It was in this interview for the first time that flared trousers became a major topic of discussion. Brown, encouraged by Cressa, was now sporting a pair. Squire spoke up in favour of parallels. ‘I think I’ve got divine knowledge and complete ignorance of everything except about clothes.’ For Brown it was 24-inchers, ‘for that slight swish’. ‘They’re probably just as important as England falling, actually, flares,’ said Brown, who would soon narrow his vision to 21-inchers. Flares, and the downfall of the monarchy, would become recurrent themes in the Roses’ media briefs.
The strongest, most controversial, line in the Melody Maker interview was Brown’s. ‘I’d like to shoot Prince Charles,’ he said. However he did it, writer Simon Reynolds had managed the first and only serious discussion with the band in the pop press in their entire career. Reynolds, agreeing with the general feeling of the time, praised the band’s live shows more than their debut album, but made a note of saying how unusual it was to meet a band who had ideas about subjects away from music.
June was equally busy on the road, as the tour continued with fourteen shows, from Walsall to Glasgow. For a band that had never properly toured, this long stretch of UK dates was crucial in building a small army of fans who all felt part of something special and empowering. These fans were treated with the respect that The Clash had treated the teenage Squire. Tim Vigon, who was seventeen, was inspired to make a fanzine devoted to the Roses called Made of Paper. In Shrewsbury, the Roses’ tour manager Steve Adge took Vigon’s disposable camera off him and he feared it would be confiscated. Instead Adge took pictures of the band close up on stage and handed it back to the awestruck Vigon.
A teenage gang of girls dubbed the ‘Bobs’, because of their haircuts, were familiar faces. The ‘Bobs’ were Eileen Mulligan, her best pal Shirley McGurrin and sisters Colette and Theresa Shryane, and all were delighted when Brown wore a Co-op T-shirt on stage that one of them had gifted him. Colette would go on to marry Roses roadie Al Smith. Even in their early days the Roses never had a groupie thing going on – and this attitude continued to mark them out. Squire and Brown were still both involved in long-term relationships, and while the band exuded sex appeal it was tempered by a romance reflected in their lyrics. It was why the Roses always had a more mixed audience than the Mondays. Adge made sure nobody messed with the Bobs, and the atmosphere backstage was ‘very innocent, very civilized and un-rock ’n’ roll’, said Mulligan.
The benefits of the band’s first sustained spell of touring were evident when, in July, ‘She Bangs the Drums’ became the Roses’ first mainstream Top 40 hit single, peaking at number 36. The A-side was the same version as on the album, but strong B-sides – ‘Standing Here’, ‘Mersey Paradise’ (which recalled The Byrds’ song ‘I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better’) and backward track ‘Simone’ – made it a must-have. Limited-edition versions of the single also included prints and postcards of Squire’s artwork.
Gareth Davies had the band back in London to promote the single with another radio interview – this time for BBC London with DJ Johnny Walker. Davies suggested that Reni, who was ‘much more forthcoming and articulate in these situations’, accompany Squire and Brown to the interview. In answer to Walker’s first question, Brown nodded furiously but didn’t say anything – not much use on radio. Walker asked the band about The Byrds, and there was more dead air time. What about Hendrix? Reni said his mum and dad had Hendrix’s Greatest Hits. Brown was asked about the Roses’ lyrics. ‘He genuinely looked totally confused,’ said Davies. ‘He said, They mean whatever you want them to mean; which is so right, because that makes the songs more personal to everyone who hears them. If you know what it’s about, everyone thinks of the song the same way. But if you don’t tell people, they can make it their own. That to me was a genuine reaction.’
The Roses were slowly making an impact on mainstream audiences, and this was helped when they featured in the British tabloids. Another anti-monarchy quote from Brown, when he offered the opinion that there wouldn’t be revolution in England unless someone put a bag over the Queen Mother’s head (he’d offered to do it himself), had sparked a degree of controversy. The Sun newspaper hassled Brown’s parents and their neighbours in Timperley, hoping for some gossip. The singer was unrepentant. ‘I think Buckingham Palace should be turned into flats for old people who live in cardboard boxes.’
