The Stone Roses: War and Peace

by Spence, Simon

  He fed some of the pain and realism of his life into new songs, and the Roses began looking for a place to rehearse and record them. Just before Christmas 1992 they chose Square One studios in Bury, a small market town only eight miles north of Manchester. It was an unglamorous location but an impressive and expensive studio. Previous clients had included Take That, Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards, and Public Enemy’s Chuck D. The studio was experiencing financial problems and there was talk of the Roses buying it off owner Trevor Taylor, with a view to running it as their own personal rehearsal and recording space. The band called Leckie in the New Year to tell him they’d booked the studio for a year. He had worked at Square One with The Fall, visited in February and agreed to return to the studio in June to continue recording the second album.

  It would mean a break of almost a year between the end of the Ewloe sessions and his recommencement of the album. According to Leckie, there was an array of factors behind this faltering progress: ‘The new songs weren’t ready. People were ill. Reni would go on holiday. Ian’s girlfriend was having a baby. John wanted more time to write songs.’ Before Leckie returned in the summer, the band began rehearsing at Square One. Studio owner Trevor Taylor said the band seemed unsure of themselves and expressed strong anti-Geffen sentiment. It was now coming up to two years since Geffen had signed the band, and President Eddie Rosenblatt was growing increasingly impatient. ‘I imagine I was less polite to Gary Gersh, saying, What the hell is going on here?’ Gersh, the Roses’ champion, flush from the success of Nirvana, was now on his way out of Geffen – having accepted an offer to become the president of Capitol. Rosenblatt handed Gersh’s A&R role with the Roses to another major Geffen A&R figure, Tom Zutaut. If Gersh was on the Sonic Youth–Nirvana axis, Zutaut was firmly in the Guns N’ Roses camp.

  Geffen scheduled the Roses album for release in autumn 1993. Rosenblatt’s only point of contact with the band was John Kennedy, who was equally keen for the band to record. He had already told the band that they needed to make two albums for Geffen before the deal started to make real financial sense. The Roses had incurred costs on the Jive/Zomba court case. ‘I made that clear at the time to the band,’ he said. ‘This is all about getting to album two, and then you’ve got one of the best deals in record company history. They were so laid-back about that. They’d had some sessions in the studio that were expensive and not productive, and I was telling them to get on with it.’

  In Square One, the band worked up the backing tracks of four new Squire songs: ‘Love Spreads’, ‘Severed Head’ (which would become ‘How Do You Sleep’), ‘Tears’ and ‘Tightrope’. While they did this, Brown spent time hanging out with studio owner Taylor. ‘What I liked about him was he had this Salford boy image, bit of a bad boy, but he wasn’t,’ said Taylor. ‘He was sound as a pound.’ One night the two were heading back from the pub and came across a guy lying in the gutter. Taylor told Brown it was the local drunk. ‘This guy wore the most ridiculous toupee you’d ever seen and, as he’d fallen over into the gutter, his toupee had slipped off and he’d puked up inside the toupee,’ said Taylor. ‘Ian goes, Right, where does he live? I said, He lives just over there. So Ian said, Look in his pocket and see if his keys are in there. When we went to sit him up it was obvious he’d filled his pants as well. It was disgusting. I’m the type that would have walked on the other side of the street, but Ian insisted we carry this guy and put him in his house so he was safe.’

  Squire had written the music and the lyrics for all the new tracks. ‘He took my fun off me there,’ said Brown. ‘My fun was doing the lyrics and the melody.’ But Brown figured that Squire had got ‘a bee in his bonnet’ and just needed to get it out. The Roses would make more albums for Geffen, Brown thought, so he would just let Squire get on with it and back him up on this one. And the lyrics were good. ‘Love Spreads’ controversially envisaged Christ as a black woman (Squire having been inspired by Rosalind Miles’s book The Women’s History of the World (1988), an elegy for the lost utopia that existed before patriarchy). ‘Severed Head’ was harder to decipher. It was easy to claim it was about former manager Evans, but Squire said it was aimed at ‘the people who make decisions that are guaranteed to cost lives, like sending troops into battle’. ‘Tears’ and ‘Tightrope’, however, were deeply personal, dark and painful songs, and, said Squire, ‘maybe that was something that Ian had a problem with’. Yet even when Squire’s control of the songs extended to his writing the bass lines for Mani, as he had done for Pete Garner, there was no apparent grudge towards Squire from the band. ‘John was being the prolific one, coming out with some great songs, so we let him get on with it,’ said Mani.

