The Stone Roses: War and Peace

by Spence, Simon

  ‘I came back after six weeks and they were still doing it,’ he said. Leckie took charge of the new single and completed a final mix of ‘One Love’. There were now difficulties with the cover art. Suggestions of a swastika could be detected in Squire’s design, reported the NME. It was more than a suggestion, and the single cover and thousands of promotional T-shirts had to be destroyed. The man responsible for making the Roses’ T-shirts was Johnny Bolland, who had known Squire and Brown since his scooterboy days leading the Stockport Crusaders. ‘We all said straight away it looks like a swastika,’ he said. ‘You could make it out. We’d done a few thousand T-shirts and somebody went to a venue in town and got refused entrance.’ The wilfully provocative Squire said he was trying to ‘re-appropriate’ the swastika. It was a serious error of judgement, and it was left to Brown to apologize.

  The band also had problems making a video for the single. They had hoped the Happy Mondays’ video team, the Bailey Brothers, would work with them. Unlike the Roses, the Mondays had already followed their chart breakthrough with a massive new single, ‘Step On’. It had put them in the UK Top 5 for the first time, and the Bailey Brothers had shot the much-played video in Barcelona. It featured Shaun Ryder wrapped around a huge neon E sign. The Bailey Brothers were keen to work with the Roses, and an idea had been loosely formed to shoot the video for ‘One Love’ on the top of a building with a helicopter.

  Tony Wilson put a stop to any such plans. ‘Wilson said, There’s fucking no way you’re doing it,’ said Keith Jobling, one half of the Bailey Brothers. ‘He said, It’s not right for the story about the war of the bands, the Mondays and the Roses.’ The Roses took the news stoically. ‘They said, Oh don’t tell us: because of Gareth?’ said Jobling. ‘We said, Yeah, Wilson hates Gareth, get rid of Gareth and we’ll do a video.’

  The May release of ‘One Love’ was postponed. The Roses had sold out Spike Island by April, but the cost of organizing the event would eat up any profit. In that sense it was cold comfort, as not just the Happy Mondays but a slew of other bands capitalized on the Madchester boom. The Inspiral Carpets’ debut single on Mute, ‘This Is How It Feels’, had gone Top 20 in the UK, and their debut album Life was at number 2, selling a quarter of a million copies. Primal Scream had also hit the payload with their radical new single, ‘Loaded’. The Charlatans single ‘The Only One I Know’ was at number 9. Steve Lock’s Granada TV documentary Celebration: Madchester – Sound of The North was also a hit in May. ‘Manchester is now the music capital of Britain, some say Europe, some say the world,’ ran the opening credits to the documentary. But the jewel in the crown, the Roses, didn’t feature in it. ‘The Stone Roses were a glaring omission really,’ said Lock, who never reached agreement with Evans to include the Alexandra Palace footage in his documentary.

  While the Mondays et al worked towards their album releases in autumn 1990, the Roses were going nowhere. They hadn’t responded to Leckie’s faxed suggestions for the new album: the band had neither the material nor the inclination, because of the ongoing contractual renegotiations with Jive/Zomba. All they had was Spike Island – and some famous Manc lip. The Roses’ attitude towards the scene they headed had begun to harden. Brown had previously declared it healthy. ‘It needs more than just one group to change things – it needs loads of them,’ he had said. Now he decreed, ‘We’ve never gone out of our way to align ourselves with the so-called Manchester scene. We’ve never understood the supposed connection between us and all these other bands. It’s a media thing. People are people, your attitude is your attitude. It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at.’

  ‘I felt like we were flogging something for somebody, but I didn’t know what it was or who they were,’ said Squire. ‘A lifestyle, I suppose. An attitude.’ Brown poured water on the idea of it being ‘Christmas every day’ in the city, and, in May, he also dampened the expectations of Jive/Zomba that the band’s plans for America would run smoothly, telling Q magazine, ‘America isn’t that big a deal to us.’

