The Stone Roses: War and Peace

by Spence, Simon

  Johnson was respected as the poet of Oi!, his poems ‘Dead End Yobs’ and ‘The New Face of Rock ’n’ Roll’ having been included on the seminal 1981 compilation Strength Thru Oi! Johnson, like Brown, had the gift of the gab and had blagged the job on Sounds, where he spent three years ‘travelling the UK, staying in five-star hotels all expenses paid, taking lorry loads of speed and meeting heroes like David Bowie, Rod Stewart and Debbie Harry’.

  Johnson listened to the Roses demo tape Brown had sent him. ‘You didn’t have to be Mystic Meg to predict they were going to be massive,’ he said. Johnson had family in Manchester and organized a trip to the city to interview the band. He spent a ‘wild weekend’ with the Roses, and the resulting piece featured in Sounds with a mention of the band’s name on the cover. ‘Garry tipped us as being a big thing for 1985 and we were a tiny band who’d done one demo tape and a few gigs,’ said Garner. ‘He was a champion of the cause.’

  Johnson wrote in Sounds that, ‘with their tense and galactic brand of starkly atmospheric sound The Stone Roses are a breath of fresh air’. He took the demo around every major record label in London and was ‘turned down by every single one … I did all their publicity,’ he said. ‘They stayed at my flat in London, living off Marmite on toast and McDonald’s milk shakes.’ Brown and Reni even appeared on stage at the Cockney Pride pub in Piccadilly Circus with Johnson’s mate and Oi! legend Frankie Flame. The Jam’s Bruce Foxton offered to produce the Roses in the studio and there was talk of Buster Bloodvessel of Bad Manners being an early fan. ‘Things were going nice and starting to happen,’ Johnson said, ‘and then I blew it and went on a massive bender.’

  ‘Garry was always taking speed, constantly,’ said Couzens. Speed was also popular with the band, but not to the extent Johnson snorted it. The Roses weren’t big drinkers either. Couzens was teetotal and Brown avoided beer altogether. Johnson took the band to a Bruce Foxton gig and introduced him to them. Whether Foxton’s offer of producing the Roses was serious or not, Squire was not keen. ‘We’d been big Jam fans but it was mainly me and Ian,’ said Garner. ‘John was never really having it. Garry had organized some photographer to take a photo of us with Bruce Foxton, but John refused.’

  Before going AWOL Johnson did manage to get a few more column inches for the Roses with a bogus story about Garner beating up the lead singer of teen pop act Kajagoogoo at a showbiz party. There were two more nights with Mercenary Skank for the Roses in January 1985, both in London, at the Fulham Greyhound and at the Marquee, where there was a microphone-throwing incident that saw them banned. Brown complained that the venue didn’t like the way he would ‘leap around’ on stage, preferring bands ‘to be nice and safe’.

  Relations with manager Caroline Reed became strained, said Couzens. ‘She was going out with one of Mercenary Skank and she was all over them. We were like a by-product of a bad problem.’ Couzens kicked her door in one night and Reed gave up answering the phone to them. But the Roses already had a new manager lined up.

  Howard Jones had been a Factory Records director and the manager of the Haçienda since its opening night in 1982 but had severed his ties with the club and label. Now, at the age of thirty-two, Jones was putting together his own record label called Thin Line with Tim Chambers of the Factory Records video arm, IKON, and famed Joy Division and New Order producer Martin Hannett. All three were keen to prove themselves outside of the Factory family, particularly Hannett, who had become estranged from Tony Wilson due to arguments about money invested in the Haçienda.

  The Roses had been introduced to Jones through Steve ‘Adge’ Atherton, keyboard player with the recently defunct band Third Law, who was now working in a loose capacity at their Spirit rehearsal rooms. It was the first of many key interventions by Adge that would result in him becoming the band’s tour manager – a title that ill reflected his prominent role.

  ‘Adge knew everybody and everything,’ said Jones. ‘He rang me and said, Look we’ve got a great band rehearsing, come and check them out.’ Jones saw it as an audition and had used Spirit in that capacity before as he sought out acts for his new label. He would normally set the band up in the live recording room and watch from the control room, separated from the band by a glass partition. The Roses demanded Jones and Chambers go into their rehearsal room. ‘Right from the bat they wanted control of the situation.’

