A year after 'The Second Coming' THE STONE ROSES are playing and talking like stars again. On the eve of their UK tour, VOX travels with the band through Japan, where these reluctant deities are dealing with fame, families and fortunes in their ever-unique style.
Outside the lobby of the Roppongi Prince Hotel, in one of the more animated nightlife-and-sushi-bar districts of Tokyo, a small victory has been won in the War For The Roses. "Jo-ohn, Jo-ohn, Jo-ohn, Jo-oo-ahn!" A squadron of giddy, young Japanese girls has swung round the shoo-ing policemen and doormen, and surrounded Roses guitarist John Squire.
No flock of schoolgirl fans flocks quite like Japanese schoolgirl fans. All day and all night they've been settling on the pavement, perching in doorways, hovering with intent and scattering at the slightest wave of a cop's baton. Now, however, it is feeding time, and they flap around their prey, wildly palpitating, shoving pens in his hand and vying for photo opportunities with the polite determination of paparazzi who've gone to finishing school.
Squire, who has happily tarried outside the revolving doors, does not seem bothered by the strangely sexual mantra formed by the synchronised, rhythmic calling of his name. It is, he reckons, "organised mobbing. They all bring pens and paper". He signs. He smiles. He obliges. You'd think this was any old teen-titillator linking arms with his financial security.
But this isn't The Charlatans. I t isn't The Verve Mk II. It certainly isn't Menswear. It is John Squire. From The Stone Roses. A seminal myth in action. And the girls know it.
Nobody is better equipped than Squire to send the hardened schoolgirl tracker of Western bands into overdrive. So tall. So dark. So pale. So legendary. And unlike all the past-it rock giants on MTV Asia Rockumentaries, this legend is alive, well-ish and living in a house by a canal outside Lancaster. The Stone Roses! A working band! Who'd have put a wedge of yen on it?
"It's very nostalgic coming back here because this is where it started in a way," says Squire once he's extracted himself from the throng. "I think a lot of the people who were involved realised when they got here last time [1989] that it was a serious thing. You get here and you know you're in Japan -- you're not in Sheffield or Leeds, loading gear into a van. We never got to America the first time round, so this was like the summit."
Aah, the nostalgia. The Es in the underwear and Os formed by Ian Brown's mouth. The curious thing about the Roses is that they are still, nearly eleven months after the release of their delayed and underestimated 'Second Coming' album, 75 per cent a figment of rock memory.
It was an anti-climax, the rolling back of the boulder from the prophets' Welsh studio cave. The album was swamped by the pre-Christmas timing (premature resurrection?); this year's "secret" British dates were scuppered by Reni legging it. The Glastonbury headline slot was lost when Squire fell off his bike and broke his collar bone. With only one British show this year -- a secret gig for the long-suffering inhabitants of Pilton, Glastonbury -- 1995 turned into the year The Roses bloomed invisible.
The global run of Finland, Sweden, Feile, Pilton, Japan and (next) Australia that leads up to the band's British tour at the end of the year is, therefore, partly an exercise in getting up to speed. The road crew, all seven thousand of them, (thanks to the band's insistence on wealth-sharing) take over the first-class bar. Meanwhile, Ian Brown, John, Gary 'Mani' Mounfield, new drummer Robbie Maddix and keyboardist Nigel Ieye Ipinson behave like angels.
We join them, a day after they've arrived, for three days, three gigs and countless glimpses of the fallible, righteous, cautious and very droll humans who inhabit the Stone Roses myth. Yes, the stone bleeds. But sometimes you have to suck it hard.
In the clanking, grey, industrial environs of Tokyo's Blade Runner-ish metropolis, our guide tells us: "When I was in London I took two microdots and three Es at a Primal Scream gig at the Brixton Academy and I saw God. There are two aliens on earth. One is Michael Jackson and the other is Bobby Gillespie." Nice one. Sayonara.
