The Stone Roses: War and Peace

by Spence, Simon

  The Roses took off for Europe at the end of September, playing in Valencia, Milan, Deinze, Hamburg, Cologne, Amsterdam and Paris. Although lucrative for Evans, who would end the short European tour showing off a suitcase crammed with £100,000 in cash in various currencies, the Roses played to crowds more intrigued by them than participating in the party. The band’s flares seemed even more incongruous on the continent. In Milan, Brown responded to the muted welcome by smashing the stage lighting. Paris, where they had played before, and Amsterdam, where a coach load of Mancunians made the trip on the Cess Express, organized by Mancunian character Cess Buller, were more like home.

  Legendary NME photographer Pennie Smith had been invited to the shows in Europe. Famed for her work with The Clash, she’d already photographed the Roses at Reading Gaol for a Japanese magazine. Squire had been a fan of her work since he was a teenager, and Smith would continue to document the Roses for the rest of their career, as she had done with The Clash. The first thing Evans had said to her was, ‘I know what I want out of the band – I want a helicopter. What do you want?’ Brown had more artfully introduced himself by telling Smith ‘you look like one of your photos’.

  The most seen photograph of the band from this period, however, was not a Smith shot but one taken by Kevin Cummins, for the band’s first NME cover. The NME trailed the band from Amsterdam to Paris for the cover feature, and Cummins photographed them in front of the Eiffel Tower. Evans had wanted him to photograph the band hanging off it. The NME cover story would not be published for over a month, in November. In it, the magazine would finally hail the Roses’ debut album one of the decade’s finest debut LPs, and Evans would have a starring role – described as ‘streetwise, funny, like some awful Mancunian mutant cross of Arthur Daley and Tony Wilson’. It was a popular rumour that he was knocking out bootleg Roses merchandise outside the venues, often undercutting the official merchandise that he also controlled. Of the suitcase full of money, Evans was quoted in NME as saying, ‘I’ve got hefty outgoings. These boys go through a lot of drugs.’ The band said very little – as was becoming their standard practice.

  In the weeks between the interview and the NME story appearing, Cummins decided he had not captured ‘the essence of the band’ in Paris and planned a further shoot back in England. ‘What I’d always wanted to do was to do them as a John Squire painting,’ he said. One of Cummins’s Paris shots of the Roses would eventually appear on an NME front cover, but not until 1994.

  Cummins had to wait to take the shot for the November 1989 cover, however, as the band were flying from Paris to Japan. Rockin’ On, Japan’s biggest and most influential music magazine, lavished fourteen full pages on the band to coincide with their arrival. The album was said to have sold 20,000 copies in its first week of release and the Roses had their first taste of being treated as stars – travelling in style on the bullet train and being chased by fans trying to pull their hair out. The four dates, in Kawasaki, Osaka and twice in Tokyo, were all hysteria-drenched affairs.

  In England a succession of events would now propel the Roses to the forefront of a similar explosion. While the band had been away in Europe and Japan, Leckie had done a final mix on ‘Fools Gold’. It had tested even his famous patience. ‘Eventually I said, Look, just give me the tape and a day at RAK and I’ll do it,’ he recalled. ‘I went in about noon, on my own, and came out about nine the next morning.’ Even a disgruntled Schroeder, who had been refused co-production credit on the track, agreed that Leckie had done a brilliant job. ‘I’m not sure it would have been as good if anyone else did it.’

  Jive/Zomba planned on releasing the single as a double A-side, with equal emphasis on ‘Fools Gold’ and ‘What the World Is Waiting For’, but Gareth Davies, whose job it would be to deliver the single to radio, had his doubts. ‘You can never really have a double A on vinyl,’ he said. ‘One has to be the B-side.’ The band had wanted to go with ‘Fools Gold’ as the A-side, but the Zomba promotions people had said Radio 1 would never play the track. Davies felt they would and persuaded Andrew Lauder at Silvertone, who told him to re-sticker the promo records with ‘Fools Gold’ as the A-side while he would reprint the records in production. This was late on a Friday afternoon, and neither the band nor many of their key associates were aware of the decision.

