The Stone Roses: War and Peace

by Spence, Simon

  The lack of financial pay-off for the band as record sales rocketed resulted in the Roses becoming increasingly hostile towards Jive/Zomba. The situation was not helped when Jive/Zomba removed Gareth Davies from the Roses’ set-up, in favour of using in-house pluggers. They only reneged when Radio 1’s support for the band dried up, reinstating Davies. The Roses relied heavily on Evans as their conduit to the label, and Jive/Zomba said Evans never fully disclosed to the band their readiness to renegotiate.

  Jive/Zomba sanctioned, as a show of good faith, a £40,000 Christmas bonus for the band in 1989. Evans said the company intended it as a ‘stop-gap’ and it was possibly an attempt to appease him over his demands for contract renegotiations. ‘We should have been negotiating on a massive scale, not quibbling over a £40,000 Christmas bonus,’ he said. ‘They thought I was some Cheshire bumpkin. That’s when I started to plan ahead. I knew I had to be two steps ahead of Zomba and one step ahead of the band.’ Evans had spent heavily on the band, and perhaps felt he was owed the lion’s share of that money, or needed it for future band dealings, as he counted out the band’s Christmas bonus of a few hundred pounds from his fat wad.

  For the Roses, 1990 was the year to deliver on the hype. ‘Fools Gold’ had established them as the hottest act in the UK, they were media darlings and Brown was an iconic face. Madchester fever had gripped the music world. Their debut album was back in the Top 40 in January, climbing to its era high of number 19 in February. America was theirs for the taking, and Reni recalled with pride how Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters had applauded the band. ‘The Roses remind me of us twenty-five years ago,’ Waters had said. ‘They’ve got loads of bollocks and arrogance and won’t take any shit.’

  But the year started badly and would get progressively worse as business not music began to dominate their lives. The mishandling of the band’s affairs by Evans seemed to be at the crux. Their earlier career had been marked by what Pete Garner referred to as one step forward, two steps back, and history appeared to be repeating itself. In December 1989 Paul Birch, boss of the band’s former record label FM Revolver, had re-released ‘Sally Cinnamon’, backed by a new video. The band had only recorded the one single for the label in 1987 before walking out on them. Birch, who had been unsure of the band’s worth then, was now certain. His original deal with the band had been for two singles and an album; he had considered taking them to court to claim damages, but had been quoted legal fees of £150,000.

  ‘Sally Cinnamon’ had been selling well throughout 1989, to fans interested in the Roses’ back catalogue. It was only when Birch switched the independent distribution of the single to major label BMG, and shot a video, that the interest of Jive/Zomba and the band was aroused. ‘We didn’t consider it to be a reissue, we just changed the distribution and as soon as we did it went onto the charts at number 46,’ said Birch. Dave Roberts, the A&R man who had signed the band to FM Revolver, took a cameraman to Manchester to film the video, including shots of Madchester temples such as Afflecks Palace and kids in flares. It ended up being shown on popular Saturday morning programme The Chart Show. The band took offence to the video, with Brown calling it ‘insulting’. Zomba took FM Revolver to court to stop it being shown, but after three days in the Old Bailey it was ruled they could still use the video.

  Around Christmas 1989, Evans visited FM Revolver to discuss the matter with Birch. According to Birch, Evans said, ‘Paul, I don’t know what’s happening at Jive/Zomba, we’re in a terrible mess, the band have got no money, we’re not getting paid – yeah, there’s a lot of publicity and on the surface it looks like the band is successful, but we can’t get any money out of them and we’re desperate; is there anything you can do to help us?’ Birch said, ‘In the circumstance that we had found ourselves in, what am I likely to say? But I still gave him a cheque for £5,000.’ Birch was unnerved by Evans, whom many members of FM Revolver’s staff found intimidating. ‘It was just nonsense, ranting and madness. But you’d always be frightened that the chap was going to pull a gun on you. You always felt he was about to harm you in some way.’ The Roses were never made aware of this £5,000 payment, just like they had been kept in the dark about the Jive/Zomba Christmas money.

