The Stone Roses: War and Peace

by Spence, Simon

  Squire, who was preparing paintings for a major art exhibition due to start in June, said, ‘They’re just rumours. I can’t see it. As you get older, you realize you are on the downward slope of your life in terms of time and there are only so many things you can do. There was a time when I tried to do both things [art and music] side by side and I don’t think either of them got a fair shot as a result. I’m happy where I am.’

  Squire was a father of five, with a sixth on the way. He was busy at his workshop at his farmhouse in Macclesfield, and the new art show meant a lot to him. The London show was entitled ‘Celebrity’, and was ‘anti-idolatory’ in sentiment. The twenty-one abstract works were named after figures such as serial killer Harold Shipman and footballer David Beckham. ‘It’s an indictment of our celebrity-obsessed culture because I think celebrity is the new opiate of the masses,’ he said. But serious art critics still did not take him seriously, and only five of the twenty-one paintings sold.

  Brown had a new track out in May, having contributed vocals to an electro house single, ‘Open Your Eyes’, by respected DJs and remixers Alex Metric and Steve Angello. Ever since his collaboration with U.N.K.L.E. in 1999 and his hook-up with the Mo’ Wax label, Brown had been feted by a fashionable collective, loosely revolving around Mo’ Wax founder James Lavelle and Japanese fashion impresario Nigo, famed for his A Bathing Ape label. Brown had spoken of wanting to design clothes. In March he had collaborated with Adidas on a pair of trainers. They were launched with an elaborate exhibition of Brown memorabilia at the Adidas store in Soho, London. Despite ‘Open Your Eyes’ failing to make the Top 40, as Brown contemplated recording his seventh solo album (his final one on his current contract with Polydor) it was clear he was still open to new ideas and considered a force in the worlds of rock, dance and fashion.

  In Manchester he was a folk hero. ‘I’ve only ever had love here,’ he said. ‘I’ve never had a bad word shouted at me in twenty years.’ Brown said he thought he was one of the ‘last working-class musicians’. He sang in front of a crowd of 42,000 at Manchester United’s Old Trafford stadium in May, leading out the team for Gary Neville’s testimonial match against Juventus. His team had long played ‘This Is the One’ when they walked out onto the pitch on match days, and Brown sang accompanied by only the crowd. There were also many friendly faces to catch up with. The old Roses rehearsal rooms, Spirit, had closed in 2009 when owner John Breakell reinvented his business as the School of Sound Recording (SSR). After establishing the Manchester facility, Breakell opened a similar operation in London, and Brown agreed to supply prospective students with a £10,000 bursary, advertised as the Ian Brown Scholarship.

  Reni was busy in the summer of 2011, having sold his house in Whalley Range, and was in the process of buying a new home in Manchester that needed serious renovation. There was a loose plan to exhibit his art in 2012, but family life dominated. ‘He would fill the Manchester Apollo if he just set up his drum kit in there and played,’ said Brown. But Mani knew Reni wouldn’t consider doing anything that wasn’t better than before. And the drumming on The Stones Roses’ 1989 album, all agreed, was unbeatable.

  Brown sat down for a meal with Reni in early August 2011, the first time the two had met for many years. Brown and Squire had been in regular contact since Mani’s mum’s funeral, and had ‘gone from laughing and crying about the old days to writing songs in a heartbeat’, said Squire. They sometimes collaborated over Skype. Brown was free and easy – single again. Reni had the stresses and strains of moving home. He was forty-seven, healthy and remarkably fresh-faced, unlike the weather-beaten Brown. He was still eccentric, but with a mature perspective on what Brown was now loosely discussing: a Roses reunion. He thought he was ‘too old’ to drum again. ‘As far as drummers are concerned you should really quit at thirty-five,’ he would say later, but he was still thinking about music, and the challenge interested him, even if he had serious doubts about the musical worth of re-forming.

