The Stone Roses: War and Peace

by Spence, Simon

  Both Reni and Evans were flamboyant and there had been a clash before this incident, but it developed into a palpable mutual dislike. ‘I don’t think Gareth had his favourites in the band,’ said his girlfriend Sue Dean, ‘but he didn’t like Reni, and Reni thought Gareth was an idiot.’

  After Leckie’s pre-production drilling, the band were well prepared to start recording the album. ‘Everything was worked out,’ Brown said. The sessions started in July 1988 at Zomba’s Battery studios and would conclude in February 1989. Working with the band in the studio alongside Leckie would be Jive/Zomba staff engineer and producer Paul Schroeder, who’d worked at Battery since 1985, recording with artists such as Detroit techno pioneer Kevin Saunderson and new jack swing master Teddy Riley. They had specifically requested a dance engineer.

  The early sessions were done at Battery 2 studio, where Bob Marley and Queen had recorded. Initially the band was kept on a tight budget and booked into cheap night-time sessions, starting at seven in the evening and finishing at nine in the morning. This would become draining. ‘We’d work on two or three songs a week,’ said Schroeder. ‘Then take some time off and do that again.’ The first block of tracks recorded included ‘I Wanna Be Adored’, ‘Made of Stone’, ‘Waterfall’ and ‘She Bangs the Drums’. Leckie was meticulous and inventive in the studio, initially focusing on the drum sound. Reni’s unconventional approach of rarely playing the same thing twice could be as frustrating as it was rewarding.

  He didn’t notice that ‘Made of Stone’ had a similar vocal melody to the title track on The Dukes of Stratosphear album 25 O’Clock, a psychedelic pop homage he’d produced with XTC in 1985. It was the album that, prior to meeting him, had persuaded the band Leckie was the man for them. Nor that the riff in ‘Waterfall’ strongly echoed the Simon & Garfunkel song ‘April Come She Will’. It was clear to him that the band was channelling a ‘freakbeat’ sound, influenced by bands such as Nazz, The Bryds and Love, as were other indie bands of the 1980s such as Primal Scream. ‘That dusty 1960s kind of thing, that’s what I do, my mark, my era,’ said Leckie.

  Leckie began to grow in his understanding of what made the band unique, despite the label’s pressure to produce singles that would be radio hits, with the vocals high in the mix. ‘I started to think, Hang on a minute, this is a band, it’s four guys, and you’ve got to give them equal importance,’ he said. ‘Although yes, you want the vocal so you can understand it and hear it, the other three elements are equally important. That’s what guided me. They all want to be in the foreground.’

  McKenna was under pressure from his bosses not only to produce hits but to keep a tight control on the budget. Leckie was being paid for his time but Schroeder worked for the company, and to save money McKenna suggested the band record B-sides for future singles with Schroeder alone. Already Leckie had been messing about playing tapes backwards with the band to create a new melody and proposing to record other stuff over the top, but it would be Schroeder who produced ‘Don’t Stop’, the album’s famous backwards track. It was the result of an incredibly productive weekend. As well as ‘Don’t Stop’ the band cut ‘Going Down’ and ‘Mersey Paradise’.

  ‘With “Don’t Stop” we flipped the tape over and I did a basic mix of what we could use and what we couldn’t, and then we just added elements,’ said Schroeder. In order to keep in with the backwards idea, all the mic’ing was done back to front. Cymbals were recorded from underneath, guitar amps were recorded from the back. ‘Then we used a lot of the backing vocals and it actually sounded like “Doooon’t stop”, fantastic,’ Schroeder said. ‘So we put extra vocals in the right way and mixed them with the backwards vocals for this dreamy effect. Then we put the bass line through a gate that was triggered by Reni playing sticks on the floor, so every time he hit the stick on the floor the gate would open up and you’d hear the bass sound. With a bit of jiggery pokery we came up with the lovely bass-line bit for the ending, which was Ian Brown’s favourite section of a record ever.’

  The band, as a rule, didn’t take drugs in the studio. They made an exception for this moment. ‘When we finished that, we knew it was good and we rolled a great big spliff and put it on massive speakers,’ said Schroeder. ‘We all lay down on the floor in front of the desk and listened to it. It was absolutely gorgeous.’ It was ultimately far too good for a B-side.