Through the taxi window, in Nintendo-Blaster Square, a giant TV screen prongs Damon Albarn's face at us. Out there, all is low-pop, quasi-paedophiliac advertising, big business and raw fish. By comparison, a Stone Roses gig next to a multi-storey sauna parlour in Club Chitta (pronounced "Shitta"), with live TV screens, Ian Brown-hairstyled Jap kids, £6-a-time beer vending machines and a posse of blokes from back home arguing that Oasis are Man City 'scum' is only mildly surreal.
In the flesh, time has shagged the Stone Roses gently. On stage at Club Chitta, they impersonate their former selves beautifully. The tambourine, the not-giving-a-nish stance, a little more stubble and that's it. The music, though, has blossomed double darkly.
Album One was super-brash sunlight, teenage groove-a-delica. But post-court cases, fatherhood (all of the Roses now have kids) and £2 million of Geffen's money weighing on their karma, man, Album Two turned out to be stormy voodoo blues: the riff- soaked warzone of the 'I Am The Resurrection' coda bursting through the blissful, boy-pop sheen. From The Byrds to Led Zeppelin in one bound? A doctor writes: 'These once loved-up boys, now with devil's music on their back, have gone through some serious psychological shit. I blame John Squire.'
On stage, Squire is now the exquisite axe hero to end all non-metal axe heroes. The flash, new, riff-heavy, Hendrix/Townshend-style tunes allow him to show out like never before. If some of them sounded like jams on the album, they are detonating marmalade live. The very '70s bit of leather thong trailing from his chord-hand wrist speaks volumes. He looks the classic icon. Brown, spot-jogging like a boxer or blank-staring at the crowd is less the centre. Plus, on the first night the 'voice problems' reported in Oslo return, and he off-keys 'I Am The Resurrection' badly. Still, it's a hyper-raunchy, heady, uplifting show.
Back in the dressing room, all is jet-lag, soccer chat and wariness. The crew come and go loudly, the band hide in their corners. Brown peers over his sunglasses, sussing 'the journalist'. The first word he says to me is the Japanese for 'punch'; then something incomprehensibly Mancunian. He exits at speed with two silent Japanese friends in tow. Later, mate.
Down the corridor rolled-up billion-yen notes are being stuffed up noses. But not the band's. On our blurry, post-gig street-wandering, we bump into Mani heading back for the hotel, McDonald's in hand. "Don't be drinking too much beer!" he advises, hearty and grounded as ever. Squire, having flicked through Brit newspaper reports on the War Child album (he designed the sleeve and the band contributed 'Love Spreads') heads for an appointment with a sleeping pill.
For the next two days Squire keeps trying to give me sleeping pills "for the jet lag". This is suspicious.
The next morning Squire wakes up refreshed, pulls on his army trousers and sloppy shirt, re-ruffles his hair and sets off to buy a porta-studio. What does John Squire do on tour? Sit in his room and record on to a four-track. How's that for a re-awakened sense of urgency? He also gives the odd interview.
Currently, the Roses project a kind of pragmatic indifference towards the press, the friction caused by their Big Issue comeback exclusive waning. It's one of their contradictions, along with being passionate but disorganised and arrogant but down to earth. So it's not surprising to sit by the hotel pool with Squire and find he's mostly interested in the odd refractions caused by the see-through swimming pool ("That's very strange, that woman in the pool with the dislocated head"). There's a calculated somnambulance about Squire. A kind of trance state beyond the regular Manc dryness. But he is also warm, funny and egophobic.
Fame arrived at John's door in the form of friends asking for loans -- which he says "hurt" -- and girls camping outside his house. It didn't go down well. "I spent a day crawling round me house on me belly so no-one could see me," he recalls. "It was a terraced street, but there was a garage opposite with a skip outside of it and there were four girls sleeping behind the skip. They'd get up in the morning and try knocking on the door and the windows and peering through the letter box. They were shouting the name of the cats through the door because they'd read them in Smash Hits. I had to crawl to the phone to ask my girlfriend to bring milk home from work 'cos I couldn't get out to buy it."
