The Stone Roses: War and Peace

by Spence, Simon

  After Dingwalls, the Roses played the International II on 26 February. It was another packed-out night and Roddy McKenna brought along his boss Steven Howard, the young managing director of Jive Records and the affiliated Zomba Music Publishing and Zomba Management. ‘What staggered me was I saw the poster listing upcoming events at the International and the Roses’ ticket price was as high as Simply Red’s, who had broken through by then,’ Howard said. ‘As an A&R guy coming up from London, it was like, What is going on here?’

  Howard was also blown away by the sight of the queue outside. ‘It was all these kids in baggy jeans, flared jeans,’ he said. ‘I thought, If they’ve got this kind of cult fashion thing going on, there’s a whole lifestyle. That, coupled with the fact the ticket price was high, the venue was larger than it should have been – my antennae were well and truly turned on. The show was, dare I say it, the second coming. The band was incredible. I spoke to Clive Calder [the owner of Jive Records] the next day and said, Look, I think we might have a U2 here.’

  What Howard had seen, in terms of a lifestyle emerging and coalescing around the band, was a movement dubbed (tongue firmly in cheek) ‘The Baldricks’ and led by Cressa, Al Smith and Little Martin. The Baldricks had been mentioned in i-D magazine as early as 1987 and called part of ‘a surreal youth cult roaming the Haçienda’. Cressa, Smith and Little Martin were photographed (by Ian Tilton) wearing flares and big outdoor jackets for a feature about the Baldricks in i-D in April 1988. Followers of the movement were defined by ‘a love of 1960s psychedelia and acid that had instinctively drawn them to house music’, the feature said. With a lineage drawn from Perry boys, casuals and scallies, the Baldricks were celebrated for initiating the return of flared jeans. The 24-year-old Happy Mondays lead singer Shaun Ryder was interviewed for the i-D piece: ‘It’s just a way of life,’ he said.

  Howard returned to Manchester to meet with the band, who were under the impression the deal with Rough Trade was going ahead. To confuse matters, no one had told Howard of Rough Trade’s interest. ‘It was an odd one,’ said Howard. ‘I was really embarrassed because here I was talking to these rock ’n’ roll guys from Manchester, and Jive Records was best known for Samantha Fox.’ Howard quickly established there was no other major label interest in the band, but was crushed when the band informed him of Rough Trade’s offer. ‘I just thought, There’s no way we can compete with Geoff Travis,’ he said. ‘Here’s a guy rooted in credibility versus these guys who’ve basically got Samantha Fox and Billy Ocean.’

  To Howard’s surprise, he found some of the Roses were open to working with Jive Records: ‘They actually liked the fact that we were in the mainstream because they viewed Rough Trade, even though it was very credible, as very “indie”. They wanted to be the biggest band in the world and they felt Rough Trade couldn’t deliver that, whereas by being on Jive, because we’re putting some of these pop records onto the top of the charts, they figured if they could do it with us, it could actually work for them.’

  Jive Records, formed in 1981, was part of the Zomba Corporation, which had been established by Clive Calder and Ralph Simon in 1975. They’d had huge success with Zomba Music Publishing, representing a diverse roster of acts including the Joy Division catalogue; and Zomba Management, most closely associated with esteemed producer Mutt Lange. Jive Records had success in the early 1980s with pop acts such as Flock of Seagulls and Tight Fit and had ridden on the back of the popularity of hip-hop and rap. The label was, as Howard said, best known in the UK for launching the singing career of former Page 3 model Samantha Fox.

  Squire was not convinced. There was a discussion between the band and Evans at Reni’s flat in West Didsbury where the merits of Jive/Zomba and Rough Trade were debated. ‘I wanted to sign to Rough Trade and everyone else wanted to sign to Zomba,’ Squire said. ‘Rough Trade seemed like a better label than the one Sam Fox was on to me. There wasn’t much to talk about as far as I was concerned.’

  Unfortunately for Squire, due to internal difficulties regarding their distribution arm Rough Trade had still not produced a contract. Jive/Zomba had moved with speed and their contract was already in Evans’s hands. Evans had the backing of the rest of the band and, with a sizeable advance on offer, was eager to sign. He liked McKenna, felt a little intimidated by Geoff Travis at Rough Trade, and was satisfied in his negotiations, having bumped up the advance from £30,000 to £70,000. Evans would not go back to Rough Trade, as would be standard practice, to see if they could match the deal Jive/Zomba had offered.