  Five tracks down, Roddy McKenna left to set up a Jive/Zomba office in Chicago. The band applauded this brave musical move. His departure allowed Andrew Lauder to take a more hands-on approach. By now the new label Jive/Zomba had set up to accommodate the Roses had a title: Silvertone, named after a vintage guitar. Squire had chosen it.

  The early sessions at Battery had been fruitful; a second batch of recording had seen starts on ‘(Song for My) Sugar Spun Sister’, ‘Bye Bye Badman’, ‘Shoot You Down’, ‘I Am the Resurrection’ and ‘This Is the One’, and the band would make frequent returns to the Zomba-owned studio before the album was complete. The Roses took a break from recording in October 1988 to promote the release of ‘Elephant Stone’. The band were happy with their work. Evans had them put them on a weekly wage of £70 each, enabling them to finally sign off the dole after three years. Squire was relieved, as the DSS were weeks away from finding him regular employment. They had money in their pockets for weed, were responding well to Leckie’s laid-back approach, and, in Manchester, had it easy at their HQ at International II. Brown and Squire were supremely relaxed and in solid relationships, and all four of the band felt, finally, their self-prophesying greatness was about to become a reality – and the last laugh on all those who had doubted them would be truly sweet.

  Zomba’s plan to launch the band on Silvertone, with the respected Lauder at the head of the label, worked well. The perception of it as a new indie label was enhanced by the fact that ‘Elephant Stone’ was promoted as being produced by Peter Hook. ‘It worked a dream,’ said Jive Records managing director Steven Howard. ‘They were coming from out of the underground into the overground, the NME loved it, it was a label they hadn’t even heard of, very indie, and with someone from Joy Division and New Order behind the group. It just caught fire.’

  The press release for the single tried to make purchase out of the band’s earlier 1985 warehouse gigs, linking the band with the explosion of illegal acid house warehouse raves now dominating headlines. No guitar bands as yet were being associated with these new raves, and for many, acid house signalled the end of guitar music. For Brown it was the opposite. ‘Pop music was saved by the advent of acid house and rap because whites [white guitar bands] have done nothing for ten years.’ In early 1988, the drug Ecstasy, the smiley face logo, and London clubs such as Shoom and Spectrum and The Trip had heralded the beginning of a new era. By what was being labelled ‘the Summer of Love’ acid house had exploded into the national consciousness. The Sun ran front pages chronicling the ‘evils’ of the scene as the first outdoor raves such as Sunrise became massive. ‘We didn’t play acid house music but we did enjoy it,’ Brown said. While in London, he, Mani and Reni had been at the acid clubs, and back in Manchester they enjoyed a similar experience at the Haçienda and the Thunderdome. ‘We saw some of the spirit of Paris 1968 reflected in the acid house movement,’ Brown said. ‘People were coming together and governments don’t want that.’

  The release of ‘Elephant Stone’ coincided with the first big illegal acid house rave in Manchester, at which Brown was present. Sweat It Out on 5 October 1988 was organized by the young Donnelly brothers, Chris and Anthony. ‘Ecstasy made that period what it was,’ said Chris. ‘At the Haçienda, Mike Pickering bringing music back from Chicago and New Order had a big influence, but it was Ecstasy that made acid house explode in the city.’ The brothers recall the first shipment of 200 pills arriving in Manchester and being distributed at a club called Stuffed Olive’s on South King Street. ‘After that night no beer got drank for about a year,’ said Anthony. For Sweat It Out, a railway arch was bolt-cropped, a stage was built
, and five or six strobe lights installed that never stopped until ten in the morning. ‘The police didn’t have a clue what was going on,’ said Anthony.

  ‘Football hooliganism got finished overnight,’ said Brown, who was an Ecstasy convert. ‘Just the strength that we felt with each other, just en masse, you know what I mean, beautiful. It was a community thing. We’d had the Tory government, we’d had the miners’ strike, and here’s the people all laughing and dancing. You’re trying to finish us but look at us.’

