The Stone Roses: War and Peace

by Spence, Simon

  The band’s growing sense of destiny was carried over into the conclusion of the recording of their debut album. They travelled to Rockfield studios in Monmouth, Wales, to begin the process on 5 January. Andrew Lauder had responded to the band and Leckie’s requests to shift studios. Whereas company man McKenna had tried to keep the band recording in Zomba’s Battery studios with an eye on the budget, the more independent Lauder green-lit the move to this residential facility. Some tracks, including ‘Waterfall’, were re-recorded in their entirety at Rockfield. ‘It was exciting, they were passionate, they meant it,’ said Leckie of this final phase of recording the album. ‘It was energetic. There was a lot of energy and Reni’s energy was important to it all.’ Unlike the Hannett album, on which Reni didn’t sing at all, now you couldn’t stop him. ‘Once he got on to harmonies he would saturate it, so you had to hold him back.’

  One of the keys to the sound Leckie achieved on the album was the blending of Brown and Reni’s voices to create something that could never be exactly replicated live. Much trickery went into this process. ‘The vocals are well mixed. But it wasn’t intentional to obfuscate who was singing what: it was just getting the best mix that felt good.’ ‘This Is the One’ caused the most problems. ‘It worked real well live, a bombastic thing that got faster and faster, but in the studio we had to work hard on getting the dynamics right and making the changes work smoothly.’ The band spent most time on ‘I Am the Resurrection’. It was the song they now concluded their live sets with. ‘We wanted something epic to end the album so we literally built that massive crescendo piece by piece.’

  ‘It was me who coaxed them to do that ending on “Resurrection”,’ said Brown. ‘Only prog rock groups and players up their own arses did 10-minute guitar solos. But I kept saying to them, Look, you’re great. Let’s do a 10-minute song where you’re just playing and playing and playing. For two days I watched them work out the ending to that song. It still sounds amazing. Me and Reni wanted John to be a guitar hero. He wasn’t the usual sort of rock guitarist at that time. He was a real quiet, mellow kid and we wanted him to be the hero for that reason – talk with your fingers kind of thing.’

  The final overdub sessions took place at Konk Studios in London, starting on 23 January. McKenna had flown back from Chicago and spent a day listening to the work. The record was £5,000 over budget and his Zomba bosses were not happy. He found Squire in a cramped back room by himself, while the rest of the band listened to obscure hip-hop, house and reggae tracks. Squire was working out the guitar part to ‘Bye Bye Badman’, recording into his Portastudio while sat on top of a cardboard box. ‘We were getting right down to the wire in terms of time, and when I went in to record I still didn’t really know the part,’ Squire said. ‘Then [Squire] came in and did it pretty much in one take,’ said Leckie. ‘At the end we had some pressure to get the album finished. Maybe there were things we could’ve done better. But it’s character that makes a record special, not fine detail and technical tightness.’ The mixing was done live, with everyone hands-on, and although time was tight there was an upbeat, celebratory vibe. ‘We recorded and mixed the album in fifty-five days – on and off,’ said Leckie. ‘It’s never enough.’

  Upon finishing the album, Leckie told them, ‘You’re going to do really well, you know.’ ‘And we just said, Yeah we know,’ said Brown. ‘And we did. We just felt it. He was a bit taken aback by our confidence. But we knew we were good.’ ‘It did seem perfect, that album,’ agreed Leckie. ‘We had a few traumas but there was this fantastic underlying sense of self-belief. I just think the band knew they were making a classic. I really don’t know how they could gauge such a thing. They’d never really done it before and for a while I thought I must be getting carried away, losing my objectivity. But it dawned on me during those sessions that this was something truly special. Strange tricks kept coming out of the recording.’