So re-entering the pop fray after five years has brought mixed feelings. Yes, he agrees, this year's comeback was chaotic but he isn't exactly disappointed. "In a way I'm actually pleased -- well, relieved -- that we got the record out. Because there was a period when I thought it wasn't going to happen. It's still like a formative period for the band. You know, we've got a new drummer, and a keyboard player. It's a bit strange. It's not the finished article yet. But I think it probably will be by the time we start touring in Britain. Which is the most important thing."
The Glastonbury no-show, he says was "embarrassing". But then what could he do with a metal plate (NHS-supplied, doubters), screwed into his collar bone? "I was hoping that I'd get to the hospital and they'd just yank it back into place and say: 'You'll be fine in a week.' But it wasn't."
Certainly there was no shirking involved. The widely held view that The Roses dossed around for five years instead of getting down to work is not one Squire subscribes to. "I didn't consider myself a competent enough player the first time out," he admits. "I spent a lot of time working on that.. I didn't feel qualified or worthy last time."
But he also denies charges that the Roses are now resigned to working hard in order to justify the Geffen cash. "There's more of an incentive not to make a complete twat of yourself on stage," he says. "We never intentionally ducked out of things. It wasn't a case of us being lazy. Which is often an accusation that's levelled at us."
The fact that Oasis recorded their second album in a fraction of the time it took The Roses is, he says, nothing to be proud of. Yes, he's "envious" of their fast work, but he refutes all notions of competition with the Gallaghers. He's a fan. "I'm in competition with myself," he says. "And with this fear that I'll never be able to do it again.. that maybe that song was the last good one."
Deeply unruffled and mischievously oblique, this sleepy-eyed painter of Pollocks once described himself as "miserable, capricious and inscrutable." Today he says: "I've never found it difficult to be an outsider. I think it's genetic. I'm certainly not a gregarious person. I wouldn't agree with you when you say being in a band shapes your whole existence. Maybe that's why we don't inhabit rock'n'roll bars. We don't fully live in that world."
The endless misunderstandings of the Roses could be rooted in the fact that they are genuinely adrift from the mainstream biz ideology. "I'd prefer to have money than not," says Squire. "But I won't do this forever if I'm not enjoying it, for the sake of the money."
Of the original band members, Squire is the one who hasn't yet invested in any 'bricks'. When he does, he'll probably buy something in the Lake District. Considering how little the Roses have been hemmed in by pop life of late, they're all very keen to get away from it ASAP. "Fresh air" is important. Buying aeroplanes isn't.
Squire says having money is not exactly new to him anyway. He had a good job as an animator for a TV company in Manchester. He's had the years on the dole, too. As long as he's "making things" he's happy.
Mani, when he joins us by the pool, is equally non-aspirational. He was pissed off when industry pundits turned on the Roses after they won the Silvertone court case, but nobody in the band paid much attention to George Michael's parallel struggle with Sony. Making It In America is hardly a topic that sets either of them alight.
"Yeah, it matters," says Mani. "But I'm not going to cry myself to sleep every night because my record's not on the Billboard Top Ten the first time we play there. You just work harder the next time. We might end up on the pub circuit, but I doubt it."
So what do you lose sleep over?
Mani: "Nothin' much."
John: "Cheese."
Is it different now you've got kids?
John: "It underlines the fact that there's more to life than this, but I knew that anyway. It's someone else to love, and that can't be a bad thing."
Can you imagine yourself not being part of the band? John: "I have to try pretty hard. I do want to stay with music, whatever happens. or welding."
Did Reni leaving...?
John: "No-one's interested in welding!"
Mani: "He keeps tossing that bait out, but he just gets blanked!"
We'll get to the welding bit later. And the prawn. And Blue Peter.
I keep stepping into the glass-backed hotel lift, bumping into the floating form of Ian Brown and holding 'What did you do last night?' conversations. Ian replies minimally with his karate-trained body language. What sort of lifts has Ian Brown known? Piss-stinking in Manchester? Air-conditioned in New York? However many floors he's risen, he's taken all of his duckin' and divin', swaggering charisma with him. A lot to fit in one lift.
