The Stone Roses: War and Peace

by Spence, Simon

  Dickinson wrote that the Roses were ‘dramatically different from all other bands’ and coined the term ‘Deviant Merseybeat’ to describe the band’s sound. ‘I wanted to say they were a bit more 60s “freakbeat” but they rejected that idea,’ he said. The label more often hung around the Roses’ neck in this period was ‘goth’. This was largely as a result of the photograph by Kevin Cummins used to accompany Dickinson’s article. Garner wore a ruffle shirt, Squire a bandana and Brown had his hair slicked back. ‘We definitely weren’t goths,’ said Brown. The photo was taken in Didsbury’s Marie Louise Gardens. Cummins worked for the NME and was famed for his shots of Joy Division and The Smiths.

  To Cummins the band ‘felt a little bit like outsiders, because Manchester was so dominated by Factory and the Haçienda’. This first photo shoot with the band was also supposed to be used by the NME. ‘When we did that session, just because of the way they looked, I wanted to do them in a more pastoral setting. I wanted it to be more hippyish – that was the feel of the shot.’

  The photograph was intended to accompany a full-page feature in the NME written by Ro Newton. The teenager went to the Roses’ next gig at Preston Clouds on 29 March intending to interview the band, but was left appalled. ‘Nightmare,’ said Garner, wincing at the memory. ‘We hadn’t played in Manchester so anyone who was on the scene who knew us travelled to Preston to see it. There was a big contingent of kids who went to this venue in Preston every week, so as soon as we started playing it was just waiting for a spark.’

  The Roses provided the spark. They opened their early shows by playing a discordant racket to grab the crowd’s attention before starting up the first song. It was an idea taken from the Sex Pistols. ‘We were also having equipment problems,’ said Couzens. ‘The gear was fucked up, so you can’t stand there in silence – there’s nothing worse. Reni called it rumble tunes, just drums and a bit of noisy guitar. The gear breaking and a droning rhythmic racket: it sets people off – it can, anyway.’

  ‘There was a proper fight,’ said Garner. ‘It all kicked off.’ Before abandoning the stage, the Roses played a cover of ‘Love Missile F1-11’ by Sigue Sigue Sputnik. ‘Just a total piss-take. We sort of liked it because it was a bit naff. It was a disaster, so John started playing the riff and we joined in, laughing, just to try and make light of the situation.’

  ‘It was a full-scale riot,’ said Jones. ‘A lot of drinking went on, then a load of amphetamine seemed to appear. I was standing next to Ro and I had to grab her under the arms and pull her out of the audience so she didn’t get trampled in the mayhem. She was pretty shaken up.’

  A horrified Newton interviewed the band backstage. ‘Ian wasn’t condoning it, but he wasn’t agreeing with her that it was outrageous and horrible,’ said Garner. ‘He was playing devil’s advocate and she took umbrage. She hated us. She thought we were celebrating it, whereas if you were going out in Manchester, that happened all the time. I thought afterwards, We’ve upset the wrong person there.’

  There was also a ‘drunk guy in the dressing room mouthing off’ during the interview, said Jones. Having repeatedly asked him to shut up, Jones finally got someone to drag him out. ‘As he’s getting dragged out he said, Do you know who I am? I said, I don’t give a shit. It was Mani.’

  The interview never appeared, but Newton penned a live review for the NME that slaughtered the band. Ever the opportunist, Jones took out an ad in the NME and quoted the opening paragraph: ‘Imagine the sound of fingernails scraping down a blackboard, amplified to an intolerable degree. The Stone Roses are tuning up. The angst-ridden vocal penetrates the plethora of deranged drumming and screaming feedback. The effect is impelling.’ The review itself went on to say that ‘it is a disgrace, they’re thugs, hooligans, there’s nothing good about the band,’ said Jones. ‘But I stopped it there, because obviously that opening paragraph sounds really interesting. I put Ro Newton’s name under it and she went berserk.’

  A gig in Oldham was cancelled for fear of a repeat of the Preston riot, before the Roses headed to Sweden for a band-defining tour starting on 10 April. During a break in the band’s activities, Brown had gone hitching around Europe with Mitch, and in Berlin met the Swede Andreas Kemi, who ran a magazine called The Eye. Brown had done his usual shtick of talking up the Roses. ‘I told him we were a big group in Manchester,’ Brown said. ‘He set up about eight or nine shows.’