  ‘There was never a proper negotiation,’ said Travis. ‘He never said, They’ve offered me this, why don’t you match it, or, Offer more and we’ll sign to you – which would be a normal sort of conversation. I would have matched any offer. We wanted to do a serious deal for a number of albums. We knew this was a once-in-a-lifetime band.’

  Evans paraded the Jive/Zomba paperwork around in triumph. He would pull it out of his briefcase, flash it at associates and then scamper off. The finer points of the contract were lost on him and he turned it over to his solicitor, Geoff Howard, for advice. Howard was a couple of years older than Evans and ran his practice from premises in Sale. He was not a music business lawyer and specialized in property. Evans and Cummins had bought and sold a lot of property with his help.

  Zomba boss Clive Calder, on the other hand, was an incredibly shrewd operator, one who would go on to amass a £3 billion fortune, and the contract Evans and Howard were looking over was in fact just a ‘draft’, an amalgam of all the toughest clauses in the various contracts Calder had come across over his many years in the business, such as the one which stipulated the band didn’t get paid on the first 30,000 records sold. Jive/Zomba fully expected the draft contract, which tried to tie the band up for an incredible eight albums, to be considerably amended – any competent music business lawyer would have ripped it to pieces. Evans, though, was eager to finally nail the big deal, and wanted to get it done fast. Nothing was changed and the contract went through as it was, which would have severe consequences. It was, famously, one of the worst recording contracts in history.

  Evans took the Roses into Rough Trade for a marketing meeting about ‘Elephant Stone’ and later the same day had the band sign with Jive/Zomba. ‘We all passed round this telephone directory of a thing and said, We haven’t got a clue, giggled and signed it,’ said Squire. Evans and the Roses had signed to Jive Records for recording, and Zomba Music Publishers Ltd for publishing, for territories encompassing ‘the world and its solar system’. The advance of £70,000 was split between the two companies: 50 per cent against the publishing contract and 50 per cent against recording.

  The news left both Geoff Travis and Lindsay Reade stunned, as Travis explains: ‘It was one of the biggest disappointments of my entire life in music. I certainly felt very used. I don’t think they ever paid us back for the recording costs for “Elephant Stone”. They just took the single away.’ Reade was ‘absolutely disgusted’ by the turn of events and told Evans she wanted him out of her life. ‘We were musicians,’ said Squire. ‘We wanted to get on with it. We weren’t interested in the business side and we weren’t interested in business people. So Gareth would take care of that and report back to us. We knew what he was like, of course we did. But we had a good time with him.’

  8.

  Leckie

  As news of the Roses’ deal spread around Manchester, one of the rumours was that Evans had bought a fleet of ex-Post Office Range Rovers with the advance money. Evans himself started many of the rumours; all publicity was good publicity as far as he was concerned. There was some truth, however, to others, such as how he was still dealing in gold bullion and had a yacht in Puerto Andratx in Majorca.

  The best story about Evans, and the one that seemed to exemplify his approach to life and business, was about a skiing holiday with Bernard Sumner of New Order and their respective girlfriends. Evans insisted on taking on the most challenging slope, despite never having skied befor
e. Ignoring protestations, he shot off down the slope and was found at the bottom stuck in a tree hanging over a fast-running river. ‘Barney was saying if he’d fallen off he’d have been dead,’ said Peter Hook. ‘Gareth was off his rocker. The group used to try and keep him in check.’

  Having enjoyed working with Hook on ‘Elephant Stone’ the Roses wanted him to produce their debut album for Jive/Zomba, but commitments to the next New Order album, Technique, prevented him from accepting the offer. Instead, the band turned to John Leckie, who in a twist of bitter irony had initially been recommended to the Roses by Geoff Travis at Rough Trade before the band had abandoned him.

  Leckie may not have been first choice, or even the band’s choice, but he was the right choice. In the early 1970s, he had worked with artists such as Syd Barrett and John Lennon in a junior studio capacity, and by the end of that decade was producing acts such as XTC, Simple Minds, Magazine and Public Image Ltd. More recently, he’d produced three albums with The Fall and had just completed work on the notoriously difficult debut album for The La’s.

