The Stone Roses: War and Peace

by Spence, Simon

  The graffiti stunt was a spectacular success in one respect, as it put the band on the front cover of the Manchester Evening News and got them television exposure on the regional ITV network Granada. But the disinterest in the band was replaced by disgust. ‘That caused us a lot of problems,’ Brown said. ‘The Manchester music press blacked us out, they pretended that we didn’t exist because they thought that we were the barbers of all Manchester architecture.’

  ‘I had the police at my door saying, If you don’t tell us who did it we’ll arrest you,’ said Jones. ‘I said, I can’t stop fans doing it.’ Reni was unrepentant. ‘As far as I’m concerned all the spraying did was brighten up the town’s architecture which was rather dull and grey,’ he said. ‘It was our town and we’d do what the fuck we want there,’ said an equally belligerent Couzens. ‘If you weren’t on Factory you weren’t anybody. The graffiti thing was very much a statement: you will take notice.’

  After the graffiti the Roses struggled to get booked in their home-town. They wouldn’t play live again for three months. They tried and failed to get a slot at the new and influential Boardwalk club that had hosted Sonic Youth and Primal Scream. ‘They said, We’re not having you lot in here,’ said Couzens.

  ‘That’s when Ian and Andy went to see Gareth Evans at the International,’ said Garner. ‘Any opportunity was an opportunity, and we went to see what Gareth had to say – to see if he could do anything for us. I felt like we were cheating on Howard by going to check out what this other guy could offer us.’ Jones knew Evans well, and claimed to have set up the initial meeting to introduce the Roses to the man who would become their new manager.

  ‘We went to interview Gareth and thought he was a nutter,’ said Couzens. ‘But the key was he ran the International, so we could get gigs and it was free rehearsal space. We thought we could use him.’

  ‘I think we’d been in the room two minutes,’ said Brown, ‘and Gareth said, This is what I do, and he dropped his trousers and he had got these underpants with an apple on the side. “Pommes” they were called, and he was dealing in them.’

  ‘He was trying to impress us, saying he could sell anything to anyone, anywhere, anytime,’ said Squire. ‘He had a whole box of them in the corner. But he insisted on taking off his trousers and trying to sell us the underpants he was wearing.’

  ‘We thought he was crazy, but funny,’ said Brown. ‘We got on well with him. We thought he was Al Capone, and he thought he was Al Capone too. But we wanted that kind of guy, a Frank DiLeo [the cigar-chomping, suspected-Mafioso, one-time manager of Michael Jackson]. We wanted our manager to be as well known as us. All the great groups had famous managers, so we needed a guy like that. We clicked straight away.’

  Squat and charismatic, with a wicked sense of humour, Evans made no secret of his various schemes. He did not exude trustworthy qualities. Nonetheless, Evans offered the band unlimited free rehearsal space at the International and free drinks and entrance to all the gigs he was putting on there. Despite never having managed a band before, his attitude chimed with Brown. ‘He didn’t have any fear and that appealed to us,’ Brown said. ‘He didn’t believe anyone was out of reach.’

  Evans was in his mid-thirties. He had grown up in Wales and moved to Manchester in the 1960s in his early teens. In that decade he would claim to have been one of Manchester’s top mods, running the city’s prominent Jigsaw club and rubbing shoulders with Eric Clapton, Elton John and Keith Moon. He’d run a chain of hairdressing shops called Gareth and Colin Crimpers in the 1970s before he launched a salon design company, moved into sports retailing and finally ended up dealing gold bullion. From there he’d acquired, with his business partner Matthew Cummins, the International. The club had overtaken the Haçienda to become the key live venue in Manchester, and Evans and Cummins now owned a second, bigger venue – the International II.

  The Roses wanted a manager in the classic mould, and they had found one. Jackson had DiLeo, the Stones had Andrew Loog Oldham, the Pistols had Malcolm McLaren – and The Stone Roses would have Gareth Evans. Incredibly, given the competition, history would judge Evans as the most astonishing band manager of the lot.