The release of ‘She Bangs the Drums’ landed the band their second music-press front cover, in Sounds. Brown proclaimed he believed in one love as a manifesto, and Squire registered his delight in having made the tabloids: ‘If you want to be as big as we want to be then you’ve got to get in that forum.’ There was talk of releasing a new single in September, called ‘Any Time You Want Me’, but, other than that, Brown and Squire gave little away. Not saying much in interviews was now becoming the talking point.
‘After the first few interviews we were getting pressurized to open up and be more chatty,’ said Squire. ‘Sell yourself, treat it as a PR exercise. And we’ve resisted that.’
‘People around us, press officers, said, You can’t do that, you won’t be getting any more interviews, people won’t want to talk to you because you’re not saying anything,’ said Brown. ‘About three weeks later it’s, Oooh it’s working, what a great angle. It’s not an angle. It’s us.’
The cover photograph for Sounds was taken by Ian Tilton, and saw the image of the band take another giant step forward, Brown’s infamous ‘money’ T-shirt and ‘monkey face’ making debuts. ‘He’d never done that face before,’ laughs Tilton. ‘He pulled the face and I said, That’s weird, do it again. He’s a good-looking bloke but he didn’t give a shit about looking cool or looking handsome.’
There were now offers coming in from around the world for the band to perform. A string of European dates was being lined up, and in America there was talk of a free gig in New York’s Central Park and one at the end of a pier in Santa Monica, Los Angeles. There was also strong interest for the band to tour Japan. The Roses, however, had other ideas and were planning a major date in Blackpool. Evans claimed it was his idea: the romance and unpretentious nature of the British seaside resort would fit with the band’s ‘street-level image’. ‘The Roses still had an awful lot of doubters. Blackpool was something different. It was almost like pulling the band back from the hype and letting them play to their own – to the people who knew them and had helped them build. It was a thank you and good bye.’
‘We wanted to give people a day out to finish their summer,’ said Brown. ‘When you live in Manchester and you’ve got no money there’s nowhere to go. Blackpool is the local seaside resort. I’ve been beaten up a few times in Blackpool. We wanted to go one step beyond just a concert.’ It was originally intended as part of a tour of seaside resorts (Southend, Scarborough, Morecambe). The venue was the Empress Ballroom – it had hosted The Rolling Stones but been off the circuit for many years. It was an awkward gig to produce, largely because the venue had a springy floor and an enthusiastic audience could easily shake down the PA system. Bruce Mitchell, who ran Manchester Light & Stage, managed the production. Mitchell had also trained up many of the Roses’ crew, as the band preferred to use mates rather than seasoned professionals.
Dealing with Evans was ‘like plaiting sand’, Mitchell recalled. ‘He changed his mind four times in a sentence.’ Instead, Mitchell relied on the Roses’ co-manager, Matthew Cummins – ‘a quiet guy and absolutely of his word’. Crucial to the band’s live impact was the lighting: a Quasar system that reacted to bass frequencies and zapped out lines from the back of the band into the audience.
It was Saturday, 12 August 1989 and the 4,000-capacity Empress Ballroom had sold out three weeks prior. The idea of playing other seaside dates had been abandoned. This was the must-see show. Steve Adge had booked a big American bus to transport the band from Manchester to Blackpool, and it was packed with crew and friends. After falling out with the driver, Adge drove the bus into Blackpool straight down the tram t
racks, having lost his directions. Photographer Ian Tilton was on board. ‘They wanted to have a good time, so you go over with your mates, everyone together and make a real thing of it,’ he said.
The fans went to Blackpool with the same intention, and there was a festival spirit in the air – a celebration of the north. ‘Having done a tour of Great Britain I’ve changed my mind a bit on Manchester because it’s a place where things are happening, there is a vibe in the air here,’ Brown said. Astonishingly, almost all of the 4,000 punters were now aping the look of the band, in flares, baggy shirts and what had become known as ‘Reni hats’. The band were taken aback. ‘We didn’t know or expect that kids would dress like us,’ Brown said. ‘We were just trying to dress so we looked different from everyone else. Reni loved it; half the crowd had the hat on.’
