The Stone Roses: War and Peace

by Spence, Simon

  Evans arrived first at BBC TV Centre and told Davies the Roses were following right behind. Then he made one of his famous quick exits. ‘He said, Tell them I’ve gone for an urgent meeting – and ran away down the corridor,’ said Davies. ‘The band arrived in two cars. John got out of one and came up to me to say that the cars were waiting for a while, because if they didn’t like how it looked, they were going. But they went into the studio, saw the amps and they were fine. The only instruction I had from Gareth was not to let the band out of my sight because he was convinced the Happy Mondays would spike their drinks with acid.’

  For Mani the show ‘felt like a vindication for the city of Manchester. The Roses and Mondays converged backstage and turned the whole of the studio ‘into a massive rave’, terrorizing the other bands on the show such as the Fine Young Cannibals and Five Star. ‘We caused chaos.’ Powder, pills and booze were freely consumed.

  For this, the band’s only appearance on Top of the Pops, Squire spruced himself up in a baggy long-sleeved top, decorated in crucifixes, and big jeans. Unlike The Late Show, when he played live using a brown Gibson with a capo, for Top of the Pops he held a paint-splattered guitar. Mani was dressed in huge jeans and mimed his distinctive bass part with a cocksure strut. Reni was in a white bucket hat and a maroon sweatshirt.

  It was Brown, however, who looked like he had benefited most from some backstage primping. He wore the same top as he had at Ally Pally, a red zip-up jacket-style top braided in black and gold, big loose-fitting parallel jeans, and his hair and face shone holy. He played games with the microphone as he danced his monkey dance, holding it above his head and mouthing the words to camera in a posture that was as defiant as it was blessed. His hair, his top, his face were all pop perfect. The song washed over the audience, as the effortless spectacle, swagger and voluminous jeans drowned all senses. The following week ‘Fools Gold’ rose to number 8.

  11.

  Madchester

  Top of the Pops was the spark that ignited a frenzy for all things Manchester. The Mondays had brought ‘Madchester’ into the public domain with their new EP Madchester Rave On (produced by Martin Hannett), and the term became a catch-all to describe what would become a golden age of Mancunian cultural dominance.

  Keith Jobling, the Mondays’ video-maker, coined the word while writing a music-driven film script called Mad Fuckers. Factory Records boss Tony Wilson ran with it from there, forcing the word on a reluctant Mondays. ‘It did sum up an atmosphere,’ said Jobling. ‘Manchester stunk of marijuana everywhere you went. It was a very lawless period, hedonistic, and it did go a bit mad.’

  Brown would become the face of Madchester, and his street stance was widely imitated. Unlike his Mondays’ counterpart Shaun Ryder, Brown had the poster-boy looks and distinctive cartoonish style that, in the business of commercial pop, was paramount. He was on his way to becoming an icon. ‘I’m not particularly keen but I’m aware it could happen, probably will happen,’ he said. ‘I’m aware there’s people who will use my face to fill their wallets, who can suck me in, then, when they want to, shit me out again.’

  Gareth Davies now fended off demands for the Roses to appear on TV programmes as diverse as Panorama and Blue Peter. The band said no to all, and Top of the Pops was to be their final performance together on British TV. Interviews to the press would also now be sparse, though deft handling by Davies and publicist Philip Hall kept this non-compliance well hidden. The band did come close to appearing on Channel 4’s The Last Resort, hosted by Jonathan Ross – even after Ross slighted them on TV. ‘We had planned to rehearse in the normal way and go through the whole thing,’ said Davies. ‘Then when it came to cuing them in live on TV, the band would just rest their instruments against the amplifiers and walk off, and there’d just be white noise. But they decided not to do [the show] in the end.’

  There had been talk of a gig at Manchester’s 9,000-capacity GMEX Centre before Christmas 1989, but the band would not play live again for nearly six months following Alexandra Palace. They didn’t need to. In the UK, their album – which had dropped out of the Top 40 a week after its release – began selling again, and the popularity of the band’s T-shirts became a licence to print money. T-shirts, above all else, became a key market, as Madchester became as much about the look as the music. Jobling created two of the best: ‘Madchester’ and ‘Just Say No To London’. Leo Stanley, at the Identity shop based in Afflecks Palace, produced the ‘AND ON THE SIXTH DAY GOD CREATED MANchester’ T-shirt and other variations thereof. For many, the cloth became mightier than the chord. The Roses admitted to being obsessed with clothes but stuck to expensive, and rare, French, Spanish and Italian T-shirts and tops. The top half of the band may have been continental but the bottom half was Madchester – flares and baggy jeans were firmly set as the scene’s key signifiers.