  Kemi was enthused by the Roses’ original demo and planned a joint tour for the Roses with Swedish group Toxin Toy. After exchanging letters with the Roses, Kemi even fronted the money for the ferry over. Before setting off, Jones told the band they’d need £50 each spending money and Reni sold his motorbike to raise the cash.

  They travelled over to Stockholm in a big Chevrolet truck. Couzens had replaced his MG Midget with a 1950s black Chevrolet, and sacrificed that beauty to pay for the truck. It was a vast improvement on the transit van the band had used, which had no seats in the rear, forcing them to perch on their equipment. As well as the band and Jones, former New Order roadie Glen Greenough was along for the ride. He was a big drinker and blew his dole cheque in the casino on the ferry going over to Sweden. In fact the whole band blew almost all their money on the ferry as they celebrated Reni’s twenty-first birthday.

  Toxin Toy – Harald Sickenga, Micke Mürhoff, Anette Svensson and Christian Adelöv – had formed in October 1984 and were equally excited by the prospect of the tour. Kemi was predicting that the Roses were going to be huge. He had appointed himself Toxin Toy’s manager and spent a month organizing the tour, making hundreds of calls, sending out demos, photos and press releases, in an effort to book gigs and get publicity. Kemi and Toxin Toy had also arranged a big tour bus with space for backline equipment and the PA system, a driver, a sound engineer, a photographer and even someone who would fix sandwiches and food. The impressive amount of gear weighed two tons, with 2 x 3,000 watts for sound and 24,000 watts for the lighting.

  The carefree Roses were unaware of much that had been organized. Their only plan was to meet Kemi in Stockholm. ‘If this guy hadn’t turned up at the train station in Sweden we’d have been fucked,’ said Garner. ‘We didn’t know where we were going really, we had no real itinerary,’ said Couzens. ‘It was just like, We’re going to Stockholm, and we said we’d be there on this date and we just jumped in the back of this Chevy truck and threw what gear we could in it.’

  Toxin Toy’s studio was in a shabby industrial area just below Karolinska Sjukhuset, where a murdered prostitute had been found a month earlier chopped up in a black garbage bag. Kemi had arranged for the Roses party to stay in a grim, ghetto-like area in Lidingö. ‘We felt bad that the guys in The Stone Roses had to stay in that hellish area,’ said Sickenga. The Roses saw it through different eyes. ‘Toxin Toy saved our arses,’ said Garner. ‘We’d have been skint and deported after a week without them.’

  ‘Sweden made us as a band,’ Garner said. ‘It was totally different from doing a gig every few weeks; we became a proper band in Sweden.’ He described it as the Roses’ ‘Hamburg moment’, referring to the period The Beatles spent honing their sound at the Star Club in Hamburg pre-fame. ‘It was absolutely brilliant,’ he said, ‘not a bad memory. We were five kids in a foreign country, doing gigs, it was our gang; it was fantastic.’ ‘We came together as a unit,’ said Couzens. ‘It became a natural thing. We just got up and did it and the music was there and everything else was on top of it.’

  The nights in Sweden varied wildly, from trendy clubs in Stockholm to huge sports halls and tiny village gigs around the country, and rarely passed without incident. At one, while Brown was in the crowd trying to provoke a reaction, a guy pulled a gun on him. ‘Ian just walked up and put the barrel in his mouth, and gesticulated, Come on then, come on then,’ said Couzens. ‘For us at that time, it was normal. That type of incident didn’t faze us at all. I can’t believe we carried on playing. I think we were halfway though “I Wanna Be Adored”.’

  ‘Tha
t could have been the end of the story, couldn’t it?’ said Jones. ‘When the Kaiser Chiefs sing “I Predict a Riot”, it’s going to be a very pleasant riot where everybody has a nice time. When the Stone Roses sing “I Predict a Riot”, things get set on fire, smashed and burned. There was that incredible energy attached to this band. That did give way to the musicality, but the energy was still in the individuals. That presence was still there.’

