The Stone Roses: War and Peace

by Spence, Simon

  ‘Geno was like, You’re a star, go do the thing,’ Brown recalled. ‘I’d never heard of him apart from that “Geno” song. John was asking me to be a singer at the same time and I wasn’t interested, but now it was, like, okay.’

  After recruiting Brown, Couzens contacted Squire to suggest starting a new group. ‘John said the only way he would do it was if Pete Garner came and played bass,’ Couzens said.

  Squire was still living at home and hanging out with Garner again after interesting him in helping to make an animated film independently at Cosgrove Hall. They spent their Sundays painstakingly putting footage together. ‘Just to get five seconds of footage you’ve got to do hours of work,’ said Garner. ‘John was doing all the work, moving all the models and stuff.’ Garner found the process tedious but was in the right place at the right time: ‘John said to me they were getting The Patrol back together and Ian was going to be the singer. And John asked, did I want to play bass? He said he’d teach me.’

  The line-up would be Squire and Couzens on guitar, Garner on bass and Brown on vocals. With the addition of Si Wolstencroft, it was basically the old Patrol gang again. After a year and a half of playing with Johnny Marr and Andy Rourke in Freak Party, Wolstencroft had quit the group. In that time they had tried out a number of singers. Marr was even said to have been keen on having Brown front the band at one stage. Finally they had settled on Morrissey, changed their name to The Smiths and made their first demo recordings. ‘I just didn’t fancy it,’ said Wolstencroft. ‘I didn’t like the cut of Morrissey’s jib and the rest is history.’ The Smiths replaced Wolstencroft with Mike Joyce, signed to Rough Trade Records and quickly scored two massive hits with ‘This Charming Man’ and ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ before releasing their eponymous debut album in February 1984. ‘We watched them go from being kids rehearsing, to being on Top of the Pops, to being a big and important band,’ said Garner. ‘So once you’ve seen your mates on telly, you’re like, Fuck, we can do this.’

  Initially the old gang rehearsed in the cellar at Couzens’ parents’ house where they also spent much time playing snooker and watching videos like Texas Chain Saw Massacre. There were also run-ins with the police and CB radio enthusiasts as the band cruised the streets, crammed into Couzens’ two-seater MG Midget. ‘Andy had a CB in his MG and we’d get on it and say, You’re all a bunch of dickheads, and they’d try and hunt us down,’ said Wolstencroft.

  It was in Couzens’ cellar where the as yet unnamed band got their early songs together. ‘Nowhere Fast’ was the first, then came ‘All Stitched Up’, ‘I Can’t Take It Anymore’, ‘Mission Impossible’ and ‘Tradjic Roundabout’. ‘The music was purely John,’ said Garner. ‘When we started rehearsing, we’d look to John, who’d worked something out at home, and he played that and we’d work that up, play it over and over. The next rehearsal John would have another riff. Ian co-wrote the lyrics, but the creative input for the music was John.’

  Brown, as Washington had forewarned, struggled at first. ‘We started a few rehearsals and everyone’s like, Fuck, we can’t put up with that,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to have singing lessons.’ He went to see an ‘old woman near Victoria Station’ called Mrs Rhodes. ‘She’d get me there at six o’clock, open the window with everyone coming home from work and have me wailing “After the Gold Rush” [Neil Young] and “Strawberry Fields Forever” [The Beatles] out the window,’ he said. It was a challenge. ‘She said, If you can’t do it, go home. So I thought, Fuck, I’ll stick it out. I did three weeks with her.’

  Every week names for the band were suggested and rejected until finally Squire came up with The Stone Roses. ‘We asked him, What does it mean?’ said Garner. ‘He said, It doesn’t mean anything, it’s hard and soft, which is sort of what we are. We went, Yeah that’ll do.’ It was also the name of a 1959 thriller by Sarah Gainham. ‘That was just a mad coincidence,’ said Garner. Squire later picked up a copy of the book in a charity shop in Chorlton.

  A key early influence on the sound of The Stone Roses was a band called Empire. ‘John and I were obsessed with them,’ said Garner, who was now running the record department at Paperchase. Empire was Generation X guitarist Bob ‘Derwood’ Andrews’s band and Garner was pushing their Expensive Sound album heavily at Paperchase. Squire was also exploring 1960s psychedelic music, particularly The Misunderstood: Cherry Red Records had released a compilation of their work in 1982 called Before the Dream Faded. ‘John turned me on to The Misunderstood and I used to love that record as well,’ said Garner.

