The era that The Stone Roses called the worst in music history “ever”
“The music scene’s pretty stale now, isn’t it?” The Stone Roses bassist Gary ‘Mani’ Mounfield pontificated nonchalantly to a reporter in the summer of 1995, and with the aid of 30 years of hindsight and some admittedly rose-tinted glasses, most of us would now be inclined to think that Mani was off his rocker.
“Nothing’s really influenced me in years,” he continued, “Maybe a new dance or hip-hop record out of England caught my ear for a time, but nothing’s really stayed with me for that long. Most bands today should just move out of the way before they get steamrolled.”
For context, this was a member of The Stone Roses speaking in the midst of the band’s make-or-break return from a long hiatus, a five-year period in which the ‘Madchester’ wave had been overtaken by a larger, far less specific cultural blob known as Britpop. From one perspective, the long-awaited release of the Roses’ sophomore album, the cheekily titled Second Coming, could have seen them reclaiming the pop throne and being carried through the streets by all the similarly retro-minded pop bands they’d helped inspire.
Instead, Mani and the rest of the band made it pretty clear they’d be repulsed by such a notion; whatever Britpop was, it had nothing to do with them.
“What I am worried about,” singer Ian Brown told The Big Issue around this same time period, “Is that there are a lot of bands making great records but aren’t getting the attention they deserve.”
Brown went on to name-drop some bona fide heavyhitters of the mid-1990s, such as the hip-hop act Leaders of the New School, Welsh rap-metal band Dub War, Jamaican dancehall singer Cutty Ranks, and reggae legends Burning Spear, noting, “Winston Rodney [of Burning Spear] has got some presence, he’s the biggest granddad on the planet.”
Guitarist John Squire chimed in to mention his own fandom for the veteran American metal band Corrosion of Conformity, and nobody, of course, had a thing to say about the bands getting all the press attention in the UK at that moment, you know, the mildly famous Oasis, Blur, Suede, Pulp: “Personally,” Mani added, “I don’t think the music scene has been as weak as this ever.”
Had the Stone Roses become embittered about the pop world leaving them back in the dustbin of 1989? Not necessarily, because they didn’t have much nice to say about their own original, so-called scene either.
“That whole scene was just a myth anyways,” Mani explained to the Orange County Register, noting that ‘Madchester’ was invented by the British press, lazily pairing the Roses up with Happy Mondays and the like, “We didn’t care about it at all. The only thing we care about or rely on is we four.”
He might also have been disappointed with the way the new imaginary scene, Britpop, was elevating bands with a certain image rather than on the basis of a distinct sound. Squire’s guitar playing on Second Coming certainly sounds like a self-indulgent, swaggering rock star, on par with anything Noel Gallagher or Bernard Butler were doing, but according to Mani, when The Stone Roses were originally on the come up, “the point of our making music was to take away all the icon mystique of rock, to prove that anyone can do it.”
In the same way, The Stone Roses’ listening preferences were now out of step with the mainstream; moreover, they also weren’t willing to conform their own sound to rise above the noise of the Oasis vs Blur chart war that was dominating the headlines.
What might have been a game-changing headline appearance at Glastonbury in 1995 was cancelled when Squire broke his collarbone in a mountain bike crash, and by the following spring, the rest of the proverbial wheels had come off. Squire announced he was leaving the band, and Brown and Mani played out the string to diminishing returns, ultimately pulling the plug on the band before the end of 1996, one of the saddest days of the worst period in music history, as they saw it.