  Another memorable gig took place at the small but cool Rockborgen club in Borås. The police turned up in riot gear and arrested half of the audience, claiming many in the crowd were minors. ‘The police wanted to search the bus – they suspected we had underaged girls high on drugs in there, which was not true,’ said Sickenga. At Studion, a big rock club in Stockholm popular with acts from the US and Europe, the stage walls were mirrored, and during ‘I Wanna Be Adored’ Brown ran straight into one of the mirrors and smashed it. ‘We never understood if he did it on purpose, or if he just didn’t see it,’ said Sickenga.

  ‘Something happened every night,’ said Jones. ‘One night the PA caught fire; Ian pushed the PA off the stage at another gig and we didn’t get paid. We were booked into this one place that was like a small house. The stage had a fireplace and Reni had a piss in it and we all left without playing. We were literally doing a gig a day, otherwise we didn’t eat. We were getting loads of Swedish reviews but it was more about how mad we were and how all the gigs ended in a riot. The reviews were saying we were good, exciting and charismatic.’

  ‘It was great,’ said Brown. ‘We got in the daily papers.’ In one Swedish interview, Brown explained much of the band’s method: ‘We all write all the music, it’s a joint effort,’ he said. ‘We just get in a room and play along and bash it out and at the end of the night we’ve got a decent song. I write all the lyrics. Our inspiration is from people who we’ve seen and respect and they ended up copping out. Our inspiration is the fact there’s no decent live music for anyone to go and see. That’s all we’re trying to do, make people enjoy it and enjoy it ourselves. Musically, we like a lot of 1960s music, 1960s psychedelic stuff, we like a lot of early punk stuff. So we try and combine the melody of the 60s stuff with the energy of the punk stuff. We’re not a punk band and we’re not a 1960s band, we’re just a 1980s band.’

  Driving the tour bus was a character dubbed ‘the Last of the Vikings’, who kept a well-used aluminium baseball bat and a crowbar to hand. Running low on fuel on an overnight drive between gigs, he used these tools to attack a self-service petrol pump that had swallowed his money. ‘When he was done, we got all our banknotes back and all that was left of the pump was the pipe with hose,’ said Sickenga. ‘Then he said, Okay, go on and fill up, there’s an alarm on the pump, we have fifteen minutes before the cops get here.’

  The photographer on the tour was an old friend of Sickenga’s called Lena Kagg. A selection of her photographs from the tour can be found in this book. One of them would also be used on the back cover of the Roses’ 1987 single ‘Sally Cinnamon’. ‘It’s a photo of Johnny [Squire] jumping off the roof of the bus,’ said Jones. ‘There was a riot going on, so to get into the venue we had to climb out of the skylight of the bus and jump onto the side of the building.’

  After the opening shows there was a nine-day gap until a final clutch of dates that would climax at Lidingö Stadium on 30 April. The band were largely surviving by eating the food provided at gigs, and on the road they often stayed at fans’ houses, but at the Stockholm flat the band were growing desperate. ‘We didn’t want them to starve to death on their first tour out of the UK,’ said Sickenga. Toxin Toy’s drummer Adelöv worked as a manager for a grocery store outside of Stockholm. ‘I don’t know what possessed him,’ said Jones. ‘He let us go into the supermarket after it was closed, in the middle of the night, and stock up on food. It was like supermarket sweep: we just ran around the supermarket filling baskets up.’

  Jones began to work the phones, trying to organize more gigs for the band to fill their days off. He successfully scored a handful of further slots, including supporting Australian indie rock band The Go-Betweens. There was still much downtime and the atmosphere in the flat became strained. The band could be vicious towards each other, but most of the tension was released on Jones. ‘Every night was a new prank they thought was hilarious,’ said Jones. ‘They’d unscrew my bed or fill my boots with jelly. Eventually I made them find me somewhere else to live.’

  Out of all the band members, Jones found he had most in common with Squire, and would sometimes spend time with him on days off in Stockholm at a Picasso exhibition or admiring Henry Moore sculptures. Jones also observed the strong relationship between Squire and Brown. ‘They had an understanding that was very intuitive,’ he said. ‘They didn’t speak that much. The way they communicated was just eye contact. If Ian was doing right, John would do nothing. If Ian was doing something wrong, John would just give him a look and Ian would stop saying whatever he was saying. They were almost like twins. That came from a real closeness.’

