The curious story of The Stone Roses
When eras that define decades overlap and seismic cultural shifts take place within them, creative innovation often rises through the cracks. When acid-house was merging with indie rock to form what has been coined the ‘Madchester’ movement, The Stone Roses identified a slipstream in which their exploration of sound could exist.
What followed was a release so iconic that it’s heralded as one of the all-time great debut records. Their self titled album fused all of the genres that were bursting at the Manchester seams. It was as though Ian Brown and his supporting cast had wandered the streets of Manchester with a net, casting in nuggets of its bursting culture and repackaging it into a new, innovative, but laser-focused soundscape.
As the technicolour of the drug-addled late 1980s made way for the monochromatic grunge of cigarette-smoking early 1990s indie-rock, The Stone Roses acted as a bridge between two cultural worlds.
Fellow Mancunian and beneficiary of the lane carved out by The Stone Roses, Noel Gallagher once said this in reference to the band’s cultural impact: “People forget how revolutionary they were at the time. I remember seeing them in town when they were a ‘goth’ band. They weren’t really but they had that goth on guitar (Andy Couzens). People think of them now about the way they look and everything but they were the last people in Manchester to start dressing like that.”
Gallagher continued: “Everybody else in Manchester already looked like that. But really, when this album came out after all the trouble they had it was just perfect. When you got to hear the full version of ‘I Am The Resurrection’, it was just perfect. Ian had the image and he was a great frontman, Reni and Mani were like the tightest rhythm section ever.”
While the record was a soaring eagle of innovation in 1989, it soon evolved into an albatross around the neck come the release of their follow-up album Second Coming in 1994. Where their throw-paint-at-the-wall approach on their debut was the sonic equivalent of a Jackson Pollock classic, the follow-up attempt was more of a sprawling mess, where ideas overlapped without any appealing direction.
And 31 years later, the band have yet to follow up on the record. When Guitarist magazine asked John Squire whether there were frustrations that the band hadn’t followed it up with another record, he quite simply said: “Well, no one wanted to do it – so it turned out to not be that frustrating at all.” But interestingly, he did admit that had another record followed, he would have been “probably more measured and respectful” on it. In fact, he later conceded that he wished he hadn’t “overdone the guitar on that second album.”
Never has one record done as much heavy lifting for a band as The Stone Roses self-titled debut album. The Manchester four-piece are consistently at the tip of any music fan’s tongue when listing the pantheon of iconic British bands, yet they only have one real record to prove it.
In 2016, they spluttered out a couple of single releases, ‘All For One’ and ‘Beautiful Thing’. And in true Stone Roses fashion, the combined releases were a tale of two halves. While the former was a poppy and distilled version of their ideas, mixed very badly, the latter marked one of their finest isolated releases, boasting the infectious rhythm section we came to adore in 1989 and a funky guitar part from Squire to boot.
With both tracks sporting similar artwork and being released within months of one another, you’d be forgiven for thinking it earmarked the imminent release of an epic comeback album. But just as our appetites began to moisten, the releases ran dry and nothing concrete came of it.
So here we are, nearly half a century on from their stunning emergence in 1989 and their legend within British music history is truly cemented. Significantly, Brown taught Liam Gallagher how to look hard clutching a pair of maracas and set off an attitudinal chain reaction that would go on to influence lad culture for the next 30 years. But their story poses the ultimate unanswerable artistic question. Had Second Coming been better received, or had they not become embroiled in legal battles with labels in the years that followed and continued to release a string of reasonably good albums, would the star of their debut stunner shine as bright?
That first record stands unwavering through the ever-changing tides of culture and to this day, echoes through the walls of bedrooms of burgeoning music fans. But its iconic status relies on more than just its sonic accomplishment. Perhaps it’s lauded further, for it is the only morsel the band have left us to feast on in the four decades since their genesis.
So, if you measure the ratio between output and impact among Britain’s greatest-ever bands, are The Stone Roses the most efficient?