  It was impossible for the Roses to truly know what they were getting into. His given name was not Gareth Evans, for a start. It was Ian Bromley. The name change was rumoured to be the result of a teenage brush with the law. The bond between Evans and Cummins was ultra-tight. Evans’s first wife, with whom he had a son who had Down’s syndrome, was Cummins’s sister. They were deliberately running the ‘Pommes’ underwear factory into the ground. The story was that there had been a government scheme offering businesses a certain amount of money, tens of thousands, if the company could raise a certain amount of capital. The underpants were a ruse to secure the government money, which, once deposited in the pair’s bank account, was withdrawn immediately.

  Dougie James was someone who could testify to Evans and Cummins’s business charms. Soul singer James was introduced to the pair in 1984 while planning to buy a hotel called the Andalusia on Palatine Road. ‘A friend of mine said, I’ve got two guys who’d be useful to you, they deal in finance,’ said James. Evans was dating a girl called Paige, whose father was a gold dealer and ran a jewellery shop in Manchester. It was Paige’s father who had enabled Evans’s entrée into the speculative world of gold dealing. ‘At the first meeting Gareth brought £50,000 in a plastic bag and stuck it on the bar and said, That’s what I’m dealing in,’ said James. ‘It really wasn’t his, it belonged to the gold dealer.’

  Nonetheless, James agreed that Evans and Cummins should get involved in the deal, not just to buy the Andalusia but also a club that was going out of business called Genevieve’s. They bought both and renamed the club the International. James, who had experience promoting at Manchester’s influential punk club Rafters, hired legendary promoter Roger Eagle to book acts for the new club, and his shrewd policy had seen the International become an instant success. In the first two months the club made £22,000 profit. It was only when it came to divvying up the money that James discovered that Evans and Cummins had, in taking care of the paperwork for the club, put the International in just their own names, effectively excluding James from the club’s ownership. James would spend the next five years battling Evans and Cummins in court over this issue, ultimately successfully.

  The International and International II had gone on to become huge successes, regularly hosting up to twenty-five bands a month. Evans was obsessed with putting up posters for the venues and kept rolls of them and a bucket of paste and brushes in his beat-up MG Montego, always looking for an opportunity to slap up a few. Manchester had the largest conglomerate of students in Western Europe, many attracted by The Smiths and New Order, and Evans also shrewdly targeted this audience. There was an element of chaos to his method, but he got things done, his club was happening and there was a phenomenal energy surrounding him and the International clubs.

  Yet, despite his success, Evans remained an outsider on the trendy Manchester scene, which was ruled by the Haçienda and Factory and more lately the Boardwalk. He didn’t like Tony Wilson, thought he was a ‘toff’ and up himself. When the Roses came knocking on his door, Evans was as eager as the band to tear down that established order.

  6.

  Gareth

  Evans and Cummins drew up a management contract for the Roses as the band began their new regime of daily rehearsals in the basement of International II. It was an old dancehall on Plymouth Grove, a few hundred metres from the International, where 2,000 punters could be crammed in. It had a huge basement with a labyrinth of rooms. Amid the beer cellars and dressing rooms, the Roses turned one room into their new home.

  Andy Couzens’ father Colin had paid for a lawyer to look out for his son’s band, and Evans was fuming when Couzens informed him that he wanted the lawyer to look over the contract. ‘Gareth didn’t want that sort of advice around,’ said Couzens. ‘He said to me, What is it with you? You come with a lawyer
attached?’ Evans wanted Couzens out of the band. ‘He even offered me £10,000 to leave the band. Ian said, Take the ten grand and we’ll split it and you can join again tomorrow. Gareth even accused me of being an undercover drugs officer.’ Evans attempted to intimidate Couzens by parking his car outside the guitarist’s parents’ house and waiting there. ‘I used to come out of my drive and he’d be there. I’d drive off and he’d follow me. I don’t know why. Proper nutter.’

  Evans had been quick to spot where the power base was in the band and was busy treating Squire and Brown like superstars, showering them with gifts and meals. ‘Gareth would split the band,’ said Couzens. ‘You’d get John and Ian and then Reni and me, with Pete sat on the fence somewhere in the middle. He always had a wad of money in an elastic band and he would drop it in front of you thinking you’d be impressed.’ Couzens never was.

