Take one loose guitarslinger, add a chance encounter in a pub… gently simmer with a song hear outside Woolworths and top with a fibreglass pub fixture. Stir with a spoon marked 'fun'. Such is the recipe for The Seahorses, the band led by the hardest working man in, um, The Stone Roses, John Squire…
'I nearly fell over getting out of the bath this morning. Had a but of a flashback.' It's the day before Glastonbury '97 and, unlike 99.9 per cent of his fellow festival goers, John Squire is determined not to fall over. He's not drunk. He doesn't even seem unusually clumsy, but Squire knows only too well the cost of a pre-festival slip-up. The Stone Roses were due to play in the fabled Somerset fields when the event last too place… and then the guitarist fell off a mountain bike in San Francisco and broke his left collarbone. The Roses never played and Pulp bagged the coveted Saturday headline slot at the eleventh hour. The once favoured 'clobber' combo of wide trouser and beanie hat was ne'er seen again, and rather than Glastonbury '95 being remembered for the Mancunians' triumphant return it instead went down as the weekend Cocker and company conquered all.
Although Squire nursed himself back to health as quickly as possible - a steel plate and six pins were added to the offending collarbone; 'I lifted tins of soup and beans to build up my strength' - The Roses never recovered. Post the Glasto no-show the seemingly indelible reputation of Squire, Ian Brown, Mani and Reni was soon sullied. When they did eventually tour the UK in November '95, things were evidently not all they should be; vocalist Brown was vilified in the press as ' a man shouting in a bucket', while Squire, it emerged, was spending more time with the Roses' crew than his fellow bandmates. Those close to the band were disappointed, though not shocked, when the guitarist quit a few months later.
So it is that John Squire sips a beer at a Cardiff hotel bar and (carefully) looks forward to playing Glastonbury… again. Unlike his pint, he's not bitter; for happily he ponders not what might have been with The Stone Roses, but what will be with The Seahorses.
Somewhat ironically, The Seahorses' career began - just as The Roses' faded - with a fateful bump. On March 28 1996, the day John Squire announced his departure from The Most Important Band Of Their Generation, the guitarist went out drinking in York with his tech Martin. They came across a local covers band, The Blueflies, whose bass player made a fine noise. A genially lubricated Squire told 20-year-old Fletcher he liked what he heard. On his way out, the lofty Squire banged his head on a five-foot-tall fibreglass seahorse hanging over the pub's door. He is convinced the events had, shall we say, significance.
'Meeting Stuart just hours after I'd left the Stone Roses can't be just coincidence.' Squire offers quietly. 'It was fate.'
Lady Luck smiled on Squire again when 25-year-old Chris Helme, busking his way through The Stones' No Expectations outside Woolworth's in York, impressed a passing friend of the ex-Rose. Helme became The Seahorses' frontman. And, fate being what it is round these parts, Helme naturally knew a top drummer who could also sing, 26-year-old Andy Watts. If all this seems to be laying the karma on a bit thick, don't tell Squire.
'I'm much happier in The Seahorses,' he asserts. 'Everything comes easier - the songs, the performances, the decisions. For a long time in the Roses I felt like we were suffocating, hanging on to everything with our fingernails. Now it seems more…' - Squire pauses for what seems like a week -'…destined'.
Although The Seahorses are less than a year old, they've already notched up a gold album (Do It Yourself), completed a sold-out jaunt around the UK, and are currently wooing Japan and America to capitalise on an 'extremely good' reaction.
'Some people think I was planning all this for a long time,' Squire smiles. 'That's not true. There's only one song on Do It Yourself, Standing On Your Head, that was completed before I left The Stone Roses - but I didn't write it with the intention of it being the start of a secret store of songs that I could use for any, um, solo project. It was just something I held back from Second Coming because I felt we had enough to work on at that time. Things were going so slowly I just didn't want to add another song to the pot. But looking back on it, it does seem strange that The Seahorses came together so quickly.'
Many also thought it strange that Squire chose to relaunch his faltering career with the help of three (relatively) youthful unknowns; if the guitarist was feeling the creative heat in The Roses surely his fame and track record vis-à-vis his new cohorts would only focus the pressure ?
I didn't consider that. I was pretty naive about this really. I thought I'd get a band together, everything would be great and everyone would love us. The one thing that slightly concerned me was the age gap, but that hasn't really proved to be the case. I don't think people change much between 25 and 35, which I'll be in November… then again, I don't think I could survive long on a desert island with Stuart - he's all Nintendo an' that !'
