Five years ago The Stone Roses were a pop sensation. Now they're trying to resurrect their career with an album of expansive blues rock jams. In a startlingly frank interview, Ian Brown, Mani and guitarist John Squire talk about the inspiration behind Second Coming, original producer John Leckie reveals why he walked out on the band and we detail how the band (sometimes) work in the studio…... Story by Cliff Jones and Ashley Heath.
By now, those who are interested will have heard the most eagerly awaited rock album of the last five years, read the acres of speculative rhetoric and decided whether they think Second Coming is genius or rambling, indulgent retro stink. Given that it's five years since one of Britrock's best loved, most critically revered and enigmatic acts recorded, it's best we go back to the very beginning and readdress the question:
Who are the Stone Roses and why should we still care about them?
For those who might not be aware of the turbulent gestation of Second Coming, the anti-Roses canards and whole klutzed re-emergence of the band onto the world stage, here's a brief recap….. Having released in 1989 what has retrospectively become one of the great debut albums of all time, the Stone Roses promptly disappeared from the public arena, dumped their manager, sued their record company, negotiated a multi-million dollar new deal with Geffen and made ready to start work on the most expectation-laden album British rock had seen for years.
Time rolled on - months, years passed - and there was still no sign of the record. In the absence of any interviews or hard fact, the marvellous musical myth machine rumbled into action, delivering rumour and half-truth about the band by the ton: they were so rich they didn't need to work; they'd all bought castles in the Welsh marches and were holding mad drug parties; they were tax exiles; drummer Reni and enigmatic guitarist John Squire had suffered mental breakdowns; singer Ian Brown had a life-threatening disease; they were splitting up; they had chased each other across the countryside with knives in a frenzy of hatred; they had scrapped their album entirely in favour of making a lo-fi version a la Beck, etc, etc…..
By mid-'93 news had filtered through that the Roses were, at last, in a proper studio with a proper producer bashing out proper tracks like no tomorrow. This time the rumours were true….. almost. They had been recording, yes, but in truth had achieved very little. Ten weeks into the sessions, appointed producer John Leckie walked out in disgust as the band incurred spiralling studio bills recording what amounted to sprawling experiments in abstraction. (Exhibit A, m'lud: the four minute intro of Second Coming's opener, Breaking Into Heaven).
A year and a half later came the power slide guitar rock bombast of the Love Spreads 45, but when the album arrived two months later the band walked into accusations of arrogance on a grand scale. Second Coming consisted of 12 rambling, solo-laden mini-epics, only one of which clocked in at under three minutes. To most of the critics the Roses had blown it big time. It wasn't because detractors thought the songs were crap or anything that mundane, it certainly wasn't just because the press 'campaign' specified that there were to be no preview copies, no playbacks, no - heaven forbid - free CDs for the journos. It was because the album, on initial listens at least, was judged to be the product of a considerable talent in an advanced and wayward state of decay. Where was the pop suss, where were the magnificent melodies? The innocence and naivety that gave their debut album its charm were gone and for a band of such status to deliberately trivialise their talent for crafting great pop came as something of a blow, to say the least. And the cheek of calling this derivative, melodiless meandering the Second Coming? To many, it seemed the Stone Roses were just taking the piss…….
Arrogance should never be confused with self-confidence, according to lead singer Ian Brown. "To me arrogance is looking down from a great height, despising, being a bloated version of yourself. We're not like that. They call us arrogant because we believe in what we do."
And as for the detractors who whined on about the album's rockist pretensions, cringed when they heard Tears' second-hand Stairway refrains and its Claptonesque guitar wailing, well, John Squire is wont to agree with them.
"It's not an original album but I witnessed all the influences that went into its making so I would think that, wouldn't I? I'd been listening to a lot of old blues stuff and to honest I found it difficult to accommodate those blues motifs and structures into our songs. I went back to the Beach Boys pop thing of simple three chord structures and tried to update it. That's why (the Jesus and Mary Chain's) Psychocandy was so incredible when it came out, that it could be so modern and powerful yet doff its cap to Brian Wilson and Phil Spector. I went and mixed up those three chords with the blues and now I think I'm giving those three chords a run for their money."
The music that Squire has been checking out over the last four years has an unashamedly retro slant, though unlike his fellow Roses, he believes that the current music scene is starting to pick up again.