  As a continuation of the band’s policy to play outside of the traditional circuit, Spike Island was a huge success. It suggested the band had the potential to take the world. Spike Island also provided ample evidence that, although there was much to admire about Evans, their manager was also wildly out of control. At a time when the Roses most needed solid, down-to-earth advice, as fame affected their own egos, Evans’s ego shot through the roof. With the Italia 90 World Cup approaching, he was dismayed that New Order were dominating the coverage – having recorded the England team’s World Cup song, ‘World in Motion’. Evans plagued the band’s plugger, Gareth Davies, with early morning calls demanding that the Roses get equal prominence.

  ‘I was usually in the office by 6 a.m.,’ said Davies. ‘And he realized this, and he would start ringing me at half past six.’ It prompted Davies to approach BBC sport show Grandstand, and an instrumental loop of a Roses track from their 1989 album was used during the BBC’s coverage of the World Cup. Despite this result, Davies found many other suggestions from Evans ridiculous. He, too, worried that Evans was neglecting to relay important messages to the band. ‘I concluded that if you wanted to get things to happen, basically you had to avoid Gareth.’

  Following Spike Island, the Roses played the Provinssirock Festival in Seinäjoki, Finland. Brown took offence at a Confederate flag waved by a crowd member, demanding that the person waving it be removed. This was followed by shows at the Mayfield Leisure Centre in Belfast and Glasgow Green in Scotland. In their desire to avoid traditional venues, and to help create a rave atmosphere at their shows, the band played in circus big tops. In front of 8,000 fans in Glasgow, on 9 June 1990, with sweat dripping like rain from the tent roof, the band played what would not just be their final show with Reni but also one of their best. ‘The best ever,’ said Brown. ‘We all looked at each other on stage, and then just went up to another level,’ Mani agreed.

  It went downhill quickly from there.

  ‘I came home from Glasgow Green and didn’t see any of them for eighteen months,’ said Cressa. ‘But you know, shit happens.’ The release of ‘One Love’ continued to be held back, purportedly due to the switch of cover art. Others suggested the band were prolonging the suspense, in an attempt to guarantee the single entered the charts at number 1. There was now a video for the single, filmed in a huge studio at Vector Television in Heaton Mersey, Stockport. It was a disheartening effort, the band miming the song as if live in front of a fire backdrop super-imposed with crude technical skill.

  The Roses’ plans for America grew more confusing, as the dates they had lined up were unceremoniously cancelled. This was despite the tickets for the Los Angeles gig, at Hollywood High, having sold out in seven minutes. ‘America doesn’t deserve us yet,’ Brown said. ‘We’re just naturally stubborn,’ said Squire. ‘If we get pressured into going to America, which we have been, we’ll turn it down.’ The band’s American manager, Greg Lewerke, said the small amount of money on offer for the shows made the dates financially unappealing to the band, and ‘Ian’s quote was just a cop-out’.

  ‘The dates being cancelled was a travesty,’ said Michael Tedesco. The Roses’ album sales were in the region of a quarter of a million in America, and all at Jive/Zomba, including Barry Weiss and Clive Calder, thought they were poised for a breakthrough.

  Contract renegotiations between the band and Jive/Zomba were ongoing. The label was willing to make an improved offer, but for boss Clive Calder there was a limit to what improvement there was going to be. For Evans, Spike Island had been the ‘defining gig of a generation’, after which every ‘top record man in the industry’ was on the phone to him, suggesting the band was now worth vast sums of money. He had expected that Jive/Zomba ‘would rush back to London and immediately start setting up a big new package’. When they didn’t, and renegotiations continued to be tough, his mind was made up. Evans was now gambling on being able to get out of the contract, and intent on making a new, ma
ssive money deal for the Roses with a different label. It was a huge risk.

  Evans sent Squire and Brown to the Mull of Kintyre to write new material. He thought it sounded good in meetings. ‘I liked the idea of sending them to this remote place. I just thought it had rock star class.’ He even suggested that Brown should fake his own death while there, washed away at sea. Once the news made the front pages, Evans envisaged Brown returning from the dead to further headlines.