  The situation with Jive/Zomba was clearly complex, but the situation with FM Revolver seemed black and white, and on 30 January 1990 the Roses decided to take matters into their own hands. Driving between Manchester and Rockfield studios, in Wales, to begin recording new material, they decided to pay Birch a visit at his Wolverhampton record label HQ, where he also lived.

  ‘When the band turned up, Olivia, my girlfriend, went to the door,’ said Birch. ‘It’s 7.30 in the evening, the accountant’s working in the back room. My office was upstairs, and she came in and said, The Stone Roses are at the door.’ At first Birch didn’t believe her, and it was only when she returned five minutes later that he went downstairs. ‘All hell broke loose,’ he said. ‘It’s quite a narrow passage into the house. There they were and they covered us in this bloody paint and it went everywhere. They threw it all over the cars and smashed the windows of the cars. I had a Dobermann and he slept all the way through it. The band weren’t in their right minds when they attacked us. They were high. And also there was the road crew. What really scared us was we found tins of Nitromors, paint stripper, outside.’

  The paint stripper was for the cars, not him. But the band were angry and aggressive. Squire said the stunt was his idea, and the damage could have been a lot worse. ‘They answered the front door of the office and Reni got in first, then the rest of us, and we just started chucking paint around, but they locked the door into the rest of the building and called the police,’ he said. ‘He thinks we’re just puppets, performing monkeys that he can earn a buck off,’ Brown said a few months after the incident. ‘He told us to make an appointment and that’s when I kicked off. He’s earning a lot of money off us and he tells us to make an appointment.’

  Roberts had left the office and was at the company’s base in London with a press officer at hand. ‘I got a call from Paul; he was really upset,’ said Roberts. ‘His voice was shaking. We rang up the Sun and they wanted to run it as an exclusive. It snowballed from there. They sent someone up to Paul to do photos and an interview, and then it appeared the next day as a major news story.’ Roberts tried to speak to Evans, but it was all ‘a bit threatening’: ‘ “You don’t know who you’re dealing with”, that kind of stuff,’ Roberts said. ‘Then I got phone calls on my mobile with no one speaking on the other end for about a month.’

  Birch accepted he was fair game, but felt that his accountant and girlfriend were victims. ‘For the longest time they both went through very difficult trauma. The paint got into Olivia’s hair, she had to have it all cut out, and had to use pumice stone to get the paint out of her scalp.’ In his view the Roses were also victims. ‘As far as they were concerned they only know what they’re told,’ Birch said. ‘They were robbed of the opportunity to make their own decisions and judgements. Young men from Manchester who have talent, hope, aspirations, dreams, and they’re looking for someone who is capable, who can steer them through the entertainment industry, which is not exactly known for its good nature. And they had Gareth.’

  After attacking FM Revolver HQ, the Roses drove to Rockfield studios, where producer John Leckie was waiting for them. They turned up covered in paint, with the police on their tail. ‘We were meant to be starting the album at Rockfield,’ Leckie said. ‘Steve Adge came in and said, The cops are coming — any minute now, they’re going to find out where we are.’ That evening the band recorded the guitar, bass and drums of a fresh Brown/Squire composition, ‘Something’s Burning’, covered in paint. It was the first new song they had come up with since ‘Fools Gold’, and would surface as a B-side to their next single, ‘One Love’. ‘What you hear on “Something’s Burning” was recorded that night,’ said Leckie.

  The next morning the police turned up at Rockfield and arrested Squire, Brown and Reni. ‘
The police woke me up and found a pile of paint-covered clothes next to my bed,’ said Squire. The same day Mani and Steve Adge walked into Monmouth police station to give themselves up. Adge was released without charge. The Roses spent a night in the cells and then on 1 February all four were taken to Wolverhampton Magistrates’ Court to face charges of criminal damage estimated at £10,000.