"I was beginning to think I was sad, only listening to back catalogue until Beck came along. There was a lot of Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters and Zeppelin played - which is what everyone's been saying the album sounds like, in fact - but I've also got round to listening to a lot of The Byrds, which is what everyone thought the first album sounded like! The bands that really turned me on when I started out were The Byrds, the Beach Boys, The Beatles, the Stones, Hendrix, all the usual stuff. But lately I've been listening to things like Beck's Mellow Gold. I love the sounds and the story telling." Portishead, Liz Phair and US prog-metal act Corrosion of Conformity also get the Squire seal of approval.
Roses bassist Mani has no such obvious heroes, preferring to praise the faceless sessioneers behind the great Northern soul records as his number one influence.
"To tell you the truth I'm only just beginning to get good at the bass," he reflects. "I was learning when we did the first album and Fool's Gold, and I had to struggle to get through I Am The Resurrection because I wasn't confident or competent. See, we've all grown as musicians tremendously…… It's a different band now and we've developed to the point where we feel confident about writing and contributing songs, not just sounds."
That the Roses ended up spending five years away, maturing as musicians and people, seems ironic in light of Brown's final words the last time the band graced a British stage, at Spike Island in 1990. "The time is now," he declared as the band triumphantly left the stage, "do it now, do it now."
So what happened? At the risk of coining a blues cliche, each member of the Roses reached their own personal crossroads at some point during the past five years. Each made decisions about their lives, their families and themselves: Brown had a son, while Reni and Mani both now have young daughters; Squire went through problems brought about by a relationship breakdown and separation from his three-year-old daughter. The arduous court battles with ex-label Silvertone had the timid-looking Roses in the witness box day after day and the legal machinations prevented the band recording a note or playing live for nearly two years. More recently, Mani's father died.
Then there were suggestions that the Roses were at war with drugs and over the sharing of the corporate spoils. Reassuringly, Ian Brown claims that he hasn't touched cocaine for nearly two years - "it gives me an enormous ego" - and that he hasn't touched ecstasy for twice that time. Squire, on the other hand, admits to a past cocaine habit but insists it was merely a symptom of other, more turbulent upsets. The rumours of financial squabbles were in a sense more worrying; bands regularly fall foul of the rock'n'roll rule that some band members are more equal than others. And the jealousy tears some of them apart.
Mani: "Personally I have no problem with the fact that John gets publishing because he writes the songs. We're friends, have been for ten years. Any fights we had weren't about money. When four boys get together there's going to be the odd altercation - we're not The Partridge Family or The Osmonds but we love each other. There was never any fisticuffs." That Ian Brown is a black belt in Kung Fu might explain the absence of recourse to physical combat.
Typically, Mani prefers to point to the legal nightmares as the true cause of the Roses' early '90s malaise. "It would have been nice not to have had the two year injunction or the legal hassle and to have kept the momentum going, but we needed a break after all that. We loved playing and touring but we were getting tired and the joy had gone."
Or as Reni, very much a part of the Roses when this interview took place, put it: "These things don't change the way you look outwardly but you grow up so much inside." For the drummer at least, the frustrations eventually outweighed the fun, as he revealed in one of the last things he said as a member of the Roses. It was suggested to him that the band, after such a long time away, were perhaps destined to underachieve; he answered with a guarded agreement.
"Possibly. Personally, I'm sick of underachieving….. I've written my own stuff, my problem is finishing it. The last few years I've been learning the guitar; I'm a very basic strummer but I just can't help writing songs. In fact my drumming suffered 'cause I was always working on songs on my 4-track at home. I've got a keyboard and a guitar and you can play those at home whereas you can't play drums - at least not where I live 'cause it would annoy the neighbours. I've been working on some Gang Starr loops that I've put stuff over that sound great. I could develop those ideas. If it takes us this long to record another album I'll have my solo LP out first."
In September 1993, the Stone Roses completed four months of writing and demoing, recording tracks live to DAT. Enter John Leckie, the veteran producer who can count The Fall and XTC amongst his credits, and the man who gave the band's debut album a unique uniformity of sound. The Roses spent ten more weeks recording, this time using the Rolling Stones Mobile, which they parked outside Ian Brown's place in the Welsh hills. The results of these sessions were early versions of Daybreak, Tightrope, Tears and Ten Storey Love Song. The Roses themselves, according to Ian Brown, were thrilled with the results. As their tenure at Rockfield commenced, they told Leckie that this was the kind of sound they were after for the rest of the album.
