The Stone Roses, Experience and Memory

Few bands lodged themselves into the consciousness of a British youth generation as much as the Stone Roses. Emerging in the late 1980s with the single “Sally Cinnamon”, they seemed, for a brief shining moment, to embody the future of rock music itself. Yet the real measure of their importance is not the records but the reaction they can still summon.

Their reunion tour produced some of the most affecting scenes ever captured in a film about music. If ordinary rock documentaries capture the absurdity of the genre and, in good ones, the power of the music, the truly great ones show what the music meant to the people who grew up with it. That’s much harder to do, but it captures precisely what makes rock music so exhilarating.

Like all great cultural moments, the Stone Roses‘ generational importance was as much a historical contingency as a reflection of their inherent significance. By the late 1980s, British pop felt utterly sterile. The charts were dominated by the production-line efficiency of Stock, Aiken & Waterman, which, while ruthlessly effective, was aimed primarily at children.

Rock music had also effectively bifurcated into anti-ambition indie music and heavy metal, producing no new dominant British voice since Iron Maiden at the turn of the decade. (Look at the 1980s line-ups for the Monsters of Rock festival: they’re dominated by glam American bands). For teenagers seeking a tribal identity, the cultural landscape felt thin, corporate, or juvenile. The 1988 Brit Awards, with nominees like Chris Rea and Cliff Richard, looked less like the future (as good pop always should) than a tired provincial variety show.

The Stone Roses changed everything. They were ambitious, if not grandiose, and actively declared themselves the best band in the world. That sounded less like delusion than a statement of fact. Like all great bands, they arrived with their own style, with exquisite Byrds-style haircuts and baggy jeans. (This was when British metal bands were still dressing like Judas Priest!) They reinvigorated the melodic tradition of rock and the guitar tradition of pop. Their much-lauded acid house stylings were actually so much hype, their rhythms instead coming from 1960s psychedelia.

Like all truly great bands, the Stone Roses inaugurated a kind of cultural revolution. They did not argue with what had come before but made it obsolete. Groups that had seemed important only a year earlier suddenly looked tired, overblown, or faintly ridiculous. Every real movement in art requires this moment of destruction, when the past is cleared away to make space for the new, and although the wider “Madchester” explosion was often absurd and sometimes an obvious cash-in, the Stone Roses helped open the space in which the next phase of British culture — from acid house to Britpop — could emerge.

As with all significant bands, each member of the Stone Roses was vital. Ian Brown may have been a poor singer, but he was an incredible frontman and lyricist, dominating the stage like his hero, Bruce Lee, and bringing religious overtones to numerous songs that suited the moment of pie-eyed optimism. John Squire was easily the best British guitarist of his generation, moving from the divine chiming arpeggios of “Waterfall” to the electric funk of “Fool’s Gold” to the psychedelic jam freak-out of “I Am the Resurrection” with utter insouciance. He was also a tremendous painter, bringing Jackson Pollock spatterings to group artwork and his own guitars, furthering the sense of the band’s depth and sensibility.

Bassist Mani brought a delicious warmth and funk to a genre then still largely stuck in punk rigidity, and supplied beautiful counter-melodies to songs like “Waterfall” and “Sugar Spun Sister”. Reni’s drumming both underpinned the songs, playing just off the beat like Ringo Starr, and at times led the band, as on the jam section of “I Am the Resurrection” or the stunning chorus in “Made of Stone”; and he was also a brilliant backing vocalist, providing light and shade to the vocal melodies.

They knew how good they were. Squire’s description of “Made of Stone” must rank alongside the greatest quotes from musicians about their own songs. He said it was “about making a wish and watching it happen, like scoring the winning goal in a cup final on a Harley Electra Glide dressed as Spiderman”. I’ve had books and poems published, and I’ve never written anything that good.

Interviews with the Stone Roses at their peak are fascinating. In one famous 1989 Music Box interview, Brown and Squire sit opposite a young presenter and respond to her questions with shrugs, smiles and long silences. The effect is not arrogance but something closer to flirtation, while radiating a confidence so complete it borders on contempt, in the manner of young men who know that their moment has arrived.

Like great cultural moments, they left us wanting more. Their implosion after the much-delayed Second Coming (1994) was sad to witness, but meant the band did not ossify into obsolescence or banality. The dream remained. Somewhere in our hearts, it was always 1989, Joe Bloggs jeans were still cool, and the Roses remained the soundtrack to our first love, our first spliff, E or trip.