Down in the lobby, Mani waits for Squire. "Where is he? Ironing his f---ing hair?" mutters Mani. "Bunch of vain f---ing bastards. All for a Number One album."
The conversation has turned to the exclusion of the War Child album from the charts, and the theory that EMI pulled strings to ensure that the Blur LP went unopposed to Number One. Everyone in the Roses camp moans. But in their own small way, the Roses have benefited from the Bosnia record. They've discovered they can record a track in one day. "That's more like the approach we want to take to the next album," says Mani. Hallelujah to that.
We sit in heavy Tokyo traffic, nudging our way towards the first show at the Budokan, and Squire gingerly fingers his collar bone. The screws in the shattered bone protrude under his skin and rub where his guitar strap hangs. Despite the padding on his strap, it's still uncomfortable. The Roses' insurance company have banned everyone from 'dangerous sports' while on the road. So no rollerblading round Tokyo for John. "That's a shame," deadpans Squire, staring at the grey suit-clogged pavement. "I've been dying to do that ever since I got here."
The Budokan is a giant, modern, decapitated pagoda of a building. High ceiling. Plastic seats. And a huge Rising Sun flag draped from the centre. The arm-band-wearing security men are briefed by megaphone. In Copenhagen, a fan fell out of the lighting rig and landed onstage in front of Mani, busting "a hole in his head like another mouth". That won't be happening here. Efficiency is the order of the day.
Faced by the culturally shocking phenomenon of a perfectly planned 7pm gig and clean dressing rooms, the Manc lads revert to type. One of the crew is wearing a 'Northern Scum' T-shirt. "If it weren't for us northern scum," lectures Mani, "you wouldn't have a textiles industry and you wouldn't have half the technologies you use, either." Derek Ridgers, VOX's (southern) photographer counters this by casting aspersions on the ability of sometime northern recording artist and actor Jack Duckworth to sing in tune. "He should've formed a Britpop band," quips Mani.
The north-south rivalry, however, is strictly for laughs. This is definitely a post-obstreperous Roses. New drummer Robbie rubs his fingers thoughtfully. "It's easy to do what Reni did," says the former Rebel MC sticksman. "But it's not the style I'm used to, so it gives me blisters." Keyboardist and back-up vocalist Nigel is trusting enough to admit that he played for a while with OMD ("But I wasn't getting much out of it")!
Even the man who ought to have been sent over the edge by the 300-plus days it took to record 'The Second Coming', producer and on-tour soundman Simon Dawson, is strangely serene. "It didn't send me nuts, no. In a way, it was a privilege to have that amount of time in the studio to explore different avenues." Well, he would say that.
Ian Brown emerges from the dressing room lift, carrying a plastic bag and wearing a pin-striped suit jacket with no shirt, half rock star, half businessman. But the jacket's from Oxfam and the trousers (plucked from a wardrobe in his house in Wales) are flares.
"The last time I saw him in that suit, it was still splattered in paint," says one of the crew, referring to the band's folk-legendary paint attack on their old label, Silvertone (The attack was actually on former label, FM Revolver and not Silvertone - Ed). But the lippy Brown of the last campaign is nowhere to be seen in Tokyo. Instead, there's a polite, private, intense man, thanking the catering people, bowing to visiting Japanese bigwigs and answering questions with whispering-guru brevity and fervent eye contact that communicates a good deal more.
"There is pressure," he says, "but it doesn't stop us doing what we do. Pressure is having four kids and living in a tower block with no job. This is good pressure."
There was a time after the Silvertone case when Brown felt like "the music industry was against us", but the exclusion didn't bother him. "I've never looked for cocaine and country houses and hanging out with bands and celebrities," he says. "I've never been interested or wanted it or done it."
For Brown, the five years out has made him more determined to fulfil the band's potential. "Well, no-one wants to see a great band fall over," he says. "So now it's like there's a sense of fulfilling what you're capable of doing."
