The Stone Roses: War and Peace

by Spence, Simon

  Initially the scooter revival had been kick-started by the release of Quadrophenia in 1979, and Couzens watched Brown’s obsession with scooters grow. He had set him up with a part-time job at his uncle’s caravan sales site, and for a time Brown had played the part of the film’s lead, Jimmy, riding his scooter to work in his tonic suit. ‘It very quickly jumped from that to “scooterboys”, who were anything but mods,’ said Couzens. ‘They were more like Hells Angels or hooligans on scooters. Although John and I got into scooters, it was to a lesser extent than Ian. We continued trying to make music. Ian didn’t take any of that seriously and went for the scooter thing hook, line and sinker, up and down the country, on rallies and runs.’

  ‘The Scooterboys were not Mods,’ Brown told Melody Maker. ‘We were a mixture of punks, skins, anyone who had a scooter.’ Brown became a well-known face on the scene in 1981. It was a boon year, one that saw the mod look of suits and parkas replaced by the skinhead look of green army combat trousers, MA1 jackets and Dr Martens, scooter clubs springing up all over the country and a fresh wave of national runs taking place.

  The first of these was Scarborough Easter weekend 1981, when 10,000 scooterists gathered, followed in July by a run to Keswick in the Lake District that ended in a full-blown, Molotov-cocktail-scarred riot, and resulted in scooter runs being banned from the Lake District for twenty years. Brown was there.

  One of Brown’s closest scooterboy pals was Mike Phoenix. ‘Ian and I met up because on his way to work he used to come down through Sale past our house,’ said Phoenix. ‘He saw my scooter, stopped and we got chatting.’ Phoenix ran a club on Monday nights above the Black Lion pub in Salford called the Twisted Wheel SC, named after Manchester’s original Northern Soul venue. Brown became a regular. ‘Ian used to sit on the door with me, take the money and watch for the best-looking girls coming in.’ The club was rammed with up to 300 people, with another 100 outside in the car park – all dancing to Northern Soul, Motown, ska and 1960s mod music. ‘It was magical.’

  Brown had a strong and classic look: white Levi Sta-Prest jeans or loose-fit Levi’s Red Tab 501s with a twisted seam, Dr Martens boots, Jaytex or Brutus checked shirt and a black Barathea three-button jacket with chrome buttons and an original Twisted Wheel patch sewn on the breast pocket. He was charismatic, spinning stories and telling jokes that would hold the attention of huddles of scooterboys, and the girls loved him. He had an ability to make easy mates with anybody, even, on one memorable run, a group of Hells Angels. He was unafraid to put forward his opinion on any subject with a cheeky grin. ‘But when he lost his rag, he really lost his rag,’ said Phoenix. Brown would often tell Phoenix, ‘I’m not bothered about being rich but I want to be famous.’

  Stockport Crusaders and the Rainy City Cruisers in Salford were the main scooter clubs. Phoenix and Brown knew most of the faces on the scene. The small clique they rode with included members of the Chorlton Trojans scooter club, such as the always ultra-sharply turned-out Johnny Poland, a key influence on Brown’s style. The Trojans were renowned for their silver helmets with Mohicans fashioned out of a brush of fox’s tail. ‘Four or five of us would go everywhere together,’ said Phoenix. On the fringe of this gang of characters was Stephen ‘Cressa’ Cresser, a future member of The Stone Roses’ road crew. ‘Cressa was a good lad, funny, but he didn’t have a scooter,’ said Phoenix. ‘He used to come along on the back of somebody else’s.’

  Throughout 1982 and 1983, Brown and his rum and rowdy clique would be regulars at the rallies in Brighton, the Isle of Wight, Morecambe, Great Yarmouth and Weston-super-Mare, as the scooterboys became the scourge of seaside towns. ‘You’d go out on your scooter and people would throw things at you and the police would pull you up,’ said Couzens. ‘You’d get heckled. You couldn’t leave your scooter anywhere because it would get smashed up. It felt dangerous, and that’s part of being young. You want to kick against things.’

  Brown’s gang would go to the Beehive pub in Eccles and fight with the locals, including the lads who’d go on to form the Happy Mondays. ‘They’d try and kick our scooters over; we used to fight them every week,’ Brown said.

  Brown had five or six scooters, including two real head-turners. The first was a Vespa Rally 200, originally dark metallic blue and red, which featured the slogan ‘Angels with Dirty Faces’ on one side of the rear wheel panel after the 1978 Sham 69 single, and on the other side ‘Stormtroopers in Sta Prest’, inspired by the track by underground Oi! band The Last Resort. Phoenix, a keen exponent of the art of scooter customization, revamped this scooter for Brown, painting it pink and candy red with a Japanese-style flag on the front and adorning it with a new logo, ‘Cranked Up Really High’, after a Slaughter & the Dogs track.