  Along with his business partner Matthew Cummins, Evans flew to Los Angeles where Greg Lewerke had set up a series of meetings with the intention of securing a new deal for the Roses. ‘The band, everybody, was pulling in different directions,’ said Lewerke. ‘Everybody had a different agenda.’ Warner Brothers had paid for the flights, but Lewerke also took Evans and Cummins for meetings with PolyGram and Geffen Records – whose HQ happened to be just over the street from his own office, on Sunset Boulevard. ‘It was all just talk, and the talk was if we could get free of Jive/Zomba, are you interested?’ said Lewerke. It was an indication of how serious Geffen Records were in their pursuit of the band that boss David Geffen, one of the richest and most successful entertainment moguls of the twentieth century, label president Eddie Rosenblatt and senior A&R figure Gary Gersh met with the Roses’ managers at an upmarket Italian restaurant in Los Angeles, Matteo’s.

  ‘It was a big lunch,’ said Lewerke. ‘It was a big deal. And Gareth was great. They loved him. I remember Eddie saying to me, How did you get teamed up with these guys?’ Brown had been right in his initial appraisal of Evans over three years ago. He wasn’t afraid of anybody, and he commandeered the lunch – regaling Geffen, Rosenblatt and Gersh with tall tales of Madchester. Geffen was the man who, while Evans was running hairdressing shops, built an empire with Asylum Records (with acts such as Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and The Eagles), and, after selling the label for $7 million, had re-emerged in the 1980s with his Geffen label, signing acts such as Aerosmith and Guns N’ Roses. The ink was still drying on a deal that had seen Geffen sell Geffen Records to MCA for $540 million, while allowing him to keep control of the company.

  Geffen was aware of the Roses and the Madchester scene and had been recommended the band by Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis. But it was A&R man Gary Gersh who appeared keenest, having been left drooling by ‘I Wanna Be Adored’, the single Jive/Zomba had chosen for the band in America. He called it ‘one of the best songs I’ve ever heard in my life’. From that moment on, Gersh wanted The Stone Roses. ‘We were told, rightly or wrongly, that the situation as it related to their long-term contractual obligations was up in the air and clearly sceptical at best,’ said Gersh. ‘And David and Eddie were nothing but unbelievably supportive and we were on a mission to bring the band to Geffen.’

  Evans would claim that he left the lunch with a cheque for $350,000 as a down payment. Rosenblatt, Gersh and Lewerke do not recall that. But it was true Geffen signalled their intent to pay $4 million up front for the band. The rumours did not take long to filter back to Jive/Zomba. ‘Gareth would be saying one thing to one party and one thing to another,’ said Jive/Zomba’s Steven Howard. ‘I’ve no idea what he conveyed to the group, but he didn’t encourage our relationship with them. He was divisive in terms of that relationship, because it strengthened his position.’

  Money was the issue. Now that $4 million dollars was on the table, Evans was hell-bent on grabbing it. Any improvements Jive/Zomba were prepared to make on the original contract would never match that figure. Howard was busy overseeing other aspects of Zomba’s growth, and the key men dealing with the Roses contract on the business side (including now a new boss of Jive Records in the UK, Steve Jenkins, a former Stock, Aitken and Waterman associate) had no real feel for the band. ‘It was all about money,’ said the Roses’ A&R man Roddy McKenna. ‘They wanted Zomba to come close to the kind of money they were being offered from Geffen.’

  ‘The negotiations with Zomba were not fruitful,’ said the Roses’ lawyer John Kennedy. ‘The Roses may have been the hottest band in the country but Zomba’s Clive Calder is a tough cookie and quite a lot of money had been spent on the band already. Maybe they thought the band were running into a bit of a brick wall, because some recordings had taken place which hadn’t been successful. So you’ve got this fantastic first album and you’ve got quite a lot of money having been spent, and the label were wondering where this band were going to go for the future. A bit of doubt had crept in.’

  Finally, on 2 July 1990, a new Stone Roses record was released, eight months after ‘Fools Gold’. The A-side, ‘One Love’, had the same title as the Bob Marley & the Wailers 1977 hit, and included the same lyric – ‘one love, one heart’. The NME made it Single of the Week, but there was no appetite from the band to promote the record. Largely, this was a reflection of the chaos caused by doubts over their future with Jive/Zomba, but the band were also dissatisfied with the song itself. Squire called it a disappointment.