"He didn't even comment," reflects Ian Brown in hindsight. "But when it came time for the proper recording Leckie said he didn't think we had the songs. We'd given him three of the best tracks on the album! I thought Daybreak was fantastic as it was."
After just one night at Rockfield, having been dragged there under duress, Leckie announced that he simply didn't have the heart to continue with a project that he felt was suffering from under-rehearsal, lack of spirit and focus. "When we first met John we were on the dole, and we'd go in and make a record in a day!" says Brown. "Now it's different. I was like, "So time's money for you now, is it John?" Anyway, one morning me and Reni are up at 8.30am and he's packed his suitcase and he's scuttling away. "Not saying goodbye to the lads then John?" We went over and gave him a hug and told him there was no hard feelings but it hurt that he didn't even have time to knock on the door and tell us."
All that remains from the Leckie-produced sessions is the complex, atmospheric intro to Breaking Into Heaven, parts of How Do You Sleep and some snatches of Begging You, the sample-heavy piledriver that hits halfway into the album. Rather than being angry or dismissive about Leckie, songwriter Squire seems simply bemused by what occurred.
"He was taking us aside one by one and waving bits of paper under our noses. He also started worrying more about the money it seemed to me. It was good in a way 'cause it made us angry and you can really use anger." Ultimately however it was Squire's dissatisfaction with Leckie's trademark 'fizzy' sound, the cold, trebly manner in which he records guitars, that caused them to part company. "I'm not sure I like that saccharine and chrome-plated Leckie sound anyway," says Squire. "It sounded too neutered for the kind of record we wanted."
Leckie for his part maintains that it was the sheer lack of activity, the band's inability to commit anything substantial to tape that finally drove him away. "My role as producer is simply to capture that magic take," he argues. "I'd tried, I really had, and contrary to what Ian says I had no problems with the songs - they were great. John would come down from his bedroom, deliver them to the band and they'd be great, but I invested two years of my life in that record, on and off, and it seemed to be going nowhere. There was no discipline, no urgency and they just didn't have that magic take in them at that point. It was like a different band from the one that made I Am The Resurrection.
"We had two sessions with the Stones mobile and in the first four weeks we did three tracks and in the second six week session we did just one, Ten Storey Love Song. They just didn't have any life in them. I told them there's no point hiring an expensive studio and coming out with demos so I said, "Go away, sort yourselves out and we'll try again." They were spending a grand a day and producing nothing! I was under contract to keep the album within budget although I was never told what that budget was. If it had gone over budget I was liable personally for the costs. In the end it just got too much. There comes a point where you have to devote some time to your own life, other albums and projects."
As to the allegation that he left without warning, Leckie finds Brown's memory of events to be selective. "We talked about me leaving the album for a while, in fact we had two or three big meetings about just that. I didn't want to go to Rockfield at all and I told them, but they managed to convince me it would work. I lasted one night."
Given that this was the most anticipated release in British popular music since Sergeant Pepper…. it's hard to believe that Leckie didn't try, as he puts it, "to work hard at making a hit record". The fact that the album took another year of studio time to complete suggests that Leckie was maybe right in believing that the band had no real direction when they began. Indeed, if it sounds like anything at all, Second Coming sounds like it was jammed up from weeks and months of tinkering and experimentation. Given that Squire and co. seemed so vehement about the songs and the sounds on the new album, why didn't they just produce it themselves?
"I didn't want that complete pressure of deciding everything myself," the guitarist says. "You need someone there to throw a different light on things - as a musician you're too involved with it. I still don't really understand what a producer is anyway, do you?"
Paul Shroeder (sic - Ed) came and rescued the sessions after Leckie's departure with a sterling stint at the controls, the results of which form the backbone of Second Coming; Breaking Into Heaven, Driving South and the careening bar-house guitar boogie of Good Times all have the Schroeder stamp. Due to a prior commitment to producing his sister's band, however, he reluctantly had to leave. "He'd have been an arsehole not to go," says Brown. "Family commitments are important." Enter the son of the Rockfield owners, Simon Dawson. Present at the sessions from the beginning as engineer, Dawson, almost by default, found himself in charge of the sessions. He had grown to know the band over the months and had engineered much of the Schroeder-produced sessions, so his appointment as new producer seemed to be the most logical move. It's a testament to his abilities that the highly focused Love Spreads, among the last of the tracks the band cut, was recorded and produced by Dawson alone.
