The Stone Roses - The Band That Saved Brit-Pop
by Mikel Jollet | 00.00.0000

The year that changed everything in Britain was 1989. You have to understand what a fucking revelation the Stone Roses were at the time. You had the British charts mired in the fey, tired or grandiose musings of Simple Minds, the Pet Shop Boys and, of course, U2. All of them standing there on stage in large arenas mooning for cameras with their largesse, their indifference, their embrace of all things pop and manufactured and W R O N G--and along comes this moppy-headed, baggy-panted guitar rock band with this psychedelically tuneful music and grand pronouncements to just tear the entire fucking thing down. They sprung from the crowd itself, the beaten, dark streets of working class Manchester (home of the Smiths, by God), determined to level the playing field with their optimism, their self-assurance. "I am the resurrection and I am the light" and "The past was yours but the future's mine" and "It's curtains for you [Queen] Elizabeth, my dear." It was cocky and it was brash and fuck if the music wasn't just perfect: hummable and danceable and brand-spanking new and timeless, the hordes of believers swaying joyfully at shows on ecstasy (because there's always a drug involved whenever music's called a "movement") during that summer of love (and the next one) on Spike Island, on the British charts, in the night clubs, on Top of the Pops, refusing the infamous Wogan Show, refusing to play dates with the Rolling Stones. They were Nirvana. They were the Strokes. They were the Beatles.

And, of course, like all tragic heroes, they were doomed.

The blessing is the curse. In Sophocles, in pop psychology, in sports, in art, in family, in love, in anything worth caring about. And these guys were blessed with an amazing bassist (Gary "Mani" Mounfield --who carried dreamy psych-love ballads as well as acid house grooves with equal skill), blessed with the best drummer since Keith Moon (Alan "Reni" Wren--a fucking master who drew the Kangol-capped hordes of Roses fans up into the heady fray to move, to groove, to dance), blessed with the best songwriting team (in Ian Brown and John Squire) since John Lennon and Paul McCartney. (Excepting, perhaps, Morrissey and Marr--though that's up for debate). They were blessed with self-assurance. They were blessed with fuck-all success with their debut album The Stone Roses which eventually grossed over 75 million dollars and found its way permanently placed on list after list of top albums of the century. But mostly, they were blessed with the music to back it up: the difference between hyperbole and bona fide truth, between, in this case at least, a story of optimism meeting reality and one of actual tragedy.

A lawsuit with Silvertone records (who kept all the profits from the first album), drug abuse (cocaine and hell, whatever else was around), ego-clashing (with John Squire mostly who demanded the rest of the band fall in line), broken bones, broken teeth, broken friendships (between John and Ian who'd been friends since age four), the inevitable press horse-whipping of the sophomore album, Second Coming, which took five whole years to complete. On the eve of their first show to support album Reni left the band, John Squire followed soon after and the whole thing came crashing down in a cloud of ugly press, hurt feelings, and over 100,000 fans at the Reading Festival in 1996 (some weeping) at the pitiful site of their once vaulted heroes standing there on stage, ghosts of their prior eminence. John Squire started Seahorses and sold a lot of records. Mani joined Primal Scream. Reni disappeared off the face of the earth and Ian Brown ended up in prison for a trumped-up charge of air rage.

He got out, of course. Two months later. And began a prolific solo career. And Mani and John still tour. And they've all grown and made some sense of it. But fans still yearn for a follow-up, for the old days, for the belief and the desire to change. And British music still quakes from the shockwave that the band wrought upon the disinterested landscape. In these exclusive Filter interviews with Ian Brown and Mani—the avatars of that fateful year in British music—speak up on what was, what wasn't and what might have been if only Roses were, in fact, made of Stone.

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Ian Brown was the lead singer of the Stone Roses.