The Stone Roses’ reformation tour in 2012 came after Brown had had a fairly good solo career, Squire had underwhelmed with the Seahorses and solo albums, Mani had joined Primal Scream, and Reni had done nothing of note. Brown and Squire, whose relationship as the songwriters was the band’s main engine, had fallen out completely in the late 1990s. (Brown’s first solo album contains some barely hidden attacks on Squire).

However, after meeting at a funeral, they rebuilt. With the group having fizzled out rather than imploding, the reunion felt like the reopening of something long sealed, a door most fans had assumed would never be unlocked. The documentary film The Stone Roses: Made of Stone (2013), directed by Shane Meadows and made to accompany the tour, captures this strange atmosphere perfectly. Especially in the early warm-up show at Warrington Parr Hall, a small, almost old-fashioned venue, the intimacy allows the camera to linger on the audience.

In that cramped venue, you can see the faces clearly. These are not teenagers aching for their future to begin, but men and women who have been through the mill: receding hairlines, lined faces, the expressions of people who have worked, married, divorced, worried about money, buried parents, raised children. Philip Larkin once wrote of the ageing jazz audience he loved, “men in whom a pile of scratched coverless 78s in the attic can awaken memories of vomiting blindly from small Tudor windows to Muggsy Spanier’s “Sister Kate’, or winding up a gramophone in a punt to play Armstrong’s ‘Body and Soul’; men whose first coronary is coming like Christmas; who drift, loaded helplessly with commitments and obligations and necessary observances, into the darkening avenues of age and incapacity, deserted by everything that once made life sweet”.

The crowd at Warrington has something of the same look. They stand with pints in their hands, a little heavier, men in Stone Island or polo shorts, women no longer slight and with tattoos on their upper arms. As a warm-up, “French Kiss” by Lil Louis – one of the first ever trance records – plays, and something very deep hits them. Not youth returned, but the memory of youth located again, like finding a familiar street in a city you thought you had left behind forever.

Somewhere on YouTube, there’s a video of an older woman who was once a ballerina, incapacitated by age and infirmity, being played the swooning climax to Tchaikovsky’s Romeo & Juliet. Suddenly, the music transports her, her arms stretch out, her eyes sharpen, her back stiffens, and once again the music flows through her like voltage. Something similar happens when the opening chords of the Stone Roses’ “I Want to Be Adored” start their ominous crawl. It isn’t euphoria, and it isn’t nostalgia. It is the rush of pure memory, the sudden transportation back to the prime of your youth. It is an affirmation of the purest kind: I am here. I am alive. I am not my job, or my kids, or my possessions. I am my loves, my passions, my music.

The gig is fantastic. Ian Brown has learned to sing. He holds the audience like a prime championship boxer, with a chutzpah that Liam Gallagher can only dream of imitating. It’s not swagger so much as utter communication, everyone’s agreement that that first album somehow aspired to divinity. The room vibrates with passion as everyone sings their hearts out. The film repeatedly turns away from the stage and back towards the crowd, showing men with thinning hair and weathered skin shouting every word, and women closing their eyes and smiling in a way that is half joy and half disbelief. The camera lingers on these expressions longer than most concert films would dare, as if the real subject is not the performance but the attempt to capture what it all meant.

The full reunion tour that followed was far less perfect, and the film does not hide the strain. The Stone Roses, older now and long unused to one another, never quite recaptured the effortless unity they once projected. Reni in particular seemed restless, at times walking off stage mid-show, as if the weight of expectation had become too much to carry. There were nights when the playing felt stiff, the old chemistry flickering rather than blazing. Yet the scale of the response only grew.

The vast homecoming shows in Manchester, followed by huge crowds in Glasgow and Dublin, made it clear that whatever tensions existed within the band, the audience had never let go. Thousands sang every word, with the intensity of people who already knew exactly what the songs meant to them. If the Warrington gig showed memory in close-up, these stadium nights showed its full force: the sound of a moment that had passed, but had never really disappeared.

The Stone Roses’ songs remain capable of summoning emotions of extraordinary power. Here once again you can dance all night, hold all the future in your arms, and drink from the clear, imperturbable well of youth. You thought it would last forever, and it didn’t. Well, everyone makes the same mistake. It would take a heart made of stone not to feel the poignancy of hearing it all return, knowing that the moment itself cannot.

When I was editor of an English-language magazine in Beijing, some of my colleagues had been assigned to look after Ian Brown when he played a gig in the city a few years earlier. They took him to the local Irish bar and did the weekly pub quiz with him. They told me, “He knows a lot about ABBA.” Even divinities, it seems, have their human side.