  McKenna invited him to meet the band in Manchester. ‘I stayed at Gareth’s farmhouse in Knutsford,’ Leckie said. ‘Gareth told me it was one of his many farmhouses and if I wanted one it was £300,000. As soon as we got there he jumped in the car and drove off again, and left me in this farmhouse.’ The next day Leckie went to see the band rehearse on the stage at International II. ‘They were very welcoming towards me,’ he said. The Roses were less welcoming of Reni’s new look. He’d returned from a short holiday with fake dreadlock hair extensions, and they teased him remorselessly until he removed them. Leckie watched the band rehearse from mid-morning until four in the afternoon, when that evening’s featured band arrived to soundcheck, and he agreed to return north to watch the band play live the following week at International II.

  Leckie had never worked with Jive Records before and was wary of the label’s lack of credibility in the rock world, although there were now plans to set up a separate guitar label for the Roses. The incongruity of bringing the band to market on the Jive label had troubled the band’s A&R man McKenna and his boss Steven Howard. McKenna said he didn’t trust the marketing team at Jive ‘to handle such a cool act’. Howard was having ‘panic moments’ about the situation. ‘The NME was the most powerful media publication that you needed to get on side for your band, and Jive as far as they were concerned was an absolute joke,’ said Howard. ‘So, talking with Clive Calder, I said, We need to have an indie label that becomes a home for guitar bands, just in the eyes of the NME, where we can be perceived as indie and they don’t smell the whole Jive thing behind it. Clive got that in a second and said, Let’s do it.’ Howard travelled to Manchester to discuss the idea with Evans and the band. ‘That was a very hard sell,’ he said. ‘They had chosen Jive because it wasn’t an indie label – but the bottom line is they went for it.’

  Clive Calder approached Andrew Lauder to front and run the new Jive/Zomba ‘indie’ label, and inked a deal with him on 18 April 1988. Lauder was reluctant to take on the Roses, because he was more into the blues, but quickly began ‘to smell and feel the groundswell of opinion from some of the tastemakers that this band was the real deal’. He was thirty-six and already had a distinguished career: in the 1970s, as head of A&R at United Artists, he had signed bands such as Can, Motörhead and Buzzcocks. He had co-founded his own label, Radar Records, home to Elvis Costello, and, during a brief stint at Island Records, signed U2.

  On 30 May 1988, Leckie returned to Manchester to see the Roses play live at International II. ‘It was jam-packed, you couldn’t move in there,’ he said. The Roses were supporting fellow Manchester band James and the night was an awareness raiser, organized by Dave Haslam, for the Anti-Clause 28 movement. ‘It was pretty chaotic,’ Haslam said. ‘You’d have thought dealing with Gareth in a club he was connected with would have been easy but for some reason it made it even harder.’ Brown described the gig as ‘perfect’. James had been on Factory Records, and tipped as the next big thing, before defecting to a major label Sire in the US and Blanco Y Negro in the UK, and failing to fulfil their promise commercially. The band were at a low ebb but retained a strong local following.

  Evans had been to work on the fly-posting, ‘putting the Roses in huge letters and James really small’, he said. He also delayed the Roses start-time until 10.30 p.m., so that by the time headline-act James played, half the audience were on the bus home. ‘We completely stole the scene,’ he said. The reviewers must have also been on the bus because there was no mention of James in either the Melody Maker or the Record Mirror reviews that followed.

  Both reviews were positive, but the gig wasn’t what Leckie expected. ‘It was a lot more of a rock kind of thing. It was loud and Reni was centre stage. I thought, Oh, this band is all about the drummer. Reni would be taking off, singing and playing, and all the lights would be flashing on him. He was all energy and showing off.’

  In June, the Roses played the International II again. In the review by Sounds, Brown was said to have thrown ‘pints and sarcasm over the audience’. The same month, there was a small interview with the band in NME that promised ‘Elephant Stone’ would be out shortly. The band was quoted as saying, ‘We want to be the first band to play on the moon. We want to be bigger than The Beatles.’ In July the Roses appeared on the cover of local fanzine M62, their first front cover since Buzzin’ over a year before. They boasted of their deal with Jive Records and talked up a next single, ‘Made of Stone’, a new song that they intended to couple with ‘I Wanna Be Adored’ as the B-side. For their debut album they were now thinking of the title The Stone Roses Are Coming. The band also provided the answer to a question that had troubled Geoff Travis: why sign for Jive over Rough Trade? ‘We’ve got to get in the middle of big business to shake it up,’ Brown said. ‘We want to become huge popstars and shake things up our own way.’