It doesn't end here. Given that the recording sources were so disparate (ranging from a 16-track Fostex machine to a full-blown 48-track setup), given that some tracks were recorded with the full benefit of state-of-the-art studio technology while others were little more than fleshed-out demos (Tightrope, recorded in the Rockfield TV lounge using just a stereo Neumann, being the obvious example) there is a surprising uniformity to the mix on Second Coming and the album has a distinct 'sonic character'. This, Squire claims, is down to Bill Price - most famously, the man who mixed the Sex Pistols' Never Mind The Bollocks. Price provided a completely fresh set of ears and was able to sort the many layers of guitars which Squire had recorded, erased and re-recorded into some sort of order.
"I loved Bill's work," says Squire. "With Begging You he was begging us - forgive me! - to let him re-do it another way. He really struggled with it for the album and still thinks he can get more out of it. I'd like to get him to do a triple length version and stick it out as a single actually."
For all the critical brickbats Second Coming suffered on its release in December '94, the Roses remain firmly convinced they're on the right path. "The best is yet to come," says Ian Brown. "No-one can get close to the sound that these musicians make together now. It's incredible to hear them play, better than it's ever been. There's tapes around of us jamming late night stuff, bluesy stuff, that would blow you away. They are unbelievably tight. Sometimes I can't bring myself to sing because I think I'd ruin it. I'll never sing as good as John Lennon but the band play better than the Beatles now."
UK audiences have yet to find this out for themselves, since the band's much-vaunted 'secret' tour of Britain was cancelled because, well, the gigs weren't secret anymore. But they're headlining Glastonbury this month, they have a new drummer, Robbie Maddix ("funky as fuck," according to Mani) and seem to have rekindled the single-minded determination that propelled them into our affections in the first place.
Even John Squire, not noted for his high energy approach to making music or his powerful self-belief ("I never really thought our first album was that good anyway"), emerged from the seemingly draining sessions with renewed vigour. He claims to have most of the next studio album written and is working to a target of producing an album every 12 months until the year 1999.
"The next album won't replicate anything we've done so far and I've got a list of songs drawn up already," he adds. "To be honest, all I desire is to make enough money to make another record. I'd like to make a live album though, something that stands up against The Who's Live At Leeds or The Song Remains The Same. I really think we capture something live that we don't have in the studio."
But for Reni, there had been too much waiting involved. In April '95 he bailed out. His first solo album may be a long way off but after ten years in The Stone Roses, Reni clearly felt the good times had already been and gone…….
Five years, one million dollars spent, one lost drummer, one already postponed UK tour, no number one album (even if they were only pipped by The Beatles)…… Should you still care about the Stone Roses? Sure you should. Whether you think the album's retro, nouveau or no-no, it stands as a worthy successor to their debut if only in terms of its sheer breadth and daring.
Public and critical acclaim for Second Coming was always going to be hard to win. It's a simple enough equation: Expectation + hype2 = disappointment guaranteed. We expected them to simply peel off a few hits from their bulging wad, slap 'em on the table and it'd be just like they never went away. What we got instead was something altogether more complex, and if you can be bothered to listen, listen and listen again, Second Coming's dense web of sound slowly starts to make sense. Just as Clapton, Green, Page, Beck and co. soaked up the music of Robert Johnson, Hubert Sumlin and Elmore James, so John Squire has done back to those original purveyors of the blues and, indeed, the whole 'crossroads' myth.
Combining this with the electric white blues legacy of Zeppelin, the Stones et al, Squire has arrived at a new, white, British blues guitar sound for the '90s, signalling the emergence of 'indie' rock into a more sophisticated arena. Baggy just grew up. In this light, you begin to understand why it took so damn long to make.
"People listened to the music and they wanted their heads blown off by it," says Brown dismissively. "That's never going to happen. These things take time."
That the Roses themselves maintain the album's brilliance so vehemently ought to tell us something. As with its predecessor, which itself was slow to be accepted (the NME gave it just six out of 10 and described it as a sub-Byrds rip-off before retrospectively making it their album of the decade), it was the Roses' righteous self-belief that gave the band their impact. Besides, you can't imagine Ian Brown, Kung Fu black belt, Bible fancier, teetotaller and family man, or John Squire, unrepentant perfectionist, putting his precious name to anything that wasn't worthy.
Ultimately, demanding absolute purity and devotion to duty from bands is pointless and obtuse anyhow. It's useless castigating the Roses for just being, well, the Roses. Let's just be glad that - for now at least - they're back.
Cliff Jones and Ashley Heath
Go To part two Back To Media 1995