There were no support acts. Instead, the crowd would be warmed up by Manchester DJs Dave Booth and Dave Haslam, whose Temperance night at the Haçienda was now big. ‘The band had decided that they didn’t want a support act because nobody was worthy enough to share a stage with them,’ said Haslam. ‘Also they hoped they would catch some of the kind of acid house atmosphere that you could experience at clubs in Manchester at that time.’ The city had by now produced two of the era’s best home-grown acid house tracks, ‘Voodoo Ray’ by A Guy Called Gerald and ‘Pacific State’ by 808 State. Acclaimed music video director Geoff Wonfor had four cameras and a crew of thirty at the gig, to film a video for the band’s next single – although there was confusion over what that would be. The song Wonfor expected to film was not on the band’s set list.
‘The place was packed, the place was hot, the audience absolutely lapped up the music,’ said Haslam. ‘As a DJ you’re working hard to hit that moment just before the band comes on when everybody is ecstatic and expectant. I played “Sympathy for the Devil” and that did the trick.’ Brown strolled on to the stage in 1972 green corduroy Wrangler 21-inch flares, nonchalantly playing a light-up yo-yo, and declared, ‘Manchester … International … Continental.’
‘I don’t usually think about anything while I’m on stage but about halfway through the set, I suddenly realized I’d been in this place before,’ he told the NME. ‘All through the soundcheck I hadn’t recognized it but I had blagged my way in here years ago to see Tony Benn at the Labour Party conference.’ Brown went on to say that he thought Benn deserved more respect than any pop group, and that he had been brought up to believe the aristocracy should be shot.
Haslam watched from the back of the stage, just next to where Cressa was grooving behind Squire. ‘The volume and the intensity that was coming off the audience was phenomenal,’ he said. ‘It was hitting the stage; waves of love. For some people it could have been their first experience of that dance club vibe.’ It was far removed from the traditional rock gig, with the whole downstairs dancing, not just bobbing up and down. ‘Proper dancing,’ said Brown.
Evans missed the show after his car broke down on the way over from Manchester. ‘We got there for the last song, as they were doing “Resurrection”,’ said his girlfriend Sue Dean. The band’s manager had missed something massive and unrepeatable. Reviews of the show glowed golden. Sounds and Record Mirror praised the band from the heavens, while the NME called it ‘gig of the year’.
10.
‘Fools Gold’
Jive/Zomba were growing impatient for new material. They had already taken 30,000 pre-orders on the next Roses single, whatever it was going to be. ‘Some bands would have felt under pressure to deliver the goods in that kind of situation,’ said John Leckie. The Stone Roses thrived on it. Leckie booked recording time at Sawmills studio in Cornwall. Paul Schroeder, the Battery studio dance-music expert, was also there.
Sawmills was one of the UK’s first residential facilities and also among the most remote, located within a creek on the banks of the River Fowey. The only means of access was by boat or, when the tide was out, by walking along a railway line. ‘If they tell you to be there at four o’clock to get the gear in and you turn up at five and the tide’s gone, you have to wait twelve hours before your next chance,’ said Leckie. ‘Everything fits on the little boat and off you go.’ Evans was caught short by these arrangements, and one evening he missed the boat back from the studio, then spent the night outdoors. Mani found him asleep on the grass the next morning.
Evans was the closest of anyone to the four Roses, but still found the bond between them impenetrable. The Roses shared a seemingly unbreakable sense of purpose and desire. What they did not have was much new material, nor any real sense of where they were heading musically. Five months of hard touring had knocked Squire and Brown out of their old songwriting routines. In the two weeks the band spent at Sawmills they recorded just two songs, ‘Fools Gold’ and ‘What the World Is Waiting For’. Initially it was ‘What the World Is Waiting For’ that was thought to be the more promising. It was a familiar, golden guitar song that dripped melody and referenced lyrically the 1961 Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley musical Stop the World – I Want to Get Off.
‘Fools Gold’ was a more experimental track, initiated by Squire. He had written it after picking up a Breaks and Beats album from Eastern Bloc records in Manchester during a signing session for ‘She Bangs the Drums’. It was one in a series of twenty-five Breaks and Beats albums that were popular with hip-hop producers as they featured drums for sampling. Squire had chosen it because he liked the photograph on the sleeve, of African American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos giving the Black Power salute on the medal podium at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. In what was a new way of working for Squire, he’d written the song over a looped break. ‘I wasn’t familiar with the song it came from. It was the repetition that made it work, that made it what it was.’