  It was 15 November 1984 and they played four songs at ‘excruciating levels’. ‘I couldn’t hear anything that was going on musically but there was something about them,’ said Jones. Reni was ‘out of this world … The way he played, his facial expressions, his finishing, how he’d kill a cymbal once he’d hit it, he’d got total natural technique. Johnny [Squire] was behind his fringe, Pete and Andy were bouncing off one another and Ian was right in your face. They already truly believed they were the greatest band in the world.’

  Most bands would have jumped at the chance to work with Thin Line, but ‘we weren’t a normal band,’ said Couzens. ‘We weren’t into that cap-doffing attitude you get with a lot of bands. We were really genuinely, unbelievably arrogant. Ian was perfect for it because he drew people in anyway. We were like, We don’t need your help. If you want to help, great – well done, pal; now fuck off. It was like that. Don’t expect any thanks.’

  Jones would use Tim Chambers, who was closer in age to the band, as his conduit in attempting to assert influence over the Roses – having found his initial suggestion that Garner cut his hair strongly rebuffed. ‘They were very much a gang and a little bit suspicious of Howard because they felt he wasn’t one of them,’ said Chambers. ‘So my role was a foot in both camps.’ Chambers clicked with Brown and Squire over a shared interest in the aesthetic and politic of punk and the concept of Situationism.

  Brown was reading Guy Debord, the French Marxist theorist, and The Anarchists by James Joll; he also had photocopies of Jamie Reid’s Suburban Press magazine. ‘These were the things we were thinking about,’ he said. ‘I loved the slogans like, “Use the medium, don’t let it use you” and, “No two situations are the same”. That’s the one we always used in the Roses – it really meant something to us.’ Chambers loaned the band his collection of punk fanzines, which included Sniffing Glue, London’s Burning and San Francisco’s Search and Destroy. ‘They were not trying to ape punk,’ he said, ‘but they had a thirst for knowing about stuff, they wanted an informed emotion. They were sucking up all these influences looking for their vision. Ian was always writing lyrics or notes or memos to himself.’

  The band were serious about rehearsals, unnervingly focused and instinctive in their approach. Arguments were commonplace as they aspired to turn their rock bombast into a white light sound. They were now more often than not to be found rehearsing at the Lock-Up in Chorlton, south Manchester, another facility owned by Spirit’s John Breakell, where The Smiths also rehearsed. Brown and his girlfriend Mitch had moved to a flat in Chorlton, and Squire, whose Cosgrove Hall workplace was in the area, lived with them there for a while. Brown and Mitch would move flats regularly, always staying around south Manchester, and often sharing with Squire.

  Jones also lived in Chorlton, and the new Roses manager often blagged the band free rehearsal time at the Lock-Up on flimsy excuses. ‘I love Howard and he was instrumental in those days in pushing the Roses along, but he was just full of shit,’ Breakell said. In the Lock-Up new songs were added to the Roses set, including ‘I Wanna Be Adored’. ‘ “I Wanna Be Adored” just felt like the mellow one,’ said Garner. ‘I discussed it with Ian, because he said to me, I need to write some more lyrics, there’s only four lines in it. I said, No, no, that’s why it’s so good. Less is more. John wrote the bass line that runs right through it, and the rest of it is ethereal. It was unusual in the set; most of our songs were fast and quite angsty, and that had quite a groove to it.’

  It was at the Lock-Up that Jones introduced the band to Martin Hannett, the real ace in his plans for Thin Line. Although they had fallen out, Tony Wil
son said Hannett was a ‘genius’, and the record producer was revered for his work with Joy Division and New Order. Hannett was looking for the next U2. He’d produced their 1980 single ‘11 o’Clock Tick Tock’ and seen them progress to the verge of world recognition. ‘Martin was saying to me there are bands in the indie market that could be as big as U2,’ said Jones, who felt the Roses’ style at present was closer to The Cult.

  ‘When Howard brought Martin down,’ said Garner, ‘we were like, Oh Martin who produced Slaughter & the Dogs, rather than, Oh it’s the Joy Division producer. Ian and I were asking him about Slaughter, we’d heard all these great stories. He was a bit taken aback because everyone wanted to talk to him about Joy Division apart from us.’