  Squire and Brown had shared the writing of the vocal melodies and the lyrics on the album. Brown wrote the words to ‘I Wanna Be Adored’, ‘Made of Stone’ and ‘I Am the Resurrection’. Squire wrote most of the words to ‘Waterfall’, while almost all the rest of the songs were a collaborative effort. The pair both admitted they had deliberately tried to conceal some things in the lyrics, so they would have hidden meanings. ‘Even on songs we’ve got that are about a girl, there’s always something there that’s a call to insurrection,’ said Brown. ‘People have to tune in, we don’t make it obvious because that would be less exciting for us.’ That applied to all but one song on the finished record, ‘Elizabeth My Dear’, whose lyric Brown wrote. It is a song about assassinating the Queen sung over the tune to ‘Scarborough Fair’, a traditional ballad that dated back to 1670 but had been popularized by Simon & Garfunkel in the 1960s. ‘We wanted the tune to be familiar so that people could instantly identify with it and then hear the lyrics clearly,’ said Brown. The song ends with a gunshot. Perhaps because the sentiment was so clear, and the other song lyrics so open to interpretation, it was this track that would quickly become a focus of the Roses’ ‘political agenda’.

  In February 1989, with work on the album all but finished, the Roses began gigging like they’d never gigged before. They had a new booking agent, Nigel Kerr, and he would have them on the road until the end of June. In these five months they would play around fifty dates, roughly the same number the band had managed to play in the previous five years. It was widely held that this was one of the greatest pop tours of all time. ‘A big thing was happening in England at that time with Ecstasy, and we arrived exactly then,’ said Brown. ‘It felt great, righteous. I felt we were pure, that we weren’t conning anyone. We were real and beautiful.’

  ‘The E-scene is just going to explode this summer, people in the media just don’t realize how massive it’s getting in the provinces,’ said Mani. The Roses were in the right place at the right time. From 17 February to 3 March they were back in Warrington at Legends, played Sheffield University on Brown’s twenty-sixth birthday, then Middlesex Polytechnic (where Bob Stanley gave them a euphoric Melody Maker live review, calling the band ‘four teenage Jesus Christs’), Brighton Escape club (where the band did four songs and walked off), Club Rio in Bradford, Cardiff Coal Exchange and back again to Legends in Warrington. They had now played this club in Brown’s hometown three times in quick succession.

  Sandwiched in this clutch of dates was a show at the Haçienda, on Monday 27 February, which had been arranged by DJ Dave Haslam. ‘Gareth said to me, can you get us a gig at the Haçienda?’ said Haslam. ‘In Manchester, playing the Haçienda was seen as one of the key stepping-stones.’ More or less at the same time Paul Cons, who was in charge of entertainment at the Haçienda, asked Haslam about booking the band for the club. Haslam told both Evans and Cons he could sort it for £200 apiece. ‘It would have been easy for them to pick up the phone and speak to each other, but they went through me and I earned £400 just for the introduction,’ he said. ‘There were those barriers, The Haçienda and Factory stood for something, and the Roses stood for something else. Then I phoned my friend Brenda Kelly at Snub TV and said, There’s this great band called The Stone Roses playing at the Haç; you must come up.’

  Snub TV was broadcast on BBC2 at six o’clock on Monday nights, and the Roses’ appearance on the show would be another milestone. ‘The band have so far concentrated on their hometown with their brand of ecstatic pop – crowds queue in the rain, concerts sell out, fans know all the words to the songs. Now on the verge of achieving national recognition, this is The Stone Roses live at the Haçienda,’ ran the presenter’s introduction to the band, who were shown playing an electric, perfect, ‘I Wanna Be Adored’. A second song was also broadcast, the less effective live song ‘Sugar Spun Sister’. Squire even smiled, and Brown, in a plain white baggy T-shirt, gave the lyrics an enunciation that was bluntly, unapologetically, northern. The Haçienda show was given glowing live reviews in both the NME and Sounds.

  The band took time
off the road in March to promote the release of a new single, ‘Made of Stone’, and to oversee the finishing touches to their debut album. The strength of the B-sides of the Roses’ singles would become a selling point, and ‘Made of Stone’ (again in a Pollock-inspired sleeve by Squire) was backed by ‘Going Down’ and ‘Guernica’, the latter a backward version of ‘Made of Stone’ featuring the lyric ‘we’re whores, that’s us’. It was a track Brown said had been inspired by trips to Manchester airport to watch the planes take off. ‘Your eardrums sound like they’re shredding with the volume of the engines and the fire coming out of the back,’ said Brown. ‘Bits of “Guernica” sound like planes. I’d love to have done it as an A-side.’

