In 1989, during my last year at university, shortly before The Stone Roses hit the motherlode, I had the chance to see them at a small arts venue in Norwich with a good friend, (the main gig going companion of my lifetime). I had a cold so didn't go. A cold ! It's probably the greatest missed gig opportunity of my lifetime.
I bought their landmark debut either before or shortly after this lost opportunity. It's an album that unaccountably went missing from my collection at some point between then and now. I've no idea how. I kind of felt that it was so ubiquitous and I knew it so well that I didn't need to replace it. but I saw a reasonably priced reissue in a record shop recently and went ahead and purchased it. I'm glad I did. Frankly it's a record every collection needs.
The Stone Roses were a very unfortunate band in some respects and a very hubristic bunch of fools in others. Unfortunate in that they signed to a dreadful and exploitative record label in Silvertone which hanstrung their efforts to build on this astonishing album. Foolish in that they believed their own and the critical hype that built steadily and rather incredibly on its release, to such a degree that they succumbed to protracted in-fighting, ego and ludicrous cocaine indulgence leading to a second record, The Second Coming, which in no ways compares to their first. None of this detracts in the remotest degree from how good The Stone Roses is. Pitchfork gives it a Ten out of Ten grading for its review of its re-release and frankly it deserves it. Age does not wither it. Even remotely.
It's strange this record should still work so well. Much of the malarkey surrounding the Madchester Scene from which they emerged seemed ludicrous and ill-advised even at the time. Men in bowl cuts and flares primate dancing in The Hacienda, caned out of their heads. In many ways the record foregrounds the least attractive characteristics of the Mancunian working class male. Arrogant, self-regarding, always apparently tetering on the edge of an unwarranted violent outburst and very, very male.
Despite all this baggage the record works. Because it's so crystalline and carefree, impeccably produced by John Leckie, a key factor, it doesn't sound like an Indie record but has a widescreen quality far beyond their contemporaries. The Roses were also top drawer players, John Squire of course, a guitar hero of the old school, but crucially the rhythm section of Mani and Reni who had genuine funk and swing of the sort rarely seen in a white guitar band before or since.
Given this bedrock it doesn't really matter that singer Ian Brown's range was limited to say the least. He was a proper frontman, with all of the swagger of Lennon and Jagger and had a great line in surly, cutting and cocksure lyrics. The band also had a politically righteous edge. The lemons on the cover of the record over its Jackson Pollock backdrop were inspired by the Paris '68 uprising where protectors would suck them to counteract the effect of the waves of police tear gas. 'Beneath the pavement, the beach.'
The album still sounds impossibly ambitious and fresh. Shortly afterwards the band were photographed on the front of the NME in the French Alps and it seemed incredibly fitting. There's a sense of brave, freewheeling adventuring, of exploration on every song here and it also has a magnificent flow that is highly geographically specific. This record could only have been made by young men from the North of England.
Listening through to it now, I go most for some of its more unheralded moments. Bye Bye Badman, Sugar Spun Sister, Shoot You Down. Much else here has been ridiculously overplayed, particularly by the Mancunian, (who's actually from Jarrow), on my local's jukebox. Never mind. That all sounds fine in its natural context too. It's by far the best British guitar record of the late Eighties and probably bests anything that British guitar bands came up with in the following decade too. It still sounds that good.
It doesn't come out of a vacuum of course. Most of all it evokes the rush of the Sixties Beat Explosion. Of those fabulous Beatles, Stones and Who records but also moments of Love and The Beach Boys too. The funkiness of Clinton, Funkadelic and War. The Indie sound of Primal Scream's Velocity Girl which definitely made an impression on Brown and Co. And also their own thing.
I'm so glad I own this again. It's much better heard in its entirity than as individual songs coming out of a jukebox or on the radio. It's a deeply singular statement that eradicates some of the ridiculousness of what came next as the band succumbed to a slightly farcical, Icarus-like slow motion descent to earth as their wings melted and their drug intake rocketed. Here though they aimed for the sun and it's still staggering how high they shot. It's a simply sublime record.
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