Recorded in Los Angeles around the turn of the year, Do It Yourself took just six weeks to complete. Initial press reaction has been lukewarm (though Squire rightly notes how that's been the case for all three albums he's made), but Do It Yourself is what's usually termed 'a grower'. If The Roses had released a song like Love Is The Law, everyone would have gone bonkers; Love Me And Leave Me should be remembered for much more than just being Liam Gallagher's first songwriting credit; Around The Universe's boogie chipperness is enough to overcome its, frankly, daft lyrics; Standing On Your Head simmers with much of The Roses' visceral menace. Yes, DIY is mostly chirpy, fun, poppy even, but it's tightly cemented by Squire's uniquely lyrical guitar and becomes increasingly impressive on repeated listenings.
Intriguingly, though DIY's knobs were twiddled by Tony Visconti - best known for polishing the glam sound of early '70s Bowie and T Rex - the album has a near-folky feel, part down to Helme's vocal delivery, part to the space that Visconti built into the mix.
'Tony was one of (record label) Geffen's suggestions,' Squire explains. 'I actually wanted to get Steve Albini (legendarily 'troublesome' US punkmeister, whose most mainstream work was the crunching mix of Nirvana's In Utero) but I was told they couldn't track him down.'
Perhaps that's, um, for the best, eh ?
'Mmmm. Maybe Geffen were being duplicitous and trying to keep us apart… I've heard horror stories from other musicians that Albini is a nightmare to work with.
'I waded through all the CDs of the 20 or so producers Geffen suggested, and they all sound pretty much the same. Most of the American ones were just caught up in a sub-standard Nirvana sound, but Tony intrigued me. I remember John Leckie (producer of The Stone Roses) surprising us in The Roses when we asked him who his favourite producer was; because he'd produced the Dukes of Stratosphear album (Beatlesque psychedelic alter-ego elpee by XTC) we were sure he'd say George Martin, but he said it was Tony Visconti. The only records of Tony's I had at the time were T Rex's Electic Warrior and their Greatest Hits. I didn't have any Bowie stuff. Those T Rex albums were the last things I listened to after all this modern America stuff and it was just far more… well, it actually sounded fresher than any of the others. It was also a lot more English.
'There was an element of risk that appealed, too. His was the last name on this list, almost like an afterthought, and Geffen qualified the suggestion with statements like 'Well, he's not worked for a long time, he might not be available; we're not even sure he's good anymore.' But Tony flew over to Manchester airport and when we met him he was just a really nice bloke, none of the attitude problems you'd think you might get from a guy who's worked with Bowie and what have you. Because he was so down to earth I thought he'd be really good for the rest of the band, as they'd obviously not worked at that sort of level before.
'Tony was great in the studio. He's a musician himself and plays all sorts of instruments; the producers I've worked with in the past all came through engineering and didn't have a musical background, whereas Tony could converse in that language. There were no situations where, when a song comes off the rails, the producer just says; It's not "right"; can you do it again ? And again, and again… there were no abstract terms like that. Tony was like; That rhythm's wrong, that chord structure's not strong. He also had great organisational sense; he got us all in on time, basically. A lot of the mood and speed of the recording can be attributed to Tony.'
Getting the band into the studio on time is not something Squire is over-familiar with. Although The Stone Roses was recorded, like most debut LP's, at a sprint, Second Coming was two years in the making and - given The Roses' protracted lay-off after their infamous court case against the Silvertone label - arrived over five years after its predecessor. Squire does not need reminding that times waits for no bloke…
'I was very conscious of that time away. There was a philosophy with Do It Yourself of taking it back to basics. I didn't want this record to sound like a continuation of The Roses, a sequel to Second Coming; I wanted it to sound like a debut album, so we contrived to capture the live sound and not spend too much time slicking it up and layering. I think that's something we'll do next time, but I don't think any record need to be as dense as Second Coming, certainly. It was just overworked… on the basis of the fact that we weren't a cohesive unit and we were spending just too long in the studio. The luxury of endless hours and endless overdubs meant the freshness was lost. Some songs on Second Coming were the third or even fourth recorded versions; things were lying around on master tapes from the first week of recording and we were still woking on overdubs six months down the line. That picking and choosing…there's no drive there, there's no immediacy.
