The American dates Lewerke had worked to set up were cancelled. The Madison Square Garden date had sold out, but the Roses stubbornly refused to play the prestigious date on the principle that Evans had arranged it without asking them first. ‘The Roses were tilting on the brink of being the biggest British band since The Beatles in America,’ Evans said. ‘They got rid of me six months too soon. They could have played those American gigs and then they could have sacked me. They got it horribly wrong.’
‘It’s easy to say we all became lethargic and pulled those big American dates,’ said Squire. ‘But we were a band who had got to where we were with a particular body of work, a particular style. Now we had to move onwards. The danger was that we would continue to play the same set and become very tired, dull. It might have raked in the money for Gareth, but it wouldn’t have been natural. We all knew it.’
The cancellation of the American dates set alarm bells ringing for Geffen A&R man Gary Gersh. He had already allowed for the possibility of ‘some insanity’ going on with Evans and the band, but thus far Evans had delivered on every promise he made. ‘Gareth was saying that those gigs seemed like they were going to happen and we believed him,’ said Gersh. ‘We felt like Gareth was the kind of character that the band needed: visionary and wily.’ Now it was apparent that there were ‘a lot of complications’, and Gersh was growing anxious to get the Roses in the studio. The rumour was they had two albums’ worth of material ready to record.
‘I kept saying to Gareth, You have to believe, and they have to believe, that they’re the greatest band in the world and they have to make the next record, that’s all there is,’ said Gersh. ‘There’s just the next record. It should be the second record in a long line of records, not the most important thing that’s ever happened in their lives.’ Geffen’s plan to release a quick single, and an album in the autumn, was the first of many to be abandoned. Gersh could get no clear answers from Evans. ‘Everyone around the world was just waiting for the Roses’ record. We had gone through this whole process – signed the band, made this big commitment – and nothing was happening.’
After seven years without any, the Roses now had money. The $4 million [approximately £2.3 million] advance from Geffen was being carefully managed by John Kennedy and a new band accountant, Patrick Savage, who worked for the OJ Kilkenny company (the industry’s leading financial advice firm, who most famously looked after U2). The individual band members were said to have received £125,000 each. Reni treated himself to a flash new Saab car; Brown walked around Manchester handing out £20 notes to the homeless. Plans for a summer show in the UK were postponed. Instead, the band took off for a holiday together in the South of France, hiring a helicopter and staying in £500-a-night hotels in Nice, Cannes, St Tropez and Monte Carlo. Squire took Super-8 footage of the trip that would later appear in the ‘Love Spreads’ video. Back in Manchester, real-life events delayed any definite decisions over their future. Squire and Reni became fathers, and all four Roses invested in property. The band splintered, following their own separate ideals, with Mani and Reni staying in Manchester, Squire moving to the Lake District and Brown buying a farm in rural North Wales overlooking Cardigan Bay and backed by views of Snowdonia. The days of living in each other’s pockets, of strolling to rehearsal at International II, of dreaming of nothing but the band, were over.
Mani couldn’t see the sense in moving to the countryside. ‘If you are away from the action it’s like over, really.’ Squire and Brown did make attempts to reinvigorate their songwriting, and they were still close, but things were changing. Nothing came of their efforts, and Squire found he was making more progress with songs on his own. ‘Ian was quite happy with that,’ said Squire. ‘He’d tell me he was sitting at home sending me positive vibes to help with the songwriting.’
The only people able to make any clear purchase out of the Roses in this period were, ironically, Jive/Zomba, who began to recoup some of the reputed £1 million – according to Q magazine – they’d lost on the court case. The Roses’ contract with the label was only void for the future. All the material the band had already recorded for them remained with Zomba. In September 1991, ‘Elephant Stone’ was re-released as a single, reaching number 20 in the UK charts, and ‘Waterfall’ reached number 27. This was followed, in October, by the re-release of the Roses’ album, in a limited vinyl gatefold edition of 50,000, and on cassette and CD with extra tracks, ‘Elephant Stone’ and ‘Fools Gold’. A video of the band’s Blackpool Empress Ballroom show, never intended as a concert film, was released in December.