  The cover photographs for the M62 piece had been taken by Ian Tilton, who’d first photographed the Roses for Sounds. Tilton chronicled this period in the band’s development, climaxing in shots that graced the debut album cover. The shots used for M62, of the four Roses sitting on a futon in Tilton’s studio gesticulating towards camera, saw the band’s look inching closer to the finished article – with Brown’s crew cut now growing out. The session had been Mani’s first proper shoot with the band. ‘Mani was like a fish out of water,’ said Tilton. ‘We had to give him a bit of guidance. He was just a lad.’

  Leckie had remixed ‘Elephant Stone’ as his first commitment to the Roses project, basically just double-tracking what Peter Hook had done for the 7-inch version of the single. Of the band, only Brown made fresh contributions to the track, rerecording his vocals with Leckie at Zomba’s Battery studios in Willesden. The studios were almost exclusively used for Zomba product and operated twenty-four hours a day. ‘It was quite corporate, quite serious,’ said Leckie. The Roses’ A&R man Roddy McKenna was dubbed ‘the headmaster’. ‘He’d talk to Ian and wag his finger at him as he was talking,’ said Leckie. ‘But Ian really respected Roddy because of a lot of the black music he was doing for Zomba.’

  Attention turned now towards recording the band’s album and future singles for Jive/Zomba. In preparation Leckie had the band in Stockport’s Coconut Grove studio working on pre-production. They had been busy. ‘We wrote most of the first album in the few weeks after inking the deal, because we’d blagged the record company,’ Brown said. ‘We told them that we had about thirty or forty songs, but we only had about eight.’ New songs the band were developing included ‘Bye Bye Badman’, ‘Made of Stone’, ‘Shoot You Down’ and ‘I Am the Resurrection’, all credited to Squire and Brown. ‘ “I Am the Resurrection” started out as a piss-take of Paul McCartney’s bass on “Taxman”,’ said Reni. ‘Mani used to play that riff every day, in reverse. I’d come in and John would doodle some Fender over the top and we’d do it for a laugh in soundchecks. Finally we said, Let’s do it properly, this jo
ke song actually sounds really good.’

  It was at Coconut Grove that Leckie discovered just how new the new Roses songs were. Lawrence Stewart was the studio’s in-house engineer/producer, and he worked on pre-production sessions that lasted two days. ‘Leckie went into the live room to listen to the band play and came back out with his face red,’ said Stewart. ‘He told me to turn off the recording equipment. He went back inside the live room and told everybody to shut up. He went through the musicians one by one – and told them what to do. He drilled them. When they first struck up, the timing was all over the place, to the point where it was incredible that somebody of Leckie’s stature would work with them. It was much, much worse than anyone could ever fathom. Once Leckie had finished with them they were a different band.’

  ‘That’s kind of what I do really: tell them it’s shit and to pull it together,’ said Leckie. ‘I was used to shambolic bands. Most of the time it’s that they don’t listen to each other, they can’t hear the whole thing. They play as individuals rather than as a band and you just get them together. The Roses’ strong point was that they all wanted to be the front man and somehow we made them into a group.’

  For Leckie there was one event from these pre-production sessions that would be hard to forget. On the second day, Reni had phoned the studio at one in the afternoon to tell Leckie he had just got up, but would be over in twenty minutes in a taxi. Reni didn’t have any money and wondered if Leckie could pay the £10 taxi fare. ‘I said, Yeah yeah, just come.’ While Reni was on his way to the studio, Evans turned up. ‘Reni walked in and came straight up to me and said, Have you got that tenner, the taxi driver’s waiting outside?’ Evans grabbed hold of Reni by the throat and said, Don’t ever ask John Leckie for money, if you want money come to me – and whacked him. Reni’s nose was bleeding and then Reni started hammering out. They were on the floor kicking and punching each other. I’m standing there holding this tenner and Gareth disappeared, vooomph, he was gone.’