  Local brand Joe Bloggs hit the jackpot with their popular jeans, heavily logoed sweatshirts, hooded tops and T-shirts. It was estimated the company was worth £60 million. More to the Roses’ taste was Gio-Goi, a fashion label started by the Donnelly brothers, Chris and Anthony, who had done ‘official bootleg’ T-shirts at the Mondays’ recent Free Trade Hall show that took place on the same night as Alexandra Palace. They were now pumping out their own T-shirt, in collaboration with the Happy Mondays’ sleeve designers, Central Station, and would soon develop a full range of clothes. ‘Finally it had landed and there was a fortune out there to be made,’ said Anthony.

  Another clear winner in the Madchester gold rush would be the Inspiral Carpets, a band who embraced the Bloggs brand and were managed by Anthony Boggiano, who had worked for the Roses’ manager Evans at the International in the mid-1980s. ‘The pecking order was the Roses, then the Mondays and then the Inspirals,’ said Boggiano. ‘They weren’t as sexy as the Roses and they weren’t as rock ’n’ roll as the Mondays.’ The Inspirals too were cashing in on the T-shirt bonanza, with their infamous ‘Cool As Fuck’ T-shirts, and, as Manchester became a Mecca for A&R men, they signed a lucrative deal with Mute Records.

  The Roses’ own label Jive/Zomba was no less eager to capitalize on the Madchester craze, and saw a possibility of breaking the band worldwide; America being the real cash cow. ‘It sort of exploded,’ said Jive’s managing director Steven Howard. ‘And we focused everyone on the Roses in America.’ In New York, Jive/Zomba had an office with a core staff of around fifteen run by Barry Weiss, today the chairman and CEO of Island Def Jam and Universal Motown Republic Group. He had astutely appointed the young Michael Tedesco to oversee the Roses’ product, specifically for his understanding of the ‘alternative’ rock scene. Tedesco had already been working hard on the band. He had used imports of the UK 12-inch of ‘Elephant Stone’ to ‘seed the soil’ with America’s alternative-rock radio stations such as WLIR in New York, KROQ in Los Angeles and LIVE105 in San Francisco. Jive/Zomba had subsequently pushed import copies of ‘Made of Stone’, and then given a first Roses American release to the single ‘She Bangs the Drums’, which sold poorly. Essentially the American operation had been tracking the pattern of UK releases. This had changed when Tedesco held back on releasing the Roses’ album in America and lifted ‘I Wanna Be Adored’ to release as a stand-alone single.

  ‘ “I Wanna Be Adored” was a significant next thrust at modern rock radio,’ said Tedesco. ‘But it wasn’t boom, the way it was happening in the UK. It was just making progress.’ The Roses’ album was released three months after the UK release, but sold poorly and was largely ignored. Then came ‘Fools Gold’. As in the UK, the single was a huge catalyst. ‘It really was the record that ignited The Stone Roses’ career, the most effective and influential record the group had,’ said Tedesco. In America ‘Fools Gold’ was both released as a 12-inch single and used as a marketing tool to sell the album. Tedesco put the track on the end of the album and re-released it in late 1989. ‘We knew there was so much more life in the album, and we also knew “Fools Gold” was just a watershed moment.’

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p; Tedesco needed the band in person and made repeated attempts to persuade the Roses to visit America for promotional duties or live dates. ‘I would speak to Andrew Lauder daily. I would also speak to Gareth, but the bigger they started to become in England the more difficult it became to get straight answers. Then we heard that they were not coming to America until they could do Shea Stadium.’

  This was the New York venue where The Beatles had famously played in 1965 to 55,600 people, an attendance record subsequently broken by Led Zeppelin in 1973, and where The Rolling Stones had recently played a six-night run. The idea was absurd, and palpably beyond where the band were at in America. ‘This is when dealing with Gareth, who was actually a very likable character, became frustrating,’ said Tedesco. ‘He was probably in a little over his head and didn’t always know what the best next move would have been.’

