Sometimes I Fantasise: The Stone Roses and Me

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SOMETIMES I FANTASISE:

The Stone Roses and Me

by

Stuart Wilson

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For Ian, John, Mani and Reni. Thank you.

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IMPORTANT – PLEASE READ

This is a free gift. You can download it, pass it on to your friends, copy it, post it on a forum or host it

on your website. I only ask two things in return. If you like what you have read, then please donate

whatever you think it is worth to one of the following charities:

1. This is a charity set up in memory of The Clash’s Joe Strummer. It helps aspiring musicians

and supports projects involving music in the community.

http://www.strummerville.com/how-to-donate/

2. This is a project set up by a friend of mine, Jose Lechiguero, to help underprivileged children

in Nepal. He runs it solely with his girlfriend on a shoe-string budget. They have already set

up an orphanage and are helping the kids get educated. Their next project is to build a

hospital. It’s a bit more fiddly to donate given that the project is set up from Spain, but

please do it if you can, as they have struggled for two years and this may be their big chance

to make a huge difference.

https://www.ciden-nepal.org/en/quienes-somos

Secondly, if you use anything from this book, please give the book a mention, and please try to link

to the charity pages if you do. Thanks.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Kendo for being the only other person I knew over the years who got it. Thanks to

everyone I met in Barcelona, Amsterdam and Manchester. Thanks to everyone who’s ever rolled

their eyes and had to tolerate this strange obsession of mine. Thanks to The Stone Roses and thanks

to anyone who reads this and donates money to the charities above.

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Preface………………………………………………………………………………………………………...5

PART 1: The Past Was Yours…

1989-1990…………………………………………………………………………………………………….6

1991-1995………………………………………………………………………………………………..…11

1996-2010…………………………………………………………………………………………………..17

PART 2: The Future’s Mine…

16th-17th October 2011…………………………………………………………………………………..20

18th October 2011………………………………………………………………………………………….21

8th-9th June 2012 – Club Razzmatazz, Barcelona…………………………………………….25

10th- 14th June 2012 – Heineken Music Hall, Amsterdam……………………………….29

29th- 30th June 2012 – Heaton Park, Manchester……………………………………………32

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Preface

In many ways, this is a book that is destined to fail. There are no words I could put onto these

pages to describe some of the things I have felt when I’ve listened to The Stone Roses or

watched them perform. Some of you will get it. Others won’t. This book, primarily, is for

those of you who get it. I met many of you in Barcelona. If you don’t get it, then I hope you

enjoy what follows but be warned: it may come across like the demented ramblings of an

obsessive madman in a (baggy) anorak. If you want to get it…..then try to imagine what it is

like to listen to music that makes you feel 10 feet tall and utterly invincible. Music that

somehow seems to articulate what it is like to experience euphoric love, like the best drug

ever created but without the chemical input or the inevitable comedown. Music that gets so

deep into your soul that you actually crave it, and you know that you couldn’t possibly live

without it. Music made by a band who looked, sounded and acted cooler than any other band

there has ever been. If you get it, that will all make perfect sense. This is a story about being

young, growing up and getting old. It’s about finding your way in the world and your place in

it. This is a story about a pilgrimage. A journey to watch the band who changed my life play

together for the first time in 22 years; a prospect that had seemed utterly impossible only 9

months previously. Most of all, this book is to say “thanks” to the band and to give something

back for everything they have given me over the last two and a half decades. The story begins

in 1989, when I was 12 years old….

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PART 1: THE PAST WAS YOURS….

1989-1990

I can’t remember the first time I heard them. All I can remember is a vibe. A sense of

excitement was sweeping through the nation that was so strong that even a 12 year old boy

living in a town 250 miles away from the epicentre could detect the tremors. The town was

Greenock, 30 miles from Glasgow. Along with neighbouring Gourock, Greenock had a

vibrant music scene and would become inextricably linked to The Stone Roses. Nobody

really knows why. The first sense I had of something stirring were the haircuts in the dressing

room of my football team. They were getting a bit longer, and people were speaking of their

attempts at cultivating “Beatle-cuts”. After one game, our striker’s usually spiky hair had

been flattened into a bowl-cut by the rain. “You look like one of The Stone Roses!” someone

said as we left the pitch. It was the first time I had heard that name. Around town trousers

were becoming baggier. At school, my friend mentioned that he was thinking about buying

some flares. The older kids who used to hang around in the park opposite my house started to

look different as they adopted what looked like some kind of unofficial uniform. The speed at

which this happened was astonishing. It was as if the world had gone Day-Glo psychedelic

overnight. Although I was slightly too young at that stage to be a real part of it, I definitely

noticed it, even if I had nothing to compare it to and wasn’t entirely sure what “it” might be.

The name I kept hearing was the Happy Mondays. As an impressionable teenager who was

only too keen to soak up anything I possibly could, I regularly ventured down to the local

independent record store, Rhythmic Records (sadly no longer there) to see what gems I could

uncover. The owners of Rhythmic had their finger on the pulse, and it wasn’t difficult to pick

up the records that were coming out of the emerging scene in Manchester, so I diligently

made the journey a couple of times a week after school. One of the first things I picked up

was the Mondays’ Bummed album. I remember this because the owner of Rhythmic wouldn’t

sell it to me with the inside sleeve (a naked woman), so after a brief negotiation that resulted

in a plain white inner sleeve replacing the corruptive influence that the Mondays had

intended, I rushed home to see what it was like. It was difficult to get my head around at first

because it was so different to anything I’d listened to before. The Mondays sounded as

scruffy as they looked, and I desperately wanted to like it because liking it would make me

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cool. I listened to that record again and again and it wasn’t long before Wrote For Luck

became my new favourite song and the Happy Mondays my new favourite band. There was

something else in that record, something in Shaun Ryder’s drawl and the loose-but-tight way

that the band played; something that tipped me off that there was more to this than met the

eye. Apart from anything else, I was just happy to have a record and a band that I could call

mine, having grown up sitting in front of my dad’s stereo playing the 7” singles from the

1960s that he inherited from his own father’s pub jukebox. There was much talk around

school of the Happy Mondays, but also of another band: The Stone Roses. The Roses, I soon

learned, had been at the forefront of the audacious move back to flares. Although I can’t

remember the first time I heard them, I’m guessing that it was I Wanna Be Adored that I

heard first. I’m also guessing that the reason it didn’t make an impression on me was because

I wanted immediate gratification and the intro to Adored is something of a slow burner. It

could’ve ended there and then, but soon my heartstrings were to be tugged by the band that

would change my life. I was visiting my friend Al, and as I arrived he was playing the debut

album in his bedroom. I only heard the final two songs, but as soon as they had finished I

asked him to play them again. I wanted instant gratification and This is the One seguing into I

am the Resurrection delivered. I detected something special and I knew I needed to hear

more, so the next day I went out and bought the She Bangs the Drums 12” single. I went

home as quickly as I could and played it on my dad’s record-player. I can still remember

dancing joyously around the house, feeling for the first time the rush that I’d still be feeling

22 years later. It was like an adrenaline shot straight to the heart, and it was the first (but not

the last) time that something in this band’s music made me jump around in a state of sheer

ecstatic abandon. I played She Bangs the Drums again and again, before eventually glancing

at the cover and realising that there were more songs on the other side. Mersey Paradise and

Standing Here; two songs that were so ridiculously good that it seemed an act of insanity to

have wasted them as b-sides. I played those songs constantly, and the next day I went back to

Rhythmic to buy the album. The Happy Mondays had now been supplanted. From that

moment on, The Stone Roses were my favourite band.

***

The rest of that summer still seems like a dream. Everywhere you went you heard this music

and felt this electricity. Luckily for me and my mates, there was a club in Gourock called

Janey’s that was enlightened enough to run an under-18s night on a Friday called “Joy”. I

was conned into going to Joy by Al, who told me that he’d been before with his cousin Tony.

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He hadn’t – he was just saying that so that I would go with him. It was my first experience of

a club, and I still remember feeling as if I’d entered a new chapter in my life when I inhaled

the first haze of dry ice as it floated over the dancefloor. What was notable about Joy was

how quickly it evolved. The first night I was there they played an eclectic blend of tunes,

from American hip-hop, to dance, to traditional UK and US indie. Manchester bands were

represented, but they weren’t dominant. Within just a few weeks, Madchester had taken hold

and the place was bouncing to the Mondays, the Roses, the Inspiral Carpets and all the other

bands that defined the era. Although it was under 18s, there were rumours of over-18s

occasionally trying to get into the youngsters’ night because they’d heard that the vibe was so

good.

For the next year, everything revolved around the Manchester scene. The music we listened

to, the clothes we wore and the opinions we expressed were all influenced by what was

happening there. My parents booked a family holiday to Spain, flying out of Manchester

Airport. I insisted we go down early to spend the day in Manchester so I could check out

Affleck’s Palace and Eastern Bloc records (both of which I’d seen in a TV documentary

about the scene). I even made them find the legendary Hacienda club (owned by New Order),

just so I could get a picture of the “Fac 51” sign outside (the look on a local’s face when a

family in a car stopped him to ask for directions to the Hacienda at 5am was priceless – “it’s

over that way”, he said “….but it’s closed”)

I would religiously buy the NME to find out who the latest bands were and to catch up on

who was releasing what and when. Hardly a week went by without a classic NME cover story

or a new must-have single or a directive on flare-dimensions by someone who thought they

knew about such things. Every day seemed to deliver some new song or band or album to fall

in love with. I had no means of comparison so I just assumed that this was what life was like

all of the time. It was an exciting time to be young and discovering music. Me and my mates

would go round to each other’s houses to check out their records and their clothes. On

weeknights we’d hang around the local park admiring each other’s trainers, clumsily showing

off in front of girls and generally trying to be like the older kids. On Fridays we’d meet on the

corner and walk a long and protracted route to Janey’s through a park. Once in the club, we’d

find a corner and wait for the first great tune of the night. Once that had been played then we

knew we were in for classic after classic, and the entire room would become one big dance-

floor full of teenagers with their hands in the air. If you were lucky, a girl might make a bit of

extended eye-contact with you and if you were really lucky she’d stick her tongue down your

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throat, but that didn’t matter as long as the DJ played the tunes. Ah, the tunes. Dance music,

guitar music, hip-hop. At that time these labels didn’t mean much to us. These were just the

tunes we loved. The DJ could play De La Soul followed by early REM followed by James

and we didn’t think that any of them were out of place.