  There was also a fondly remembered pink and white cut-down Lambretta ‘chopper’ with ‘Sweet and Innocenti’ written on the rear panel. Much of the customization was done at Andy Couzens’ parents’ house. Couzens, Brown and Phoenix would take a break from the hassle associated with riding scooters by going for rumbles around Manchester city centre in Couzens’ father’s white Jaguar. Guided by Phoenix they took the Jag to Clifton Hall in Rotherham, where Couzens and Brown experienced their first Northern Soul ‘all-nighter’. ‘They’d never come across anything like it,’ said Phoenix, ‘some dirty old music hall that smelled of stale grease where people were dancing all night.’

  John Squire was also noted for his customized scooter and had done the work himself. It was a Lambretta GP 125 in iridescent dark blue, with the petrol tank, the internals and the forks plated in copper. The rims were painted and then flicked with paints in the Jackson Pollock-style that would later adorn The Stone Roses’ instruments and record sleeves. ‘John really was meticulous,’ said Phoenix. ‘He had good taste. That scooter would stand up today.’ Although not as heavily involved in the scene as Brown, Squire made it to rallies in Skegness and Morecambe. ‘John was pretty introverted, quiet, but dry as fuck,’ said Phoenix. ‘He would stand back and listen to everyone else.’ He was also keen to borrow records that were popular at the Twisted Wheel club. ‘So he could listen to bass lines,’ said Phoenix. ‘He was always looking for new stuff and looking to make it his own.’

  ‘Ian was definitely a face on the scene,’ said Johnny Bolland, who ran the Stockport Crusaders and would go on to own the company who made the Stone Roses T-shirts. ‘He was loud and funny. He had the image and the style. John was just there, one of the crowd.’ On the Manchester scooterboy scene, however, the punks and mods who turned skinhead like Brown were far outnumbered by the football hooligans, ‘Perry boys’, who had taken to two wheels. In fact around the country many of the new scooter clubs often had strong links to football hooligan firms.

  Synonymous with this phenomenon in Manchester was a lad called David ‘Kaiser’ Carty, a well-known face from Moston. Among his crowd was none other than Gary ‘Mani’ Mounfield, who would go on to replace Pete Garner as the bassist in the Roses. ‘Mani stood out, same as Ian,’ said Bolland. ‘Him and Kaiser were proper Mancs from north Manchester, the rough end of town.’

  Mani, who was just a few days older than Squire, said his scooter crowd was made up of ‘punks, scallies [Perry boys], pirates, vagabonds and ne’er do wells’. They were a rowdy bunch, cruising about and getting ‘involved in skulduggery and shenanigans’, often clashing with the ‘smellies’ or ‘stinkers’ in nearby Oldham. ‘We’d kick fuck out of anyone with a leather jacket on or with long hair or anything like that,’ Mani said. They’d been at Scarborough in 1981, and were on many of the big runs such as Great Yarmouth and the Isle of Wight. Mani had a Vespa 90 racer called ‘Dirty Jimmy’. Alongside a taste for Motown, Northern Soul and mod-revival acts, they were into the psychobilly scene, a good-time apolitical mix of punk and rockabilly led by King Kurt and The Meteors.

  Initially there had been a divide between Kaiser’s north Manchester scooterboy crowd and Brown’s clique from south Manchester. ‘We always used to think the southern Manch
ester scooterboys were a bit middle class,’ Mani said. Slowly that attitude dissolved and the two sets of scooterboys came together, realizing ‘we were all into the same scene: dress sharp, have a smart scooter and like good music’. Mani met Squire for the first time in the Northern Soul room at the Pips club and knew him by his nickname, Red John. Squire was a ‘real staunch communist’, one who always wore a hammer and sickle badge, said Couzens. Mani first encountered Brown under more troubling circumstances. ‘We were having problems with this gang of local skinheads,’ Mani said. ‘The word went out to Ian’s south Manchester crew; Mike Phoenix, Johnny Bolland and all their lot.’

  ‘We’d heard about this kid with a swastika on his head, some bonehead who was living near Mani’s who was bullying kids and causing trouble in the bars and clubs,’ said Brown. ‘So Mani’s posse came to our posse and asked if we’d go up to deal with this guy. That’s how we met. We were policing ourselves in those days. I remember seeing Mani sat down in this council house. I’m thinking, He ain’t no fighter.’