  RCA, who licensed and distributed Jive/Zomba product in America, had not put their full might behind the Roses. Clive Calder had interceded, but the major label’s priority remained more mainstream material such as the soundtrack to Dirty Dancing. Alternative rock was not yet considered big business. In RCA’s Los Angeles offices, however, there was a small core who were wildly enthusiastic. Evans’s American representative, Greg Lewerke, was also based in Los Angeles and was a regular at RCA, trying to boost the band’s profile and importance to the label: ‘It took a while but they finally caught on. I dealt with a lot of RCA people all the way up to the top.’

  One of the band’s supporters at RCA was radio plugger Bruce Flohr. ‘These guys didn’t give a fuck,’ he said. ‘We were doing everything we could just to track them down on the phone, to find out what we should be doing. It was just a mad scramble to keep up with the explosion. It was out of control. Nobody at RCA, not in PR or anything, could get any access to the band.’ Robbie Snow was the Roses’ product manager at RCA. ‘The question of the day, every day, was, When are they coming?’ he said. Snow felt Evans was not relaying to the band the message of how important it was for them to have a promotional presence in America. Accompanied by Lewerke, Snow flew to the UK on a mission to talk to the Roses directly. He couldn’t get through to Brown and Squire, but spoke with Mani and Reni. ‘I thought they got it, they knew what I was talking about,’ he said. ‘I came back thinking, They know there’s demand. We did communicate it to them. But it was not easy.’

  The idea that the band could play Shea Stadium, and everybody in America would come to that one show, betrayed either breathtaking arrogance or a genuine naivety at the heart of the Roses. Either way, the band’s resistance to flying to America to promote their records initially fuelled anticipation in the country. ‘I used to think, in the early stages of it, they were being really smart,’ said Snow. ‘I kept thinking, They’re going to come, but six months after everybody thinks they should have come. But in those six months they’re going to build up so much more demand that it’s going to be the hottest ticket going. I did believe there was a method to the madness at first.’

  In the UK, demand for the group was unquenchable. The Roses featured in Smash Hits for the first time, with Brown commenting on the rumour that the band had turned down a lucrative tour support with The Rolling Stones. ‘They should be bloody supporting us,’ he said. The same month, December 1989, the Roses stared out from the front covers of Melody Maker, The Face and the NME. Oddly, both the Melody Maker and the Face articles were negative, although at least The Face had Glen Luchford’s sumptuous photographs, with Brown on the cover and a band portrait inside.

  The Melody Maker cover story was by Jon Wilde, who had first seen the band in 1985 and still wasn’t impressed. His article was an all-out attack, claiming the band typified ‘the late 1980s rock malaise’. Wilde labelled Brown and Squire, who did the interview, as ‘pitifully inarticulate’. The Face cover story echoed the sentiment. Written by Nick Kent, after meeting both the Mondays and the Roses at Top of the Pops, he expressed unease with the Roses’ statements of intent, such as their belief in ‘positive thinking’. ‘We want to keep moving,’ Brown said. ‘The world’s too small. It’s doesn’t end at Manchester.’

  ‘The next album will be more positive, tidier, looser, better,’ Squire said. ‘The idea with the first album was to make each song extremely different from the last, but we didn’t get it. So that’s the aim with the second. We don’t want to sound like a band.’ Brown elaborated on why the Roses had turned down the Stones – one of Kent’s favourite bands. ‘We said no to the Stones because everybody else would have said yes. We’re against hypocrisy, lies, bigotry, showbusiness, insincerity, phonies and fakers. People like Jagger and Bowie, they’re so insincere now they’re just patronizing.’ Evans later said that he’d made up the story about the Roses turning down the Stones as a press stunt: ‘We sat in the International trying to think which band we could refuse to support,’ he said. Nonetheless, the Stones and Bowie were the latest acts Brown had impressively trashed. He had already called U2 ‘drivel’, Lou Reed ‘a miserable bastard’, said Bruce Springsteen ‘always sounds like he’s having a shit’, and labelled another of Kent’s favourite acts, Guns N’ Roses, ‘redneck rubbish’.