At the centre of all of this were The Stone Roses. I had already bought their album twice

because I had worn out and scratched my original copy (I’ve lost count of how many times I

have bought the album since – I’d guess about 12). After initially dismissing I Wanna Be

Adored (which I was/am slightly embarrassed about) I quickly became convinced that every

song on this album was a classic, and they were soon engraved upon my soul. At Joy, they

would regularly play at least half of the album and the songs seemed to have a galvanising

effect, with everyone throwing their arms around each other and singing along. The rush of

She Bangs the Drums, the chime of the guitar in Waterfall, the menace of the lyrics in Bye

Bye Badman, the perfect pop of (Song for My) Sugar Spun Sister, the heart-tugging chorus to

Made of Stone, the sheer majesty of This is the One and the heart-stopping triumphalism of I

am the Resurrection. It was and still is an album I never grow bored of. Every time I listen to

it I get the same shivers that I got when I first heard those two closing tunes in Al’s bedroom.

Squire played the guitar in a way that made us forget it was a guitar. Reni’s drumming was

fluid and funky and his harmonies were perfectly matched to Ian Brown’s hushed northern

vocals. There were times when I would listen to the entire album solely concentrating on

Reni’s voice, then play it again straight after to focus on his drumming. Mani’s bass parts

were inventive and funky, perfectly complementing everything else. The songs didn’t sound

as if they had been written. They sounded like they had existed forever, in some Platonic

realm of perfection that the Roses had somehow broken into and plundered.

At some point during this period, I went on a school-trip to Switzerland. We got the ferry

over to the continent and we were delighted to discover that there was a disco on the boat. As

the only disco we had ever experienced was Joy, we naively thought that all discos played the

same music, so it was baffling to us when we arrived to find the DJ playing Stock, Aitken and

Waterman chart rubbish to an empty dance-floor. Something had to be done, and after a

quick bit of smooth-talking I was dispensed to my cabin to fetch the compilation I had

created for the trip. The DJ realised that playing our requests was the only thing that was

going to stop us harassing him, so he put my tape in the tape-deck and soon we were happily

dancing to This is How it Feels by the Inspiral Carpets. It was a long bus journey to

Switzerland, so a Walkman and a large bag of cassettes were essential for the trip. I, of

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course, had the Roses debut on tape. Someone (I can’t remember who) asked me what I was

listening to, and when I said it was the Roses, they handed me a cassette and said “you should

check this out – it’s some of their early stuff”. I was only familiar with the debut album and

the associated b-sides but on this tape were Sally Cinnamon, Here it Comes, All Across the

Sand, Elephant Stone and The Hardest Thing in the World. I don’t think I ever returned that

cassette. This was the moment when the obsession began. This was when I went from being a

guy who liked The Stone Roses to a guy who felt their music engrave itself on my DNA. I

listened to the Roses constantly on that bus, spacing out for hours and letting the melodies,

harmonies and lyrics seep deep into me. Just about every kid on the trip was decked out in

full Madchester regalia, a sight that caused more than a few bemused double-takes amongst

the locals when we all disembarked in a sleepy Swiss mountain village. When I returned

home, I knew I was hooked. I went out and I bought every single thing I could by The Stone

Roses.

***

It seemed as if the Roses were everywhere during 1989 and 1990. Hardly a week went by

without there being an article about them, a TV show documenting them or a new single in a

brilliantly paint-splashed cover being released. I had fallen in love with the music, but it

wasn’t long before I also fell in love with the band. That wasn’t difficult because they looked

cooler than anyone I had ever seen. Like all the best rock stars, they looked like they had

fallen to earth from a different dimension, but somehow managed to also look like the coolest

kids on your street. As Bob Stanley described them in Melody Maker, they looked like boy-

gods. The hair, the clothes, the cheekbones, the pouts – it all just looked perfect. I’d seen

classic pictures of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and, as much as I loved those bands,

they were from a different time….I couldn’t call them my own but this was happening now.

This was for us. A good image is one thing, but to be bona fide superstars, you have to

combine it with attitude, and here was yet another reason to love the Roses. They exuded

self-belief and (importantly) it didn’t come across as contrived. When they said they were the

best band in the world, it wasn’t bravado: it was fact. Everything they did and everything they

said seemed real and without pretension. They had learned from the punk bands that they had

grown up with and adopted an ideology that still lingers within me all these years later. The

Roses stood for integrity and honesty. They would never sell out or do something for the

wrong reasons. If an interviewer asked them a stupid question, they wouldn’t answer it (or if

they did respond, they’d tell the interviewer what a stupid question it was). They insisted on

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doing things on their terms and they absolutely refused to compromise. To see a band

conduct themselves in this way was inspirational. It taught me (and many others from my

generation) that life could be lived according to a certain set of principles, and that deviating

from those principles was corrosive. They were anti-royalist at a time when the teenage me

didn’t even know such an option existed. They believed in fairness and justice at all costs. If

anyone doubted these credentials, they only had to look at what the Roses did when someone

attempted to take advantage of them. Incensed that they were being exploited by a former

record-company, they went down en masse to the boss’s house and splattered him and his

BMW with paint. Immediately afterwards, they recorded One Love. The day after, they were

arrested and very nearly went to prison for their actions. They showed similar grit in standing

up for their principles when they realised that the record contract they had signed was one of

the most restrictive contracts ever drawn up in the music industry. Although badly advised by

their manager, the band had signed it nonetheless and attempting to get out of a binding

contract with a major label was unprecedented. They had much to lose. If they were

unsuccessful there was the very real possibility that they would not be able to release any

official material ever again. But their values held strong and they stuck to their guns, stating

that they would tour and let fans distribute bootlegs should their career be hampered in this

way. In the end, they won a victory that shook up the industry and led John Squire to describe

it as their biggest contribution to the music business. All because they stuck to what they

knew was right. I watched all of this play itself out in the music press, and although I didn’t

know it at the time, I was being taught the values that I would live by for the rest of my life.

They cared about their fans, and never wanted to be idolised. To them, it was as much about

the buzz the fans got as it was about what the band were doing. They wanted to give people

experiences that would last a lifetime, which is what prompted the iconic gigs at Blackpool

Empress Ballroom, Alexandra Palace, Glasgow Green and Spike Island. Again, I was just a

bit too young to experience any of these happenings first-hand, but I was keeping a keen eye

on all the channels available to me and I got a very real sense of what was going on and how

important it was. Even at my young age, you realise something unique is happening when

you read stories about people giving up their jobs just to follow a band around. The Stone

Roses were the perfect band at the perfect time. Which is not to say they were entirely of the

time. Although they were part of the Manchester scene, they were also detached from it. They

were smart enough not to get too caught up in the “Madchester” thing, which only added to

their mystique. We heard that they planned to go on Terry Wogan’s chat-show with the sole

intention of pulling off his wig. When they appeared on a late night arts programme they

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berated the TV crew live on air when their equipment failed. This was a band that was

operating outside of the usual boundaries. They didn’t seem like other bands. They were

different. They were special. And then they were gone……

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1991-1995

The signs were there, but I didn’t really notice. The court cases were well documented in the

press, but I loved seeing the Roses in the papers, turning up at court looking like rebels taking

on the establishment. They had released One Love in 1990, after a slight delay caused by the

fact that the proofs of the cover were accidentally reminiscent of a swastika1. One Love was

reported as a disappointment at the time, but that’s not how I remember it. Fool’s Gold and

What the World is Waiting For had taken them into the stratosphere the previous year, but to

me One Love was just the next great Roses single, and the b-side of Something’s Burning

suggested that they might be getting even more loose and funky in the future. Although the

Madchester scene had predictably fizzled out, we were all looking forward to the next Roses

album and I would scour the music press for any information on when it might be out. Early

reports suggested that the band had writer’s block and that they had rejected a batch of Squire

songs for not being up to standard. At the time, I thought this was reassuring as it suggested a

level of quality-control that would ensure the new album was every bit as good as the

previous one. Eventually, the news dried up. We’d occasionally hear about their battle with

their record company, but I had faith that it’d all be sorted out and they would return

triumphantly with a killer new single and album. And then, nothing…

***

We now know that the Roses were unravelling during this period, but their complete

disappearance only added to the air of mystery surrounding them. They had always had this,

probably driven by their reluctance to say much when interviewed, but going underground for

so long whilst creating the ultimate follow-up to their astonishing debut album was (in my

eyes) the coolest thing they could do. They eschewed fame and celebrity, instead focusing on

the music and dedicating themselves to recreating that rush. As the months turned into years,

rumours started to emerge. John Squire had been listening to nothing but old blues and Led

Zeppelin and (in the words of one report) had “hit a run of form that surpassed Clapton at his

peak”. We read that they had won their court case and had signed with Geffen for a multi-

million dollar advance, prompting tales of Ian Brown walking around Manchester handing

out £20 notes to the homeless because he “believed in giving alms”. But there was still no

1 This is how it was reported in the press, but according to Simon Spence’s biography of the band, the swastika

was entirely intentional and was there because John Squire thought the Roses could “reclaim” it from the Nazis. If true, this shows just how high the self-belief levels were in the Roses camp at the time.

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new music. Other bands had entered the scene, most notably Nirvana, the first band I ever got

drunk to. Nirvana shared the Roses’ ambition and values, but I couldn’t quite connect to them

on the same level as I had once connected to the Roses. I’d still regularly play all the songs. I

went to Uni in 1994, and in the Student Union bar I’d frequently play the entire album on the

jukebox during an afternoon drinking session. When I went out on my first-ever date I

blasted This is the One whilst getting ready (something that I think I’ve probably done on

about 90% of subsequent first-dates, and 100% of the ones that I wanted to go well). Any girl

I went out with was quickly informed that I was a Stone Roses fan, and how she dealt with

that determined my subsequent opinion of her. When someone asked me what music I was

into, I would proudly reply “The Stone Roses” and their reaction told me all I needed to know

about them. Although the floppy fringe and flares had long been consigned to the bin, the

Roses influence still haunted me every time I got my haircut or bought new clothes. I wasn’t

trying to be them. I wasn’t even trying to be like them. I just knew that I had adopted

something somewhere along the way, even if I didn’t know exactly what that thing was (and

still don’t). It was an attitude, a style and a worldview (I suppose).