Although the demand for Roses product remained high, the media’s interest in Madchester had cooled. The Happy Mondays provided the movement’s final hurrah, with their own Spike Island moment, headlining a massive gig at Leeds United football ground in the summer of 1991. It was the band’s last significant performance before disbanding. In Manchester, gang violence, gun crime, and even ram raids on clubs, became national news. The Haçienda had reopened with gun detectors on the door. Factory Records was on the verge of collapse. A new musical phenomenon called ‘grunge’ and a new city, Seattle, stole the limelight. Nirvana were signed to Geffen by the Roses’ A&R man Gary Gersh in December 1990, and the band’s album Nevermind, released in September 1991, exploded worldwide, on its way to selling 30 million copies.
In January 1992, under the headline ‘Roses’ Muse Dying on the Vine’, the NME reported there would be no new album until the end of the year. A source claimed the court case had blunted their creative edge and that new songs, written by Squire, had been rejected by the rest of the band. ‘Summit meetings’ between Evans and Geffen were planned to iron out strategies. Gersh was now fully aware of the difficulties that lay ahead. ‘I could tell it wasn’t going well,’ he said. In February 1992 Evans was officially dismissed as the Roses’ manager. He would claim unfair dismissal, but it would not be until 1995 that this case would come before the High Court. ‘I want £1 million,’ he said. ‘The Stone Roses have a five-album deal with Geffen. If they are successful, it could net them anything up to £50 million. I simply want monies that are owed for the part I played in thrashing out the deal. Right from the start I was out hustling and bustling every day for them.’ With no records or gigs to promote, the Roses remained silent.
14.
Second Coming
It was almost a year since they had signed with Geffen, and over two years since they had recorded ‘One Love’, when the Roses finally started to record a new album. They were free of Evans and Jive/Zomba but, in the process of achieving this, had lost the momentum that had propelled their rise to the top.
The Rolling Stones Mobile had been one of the twelve studio ideas John Leckie had mooted when he had planned on recording this album in the summer of 1990. Now he tried to talk them out of the idea, suggesting more traditional studios in New York or Paris. The Rolling Stones Mobile was essentially a studio built in the back of a van. It had an impressive pedigree: the Stones had used it to record Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St., and Led Zeppelin for Led Zeppelin III, Led Zeppelin IV, Houses of the Holy and Physical Graffiti. Bob Marley and Deep Purple had also cut albums with the mobile unit.
Bowing to the band’s request, Leckie hired the Stones Mobile and parked it outside the secluded Old Brewery in Ewloe, Wales, where Leckie, the engineer, the band, and tour manager Steve Adge, would all live during this first four weeks of recording, beginning on 25 March 1992 and continuing until 22 April. The Old Brewery was on a hill next to Wepre Park, where the ruins of the historic Ewloe Castle stood. The Old Brewery was now run as a bed and breakfast by Sandy Finlay, and the Roses would record in the cellars underneath the main house where there was a natural echo. The main benefit was seclusion: Evans had threatened to burn down any studio he found the Roses using.
Finlay was delighted to have a solid booking for a month and tried his best to accommodate the band. ‘He said he used to be a chef but the food was terrible and it was always late,’
said Leckie. ‘Anything you didn’t eat the night before came back at you the next day with a layer of mash and melted cheese on it,’ said Mani, who admitted that following the death of his father he was in no fit shape to record. ‘My head was totally done in; a million miles away from where it should’ve been.’
Unlike the first album they’d recorded with Leckie, when they had all the songs virtually nailed down, for this new album the band only had three songs so far, all solo efforts by Squire, and they intended to use the time at Ewloe to conjure more. Brown was keen for the band to continue in a more groove-orientated direction. Squire had spent the better part of a year hooked on Public Enemy’s classic 1990 album Fear of a Black Planet. He had leaned on Simon Crompton, who made acid house records under the name Vanilla Sound Corps, to help him get to grips with sampling and sequencing. But now the idea of deconstructing and reassembling music in the vein of Public Enemy had lost its appeal. ‘Too much like a science lesson,’ he said.