  The NME were in court to report on the day – although there wasn’t really much to report. The case was adjourned to 6 March and the Roses released on bail. ‘It’s the worst hotel I’ve ever stayed in,’ said Brown of his stay in the cells, mimicking Mick Jagger’s famous quote after his night in Brixton Prison following the Redlands bust in 1967. ‘I didn’t know abstract expressionism was an offence,’ said Squire. The story made the front page of the Manchester Evening News, under the headline ‘Pop Stars in £10,000 Raid Quiz’. As the band were having their fingerprints taken, they joked with police about which papers they were going to be in next morning. ‘It’ll be in the NME,’ Mani said. That issue just happened to come with a free poster of the Kevin Cummins photograph of the band covered in paint. ‘Just the sweetest irony, unreal,’ said Mani. ‘We signed the poster for the coppers and wrote “Exhibit A” on it.’ The band could afford to joke. They expected nothing more than a slap on the wrist and an avalanche of publicity.

  12.

  ‘One Love’

  After being released on bail the Roses returned to Rockfield to continue recording new material. ‘Something’s Burning’ was a further exploration of the groove and rhythm they’d begun to ride with ‘Fools Gold’. The track was as grown-up as the Roses had ever sounded, mining a funk that suggested they might take off in George Clinton’s 1970s Mothership. But this promise of channelling the essence of Funkadelic/Parliament quickly evaporated as the band drew blanks in the studio. With ‘Fools Gold’ they’d ridden out into the middle of the ocean with such pioneering spirit that now they found themselves a long way from dry land.

  Changing their classic sound was seen as essential for a band keen not to ride on the back of their own reputation, but ‘Something’s Burning’ was the full stop on that journey. Squire and Brown had no new material. The only other track they recorded at Rockfield was ‘One Love’. It was essentially ‘Any Time You Want Me’, the song they’d talked about releasing before ‘Fools Gold’, with a new chorus tacked on. The song had a melodic chime, which suggested it would be another Roses classic, but they wanted it to be more than that. They wrestled with the song. ‘The idea was we were starting the new album and they just had those two songs and that was it,’ said Leckie. ‘One Love’, based around programmed loops of bass and drums, was the song Jive/Zomba pencilled in as a new single, but the recording of it would prove frustrating and fractured – and would eat up the remainder of February, March and April. Evans was now in the habit of telling the band it didn’t matter when the next record came out, the longer the better. ‘He kept telling us to slow down,’ said Squire.

  Although Leckie didn’t want him there, the band insisted Paul Schroeder act as engineer on these fractious sessions. ‘ “One Love” was difficult to record,’ Schroeder said. The mixing process would go on endlessly. ‘They were a difficult band to have in the mixing room. They’d all be trying to get something out of it; Reni telling you to turn the drums up, John telling you to turn the guitars up, all these little ideas.’ Schroeder produced a series of mixes of the track. ‘I did a punk mix, very monofied; it was pumping and very tough,’ he said. But it wasn’t used. Adrian Sherwood, from the influential On-U Sound Records, revered for his experimental punk, avantgarde, dub and reggae releases, was also sanctioned to remix ‘One Love’. Unlike the Mondays, who had embraced remix culture, this was the only remix of a Roses track done with the band’s say so while they remained with Jive/Zomba. Squire said the Sherwood remix made the band sound like Janet Jackson and stamped on the tape.

  After recording ‘One Love’, Leckie had left England for Seattle to produce an album by American alternative rock/power pop band The Posies. During the time he was away, the Roses remained in stasis. This apparent slow death of the band’s creativity had not gone unnoticed at Jive/Zomba. The label further alienated the band with their haste to capitalize on the success of ‘Fools Gold’. In February 1990 they’d re-released ‘Elephant Stone’ as a single and it peaked in the UK at number 8, despite zero promotional support. The same month ‘Made of Stone’ was re-released in the UK, reaching number 20, followed by a re-release of ‘She Bangs the Drums’. Jive/Zomba was also busy working Roses product around the world, such as Germany, where a singles EP was released. The band had not been consulted on, nor supported, any of these releases.