  Up to this point Davies had experienced little joy in getting the Roses’ singles played on Radio 1, consistently being told he was six months ahead of the curve. But he was positive ‘Fools Gold’ would work. Richard Skinner, who had a Saturday afternoon show at Radio 1, was the first to pick up on the track, or rather his producer, Mark Radcliffe, was. ‘I rang Reni up and said, Richard Skinner is going to play “Fools Gold” this afternoon,’ Davies said. ‘Reni said, No, Gareth, you’ve got the wrong track, they’ll never play that, it’s “What the World Is Waiting For”. I said, No, they’re going to play “Fools Gold”. On the Monday I rang [Radio 1 DJ] Simon Bates, while he was on air, and he said, Yeah, bring it over. I took it around to him and rang [the band’s publicist] Philip Hall to say Simon Bates is going to play “Fools Gold”, and he too said, No, Gareth, you’ve got the wrong song. Radio 1 will never play that, it’s “What the World Is Waiting For”.’

  From here ‘Fools Gold’ began to take on a life of its own, with promo copies also proving popular in clubs. There was no going back, and ‘Fools Gold’ became the undoubted lead track on the single that was scheduled for release on 13 November to coincide with the band’s highly anticipated big London event at Alexandra Palace on 18 November.

  At the NME, the cover story, started in Europe and planned to coincide with both the gig and the single, would now get its famous cover shot. Schedules were incredibly tight and the band only had a Sunday spare. Photographer Cummins rented a studio in Manchester and covered the whole place in polythene. The band arrived carrying five-gallon tins of paint. ‘I thought John would then get a brush out and start painting each of them,’ said Cummins. Instead Squire opened a tin of white paint and hurled it across the room at the rest of the band. Then he tipped it over himself. ‘I thought, This isn’t going to plan,’ said Cummins. ‘But I’m going to have to run with it.’ Squire stepped out of the frame and threw a tin of sky blue all over the band before tipping the rest over his head and laying back in the shot. ‘Then we put some yellow and red and black on, and I shot it in every stage. They were lying in it for two hours. It was a riot of colour. You look at that and you feel you could be on E.’

  After the shoot the band were eager to shower, but everywhere in the building was locked. ‘They went mental and left handprints down the stairwell.’ Cummins kept Reni’s hat as a souvenir, and that paint-splattered hat would subsequently adorn the sleeve of the tenth-anniversary release of the Roses’ eponymous album. ‘I knew when I was doing it that the picture would define The Stone Roses.’

  With ‘Fools Gold’ picking up pre-release radio play, the band flew to Lanzarote to shoot a video for the track. The director was Geoff Wonfor, who had filmed them at Blackpool, and while in Lanzarote would also shoot a video for ‘I Wanna Be Adored’, which Jive/Zomba planned to release as an American single. ‘Blackpool was chaotic but not as chaotic as Lanzarote,’ said Wonfor, celebrated for his work with Paul McCartney and The Beatles. All his crew’s equipment was impounded at customs, and the time it took to secure its release meant Wonfor had one day to shoot two videos. The band told him they wanted the video to look like it was shot on the moon. ‘Then they said they wanted to do it at night. Which begs the fucking question, why are we in fucking Lanzarote when I could have been in Twickenham studios with a bit of volcanic rock? Then they had the great idea of lighting the mountain behind, which is ten miles away. I had a generator of about four foot square. By God, every fucker was on the moon and past it. We were all on Mars … We eventually found this wonderful place to shoot it and we’d just got into it when a cop came up on a motorbike and asked us to leave.’ Wonfor stood his ground, but the cop started to finger his g
un. ‘I said, Don’t even bother, because the only thing you can do at this moment in time is fucking kill me and right now that seems like a good option.’

  Back in London, Wonfor edited the footage and showed it to the band. He was already known for his filming style, and the band walking towards the camera in slow motion was a familiar trick of his. ‘They looked at it, looked at me as if I was a Martian, and said, No, man, it’s not what we wanted.’ Wonfor asked what did they want? ‘They said, We don’t know.’ Wonfor stormed out of the editing suite and left the band there to make their own changes. ‘The band didn’t change a thing on it, not one shot.’

  Alexandra Palace would be the Roses’ first UK live show since Blackpool. The band had considered holding this major London showcase at a film studio in Shepherd’s Bush used as a venue for an illegal rave by Energy, but that idea had stalled as crackdowns on raves by the police intensified. ‘Ally Pally,’ said Brown, was the ‘best legal alternative’. The venue, famous in the 1960s for hosting acts such as Pink Floyd, had been off the circuit for decades. The Roses would be the first band to play there after its recent reopening. The woman in charge of the venue had heard of The Stone Roses and was petrified by the prospect. ‘But I was there with the cash and they were at least going to get the press,’ said the promoter Phil Jones, who was close to Evans.