  The band’s plugger, Gareth Davies, accompanied Squire and Brown to an interview on Radio 1’s Newsbeat. ‘They told me they thought I was unhappy with the last interview with Music Box, so on the train they thought they’d write down some things they could talk about,’ said Davies. Towards the end of the interview, when Brown and Squire were doing their usual yes/no answers, they were asked if there was anything else they wanted to talk about. ‘They both said, No, not really; they didn’t look at the notes they’d made at all,’ said Davies. ‘People thought they were very unhelpful but more often than not it was simply that they had nothing to say to the question that had been put to them.’

  ‘Made of Stone’ was the NME’s Single of the Week and entered the indie charts at number 4, and although sales were not strong enough to register on the UK Top 40 it raised awareness of the band, particularly in London. It was also a clear vindication of Jive/Zomba’s decision to form Silvertone; few in the media connected the Roses to their parent company and the band’s ascendancy was aided by the perception of them being an ‘indie’ act.

  Following fast on the heels of the single, the Roses’ eponymous debut album was released in April 1989. The band were exuberant and had been proudly playing advance copies to associates in Manchester. They were particularly excited by ‘Don’t Stop’, so enthused that few dared to point out The Beatles had done backward tracks decades before. The album provided the band with their first proper Top 40 hit, as it entered the charts at number 32 in its first week. It climbed no higher, plummeting out of the Top 40 the following week. For a major label act this would have been a disaster, but for an indie band a chart placing, however brief, was seen as real progress. The band were unhappy, however: the album had failed to set the charts ablaze, and there was little to suggest they had hit the mother lode. Nevertheless, in the music press Bob Stanley continued his canonization of the band with breathless praise of the album in Melody Maker. John Robb nailed it in his Sounds review: ‘In guitar pop terms, this is a masterpiece.’ Record Mirror pondered a backlash to the Roses hype but decided against, awarding it four out of five stars.

  There was only one major music press interview to promote the album – by the NME, which by now was seen as the most influential of the three music weeklies. It had damned the album with faint praise, awarding it seven out of ten. Brown toyed with a lemon throughout the interview and said he was listening to reggae and funk, Barry White, Adrian Sherwood and Black Uhuru. Squire was also into Sherwood and expressed a preference for the 1971 Shaft double album. ‘Everyone I know has always liked rock music, dance music, punk and Northern Soul,’ Brown said. ‘I don’t think it’s unusual for our fans to be into dance music. Those dividing lines aren’t there any more.’ He also came up with another killer quote: ‘It takes effort to sound effortless.’ In Philip Hall, the Roses had a publicist who could play the press as apparently effortlessly as the band could their instruments. He was eyeing a front cover for the band, and, by granting just this one interview to the NME, had Melody Maker chomping at the bit.

  The lemon Brown used as a prop in the NME interview was a reference to the three slices of the fruit featured on the cover of the band’s album, which lit up a fairly nondescript green-hued Pollock-inspired painting by Squire, entitled Bye Bye Badman, with daubs of blue, white and red overlay. ‘The lemons aren’t part of the picture, they’re real lemons nailed on because it was photographed on the wall,’ Squire said. ‘It ties in with the lyrics of “Bye Bye Badman”, to do with the Paris student uprisings of May 1968. Me and Ian saw a documentary on it and liked the clothes: there was a guy chucking stones with a really nice jacket and desert boots. The students used to suck the lemons to nullify the effects of tear gas. That’s why the tricolour is there.’ The green of his painting was inspired by the water at the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland, which the band had visited before their gig at Ulster University – and where Led Zeppelin had shot the cover for their Houses of the Holy album. The other Squire painting to be found on the album’s inner sleeve, a crude but pretty amalgamation of the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes, entitled Waterfall, was inspired by a more prosaic image: a pair of Sue Dean’s trousers.

  The band went back to the treadmill of small venues. After three dates in April, playing at Liverpool Polytechnic, Portsmouth, and Brunel University, there was barely a day without a gig in May. Following a return to Liverpool Polytechnic, the Roses arrived in Widnes where a local magazine wanted to know what it felt like to be big in Manchester. ‘We’re not massive in Manchester,’ said Squire. ‘There are a million and a half people in Manchester and we only get 2,000.’