  Mani, who had been a guest at Kate Moss’s wedding in July, was often back in Manchester for a few days between Scream gigs. He was godfather to three of Squire’s children, and Squire took the kids for a visit. Squire’s outlook had changed since his chance meeting with Brown. It had made him think a reunion was possible, ‘even enjoyable’, he said. Mani was happy to hear of Squire and Brown’s ongoing rekindling of their friendship, of the progress being made in the songwriting, and also of the news that Brown and Reni had met up. The heavy touring schedule of the Scream was tiring. He would soon be forty-nine, had sworn off booze and drugs, and was trying to kick the fags. Before he set off again for another two months of globe-trotting on the Screamadelica tour, in principle it was agreed the Roses were all broadly in favour of re-forming.

  There could be no band rehearsals until Mani returned from his tour with the Scream at the end of September. Brown wanted the band to play before announcing any plans for a reunion. ‘Just in case someone said, When you play together, how do you know it’s not going to be shit?’ It gave him and Squire further time to work on songs, and Reni the time to finalize the purchase of his new home. There were also other issues that needed thinking through. Brown, for instance, managed himself, Squire was managed by Simon Moran, Reni had his own manager, and Primal Scream were talking about recording a new album, having been reinvigorated by the reception of the Screamadelica tour. It was a given that Simon Moran, as managing director of SJM, the country’s leading concert promoter, would organize the dates, but myriad other business decisions needed addressing. It was also inevitable that, given the volatile and unpredictable mix of the four Roses’ personalities, there would be arguments. Nothing but that was certain.

  Mani told the Scream he was leaving the band to join the Roses in a bar in Buenos Aires, at about two o’clock in the morning. It was 28 September and hard for Mani. He had ‘mixed emotions’, said the Primal Scream guitarist Andrew Innes. Mani had been in the Scream for longer now than he had the Roses, and they were family to him. He was back in England at the beginning of October, however, and the Roses played together for the first time. Squire and Reni were rusty, Mani was recovering from the Scream tour, but Brown was on sparkling form. Reni had ‘never heard him sing better’.

  The first song they played was ‘Shoot You Down’. ‘It’s just something magical when us four are in a room together,’ said Mani. ‘And you can’t put your finger on it, and it’s just so beautiful to catch back hold of it again.’ There were arguments, quite serious arguments, but they worked through them.

  Next, all four were down in London to meet with Moran and finalize arrangements. Again, tempers frayed. Tensions that had been fifteen years in the making had to be aired. The band were photographed by their favourite, Pennie Smith, for shots to be used to promote the comeback.

  On Friday 14 October, PR Murray Chalmers, who now had his own company after spending twenty-four years as Director of Publicity for EMI Records, sent out invites to a press conference on 18 October where a ‘very special announcement’ would be made. The band had originally wanted the conference to take place at the Radisson Hotel in Manchester, but it had been switched to Soho House in London. The ‘special announcement’ was quickly linked to the Roses and their re-formation, initially by Clash magazine on their website, and the news immediately trended on Twitter and spread across the Internet. It was still touch and go, and there was no guarantee all four would show up. Squire’s wife was due to give birth, and on the Friday evening Reni’s manager texted a message, on behalf of Reni, that read, ‘Not before 9T will I wear the hat 4 the Roses again.’ Although the Sun confirmed the conference was for the Roses, who were definitely re-forming, there remained intrigue about Reni’s statement – a deliberate hoax – and fans and the media spent the next three days discussing whether they would re-form without Reni, and whether the reunion would really happen. It was headline news around the world.

  On 18 October, at 2 p.m., filmed by Shane Meadows, famed for his film This Is E
ngland (2006), and with Liam Gallagher in attendance, the four Roses took their seats on stage at the press conference. Brown, his hair flecked with grey, said they planned to ‘shake up the world’, and announced two dates in Manchester at Heaton Park, on 29 and 30 June 2012, which would be a prelude to a world tour. They would be doing new songs. Squire said very little, just that the friendship he and Brown shared defined them both, and it ‘needed fixing’. Brown confirmed they had met for the first time in fifteen years at Mani’s mum’s funeral. ‘A beautiful thing has come out of a really sad situation.’ Reni remained cautious: ‘We’ll see how beautiful it is when it’s on record and on stage,’ he said. When Mani thanked Primal Scream for ‘saving his arse’ after the Roses split, Reni said, ‘They might be saving your arse again in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘We’ve got a long way to go,’ Reni said. ‘I’ve never seen anyone our age do what we’re attempting to do.’ He said he was probably too old to drum again, was rusty, but had the eight months ahead to prepare. ‘You’ve got to understand that we’ve not played much yet,’ he said. ‘We’ve been circling around each other for a while and it’s just like joining a new band … with ghostly kind of presences. It’s a strange phenomenon.’ Brown described the process of remoulding the band as ‘like a language we all used to speak that we’ve not spoken for a while’. ‘In some ways it seems like fifteen years ago was yesterday,’ said Squire.