All of this happened in the Roses’ absence, which only intensified their myth and somehow

made the songs more special. Maybe they would never return. Maybe this was it – one

perfect album: their gift to us to be cherished forever. The friends I had at school all diverged

into different things; some into dance music, some into rock music, some into indie. It was

only in retrospect that I realised just how all-inclusive the scene from a few years before had

actually been, and how quickly things fragmented as people retreated into cliques that had

meant nothing only 3 years previously.

***

Eventually we started to hear whispers of recording sessions. John Leckie, the producer of the

first album, was reported to have been working on new songs, including a “five minute

wonder” called “Ten Storeys” (this was how it was reported…the song was Ten Storey Love

Song). It wasn’t much, but it was something, and the existence of new Roses songs sent my

imagination into a tail-spin. What were they concocting in that studio? One day in 1993, I

picked up the latest NME and my heart almost stopped when I saw a picture of Ian Brown on

the cover with the headline: “Gotcha”. The NME had sent a reporter to find the band. The

resulting piece was hammed up to the max, but to me it was absolutely thrilling and added

even more to the air of mystery surrounding them. There were still no release-dates or news,

15

but this was evidence that The Stone Roses still existed and were playing music together.

That was good enough for me. For the next year, we waited. The only news seemed to be of a

succession of producers who came and went, with Leckie being reported as having left the

project because he “felt he was involved in something so strange that it was ruining his life”.

What on earth were the Roses doing? A&R men from the record company were also on a

revolving-door, every one of them failing to penetrate the Roses inner circle and get any

answers as to what exactly they were doing and when they might be ready to release

something. Eventually, we started to hear rumours of songs. One rumour maintained that they

had recorded a 10 minute song that consisted solely of jungle noises (this would end up being

the intro to the second album’s opener Breaking into Heaven). Maybe Leckie was right. This

did sound strange.

Eventually, a title was announced for the comeback single: Love Spreads. Dates were

announced and then changed. Right up until I heard the song, I told myself to prepare for the

possibility that it might not happen. November 21st 1994 was listed as being the day that it

would be released, but it would be played on the radio before that. I bought a brand new

blank-tape especially for the occasion and had my finger hovering over the “record” button to

record from the radio. The first few notes took me by surprise, but they shouldn’t have –

we’d been told that Squire had “gone Zeppelin”. Reni’s drums crashed in, and the song

settled into a groove. When Ian’s vocals made their first appearance I knew for certain that

the Roses were back and they meant business. Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream called it

“the greatest comeback single of all time”. That night I went to our local club, Rico’s and the

DJ (McD – Greenock’s music Svengali, a subsequent friend of the Roses, and all-round good

bloke) played Love Spreads. He’d obviously taped it off the radio as well, and it sounded

even better on the big speakers. On Monday 21st I left home early to go to University. I

wanted to be at the shop at 8am so I could buy Love Spreads before my first lecture. All the

way on the train I thought of nothing else but buying this single. I wondered what the b-sides

would be like, remembering that the Roses always had great b-sides. Once off the train, I

walked as fast as I could towards the record shop. I expected to have to join a queue, but

there was none there. For a horrible moment, I thought that this meant the single had been

cancelled at the last minute. I went into the shop just as they were opening, and there it was,

right in front of me. A whole display-stand of them. The cover wasn’t the paint-splash I’d

been expecting, but it still looked great. I grabbed one and took it up to the counter. “I never

thought I’d see this day” said the guy serving me. “Me neither” I managed to mumble

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without taking my eyes off of the cover. I’ve still got the receipt somewhere. It says “08:00”

as the time-of-purchase.

And then we got news of the album. It was going to be called “Second Coming” – perfectly

appropriate given that the closer to the debut was “I am the Resurrection”. Everything was

falling into place at last. As with the single, some of the album tracks would be played on the

radio prior to release. The date given was a night on which I was at football training, so I

knew I wouldn’t be able to record it. My mate Kendo, however, was a fellow Roses fanatic

and I knew he would record the new song for me. After football training I drove my mum’s

car over to his to pick him up. He slipped the tape into the stereo, and hit play. At first, there

were some odd psychedelic noises, but gradually these gave way into something wonderful –

this was Ten Storey Love song, the tune that Leckie had described as a five-minute wonder –

and those first few lines melted my heart. The Roses were back and they sounded as brilliant

as they ever did. My imagination ran away with me, and I convinced myself that the album

was going to be every bit as good as the first, if not better. So we didn’t spoil the joy of

listening to the album as a whole, I made Kendo tape over the recording of Ten Storey Love

Song. The album was only a few days away. Again, I bought it first thing in the morning, but

this time I waited until after my lectures before going home for the first listen. I had a 45

minute train journey to get home, and the knowledge that I had a new Stone Roses record in

my pocket that I hadn’t heard yet was driving me insane with both excitement and frustration.

After what seemed like several hours, I got home and pressed play on my CD player. Ten

minutes of jungle noises ensued – it was true! The album wasn’t as immediate as the first

one, and there were a few gear-shifts that I wasn’t prepared for. It took me a few listens to get

used to the changes in direction, but eventually I loved Second Coming almost (but not quite)

as much as I loved the debut. Breaking Into Heaven was the natural successor to Something’s

Burning (which was their last recorded output), so it seemed like there was some continuity

despite the five year gap. Ten Storey Love Song was majestic, had a chorus to die for and a

magical understated guitar solo. Good Times was an out-and-out rocker, whilst Tears

summoned the spirit of Led Zeppelin. How Do You Sleep harked back to What the World is

Waiting For and boasted a classic Roses chorus and another great melodic solo. Love Spreads

closed the album with the fierce slide guitar that had heralded their comeback a few weeks

before. Although it’s not faultless, I’ll defend that album to anyone because as far as I’m

concerned, any album with those four playing on it is compulsive one way or another. It

maybe hadn’t been the euphoric nirvana that we were all hoping for, but it was never going to

17

be. How do you improve on perfection? Second Coming was just a very good album, and

after the five year wait, that was good enough for me.

***

Now that I had two album’s worth of Roses tunes (three if you count the b-sides) I’d take

great pleasure in creating compilation tapes of old and new Roses tracks for my trip to and

from Uni. It even got to the point where, if I had forgotten my Walkman or if the batteries

died, I would leave University early just so I could go home and satisfy my craving for The

Stone Roses. It was beginning to feel like an addiction. They gave their only comeback

interview to The Big Issue, annoying the mainstream music press and further cementing their

status as big-hearted outsiders. Word spread of a tour. Given that they tended to do things

differently, I expected any live performances to be unique. The rumours were that they would

do about half a dozen secret gigs in small clubs up and down the country. I can’t remember

where I heard it, but the Garage in Glasgow (a student haunt that I was familiar with) was

touted as being part of the tour. My girlfriend’s dad did some work for the Garage, and so

began a relentless campaign on my part to have him get me into any Roses gig one way or

another. According to his sources, the rumours were true; the Roses would be playing a secret

gig in Glasgow, and somehow I would be there to see it. And then it fell apart. We heard that

the secret gigs had been cancelled, and then we heard that they had pulled out of some other

promotional activities. And then the bombshell: Reni had quit.

***

The news left me numb. Reni was a key player; they were ALL key players. They were a

gang. It seemed inconceivable that they could carry on without Reni. But they did. They

quickly announced that a new drummer had been installed and that they’d be touring

throughout 1995. When UK dates were announced, I knew I had to get tickets, Reni or no

Reni. I was playing in a football tournament in Dunoon (a ferry-ride away from Greenock) on

the night before the tickets for the two Glasgow gigs went on sale. The plan was to get to

Rhythmic at about 6am and then wait for them to open and get my hands on the gold-dust

tickets. However, being a bit slow in the changing room after the tournament meant that me

and about 3 of my team-mates managed to miss the last ferry home. This in itself wasn’t a

disaster, because the manager of our team said we could stay at his place and get the ferry

home the next day, but I knew that it was a disaster because the first ferry was at 6am,

meaning that I wouldn’t be able to get to the ticket queue until 7am at the earliest. I was

18

convinced I was going to miss out. The next day I got to Rhythmic, and my heart sank when I

saw a queue of about 30 people lined up outside the shop. I started doing calculations in my

head: how many people were there, how many tickets they would each be buying, and how

many tickets were Rhythmic likely to be selling? Almost as soon as I joined the queue,

someone from the shop came out and started handing out raffle-tickets, explaining that only

people with one of these would be able to buy tickets. Luckily, I got one. I bought four tickets

for me and my mates for the second night at the Barrowlands. Soon afterwards, one of my

mates said he couldn’t go, which left me with a spare ticket that I managed to swap for a

ticket to the first night. I was going to finally see the Roses, and I was going both nights. The

gigs were several months away, and I spent these months immersing myself in the new

album. I was in my late teens and a student. I enjoyed being a student, because it gave me the

opportunity to concentrate on music (give and take the odd exam here and there). I’d save up

the money that I was to use for food and at the end of the week I’d head over to Fopp

Records and see what I could find. Every week I’d have a new obsession. 60s Soul; Delta

Blues; American New Wave. About 90% of my current CD collection was bought during my

four years at University, and I could easily spend a whole afternoon exploring the second-

hand record shops of Glasgow desperately searching for that next buzz. I’d get into

discussions with other people in my class, some of whom were cooler-than-thou scenesters,

and whenever we had those “top 5 albums/singles/bands…..” debates, I would always argue

for the Roses. I was doing what most 18 year olds do; going out, getting drunk and having

fun. I’d also obtained a bit of a reputation as a Roses fan and when I went to Ibiza with my

mates that summer, Kendo was astonished when he got speaking to some Scottish guys in the

queue at McDonalds. After telling them he was from Greenock, one of them said “yeah, I’ve

heard of a guy from Greenock who’s really into The Stone Roses: Stuart Wilson or

something”.