  The band listened to The New York Dolls too, following the output of the group’s charismatic guitarist Johnny Thunders, as well as the debut 1967 Pink Floyd album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn; Love’s 1967 album, Forever Changes; and another of Garner’s favourites, MC5. Couzens said they listened to The Beatles’ Revolver ‘a lot’, while Squire said he ‘spent a lot of time with “Red House” ’, a track from Hendrix’s Are You Experienced. ‘A lot of the licks [on that track] made it on to Roses records later.’

  The Stone Roses may have had high hopes, but with Garner and Brown still learning their roles they were more just mates having a laugh. So when the opportunity arose for Wolstencroft to join a real band in January 1984, he jumped at it. The Colourfield were the new act of former Specials and Fun Boy Three front man Terry Hall. Wolstencroft passed the audition and for a while The Stone Roses continued to rehearse without a drummer. Various people came down to Couzens’ cellar to try out, including Chris Goodwin. ‘There’s a few drummers out there who could say, I was in the Roses for one rehearsal,’ said Garner. None of them stuck around for much longer. ‘We couldn’t find anybody,’ said Garner. ‘So either John or Ian wrote a “drummer wanted” ad and put it up in A1, the music store on Oxford Road. I’m assuming they might have put down influences to indicate what kind of band we were. I don’t remember if they put down Generation X, The Clash and Empire, but we were into those bands.’

  Alan ‘Reni’ Wren had just turned twenty when he saw the ad in May 1984. He lived in Gorton, a rough part of inner-city Manchester, and was a self-confessed ‘stinker’, or ‘smelly’, into the New Wave of British Heavy Metal scene. A live-wire jobbing drummer with an eye on the big time, he was playing with a number of local rock bands, such as The Dealers and Tora Tora. He had landed in the latter band after his friend Simon Wright left the group to join rock legends AC/DC in 1983. Ian Paice of Deep Purple was a key influence on Reni’s drumming style, and he listed the bands UFO, AC/DC, Thin Lizzy and Van Halen as favourites. He was, as Brown said, a ‘proper rocker’ who used to go to the annual Monsters of Rock festival at Donnington Park. He was also in a vocal harmony group and a fine singer.

  Reni was born in April 1964, the second of six siblings. He held down a day job as a signwriter, having studied graphic design at college, although he said he never completed the course, ‘kicked out’ for missing classes. Reni had displayed freakish abilities on drums as a child, playing on the kit set up in the pub his mum and dad ran in Denton.

  Instead of writing down the number on the ad, Reni took it off the wall and stuck it in his pocket so nobody else would see it. ‘I bet he thought, Who the fuck is Empire?’ said Couzens. ‘The number in the advert was my house, and to this day I think he said his name was René, with the French accent.’ Reni didn’t have his own transport, so Brown and Couzens went to pick him up from his home for the initial audition. ‘He was from the other side of the tracks,’ said Couzens. ‘He had a Rottweiler called Bella the size of a big bloke.’

  Couzens and Brown loaded up Reni’s drums and the three drove to Decibel studios in Ancoats, where The Smiths had rehearsed. ‘They brought him in and we were working on something,’ said Garner, who recorded all the band’s rehearsals so they could listen back and sift out all the good bits to keep. ‘We said, The song goes like this – thinking he’d listen for five minutes and then join in. Within ten seconds he was in and the band sounded better than it had ever sounded.’<
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  ‘He changed us overnight,’ said Couzens. ‘No Reni, no Roses. It would have faltered like all the other things John and Ian and I had done. John was a punk guitarist when we met Reni, but Reni could play anything. He had a musical talent none of us had.’

  ‘When I went to the audition I thought they made a horrible racket,’ said Reni. ‘But I was struck by their commitment. The whole group was such an oddball collection of long-hairs, scruffs and smoothies I just had to join.’

