Q February 2005 Issue



WAR OF THE ROSES




They had the world at their feet, but The Stone Roses threw it all away. This is the inside story of how their Second Coming destroyed them.

MIDWAY THROUGH UK zombie spoof Shaun Of The Dead, there lurks a split-second joke. Two walking cadavers are advancing on Simon Pegg and co-star Nick Frost, whose only means of defence is the contents of a record box. After debating which records to use as missiles, New Order's Blue Monday and Prince's Purple Rain stay in the box. The Batman soundtrack and a Dire Straits album go straight at their attackers.

They then come across the first album by The Stone Roses. It goes back in the box, but Frost's eyes light up when he comes to its successor. "Second Coming?" he asks, getting ready to throw.

Pegg hesitates, before protesting, "I like it."

On the film's DVD commentary he elaborates: "Yes, I do like it. The joke is very true. It's an ongoing dispute in indie culture."

He's right. The status of the Roses' 1989 debut is assured, but its follow-up, released over five years later, occupies a more uncertain place in rock history. Peppered with booming hard rock and hampered by a handful of musical non-events, its initial release was a howling anti-climax. These days, however, at least one of the people responsible believes it's time for a reappraisal. "When I go out DJing and play Second Coming," says bass player Gary "Mani" Mounfield, "it sounds fuckin' excellent. A lot of people were too quick to judge it. It's much more layered than the first album, when we were loveable moptops. We were turning into horrible bastards, and the music had a darker edge. People come up to me now and say, It's far better than the first album."

That might be overdoing it, but much like The Smiths' Strangeways, Here We Come, The Clash's Sandinista! and The Beatles' White Album, Second Coming is a record that derives its appeal from where it sits in its authors' history. Within its songs you can hear the echoes of a compelling story of setbacks and mishaps, days and weeks of wasted time, once-close relationships becoming hopelessly distant. Talking to those who made it, it often seems miraculous it came out at all.

IN THE SUMMER of 1990, The Stone Roses were at the apex of their career. Over 30,000 fans had seen them play at Spike Island in Widnes, a lamentably-organised event nonetheless acclaimed as the high point of rock's absorption of the communal spirit fostered by acid house. In its wake, a single entitled One Love reached Number 4 (back then, dizzying heights for a guitar group), and there was excited talk about the direction they would take on their second album.

In the meantime, the band's manager, a mercurial Mancunian hairdresser-turned-impresario named Gareth Evans, had begun to heed advice suggesting the band disentangle themselves from independent imprint Silvertone and strike a deal with a major label. Geffen, then home to Nirvana and Guns N' Roses, not only offered to meet any legal fees but were prepared to sign the band for a £2 million advance. So it was that the band's case against Silvertone came to the High Court in the spring of 1991.

As the legal confrontation approached, Evans advised his charges to ease their work rate. "Gareth got into the habit of saying, It doesn't matter when your next record comes out - the longer the better," says guitarist John Squire. "He said that on a weekly basis. He kept telling us to slow down."

Still, to give them something to do, in early 1991 Evans billeted the band in Bluestone, a windswept rehearsal studio in Pembrokeshire. Trouble was, precious little new music had been written. "Nothing was coming," says Squire. "We kept drawing blanks." Or, as Mani puts it, they acted "like the Banana Splits - causing mayhem, breaking stuff, basically doing nothing."

"We had nothing better to spend our money on than these big tins of ant repellent," Mani recalls. "We'd build a fire and throw one on and then shoot it with an air rifle. You got these massive Apocalypse Now-type explosions," he laughs.

Only once did their more artistic instincts surface: John Squire using a set of Harrods kitchen knives to create an eight-foot "snow penis". The guitarist's other abiding memories are of mixing "James Bond cocktails" at the studio bar and attempting to master Stevie Wonder's Heaven Help Us All, a Roses version of which was intended as a protest against the start of the first Gulf War.

The rest of 1991 was scarcely more productive, though it gave rise to plenty of intrigue. The aforementioned court case shone light on the band's iniquitous deal with Silvertone. It transpired the group were only entitled to half-rate royalties on any greatest hits package and, bizarrely, the reach of the contract encompassed "the Earth and the solar system". The case also revealed the limited extent of Gareth Evans's business skills. His legal advice at the time of the Silvertone deal had come from a mortgage specialist based in the Manchester suburb of Sale. He also took an unprecedented 33.3 per cent of the Roses' earnings - and was alleged to have withheld £90,000 from the band.

In response, the four Roses visited Evans's home and refused to leave until he had given them £10,000 each. On a whim, they then headed for the South of France. "We went, Right, let's fuck off and spend some money," says Mani. "We flew into Nice first, chartered a helicopter from Nice to Cannes, and from there to St-Tropez. We booked into the [legendarily raffish] Hotel Byblos, stayed a couple of days, went to Monte Carlo. Very nice it was too."

Some of John Squire's Super 8 film from the trip ended up in the video for 1994's Love Spreads single. "We tried to get in casinos, but we were turned away for not wearing ties," Squire says. "That happened in quite a few places. It was weird: we were loaded, but we were scruffy fuckers. We called ourselves the Cockroaches. That was what we were made to feel like."

