Hard to believe it was THIRTY years ago this week that The Stone Roses’ debut album was released, eh?
As much as I love the record, it always comes with a difficult truth attached – The Stone Roses ended me. Ended my musical career, that is, for which most readers should probably be forever grateful.
Come to think of it, so should I. Had I become a successful rock star at a tender age, then it’s very likely I wouldn’t be sitting here typing these words right now. Well, I might be typing them in a straightjacket.
But let’s rewind to the beginning of 1989. At the time, I was a 22-year-old guitar player in a respectably struggling indie band called The Wishing Stones.
We were respectable because we’d made a few singles, we’d been in the NME, we were on quite a cool label and we could draw a crowd of a couple of hundred in London – not bad by late-80s indie band standards. (The crowds outside of London? Not so much.)
We were struggling because we were absolutely stony broke. I recall being at the London marathon (as a spectator, obviously) that April and between four of us we were unable to afford a single ice cream cone.
(Image: Publicity photo)
It might be helpful at this point for younger readers to paint a picture of youth culture in Britain at the time. You had indie guitar bands who appeared in the NME and played to a few hundred people in London. Then, increasingly, you had club culture: Shoom in London, The Hacienda in Manchester, The Sub Club in Glasgow. And never the twain would meet.
Anyway, a couple of us from the band started going to some of these new clubs. We were used to tapping our Chelsea boots to the Velvet Underground in the back room of some dismal pub. We had no clue how you were meant to respond to this strange electronic music.
But we soon got the hang of it – at one point, and heavily under the influence, I believe we found ourselves Cossack dancing to Going Back to My Roots by Richie Havens. (Some readers may know what I’m talking about here.)
And we soon noticed that, to put it mildly, the people in these clubs seemed to be having a slightly better time than the people at the indie gigs were.
A thousand boys and girls going crazy on the dancefloor or a handful of lads nibbling on the edge of their pint pots while noting the chord changes down the Camden Falcon?
You didn’t need a Weather Prophet to know which way the wind was blowing, as Bob Dylan didn’t quite say. The thing we couldn’t comprehend, the thing that we decided was in fact absolutely impossible, was how a guitar band was ever going to be able to bridge the gap between these two worlds.
How could you recreate the euphoria of those records, of those heaving dancefloors, in a concert hall with guitar, bass, drums and a singer? It just couldn’t be done.
Unless, of course, the guitar player was John Squire, the bass player was Mani, the drummer was Reni and the singer was Ian Brown.
Yes, about a week after the 1989 London marathon, The Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album was released and quickly became the only thing we were listening to.
It soon seemed like it was the only thing anyone was listening to during that long, boiling London summer of 1989. You’d hear it at parties. You’d hear it coming out of cars. From people’s houses as you walked down the street. You’d play it when you were getting ready to go out for the night and when you went back to someone’s house after the night had finished.
We had a party at our flat that New Year’s Eve, as the 80s turned into the 90s, and I think we played the album back-to-back three times in a row.
In fact, this happened a lot – the final notes of I Am the Resurrection would fade out and you’d flip the record over and put the needle back to the start of I Wanna Be Adored. In hindsight, the reason for this is obvious enough – the record could not be followed. It was simply peerless. There was literally no other album you could think about playing after it had finished.
It has also proved to be timeless – as beloved by my son and his friends as it was by me and my friends when we were their age 30 years ago.
And suddenly, back in 1989, things were much more straightforward for The Wishing Stones – our band was worthless and I was going back to Glasgow University to finish my English degree and then, hopefully, to write some books one day. Oh well, rock and roll’s loss turned out to be literature’s gain and all that. (Debatable, obviously.)
There was a nice coda to all of this. A good few years later, I got to know Mani from the Roses socially. After a few drinks one night, I wound up telling him that his band were the reason my band split up. He just nodded sympathetically. Then I told him the Cossack-dancing-to-Richie-Havens story.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a man laugh so long or so hard.
Well, it was nice to be able to repay him for the music.