  Next stop for the Roses was a triumphant show in front of 2,000 at International II on 6 May. They played in front of Squire’s Union Jack and Stars and Stripes hybrid backdrop, and Brown introduced himself ringing a bell like a town crier. There was now no need for Evans to give away any free tickets, as a new breed of genuine teenage fan crowded into the venue to worship the group. Support was The Charlatans, pre-Tim Burgess. ‘I’d never seen that kind of relationship between a band and an audience before – it was messianic,’ said the band’s drummer, Jon Brookes. ‘We couldn’t understand how people knew all the lyrics to their songs.’

  The Charlatans went on to play with the band at Junction 10 in Walsall, Warrington Legends and Trent Poly. Outside Manchester it was still hit and miss for the band. ‘At Trent Poly there was a guy skateboarding inside the hall when they were playing, that’s how empty it was,’ said Brookes. ‘It didn’t seem to bother them, you never heard them moan, they just got on with it.’ The Charlatans were deeply impressed and copied a great deal from the Roses. ‘They wore flares and outdoor jackets which they kept on inside, zipped up. We thought that was the ultimate statement of ice cool. They were a gang, the band and the crew. From when they turned up with their gear, when they soundchecked, played, and when they went, it was all one cool movement – there was never anybody out of place. It was beautiful.’

  Brookes was particularly observant of Reni, in his bucket hat and with his edited-down three-piece kit, a mixture of Ludwig, vintage and a big expensive Sonor snare drum – all customized in the Pollock style to match Squire’s guitar and Mani’s bass. ‘He never pounded the drums, he used to caress them and get them to sing, he was that kind of drummer. It was great to just watch him, very poetic, beautiful motion, very light touch, at the same time very musical. And he was singing as well, these beautiful melodies, it was unbelievable. On the first album a lot of the spirit emanates from the drums. The album captured a man at the height of his creative powers rhythmically.’

  In Leeds, Brown told a fanzine writer he didn’t want to be just New Order big, he was aiming to be as massive as Michael Jackson. After Trent, Dudley and Tonbridge, a show at London’s ICA saw the Roses playing to their biggest London crowd to date (500) and was reviewed euphorically by Melody Maker and the NME. Birmingham, Aberystwyth, Camden, Oxford, Shrewsbury and Preston followed before the band were forced to cancel dates in Milton Keynes and St Helens to finish the recording of B-sides for their upcoming single, ‘She Bangs the Drums’. At the end of May the NME carried a report that the Roses had turned down two support slots in favour of headlining this run of smaller shows. The band were said to have turned down a UK support s
lot with The Pixies and a lucrative guest spot with New Order in America. ‘The band have never supported anyone in their life and see no reason why they should now,’ a spokesman said. ‘Other bands would have jumped at the opportunity but the Roses have their own thing to do and don’t want to play second fiddle to anybody.’ The real story, as with much of the Roses’ media hype, involved Evans.

  ‘Gareth phoned me up and said, Hooky, you’re big in America, aren’t you?’ said New Order’s Peter Hook. ‘I said, Well, yeah, we’re doing quite well. He said, Who does your tours? I said, We’ve got our own American manager called Tom Atencio. Gareth said, I like him, I like the sound of his name, give me his number.’ Hook put Evans in touch with Atencio, who planned a series of college dates for the Roses in America. ‘Tom phoned me up a few weeks before the tour and he said, Hooky, how well do you know this Gareth?’ said Hook. ‘He said, He’s just phoned me and asked, can I guarantee when The Stone Roses arrive in America they are mobbed like The Beatles? Tom told him, Of course I can’t guarantee that, they’re only a college band, they’re only coming over doing 1,000-capacity venues. Gareth said, Well, if you can’t guarantee that, then they’re not coming – and cancelled the tour. Tom said to me, Don’t send me these nutters any more.’

  In early June the Roses appeared on their first weekly music paper front cover: Melody Maker. Brown was the sole band member clearly pictured, doing an approximation of a Cressa/Bez-style move in a rave-styled photograph. ‘I’ll be severely disappointed if we haven’t had a number 1 by the end of 1989,’ Brown was quoted as saying in the article. In a lengthy and unusually productive interview with just Brown and Squire, the talk veered from sexual politics – where they batted back accusations of misogyny in the lyrics – to homelessness, the royal family (‘a bunch of castle rustlers’), religion (‘Jesus was the world’s first communist’), the British Empire (‘sick’), working-class freedom or lack of, and their worship of women. ‘Man is weak, Woman is power,’ said Brown.