The Stone Roses: War and Peace

by Spence, Simon

  Couzens was tasked with picking up Hannett every night and delivering him to the studio. This often involved delays, as Hannett insisted on stopping off at various dealers’ houses to collect cocaine and heroin. Once at the studio, the producer would invariably get the munchies and start making cheese on toast. ‘We probably wouldn’t start recording until midnight,’ said Couzens. ‘Martin was massively overweight, sweating profusely, and taking far too many drugs.’

  Hannett’s long-standing engineer was Chris Nagle, a diabetic who had to inject himself with insulin and reacted badly to extremes of temperature. Hannett would insist on having the air-conditioning on in the studio to make conditions freezing cold. ‘Chris was up and down, up and down with his sugar levels,’ said Couzens. ‘They were as bad as each other; both off their nuts.’ Nagle’s relationship with Hannett was strained and the two men would often disagree over versions of the songs the Roses were recording, adding another layer of tension to the bewildering atmosphere. Often Nagle would walk out.

  During one vocal take, by the time Brown had finished the song, Hannett had nodded off at the mixing desk. ‘He didn’t just gradually fall asleep,’ said Couzens. ‘You’d be halfway through a take and he’d collapse on the desk and that would be it.’ One time in the vocal booth Brown could get no answer from Hannett or Nagle. ‘I walked into the control room and there was no one in there,’ he said. ‘So I woke Martin up and said, Martin, where’s Chris? And he said, He’s gone to the pub for a pint.’ It was the vocals that Hannett seemed to pay least attention to, recording them quickly with few retakes. ‘Martin always used to say, What do you want me to do? That’s what he sounds like,’ said Couzens. Reni did not contribute his honeyed vocals to the mix and hadn’t yet sung with the band – or even told them he could.

  According to manager Jones, Hannett was never happy with the vocals on the album, apart from ‘I Wanna Be Adored’, ‘which he said he got bang on’. On ‘I Wanna Be Adored’ Hannett also created a guitar sound for Squire that allowed the song’s classic riff to snake majestically out of the speakers. Essentially the atmospherics and dynamics of the song were those that would finally appear on the album The Stone Roses in 1989. Brown’s vocals were thin in parts on Hannett’s version, and there was also a noticeably odd dislocation between the drums and the rest of the band. These twin problems, the latter perhaps intentional on Hannett’s part, were also evident on another classic on the album, a new song called ‘Here It Comes’. Nonetheless, the stridently melodic song hinted at the sound the band would go on to develop and would be better captured at Spirit for the B-side to the band’s 1987 single, ‘Sally Cinnamon’. Hannett’s version of ‘Here It Comes’ remains a definitive moment, catching the band perfectly between punk pupation and their metamorphosis.

  The Roses were recording pretty much all the material in their repertoire for the album, and Hannett added clever guitar effects and gave some of his magical ‘space’ – a glacial clarity and unfathomable intensity – to their earliest, punk material. ‘Getting Plenty’, ‘Tradjic Roundabout’, ‘Mission Impossible’, ‘Just a Little Bit’, ‘Heart on the Staves’ and ‘Fall’ all brimmed with aggression, intensity and spite. Brown’s vocals were confident, joyous and tough on these familiar songs, matching the assault of Reni’s drumming. Lyrically and sonically these early songs seemed to reflect the atmosphere of Friday-night Manchester: violent, unforgiving and dangerous. Hannett managed to hold the band back from metaphorically pushing a broken bottle in the listener’s face, with a hand that marked him out as Britain’s best record producer of all time.

  ‘Working with Martin was a nightmare but enjoyable as well, exciting and odd … You see those films of people in the studio with Phil Spector. It was like that but worse,’ said Couzens. Inevitably, amid the craziness, the Roses turned on one another, especially through the mind-warping nights. Squire, for instance, decided Garner’s bass lines were not good enough and insisted on playing them himself. The band also had little respect for their plush surroundings. Strawberry was the North-West’s premier 24-track studio, but the band abused the free phone, microwave and pool table.