***

In 1995 I knew the Roses were touring Europe and America prior to the UK dates, and I was

desperate to find a bootleg (these were the early days of the internet, and bootlegs were still

nuggets to be physically tracked down at record fairs and market-stalls). Flip was a shop in

Glasgow where I had bought many of my clothes during the Madchester era, and they had a

CD stall in the basement that wasn’t entirely committed to only selling “official” releases.

Every single day I would go in there on my way to the train station after Uni and ask the

long-haired hulking metal-head that owned the stall if he’d gotten anything in by The Stone

19

Roses. After a couple of weeks he said “look, mate, why don’t you just give me your phone

number and I’ll give you a ring if I get anything in?” I did, but a couple of weeks later I

happened to drop in as I was passing, and there it was…the first bootleg of the tour, called

The Song Remains the Same and recorded “live in Europe” (it wasn’t more specific than

that). Again, I rushed home and put it on (completely forgetting to ask the metal-head why he

hadn’t phoned me). This was my first chance to hear how they sounded live with the new

drummer. I was disappointed. Ian’s voice was all over the place. I knew he wasn’t the

greatest live singer in the world, but his voice on this made the CD unlistenable. I don’t think

I’ve listened to it since that night. This didn’t bode well, but I knew what the Roses were like

and I was confident they’d pull it together for the UK leg of the tour. Once they were in front

of their home fans I fully expected them to deliver.

December couldn’t come quickly enough. That summer I’d seen Oasis introduce songs from

their upcoming album (What’s The Story) Morning Glory at Irvine Beach, but the Roses

were the band that I really wanted to see. I’d been keeping an eye on the reviews from their

American tour, most of which were mixed some of which were scathing, but none of which

could dampen my excitement. The night of the first gig arrived. I was going with my mates

on the second night, so for the first one I was on my own. I got on the train, and when it

started moving I was acutely aware that every passing second was taking me closer to The

Stone Roses. I met a girl I knew from school who tried to start a conversation, but my mind

was solely focused on what I was about to see and I think I was probably a bit rude in my

interactions with her. I got to the venue early, bought a beer and took up a position alone at

the very front of the stage and in the middle. The lights went down and the jungle noises of

Breaking Into Heaven began, and along with a thousand others I erupted with elation. The

west of Scotland has an affinity with this band that can’t really be explained, so to see them

in the legendary Barras Ballroom was truly special. Ian Brown was every bit the star I had

hoped he would be, and Squire was now pulling some rock-god moves that nobody who

watched the Blackpool Live video could ever have predicted. The second night was just as

good – one of my mates got up on my shoulders for She Bangs the Drums and I had a lump

in my throat during Made of Stone. Sure, Reni wasn’t there but the other three were and they

were playing the songs that I’d spent the previous 6 years getting to know and love. As I

walked out of the Barras that night, I was convinced I’d seen the best gigs of my life.

Seventeen years later, the Roses (this time with Reni) would make me feel that way again,

but not before they fragmented in the most heart-breaking way imaginable……

20

1996-2010

To me, the Roses had always been a close-knit gang. Legend had it that Ian Brown and John

Squire had met in a sandpit when they were kids, forming an unshakeable bond. Mani had

been the final piece of the jigsaw, providing raw spirit and enthusiasm. When Reni left, it was

crushing but there was a part of me that thought he might return once the tour was over. I

couldn’t imagine that they’d ever not be that gang. Stories from the tour weren’t encouraging.

Squire was travelling separately to the rest of the band, and they hinted that all had not been

well between them during the recording of Second Coming. But they still existed, and I

assumed that they’d regroup to mine that chemistry once again and make a third album. By

1996, the UK music scene was gripped by Oasis-mania. I loved Oasis, so I was only too

happy to be caught up in it. I’ll defend the first three Oasis albums to the hilt, but despite

being as amazing as it was possible for them to be, they weren’t The Stone Roses. “Britpop”

had arrived, and although there were only really one or two good bands, it was a good time to

be young. The scene felt a bit blunter than Madchester but despite that, my weekends

consisted of going out with my mates and jumping around to Oasis songs. I still adhered to

my lifetime rule of dancing to the Roses any time they came on in any club I happened to be

in, but Oasis were where the buzz was at and I must admit that I can’t remember even

thinking about the possibility of a third Roses album after I’d seen them on those two cold

December evenings in Glasgow. So when John Squire announced that he had left the band, it

was a shock but I wasn’t entirely surprised. It had been clear for a while that things had

soured between the band members. When I heard, I naturally thought that the Roses story had

come to an end. But it hadn’t. Ian Brown announced that they had recruited a new guitarist

and would be playing some gigs. He also made noises about a third album. At this point,

every Roses fan knew that this was going to be a long, protracted death. Something wasn’t

right about this, and we all knew it. They were about to gamble with the legacy that they had

worked so hard to achieve in the early days. The thought that there could be a Stone Roses

album without Reni was bad enough…but without Reni and Squire? It was inconceivable.

Eventually, of course, the Roses played at the Reading Festival in what was an

embarrassment of a gig. I read the reports and thought “it can’t have been that bad…”, and

then I heard a bootleg and realised that it was much much worse. A dancing girl, a Squire

copy-ist, a drummer who lacked the subtlety of Reni and a keyboard player who appealed to

the crowd to let him “see those hands in the air…” And Ian’s voice, described by one

reviewer (I think it was Caitlin Moran) as “a man at a bus-stop shouting into a bucket”. This

21

wasn’t the band I loved. It was relief when Ian Brown finally announced the end. I reckoned

that they had just about managed to escape without totally destroying their legacy, and I

looked forward to whatever the original members did next. I was to get a taste of this sooner

than I imagined. John Squire had quickly formed another band called The Seahorses and

there was much excitement over what they might be like. At this point, Squire was

considered to be the musical genius behind the Roses, so his next project was highly

anticipated. I’d heard that they’d played one gig in America and another in Wales, and I was

only beginning to track down reviews when I got a phone call. I was sitting in my mum’s

house with my girlfriend one evening when my mate Andy (thanks, Dale boy) called me and

asked if I’d fancy seeing The Seahorses. I obviously didn’t believe him at first, but he

promised me it was true: John Squire’s new band was playing in Rico’s – the club we went to

most weekends (thanks to McD). I got down there as quickly as I could to find a larger than

average queue. I asked a few people what was going on, but nobody seemed to know

anything for sure beyond the rumour that had got me there. We got in and saw that the stage

had been set up for a band – unheard of on a Saturday night at Rico’s. I don’t think I ever

found out for sure what was happening until Squire and his new band bounded on stage. I

was thrilled – here was my guitar hero playing in a tiny club in my home town, a few meters

away from where I stood! I was ready to be blown away. Squire’s guitar playing was as good

as it ever was, but there was something missing: the rest of the Roses. The songs didn’t have

that sparkle, the drummer was nowhere near as mercurial as Reni and the singer looked and

sounded like the busker he was. It wasn’t that they were terrible – they just weren’t the

Roses. After the gig, Squire left the stage and I rushed over to the exit (there was no

backstage and he had to get through the crowd to leave). As he disappeared through the door,

I shouted “John!” and was amazed when the door opened again, and he came towards me

offering his hand. As I shook it, he leaned into me and whispered something in my ear…..

and to this day I have no idea what it was!

***

That night began a fifteen-year period during which I would see each member of the Roses as

many times as I possibly could in their new roles. I first saw Mani play with Primal Scream

in 1997 at Glasgow Green (scene of the infamous Roses gig) and subsequently saw him on

countless occasions. Bizarrely, my sister’s friend started going out with a friend of Mani’s

(and Noel Gallagher’s) which meant that Mani was frequently in my home-town and hanging

out with my sister’s friends. On one evening, I was at a club with my new girlfriend when

22

Mani walked in. The Roses were heroes in Greenock, so the entire club stopped what they

were doing and watched as he swaggered through the door. He had a quick look around,

spotted my sister, and immediately bounded up to her to give her a hug, shouting “Netters!!”

as he did. “Shit” I thought, “not only does Mani know my sister, he’s even got a nickname for

her”. Later that night, my sister’s friend introduced me to him, but I was too star-struck and

the music was too loud for me to be able to say anything more than “how you doing?”

It was Ian Brown that I saw most. Nobody really expected him to do anything after the Roses,

which always surprised me because he was, after all, half of the Squire/Brown partnership

that had written those timeless classics from their heyday. I liked Brown’s solo stuff without

ever really loving it. One night Kendo and I saw him in Glasgow, and he started with three

Roses songs. We lost our minds and thought we were getting an entire set of Roses classics.

We didn’t, but just to hear him sing those songs again was magical, even if it was without the

rest of the gang. Shortly after that, The Roses connection with my hometown was further

solidified when McD made Ian patron of the new music department of the local college and

Ian played a free show in the Town Hall. Tickets were supposed to be via a ballot, but I like

to think that it was my reputation as a Roses fanatic that secured me mine (but it may not

have been).

Squire also incorporated Roses songs into his solo gigs, but his voice never really suited them

and it was a frustrating experience hearing the guitar parts without Reni’s drums, Mani’s bass

and Ian’s vocals. Kendo and I even managed to catch Reni at King Tuts during his short-lived

band The Rub. The first thing Reni said when he came onstage was “who’s from Greenock?”

More proof of the inextricable link between the Roses and my hometown.

With the Roses no longer in existence, I started collecting memorabilia. The centrepiece of

this is a signed print of the Elephant Stone artwork of which only 300 were produced. The

day they went on sale I was on the website first thing, expecting there to be an enormous rush

for such Roses rarities. I entered my credit card details and sat back happily. A couple of

hours later I got a phone call asking me if I could give them my details again: “we had no

idea anyone was going to buy one right away and we hadn’t set up the website properly”. I

had been the first person to buy one (although when it arrived, it was 13/300).