  ‘I vividly remember meeting Ian,’ Mani said, ‘and thinking, That kid looks like Galen off Planet of the Apes. He always had that striking simian thing. I liked him from day one because he looked like my favourite telly programme.’

  Kaiser would often join Brown’s small crew on scooter runs. He was an expert ‘jibber’, always trying to get something for nothing, be it petrol or steak pie, chips and peas all round for the lads. They called themselves, briefly, the Manchester Globe Scooter Club – largely as a front to sell off hundreds of inch-wide black, red and green patches they claimed were the club’s insignia, at 50p each. ‘Nobody had any money, we were in a recession,’ said Phoenix. ‘We were young and just wanted to enjoy ourselves.’

  Kaiser and Mani were both part-time members of an irregular Oldham-based band called The Hungry Sox, whose psychobilly and garage rock set was played mainly for laughs. Squire’s interest was aroused. He’d tried but failed to keep The Patrol going with Couzens and a succession of new members after Brown and Wolstencroft had lost interest. Now, in October 1982, Squire, Couzens, Mani and Kaiser came together to form a new band, initially calling themselves The Fireside Chaps before changing their name to The Waterfront. They rehearsed at Couzens’ parents’ house, where a full-size snooker table was often a distraction.

  The Waterfront, with Kaiser on vocals, Mani on bass, Squire and Couzens on guitars and Mani’s mate Chris Goodwin on drums, recorded a demo tape featuring two songs: ‘Normandy (On a Beach)’ and ‘Where the Wind Blows’. Again Squire’s crystalline guitar lines are distinctive, especially on ‘Normandy’. The lyrics to the track were written by Kaiser and inspired by a recent trip to France when according to Mani, ‘everyone around our way all chipped the train and ferry and went to live in Port Grimaud, just outside St Tropez, for the summer’. Both tracks on the Waterfront demo, which Squire again designed the inserts for, were carefully constructed pop and in part precursors of classic period Stone Roses. Ironically, The Waterfront sounded more ‘Roses’ than the actual Stone Roses did in their early days, although ‘Where the Wind Blows’ did feature, remarkably, a whistling solo.

  ‘We spent quite a bit of time on that demo,’ said Couzens. ‘The first demo with The Patrol we didn’t know what we were doing, but that second time we’d got more of a handle on it. John and I talked about The Beach Boys a lot. We were definitely more pop-orientated. We had an idea of what we were trying to do.’ They tried to get Brown interested in joining The Waterfront. ‘John and I had an idea of having Ian and Kaiser at the front trying to do a counterpoint with one another. That’s what we were trying to push, this question-and-answer thing with these two lads at the front singing sweet pop music.’

  ‘We were joint singers for a couple of weeks,’ Brown said. ‘The Waterfront sounded like [post-punk Scottish band] Orange Juice. I was impressed I knew somebody that could play to that quality. Since 1978/79 John hadn’t done much except play his guitar.’ The Waterfront never gigged and came to an abrupt end. ‘It was John who said, I’m not doing this any more, and just stopped,’ said Couzens. Mani invited Couzens and Brown up to Oldham in an attempt to get something else going. They rehearsed for an afternoon with another member of the Hungry Sox gang, Clint Boon, at his studio the Mill, but nothing came of it.

  Squire and Brown appeared to be leaving behind their adolescent obsessions of music and scooters and adopting new, more adult responsibilities as their teenage years faded out. Squire had landed a good job, and Brown was settling into a long-term relationship. The scooter rallies were becoming bigger and bigger, but growing increasingly ugly as racist skinheads, often without scooters, infiltrated the scene. The National Scooter Rallies Association folded in 1986 and the runs came to an end. ‘Ian’s last rally,’ said Phoenix, ‘was the Isle of Wight, August 1984. He went down with his girlfriend, Mitch.’

  2.

  Reni

  Brown was bringing in a steady wage working for the Department of Social Security (DSS) in Sale and living in Hulme with his girlfriend Michelle ‘Mitch’ Davitt, a former Altrincham Girls Grammar School pupil Brown had first met at South Trafford College. At that time Hulme was the poorest, most neglected part of inner-city Manchester. The houses in the area had been demolished and replaced in the 1960s by a brutal, modernist curved row of low-rise flats with deck access above the streets, known as the ‘Crescents’. These flats had been award-winning designs, but by the 1980s inherent faults meant they were cold, damp and riddled with cockroaches and other vermin. Crime and drug abuse had become significant and the Crescents were declared ‘unfit for purpose’ by local authorities. Many of the flats were squatted and the area had acquired a bohemian reputation because of the punks, artists and musicians living there.