  Hannett didn’t just like the Roses, he loved them: their attitude and sound immediately clicked. News that Hannett had agreed to work with the band spread fast. ‘Manchester was a village in those days with just a small group of people who did things, so you inevitably bumped into each other,’ said Chambers. ‘Tony Wilson said everyone he knew had left to go and join the Roses. There was a joke that at Thin Line we were forming Renegade Records.’

  ‘They were trying to set up an alternative Factory,’ said Couzens. On this principle the influential Wilson hated the Roses. Chambers described it as ‘tribal’: ‘If you’re one of us you hear The Stone Roses as the future, if you’re one of them you hear it as a tuneless heavy metal racket. The Roses were a force, which meant you either loved them or you didn’t, they polarized opinion. I’m not sure it was specifically Factory Records they were against, it was more upsetting the current power-base: what is black must be white, what is yes must be no, that inarticulate rebellion against established order.’

  3.

  Sweden

  Since early 1984 Tony Michaelides had hosted an alternative Sunday-night music show called The Last Radio Programme on Manchester Piccadilly, the biggest radio station outside London. Over a beer in the Haçienda the Roses’ new manager Jones called in a favour from him, who he knew from his time at Factory Records. ‘Howard was a hustler,’ said Michaelides. Jones sent Garner over to Piccadilly to drop off the Roses’ original demo tape the following Sunday.

  ‘It was only fifteen or twenty minutes before the show started and the tape was a quarter-inch reel-to-reel,’ said Michaelides. ‘I took it into an editing suite and listened to it with the young girls, Paula [Greenwood] and Ro [Newton], who were my helpers. It had an immediate impact on us, so we played “Misery Dictionary” straight away on air. It had an element of discordant chaos, punk in a way, but it wasn’t completely at odds with the Paisley Underground thing I was pushing.’ The response was instant, with listeners calling in to praise the track.

  Michaelides played ‘Misery Dictionary’ and the other three tracks on the Roses demo consistently on his show through late 1984. He had asked Jones about the possibility of Brown and Squire coming on the show to play an acoustic set, but Jones wanted it to be the whole band. The Roses went into the Piccadilly live studio – more accustomed to hosting orchestras than rock bands – to record a live session on 12 January 1985. The songs were ‘Heart on the Staves’, ‘I Wanna Be Adored’ and ‘Tell Me’. An early soundcheck had to be abandoned after Reni’s drumming interfered with the station’s smooth afternoon soul show. ‘So we had to soundcheck the band an hour before we went on air,’ said Michaelides. ‘It was punk radio, total mania, everything in the spirit of the moment. There was a little bit of an interview after the session, but they were not really great interviewees. They’re not really the sort of band you’d sit down and interview.’

  ‘Piccadilly did not know what on earth was happening to them,’ said Jones. ‘They thought they were getting a local band and they got a band on fire.’ Spirit’s Steve Adge was in the studio with the band and, Garner said, ‘threw a chair at us, just to add to the tension’ halfway through the live broadcast.

  The relationship with Piccadilly Radio continued when the Roses played their sixth gig at a Last Radio Programme showcase at Dingwalls in London on 8 February. ‘There wasn’t a huge turnout but we’d brought forty or fifty people in a coach down from Manchester,’ said Michaelides. ‘The Roses were the headliners. Ian got right out in the audience and he was going up to people and singing in their faces.’

  There were London journalists at the show, including Jon Wilde, who in 1989 would write a scathing Melody Maker cover story about the band. ‘I was talking to him about the Roses and getting excited, but he didn’t think that much of them at all,’ said Paula Greenwood. ‘And they were definitely doing things that became part of what they became later on. It was raw but you could hear the potential. The set was pretty short, about twenty minutes max, inspired by the Sex Pistols. Best to keep the audience wanting more. What I was into more than anything was the energy. They were exciting for teenagers like me who’d missed punk. Ian used to come off the stage and be quite menacing.’

  ‘I was aggressive on stage,’ Brown said. ‘I was always walking around the crowd singing in people’s faces, high kicking, or kissing someone’s girl, winding someone up. I sang to the girls to get the lads wound up. Everywhere we went I used to get on that. And it worked – people remembered us.’

  ‘He’s got balls of steel; that’s why you want him as your singer,’ said Garner. ‘He’d go out into the crowd and pick someone’s drink up in front of them and say cheers, not in a threatening way but in that Ian way, and he got away with it. It was just bravado.’