I wanted to start by asking you about Unfinished Monkey Business, your first solo album. I mean, living with the publicly-scrutinized persona you had at the time, after the Roses broke up and everyone was wondering what would happen next, it must have been odd to just lay it out such raw vulnerability and anger for everyone like that.
Ian Brown: The only thing that kept it out of number one [on the U.K. charts] was the Titanic soundtrack. And that was one of the biggest albums of all time. Because of this legacy with this group, I thought the best thing is for someone to just hear me sitting on the end of me bed. I wanted it to have this real homemade sound to it. To make it more intimate. It was a lot of fun, you know. All the time with the Stone Roses I thought we were going to be so successful, but as a soloist I really had no idea. It's even more fun for me now because I don't feel any sort of pressure as the ex-Stone Roses guy with some legacy to live up to. If a tune's got me, it's got me the same as it did 10 years ago. I think eventually my own greatest hits will be better than the Stone Roses' greatest hits.

Yeah. Um, a lot of your fans still see you as some kind of God. Is that weird?
It's just water off a dog's back. All that hero-worship is just water off the dog's back. I expended so much energy when the Stone Roses first came out trying to convince kids, you know, "Don't worship us. We don't want to be a band on a stage." Even now I feel like that. I want to be the kid that's supplying the music in the place. The band and audience are one; that was the policy of the Stone Roses.

When the Stone Roses started, you had in the mind the goal of ending the days where everyone stares up at Bono or whoever. It was a reaction against all the bullshit the music industry seems to supply.
Right. We wanted to be a part of a community. Not on a pedestal above it.

That was a beautiful thing about the Stone Roses. But if you look at the trajectory of the band, from a meteoric rise to hyperbolic fame to the infighting, drug use, clashing egos--in many ways the Stone Roses took the hardest fall into that abyss of rock excess and its trappings that any band has ever taken. Which is wildly ironic, since the whole point of the band was to destroy that idea.
[Pausing for a moment, then thoughtfully] That's right. God made us, then destroyed us.

I wonder if the reason is because it's the nature of the industry to encourage that idolatry and ego and a band like U2 accepts that, whereas you never could.
Yeah, you're right. That's right. They accept that. I think with U2, each man's got a job and he understands it and he's not jealous of the next man's job. Each man's happy with what he's got and what he's receiving. And he doesn't need anymore. I think my guy probably wanted a little more because he did the artwork, perhaps he thought he wasn't getting enough attention. Half the crowd have got a hat on like the drummer. But when they mention the Stone Roses, they just pin up my picture. I think that's something that's in men anyway, in'it? To get another guy to do a job with him is tough. It's hard to find three guys, to find four is almost impossible. For a band, a job, whatever it is.

Do you think it was the idealism of the Stone Roses that led to their downfall? Your idealism, in specific, which essentially said, "It's not about these things." And the entire fucking history of the music industry saying, "Actually, Mr. Brown, it is."
Yeah, I do. That's true. These days, I just feel lucky because I'm still able to make my own music. However I want. Whenever I want. I don't get all up on anything on the music industry because I know it's just designed to take the pocket money that youth in the West have got. It's designed to do that. The main battle is for your ideas to remain concentrated and not to be diluted along the way. I just decided that before I got into making solo records, that I would have complete control over it, from the sounds right down to the sleeves.

That's interesting. David Bowie said the same thing. That at one point he had to just be an artist and forget about being a product, a symbol, a businessman.
I wish I'd thought about being a businessman. I wish I'd had a suit and tie on instead of a leather jacket. David seemed to know that, you know.

It's insane. The first Stone Roses album grossed something like 50 million pounds. And from that you've seen...
About 25 thousand pounds between us. We get paid for radio plays, but we've never been paid for sales.

Even Spike Island, you only broke even on that.
No one thought we'd get anyone there. Thirty-thousand people showed up and we never got paid and then we found out that the manager stole 200,000 pounds. Because we made sure when the tickets were sold that there was no profit, that we broke even.