Drummer Andy Watts was the last Seahorse to join, so Squire, Helme and Fletcher spent three months in a rented Cumbrian cottage, honing arrangements. When it came to committing DIY to tape there was, to be blunt, no dicking about.
'We recorded exactly what we'd been rehearsing for that long time', says Squire. 'The only problems we had were fitting in second and sometimes third guitar parts. We went through quite a few amp and guitar combinations.
'I started off wanting to use Les Pauls for the whole album, but once you've got one strong guitar part down that can make things a but thick-sounding, so we put a lot of effort into mixing and matching. My main overdub guitar was a Telecaster that Chris had bought just prior to the sessions; he wasn't playing it himself, so I grabbed it.
'But another factor, I've now learned, is how you mix. This album was also sounding very thick, like Second Coming, for a while. We were working on a mid-'70s Neve desk which apparently creates a warmer sound - we did some rough mixes on it, and they were extremely syrupy. It was only when we moved into a modern SSL desk that the sound opened up and became brighter. Maybe we got the best of both worlds. I don't like all-new gear - I do feel some modern CDs sound too pristine, too clinical - and I think we've still got a lot of warmth on this album.
I'd like to have done more of it really live, actually. We did bass and drums live, with me doing a guide guitar - but that was basically because the same room was used for the drums and guitar ambience track. Stuart was playing in the control room with his cab out in a booth, Andy was in the main room, I was stood in another room with glass doors so I could see them both. Chris was on the other side, doing the guide vocals.'
Still, DIY is - supercharged guitar solo outro to Love Is The Law withstanding - a concise record. Compared to Second Coming, anyway.
'I think it was my frame of mind,' Squire ponders. 'A cloud lifted when I left The Roses and it's reflected in The Seahorses' material and, perhaps, the guitar playing too. I did make a concerted effort to be more concise.'
There was a time, quite a while ago, when one note was all it took to get John Squire excited about guitar. 'I was 14,' he intones. 'There's a low note on God Save The Queen, probably an A-string, just before the beginning of the second verse. Dowwww ! Really fat and thick. One note… raw sex. I heard that… had to go and do it myself.'
The Pistols' Steve Jones and The New York Dolls' Johnny Thunders provided him with initial inspiration - 'they were the only guys who were playing any sort of fast runs; everyone else just played chords' - but Squire soon realised he'd go forward by looking back.
'After getting over the taboo of listening to long-haired, flared trouser musicians - the very people punk slagged off - I actually appreciated how much punk musicians had taken from before. You can hear elements of the Pistols in the first two Zeppelin albums, to be honest.'
The Squire family were not particularly musical; John's father was a keen fan of jazz saxophonists. His grandad was in amateur dramatics - 'closest I ever was to a showbiz family' - but for the most part it was a case of, ahem, do it yourself.
'I probably spent too long practising guitar on my own,' he muses. 'We didn't live in a musical street or school, and it wasn't until just before the first Roses album that I met another proper guitarist. This guy Ian (Brown) used to work with used to go to a blues and folk guitar teacher in Rusholme; I went to see him a couple of times and he taught me a lot. Apart from that, it all comes from books and cassettes. Plus I had the record player…'
Not any old 'stereogram', mind. Squire's industrious father wired up a train set transformer to said LP player allowing with a tilt of the dial, variable voltage. So not only could 45s be played at 33 1/3s, when the guitar parts got a bit tricky 33 1/3s could be played at, ooh, 12 1/5. 'It was so good when I got into Page, Hendrix and Clapton because I could slow everything down and pick out the guitar lines. Very helpful.'
From here, Squire absorbed a smidgen of chord theory - 'I don't carry it up around here, though (taps head)' - and cherry-picked the best licks he could from a book called Lead Guitar by Harvey Vincent.' It came with a flexi-disk and was all blues-based,' he remembers. 'That stuff just came easy to me. Dunno why… I just liked the sound. Still do.'
This blooze-rawk education continues to inform Squire's playing. More than on any of his records, DIY eschews a chordal approach, with Squire often playing lead lines and solo licks throughout whole songs. Doesn't he ever feel like, y'know, hammering away on huge barre chord for 10 minutes ?
'Chris handles the chords, whether on his songs or on mine. The acoustic guitar becomes a percussion thing in this band; but I don't think it's necessary to ram big chords down other people's throats, I really don't - it's better to suggest them.
What does Squire think when he solos ?