From time to time, a Roses reunion was touted. Over the years, it had become clear just how

bad the breakdown in the band was. Ian and John had obviously fallen out badly, and nobody

really knew where Reni stood. Mani seemed to be the only one on speaking terms with the

23

rest, and the only one who seemed up for a possible reunion. I always said that I was dead

against any reformation. The Roses had a legacy that was matched only by a few other

legendary bands, and I thought it was too precious to gamble with. Plus, reunions were crap,

weren’t they? Old bands getting back together for a final pay-day was the antithesis of what

the Roses were all about. They would never sell out like that. It went against what they stood

for. Most of the band seemed to feel the same way, and were dismissive and hostile whenever

the possibility was put to them. Ian and John were particularly resistant, and as more emerged

about their feelings for each other, it seemed that this was a relationship that was impossible

to fix. When Squire responded to the latest round of reformation rumours in 2009 by

denouncing them on Newsnight and creating an artwork declaring that he had “no desire

whatsoever to desecrate the grave of seminal Manchester pop group The Stone Roses”, it

looked as if the legacy was safe.

In the same year, Ian released his sixth solo album: My Way. As I always did whenever an ex

Stone Rose released new material, I bought it straight away. I put it on and went into my

kitchen to do some washing up. It was sounding pretty good, but then a song came on that

stopped me in my tracks. It was called “Always Remember Me” and by the end of it I was

standing in my kitchen, holding a half-washed plate, crying my eyes out. That was the

moment that I realised that perhaps Ian hadn't moved on as much as he liked to have us

believe he had. He still loved the Roses and had channelled that love into his most tender solo

song to date. He had written a love song about his old band, reflecting on how much they had

achieved and how much they meant to people. There was also a sense of sadness about how it

had all fallen apart, but there was no bitterness in there. There was only love. At first I

thought it was a message to Roses fans, but after repeated listens it sounded more and more

like a message to John Squire. I wondered whether John would ever hear it, because this

beautiful and straightforward song may have been a message from one old friend to another

that had taken 13 years to deliver. A message that signalled that, to Ian at least, the Roses had

unfinished business to attend to…

24

PART 2: THE FUTURE’S MINE….

16th

– 17th

October 2011

Fifteen years had passed since The Stone Roses announced their breakup. I was now

approaching middle-age with a career and a mortgage. The days of going to clubs on

weekends and dancing around with my mates to the tunes we loved had gone. Many of my

friends had families. Some had moved away. I watched as people I knew got trapped in jobs

they hated, doing things purely for the money that had no passion for. I was lucky – I had

managed to find a job I loved and that I would probably do for free. Luck came into it, but so

did the lessons I learned during those formative years. There were many points along the way

where I had to choose between the right thing to do and the easy/selfish/profitable thing to

do, and whenever a decision like this presented itself, I always drew on what I had learned

twenty years previously. The lessons had served me well. Did I go to Uni to do something

that would guarantee me a job and a large wage, or did I go to do something that I had a

genuine enthusiasm for even if there was no guarantee of a job at the end of it? I chose the

latter. Follow your heart and the rest will take care of itself. It wasn’t always easy, and there

were always pressures to take the money and run, but I knew that once I made that decision I

would have to become someone that I didn’t want to be. Again, I wasn’t trying to be them

and I wasn’t trying to emulate them: it was more that I identified with certain values and

thought they were worth sticking to. In that respect, I owed The Stone Roses everything. Not

only had they provided me with innumerable hours of joy through listening to their music,

but they had given me a moral compass and helped shaped the man I eventually became. For

this, I am eternally grateful but for me, the story of The Stone Roses was finished. They left

us with a classic album, a handful of amazing b-sides, a few gold-plated singles and a flawed

but brilliant follow up. Their legacy was assured and they were already considered to be one

of the all-time great bands. Theirs was a tale of a band who were determined to be the best

but didn’t have any appetite to pander to anyone in the process. They imploded in the end,

but even that was part of the story. For this fan, there was nothing more for them to do.

***

On October 16th

2011, I started getting texts around mid-afternoon from various people

asking me if I’d heard that The Stone Roses were reforming. I was used to this kind of thing

as it blew up every couple of years, so I knew the drill. I’d get a few texts that I’d denounce

25

as nonsense, confident that a reunion was not something that the Roses would do. After a day

or so, someone from the band or their people would officially put the rumour to bed. That’s

how it had worked in the past, and that’s how I expected it to work this time. “But there’s a

press conference in a couple of days” someone said. “Big deal” I replied “it’ll be about Blur

or something”. The rumours grew, with a tabloid claiming to have inside info on a tour, and

then Reni released the statement I’d been waiting for: “Not until 9T will I wear the hat for the

Roses again”. Done and dusted until next time, I thought. But the rumour persisted, and this

time John Robb, a confidante of the band and the author of a book about them, seemed to

support it. Something didn’t seem right.

26

18th October 2011

I found out the time of the press-conference and sat in front of my computer watching the live

feed. I was staring at four empty chairs and at this point, I fully expected some other band to

sit in them. I was looking forward to sending a series of “I told you so” texts to all the people

who had texted me over the last couple of days. I found John Robb on Twitter and kept

checking his updates. It soon became clear that I had been wrong. John Robb tweeted a

picture of himself and Ian Brown who, he reported, was on his way to the press conference.

The live feed had died, so I was getting my information solely from Twitter. The Stone Roses

had reformed, and would be playing gigs in 2012. Oh, and there were new songs as well. I

started getting texts right away, many from people who thought I would be deliriously happy

with this development. It’s hard to put into words the emotional rollercoaster I went on over

the next couple of days, but happiness was not something I felt for a long time after the Roses

reformed. This was my band. I revered their principles. I thought and hoped that they were

above something as crass as a reformation. That was what the old-guard did. That’s what

money-grabbing sell-outs did. Not the Roses. Not my band. Emotions were running high, and

I was getting so many texts and emails that I poured my heart out into a reply that was really

an essay. Reading it back now, it sounds harsh, but at the time I meant every word:

They gave me something to believe in. Not just me, but thousands upon thousands

of our generation. They were the band who had everything. They looked perfect.

Their clothes, their haircuts, their pouts and their poses. They were beautiful:

classic rock starts, but somehow avoiding clichés. But anyone can dress well.

That’s never enough. The Roses also had an attitude. Not a “bad” attitude, nor the

“difficult” tag that they were so often accused of, but a self-belief and a sense of

right and wrong that was as uncompromising as it was laser-sharp. Bands that

come with ideologies are usually never far away from self-righteous pomposity,

but again the Roses dodged these clichés. Their ideology was fairly simple. Never

sell out. Always stay true to yourself and behave with integrity. Do things your way

and don’t ever do things for impure reasons. It was this attitude that permeated

their interviews and their music. Ah, the music. Not before or since has a band

sound so effortlessly perfect. Spine-tingling melodies, delicious harmonies, a

rhythm-section to die for and the guitarist of his generation. The effect of the

soaring music that they made had on me and countless others is impossible to put

into words. They made me feel 10ft tall and capable of doing anything at all.

27

Theirs was the sound of pure love in musical form. Everything about them,

including the time they emerged, was perfect. Hardly a week went by without

them releasing another magical chunk of pop-perfection wrapped up in a paint-

splattered sleeve. Their songs could be heard everywhere you went. It’s often said

that the impact of a band can be measured in the influence they have on the

nation’s trousers and haircuts. In 1990, The Stone Roses had somehow seduced

the nation’s youth into wearing flares and adopting bowl-cuts. They were the band

of a generation, and they deserved to be. They spearheaded a movement that

made you genuinely thrilled to be part of, and still inspires nostalgic teary eyed

reminiscence. In amongst all this, they gave us the greatest album of all time;

preceded and followed by singles with b-sides as good as anything you’d ever

heard. They could do no wrong.

They disappeared, of course, but this just added to their mystique. They never

seemed like normal people. It was almost impossible to imagine Stone Roses songs

being written, because listening to them always felt like the tunes had always

existed. The disappearance was perfect. It added to the legend. Sure, it was

marred by legal disputes. But these were noble disputes. Record labels were trying

to exploit them and the Roses instinctively knew that they had to retaliate.

Retaliation, whether in the form of court battles or a more robust form of stylised

vandalism, was justified and in line with the high standards of integrity that they

displayed. When they returned, they were still as swaggering as ever, but this time

with a meatier sound. It was hard to digest at first, but their comeback album

gradually revealed itself to be a classic in its own right. And they gave their first

comeback interview to The Big Issue. There are those values again. The wheels fell

off, of course. A Reni-less Second Coming tour and a Reni/ Squire-less Reading

Festival disaster threatened to tarnish the legacy, but it remained intact and they

disappeared into the pantheon of music history. Their beliefs loomed so large that

it was inconceivable that they would ever risk tarnishing everything that they had

worked for and stood for.

The reason the Roses meant so much to people wasn’t the trousers, the hair or

even the tunes. It was the whole package. The Roses gave us an ideology to

believe in. Never sell out. Above all else, maintain your integrity. Every important

28

decision that has been made in my adult life has been informed in some way by

the lessons that the Stone Roses taught me in my teens. Those lessons got me to

where I am today.

And that’s why this reunion is a huge mistake. The Roses did things differently.

They weren’t the type of band to cash in. Cashing in was anathema to their values.

They were proud people, proud of their legacy and proud of what they meant to

the generation of fans who adored them. Coming back makes no sense. Playing

massive venues in front of aging nostalgic fans clutching their commemorative

comeback merchandise goes against everything they ever stood for. It is a betrayal

of the ideology that they taught us. What makes Roses fans so loyal is not just the

tunes they bestowed upon us. To be a Roses fan was to share their worldview. You

felt part of a gang. We held them dearly because they stood for something. It

didn’t matter what you had or didn’t have – if you had the right values then you

won’t go far wrong. That’s why Reni uttered my favourite interview-answer of all

time when a Smash Hits journalist asked him what his most treasured possession

was and he replied “the purity of my soul”.

Why risk all that? Why rehash the past and potentially ruin the legend? It makes

no sense. Comebacks are, by John Squire’s own admission “tragic” affairs. I didn’t

sign up to this. I didn’t buy into the Roses to see them become a cheesy cabaret

act. Playing new songs is a huge risk – they can never be the same as the ones we

love. There is nothing about this that is a good idea. The gigs will be full of pissed-

up idiots. The new material will be noticeably average (at best), the cultural

landscape can never re-align itself to what it was in the late 80s-early90s. It’s a

terrible idea, and I have never felt so betrayed by anyone I once looked up to. They

were never supposed to be one of those bands. We all thought they were different.