Growing up your hero was Muhammad Ali and you’ve talked about boxers like Smokin' Joe Frazier. I'm wondering, given the struggles and triumphs you've faced, it sort of follows the arc of the life of a boxer. You know, he's in, he's out—always trying to shoot for that heavyweight title. Do you ever see yourself that way?
I think boxers are amazing great guys, to go into a ring alone like that. I wish I had the balls to do that. But I don't like fighting. I once did boxing training and after two years, I realized it's not about learning how to take a punch, it was about liking taking punches. And I didn't.

You took a lot of punches in the mid-‘90s.
Yeah, I got jumped in Japan by Australian body-builders. They took four teeth out. I got jumped in me own town by a doorman. I got beat up on the street by a guy with a metal bar. I avoided violence until the age of 32, and then within a year I got a proper beating like three times.

What were they all so pissed off about?
I'd have to say the thing about all of this is just pure jealousy. The first two guys didn't even speak to me, they just literally attacked me. It was jealousy because I was known. Some bad fucking nights. I took like 25-30 kicks to the head.

It's funny because in the United States, you're more likely to get shot or killed. But in the U.K. you're much more likely to get your ass kicked. People are much more confrontational.
Yeah. But you know, I don't usually get that. It hasn't happened since '96 or '97. I've never had any trouble apart from those three incidents.

You once said about ecstasy that the best thing it did was end football hooliganism. So much had been written about the Stone Roses and ecstasy.
I still think it did end football hooliganism. I haven't touch Class A drugs since 1991. Cocaine, heroin and ecstasy.

Watching what cocaine did to John Squire in the demise of the Stone Roses was really quite tragic.
I thought that's what the old school did was all become cokeheads. I thought with this exciting new band it would never touch us. Coke was the old dinosaur. It was disappointing.

Have things mellowed between you and John Squire since the Roses broke up?
Super mellow. I haven't spoken to him since 1996 when he called me up and told me he was quitting the band. He's never called me. I've had the same phone number since then. We were never in an argument, you know. He just phoned me up out of the blue one day and said, "I'm quitting. I don't want to play guitar no more." Then the next day I read that he'd formed a new group. I'd known the kid since he was 14 and I thought the least he could do is come down and tell me face to face, sit and talk to me. We'd come from nowhere, we'd gone around the world together, surely I'm worth more than just a phone call.

Do you think John Squire is a casualty of the excess of the music industry?
Having heard his latest solo LP, I'd have to say yeah. There were roadies that said it's like a blizzard around him, there's so much coke, that he's just a shadow of his former self. I wouldn't know because I haven't talked to him.

Do you get asked constantly if there is going to be a reunion?
Yeah, it comes up. It really feels like a lifetime ago. It's really not on my mind. It's not really one of my ambitions. My big ambition is to write an LP for a girl singer. I'm looking for a girl like Sinead O'Connor, someone who can sing but is also kind of a rebel.

I read The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner recently and seeing prison through the context of that book, I was wondering if you thought there was something purifying about the suffering you had to undergo in jail.
I was jailed for words I was supposed to say that I didn't say. I feel like if I'd paid for a London lawyer, I wouldn't have been put in the situation I was. But I just decided, "I'm innocent. I've not done it. That's gonna show through. I'm gonna get in the witness box and they’re gonna see the truth." I suppose it was a little naive. I should have gotten a really flush lawyer to come in and get me off like the guy from R.E.M. did, when he got Bono in the witness box for him.

When you got out you wrote a lot of songs so I guess there was something to it.
Yeah, for me art it worked, if you want. [Laughs] But I could have done without it. I'm sure those tunes would have come anyway.

So besides penning an album for a woman, do you have any other grand ambitions?
I'm in the next Harry Potter film. It's not an ambition to be an actor but I'm a friend of the director. He's a Mexican guy and he offered me the part and I said I'll do it.

That's brilliant. What are you playing?
I'm a wizard. But I'm not a gothic wizard. He wanted me to be a bohemian romantic wizard. I've got, like, gold teeth and there's all these special effects. I had a trailer and a golf cart and all that thing. It was really good to be a movie star for a day.

