, their delay in returning to the British stage and their arguably fan-neglecting nature. "Why's it letting people down ? You'd be letting them down if you did a crappy LP every year and they could see you every Wednesday at the Brixton Academy."
"The idea of people being into bands so much that they grieve for them if they disappear is a myth," muses Maddix. "Do you think," drawls Brown, launching one of his shut-up-you-journo-fool summations, "that people were just sitting there ? Not eating ? Holding their breath ?"
According to people whose thoughts occasionally stray into the realms of conspiracy, the time away was surrounded by the beguiling scent of premeditated intention. The Roses, always characterised by their fondness for the odd "blag", were supposedly relishing the chance to experience the life of moneyed men of leisure…
"No way," spits Mani. "It wasn't an enjoyable experience. I'd much prefer to have kept moving. But there were things going on in everyone's lives. People had a bit of living to do."
However ill-grounded, the notion of a masterplan, up until last year's splurge of near-chaos, had always attached itself to the Roses' activities. Ditched manager Evans was frequently cracked up to be a McLaren-esque schemer, and irrespective of the contribution the band now considers he made, he shared the bands initial disdain for the rock manual - hence their insistence, at the peak of their first wind, on one-off "events", that accelerated their rapid ascent. At each stage, it wasn't unreasonable to assume that The Stone Roses knew precisely what they were doing.
"All you are saying," retorts Mani, "is that we've always wanted to do everything on our own terms. A lot of people call us arrogant for it, but that's how we work. There's only ourselves to answer to, and if it goes wrong, there's only ourselves to blame. Geffen might not like it sometimes, but that's how it is. We won't trust anyone else with how we look or sound or what we do."
This has its drawbacks, of course: like the allegedly gargantuan debt that ties The Stone Roses to their American paymasters.
"We owe 'em two million pounds," says Ian, apparently on the wind-up (upon fact-checking, this proves to be the case).
Mani: "We probably do owe 'em 2 million pounds. But they've got fuckin' billions. It's summat they'd drop behind the couch."
And so the conversation eddies on, as each point is parried with official spokesman-type precision. The subjectular torrent flows through the Roses new-found metabolic cleanliness (Mani: "I was playing Russian Roulette with my head. I was on top of it, but you never know what might happen"), the departure of Reni (Ian: "We knew he was going to leave, 'cos he said so. All the time"), their apparent propensity for accident ("Shit happens. People do fall off bikes") and a final statement of short-term plan that initially oozes graftcentric determination, only to address a rather wretched and hopefully unlikely eventuality.
"More work," says Mani, describing their immediate itinerary, "and more work. And even more work. We've got a good few songs, everyone's writing a bit… we'll probably record next year. Maybe. We might have another four years off."
A smile garnishes the last sentence, only for Maddix to seize the baton with a completely straight face and go running off with it.
"Who knows what we'll do ? We can say, We hope to go in and start recording by January 1, get it finished by February 18, go out on the road, tour for the next 18 months. That'd be beautiful - but Geffen might say, This album's shit. We might think it's the best thing we've ever heard, and then we'll have a problem… anything could happen."
The inevitable doubt spread by such ruminations vanishes into the ether come showtime. Greeted by a deluge of frenzied affection, The Stone Roses stride through a set that is, frankly, divine. Brown's voice, so long the favourite target of abusive reviewers ("Like a man shouting into a bucket" was one glowing judgement) frequently succeeds in sounding surprisingly commanding. The presence of keyboards fattens up the sound to a beautiful degree. And the over-arching, free-flowing contribution of John Squire propels everything towards virtuosic excellence. Naturally, all the statements of stout-chested self-belief are soon borne out beyond question.
The audience - many of them participants in nation-spanning coach pilgrimages - behave with a fervour that verges on the frightening. By the end, all is sweat and broad smiles - and phrases like "The Greatest Band Of The Last 10 Years" seem more like honest judgements than rash outbursts. Hats off.
When enquiring into the nature of the Roses' brilliance, all reasonable roads lead to the tousled head of John Squire. An easily worshippable guitar hero in the classic mould, he's a far more reserved creature than the others, oozing a quiet calm that brings a zen-like smile to his face at frequent intervals. Famed for his reticence, he speaks in whispered sentences that can, thankfully, build into enticingly informative paragraphs. Moreover, his conversational tack is less hyperbolic than that of his colleagues, more likely to take him towards open statements of doubt, regret and self-deprecation.
Born in Broadheath, South Manchester ("next to a tip"), he soon moved to the more fragrant climes of Cheshire-nudging Timperley. His father worked at the vast GEC factory in nearby Trafford Park, his mother remained at home - and at the age of 14 he heard the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen, which sent his attentions flying towards the windows of guitar shops.
Having resolved to master his chosen means of expression, Squire cajoled his long-time compadre Ian Brown (they met, according to legend, "in the sandpit") into joining him in the group that eventually became the four-piece Stone Roses. Up until Second Coming, the two of them shared song-writing royalties - but owing to a sudden spurt of creativity and parallel drying-up on Brown's part, Squire took 90 per cent of the album's credits. Thus, his position as King Rose is beyond doubt.
The conversation begins with One Love, the 1990 single that, unbeknownst to the group, would mark their passage into inactive limbo. At the time, what was meant to happen next ?
"I thought we needed to take a bit of time out," Squire recalls. "I thought we'd rushed into that song. We didn't like the chorus, we were hacking it over that same drum beat… it wasn't what we should have been delivering. And I was getting sick of the whole 'Madchester' thing. I felt like we were flogging something for somebody, but I didn't know what it was or who they were. A lifestyle, I suppose. An attitude."
