IN MANCHESTER, normally sane folk are laying down hard earned cash on The Stone Roses making the big time.
Storming in on the twilight of our interview, Membrane and man about town John Robb triumphantly waves his betting slip aloft.
"If you get a Top 10 hit by Christmas I'll win £15 ! I've won £5 on you so far with the Top 40 !"
"Oh cheers," responds Ian Brown. "We'd better make an effort now."
Being a Stone Rose means never having to say you try. Never having to say much at all, in fact, if their bolshy interview reputation is even remotely accurate.
But, as with their music, intuition guides Ian, John, Mani and Reni to a degree that disarms anyone not actually in the Stone Roses. No one tells them what to do, they say, and those who try face death by stonewall.
"After the first few interviews," says John Squire, "we were getting pressurised to open up and be more chatty. Sell yourself, treat it as a PR exercise. And we've resisted it."
"So we weren't talking," continues Ian. "And people around us, press officers, said, 'You can't do that, you won't be getting any more interviews, people won't want to talk to you cos you're not saying anything.' And about three weeks later it's 'Ooh, it's working, it's working, what a great angle'."
"It's not an angle, it's us."
This non-angle won't change come fame and fortune - a development Ian views sure as death, despite the slight hiccup of 'She Bangs The Drums' and its all too brief residence in the nation's hearts and charts.
"I always knew it would get to this stage. I'm disappointed that we haven't had more press. Interviews keep talking about what good press we've had and how we're the press darlings. We haven't had enough !"
"We're a good group. If you're good you can't be stopped. And if what you've got doesn't work you'll die. Always. There's no brilliant groups that never made it."
NONE OF this would wash were it not true. The Stone Roses are the stuff of dreams. They speak them - Ian particularly talks in mythic terms, as if on the verge of some religious discovery in the mirror; and their music is the stuff of them, a breathless redress of traditional guitar pop with contemporary dance culture credibility.
The Stone Roses are a band of their time. Just as the Rolling Stones - the comparisons are many, irresistible and valid - successfully encapsulated pop's mid-'60s golden age in everything they did, The Stone Roses are a thumb-print of the late-80's Thatcherite landscape: a street smart gang, fiendishly self-sufficient, self-confident and ever so slightly selfish.
When Mani makes his entrance it's handshakes all round, but first to Ian and John. Personally, it's hard to imagine a friendlier bunch, but there's little danger of the non-initiated getting a ticket to the inner sanctum.
Still in keeping with the times, The Stone Roses' music is an imitation of the past. The blatant recurrence of the '60's motifs on their debut album is at first as off-putting as Ian's extravagantly proportioned trouser bottoms. But the Roses' club-conscious credentials sets them apart from various contemporaries who also choose the earlier strains of psychedelia for a base camp, a distinction the band intend to make explicit with a special London warehouse party.
Ian: "It's up to Douglas Hurd, isn't it ? Because of the scare about acid house parties, they're clamping down on things like that. It's gonna be hard for us cos we wanna try and do something different."
John: "Break ground wherever we can."
Ian: "We're trying to pull people away from rock'n'roll, even though we use guitars. England hasn't done anything, musically, for quite a long time, I don't think. Chicago and New York have been giving people the soundtracks. And hopefully everybody who's bought our records or wants to see us will come and it'll be something they've never really heard. Cos the Town And Country Club, that kind of circuit, we don't wanna get on it."
Because then you become just like any other band ?
"Yeah. The hardest part isn't getting established, it's when you're established - what do you do ?!"
AFTER FIVE years waiting, The Stone Roses are on the verge of phenomenon status.
Blessed with a sharp eye for the details of style as well as content, they are about to become newsworthy for what they are rather than purely for what they do.
And that means trial by tabloids.
Ian: "That's OK. We're already in the tabloids, last week. 'Pop nutters The Stone Roses !'. It came from that Sounds interview a while ago where I fantasised about putting a blanket over the Queen Mother's head. Geoffrey Dickens was trying to get us banned off Top Of The Pops or get the viewers to switch off so the BBC wouldn't put us on again !"
"That was our first tabloid press, the more the merrier. Front page every day. Forget the Sex Pistols, forget everybody. I want to see our band on the tabloid press, News At Ten, whatever. I'm big headed enough to think that we're more interesting."
John: "If you're gonna be as popular as we wanna be you have to get into that forum. You can't look at what's happened to other people, cos they were other people. They didn't have the timing, they aren't us."
Ian: "Just by existing you can show up the other people around you for what they do, which is just doing things for money. Making music purely for money."
And you don't make music purely for money ?
"No. There's easier ways of making money. Most of the money I spend, it's always burning holes in my pockets. Money's just for treating with contempt, it's just for spending. It shouldn't be a motivation. If it's a motivation you've got a problem. That's not to say I don't like it."
Ian's eyes begin to wander off into the mid-distance, sensing another enigmatic one-liner on the way.
"It gives you a feeling of security, your movements aren't restricted. Perpetual motion…… that's what I believe in."
Er, right on, matey.
THESE OPAQUE utterances are Ian's stock-in-trade but pinning down The Stone Roses to specifics is a tough task. Their songs leave an ambiguous trail, pitching from extreme confidence to vulnerability, sometimes in the space of a few bars - but their self-belief is overwhelming.
'She Bangs The Drums', with its key conceit "The past was yours but the future's mine", could rank as a classic youth anthem but the Roses prefer to cast its net wider.