The songs he brought to Ewloe – ‘Ten Storey Love Song’, ‘Breaking into Heaven’ and ‘Driving South’ – bore that out. Squire had gone back to guitar music ‘in any form that it came’, he said. ‘No matter what the trousers and haircuts were like.’ Brown was now almost exclusively listening to rap music, while Reni kept a foot in both camps. ‘Reni wasn’t an elitist in any way with regards to what he would listen to,’ Squire said. Lyrically these Squire solo compositions appeared to be playful and optimistic. ‘Breaking into Heaven’ seemed to take a sly dig at their new label-mates Guns N’ Roses, a band Brown had aggressively dismissed. ‘Driving South’ reanimated the age-old theme of selling your soul to the devil in exchange for musical prowess, as first explored on ‘I Wanna Be Adored’. It featured the lyrics ‘Well you’re not too young or pretty and you sure as hell can’t sing, any time you want to sell your soul, I’ve got a toll-free number you can ring.’
The band’s routine was to work through the night, retire to bed around eight or nine in the morning and start recording again around three or four in the afternoon. Leckie acknowledged that the Squire songs – apart from ‘Ten Storey Love Song’, which he called a ‘traditional Roses song’ – were radically different from the band’s previous material, but the recording of them went well. ‘My version of “Breaking into Heaven” was probably “Fools Gold” and “One Love” revisited,’ he said. ‘It was done to the same drum loop, anyway.’ Brown thought the song sounded good but recalled it being written over an Eric B. & Rakim beat. One thing all could agree on was that Reni was ready to roll. ‘When we started recording we had Reni playing the drums for 40 minutes and it was out of this world,’ Brown said. ‘I remember John Leckie turning around with a big beam on his face and saying, Can’t this be the album?’
‘Reni was always thinking of new ways of adding to the songs,’ said Leckie. ‘And it took very little time to do his drums. He’d bought lots of Tibetan cymbals and he used a lot of them on the “Breaking into Heaven” intro.’ Leckie had hired engineer Brian Pugsley, fresh from working with experimental dance outfit The Shamen, to give the group scope to explore sampling, drum machines and loops. As well as Public Enemy, the band were in thrall to Barry Adamson’s 1988 album Moss Side Story, particularly the track ‘Man with the Golden Arm’. It had a dense, rich sound, which the band sought to mine. ‘The atmosphere was quite experimental,’ said Pugsley. ‘We had fun with loops and various weird samples. Most of the loops came from Reni’s playing, with maybe a few off vinyl. The band hadn’t played live for a while and there were all kinds of very distracting stuff going on in their private lives. I think they wanted the space to experiment and see what came up.’
Out of this process came the album’s most radical track, ‘Begging You’, the only song on the album to be credited to Brown/Squire, and one that sounded like the perfect solution for a band searching for a musical direction. It was original and powerful, more danceable than Squire’s solo compositions. As Pugsley remembers it, ‘We did not see very much of John Squire in the mobile. He was mostly writing in his room while the band worked on the tracks we had to go on.’
The Roses worked hard and the mood at Ewloe was upbeat. The band relaxed playing games of Jenga, and Finlay gave them archery lessons. They also explored their remote surroundings and found a small outhouse on the property which was lived in by Geoff Dwight, half-brother of Elton John, and a prodigious cannabis smoker. ‘Ian and the band used to talk to him,’ said Leckie. ‘He hand-made acoustic guitars and mandolins.’ The Roses used some of Dwight’s instruments while indulging in late-night recording fun, jamming with a piano, violin and mandolin on a tune that would surface as a secret track on Second Coming.
Beside Public Enemy and Barry Adamson, the band’s listening also included Led Zeppelin, who had recorded the bulk of their 1970s material with the Stones Mobile unit. There were screenings of Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same, and talk of Reni’s love for the album Led Zeppelin IV, and of the Roses creating monster riffs to match Led Zeppelin – as Squire was attempting on ‘Driving South’. There was even talk of Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin’s infamous manager, being approached to replace Evans. Grant was said to have replied, ‘How wide do you want the flares to be?’