'Nothin'. Why ?'
Well, do you sing them in your head ?
'Oh yeah.' He pauses, then adds; 'I like the feeling of being in neutral, and that's what it feels like. It's totally liberating, playing a guitar solo. I guess that if I was an accomplished surfer, the feeling would be similar. You forget all your problems, everything dissolves, you're living for the moment. But y'know, I think that's the same whether you're playing guitar in your bedroom or on stage.'
But are you conscious that people regard you as pretty 'handy' in that department, that people of a certain age put you up there with 'the greats'?
'Mmm. I'm conscious of the fact that that the more I practice and the better I get, the more I get compared to Jimmy Page… but in a disparaging way. In some ways it bothers me, it's like; He sounds like Jimmy Page and what's the point in that ? I dunno. Maybe I've spent long enough trying to play blues rock guitar, maybe I should leave it alone.
'The thing is, I can't listen to my guitar playing without knowing where my fingers go and knowing how it's done. A lot of the supposed magic is lost on me.'
Given the guitarist's dominance of latter-day Roses output, many feared (or hoped) that The Seahorses would be a proto John Squire Blue explosion and nowt else; yet he insists that total fretular dominance nor a freelance Marr/Butler sojourn were ever on the cards.
'I'm not a despot, not at all. You see, I think it's right that the author of any song has the last word, and that's true for Chris - he has veto on what I play on his songs, and if he felt something was inappropriate I'd change it. I don't want to be deemed a tyrant, it would be to the detriment of the band - which is what we are.
'I've actually learned a lot from Chris about pacing songs, writing songs for singers, which is - to be honest - something I never considered in the past. Before, I just believed; This is the song I've written, this is how it goes and whoever's standing at the mic should be able to sing it. But you can work on things to make the singing as pleasurable as possible. Do It Yourself is quite a mid-paced record in some ways but it's also wordy - I don't thing it's easy to sing. Since meeting Chris, I've been trying to build more breathing spaces into the lyrics I'm writing, seeing it more from his point of view. Stuart's helped me see the potential of time signatures, as well. He's got a very good musical brain - his dad's a musician, too. I see Stuart as the band's musical index; if ever there's a problem, he's the man to ask why it isn't working.
'The fact that Chris is an independent writer who can sing and play guitar gives The Seahorses an edge, and an internal competition that I've never had before; we're like, I've written this - what have you got ? In the Stone Roses, I was… the initiator. I'm not disregarding Ian's contribution, but he didn't play any instruments and I think he should have learned. He got frustrated because he couldn't express himself without an accomplice. I wouldn't take credit for the whole thing, but…'
The following day, Squire makes it to Glastonbury without mishap and leads The Seahorses through an assured set. Despite the quagmire that passes fort the second stage's 'arena', regardless of the previous let downs and cock ups, the size of the crowd confirms that thousands still think magic drops from Squire's long and lean fingers. He acknowledges their affections by soloing like a nutter. Perhaps surprisingly, he doesn't believe he's all that good…yet.
'I don't think my playing sounds very effortless,' he says. 'It's not as fluid as I'd like.'
Then again, there are many things you might be surprised to learn about John Squire - that he once braved a Megadeth gig so as to catch grunty noiseniks Corrosion of Conformity; that he refuses to play a Strat on stage because it's 'like wearing a school tie, done up real tight' (eh ?); that he's partial to a bit of Steve Vai's Passion And Warfare - but surely the most jaw-dropping is that - hey - he's not really lazy at all. Chris Helme has already penned five songs for the next Seahorses album, and Squire himself has got the basis of six more. Indeed, so fired up is he that when The Seahorses said farewell to the good burghers of Geffen after completing DIY, Squire found himself ranting about what the next album was going to be like. He hopes The 'Horses will be back in the studio come September.
'Sensibly, Geffen said; Don't get carried away, you're going to be touring this one for a year and a half,' he counters. 'I know it's too early to predict when the next Seahorses album will come out, but it won't be another half a decade. I can guarantee that.'
The 'quiet' years in The Roses are still clearly irksome ?
'Yeah. I don't think they were entirely wasted years but, um, they could have been put to better use. I don't take The Stone Roses as potential unrealised, though - I think we just could have made more records of the standard we were clearly capable of.
I didn't waste my time during that lay off, though,' he smiles. 'I did become a better guitar player.'
Go To part two
Back To Media 1997