Ian: "There's a 50-year-old guy down the Hacienda every Friday getting people at it. He's 50 odd, 20 stone…… no-one laughs at him, he gets on partying ! It's not the joy of youth, it's the joy of being alive. Live fast, die old !"
But for many people, it's no more a dream to have the comfort and freedom to live life to the full.
Ian: "It is a dream, a dream for everybody."
John: "Everybody's got to feel despair. You can't be eternally happy, or if you were you probably wouldn't know it cos you'd have nothing to contrast it with. You've got to be depressed so that one day you can go up."
Are you happy now ?
John regards the blustery Manchester weather.
"It's a bit too cold for me at the moment. The band isn't the only barometer of happiness. Depends which side of bed you get out of."
Ian: "The day can depend on the first face you see in the morning. If the first face I see is a happy smiling one that says, 'Hello, how are you ?', I'm in a good mood for a long time. But if the first one I see is some miserable f***er like my landlord beating on the door asking for my rent then I'm down till at least dinner time."
My, it's a hard life.
"I read that book The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp, and he was talking about when he was a kid," says Ian. "He used to sit in front of the fire with his arms outstretched just staring at the ceiling. His mam says, 'Why don't you go and find something to do ?' He says, 'I am doing something, it takes a lot of effort to do nothing, just to be.'"
"I get into doing that !" he laughs.
And how does your mam react to that ?
"She doesn't care what I do."
IAN AND John come from working class families. Ian's father is a joiner; John's works for GEC - "I'm not sure what he does but he's being doing it a long time now" - but are a long way removed from the ludicrous Professional Prole antics of Manchester's slum king Mark E Smith.
With their exuberant, escapist dress sense and music to match, The Stone Roses suggest a way out of humdrum routine for their considerable, committed local following.
Ian: "I consider myself lucky cos he could have got me an apprenticeship as a joiner. I could be putting up window frames now."
Following in your father's footsteps…
"Yeah. Like Ziggy Marley !"
You must be relieved to have avoided jobs like that.
Ian: "No, I've done jobs like that, some are alright. Depends on the people you work with. A mate of mine, he'd been on the dole for about four years then he got a job in a record shop, now he's packed it in."
"He said basically all that happened was he could go in and see a few more films, he could eat pizza twice a week instead of once a month, buy a bit of drugs, go out a couple of weeks more, buy a couple more LPs and that's it. Eight hours every day is taken up and when he gets home from work he's too tired to do anything. Time's more important than money."
"So if you've got a job and you have a good time, stay there. If you've got a job and you hate it, stick it."
Are there any jobs you'd prefer over the band ?
Ian: "Wouldn't mind being an astronaut."
John: "Long hours, though."
Ian happily confesses to being "workshy", whereas John always has to have some scheme on the go, be it his painting, sculpting or the band. The laidback Mr Brown therefore has plenty time on his hands to plan The Stone Roses' manifesto for life.
"You've got to believe in something. One Love - that'll do."
Sounds a bit vague.
"Realising that you're no more important than anybody else. Helping each other and looking out for each other's backs, like when you were kids. You should retain that attitude always. Strength. Exist for yourself but also for other people."
Again this seems to demand a lot of self-confidence and strength, too much for some people.
Ian: "I know. You just learn them. If somebody's weak, you've got to help them. If somebody's shy, chronically shy, you've got to try and bring them out of it. If you see someone falling, pick him up."
"You could look on that kind of attitude as being selfish," cautions John. "To give to other people is, in a way, selfish because you know you're gonna get something back."
You seem to shy away from explicit political statements. Is that because you don't see life in such concrete terms ?
John: "Yeah, I think any sort of dogma is dangerous as it inevitably leads to generalisations that don't cater to everybody."
Ian: "Trade unions are out of step aren't they ?"
Are they ??
"Well, what can they actually achieve now in 1989 ? There has to be a better way for working class people to get a better life. Trade unions don't have much power to help them. At the time they were set up they were relevant. Times have changed."
"I don't know about that," says John, maybe sensing Ian losing his way a little here, "because they've been hammered lately. It's harder for them to do anything. You can't stick to your principles anymore unless you've got a secret Swiss bank account to see you through once your funds have been sequestrated."
The quiet, thoughtful Stone, John's paintings reinforce the ambiguity of his songs. The most striking of these, Waterfall was used as a live backdrop, the Stars And Stripes encroaching upon a Union Jack. What inspired him to produce a work criticising the influence of America on Britain ?
"It seemed like they're destroying a lot of places in town. There's an old cinema on Oxford Road that was a really wicked-looking building. It'd been boarded up for a bit but I always thought it might be a club or something. But McDonalds f***ed it. They're building a drive-in here in Chorlton as well. It's been going on for ages though, since the '30s and Hollywood."
Ian: "The American Empire - smooth and subtle."
And very glamorous.
John: "Yeah. You can't dismiss the whole continent and everything it's done but it can't be healthy for it to stamp it's identity on every other country in the world, which it seems to try and do."
"We got offered a free gig in Central Park in September and one at the end of a pier in Santa Monica," says Ian, informatively. "It's like Japan, they've offered us gigs in Japan but said they'd only pay for two road crew, so no way, there's 12 of us altogether.
"So…… you have to turn down the first few offers, don't you ? That's showbusiness !"
Stone Roses showbusiness - there's no other like it.
The folowing photos were not included with this actual article in Sounds - 12th August 1989. But they are from the same photo session, hence their inclusion here:
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