  ‘Elephant Stone’ reached number 27 in the indie charts. The band had sold the majority of the 2,000 records in Manchester. Due to the switch from Rough Trade to Jive/Zomba and then to Silvertone the single had been on hold for six months. The band were already keyed up to release ‘Made of Stone’, but a game plan had been formed and ‘Elephant Stone’ was seen as an incremental step forward. ‘Album out early next year,’ teased the press release. Andrew Lauder had arranged for Philip Hall at independent PR company Hall Or Nothing to handle the group’s publicity. Hall had already won a Music Week PR award for his campaign for The Pogues and was working with bands such as The Waterboys, James and The Beautiful South. With Hall on board the profile of the Roses in the three main weekly music papers began to improve.

  There was a small but largely disparaging Melody Maker interview published on 12 November. Brown was quoted as saying, ‘You can make yourself everlasting by making records.’ In the NME, Manchester writer Sarah Champion penned the band’s first serious career overview, chronicling the 1985 graffiti outrage and warehouse gigs at length. ‘Elephant Stone’, she wrote, had enjoyed phenomenal regional sales. ‘If I thought we’d remain selling 2,000 records I’d give up now – I think we’re going to be huge,’ Brown told Champion. Hall would continue to build the band in the press on the back of a steady series of glowing live reviews in the coming months. Lauder knew to really break the band nationally he would need exposure on radio and TV and wanted Gareth Davies of Beer Davies (who had represented The Smiths) to handle this key element of the band’s career.

  Lauder sent Davies to Manchester to watch the band rehearse at International II. There was also a boy of nine or ten watching the band that day, having strolled in uninvited on his way home from school. When the band stopped to chat with Davies, Reni handed the kid his drumsticks so he could have a go on his kit. ‘I’d never come across a band that would just let a kid who had wandered in play their instruments,’ said Davies, who would become the band’s TV and radio plugger for their entire career. ‘They were just about the least arrogant and most friendly band I’ve ever dealt with, completely different to the way most people perceived them.’

  Davies immediately arranged for the group to film their first TV show, an interview and mimed performance of ‘Elephant Stone’ for indie show Transmission made by Music Box, a European cable and satellite channel owned by Virgin and also seen on several terrestrial TV channels, most significantly ITV’s Yorkshire Television. The Roses were interviewed and filmed in their dark cellar rehearsal space at the International II, which Squire had bedecked in a Pollock-inspired backdrop. The band mimed to ‘Elephant Stone’ enthusiastically; Reni’s drum kit was now Pollocked, as was Squire’s guitar and Brown’s shirt. The band’s classic look was taking shape, although there was no Reni hat, Brown’s hair was still short of its heyday and the jeans were narrow at the ankle. Squire and Brown, the only two featured in the interview, were awkward and defensive. Asked what ‘Elephant Stone’ was about, Squire deadpanned, ‘Love and death. War and peace. Morecambe and Wise.’

  ‘Rachael Davies was doing the interview,’ said Davies. ‘John and Ian were standing beside one another and they both had their hands behind their back, just swaying from side to side, like shy schoolchildren. They were very slow with their answers and it all seemed very difficult. Rachael came up to me afterwards and said, God, did I do something to upset them? They very quickly picked up on the fact that you can create your own sort of mystique about yourselves by not talking.’

  There was also a handful of gigs to support ‘Elephant Stone’. In November the band played in Brown’s hometown of Warrington, in St Helens, at London Polytechnic and in Chester. Evans, unbeknownst to the band, was often out the day before handing out free tickets and manically putting up fly posters. In December the Roses played the London School of Economics, reviewed by Melody Maker and Record Mirror, the latter calling the Roses ‘indie’s great hopes of 89’, then Belfast and Edinburgh. The dates marked a shift in the band dynamic. Cressa had left the Happy Mondays to take up a permanent position on Squire’s side of the stage, grooving his funky dance behind the largely static guitarist. His task was nominally to change patches on Squire’s guitar effects, but it was more about the look.

  ‘There were only three or four songs I would have to change his effects on more than once,’ Cressa said. ‘John could have done it with pedals like everybody else.’ With Cressa came fellow ‘Baldrick’ Al Smith as the Roses built a new touring crew, corralled chiefly by the indefatigable Steve Adge. He involved a strong presence from his part of Manchester, Hyde, including Phil Smith and Chris ‘The Piss’ Griffiths – nicknamed because at gigs he would urinate wherever he wanted (in people’s pockets was his forte).