  For Squire, the tour of Sweden showed him the Roses ‘really could happen … Before then I wasn’t sure if we could make it. Something happened to me in Sweden. I can clearly remember the day. I was walking back to the flat we were staying at – under a concrete underpass with loads of graffiti. It was a bright sunny day and it was next to the water. I just felt that this was too good not to do full time. It just felt so right, there was no way I could pass up the opportunity of seeing where it could go. I still had a job at Cosgrove Hall. I’d taken a holiday to go to Sweden but I decided that this was it. I couldn’t go back.’

  4.

  So Young

  Post-Sweden there was a new sense of commitment as the rest of the band followed Squire and quit their day jobs to sign on the dole and concentrate fully on the band. ‘John was giving up a fantastic, creative job he really loved,’ said Garner. ‘And he was on good money, so it was a big thing for him. When he did that, that made us all feel, Wow, we’re serious now, we’ve become a proper band.’

  The Roses’ first gig back in England was a low-key affair at a newly opened club in Manchester. The International, on Anson Road in Longsight, had hosted American Paisley Underground bands such as The Long Ryders and Los Lobos. It was owned by future Stone Roses managers Gareth Evans and Matthew Cummins. Special guests for the Friday night on 10 May 1985 were It’s Immaterial; admission was £2. Among the crowd were two girls from Sweden who had made the journey over to see them play. ‘I thought we’d never see any of these people again,’ said Garner. ‘We’d become the kind of band you’d travel across countries to see play,’ said Jones. ‘Those girls knew the Roses were going to be huge.’

  That night Jones told the band they would have to sack Reni if the drummer’s ‘disruptive’ behaviour didn’t change. Jones had organized for MTV to interview Brown and Squire at the show, but while they waited backstage for the crew to arrive, Reni had gone to the front of the venue and hijacked the interview. ‘Reni just did the interview on his own,’ said Jones. Jones was furious, having already discussed with the band that Squire and Brown would handle the media. He was serious about ousting Reni. ‘Ian said to me, Are you fucking stupid?’ said Jones. ‘He said, It’s not happening. You’re going to have to manage him better. It’s your problem, not mine.’

  ‘He couldn’t even get me to cut my hair, never mind getting someone sacked out of the band,’ said Garner. ‘As far as we were concerned, if Howard got us gigs and put our records out and things were moving forward, then we were happy.’ But Couzens said the band did come perilously close to sacking Reni. ‘Myself, John and Ian were driving over to Reni’s one night to sack him. And it was only as we were ten or fifteen minutes away from Reni’s house we thought, What the fuck are we doing?’

  Hannett had by now mixed ‘So Young’ and ‘Tell Me’ at Strawberry Studios, and Jones busied himself preparing the release of the Roses’ debut Thin Line single, organizing the artwork and arranging manu
facturing and distribution. He used many of his connections from Factory Records. The Cartel, an organization who distributed Factory in the UK, would do the same for Thin Line, and Jones was also talking to Rough Trade about distribution in Europe. During this process Jones sought to clarify which names to put down for the songwriting credits. ‘I said, You’ve got to talk it out yourselves,’ he recalled. ‘Then Ian and John came to see me on their own, which is always an ominous sign, and said we’re going to do Squire and Brown like Lennon and McCartney, but we’ll sort out everything else with the band.’

  The decision did not go down well. After a tongue-in-cheek ‘secret’ gig at the Gallery, a hip venue in town, where the Roses played under the name of The Boned Noses, Reni and Couzens both left the band and there followed a six-week stand-off. ‘Put yourself in mine, Reni’s and Pete’s shoes,’ said Couzens. ‘You’ve got your first record coming out and it’s the most exciting thing. Then you get confronted with John and Ian and your manager saying this is how it’s going to be: it’s not, as we’ve all discussed, “The Stone Roses” as songwriters, it’s going to be “Squire/Brown”. We all used to say it would be “The Stone Roses, no egos”. No egos among us, just one big ego to the outside world. We were all into the Sex Pistols and the way they always credited the songs was: Jones, Matlock, Cook, Rotten. We had discussed all this. It wasn’t going to be our surnames like the Pistols, but it was just going to be “The Stone Roses”. That was the breaking of the bond right there. It became them and the rest of the band.’