  Following Dingwalls the Roses came to a decision over what songs to record for their debut single on Thin Line. Jones corralled the Roses into the twenty-four-track Yellow II studio owned by Peter Tattersall – over the road from his more famous Strawberry Studios in Stockport – to record ‘So Young’ and ‘Tell Me’, with Martin Hannett producing.

  ‘Martin had got an abscess on his tooth, so he wasn’t in a great mood and he drank copious amounts of Guinness and was rubbing raw cocaine onto his gum,’ said Jones. ‘He said it was to deaden the pain but I’m sure as much went up his nose. He adored the Roses. He liked rawness.’ Hannett had his own image to keep up, and that was, said Jones, of ‘a grumpy, miserable bastard that you only spoke to when spoken to. He liked that authoritarian studio thing because otherwise the whole band would have tried to interfere in the recording.’ The Roses did to a certain degree, until Hannett, who always kept a revolver on his desk, threatened to shoot them. ‘It was all Phil Spector homage – there were no bullets in the gun,’ said Jones. ‘Can you believe how lucky they were? They were in a fantastic studio as an unsigned, unknown band, with Martin Hannett – but they didn’t see it that way. That’s the arrogance level of them.’

  While recording the original demo at Spirit, the Roses had just counted to four and performed the songs live with limited overdubs. This first single session was more arduous as Hannett recorded each instrument separately. Hearing themselves in perfect clarity was an eye-opener and led to rows in the studio. ‘It never came to blows,’ said Couzens, ‘but you couldn’t really tell John anything. That’s where a lot of the arguments used to come from. If Ian, or I, would say anything about anything, he used to go mad. One of the biggest arguments we had was over whether we should have “The” in front of “Stone Roses”. Fucking ridiculous. Petty but very intense.’

  ‘We argued violently for that one; it had to be The,’ said Garner. ‘When it was released, “So Young” just said Stone Roses and I had a fit at Howard because that was wrong. On the back of the sleeve he spelt rhythm wrong; how amateur. We tended to get animated and upset about things that seem ridiculous now.’

  ‘Too much enthusiasm and not enough thought went into that record,’ Brown said of the single. ‘They weren’t really songs, just a sound. It’s a good noise. We played the original version [of ‘So Young’] in the car. Martin’s first remix was the most extreme thing I’ve ever heard. We went for a drive and Reni’s nose exploded, blood everywhere – there was so much treble on the rec
ord that his nose went with the frequency. We should have gone with that version. It was pre-Mary Chain and full of feedback. It was beautiful. But we went with the safer mix.’

  ‘So Young’/‘Tell Me’ would not be released until August 1985, giving Jones plenty of time for hype. He had already issued a lavish press release to publicize the fact the recording ‘with the enigmatic’ Hannett was taking place. In it he promised three mixes of the single ‘Hurt’, ‘Hard’ and ‘Heat’, and bragged of ‘further info’ coming soon in the music press. The mixes would never materialize.

  Bob Dickinson was the first local journalist to interview the Roses for an article that would appear in City Life (Manchester’s Time Out equivalent) on 29 March. Again it was a favour pulled in by Jones, who had supplied Dickinson with the band’s original demo tape. ‘The sheer attack the band packed into that demo was amazing,’ said Dickinson. ‘The guitar sound was so intense. It was very un-Manchester. There was a mini-wave of jingly-jangly bands such as The Railway Children, The Waltones and The Man from Delmonte getting written about. I got the impression that the Roses had heard a lot of British stuff from the 1960s.’

  Dickinson asked Squire about this musical reference point. The guitarist said he was more interested in Slash Records, the seminal late 70s/early 80s LA punk record label that was home to bands such as The Germs and The BoDeans. ‘We don’t want to be clothes horse puppets,’ said Squire. ‘If there’s another group like us, we haven’t heard of one.’ ‘We’re five people who all want to be a front man,’ said Brown. Asked about the current music scene, Squire said, ‘There’s nothing exciting enough to make you want to buy it or play it. There was nothing exciting us at all, so the best thing was for us to do it ourselves.’ The killer quote in the Dickinson piece came from Reni. ‘We don’t want to be another up and coming band of the 80s,’ he said. ‘We want to be the band of the 80s.’ Later, Reni said, ‘The respect and musical integrity of Echo & the Bunnymen with the Wham! bank account would be ideal.’