  Sue Dean, who would go on to be the girlfriend of The Stone Roses’ future manager Gareth Evans, lived in the flat below Brown and Mitch on the second floor. She knew Brown and his crowd from Manchester clubs such as Berlin, Legends, Pips, Placemate 7 and Devilles, and had even seen The Patrol at South Trafford College. ‘They were rubbish, absolute rubbish,’ she said. When Brown moved to Hulme, she followed, and shared her flat with Rob Hampson, a scooterboy and suedehead heavily into Northern Soul. Hampson would briefly become a member of The Stone Roses in 1987.

  ‘Ian had quite a settled life with Mitch,’ said Dean. ‘She had the proper skinhead look as well. As a couple they were still a bit mad, as anybody who lived in Hulme in that period would be, but to all intents and purposes they were settled down. They were both working. Ian used to drag his scooter up into his flat because it’d get nicked.’

  Squire had landed a job as a model maker for the animation company Cosgrove Hall. ‘It was my cousin who told me about the job going on the other side of the city, making props and theatrical sets,’ he said. ‘I thought it sounded like something I could do, so I jumped on my moped and drove over to the workshop while trying to balance a model I’d made of a Wind in the Willows riverside house, which was the nearest thing I had to a CV. I got the job, and I loved it.’ After Cosgrove Hall’s hit with Danger Mouse, the company released a seventy-five-minute film of The Wind in the Willows in 1983, winning a BAFTA. Squire was employed to work on a subsequent TV series based on the characters in the film.

  ‘By 1983, everyone was drifting off and starting to do jobs,’ said Couzens. ‘John had a good job. Ian was working at the dole office – behind the counter, where people come in asking for money.’ Couzens had learned guitar and missed the old gang. He pestered Brown about forming a new band. In all likelihood the invitation would have fallen on stony ground had Brown not just had a remarkable visitation from soul legend Geno Washington – one that swayed his decision and changed his life.

  Fate delivered Washington into Brown’s decrepit Hulme flat during a party to celebrate Mitch’s twenty-first birthday. In the 1960s Washington had been a mod favourite on London’s Soho R&B scene and with The Ram Jam band had scored two of the decade’s best-se
lling albums, both cut live. After a period out of the limelight in the 1970s, when he returned to his native America to study hypnotism and train to be a life coach, his solo career had been given a shot in the arm by Dexys Midnight Runners, who had eulogized him in the song ‘Geno’, a huge number 1 single in 1980. ‘I had a friend who worked at Salford University who was in Geno’s road crew and he brought him down,’ Brown said.

  ‘We were staying over the night and I didn’t just want to go back to the hotel straight away,’ said Washington. ‘I was signing some autographs and someone was telling me about this party that was going on, would I like to come? I said, Yeah, man. I went and the party was jumping, but I really wanted a joint instead of just drinking the booze. I got talking to a bunch over in the corner, which was Ian Brown and another couple of guys. I kept seeing these girls looking at Ian. They’re coming up and talking to him. They all liked him. So I said to him, Looks like you got a lot of action going on. He said, Nah, man, I’m just hanging around. So I said, Hey, look, just to make this shit great, have you got any friends that could bring over some smoke? I’ll pay. This friend came over about twenty minutes later. He had some good shit too. So I was on the good foot, I felt like I had had more glide in my stride, I had some loot in my flute.

  ‘So Ian had done this favour for me,’ said Washington. ‘And when someone is nice to me I try and give them something back if I can. Here’s a guy, he’s got great personality, got the looks and girls are going crazy over him. I took him away from his friends, over to another corner, and was talking to him seriously. I said, Look, man, you ought to be a pop star, you ought to go into the pop business. I asked him, You sing? He said, No, I don’t sing. I asked him, Do you write songs? He said, No, I don’t write songs either. Goddamn, I said, Look, when you were in school did you write poetry or some kind of shit like that? He said, Yeah, I wrote a little bit of poetry. I said, Well, listen, because I’m being very serious with you now. If you write poetry, that’s only one inch from writing songs, and that’s where the pie is in the music business. All you need to do is learn how to sing and write your own goddamn songs and you’re going to be cooking with gas, man. He looked at me and said, Really, you think so? I said, I’m telling you the truth, I’m not bullshitting you, I’m trying to help you and tell you a secret that you don’t really know that you have. You got the looks, you got the personality and people love you; you’re like a goddamn magnet. All you got to do is start writing your poems again and just move the shit to songs. I said, All you have to do is remember when you start off you’re going to be shit, but just think you’re only warming up. Then the more you do it the more you improve. You got it in your hand, man, do this. Do it for yourself, Ian. He said, Yeah, I’ll look into it.’