A lay-off was conveniently enforced by the Silvertone case: the source, according to Squire, of dark days indeed. The deal they'd signed was abominable - no royalties on CD sales, a clause binding them to the label for "the world and the solar system" until nine months after the American release of their latest album, with no obligation for Silvertone to enter the US market, meaning they could be in bondage forever.
"We weren't extremely confident of winning, but we were determined to do or die. If we'd never been released from that contract, we wouldn't have worked for them again, so we were discussing plans to only release bootlegs, to just tour… The deal was a joke. It also highlighted how badly we'd been managed, 'cos we were allowed to sign it. Gareth's lawyer was a mortgage specialist from Sale…"
Do you feel any pride about having injured the corporate dragon ?
"Yeah, I do. It's probably a greater contribution to popular music than anything we've ever recorded (laughs)."
The Stone Roses thus crawled slowly towards the second phase of their ascent, making allowances for a sizable holiday and the first stages of recording. The break from public activity, however, was never envisaged as the 48-month hiatus that it became. There was, Squire reckons, a preferable course of action - if only someone could've seen it.
"We were looking at being away for as long as it took to make the second album. And that was the big mistake: sticking to the idea that it has to be done before we did anything else. We should have written a bit, recorded a bit, toured a bit - and I think the record would've come out a lot sooner. We were guilty of saying, Let's sort everything out and then carry on. We lost momentum."
Gradually, Second Coming began to take shape. Gareth Evans's services were dispensed with (a claim on Roses funds was recently settled out of court; "It's an expensive business criticising him," says Squire), the band - who are still managerless, despite a short-lived partnership last year with Guns N'Roses overlord Doug Goldstein - eventually moved into Monmouth's Rockfield Studios. There, against the low hum of the Roses rumour mill, they set about tying innumerable loose ends into a coherent musical work.
The whispers, needless to say, became evermore ludicrous. The Roses were said to have turned into corpulent hermits. The album was reputed to sound like Aerosmith. According to one update in the stratospherically clueless pop pages of The Guardian, derived from top pranksters and fellow Rockfield residents Dodgy, they were rehearsing a 20-minute version of That's The Way (I Like It) - and Ian Brown was refusing to talk to anyone unless they addressed him as "King Monkey". Only two of the recurrent tales appeared to be beyond doubt: firstly, that John had rather overdone the old turbo-talc ("It made me anti-social," he confesses), and secondly, that the once-debauched Roses had become settled, partnered-off family men. Can this be true ?"
"No," says Squire, guardedly. "Everyone's made a hash of that, with the time we were given. No one's got a stable… I'd better not say any more, but that's not the case. It's not all hunky-dory in Rosesworld."
For what reasons ?
"Just domestics."
And this apples to you personally ?
"Mmmm. I was far more settled the first time round. I was virtually married. I'm a bachelor now; a bachelor father. I never imagined myself like that. It wasn't one of my parental role models."
Examining the last year in Squire's company produces a far greater sense of recurrent calamity than Brown, Mani or Maddix betray - probably because two of the schedule-stopping crises had Squire as their only immediate victim. There was, for a start, his pneumonia.
"I collapsed walking from the toilet to my bed, which was about where that ashtray is (a matter of a few feet). It was pretty scary. I was in bed for two weeks, feeling like I was drowning. Then we flew to America, and I remember - who was on the plane ? - Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, being fashionably late, with the bags of shopping, running for the gate. I was behind them, walking like an old man, the last one on board. It was the illest I've ever been.
Mishap number two arrived within weeks, when the apparently tour-shy Reni got his P45. Not without reason, many mourned the exit of a figure whose centrality to the band - his groove-laced drumming arguably defining the "baggy" ethos - was beyond question. In keeping with all this, Squire's feelings about his departure - shock, relief - were mixed.
"They were dual, really," he says, in marked contrast to the let's-move-on dismissiveness of the others. "The thing is, I don't think it'll ever be the same as it was, because part of the spirit died when he left. I think the four members of the band, at that time, meant it was greater than the sum of its parts; the fact that we'd all started from nothing, and worked out way up there made it somehow special.
"There was that inner core, and we could all look at each other and know what we were thinking. It's bound to be different when someone new comes in, who applied for the job. You feel different about yourself too, once you're choosing people to play with."
Having watched you play together, the prospects seem fairly rosy.
"(Pause) Yeah, I think so. But it can never be the same, because anyone new isn't going to spend time on the dole with us, waiting for buses, holding guitars…"
Was it conceivable that it could've worked out with Reni ?
"(Regretfully) No."
So, Reni exited, as the Roses-vine began to vibrate with stories about his unwillingness to be paid less than Brown and Squire ("Not true"), and his alleged problems with our old poppy-derived friend Mr H. "I never saw him do it, "Squire says, "and I'm sure I'd have known if he was."
SIX MONTHS LATER - after hysteria-soaked tours of Japan and Australia - John Squire sits in a pink armchair, overlooking a grey beach, confessing that he's yet to complete any new songs (there are, thankfully, innumerable half-finished compositions), speculating on the likelihood of this distinctly rudderless band employing a manager ("It's very hard to get a majority decision from this group"). What, pray tell, is going to happen next ?
We'll keep making music, but we're not ready to start setting ourselves deadlines and disappointing people again. As soon as possible…"
Within two years ?
"Yeah," he smiles, as the latest spate of desultory drizzle falls limply on Bridlington seafront. "Promise."
Back To Media 1996