  According to Garner, ‘We never said, Shall we have him in the band. He was basically in the band, why would you not have him? He was easily the most talented musician of us all, way beyond everybody, including John. We were all pissing about a bit. He was a serious drummer who could have joined any band. He’d played with some quite big local bands from his area and done proper gigs. We all felt pretty lucky he’d joined us. Rehearsing got more enjoyable because he could play any style of music. That’s when it got serious, from the moment Reni turned up.’

  And, said Garner, Reni fitted into the gang straight away. ‘It was bizarre. He was into a totally different type of music, he came from a totally different part of Manchester, but instantly I loved him.’ Reni didn’t think The Stone Roses were in any way musically brilliant, they weren’t, but he thought they had something even if he wasn’t quite sure what it was. He was also keen to broaden his horizons, and happy for the gang to introduce him to their haunts and influences. It was not a one-way dialogue: Reni turned the circumspect band on to AC/DC.

  The Stone Roses continued rehearsing at Decibel for a few weeks before moving to nearby rehearsal rooms at Out of the Blue on Blossom Street, where for a time they shared a room with Easterhouse, who were signed to Rough Trade and being tipped as the next Smiths. When some of Easterhouse’s gear went missing the Roses were kicked out and moved to Spirit on Tariff Street, close to Piccadilly Station. John Breakell, who owned the basement set-up, would become a key benefactor. Since opening in 1981 Spirit had been home to The Smiths, Simply Red, Carmel and the Happy Mondays. It cost £6.50 for an eight-hour day, but Breakell would often let the Roses rehearse for nothing. ‘They’d say, I’ll give you £2, John, I’ll give you £3 next week,’ he said. ‘But it never materialized.’

  The Roses recorded their first demo at Spirit in an overnight session on the newly installed Brenell eight-track. The studio was basic. ‘Half the mics didn’t work, the faders were all crackly,’ said Breakell. The sound of the toilet flushing often interfered with recordings, and ‘the wiring was so shit, when you put the hairdryer on in the toilet it put the eight-track machine on’. Having borrowed the keys from the cleaner, the Roses invited themselves into the studio to record four songs: ‘Nowhere Fast’, ‘Mission Impossible’, ‘Misery Dictionary’ and ‘Tradjic Roundabout’. The band played the producer of the demo, Tim Oliver, a Slaughter & the Dogs track as an indication of the sound they hoped for. ‘We were looking for something with a bit of attitude,’ Couzens said. ‘That’s what we were getting at, the attitude.’

  The first Breakell knew of the recording was when he got a frantic phone call from his secretary the next morning saying the band wouldn’t let her in and asking if she should call the police. ‘I realized it was The Stone Roses, so I said, Leave ’em, and I took the phone off the hook and went back to sleep,’ he said. He was also in for a surprise when he discovered Reni and Squire had painted the live room overnight. ‘It wasn’t the Pollock style,’ he said. ‘It was a bit mad. Reni was an amazing character.’

  The four songs the Roses recorded would become mainstays in their early repertoire. ‘There were a few other early songs such as “Coming of Age” that lasted a month and we didn’t continue with,’ said Garner. ‘Misery Dictionary’, which the Roses would retitle ‘So Young’, was written as a reaction to The Smiths. ‘We were all young and enjoying ourselves and our mates were in a band that were known for misery, shyness and depression,’ Garner said. ‘It didn’t seem right to us.’ The band also changed the title of ‘Nowhere Fast’ to ‘Just a Little Bit’, after realizing The Smiths also had a song called ‘Nowhere Fast’.

  The Roses limited the demo to a hundred copies. ‘For an eight-track, it’s the best demo that’s ever been done – definitely,’ Brown said. He was proud of his lyrics to ‘Tradjic Roundabout’, which name-checked Martin Luther King. ‘They had some kind of passion. It’s like being hit by a ton of bricks, but there’s always a tune.’ Squire would concur. ‘Wild sounds with attractive melodies,’ he said of the band’s early output. ‘We chose the name The Stone Roses because it reflects the contradiction.’

  Couzens and Brown were the most proactive members, often driving down to London for the dual purpose of a night out and to hustle the demo tape. It was on one of these trips that the pair met Caroline Reed, who would become The Stone Roses’ first manager. Reed already managed the Rhyl-based Clash-influenced Mercenary Skank, and offered the Roses their first gig supporting the band at an anti-heroin benefit at the Moonlight Club in West Hampstead in October 1984. Brown had seen an ad Reed placed in Sounds for ‘bands wanted’, sent the Spirit demo off to her, and told her they were big on the Manchester scene. ‘She didn’t know it was our first gig,’ he said.