Special. Unique. Pure. It seems we were all very very wrong. They should be

ashamed of themselves (and probably will be by the end of the tour). I want no

part of it.

Now, I will be the first to admit just how pompous all of that sounds. But I was upset. I

genuinely thought it would be a bad idea, and would turn this precious band into a nostalgic

cabaret act. The last thing I wanted was for the band I loved to become a joke.

29

Then this happened, over text messages, with Kendo.

Kendo: I admire your stance but I'm afraid I can't give up my dream of seeing Reni

play drums in the flesh. Today I woke up around 06.00 with Emily crying. I got up

and took her into bed with us and instead of following asleep again I immediately

started to think about the reunion. I was willing it to be a false alarm and

statements to be released by the Ian and John confirming that they would not get

back together for any amount of money. However I knew deep down that it was

going to happen this time. I thought about all the way to where I was working

today and checked the internet for any news prior to starting at 9. At this point no

news was good news. I started work and forgot about it until I started to write my

report at 14.30 at which point I saw your text and checked the internet again. I

read that article I sent you and kind of accepted that it happened, but a bit of me

was still denying it possibly could. I then received your text confirming it and

despite driving country roads at 70mph checked the internet again. At this point I

read the article in the Guardian and it finally sunk in that this was happening. The

final words in that article confirm tickets go on sale at 9am Friday. I was

gobsmacked that it was happening so soon and then a strange thing happened. I

got goose bumps all over. This was excitement I was feeling. I thought of the

feeling I would get seeing the roses walk on stage hands held high for their

triumphant return. I thought of the majestic feeling I had during seeing Primal

Scream do Come Together in London. Could this actually be as good?

I then had another hour long journey to contemplate what this actually would

mean. My first thought was Reni, I would get to see him at last. But then I started

to think about my earlier feelings of dismay and then my thoughts were no longer

of a triumphant return, now they included the haggard greying Ian Brown killing a

field of dreams. Alas, despite knowing I shouldn't, I will be going all out to be there

at the point they return on stage. At that point I will hope and pray they deliver

and something inside tells me they will. I just hope the image in my head of them

on stage is not ruined forever.

30

Me: A massive world tour of arenas. Merchandise stands. Millions of pounds in

revenue. Old men with beer bellies in Reni hats desperately trying to relive their

youth. Young bampots trying to jump on the bandwagon without the slightest

inkling of what made it all so special in the first place. This isn't The Stone Roses.

This is something else. None of that represents the band we used to love. The old

Roses would never have considered something as vulgar as a comeback world

tour. They may be back together but The Stone Roses died a long time ago. The

spirit has gone. This is a cabaret act.

[more pomposity. I’m sorry]

Kendo: I know. I know. But. You can't miss the comeback shows. What if it’s the

biggest mistake you have ever made? Many many times we've had this what if

conversation and I remember a younger less cynical Stuart Wilson embracing the

idea of a return, if he could just get to see all 4 of them onstage.

It is. It is. It is. You can't get away from it. But The Stone Roses will all be onstage

together. You can't get away from that either. No matter how much the whole

thing goes against your whole being you can't get away from the fact that those

four will be on a stage together. I can't believe you would miss that return. I just

can't believe it.

And that was when I cracked. Something in that last text from Kendo flicked a switch inside

my head. The Stone Roses were back together. It may not have been what I wanted, but they

were my band. I’d grown up with them and I owed it to them to see this thing through to the

end. It may end up being terrible, but if it was terrible, I wanted to be there to see it. Ian,

John Mani and Reni were going to play music together again. Kendo was right. It would

have been insane for me to miss that….

31

Friday 8th

& Saturday 9th

June 2012 – Club Razzmatazz,

Barcelona

I’d managed to get tickets for the first two nights at Heaton Park, the huge comeback gigs

announced by the Roses at the press conference. However, we knew that these wouldn’t be

the first shows; no band gets back together after 22 years and plays their first gig to 75,000

fans in their home town. Kendo and I wanted to be at the first warm-up gig. In the months

after the reunion was announced, the Roses added more dates to their tour. At first it looked

like the first warm-ups might be in Scandinavia, but then two nights were announced in a

club in Barcelona. Tickets went on sale and were surprisingly easy to get, despite some

difficulties negotiating the Spanish website. We were going to see the Roses play their first

gig together since Glasgow Green in 1990. During the previous 8 months it had all been quite

difficult to comprehend. As I had done over the previous 20 years, I’d always put the Roses

on when I was drunk, singing along joyously at the top of my voice. I could be spotted in

pubs and clubs when I am the Resurrection was played, arms outstretched like a drunken

Scottish Jesus. A few months before the reunion, I forced my mate Al and his wife Angie to

watch the Blackpool Live video in my living room, drunkenly but enthusiastically instructing

them to “watch Reni…..WATCH FUCKING RENI!!!!!!”. The prospect of seeing the original

line-up was a strange one. Every so often it would hit me when I wasn’t expecting it, and the

hairs on the back of my neck would stand on end. Sometimes, I’d get a lump in my throat as I

imagined what it would be like to see those four mates walk on stage once again. Could they

recreate the magic that they so effortlessly produced all those years ago? By this point, I had

more or less dispensed with the negativity that I originally felt about the reunion. I wasn’t

sure what it would be like, but I was intrigued. The Roses had gone into hiding immediately

after the press conference. No interviews, no new material, no information. Nothing. They

disappeared, much like they had in 1990. It started to feel like they were being The Stone

Roses once again, and that excited me. Maybe they were going to do it. Maybe they were

going to pull this off…..

***

We suspected that there may be a secret show before the Barcelona gigs. That would be a

very “Roses” thing to do, and we were right. An email came in at 3pm on May 23rd

announcing that the Roses would play a free show that night in Warrington. Tickets in the

form of wristbands were being handed out on a first-come basis. I dropped what I was doing

32

and ran to my car, typing “Warrington” into Google Maps as I did. It was three hours away. I

checked the trains. Three hours. I wasn’t going to make it. Damn! I deliberately placed an

embargo on all information about this gig. When I saw them, I wanted to feel like it was their

first gig. I didn’t want to know anything about the set-list, the quality of Ian’s voice, or the

length of Squire’s hair. I was to be pure for Barcelona. After the Warrington gig, rumours

started circulating about a free gig in Greenock. It made sense given the Roses connection

with the town and I tried my best to find out if it was true, but if anybody knew anything they

weren’t telling. I decided that I couldn’t possibly miss a gig in Greenock, so for the entire

next week I would leave my adopted home of Edinburgh at lunchtime and make the 90

minute drive back to Greenock so that I arrived around 3pm. I’d wait in Greenock checking

emails and Twitter for any potential announcement before heading back to Edinburgh either

later that night or early the next morning. People kept telling me how crazy this was. I knew

it was crazy, but I also knew that if I missed a secret gig in the town where I fell in love with

them, I would be absolutely gutted. The gig never happened, and so on June 8th

2012 I left

Greenock for Barcelona to see the Roses play their second and third gigs in 22 years….

***

I couldn’t relax on the way to Barcelona. The main reason was that we didn’t physically have

the tickets in our possession. The way the website was set up meant that it would have been

nearly £80 to have them posted to us, so I opted for the “collect at box-office” option. This

should have been easy (and it was in the end), but I kept imagining things going wrong. So

much so, that I asked my Spanish friend Jose to write me a letter in Spanish that I could use

in an emergency. The letter said:

This is my good friend Stuart. He does not speak Spanish, but has travelled

from Scotland especially to see two concerts by The Stone Roses in Club

Razzmatazz. He has bought 4 tickets, 2 for Friday and 2 for Saturday. I have

spoken to an employee at the venue who told me that he would be able to pick

up his tickets at the box-office on Friday before the show.

Please help him in any way you can, because if he has had to show you this

letter, then it means things have gone badly wrong and he is seriously

fucked… He has been waiting 22 years to see this group play together, so

please help if you can

33

I was leaving nothing to chance. I needn’t have worried because the entire adventure in

Barcelona was as perfect a weekend as I could imagine having. We met some Roses fans on

the plane. Two were brothers, one of whom had seen the Roses at Glasgow Green (and had

been using this to torment his younger brother for 22 years). Another was called “Sauce” who

wasn’t that bothered about the reunion but just wanted to have a good night out (and he

certainly looked like he was achieving that goal when I saw him later in the evening). After

picking up the tickets without a hitch, we settled down in the bar around the corner.

Fortunately, we managed to hook up with some other Roses fanatics who had travelled from

all over the world to see these gigs. This was to be a true celebration. I had some food and,

crucially, tried not to get drunk (something that the two brothers from the plane failed to do,

resulting in them both forgetting the entire gig and having to stay out for an unplanned second

evening just so they had something from the weekend that they could actually remember). As

the gig drew near, Kendo and I both decided that we just had to get into this venue, even if we

were just around the corner with an hour to spare before show-time. We walked into Club

Razzmatazz and were blown away. I’d read that the club held about 6000, but what I didn’t

realise was that this was spread over several floors – the room that the Roses would be

playing in was tiny. This was a proper club gig! On stage sat Reni’s drums, resplendent with

two bass-drums both decorated with the debut album’s lemon logo. We stood and watched

those drums for what seemed like an age, trying to get our heads around the fact that we were

about to see The Stone Roses, together again. We watched as a Welsh lad who had travelled

from Palma with no place to sleep got chucked out by the bouncers before he’d seen the band

play a note. We looked around us and realised that just about everyone we saw had exactly

the same expression as us – somewhere between excitement and disbelief. Then the DJ played

Stoned Love by the Supremes and suddenly they were there. In front of us. I don’t really

remember what I did when I saw them walk onstage, but I don’t think that I will ever have a

purer, more honest emotional reaction than I did at that moment. I had long abandoned my

scepticism – the Roses were in front of me with Reni behind the drums. This was the

Resurrection.