  He was not the only one to warn the band about the contract Evans and Cummins wanted them to sign. Chief roadie Slim advised them to see a lawyer. Even his own staff didn’t entirely trust Evans. Paula Greenwood, now handling press and promotions at the International, also told Brown to get legal advice. Despite his best efforts, and mainly due to Couzens’ belligerence, nothing was officially signed to make Evans and Cummins the new managers of The Stone Roses when, on 5 March 1986, the band played their first dates of the year. After supporting The Chiefs of Relief at Warwick University and returning to the same venue three weeks later to support goth outfit Love and Rockets, the band played at Manchester University on 10 May, where they again wore their matching striped shirts. Brown’s hair was newly shorn, with bleached highlights, and, as well as being hugged by two girls invading the stage, he was back out singing among the crowd, trying to provoke a reaction.

  On 31 May the band travelled to Ireland to play McGonagle’s in Dublin. The club was packed out with a heavy metal crowd, and as soon as the Roses started to play a riot broke out. ‘We turned up in our little Beach Boys shirts with our little psychedelic pop songs, got one song in and it was clear they didn’t like us,’ said Garner. ‘It started getting a bit antagonistic and John went into the riff for “Smoke on the Water”. The place just erupted. They obviously realized we were taking the piss and there was a deluge of beer glasses and bottles thrown at the stage. We had to get off. They wanted to kill us.’

  This would be Couzens’ last gig with the band. He decided to fly back from Ireland while the rest of them travelled on the ferry. The Roses were so broke on the journey back to Manchester, Steve Adge convinced a café owner to let him use the facilities to cook a meal for them all in exchange for doing the washing up. ‘Andy flying back didn’t go down well at all,’ said Garner. ‘That’s what killed it for Andy.’ Evans seized the opportunity and attacked Couzens relentlessly over the incident. ‘He became really angry and nasty and put his head to my head and threatened me,’ said Couzens. His stance on the management contract had already ostracized him from the rest of the band, who were coming to the conclusion that the benefits of signing with Evans and Cummins outweighed the pitfalls.

  ‘It solved a lot of problems at once,’ Squire said. ‘People immediately thought we were mad but we got in there and started rehearsing. It never struck us this was a bad move.’ The band knew the management contract was outrageous. Evans and Cummins were after 33 per cent cut of gross profit and wanted the band to sign for a period of ten years. ‘We didn’t really care,’ said Garner. ‘What we wanted from Gareth we were getting, and it was obvious to all of us what he was asking for was ridiculous. We even suggested to him to make it more ridiculous. We all knew if this all goes tits up, anybody with a brain could see we’d just been exploited. Plus, it was like we’ve got nothing at the moment, so he’ll be getting a percentage of nothing. I was happy to sign it just so we had a rehearsal space.’

  On 29 June 1986 there was a summit meeting between the band, Evans, Cummins, lawyer Stephen Lea and Howard Jones at the Eighth Day café in Manchester. ‘Gareth said to Howard, Look, the band want to work with me, they want to do it my way, there’s no room for you, go away,’ said Lea. ‘Then he was like, Now let’s go back to my office and discuss where we’re going to go from here.’ In the office at International II, Evans settled into the only chair, behind his desk, while the Roses and Lea sat on the floor. He started talking about the route he wanted to take from now on. Couzens lasted five minutes, got up, said that it wasn’t for him, he wasn’t interested, and walked out. Lea lasted a few more minutes. It was obvious Evans wasn’t going to listen to anything he said. ‘Andy was waiting downstairs in his car,’ said Lea. ‘His attitude was, Well, fuck that for a game of soldiers, I’m out of here. I was immensely disappointed that the others all seemed to be sitting there and going along with it.’

  Couzens left The Stone Roses that day. Although upset, he would be one of the first to acknowledge that the Roses looked and sounded better without him. He felt that Squire had been angling to get him out for some time, an assertion that was backed by Brown. ‘John didn’t want to play with him. John was getting better and coming out with these lovely lines and Andy would come in with these big, chuggy rhythm guitar parts and cover it up. So John came to me and said he didn’t think he could play with him any more.’ Brown did express regret at having ‘used’ former manager Howard Jones. ‘Took him to the cleaners really. I’m not too proud of that, but a lot of it was his fault.’