  Having recorded ten songs, the Roses emerged blinking into the morning light as the BBC Philharmonic trooped past them. Hannett was not quite finished with them. ‘We did all the songs we had, even the ones we’d sort of dropped from the set,’ said Garner. ‘And then Martin put us on the spot to do a new song.’ He didn’t lock them in a room to do it – as the other pre-eminent British producer Andrew Loog Oldham had done when forcing Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to write their first original material for The Rolling Stones – but Hannett acted with a similar certainty and belief. The band had something more in them. He wanted it. The Roses delivered ‘This Is the One’. Virtually note for note, word for word, it was the version that would appear on the band’s eponymous 1989 album.

  Hannett had finally caught the butterfly, and he pinned ‘This Is the One’ down at Strawberry. Couzens would always maintain the opening melody on the song was his, this being the period shortly after Brown and Squire had made their land grab on the songwriting. As an indication of the group’s abilities and promise, just a year after Reni joined, ‘This Is the One’ was a breakthrough they’d made together – thanks to Hannett. ‘Martin taught us how to arrange our songs and pull our melodies out,’ said Brown.

  The album was to be titled Garage Flower after Brown’s lyric ‘I am the garage flower’ on ‘Tell Me’. The Roses were left shell-shocked by the experience of recording it. ‘It was six nights of hell,’ said Couzens. ‘Martin was giving me what I always thought was speed and it was speedballs, which is a very different thing, coke and smack, and I was snorting it. I had no idea.’

  Listening back to the Hannett album the band began to have doubts over what they had recorded. ‘We weren’t really in control,’ Brown said. ‘We hadn’t rehearsed through. It was like five excited kids running into a studio and trying to play louder than each other. We jumped at it [the chance to work with Hannett], but we shouldn’t have.’

  After the recording, Hannett flew to Stockholm to set up Thin Line Sweden with Andreas Kemi at The Eye magazine. Hannett wrote off Kemi’s car as soon as he’d left the airport and then disappeared for two weeks. Jones pressed ahead with his plans for the Roses, which now included releasing two more singles, ‘I Wanna Be Adored’, and then ‘This Is the One’, before Garage Flower. ‘Ian wasn’t very happy with “Adored”, but John had done the artwork for the cover,’ said Jones. It was another patch-up of bits and pieces, collaged and painted; and Squire completed the cover of ‘This Is the One’ in a similar way.

  With the album complete, Jones was keen for the Roses to work on their image. Hannett suggested they collaborate with renowned photographer and stylist Dennis Morris, who’d risen to prominence as a teenager photographing Bob Marley. Morris was also associated with the Sex Pistols and had created the logo for Public Image Ltd, as well as designing covers for Bob Marley and Marianne Faithfull. It seemed a perfect fit, and Hannett invited Morris to a band rehearsal. ‘I think Martin brought me in to have a look at it to confirm his feelings for it,’ said Morris. ‘Martin was really into the band, he found something in them and if he’d continued working with them he would have taken them to where they wanted to go.’

  Morris offered the Roses their next gig at the Embassy Club in London on 11 September. He ran a regular night called Grace Under Pressure, putting on bands and exhibitions and attracting a crowd of people, including Boy George. The night the Roses played was billed as ‘a celebration of Rebel Rock the year it all began, 1977’, with a Morris photograph of Sid Vicious on the flyer, and the strapline ‘looking into the future with Stone Roses’. ‘They played and everybody hated them, said they were shit,’ said Morris. ‘I said, No, no, they’re going to really happen. They said, You’re crazy, man.’

  Hannett’s idea was that Morris would put together a cohesive image for the Roses that would help them achieve recogniti
on in fashion-conscious London circles. ‘We always knew to be a truly great band you’ve got to look like a band,’ said Garner. The Roses may have acknowledged the importance of the idea, but Squire was not happy to hand over control to Morris. ‘There was just a clash of personalities,’ said Morris. ‘I think John felt a bit threatened by me getting involved. I wasn’t interested in taking over; I just liked the band. I really got on with Ian, Reni and Pete, but Squire had a problem with me. So I just pulled away and thought, That’s fine, I’m cool with it.’

  Morris would, however, retain an informal relationship with the band. ‘When they were in London we used to hang out, have a few beers, go and have some Jamaican food,’ he said. Sometimes the Roses would go back to Morris’s studio. This bond and these meetings would result in Morris building a vast catalogue of images of the band throughout their career. These shots have never been published, until this book.