The arrival of the phalanx of post-baggy Britpop bands has not worried him. He's happy to see Oasis on the scene, partly because they were in his audience in the old days and half the idea back then was to encourage kids to form bands. The fact that Liam appears to have borrowed his on-stage persona is not a problem, either. "Well, me own mother and father say he's got my mannerisms!" he twinkles. Most of the newcomers, however, he dismisses. "With us and the Mondays, we were really into house music, and I loved all that. All these bands aren't into any of that or any of the community thing. They seem to me to be the kids who weren't into dancing, so I don't think they've really progressed anywhere."
Brown himself is an Ecstasy-free zone these days. A little weed, natural buzzes and the joys of fatherhood are his highs now. "Playing tonight, in front of 9,000 people, will be a buzz. But going home and seeing me boy will be a bigger one."
His private learning curve has taken him on past the drug casualties he saw in Manchester and past the delusions of fame and fool's gold.
"We want to be successful everywhere but we won't prostitute ourselves to do it. We're not chasing fame, because it's vacuous and empty and there's nothing there when you get it. If you're doing it because you love music, and you believe in the music that you make, it doesn't matter whether you play to ten people or ten million."
In Ian's bank account this week there is just £1,000. "I'm not a rich man," he shrugs. "I owe a lot of money. Money runs through your fingers and it's gone. Everyone thinks we're loaded, that we're driving round in Bentleys. Let them think it. Every time you see the words Stone Roses, it's Stone Roses, £20 million; Stone Roses, £40 million, but it's gone."
The story about him taking £100,000 in cash out of the bank when the Geffen money came through, then walking round Manchester handing out notes is true, he says. Why did he do it? Because he believes in "giving alms". There is an almost Biblical righteousness to his interviewable self which would be preposterous if it wasn't so convincing.
In his time out from the pop business, he took to travelling, like he'd done in the pre-Roses, mod-on-a scooter days. Ibiza, perhaps? No, Brown's dancin' feet trod the history trail.
"I saw the Holy Steps where they say Jesus walked up before his trial with Pontius Pilate," he recalls. "I walked in and I had shorts on and a vest. And this old priest saw me, and he's, like, hissing. And I'm like: 'Who are you hissing at?' He's going: "Hsssssss! Come in naked. Go out naked.' And they've got the steps where people go up on their knees. They come from all over the world. And they've got steps at the side. So, out of respect, I walk up the steps at the side. When I come back down I look at him and he knows it. And he's like: 'Yes!'"
Is humility an important thing?
"Yes."
But the Stone Roses have often been accused of arrogance.
"If you believe in yourself, others can say that's arrogance. To others you're a beacon of... whatever. Some would say Muhammad Ali was arrogant."
These days, Ian's on-tour CD collection is almost exclusively black. Buju Banton. Biggy Smalls. Redman. Methodman. He only wrote the one song on 'Second Coming', but Brown says he has recently taken up the acoustic guitar and has been writing lyrics.
About what?
"Positivity. And keeping negative people away from you. I can't stand it when you see people in bands and they've got all these things going for them and they're moaning. I can't stand it. I know kids who haven't got shit and they don't moan."
Self-reliance and positivity are the twin pillars of the Brown worldview. The fear of losing it all is not something that bears heavily on a man who's already blown most of it. Mention Blur and Suede, and Brown says: "They seem like they'd do anything. All them bands that take their nipples out and all that." Mention the fact that the Roses could have been more open over the years and he asks: "When were the NME phoning me in '85, '86?" Old scars heal slowly, it would seem.
If The Roses' independence of mind has damaged them this year, there's little sign of it talking to Brown. Yes, he misses Reni, but he's excited about working with Robbie and Nigel. "What we've got now is even stronger." And, no, he's not worried about his voice (although there was talk of a vocal coach in America). Everything he seems to be saying, is coming up roses. But what if... what if he had to cope with being someone who 'used to be in The Stone Roses'?
"Well, that'll come up one day anyway, won't it? Hopefully I'll be 99."