  The Roses played five dates during the summer of 1986 as a four-piece before retiring from live performance for almost six months. In part this was down to the fact that along with Couzens went the band’s tour vehicle, but also Reni had injured his hand putting his fist through a pane of glass in a door at his parents’ house. He still has the scar. Although he couldn’t hold a drumstick, Reni soldiered on, making the band tape one to his hand and playing like that. The shows were at the Leeds Warehouse, the Three Crowns Club in London, Manchester Ritz, Liverpool Mardi Gras (where Cressa brought Happy Monday Paul Ryder to watch the band) and Barrow (where they all took to the sea late at night until Garner pointed out their close proximity to Sellafield nuclear power station).

  Garner had finally heeded Jones’s advice and cut his hair to shoulder length, Squire wore leather trousers, while Brown alternated between shaving his head back to its natural dark colour and then bleaching it in a Tintin style. Squire had also made the band a matching set of harlequin shirts to wear. Sue Dean, who was now Gareth Evans’s girlfriend, was a keen photographer and captured the band live and in rehearsal during this transitional period in photographs seen for the first time in this book.

  Dean, who already knew Brown, had started seeing Evans before he got involved with the Roses. She was a few years younger than the band and part of a tight-knit gang of girls who seemed to know everybody on the Manchester scene. Her best friend was Sarah Dalton, who would go on to marry Bernard Sumner of New Order. Dean had first met and impressed Evans after blagging her way into the International, and he’d suggested a job for her on the door of the club, thinking she would make sure everyone knew the International for being somewhere that Manchester music people got treated well. Dean hadn’t taken him entirely seriously, but soon met him again while hanging out at Howard Jones’s flat. Evans had pulled his familiar trick of dropping a wedge of money on the floor to try to impress her. ‘If you looked at it closely it wasn’t all money, it was newspaper, and money wrapped around the outside,’ she said. Dean picked it up and threw it back at him.

  Evans didn’t need sleep. ‘He’d do the club until two or three in the morning and at six in the morning he’d be up and out, saying, Life’s too short, we’ve got to do this, we’ve got to do that,’ said Dean. ‘He’d go out at 6 a.m. and do things and then be back at the international for 12 for the load-in for the next band. That was every day.’ He appeared to live his life in a permanent state of disarray. He would take band merchandise from the International and wear a different band T-shirt every day, thinking it made him ‘down with the kids’.


  When the International’s chief booker Roger Eagle had doubts about the Roses, Evans responded by sidelining him and putting Cummins in charge of that side of the club. Cummins had a vast record collection and proved shrewd at spotting new and upcoming bands. Evans himself had a unique way of judging bands. ‘Gareth worshipped his son Mark and would take him to a lot of the soundchecks and introduce a lot of the bands to him,’ said Dean. ‘If they weren’t nice to Mark you didn’t go back to the International, doesn’t matter how big you got, you did not get another gig there.’

  Despite his chutzpah and enthusiasm, Evans was unsure of how the music business worked. He had a habit of turning every conversation towards the Roses, often asking all and sundry what they thought of the band and professing he really had no idea if they were any good or not. Although this may have just been a clever ruse, he certainly wouldn’t discuss the ins and outs of music publishing with the band, like previous manager Jones. Evans never seemed to have a clue how that worked, no matter how many times he asked people to explain it to him.

  Top of the list, as far as Evans was concerned, was to get a new record out. The International ran local band nights every Monday, and these events would often be buzzing with A&R men. Evans would offer up free drinks and try to push the Roses. Until he realized how much money it would cost, Evans had planned on forming his own label for the Roses, International Records, taking an office above the estate agents opposite the International. Although Couzens was out, the band had still not signed the management deal and Evans was keen to impress them with some swift action. He’d heard rumours that the Happy Mondays’ manager Phil Saxe was interested in signing the Roses to Factory, and Howard Jones was bragging that he had got interest in the Hannett-produced Roses album from A&M Records. If either Factory or A&M offered the band a deal, it would spell the end for Evans’s dream.