Soon after their return came good news. The band won their case against Silvertone, signed to Geffen, and received initial payments of £125,000 each (singer Ian Brown later claimed to have celebrated his good fortune by stuffing a carrier bag with cash and handing it out to the Manchester homeless). The downside was that each member of the band felt they had - in Mani's words - "some living to do". They would not resume work until March 1992.

IT WAS CLEAR the group's dynamics had begun to shift. In the wake of Spike Island, Squire and Ian Brown had been packed away on songwriting trips - to the Hebridean island of South Uist and a waterside cottage in the Lake District. Yet the creative partnership that produced the first album had pretty much dried up. Squire began to write new songs alone, coming up with material which was altogether more rock.

"I think everyone agreed that the first album wasn't really us; not the way we saw ourselves," he explains. "There was never enough bass, the drums weren't heavy enough, the material was too light. We thought it was the fault of the production team, but looking back, they were working with what they were given."

Squire also began to soak up the influence of Led Zeppelin, thanks largely to drummer Alan "Reni" Wren's enthusiasm for Led Zeppelin IV. "It was a completely different way of working from the first record, which was more like a folk thing: sit down with an acoustic guitar, write a verse and chorus, take it to the band. The second record was, What's the next monster riff I can knock out on the guitar? How far can I stretch it? How do I build a song around it?"

With a handful of Squire compositions to work on - Driving South, Love Spreads, Breaking Into Heaven, Ten Storey Love Song - the Roses finally started their second album in the company of John Leckie, who had produced the first record. They began by installing a mobile studio at the Old Brewery, a country house in Ewloe, North Wales. From there, they moved to another property, on the fringes of the Peak District, owned by a local notable named Derek Bull. "I think he'd made a lot of money in the early '70s," says John Squire. "It was a brown and cream and orange house. It had a sunken bath, and lots of gilt and mirrors." Here, they at least put something satisfactory on tape: a rough-edged acoustic treatment of Tightrope which eventually made it to the finished album.

At that point, of course, the finished album remained a long, long way from completion. The band moved on to Square One studios in Bury, hired at a knock-down price on account of the fact that it was being slowly dismantled. "The owner was called Trevor," says Mani. "I think he ended up going out with someone off Coronation Street."

It was here that John Leckie claims to have finally lost patience. "There were always problems," he says. "Power cuts, electrical problems, people disappearing. They'd say, Oh yeah, we'll have an early night, get up at 12, have a good lunch. And then it'd be three, four, five o'clock, and Ian would come in and say [adopts bleary tone], What's happening? You can't change people, I suppose. That's what Reni always used to say: "You're never going to change us, no matter what you do."

By late 1993, Leckie had handed in his notice and the band were managerless (they had dispensed with the services of Gareth Evans two years earlier). Phillip Hall, the much-respected music industry player who had previously handled their PR, was approached with a view to the Roses joining Manic Street Preachers on his list of management clients. Tragically, he died of cancer less than three months later (Second Coming is dedicated to him). When the band started recording again at Rockfield Studios, near Monmouth, they began to feel perilously alone.

"I always think of the Rockfield sessions as the place where the rot set in," says John Squire. "That was when it became an uphill struggle."

Rockfield's in-house engineer, 33-year-old Simon Dawson, agreed to take on the role of producer. Squire, having written most of the songs, resolved to seal himself off from any distractions and lead the record to completion. Yet the rest of the band, in his recollection, displayed varying levels of sympathy, interest and commitment.

Reni often did not bother to show up ("He had the worst attendance record," says Squire). At one point, feeling that Reni and Squire were pushing him too hard, Mani threatened to quit. The most damaging schism, however, opened up between Squire and Brown. Nothing was explicitly verbalised, but the singer seems to have resented Squire's new role as the group's songwriter.

As evidenced by songs such as Good Times, Your Star Will Shine and Tears, Squire had recently experienced trying times. "I don't know if I'm alive, dead, dying or just a little jaded" went the lyric of the latter song, "someone throw me a line." Brown was sufficiently displeased by these lyrics that the finished version features a guide vocal. "I think Ian said to John, You'd have to put a gun against my head and walk me down to the vocal booth for me to sing that again," says Mani.

"I'd become a father, a longterm relationship broke down those were things that went into the music," says Squire. "And maybe that was something that Ian had a problem with: some of the realism from my life, not his."

In Brown's telling of the story, he had problems with Squire's use of drugs. "He was on cocaine all the time," Brown said in 1998. "There were too many drugs in the studio." Squire, by contrast, calmly denies that his intake was anything other than "measured and moderate". "If I had been strung out," he says, "I couldn't have made that record. I couldn't have put the hours in that I did."

The sessions do seem to have been bedevilled, however, by Brown's fondness for marijuana. "There was a problem with Ian and the amount of smoke he was doing at that time," says Simon Dawson. "It as affecting him head-wise. And when he was very stoned, it was very difficult to understand what he was saying." The producer's most remarkable memory of his wayward tendencies is the occasion when - for reasons still unclear - Brown suddenly decided to shave his head. Attempting to "try and hold it all together", Reni quickly followed suit.