  The Roses rehearsed hard in Spirit for their debut, adding new songs to their set, including a cover of Nazz’s ‘Open My Eyes’ (Nazz had been Todd Rundgren’s 1960s breakthrough act). There were new originals, such as ‘Heart on the Staves’, written according to Garner because ‘the tortured artist, false emotion thing annoyed us’, and ‘Tell Me’. With its ‘You can’t tell me anything’ lyric, it was ‘Rage Against the Machine before you were allowed to swear’. Another original was ‘Getting Plenty’. ‘Not about sex,’ said Garner. ‘I don’t think there’s a single song the band has done that’s cheesy, singing about chicks like that. That would have been wrong.’ And there was ‘Fall’, a barbed song written about the Factory Records/Haçienda scene. ‘All of us felt the Factory thing was a bit pretentious,’ said Garner. Factory, famed for Joy Division and run by Tony Wilson, dominated the city – especially now New Order were firmly established. The Haçienda, said Garner, was ‘generally empty with an awful sound and freezing cold’.

  ‘We were very anti-Factory, anti-Haçienda,’ said Couzens. ‘James Anderton, the Greater Manchester police chief, had shut everything down apart from this one place that monopolized everything, the Haçienda, and it was a dump. John and I were members really early on, but it was the only place to go. So it became a resentful thing, this big shining light in this sea of shit. Manchester was a horrible, dirty, scruffy place.’

  The band was so determined to impress at their debut gig they even rehearsed stage moves. ‘We were all young, energetic lads so we’d enjoy ourselves,’ said Couzens. ‘Leading up to London we were all excited.’

  The Roses were an instant hit in London. They soundchecked by playing ‘Open My Eyes’, and on the strength of that Caroline Reed offered to manage them. There was also a surprise guest that night: The Who’s Pete Townshend. He was equally impressed. ‘We didn’t know when we set out to do our first gig that we were going to be supporting Pete Townshend,’ said Garner. ‘That was pretty surreal. I believe the previous gig Townshend had done was some massive stadium on The Who’s farewell tour.’

  ‘We came off stage and Townshend was, like, You look really good up on stage and your drummer’s great,’ said Brown. ‘Then he said, as an end of the night thing, I want to play a couple of tunes, and he asked Reni, Do you want to do it? Reni’s like, Yeah! He ended up playing three or four The Who tunes with Townshend.’

  ‘One of them Reni didn’t know,’ said Garner. ‘I was on the side of the stage and Reni mouthed to me, How does it go? … What an experience. But I was thinking, Shit, man, our secret weapon is out of the bag. My worst fear had come true. Reni was going to get poached – oh fuck, he’s going to join The Who now. First gig and we’ve lost him.’

  Squire shared the same fear. ‘We were to
ld he’d said he really wanted to use Reni on his next LP. We were like, Shit, Reni’s going to leave. Townshend’s nicking Reni.’

  ‘At that time Reni was awe-inspiring,’ said Couzens. ‘To play with him made us sound phenomenal; he was just this force. Just to watch him play was inspirational. That’s what got Pete Townshend that night. He was inspired by what he’d seen.’

  ‘We were buzzing on the way back to Manchester,’ said Garner. ‘Can you imagine? We came back thinking, Fucking hell, we’ve made it.’

  Caroline Reed organized for the Roses to support Mercenary Skank at Exeter Labour Club and the Kensington Ad Lib club in November. The two bands were not a natural fit. The Ad Lib gig was reviewed in Sounds. Mercenary Skank were praised but the Roses panned, described as ‘one-paced and blustering’ and ‘loudmouthed and careless’.

  ‘The review and the next few gigs were the comedown, back to earth,’ said Garner. ‘Playing in front of two men and a dog and no one’s really interested.’ The review had been especially disappointing because Sounds was the weekly music paper Garner and Brown preferred over rivals NME and Melody Maker. Brown particularly ‘knew what journalists did what at Sounds’, said Garner, and he targeted Garry Johnson as the man there most likely to give the Roses a leg-up.