  There were thorny questions too. Were they getting back together for the money? ‘The money’s always been there,’ said Brown. A recent Shaun Ryder quote was put to him – Ryder had suggested Brown’s recent divorce had stripped him financially. ‘There’s always truth in Shaun’s comments,’ Brown replied. What about the hurtful things they had said about one another over the years, and the acrimonious nature of their original break-up? ‘Life’s full of hurt,’ said Reni. ‘You’re never going to get away from the hurt, but what happens is you grow away.’

  ‘I think we’ve still got it and I think we’ve still got something to give to people, and I think that at times like this we can uplift people,’ said Brown. ‘We’re doing it for ourselves, I’m not going to lie, but … it sounds magic.’

  The next day the Roses had an official website and the tickets for the two Manchester dates went on sale on 21 October. Demand was such that a third date in Manchester was added, and all 210,000 tickets sold out in sixty-eight minutes, the fastest-selling events in UK rock history. That evening Reni was in a state of disbelief. He had not expected this. The band were overjoyed. The press quickly calculated the concerts would gross £12 million.

  In November, as the band continued their rehearsals on a farm in Cheshire, further live dates were added at festivals over the summer of 2012, in Spain, Japan and Scotland. There was also an array of new T-shirts for sale on the official website. The four of them could not, however, simply walk in a room and immediately recreate their magic, and rehearsals were frustrating and hard work. It was not just a question of new material, of which they had plenty, especially as Reni had brought some of his own material to the table; they needed to breathe new life into the old songs. Even those closest to the band admitted, despite everything, the comeback was not guaranteed.

  The Roses were exactly the type of band, the only band in fact, who were capable of raising expectations to this level and suddenly walking away from it if they didn’t feel it was right. It could still fall apart, and nearly did when a tyre on Reni’s car blew out when he was driving back from rehearsals one night. He escaped unscathed. ‘We’ll ride it till the wheels fall off, like we did last time,’ Brown had said at the press conference. Brown also faced a distraction when he twice appeared in court on charges of speeding while driving, and was banned for three months.

  In December, more summer 2012 festival dates were added, in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and Squire and Brown made a surprise appearance to play a Roses song, ‘Elizabeth My Dear’, and The Clash’s ‘Bankrobber’ with Mick Jones of The Clash and members of The Farm, for the Justice Tonight: A Concert in Aid of The Hillsborough Justice Campaign and the Don’t Buy the Sun Campaign at Manchester’s Ritz club.

  This was followed, on 10 December, by news that the Roses had concluded negotiations on a record deal for the new material. Simon Moran was now the band’s official manager, and the Roses had signed to Universal in the UK and Columbia in America. More dates were added for summer 2012, with festival shows in Portugal, Hungary, Germany, Ireland and South Korea. There would also be a gig in Dublin at Phoenix Park, for which all 45,000 tickets immediately sold out. The band had a Lollapalooza Festival-shaped hole in their schedule for August 2012, as the Roses planned a second assault on America, but were wondering if they should delay it until 2013.

  The band stopped rehearsing during Christmas, with Mani playing three final Screamadelica shows that climaxed in a Hogmanay gig in Edinburgh, and in January 2012, rehearsals picked up again. Shane Meadows told the press the band were not just in it for the money. ‘It goes way beyond that, because they’re all fucking intelligent and very proud and they wouldn’t go out there to the slaughter,’ he said. ‘I saw them rehearsing one verse of “Bye Bye Badman” for an hour yesterday. I looked at that and thought, They are taking this fucking seriously.’ The explosive arguments – particularly between Brown and Reni – had cleared the air, and all four were enjoying themselves. The Sun ran an entirely false story in February 2012 that quoted Mani saying he had been amazed to find £2 million deposited into his bank account. The others had to be scraped off the roof, having all agreed to stick to a media blackout until June 2012. In mid-February, however, Reni said that the band had finally gelled and once again become the band that they used to be. Brown, sounding happy and relaxed, said much the same.