  ‘We tried in vain to cover all bases – we wanted to appeal to everyone in clubs and indie kids and whoever, but it was a poor chorus,’ said Brown. An opportunity to promote ‘One Love’ on the prime-time Wogan talk show on BBC1 came up. Brown and Squire were initially jubilant at the news. ‘I was convinced, because there were always rumours about [the show’s host] Terry Wogan having a wig, that the Roses were going to try and pull his wig off,’ said Gareth Davies. ‘Around the world they’d be known as the band that pulled that bloke’s wig off.’ The band pulled out of the show, however, when they discovered that the episode would be pre-recorded. This refusal to appear on Wogan was widely reported. ‘Terry’s worried about being the next Bill Grundy,’ reckoned Sounds, referring to the Sex Pistols’ foul-mouthed appearance on an early evening Thames TV show, Today, which launched the band. ‘Roses Boycott Wogan’ was the Daily Star headline, the band called a ‘rebel four piece’ whose ‘new single is expected to rocket to next week’s number one’. ‘Terry obviously doesn’t have enough bottle,’ Brown was quoted in the Daily Mirror.

  The Roses did appear on the cover of Smash Hits. ‘We’re the best band on the planet’ – a Mani quote – was the headline, and on 14 July Brown, alone, was on the cover of Number One. In the Smash Hits interview Squire expressed concern about the impending criminal-damage court case, and Brown declared flares over: ‘Too many sheep.’ The band had already expressed their pleasure at featuring in the tabloids, and perhaps appearing in the teen magazines was another step in attaining the hugeness they aspired to: ‘bigger than The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Madonna put together’.

  It was also time for reflection. ‘Some people say we’re a lads’ band,’ said Brown. ‘Some people say we’re a 16-year-old girls’ band; they say a lot, don’t they? But they say fuck all.’ Fame was not an easy fit for the now 27-year-old Brown. He had always said the star was the audience, and that he was not to be worshipped. ‘I Wanna Be Adored’ was a song about sin, not a declaration of his own desire. He had talked about destroying the way that fans looked up to pop and rock stars like Bono, wanting to kick over those false icons. Squire spent a day crawling around his house on his belly after the Smash Hits cover attracted four teenage girls to camp outside the terraced house he shared with his girlfriend, Helen.

  There were no further interviews as the band went into lockdown. Despite the lack of promotion, ‘One Love’ entered the UK charts at number 4, their highest position to date. There was no celebratory Top of the Pops performance to propel the single towards number 1. On the back of the success of ‘One Love’, however, ‘Fools Gold’ climbed back into the charts, reaching number 22. The Roses were persuaded to perform ‘One Love’ for the syndicated Hit Studio International, broadcast on the satellite station Super Channel, and shown in Japan and Europe but not the UK. It was unclear if the band were supposed to play live, as many bands did on this show, or mime. Brown walked off stage during the filming.

  ‘One Love’ was strangely anticlimactic. The song lacked any real club t
hump, and its sentiment was out of step in the context of the gang violence now taking hold of Manchester. Madchester was still a global attraction, but in the city the glory days of 1988 and 1989 were over, replaced by an era that would be dubbed ‘Gunchester’. There was to be no ‘Third Summer of Love’ in Manchester, no ‘one love’, no love at all. Already the police had closed the Thunderdome club, following a drive-by shooting, and the Gallery venue, a favourite haunt for the notorious ‘Cheetham Hill gang’. The Haçienda had become the focal point of a series of drug wars, door wars, gang wars, and in a few short months would be forced to temporarily close. The International clubs that Evans and Cummins owned, although more associated with the student crowd, were not immune to the darkness spreading across the city. Brown had been present at a reggae night at the International when shots had been fired.

  With a new student hot spot, the Academy, recently opened on Manchester University campus, it was a good time to get out of the business. Evans and Cummins did. Dougie James had the pair up in court and, finally, won his long-running case against them. James was ruled to be a legitimate partner in the International and took outright ownership of the club. Another interested party bought Evans and Cummins out of International II. Although they had to pay a reputed £133,000 in court costs, it was offset somewhat by the sale of their shares in both clubs. Evans’s personal wealth at the time of the court case was £1.7 million, and James estimated Evans and Cummins had taken as much as £3 million out of the International in the five years he’d been locked in a legal battle with them. In the International’s accounts he came across £28,000 in video royalties meant for the Roses. ‘They didn’t know about it. I sent it to them. I felt very sorry for the kids because with a man like Gareth you can never have success.’