***

As I write this, that first night in Barcelona was only 13 days ago. Every so often, a new

memory of the night will suddenly present itself to my consciousness. Every song they

played was a song that I’d played thousands of times, always dreaming that I’d one day

watch them play it live, but never daring to think that I actually would. They looked like the

34

band they used to be and they sounded better than ever with Squire’s muscular guitar almost

exactly half-way between the jangly debut and the Zep-rock Second Coming. When the

opening bars of This is The One smashed into me, I struggled to watch through the tears. I

could only put my hands to my mouth and watch in awe, as The Stone Roses played my

favourite song. I didn’t know how Ian’s voice was holding up, because 1500 people were

drowning out every word. When I saw Ian and John smile each other, emotion got the better

of me. The friendship had been repaired. They were mates again. As Mani said at the press

conference, re-establishing the friendships was more important than the reunion of the band,

and the humanity and love that was evident between these four old friends on that stage was

what protected this whole endeavour from ever turning into the cabaret I had feared it might.

I got it now. This wasn’t a cash-in, although cash was to be made. It wasn’t a sell-out. This

was something pure and honest because it happened for the right reasons. Watching the

Roses make eye contact with each other as they played those songs was what convinced me

that not all reunions are crass. They can happen for good reasons as well as bad. The Roses

knew that they had to fix their friendships before they could fix the band, and it was for this

reason that the gig was a success. If they had tried to do it the other way around, it would

never have worked. As always with the Roses, everything about this was 100% real and

honest. Reni was even better than I could have imagined. Absolute effortless and fluid, it

would not be an exaggeration to say that I had just witnessed a genius at work. I thought I had

seen The Stone Roses in Glasgow in 1995, but I hadn’t. I first saw The Stone Roses on 8th

June 2012 in Barcelona. With Reni, their drummer. The gig seemed to last about 10 minutes,

but in reality it was nearly 90. They ended with Love Spreads and then disappeared. The

Roses didn’t tend to do encores, but I don’t think they had much choice on this

occasion…and there was only one song that could possibly fit the bill, as they re-appeared

onstage with Reni leading them into I am the Resurrection.

After the gig we somehow managed to locate the lads we’d spent the day with, who had

congregated in a kebab shop near the venue. We’d only been together for a few hours, but it

already felt like we were a gang. We had shared something special and we were going to

celebrate. After a few more beers a couple of tequilas and a lot of triumphant chanting, I went

back to the club for the after-show party. By this point I was too drunk and emotionally

drained, so I went back to the hotel and went to bed. It had been quite a day, but what I didn’t

realise at that point was that the best was yet to come.

***

35

Kendo woke up with a start on Saturday morning. He had to go home because it was his

daughter’s birthday and when he eventually surfaced he realised that he didn’t have much

time to get to the airport. He threw his things into his bag and rushed off to find a taxi. When

he found one, he called me and told me that he’d seen some of the lads from the previous

night and they were heading out for some food. Luckily, I’d swapped a couple of numbers, so

after a few phone calls and a couple of wrong-turns, I found where they were. Everyone was

still buzzing from the previous night (I think a couple of them hadn’t even been to bed) so I

ordered some food from the Spanish menu (meaning I pointed at something without knowing

or caring what it was) and a beer before downing some caramel vodka shots from a bottle that

the owner of the bar had apparently given us for free. When the bar was closing, we asked for

the bill. It still doesn’t seem right that so many people eating and drinking so much were only

charged 40 euros.

The rest of the day was spent surfing on the euphoria of the previous evening. Another friend

of mine, Craig, had arrived to replace Kendo. I told him that he had no idea what a treat he

was in for, but I’m not sure he believed me. The evening progressed in much the same way as

the previous one, except this time I wasn’t so strict about staying sober. We got to the venue

and had a look at the merchandise stand. I was with Ajay, who I had met for the first time the

previous day. I bought a t-shirt and then casually pointed out a couple of other things that I

liked the look of. Ajay bought them and handed them straight to me. We got into the venue

and Craig went to the bar. That was the last I saw of him until the end of the gig, so Ajay and

I found a decent spot and waited.

The gig, when it arrived, was sensational. Maybe it was because I found it hard to take in

what I was seeing on the first night, maybe it was because the band were more confident,

maybe it was because the “Saturday” crowd were more up for it, but something happened on

the second night in Barcelona that I’d never experienced before and doubt I ever will again.

When I used to read articles about the Roses, they used to speak of the connection that the

band had with their audience. Roses’ gigs from their golden era were sometimes described as

being like raves. I never fully understood what any of that meant until June 9th

in Club

Razzmatazz. It was stunning. Breathtaking. This is a band that feed off their audience, and on

that night everything just seemed to click. The crowd inspired the band to new heights and

every song sounded urgent, as if The Roses had something to prove. As the music poured

over us we celebrated like this was the greatest party that any of us would ever experience.

Mani, perhaps a little subdued by his standards on the previous night, looked like he’d

36

suddenly remembered what he was doing. He looked like the biggest Stone Roses fan in the

room, and the great thing is – he probably was. Spontaneous chants of “Reni, Reni” broke

out in different pockets of the room, and everywhere you looked there were people with their

hands in the air and huge smiles on their faces. During She Bangs the Drums I looked behind

me, and I saw 1500 people bouncing in perfect unison, singing their hearts out and punching

the air with delight. By the time they got to Resurrection I had become part of a 6-man circle

in the second row from the front. It was the most thrilling experience of my entire life. The

band came together after wringing the last possible notes from the final song and embraced

each other. They stayed in their private hug whilst the club around them erupted. And then

they came to take their bow. Every one of them was grinning, Mani punching the air in

jubilation, Ian handing out gifts to the front row, Reni putting on a Reni-hat that landed at his

feet as the chant “Ole Ole Ole, Roses, Roses” filled the hall. Squire was the last to leave the

stage, shaking hands with anyone he could reach as he did. It was the kind of gig that people

will still talk about in 20 years. Outside the venue, we saw a guy grab his girlfriend by the

lapels, shouting “NOW DO YOU UNDERSTAND? DO YOU UNDERSTAND? DO YOU

UNDERSTAND NOW?” He was still doing it when we saw him 5 minutes later. Lee called

his wife and burst into tears on the phone. It was that kind of night. And it still gives me

shivers to say that I was there.

37

Sunday 10th

to Thursday 14th

June 2012 – Heineken Music Hall,

Amsterdam

The plan for Sunday was to have a relaxing day in Barcelona before getting the overnight

train to Paris. I had a few hours to kill before catching the train, so I found some of the lads

we'd met and joined them. After a couple of beers we decided that it would be a good idea to

actually see a bit of the city (for the previous two days, the only part of Barcelona that I had

seen were the road from the airport to my hotel, and the two streets between my hotel and

club Razzmatazz). After a stroll along Las Ramblas, Ajay, Lee and I decided to have some

tapas. We started with some restraint, but the excitement of the previous night's gig soon

overtook us, and three bottles of wine later I was wondering about how I was going to get to

the train station. I left in plenty of time, just in case i got lost. I needn't have worried, because

I found the station easily, which gave me another 90 minutes to kill. Spain were playing Italy

in Euro 2012 so I had another couple of glasses of wine and watched the game. By the time I

got on the train I was drunk and buzzing from the night before. I had booked a bed, and when

I found my cabin I was greeted by a Romanian lad who told me he was just about to find the

restaurant car and I was welcome to join him. I chucked my bag on my bunk and set off down

the train. The restaurant was full, so we sat in the bar until a table became free. More wine.

We got a table after a while and sat with a young American couple from Texas who were

touring Europe. More wine (this time whilst I tried to explain the purpose of my journey - not

easy to three people whose knowledge of UK music barely extends beyond the Beatles). We

finished eating and went back to the bar. More wine. One by one, they went to bed. I was on

a roll, however, so I befriended the only three people left in the bar and ordered more wine.

The bar closed at 3am, but I made sure we ordered enough wine to keep us going for a least

another hour. Eventually, it was only me left standing, at which point I decided I should

probably go to bed. But where was my cabin? The Romanian lad had gone to bed a few hours

ago, and my bag with my booking details was on the bed. I looked down the train. There

were literally hundreds of cabins. I knew mine was on the left. But I didn't know where.

There was only one thing to do, and that was guess roughly where it might be and start

opening doors. So if you are one of the several people who were woken that night by a

drunken Scotsman looking for his bed, I can only apologise. I found my cabin in the end, and

woke up everyone in it by attempting to jump into my top bunk without the help of a ladder.

Again, I apologise.

38

I woke up the next morning feeling absolutely grim. I had a 6 hour stopover in Paris before

my train to Amsterdam, and I was not looking forward to it. Despite feeling that I may

variously vomit, faint or sweat my soul away, I managed to rough out the wait. I found my

seat on the train and was delighted when a stunning blonde Dutch girl sat down next to me

and said "hello". Maybe this trip wasn't going to be so bad after all. Just when I was about to

strike up a conversation, the ticket collector appeared. I opened my bag to get my ticket,

completely forgetting that my self-designed t-shirt that I had worn to both Barcelona gigs was

at the top of my bag and was absolutely stinking. The stench poured from my bag straight

into this poor girl's nostrils. It took her under a minute to gather her belongings and move to a

different seat. Oh well.

***

Amsterdam is one of my favourite cities and I was looking forward to spending some time

there, but the travelling and my hangover had taken its toll on me, so when I arrived I went

straight to bed. I had booked to go to Amsterdam alone, as neither Craig nor Kendo could

justify a third gig. They both had family responsibilities but I didn’t, so I was free to follow

this thing wherever I wanted. I awoke the following morning to two text messages. One was

from Jamie, another guy I had met in Barcelona. He was asking if it was OK for him to take

me up on my offer of floor-space that I had made a couple of days previously. Barcelona had

given him the bug and he needed to see more. The second was from my brother-in-law who

had been inspired by my descriptions of Barcelona that he decided to ditch his business trip to

Sweden and get a last-minute flight to Amsterdam instead. The Roses bug was spreading.

After meeting my bro-in-law (also called Stuart) we had a relaxing day in Amsterdam as I

regaled him with tales from the previous few days. Jamie rolled into town about two-hours

before the gig was due to start, and we got the train to the venue. There wasn’t the same air of

camaraderie that I had enjoyed in Barcelona, but I did sense the excitement of the Roses fans

who were on the train with us. The look on their faces must have been similar to how I had

looked the previous Friday. The venue itself was far-removed from the hot & sweaty

intimacy of Club Razzmatazz. I’d heard that it wasn’t the best venue, but I’d also heard that

the sound was excellent, so I had planned for this to be my “listening” gig rather than

anything resembling the raw emotion of Barcelona. The crowd were more diverse as well,

with groups of lads from the UK mingling with curious locals. When I spotted the first plastic

pint of beer sailing through the air, I knew that the countdown to Heaton Park began here.