  There was now no doubt the Roses would deliver, on stage and on record. They had never had a number 1 up to now, nor had Brown as a solo act, The Seahorses, or Mani with the Scream. And being number 1 was everything. It always had been. A new album would now surely and finally give them that satisfaction. The last great rock ’n’ roll band deserves nothing less.

  Afterword

  I had started chasing Reni in 2008, forewarned with the knowledge that he usually said no to all requests. He seemed intrigued, however, by my work with Andrew Loog Oldham on the books Stoned and 2Stoned. I sent him copies and he liked them. Loog Oldham had been a recluse in Colombia for twenty years when I brought him to book, and that took ten years. Reni hadn’t spoken to the press in fifteen years, and I was told he was a great storyteller when in the mood. He was tantalizingly close, just across the city. Although it hadn’t been a no, it didn’t ultimately translate into a yes and he remained out of reach.

  Towards the end of 2010 I made a fresh play. Any last flicker that the Roses would re-form had been extinguished. It was known, however, that all the other Roses had a great deal of esteem for Reni, as did almost all who had worked with the band.

  Reni, true to form, wasn’t particularly interested in talking about himself or his family, but now agreed a broader effort about the band could work. A list of over a hundred interviewees was drawn up with everybody on it, bar Gareth Evans. Reni’s manager, John Nuttall, who had known all the Roses since the mid-1980s and was respected by them all for his level-headedness, was instrumental in securing many contacts. I had conducted over 300 interviews for Stoned and 2Stoned, so was in it for the long haul and, this being the Roses, aware of the pitfalls. I’d been on the rack with Loog Oldham, but this was a new form of exquisite pain. Work started in March 2011.

  Some names were given to me, some depended on the wind, and others were chased. When I tracked down Toxin Toy, who had played with them on their seminal 1985 tour of Sweden, it seemed to be a real positive. Reni added a batch of new names that seemed to illustrate just how little was really known about the band, and hinted at hidden treasure. The information that David Bowie had offered to produce the Roses around 1990 was new. As was the fact Paul McCartney had wanted to get
to know the Roses in the same period, but that Evans had cut him off at the pass, thinking he was being clever by asking McCartney’s secretary, ‘What’s in it for Paul?’

  One disappointment was the Roses’ road manager Steve Adge, who is involved in a similar capacity on their comeback. He was working on his own book and understandably preferred to keep his stories to himself. There were many more successes, and many spoke for the first time on record. Soon I had interviewed eighty people. I was pleased to have opened a window onto the Roses’ American career, and had managed to separate fact from fiction, without relying on old press cuttings in the attempt. I’d spoken with six of The Stone Roses, and I only had the final four left to cover. We were weeks away. Reni was ready to answer a long set of questions, Mani was on board, Brown was said to be in markedly good spirits, with only Squire unfathomable. As his own father said of him, Squire seemed to ‘live in a world of his own’, but he is also a genuine friend and admirer of Reni.

  Things began to change on 4 October 2011 when this book made national news, including a two-page spread in the Independent. This was only two weeks before the band’s press conference, and the book was interpreted by many as a sign of an imminent ‘third coming’ of the Roses. Reni walked into an almighty row about the book at the band’s first rehearsal. Brown was particularly unhappy with the book being described as ‘authorized by the band’.

  When Brown and Reni were dining, or Mani and Squire socializing, I took these as good signs. Reni said he had talked to Brown about the book, and he was okay with the idea. It was only when all four were down in London to talk to Moran that I began to suspect a reunion was definitely on the cards. After the press conference, the book continued to be a source of argument between the band members, and any idea of using the word ‘official’ or ‘authorized’ was repudiated. Brown telephoned to call me a ‘parasite’, and would hear no defence. Mani now didn’t want to get involved in the spat, having previously been amenable, even open to DJing at the launch of the book.