  Although Blackpool had been a major success, and there was a growing buzz around the band, it was difficult to gauge if this would translate to numbers in London. Jones intended to poster prime sites there, but on the morning tickets went on sale, all 7,500 sold out immediately. The posters never went up. ‘We were like, Shit, this thing has transferred to London,’ said Jones. The Berlin Wall had fallen on 9 November and Brown was full of insurrection talk, suggesting that a revolution was possible in England. Maybe, even, the Roses could provide the spark. ‘Anything is possible when people come together,’ he said. ‘I’m talking about people who are constantly being had over, sold short, misled, had the wool pulled over their eyes. Eventually they will say they are not having it any more.’ He talked of a raised consciousness. Something, he suggested, was ‘in the air’.

  At Alexandra Palace it was the hot air leaking from the band’s pricked ego, as they were forced back down to earth. The gig was held on the same Saturday night that the Happy Mondays played the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, and Bruce Mitchell of the Manchester Light & Stage company Lighting (who had handled production in Blackpool) opted to work on the Mondays’ show. ‘Gareth had wound me up so much, I didn’t want to be down there with him,’ said Mitchell. ‘So I did the Mondays.’ He also knew Alexandra Palace was a terrible venue. ‘You can only fix the sound by spending more than the gross of the door,’ he said.

  On the day of the gig Cummins’s classic shot appeared on the front cover of the NME but little else went to plan. Mitchell subcontracted the Roses job to a company who had hired expensive hydraulic lights, but they didn’t know how to make them work. Nothing could be done until the lights were up, and they were still being erected at quarter to five. When finally the band could soundcheck, promoter Jones discovered the PA team hadn’t brought a radio to communicate between the front of house and the stage. In the cavernous great hall, the sound levels for the band were achieved by shouting instructions back and forth.

  ‘It was a very stressful day, mainly because we couldn’t get these lights up.’ When the doors finally opened Jones realized that the 7,500 tickets he’d been allowed to sell barely filled half of the venue. ‘The punters only went back as far as the mixing desk. The venue could have held three times the number.’

  As at Blackpool, the Roses didn’t have a support band, relying on Dave Haslam and famed Balearic/acid house DJ Paul Oakenfold to warm up the crowd. This decision to open with DJs was seen as further evidence of the Roses’ open-mindedness to the cultural shift heralded by acid house. ‘All roads were open, all things were considered,’ said Haslam, whose set was disrupted by the chaos surrounding the production. ‘Equipment was still coming on and off stage. I played “Good Life” by Inner City and it jumped about three or four times. Every time it jumped I winced and threw a dark look at Steve Adge.’

  After missing Blackpool, Evans made a show of himself at Alexandra Palace. ‘Gareth had the worst knitted jumper on that I’d ever seen on anyone in a position of influence in the music industry,’ said Haslam. ‘It was a Christmas jumper with a Santa on it.’ Evans had demanded £70,000 to allow Steve Lock, the Granada producer who’d got the band their break on The Other Side of Midnight, to film the gig. The price was still being negotiated, but they came to an agreement that Lock would film two or three tracks. Lock’s overriding memory of the event was of seeing Evans after the show. ‘He had bin-liners full of cash that he was putting into the boot of his car from the merchandise he’d sold.’

  When the band took to the stage to the familiar strains of a loop from ‘Small Time Hustler’ by The Dismasters, itself based on a sample from the 1970s track ‘Sport’ by Lightnin’ Rod of late 1960s rap pioneers The Last Poets, the vast venue was half empty and the gig stalled and stuttered, failing to generate the spirit of the packed Blackpool show. This was a dark, damp night, not a summer’s day out, and the sound was as bad as Evans’s jumper. The band played on manfully as the guitar went missing, the bass often became inaudible, the drums grated and Reni and Brown’s vocals shot up and down. As the crowd grew bemused, Brown admonished them. ‘You’re not moving much. We need to be entertained too.’ He responded to a heckler, ‘It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at.’