  After the Embassy Club, there were no Roses gigs for six long weeks. It was in this period that the band’s relationship with Thin Line disintegrated. The Roses were initially unhappy with Jones’s plans to expand the label. Hannett was also recording The Railway Children and The Man from Delmonte for Thin Line, and Tim Chambers had brought a band called Gifted to the label. All three bands were generating strong press interest. ‘The Roses thought they could be fourth on this label’s roster, not first, which would have been unbearable for them,’ said Jones. ‘So they started making demands.’ One was that Jones abandon his ambitions for Thin Line. ‘I said that wasn’t why I left Factory. I wanted to do something myself. The label was more interesting to me than the band and that really upset Ian.’

  The issue was complicated by the fact that the Roses didn’t have a contract with either Thin Line or Jones, and everything had been done on handshakes. Jones knew that by paying for the recordings of both the Roses’ single and album it meant the label owned the rights to them. The band was suspicious that Jones was somehow trying to rip them off. It was not just the sound of the album the band was unsure about, it was the business aspects relating to it. They wanted a proper contract.

  A further concern for the Roses was Jones’s frequent alteration of his plans for them, as Thin Line’s fortunes wavered. ‘One week we might be doing a second single somewhere, the next week it was forgotten about and Howard would be talking about something else happening, a new strategy or idea,’ said Garner. Jones was now staring at a bill of £11,000 for the recording of the Roses’ album. Strawberry Studios was encountering financial difficulties, and owner Peter Tattersall had readjusted his opinion on the amount of free time Hannett was owed in the studio. It was money Thin Line didn’t have. Andy Couzens had already loaned Jones £1,200 to pay for Chris Nagle’s bill as engineer. The cost of releasing the album independently would be beyond Thin Line’s budget. As an alternative, Jones suggested trying to get a major label interested, licensing the recording to them for release. ‘Howard took the album to Rough Trade, who were a big deal,’ said Couzens. ‘Scott Piering, the promotions guy, was dead honest. He listened and said, Yeah, I like “I Wanna Be Adored” and “This Is the One”, but the rest of it is shit.’

  ‘We didn’t entirely take this talk of Howard shopping the album to the majors seriously,’ said Garner. ‘We didn’t really want it to come out, certainly not on Thin Line. If we had put that album out then, we’d have wasted “I Wanna Be Adored” and “This Is the One”. It would have just come out and sold to a few people in Manchester and been forgotten about.’ Brown said progression comes from hate, and he hated the album. After it was recorded, the band rehearsed at the Lock-Up with a renewed sense of vigour. ‘This Is the One’ was not the only new song the band had come up with that suggested a future away from their raw beginnings.

  They invited Jones to rehearsals to check out a new song that had a ‘different vibe’. It was ‘She Bangs the Drums’. They had lacked the confidence to record the song for the album, but it was one that they knew was another step away from the band Hannett had captured. Jones was blown away by it, suggesting it could be another single. ‘John was playing the bass line to “She Bangs the Drums” in rehearsals before he played guitar on it,’ said Garner. ‘We worked on getting the bass line sounding really good, then I took over and he wrote the guitar.’

  It was the start of the Roses’ most fertile period, as Squire and Brown began to work as a partnership. ‘We were terrible at the start,’ Brown said. ‘We couldn’t even write a melody line, the sound was just rubbish. We were loud, noisy, tuneless, big-mouthed, brash and bratty. We had the energy but we didn’t have the melodies. So [after recording the album] we concentrated on learning how to write and shape them. We’d work out our earlier songs in rehearsals then I’d come up with the words. But then John and I sat down with an acoustic guitar and wrote the songs and the vocal tunes together. Made it more musical. John and I went to Italy to write. We slept rough – we took an acoustic guitar and sleeping bags.’

  In this period, late 1985, Brown and Squire also came up with ‘Sally Cinnamon’, ‘All Across the Sands’, ‘The Hardest Thing in the World’, ‘Sugar Spun Sister’ and ‘Where Angels Play’. Neither of them worked, and they lived in each other’s pockets. Time, space and the newly discovered effects of marijuana resulted in more reflective, carefully thought-out material. Lyrically, Brown and Squire were drawing on their experience of life, situations with friends and the things they wanted. In this batch of more considered songs, it’s easy to see the influence of their Swedish experiences. Behind the hallucinogenic suggestions and softer colours in the songs, there remained a vicious streak to the lyrics.