Brown was deeply suspect of this fixation: ‘I’m watching them watching Led Zeppelin and thinking, You’re all over these guys. They’ve not got that funk. They’ve not got what we’ve got. I thought, Don’t they realize where we are in history, who loves us? We were better and bigger than Led Zeppelin. We weren’t trying to be them old blues guys. I felt I was the only member of the band who knew how great we were, how much we meant to people. It was stupid sitting around worshipping lesser bands, really stupid.’
To complete the album a second session with the Stones Mobile unit was booked at Ewloe to begin in July. The band had planned to record ‘Where Angels Play’ on the album but had been forced to abandon the idea as Zomba continued to plunder the Roses’ back catalogue, including a rough demo of the track on a compilation album of A- and B-sides, Turns into Stone. Already in March 1992 Zomba had released ‘I Am the Resurrection’ as a single that peaked at number 33 in the UK charts and re-released ‘Fools Gold’, which reached number 73. Turns into Stone was out in July and peaked at number 32. Zomba also released a singles box set, and even issued ‘So Young’, the band’s 1985 debut single, on CD. This release prompted Brown and Steve Adge to visit Strawberry Studios and buy back the album they had recorded there the same year with Martin Hannett, intending to prevent its release.
When they reconvened at Ewloe in July, no new songs had been written in the two-month break. Leckie felt the band was missing the guiding hand of a manager: ‘Everything had fragmented. It was chaotic disorder.’ Squire often played guitar by himself to a click track or a drum machine. ‘Then it was endless overdubs,’ said Leckie. ‘John would go back to his room. Reni might go home to his kid. Mani would get stoned and go to the pub. Ian would hang about. John would say, Is this going to be the demo? And I’d say, No, it’s not – it’s the real thing.’ With money no object, and no new songs to work on, the Roses picked apart the already recorded material.
Leckie called Gersh at Geffen. ‘I told him, We’ve been here for three weeks and haven’t done anything. He’d say, Don’t worry, John, just carry on, let them be, how’s everything, how’s your wife? And change the subject.’ The session ended on a down when Evans showed up at the Old Brewery. ‘We were in the kitchen having some cornflakes, eight o’clock in the morning, and this car draws up through the farmyard and parks up over the back,’ said Leckie. ‘Everyone ducked and peeked though the curtains.’ Evans, and another man, sat outside in the car for a while and then drove off. ‘The next thing Steve Adge turned up with this security guy, a big tough army type, and he lived with us there for the next four or five days – and then we left. That was the end of Ewloe.’
The band were not looking for any input from Geffen, but Gersh was unconvinced by the Roses’ efforts. �
�They were the very rough beginning of something that sounded like a band in the process of making a record,’ he said. ‘I believe a fear had crept in. I’ve never really asked John [Squire] that question, but I believe that’s what happened and in some way, somehow, somebody became paralysed. That is the worst place to try and make a great record from.’
Gersh, like Leckie, felt the band needed management and advised them to meet with Peter Mensch and Cliff Burnstein, who managed Metallica, Def Leppard and Shania Twain. ‘They kept saying they wanted a manager but there was no real attempt to get one,’ Gersh said. Brown would later admit the band’s lack of a manager meant ‘we had no one to get us in line … It was just four chiefs and no Indians.’
Squire admitted the band made a ‘big mistake’ by sticking to the idea that the album had to be done before they did anything else. ‘We should have written a bit, recorded a bit, toured a bit, and I think the record would’ve come out a lot sooner. We were guilty of saying, Let’s sort everything out and then carry on. We lost momentum.’ Post-Ewloe, Squire became more insular, said Brown. ‘He cut himself off. I carried on writing my own things but he refused to work on anyone else’s stuff.’ Squire was having personal problems, as he dealt with being a new father and his long-term relationship with his partner Helen broke down.
The Stone Roses: War and Peace Page 23