  They had, though, finally agreed to a short tour of America. A series of dates was being organized for Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Detroit – a city the band had insisted on playing due to its dance-music legacy. In late February the Roses acquiesced to two days of international interviews at London’s Tara Hotel to talk up these plans. The British press was not invited. ‘The Manchester scene is a convenient myth to sell product, whether it be records or newspapers,’ Squire told Rolling Stone, America’s most influential music publication. ‘We feel we’re the only British group worth exporting since the Sex Pistols, definitely,’ Brown said. ‘We don’t want to be an English phenomenon,’ said Squire. ‘There’s a lot of other British groups doing well in America,’ said Brown, ‘but we think we’re better, so we want Americans to see us and hear us. It’s just as important to be big in New York as Manchester.’

  It was during this short period of promotion at the Tara Hotel that Evans, and the Roses’ American manager, Greg Lewerke, met and hired lawyer John Kennedy, a decision that would deeply affect the future course of the band. A fierce litigator specializing in music business law, Kennedy would be the ideal man to assist in the renegotiations regarding the Jive/Zomba contract. It would seem a shrewd move by Evans, but the decision had been forced on him when his preferred lawyer, the property specialist Geoff Howard, was brought before a Law Society tribunal in December 1989 and accused of practising while uncertified, accounting deficiency, and bringing the profession into disrepute. On 27 February 1990 the tribunal had found the allegations to be substantiated.

  Lewerke asked the new lawyer, Kennedy, about the possibility of the band escaping Jive/Zomba and signing to a different label. Kennedy, who knew and respected Clive Calder, said that although the Jive/Zomba boss would be tough on renegotiations, ‘it’s always better if you can work out a deal and stay on the label’. Evans handed over the contracts, and Kennedy was amazed. ‘The contracts were so bad, they were the like of which you didn’t see any more. One of the most damaging things was the combination of the recording and publishing agreements. They were two very tough agreements, both of which in their own right might have been vulnerable – but the fact that they were together, and linked in a number of ways, made it dynamite in terms of vulnerability.’

  A week after hiring Kennedy, the Roses were back at Wolverhampton Magistrates’ Court for the FM Revolver paint incident, arriving from the ongoing mixing sessions for ‘One Love’, which were now taking place at RAK studios. Surprisingly the band’s legal representative was Geoff Howard, and things didn’t go well. A small crowd of fans had gathered outside the court, and again the NME was present – this time putting the band, on the court steps, on its front cover. It was proposed the case should be referred to the Crown court because of the seriousness of the offences: estimated damages had risen to £23,000. Howard raised no objection but said the band would fight the charges.

  Crown court was, as Reni said, ‘big lad’s court’, where penalties were much more severe than in the magistrates’ court. Only serious offences were taken to the Crown court and, if found guilty, the band would be facing a prison sentence. The Roses nonetheless spent forty-five minutes posing with fans and signing autographs afterwards, as Evans flogged ‘Ian Brown is innocent’ T-shirts. ‘We�
�re going to get our bottoms smacked good and proper,’ said Squire. ‘That’s when it hit us that we’d done a pretty bad thing. Mani was making jokes about us getting raped in prison.’

  The new Roses single, ‘One Love’, was expected in May to coincide with the recently announced Spike Island date. But the single continued to prove problematic; rehearsals and songwriting attempts between court appearances also faltered. The band reappeared on 12 April at Wolverhampton Magistrates’ Court with over a hundred fans and chaotic scenes awaiting them. FM Revolver’s Paul Birch was ‘jostled, nudged, punched and elbowed’ in the gallery overlooking the courtroom. The case was adjourned until 26 April, and it was then that the trial was finally committed to Wolverhampton Crown Court. The case was expected to come before the court in September and the threat of prison was stark. Geoff Howard was replaced with Paul Reid QC, a specialist in crime.

  Andrew Lauder at Silvertone was now under increased pressure from his Zomba bosses to get the band restarted on the new album. He had requested a list of studios and recording dates from Leckie while he was away in Seattle. In late April he faxed back twelve possible locations around the world and a schedule that began in June and concluded in September. Among the studios Leckie suggested in New York, Malibu, Paris and Dublin, he listed the Rolling Stones Mobile and ‘a little eight-track in New Orleans at Mardi Gras’. On his return from America, Leckie was amazed to find the band still mixing ‘One Love’.