  The news that the Roses were recording in Square One quickly leaked, resulting in the band appearing on the front cover of the NME on 29 May 1993, under the headline ‘Gotcha! The Stone Roses hunted down’. The piece relied on a snatched photograph of Brown that appeared on the cover. The band refused to talk: Brown told the NME it was ‘too soon’ and to come back in a few months when the album was finished.

  On 1 June, Leckie arrived at Square One, expecting that the band had got the fresh material required and they would nail the album before he left at the end of June. He and the band would live together while recording, in a rented house in Marple, Cheshire, at least an hour’s drive from the studio. The house ‘was a loafer’s paradise’, said Mani. It had electronic gates, a snooker room, indoor pool, a sauna and jacuzzi. The band caused £7,000 worth of damage, it would later be claimed.

  Square One was expensive and booked twenty-four hours a day. The band would rise around three in the afternoon, drive through the rush hour to Bury, organize food, and were ready to record around nine or ten o’clock at night. ‘Then about three in the morning everyone would be a bit bored and want to go back to the house to go in the swimming pool, and stay up until eight o’clock,’ Leckie said. ‘Sometimes they’d turn up at the studio, have something to eat, chill out, strum a bit on the guitar and go home,’ said Taylor. The air-conditioning in Square One was faulty or non-existent, and the studio was unbearably stuffy. ‘Leckie wasn’t happy with anything. I’d had him in before and he seemed quite a laid-back character, happy, but with the Roses there was a lot of trauma going on. John [Squire] wanted more say over what was going to tape. Leckie was a respected producer but it wasn’t working – it was just a bad gel.’

  After only a few days at Square One Leckie suggested they spend the rest of the month recording in the house in Marple. He had hired equipment from London, including the tape recorder and mixing desk, and it was transferred to the house. Reni was set up in the back room and they cut lacklustre versions of ‘Love Spreads’, ‘Severed Head’, ‘Tears’ and ‘Tightrope’ in Marple. They also re-recorded ‘Driving South’ in a different key. Squire’s original version required Brown to sing high, like Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant, and Brown had refused. ‘There was not much screaming or fisticuffs,’ said Leckie. ‘Sometimes, in terms of the music, or not getting a part right, but it was very rare. They always seemed to be mates. But they were in a rudderless ship, and just seemed to be drifting. The raw material they presented to me had no clear direction.’

  By 30 June, with nothing really achieved, Leckie left Marple for New York. ‘I’d exhausted all my suggestions,’ he said. ‘Although they’d spent all this time rehearsing the songs, I said they needed to do some demos as the band, without me, without my influence. I just said, Give me some demos of the songs.’ They were due to reconvene at Rockfield Studios in Wales on 27 July, to complete the album. This time the Roses followed Leckie’s advice, and booked into Manor Park Studios, in Tintwistle in the High Peak, to record demos. The band remained in the shared house in Marple, determined to nail down the eight songs they already had and to add more.

  Manor Park Studios was based in a former working men’s club, now operating as both a private club and studio. The live recording area was the club’s main room, with a small foot-high stage and stinking of ciga
rettes and beer. The studio was £15 an hour and mostly used by indie bands hoping to get a demo done quickly and cheaply. It was not the sort of place you expected The Stone Roses to turn up.

  The Roses worked with in-house producer, Mark Tolle. He was assisted by Al ‘Bongo’ Shaw, who wasn’t a qualified engineer but knew where to get weed. The Roses had booked the studio initially for just a few days, but appreciated the relaxed atmosphere and spent three weeks recording there. The band worked long days, and Tolle was struck by both how the material echoed Led Zeppelin and their impressive work ethic. ‘They’d try a middle bit for a song ten different ways for four or five hours, until they got what they wanted,’ he said. ‘John was in control but Ian wasn’t sat on the sidelines or anything. There wasn’t a whole lot of banter going on. It was pretty serious.’ Squire bossed the sessions, and was protective of the master tapes, taking them away with him every night after they finished. He also asked Tolle to dissuade outsiders from coming in while the band were there. The band played as if live in the studio cum club, and finally seemed to have turned a corner.