Mani added his own unique contribution. His all-night partying often met with disapproval from Squire at rehearsals, but Mani said clubbing was for research, and he was looking for ‘things to pinch’. The bass line from the Young MC’s club hit ‘Know How’ was a case in point, and it was used as further inspiration on ‘Fools Gold’. Brown said the words were inspired by John Huston’s 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, starring Humphrey Bogart. The promo line above the film’s title was ‘They sold their souls for …’, and the plotline was summarized by Brown as: ‘Three geezers who are skint put their money together to get equipment to go looking for gold. They betray each other. They all end up dead.’
The loop Squire wrote the ‘Fools Gold’ riff over was taken from ‘Hot Pants’ by Bobby Byrd with John ‘Jabo’ Starks on drums, produced by James Brown. If the band and Leckie were unsure about the nature of ‘Fools Gold’, Schroeder had no such doubts. He declared it a ‘fucking smash’ on first hearing. ‘Even just in the demo form, it was brilliant. It had the “Funky Drummer” loop, it had the bass loop, it had the lyrics so it was all pretty much there. I was into this idea of having the drum sample loop round kind of every thirteen bars, a very odd number of bars, so the beat would never be the same. Reni loved it. It meant he could dance around it with his kit.’ The band responded to the vibe of the unique recording location, and the beauty and spirit of Sawmills seeped into the session as they experimented.
Schroeder also spent time on the guitar to ‘Fools Gold’, and the more work went into the track the better it sounded, until the band began to prefer it to the sublime control of ‘What the World Is Waiting For’. ‘It was more what we were about,’ said Brown. ‘Fools Gold’ was a brave and radical departure for the band, more rhythmic and dance-orientated.
The vocals on ‘Fools Gold’, Brown’s strongest to date, were recorded back in London in a tiled room in a studio in Muswell Hill. The groove of the track suited Brown, who displayed an astounding ability to lay back and ride a rhythm in the best reggae tradition. ‘The natural echo you hear on Ian’s vocal, that’s not extra stuff being added, that’s just him,’ Schroeder said. ‘I had the lights turned off, so he didn’t know where the mic was, and
he was dancing around really out of it. It worked a treat. It was just a condenser mic but I put it on “all round” so that it would pick up everything. I just told Ian to pretend he was sitting on top of a speaker looking down on people dancing. I said for him to imagine that he was in control of the dance floor while he was singing. I think he had that in mind while he was doing it. He had a big smile on his face when he came back in.’
Schroeder did a rough mix of ‘Fools Gold’ that he played to Jive/Zomba boss Clive Calder. ‘He said, That’s a hit record but it needs a remix,’ said Schroeder. The recording of the single had already eaten up over a month. ‘We’d do the mix with everyone together, the whole band and me and Paul in a room, and then, invariably, Paul would go off and mix it by himself,’ said Leckie. ‘He’d say, I’ve got next week booked to mix it again. It was like, Hang on, it’s only one song.’
In late September, while work continued on the single, the band were filmed for the popular BBC2 pop show Rapido. The feature, scheduled to air on 7 October, captured the band in and around Battery studios looking cocksure and unkempt. The main focus was their debut album, which six months after its release was still picking up praise. Interspersed with footage from Blackpool, the band delivered an unparalleled example of their classic interview technique. ‘It’s hard to act interested when you’re not,’ Brown told the interviewer, bluntly. He went on to denounce the UK indie scene as certainly as Mani dismissed the psychedelic label the band had been tagged with.
In the background, as the band were being interviewed, Leckie and Schroeder were seen at the Battery recording desk working on ‘Fools Gold’. Mani’s distinctive bass line could clearly be heard. When Rapido was broadcast, Gareth Davies got a call from a BBC TV contact asking about the ‘amazing’ bass riff. The truth, Davies admitted, was he didn’t know. The band remained cautious about ‘Fools Gold’. It was very different thing from anything they’d done before, lacking not just the ripe melody and soaring chorus the band were known for but any traditional strong structure.
The Stone Roses: War and Peace Page 17