The band arrived right on cue, and the first thing Ian and John did was acknowledge the faces

39

in the front that they recognised from Barcelona. When they started playing they sounded

excellent. I could finally hear Reni’s harmonies properly, and they were heavenly. It took a

while for the crowd to warm up, with pockets of hardcore fans outnumbered by those who

had only come to hear the songs they recognised and were uninterested in paying attention to

anything else. The band had obviously picked up on this, with Ian doing his best to encourage

the people in the seats at the back to join in the party. Eventually, though, even those people

were powerless to resist the spell that the Roses cast. This is the One was triumphant, causing

the two well-dressed girls next to me to jump around with the same abandon that everyone

else was. She Bangs the Drums and Made of Stone signalled a further shift in gear before the

dirty blues riff of Love Spreads nearly blew the roof off. During Made of Stone Ian spotted

someone crying during the intro. He showed John and tried to make this person smile by

doing the monkey dance. It was a great moment and it had been a great gig. The Roses were

on form and looked up for it. After Love Spreads, Ian joked with the crowd, saying “we’ve

got to go up three flights of stairs, so you better shout loud if you want us to hear you” (or

something similar). At this point, I turned to Stuart and Jamie and said jokingly “I hope they

never do another encore, because that would make Barcelona even more special”. I had no

idea how prophetic that was to be, because after a couple of minutes of shouting Ian Brown

appeared back on stage, alone. As soon as he started speaking, I knew something was wrong.

“This is no joke, right, but the drummer’s gone home”. I looked at Jamie with a raised

eyebrow. The crowd thought that Ian was still joking – an extension to his teasing a couple of

minutes previously – but he persisted in telling us that he was serious. A few boos and shouts

later and Ian sensed the change in mood. It was then that he uttered the words that would

spread all over the internet within minutes: “the drummer’s a cunt”. Was this it? Was it over

already? It was hard to gauge the tone of his voice, but at the time he sounded fairly serious

to me. I had seen Reni gesture to the side of the stage during the last couple of songs, and as

Love Spreads began I saw him shaking his head. He was clearly unhappy with something, but

had the fragile peace that had been brokered just been shattered before my eyes? As the

crowd slowly began to realise that they wouldn’t be hearing I am the Resurrection, I quickly

got to the merchandise stall. If this was to be the last Roses gig ever, then I wanted some

souvenirs.

***

40

We decided to avoid the mad rush for the train after the gig, so we wandered around outside

the venue for a while. We spotted a little bar that was fairly quiet, and just as we got there I

saw a couple of guys with tour passes walking across the road. I asked them if they knew

what was happening, and they were a bit cagey, saying “how do I know you’re not from the

NME?” Fair point, I suppose. It turned out that this was Phil, the tour DJ and another friend

of the band. They sat down with us, we bought them a drink and they started chatting without

giving too much away. They seemed as shocked as we were and didn’t really have any more

of a clue than we did about what had just happened. At one point I glanced up to my right and

spotted Mani hanging out of a window having a cigarette. “Is that Mani?” I asked with

amazement. “Yes it is, and he’s smoking….his wife will kill him if she finds out!” came the

reply. “What’s happening Mani?” shouted Phil. Mani sighed and shrugged his shoulders. The

three of them arranged to meet later, and then Mani disappeared. It was a bizarre experience.

Here I was at my third Roses gig in a week, and one of my heroes was hanging out of a

window above me. At the time, I thought there was a real possibility that this might have

been the end of the road. In retrospect, I really have no idea whether Ian’s comment was

serious or significant or not. There was even some suggestion that it was staged to add a bit

of drama to the documentary that Shane Meadows was making about the reunion. Maybe

we’ll find out one day, but until then this was just another moment in the story of The Stone

Roses, and I was strangely pleased to have been a part of it. We got a taxi back into town and

tried to make sense of what we had seen. It had been a great gig, but the ending made us all

wonder whether this famously tempestuous band could recover. There was to be no party in

Amsterdam for me that night.

41

29th

& 30th

June 2012 – Heaton Park, Manchester

And then it was Heaton Park. The concerns after Amsterdam had been unfounded and the

Roses had played together at festivals in Scandinavia and a seemingly outstanding show in

Lyon that I’m gutted I missed. The next stop on the journey was to the fastest selling rock

gigs in UK history. They had always liked “events” and at Heaton Park they were to play to

225,000 people over three nights in what were unimaginatively described by the press as their

“massive homecoming shows”. My experience of Heaton Park was different to Barcelona

and Amsterdam. These were mini-festivals complete with noodle bars and VIP tents. I must

admit to being sceptical. I had been to many festivals and outdoor gigs and I thought I had

left behind the hassles that go along with them: rain, mud, insufficient toilets and people

chucking pints of piss all over the place. The journey down had done nothing to quell my

worries. Flooding had resulted in a number of trains being cancelled, and for a while it looked

as if we might have to make alternative travel arrangements. My train, however, was still

scheduled, but not only was it to carry several hundred Roses fans to Manchester, but it was

also to serve as a replacement service for several of the trains that had been cancelled during

the previous few hours. It was absolutely mobbed. I got speaking to a few people, including a

couple who had travelled to the UK from Los Angeles purely to see the Roses. I was

reminded again of what this band means to people and I arrived in Manchester in a better

mood than the one I had left Edinburgh in. Travel worries behind me, I could now

concentrate on the most important thing – watching The Stone Roses triumphantly return to

their home town.

After a hellish journey on a tram, we arrived at Heaton Park. It was massive. One of the first

things to strike me was the sheer diversity of people who had come to see this band. I saw

hip-hop guys, mods (in full mohair mod-suits, with winklepickers….in the mud), I saw

metal-heads in studded leather, I saw indie kids, I saw teenagers I saw old people, I saw gay

people, I saw people of all races and all creeds. It reminded me of how the Roses always

brought people together, transcending barriers. The supporting acts made more sense on the

day. We had The Wailers for the stoners (both nights) and Primal Scream (Friday) and Beady

Eye (Saturday) for the pill-heads. Everyone had been catered for. We arrived a bit late, and

had resigned ourselves to the fact that the front “pit” (which held 20,000 people) was full and

we would have to watch the gig from quite far back. But then out of the blue I got a text from

Jamie, who told me that they had ran out of wristbands at one gate, but there were plenty left

42

at another. When we got closer to the stage, I felt my excitement move up a notch. All we

could do was wait and try to avoid getting hit by flying cups of piss.

***

On Friday, Craig and I managed to find a decent spot that was near the front but not in the

middle of the madness (we had lost Kendo and another friend, Gaz, by this point). When the

Roses arrived, everyone went predictably crazy. It was hard to hear the band at all for the first

few moments of I Wanna Be Adored because several thousand people were singing every

guitar line and every lyric straight into my ear. But here they were, still together and still

looking up for it. All around us people were hugging each other, proving that the power of

these songs and this band works every bit as well in a massive field as it does in a tiny club.

They played Bye Bye Badman, which they hadn’t in either Barcelona or Amsterdam (and

which I doubted they would play at all given its complexity) and they nailed it perfectly. The

set had been re-worked with a blistering 15 minute version of Fool’s Gold as its centrepiece.

And no encore. My throwaway statement in Amsterdam had come to pass. The “Amsterdam

incident”, whatever it may have been, had caused them to drop encores from their repertoire.

I was happy about this. I’ve never been a fan of the automatic encore. Instead, they had

introduced Elizabeth My Dear into the set (another song that hadn’t been played at the gigs

I’d seen previously) which gave everyone enough breathing space before Reni kick-started I

Am the Resurrection in exactly the same way as he had done at Spike Island and Glasgow

Green – his last gigs with the band before his 22 year hiatus.

Heaton Park was a long way from Barcelona. The production of these gigs was immense and

the video accompaniments perfectly complimented the songs. On Saturday night we found a

spot directly in front of the sound-desk (which protected us from flying piss). The atmosphere

was in no way diminished, and just before they took the stage a guy standing in front of me

turned around for no reason, looked me directly in the eye and said “you’re about to have the

best night of your life”. I watched as a German lad standing next to me had exactly the same

reaction to hearing the opening notes of This is The One as I had experienced in Club

Razzmatazz: he raised his hands to his head and stood wide eyed and open-mouthed with

tears streaming down his face. As Standing Here entered into its gorgeous, gentle coda, Reni

and Ian harmonised with each other in a way that almost made my knees buckle. I looked at

Kendo and he looked back at me, wide-eyed and with a massive grin. Reni, often viewed as

the most reluctant and accolade-averse member, was the last to leave the stage on both nights.

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All around people were hugging and crying and before anyone could gather their thoughts, a

massive firework display exploded into action accompanied by Bob Marley’s Redemption

Song. The Stone Roses had absolutely smashed it.

***

After the long walk into town we went to a club to meet some of the people we had

befriended in Barcelona. It was great to see them all again, still with the same massive grins I

had left them with in Spain. We swapped stories and memories of the last few weeks. The DJ

played everything a Roses fan could hope for, and I danced so enthusiastically that when the

lights came up a random stranger walked up to me and handed me a brand-new Ian Brown t-

shirt, saying simply “this is for you”. It was the last big gesture of an amazing journey.

And then it was all over. It was hard getting back into normal life after the experiences I had

in June 2012. If you were there, you’ll understand. I am aware that many people reading this

will dismiss it as the hagiographic ramblings of a deranged fan-boy. I make no apologies for

that because the things that I have tried to describe were so thrilling that they made me glad

to be alive. It’s easy to be dismissive and cynical, so if that’s your reaction to this then you

should understand that your opinion doesn’t matter to me. The Stone Roses set out to write

classic songs that inspired a generation and gave people a buzz. As far as I’m concerned, they

achieved that. During those magical three weeks in June I saw exactly what I wanted to see,

heard exactly what I wanted to hear and felt exactly how I wanted to feel. And that, at the end

of the day, is what matters most. One love.

The End

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