  ‘Daybreak’, the only Roses song ever credited to all four members, was started here as an improvised instrumental jam. It was more the direction that Brown imagined the band going in, capturing the funk he knew the band had in them. It was also a powerful reminder of Squire and Reni’s musical rapport, forged now over nine long years. There was a playful spirit to the song, as the two fought one another for the same space. Footage from these sessions was captured by Squire on a Super-8 camera, and would be used in the video for ‘Love Spreads’. Squire and Reni were captured walking down the street towards the studio, both looking like heavy rock gods: Reni with a beard and mirror shades, and John, tall with his hair immaculately scruffy. They oozed a supreme confidence, and that’s what ‘Daybreak’ sounded like.

  Tolle and Al ‘Bongo’ Shaw were credited with the initial recordings of ‘Daybreak’, ‘Tightrope’ and ‘Tears’ on Second Coming. ‘They didn’t have to do that,’ said Tolle, but it was a mark of how much the band had enjoyed their time in this obscure backwater club. The demos were sent to Leckie, but as usual the band cut it fine. ‘I got the demos on the Saturday morning, and we were due in Rockfield the following Tuesday,’ he said. On Monday he was in Rockfield, listening to the demos, waiting for the band, and on the Tuesday he resigned. ‘When it came time for the proper recording Leckie said he didn’t think we had the songs,’ said Brown. ‘We’d given him three of the best tracks on the album. I thought “Daybreak” was fantastic as it was. All the songs were in shape. He told us we weren’t ready to record but we knew we were.’

  The Roses were booked in for an initial period of two weeks. In fact, they would spend the next fourteen months, from July 1993 until September 1994, at Rockfield at the cost of approximately a quarter of a million pounds and their own sanity. Nine of the tracks on the album were already in shape: ‘Tightrope’, ‘Tears’, ‘Breaking into Heaven’, ‘Driving South’, ‘Ten Storey Love Song’, ‘How Do You Sleep’, ‘Daybreak’, ‘Love Spreads’ and ‘Begging You’. ‘I thought we would go in the studio and just bang it out in a month,’ said Brown.

  Based just outside the village of Monmouth, Rockfield Studios was where they had recorded parts of their first album. It was in a converted farmhouse, with the Roses in the Coach House studio where someone had scrawled a drawing of the devil on the door. The Roses called on Paul Schroeder, the dance engineer/producer they had worked closely with on their 1989 album and ‘Fools Gold’, to replace Leckie. ‘I listened to the songs, the demos,’ said Schroeder. ‘I thought it was a good protest record, almost in a Dylan style.’ ‘Daybreak’ name-checked Rosa Lee Parks, who’d helped galvanize the American civil rights movement in the Montgomery bus boycott. Brown played Schroeder a vinyl recording of a stirring Martin Luther King address in the studio. But he could tell it wasn’t a happy camp. ‘They were feeling the pressure. It was obvious that John had written pretty much everything, and the other three members were almost not a part of it. They were there for John, obviously, but because they hadn’t done it themselves, it was difficult for them to put everything into it.’

  There were signs, though, that the Roses were readying themselves for action, having decided on a new manager, their PR man Philip Hall. As well as running the industry’s leading independent PR company, Hall Or Nothing, Hall was also now managing The Manic Street Preachers. While their lawyer, Kennedy, continued to look after the Roses’ business, and had been running their affairs for the past three years, he had hundreds of other clients to consider. Hall would provide ideas, plus the good humour and common sense the band had been missing.