  Mani, bluntly, said the gig was ‘crap’ and ‘a disaster’. It received mixed reviews. For many in the London media this was their first taste of the Roses, and it was puzzling. ‘No matter about the vague sensation of déjà vu, the 1990s it seems start right about here,’ ventured the Q magazine review.

  ‘Ally Pally wasn’t what it should have been,’ Brown admitted. After the show he and Squire left in a car and didn’t say a word for two hours. But they knew they still had an ace up their sleeve. They had ‘Fools Gold’. In a sleeve that featured Squire’s best artwork of the period, Double Dorsal Doppelganger One, the single charted the day after Alexandra Palace, on 19 November, at an impressive number 13 in the UK Top 40, giving the band their biggest hit to date. Squire had aimed to put the ‘human touch’ back into acid house, which to him sounded as if it had been written by a computer virus. Brown declared that if they’d had the confidence, more of the debut album would have sounded like ‘Fools Gold’. ‘We never intended to sound like a 1960s group.’

  Three days after the single charted, the Roses filmed an infamous live appearance on BBC2’s The Late Show. The arts programme went out at 11.15 p.m., in the ‘graveyard slot’ after Newsnight. Two minutes before the band went on to play live, Brown said he looked at the others and knew they didn’t want to do it. ‘We said a little prayer that something would come and get us out of it and it did.’

  The band, at first glance, looked magnificent: Mani, with his hair scraped back into a ponytail and holding his Pollocked Rickenbacker bass; Brown still wearing the famous ‘money’ T-shirt; Reni in a leather bucket hat and leather jacket, over a yellow T-shirt, behind his thrown-together drum kit; and Squire, disinterested, concentrating on his guitar parts. They got through the first verse of ‘Made of Stone’ and were building into the chorus when the guitar and bass suddenly cut out. A beat later, and the camera fell on Reni, smirking. He attempted to straighten his face but couldn’t, and started to laugh.

  ‘Hey, what’s happened? Hey, que pasa?’ Brown said. The show’s presenter, Tracey MacLeod, appeared on screen to apologize for what looked like a power shortage. Behind her Reni snapped his fingers, whipping his hand towards Squire, who threw back the same ‘wicked’ hand gesture. Brown started shouting behind MacLeod, ending with, ‘They ask you to come and then they mess you about.’ As MacLeod began to introduce the next segment of the show, Brown, still visible behind her
, appeared to be looking at someone off screen. ‘We’re wasting our time, lads,’ he said. MacLeod turned to him and said that they would sort it out in a minute, then continued her preamble to the next piece. Brown strutted towards the camera. ‘The BBC are a bunch of amateurs,’ he declared. MacLeod flinched, but soldiered on with her attempt to keep the show moving. Brown interrupted again. ‘Amateurs! Amateurs!’

  Evans claimed it was all a set-up, intended to launch the band into the public’s consciousness in a similar way to the Sex Pistols. It would certainly prove priceless in terms of publicity, but Gareth Davies, who had booked them on to the show, said that during the afternoon rehearsals there had been problems with the automatic cut-out switch, triggered by the band’s volume. ‘It was cutting in too quickly, which didn’t give the engineers time to adjust things. So when it came to film the show live, the volume triggered the cut-out switch.’ Brown had reacted impressively. ‘If you look at the video,’ Davies said, ‘when the sound cuts out, Ian ducks down. He was looking to see if he was on the TV monitor. That’s why he then started walking up and down shouting, Amateurs, amateurs, BBC are a bunch of amateurs. If you notice he didn’t swear.’

  The following day, on 23 November, the Roses were due to appear on Top of the Pops. Also booked to make their debut appearance on the show were the Happy Mondays. The Roses were staying the night in London at the YMCA on Tottenham Court Road, and after arriving back from The Late Show recording they told Davies they didn’t want to do Top of the Pops. The band realized that the impact of their aborted appearance on The Late Show would be positive. Davies tried to persuade them that doing Top of the Pops would throw them into the mainstream, and that the band’s fans would love seeing them on the show. The Roses’ main doubt was over the show’s strict rules that no band could have any amps on stage, and they were afraid of looking naff. ‘They were insistent on having amplifiers, just to make it look vaguely real,’ Davies said. It was smoothed over when a couple of the Roses’ crew charmed the TV crew into letting them set up.