  In the Face article, Kent wrote about an interlude backstage at Top of the Pops, with Tony Wilson holding court and chastising the Roses for being unprofessional at Alexandra Palace due to excessive drug use. Evans ‘softly but firmly put his hand over Wilson’s mouth and whispered something in his ear that caused Wilson to stiffen momentarily’. Wilson turned to Kent to tell him, ‘You should know The Stone Roses don’t take drugs.’

  Evans had previously attempted to play up the link between drugs and The Stone Roses. The band maintained it was overplayed. ‘We were never strung out,’ said Squire. ‘A lot of the drug stuff came from Gareth,’ said Brown. ‘We never even smoked in front of him, but he was just trying to be a rock manager, trying to make us notorious.’ ‘Ecstasy wasn’t the band’s fuel,’ said Squire. ‘That was the desire to succeed and create.’

  The cover story in the NME, head cheerleaders of the Madchester scene, was more positive. The band were interviewed and photographed amid snowy scenes in Switzerland. They had gone there, reputedly, so that Evans could stash the money he’d made from the International in a Swiss bank account. The five-year-running Dougie James court case over ownership of the International was close to being decided. The NME cover line was ‘Top of the World’, followed by ‘The Stone Roses: Band of the Year’, and the article was a puff piece, best summed up by a quote from Reni: ‘No-one can ever get the right impression from a picture and a 1,000 words. You can’t compress the whole of four people into that. When you do, you end up with misinterpretations like “Scallydelic” and nothing could be further than the truth.’

  ‘We’re the most important group in the world, because we’ve got the best songs and we haven’t even begun to show our potential yet,’ declared Brown. In the same edition of the NME, ‘She Bangs the Drums’ was named Single of the Year, with ‘Fools Gold’ at number 2 and ‘Made of Stone’ at number 5 in the magazine’s Top 50 singles. The Roses’ album, which had now sold close to 75,000 in the UK, came second in the NME’s Top 20 albums of the year, behind De La Soul’s 3 Feet High And Rising.

  The critical acclaim and growing commercial success, however, had not translated into financial reward. Just before Christmas 1989, Steve Lock went to visit Evans at a serviced office complex in Knutsford. It wasn’t a proper office; Lock wasn’t even sure it was Evans’s office. Lock was putting together a documentary about the Madchester scene for Granada TV, and was trying to negotiate use of the Alexandra Palace filming for the programme. Evans was holding out for £70,000, and an agreement eluded Lock. After the meeting, Evans asked him for a lift back to town. He wanted to stop off in Didsbury to drop something off for Reni. ‘This was the week The Stone Roses had been on the cover of the NME, that classic Top of the World shot,’ said Lock. Evans invited Lock into Reni’s flat to say hello.

  ‘We go in and Garet
h goes to Reni, This has been a really, really good year this year, really good, so I’m just dropping off your Christmas bonus,’ said Lock. ‘He gets out his wallet and he counts out, I think it was £150, might have been £200, and his next line was, Now if this all carries on after Christmas you’re going to have to think very seriously about getting your own … I was expecting the next word to be accountant, or lawyer. And Gareth said, Your own bank account. I was just gobsmacked. You read old rock ’n’ roll stories about Colonel Tom Parker, or whoever, ripping off young bands. I was close to [Tony] Wilson where it’s all 50/50, no contract, and everyone still gets ripped off anyway – but at least there’s some kind of semblance of fairness. With Gareth and Reni it was just the classic musician getting ripped off.’

  The Roses and Evans had been aware for some time that they had entered into a bad contract with Jive/Zomba. It was now particularly apparent that their percentage on record royalties was not good. When the cash should have started to come through, it just wasn’t stacking up. This was only on record sales. Brown and Squire were beginning to get their publishing money as songwriters. This extra revenue stream for Brown and Squire was pronounced, as record sales weren’t generating what Mani and Reni had expected, and potentially divisive. Evans had already discussed the record contract with Andrew Lauder and Roddy McKenna, and they both agreed it needed fixing. Following the success of ‘Fools Gold’, Evans met with Mark Furman, Jive/Zomba’s young business affairs executive, and John Fruin, former boss of Polydor and Warner Bros in the UK and one-time chairman of the BPI (British Phonographic Industry), who was now a consultant to Clive Calder, to discuss the issue further.