This record, for many, many people of a certain age, particularly in the UK, the record, was released exactly thirty years today. This feels worth discussing, especially for someone of my mature years. I have quite mixed feelings at this remove about both the record and the band. It's a good album of course. No it's a great album. A great, great record. Inventive, creative and very, very exciting. At least it was. But from my perspective the march of time has done something to it.
It needs to be remembered what the British music scene had been like when the Stone Roses first emerged. It was frankly, unbelievably drab. The Smiths, probably the finest and most important British band of the Eighties were long gone. The Jesus & Mary Chain, who had briefly shaken things up for a few seasons had lost their spark. A hundred lesser bands had tried to ignite their own and failed. Interest had largely moved away from white British guitar bands towards dance music and hip hop and then this record landed to little initial fanfare on the incredibly obscure independent Silvertone record label early in May 1989.
As the months of the year passed, the word on the record and the band built. The Happy Mondays rose to similar prominence during the same period, the Stones to the Roses Beatles and people began to talk of Madchester and The Hacienda. By Christmas, as the Eighties became the Nineties, and the two bands had appeared on a famous Top of the Pops, it was clear they were the zeitgeist.
I listened all the way through to the album today for the first time in years and I'm listening to it again now and it is a quite brilliant record. Songs that have annoyed the living hell out of me when played again and again and again on my local pub's jukebox fall into their natural context and shine once more. The Stone Roses had a number of things going for them. The three musicians, Squires, Mounfield and Wren, (Mani and Reni) were great players. Mani and Reni particular were a rhythm section capable of being genuinely funky, something not seen in a British band since the days of Led Zeppelin. They had written a clutch of gorgeously sunny and quite fabulous guitar songs the likes of which we probably hadn't heard in Britain since the Sixties from whence the inspiration for all this clearly stemmed.
Also they had Ian Brown. While never a great singer, he was a great frontman and a great mouth. Someone who had learned as much from Muhammed Ali as he had from John Lennon. The record's vision, which was largely projected by Brown, with some help from Squires, was positively lysergic. Some of Brown's lines fell flat to me, at the time and still, the 'so good to have equalised' one which presaged Brit Pop and Loaded's obsession with football. Also some of their misanthropy verging on misogyny borrowed clearly from the Stones. But the fascination with the imagery, (lemons on the album sleeve), and sloganeering of Paris '68 was something else altogether. 'Sometimes I fantasise. Where the streets are cold and lonely. And the cars they burn below me.' Very difficult to beat. Beneath the pavement the beach. They really did inspire some genuine, if possibly misguided revolutionary zeal for a few years. But I was never quite sure what the Roses really wanted to happen most. The football or the political analogy. That's pop stars for you!
I loved listening through to the record again. Like I said, I haven't heard it in full for years having lost my copy many moons ago unaccountably and vowed never to replace it. Like the essential obscurist that I am, I enjoyed the songs I hadn't heard for such a long time most. The fabulous Don't Stop, a backwards treatment of Waterfall which frankly clouts the former out of the ballpark. Bye Bye Badman. The curt anti-monarchist reel Elizabeth My Dear at the start of Side Two, (re-cast from the bones of Scarborough Fair of course). Sugar Spun Sister which may even be my favourite thing on the whole album. Told you I was an obscurist. Shoot You Down. The utterly crystalline intro to This is the One.
Of course I've missed out all the hits. The ones everybody puts on the jukebox all the time. The ones that made the Stone Roses legend. I Wanna Be Adored, She Bangs the Drums, Made of Stone and I am the Resurrection. the ones that propagated the myth and have put the spring in the step of umpteen bowl headed clones ever since and here lies my problem with the record, regardless of how good it was and is. They've been played too often, done to death and lost their shine. Just my take of course. But I certainly don't think I'm the only one who feels that way
So what does that tell us except that I'm a bit of a snob. This is a great album I say again but the legend of the Stone Roses burns a lot less brightly in 2019 that it did in 1990. There are other records to play. Put on Can, The Velvet Underground, Kraftwerk, Funkadelic, The Beatles, The Stones, Bowie and Roxy. All artists who I imagine inspired The Stone Roses themselves. Don't succumb to uniformity as even this band did after their initial explosion in 1989. Fool's Gold was great of course but how often does anyone listen to their second album? Not very often I'd imagine. So, happy birthday to The Stone Roses and thanks for the memories but I think I'll put the idea of listening to the record away again for a while now and I don't think I'll ever replace my original vinyl version. Some memories are best for the most part left in the past.
There you go! And I managed not to mention Oasis once.
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