  ‘We were coming up with songs that were more sophisticated than those we’d recorded for the album,’ said Garner. What made them sound even better was the fact that the Roses had also discovered that not only did they have the best drummer in Manchester, he could sing sweet harmonies. ‘When Reni started singing at the Lock-Up, it was like, Wow, he can actually sing,’ said Garner. ‘The secret weapon has another level.’

  It was also now clear that Squire and Brown, as well as pairing off to write the songs, were making the key decisions. They both had a burning intensity to be the best. If you didn’t match up to that, you got dropped. Thin Line didn’t. Ultimately, despite its impressive personnel, it was an ill-financed indie label. There was not time for sentiment. ‘They delivered a final ultimatum and insisted I fold Thin Line to concentrate on managing them or they’d cease to cooperate with placing the album,’ said Jones. ‘Martin said, Leave it, let’s move on to The Man from Delmonte, and when the Roses get big we can sell the album.’

  On 26 October the Roses travelled to London to play at the Riverside club, picking up a promising review in Melody Maker. This was the start of the new Roses, ‘an unholy tryst of Smiths whimsy, Jam punch and US psychedelia’, according to the review. It concluded presciently, ‘At last an energy that is directed not dissipated, a band who actually know what they are doing’. The Roses followed this with a gig at Manchester University on 2 November. Squire had taken on board Morris’s ideas about creating an identity and image. Assisted by his new girlfriend Helen Plaumer (who worked as a costume assistant at Cosgrove Hall), he had made matching shirts for all five members. The striped shirts, in both black and white and red and white, were influenced by ones he’d seen on The Beach Boys. ‘Ian was worried they were a bit Morrissey-ish,’ said Jones. ‘People had already compared him to Morrissey and he didn’t like it.’

  The band’s final gig of 1985 was on 30 November – another Manchester warehouse show organized by Steve Adge, this time at railway arch 99 on Temperance Street. Advertised as ‘Warehouse 3 … Take Two, What a good year for the Roses (the Video Shoot)’, the show had the same set-up as the earlier Flower Show warehouse gig – 11 p.m. till late, £2 on the door – but it was freezing cold and only fifty people turned up. There was also a power cut, as some kids who had earlier tried to hustle Adge for cash had unhooked the generator and made off wi
th it. It was a low point. Factory Records had stolen The Railway Children from the financially bankrupt Thin Line, and they were being tipped for stardom. The Roses, in stark contrast, were going nowhere.

  Those who had heard tapes of the Roses’ album scoffed at it, and it was suggested the new shirts and more melodic songs were an effort to fit in with the prevailing indie scene. Brown was not having that. ‘That’s just stupid people talking rubbish,’ he said. ‘We’ve just got a lot better. If people expect The Stone Roses to stand still they’re following the wrong band. We’ll always move on and if record companies can’t see the quality then that’s just tough. I know these people are stupid but they’ll have to catch up with us. They will in the end, because they will have to be in on the action. And we will be massive.’

  At the under-attended warehouse night it was easy to see why a consensus was building that, after the initial flourish of hype, the Roses were never going to make it. It was not just the power cut. Brown had adopted a psychobilly cut, shaved at the sides with a long centre section died blonde to either flop forward or quiff up; Squire had lost the bandana and hid behind his floppy fringe; Garner was in psychedelic trousers with his long dyed black hair; Couzens had a clean-cut, hard, rockabilly look; and there was Reni, in shorts with his shirt off, showboating as if he was on stage in Las Vegas. They didn’t look right and when they played live they tended to trample all over the delicacy of their new songs, unable yet to shake off the punk aggression.

  Yet the band’s irrepressible sense of destiny, determination and belief remained undimmed. Manchester needed to wake up to The Stone Roses. The city did. Brown and Reni covered the place with graffiti proclaiming ‘The Stone Roses’ overnight. ‘Me and Reni decided we’d been ignored for long enough,’ Brown said. ‘So we sprayed everywhere. Reni was spraying the front of the library and there was a copper stood just around the corner – but the copper couldn’t see him!’