  In the studio Schroeder quickly disabused the band of the idea that they had to record everything from scratch. ‘We had a chat and they asked me if I wanted to redo “Tightrope”,’ he said. ‘They’d done that, just fucking about [at Manor Park Studios] and it sounded great. There’d be no point in redoing it because it had that feeling of exactly what the record needed. We could have done a studio version and it would have come out like “Stairway to Heaven” or something. Why do that when you’ve got this fantastic backing track?’ As early as September 1993, Schroeder had the basis of the record, the drums and bass, down on tape. The vocals couldn’t go down until Squire had finished his guitar parts. ‘We had all the rhythm tracks done so we were waiting for John to come out of his room and do it. It took a month and a half, two months, so we weren’t doing anything.’

  In this period, frustration, boredom – and drug use – grew exponentially. Brown even quit the group but was persuaded to stay. ‘I kept on suggesting, Let’s just go home,’ said Schroeder. ‘When they had the guitar parts we could resume. But John always said, If we leave, we won’t come back. John knew that if he didn’t pull something amazing out of the bag then the album would fall flat, so he was very probably scared of what he could put on the record and what he couldn’t and, maybe, that’s why he got into his coke. Nothing makes you feel good like good cocaine.’

  The increasingly insecure Squire had started to use cocaine to bolster his confidence, and to give him the energy required for the long hours he spent concentrating on improving his guitar parts and the songs, but now he was addicted. With his personal life in chaos, Squire retreated to his room at Rockfield and locked the door, lost in his own private world. Reni tried to reach him, but Squire wouldn’t let anyone in. ‘Charlie [cocaine] is the devil, simple as that,’ said Brown. When Squire did periodically emerge from his room, his drug-induced delusions and paranoia could translate into arrogance – alienating his band and destroying any sense of camaraderie – and even megalomania. He discussed the idea of sacking an under-performing Mani, who was self-medicating for depression caused by the death of his father. ‘I’d go away for a week, come back and no one’s talking,’ said Brown. ‘He’s not talking to him – he thinks he’s a dick and he thinks he’s a dick, and I’m trying to be the daddy of them all. I’m walking in each room and getting big hugs, but he won’t work with him.’

  Cocaine was not the only drug problem in the band. As Brown, Mani, Reni and Schroeder waited for Squire to finalize his guitar parts, a heavy fug of cannabis hung over the studio, the weeks turning into months with nothing much else to do. Reni was now a father of three, and often excused himself to attend to his family in Manchester. In the studio Brown was smoking weed ‘all day and all night’. It often became difficult to understand what he was saying. Cannabis turned his head to ‘mush’, he admitted. ‘You get a false idea of what you’re doing. You get hyper-critical and you never get to the end of it.’

  15.

  Reni II

  Even at their weakest, the Roses remained a formidable beast. One of the highlights for Schroeder was a new song that emerged from Squire’s bedroom, called ‘Good Times’. Again, with Reni and Squire fighting each other for supremacy, the track had a real potency, a great feel, and a lyric that Brown delivered at the very limit of his comfort zo
ne. Brown had taken Schroeder aside to say he wanted to do all the vocals in one take, and as a result the effect was noticeably different from the honeyed sound on the band’s 1989 album.

  ‘On the first album there’s a lot of drop-ins, his voice is triple-tracked, a lot of jiggery-pokery,’ said Schroeder. For Second Coming Schroeder, who was unsure that Brown could pull it off, attempted to double-track his voice while recording live by simultaneously putting it through a guitar amp. Ultimately these effects would be dropped, and hearing Brown sing with no trickery, laid bare and often sounding uncomfortable would give a purity and emotional impact to many of the tracks.

  If Squire’s lyrics were at times overwhelmingly dark, personal and laboured, then Brown’s delivery suggested there was more to them. In exquisitely expressing his own disquiet, it took Second Coming to levels their 1989 album could never touch. It was a truly remarkable performance: ‘Good Times’ Brown disliked, as he did ‘How Do You Sleep’, but on ‘Tears’ you got down to the bone. ‘ “Tears” was a difficult song to sing, that’s for sure,’ said Schroeder. ‘Even if you’re an accomplished singer it would be difficult. And it was out of Ian’s key. I quite liked the band taking it on because it’s almost like a ballad.’

  ‘Ian said to John, You’d have to wake me up, put a gun against my head and walk me down to the vocal booth for me to sing that again,’ said Mani. ‘He didn’t like the song, and we didn’t have a gun.’