When reminded of this episode, John Squire laughs. Yet any amusement masks the fact that relations between the two chief Roses were turning irreparably sour. "Ian smoked too much dope," says John Squire. "When he was stoned, he was at best a tuneless knob and at worst a paranoid mess. That made it very hard to make a record."

One evening at Rockfield, the band gathered around the studio TV to watch Oasis' debut on Top Of The Pops. The Gallaghers had been recording at nearby Monnow Valley, and using the music press to issue proud proclamations that they were the Roses' spiritual offspring.

"We all watched it," John Squire later recalled. "I didn't think the tune [Shakermaker] was that great, but they just looked right. It was like archive footage of a great '60s band you'd never got round to hearing."

SECOND COMING was finally released in December 1994, trailed by wondrously Zeppelin-esque single Love Spreads, which reached Number 2, suggesting the Roses were as potent a force as they had been five years earlier In fact, much had changed - not least the arrival of what came to be known as Britpop.

On top of that, it took nearly a year for the band to play any concerts in the UK; the three singles came with depressingly perfunctory B-sides; and where the Roses had once been at pains to look like the perfect band, their photographs now suggested four disparate individuals."

There was a reticence about coming back," agrees Squire. "Ian and Reni didn't want to be photographed. There was talk about not doing videos, which is why I started making Super 8 films, to try and nurse us back into the daylight."

The following April, Reni left the group. There have long been whispers about a heroin problem, but both Squire ("I never saw him doing it") and Mani ("I think we'd have known") are unconvinced. Whatever, Squire claims that Brown blocked his and Mani's attempts to persuade the drummer back: "It's me or him," the singer told them.

Having hastily recruited a Mancunian sessioneer named Robbie Maddix, the British shows they played at the end of 1995 were largely a delight, though Squire says the group's spirit had ebbed away. "The band didn't really exist any more," he says. "It was like a ghost." There was also the small matter of his nonexistent relationship with Ian Brown. If the Roses carried on, he says, he faced the prospect of "being in a band with somebody that I used to love and respect, and had nothing in common with any more."

Squire resigned in April 1996. His last encounter with his colleagues took place at the London offices of their lawyers Babbington & Bray. "When the rights to the name came up, I said, You can have the vowels and I'll have the consonants. Mani laughed, then checked himself. With Ian, steam was coming out of every orifice."

The Stone Roses never recovered. After an absurdly anti-Squire press conference, Brown led a line-up featuring guitarist Aziz Ibrahim into a disastrous performance at the 1996 Reading festival. Even Brown admitted they were"a cabaret version".

Besides, the public's attention had shifted elsewhere - 1996 was the summer that Oasis played to 250,000 people at Knebworth. In a curious footnote, it turned out that during the versions of Champagne Supernova and I Am The Walrus which closed the shows, the man stage right supplying Jimmy Page-like guitar licks and confirming just by his presence the handover from one Manchester generation to another, was John Squire.



John Harris


Who's Who

The Second Coming's cast of characters.

JOHN SQUIRE
Famously reticent guitarist and sole author of most of Second Coming's songs. Has enjoyed a chequered solo career since the band's split. His Jackson Pollock-inspired "drip" paintings decorate all the Roses landmark releases.


IAN BROWN
His unique lope means he will forever be preceded by the adjective "simian", but the Roses' vocalist remains a Manc-rock talisman. Still unreconciled with Squire, but at least his solo career is a success.


GARY "MANI" MOUNFIELD
Bass player and self-styled "Rogue Rose", the leather-trousered hedonist nonetheless provided a rock-solid rhythmic foundation for Squire's florid guitar work. Currently living the rock'n'roll high life as a member of Primal Scream.


ALAN 'RENI' WREN
Producer John Leckie says Reni is the best drummer he's ever worked with. Quit the Roses in April 1995 under acrimonious circumstances. Currently writing and rehearsing with his band The Rub.


JOHN LECKIE
Producer of the band's finest moments, including their debut album and Fools Gold. Was involved in the first Second Coming sessions, but left due to the band's poor work rate. Currently working with New Order on their new album.


GARETH EVANS
One-time hairdresser and the Roses' ex-manager. His cheek, ambition and energy helped launch the band, but after he was fired in 1991 the recriminations and lawsuits continued for years. Ian Brown now refers to him as a "wanker".


SIMON DAWSON
In-house engineer at Monmouth's Rockfield Studios, Dawson was promoted to producer after John Leckie left. Has overseen John Squire's two solo albums to date.





Tune In
It wasn't all bad. Second Coming's essential track.

How Do You Sleep
Written by John Squire

Originally titled Severed Head, and intended as an elegant pop at Gareth Evans, its theme subsequently broadened into an attack on "general wrongdoers". Given its sequencing as the album's penultimate track, it sounds like a surreal summation of Second Coming's saga, not least when Brown sings, "So raise your glasses, here's a toast to wasted lives."

Listen Out For: Squire's gorgeous solo at 3:40 - over-the-credits music for the end of an imagined Roses biopic.

Find It On: Second Coming (Geffen, 1994).





Back To Media