In the cold light of print, Brown's vision of the band (and himself) as some sort of beacon of purity in a sick business might seem fanciful. Live at the Budokan, it is incontrovertible. That night, the show is faultless. From the monumental 'I Wanna Be Adored' opener through the semi-acoustic sit-down run of 'Your Star Will Shine', 'Tightrope', 'Elizabeth My Dear' and 'Tears', it's one long, liquid-gold orgasm.
Out front, 9,000 Japanese raise their arms in the air to salute the endpiece rock-out of 'Made Of Stone'. Even the woman who's watched the whole show through binoculars puts them down in awe. On that form there is a humanity and spirituality (and danceability) to the Roses that none of their successors comes close to. When the beers are cold and foamy, there's Oasis. When the streets are cold and lonely, there's The Roses.
Such is the buzz generated by the show that by 6am nobody's gone to bed. Outside the hotel, the all-night fan-vigil continues. The band, however, have caught sake madness. In the Western model hang- out the Lexington Queen club, the Ying Yang bar and some dawn-patrol private party, Ian Brown is slugging back the rice wine that will, in a few hours, have him puking all over his room. Even reformed characters have their off-days.
The following day, the scene backstage at the Budokan is a sorry one. "Are you supposed to drink it all? It tastes like Old Spice." Squire sips a scary local "hangover cure. Mani is quiet. Brown is asleep under the table. This is a trashed band. They open up a little, very slowly. Squire won't utter more than a monosyllable about his coke problem, which apparently contributed to the late arrival of the album. He says he's happy. But he also says there are "deep wells of despair that I don't want to uncover".
And then, nuttier memories start to surface. About how Mani dreams of planes landing on his head. And John wakes up thinking he's been tattooed with a map of the world. And how a wide-awake John once saw The Green Goblin from Spiderman comics floating past the end of his bed.
Slowly, the frost melts. Both John and Mani start to (half) smile. When Squire was a kid he got an autograph from Blue Peter's Biddy Baxter. "I sent her a picture of me guinea pig, having a bath in a kitchen bowl," he says. "I got a Blue Peter badge and a signed letter from Biddy Baxter, 'cos it went up on the pictures-of-your-pets board."
And he's not the only one implicated in the Roses/Blue Peter conspiracy.
"Ian got a limerick published in the 1972 Blue Peter Book Of Limericks," laughs Mani. "Well, we have got a new tune called 'There Was A Young Fella From Slough'!"
And curiouser and curiouser it gets, until talk turns to John's painting, currently in a 'construction' phase.
The welding?
"Yeah," says Squire. "It's.. I wanna make.. a prawn. Out of scrap metal."
You want to make a prawn?
"Yeah, a big prawn out of scrap steel and then spray it with salt and leave it outside and let it go rusty. I thought 'scrap steel seafood' was a good, er, sentence. And when I used to live in Chorlton there was a short cut through Beach Road, and someone there had these.. monsters that he'd made, out of girders and exhausts and railway tracks and stuff. His garden was deep in grass, and he had these..
" Stop. Enough. In truth, if the Roses had wanted to be any old band, they could have dissected their patently human souls long ago. But as the first words on the first track on their first album say: "I don't have to sell my soul/It's already in me." They wanted to be adored. They wanted to be the best band in the world. And they knew that the best band in the world existed up there on stage and not in soundbites in a jam jar. Their stubbornness over the years has allowed the magic to survive.
Who's the best band in the world?
Mani: "It'd be a bit cute of me to say us, wouldn't it?"
POST SCRIPT: When I'd finished talking to Ian Brown, he did something strange. As if there was something he wanted to say that he couldn't quite explain. He picked up the headphones of his CD player, put them on my head, flicked to a track called 'Complaint' on the 'Til Shiloh' album by Buju Banton and MC Garnett Silk, and walked away.
The words go as follows: "Blessed are he when men shell revile you/ And persecute you, say all manner of evil/ Against you falsely, for Jah's sake/ Rejoice I say and be exceedingly glad/ For great is your reward/ For so persecute they the prophets/ Before you and I."
Earthly praise and royalty cheques presumably count for nish when you are breaking into heaven. Zen Zeppelin are back for their crowns.
Back To Media 1995