  There was a new addition to the management set-up as Evans was introduced to the Los Angeles-based Greg Lewerke, a friend of Andrew Lauder. Lewerke had previously been head of International at United Artists, and Lauder hoped he would help Evans understand the American market, where Jive/Zomba product was distributed by major label RCA. Lewerke was impressed in Edinburgh as the Roses drove the crowd crazy in ‘a tiny room that was hotter than hot, dripping sweat off the wall’.

  Lewerke agreed to represent Evans in America, for a percentage of his commission. In Edinburgh Evans was selling band T-shirts, and told Lewerke the band didn’t know how many he sold and that he was keeping the money. ‘I should have known from the beginning,’ said Lewerke. ‘But Gareth was as much part of the myth of the Roses as anything else.’

  9.

  Blackpool

  The band kicked off 1989, the ‘year of the Roses’, with a defining performance on the Tony Wilson-hosted show The Other Side of Midnight. It was a booking that had nothing to do with their newly appointed plugger, Gareth Davies. This was strictly a Manchester thing.

  ‘When we started, Factory was the Manchester mafia,’ Brown said. ‘The Smiths had broken through but even they needed the say so of Tony Wilson and the rest. You had to play the Haçienda as a sort of homecoming. But we really believed we could do it our way. In a way we were wrong, because it wasn’t really until The Other Side of Midnight that we were accepted and things started to happen.’

  How the famed boss of Factory Records ended up with the Roses on his Granada TV show (he admitted during his introduction that he’d ‘seriously disliked’ the band ‘for four or five or six years’) can be attributed to producer Steve Lock, who had only recently arrived in Manchester. Lock quickly discovered that two bands were being talked about: the Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses. ‘They were in very different camps. Tony hated The Stone Roses, absolutely hated them.’ Evans rang Lock and invited him to see the band rehearse; he was impressed but had no joy in persuading Wilson of the band’s worth.

  The Other Side of Midnight was often put together at the last minute, and it was only when an act dropped out of the show that Lock was able to force Wilson to reconsider. ‘I had a big row with Tony,’ he said. ‘He said, I don’t want a fucking goth band on. They’d obviously been around for a while in a number of different guises, so the band he hated may not have been the band they were, but knowing Tony he wouldn’t have let that get in the way of a good hatred.’

  The show went out weekly and, although it gave the impression of being a late-night affair, was recorded between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Thursdays in the Granada 2 studio, where the Sex Pistols and The Beatles had played. The show was transmitted on Granada and ITV regional networks su
ch as Yorkshire and Tyne Tees. In London it went out in the early hours of Sunday morning on LWT and had a cult following due to Wilson’s involvement and the fact that the critics Paul Morley, Stuart Cosgrove and Jon Savage sat in the studio and reviewed the show live on air. ‘Although it may have been seemingly obscure, it was a very influential show in terms of the type of people who watched it,’ said Lock. ‘It was being written about in the music press all the time.’

  The Roses invited photographer Ian Tilton to come to the recording, and the photos he took in the studio would end up gracing the band’s album sleeve. ‘So it was kind of a seminal moment,’ said Lock. ‘None of us had any inclination of that. It was just a local band coming into the studio and we were just a low-budget regional TV show who couldn’t get proper bands on the show.’ The band ran through ‘Waterfall’ a couple of times. ‘The first time Reni didn’t wear a hat and the second time he wore a hat,’ Tilton said. ‘I didn’t even think about the hat. He just wore it, it looked right on him and that was that. I did colour and black and white photographs but didn’t know what it was going to be used for. They didn’t pay me, nobody mentioned money. I just did it.’

  On the live version of ‘Waterfall’ that was broadcast, Reni’s hat was in place. The studio was entirely white. Cressa did his groovy dance behind Squire’s amp, Mani’s Rickenbacker was Pollocked and – spare a few inches on the hair and trouser legs – the band’s look was in place. The effect was electrifying, almost hallucinogenic: Reni’s vibrancy behind the kit, Cressa’s Bez-like grooving, Mani’s dainty flick haircut and pouting showmanship, the melodic chime of the song, and Brown and Squire’s staggering insouciance.