Do you have any desire to get out of the music industry? You once called it the "filthiest business in the universe."
I do always have that desire. But I suppose my desire for making music must be bigger. So I'm still here.

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Gary "Mani" Mounfield was the bassist for the Stone Roses.

What was your first memory of being with the Stone Roses?
Mani: I remember the first gig we played for something like 13 people. Then the second night in Birmingham we played for even less. Then we returned to Manchester and played for something like 1200 people. We went from the sublime to the ridiculous in a matter of a couple of days.

What was the relationship like between the guys in the band at the beginning?
We were very tight. We used to have this thing we called the Egg. Where we were inside the Egg and everyone else was pecking away at the shell on the outside. We lived and we died for each other. Gang mentality was very important to us.

What about recording the first album, The Stone Roses. Were you looking at each other after recording something and just saying, "Fuck, that was good"?
We always knew we were on to something, even when everyone else was ignoring us. Even before we got our first deal, we knew we were going to be huge. A lot of people used to mistake that for arrogance, but we just had the most unbelievable self-belief.

So when the album came out, was there a sense of an immediate change? You were such a monumental phenomenon.
It was a vindication, in a way. The LP started out kind of slowly, you know. The NME gave it a three out of 10, or something ridiculous like that.

Holy shit. Really? That's fucking hilarious.
Something like that. Nothing really complimentary. And the next thing, a whole movement started up. And we were in the center of it all. Great Britain, at that time, '88-'89 was a time of great change. Great Britain used to be a really violent place but then the drug [ecstasy] came and kind of calmed everyone down. Gave them a bit of unity. Kids from all over were getting into it. It was more of a movement than just a band. There was a lot more to it than just music.

Did all this success affect the relationships within the band? I think around this time John Squire started doing a lot of coke.
You know, there are a lot of things that have been said about John and his cocaine. But I don't see that he had much of a drug problem. I don't think anyone did. Maybe we used to smoke a little bit too much weed. I think that can be as destructive as anything else. But I don't think anyone ever really sold out to coke. I know Ian's got a bee in his bonnet about John and his coke. But me and Ian Brown used to snort coke like it was going out of fashion.

There was quite a bit of struggle during the time between the two records.
We were getting songs in the pop charts at number two and number four and the next thing we knew, the fucking wheels are off. We were injuncted by the record label so we couldn't write or record. It was two years of just suspended animation. Once you lose the impetus, it's really difficult to regenerate. It was horrible. People start drifting apart. People started moving away and having children and the priorities changed a little. It's just part of the process of growing up, man. It's a natural thing for people to drift apart.

During this period, the five years between the two albums, John really wanted to take a more active role—telling people which bass part to play or which drum part to play. Ian's perspective on it was something like, "Well, he's a great musician and we've got 10 records to go so lets just let him get it out of his system for now."
Yeah, that's basically what happened. But I think we let him get away with too much control there for a while. That was pretty strange, because it had always been a pretty collective thing. But then John assumed the mantle and it would come to the point where I'd be coming up with bass lines and he'd say, "That's not what I wanted at all." It may have been a bad thing to let him do that. Maybe someone should have just put his fucking foot down and said, "Wait a minute here, buddy. This isn't your show. It's all of us." But nobody did.

But you don't, like Ian, think that was a result of his drug habit?
No, not at all. I just think John's a very very highly motivated guy. You know, truthfully myself, Ian and Reni could sit down and be lazy and just smoke and take ecstasy with each other and look at the birds in the sky. But John was the kind of guy where he would just lock himself in the studio or his room and work. He's a very focused guy where the rest of us were more into life.

Were you surprised by the response Second Coming got? There was so much anticipation for that record.
It was doomed from the word go. It could never surpass the first one, because there was so much of a weight of expectation on it. But I think that album stands up. It's the sound of a band that's matured. I'm proud of it.

John left the band before the supporting tour for Second Coming. You left later after attempting the tour.
Yeah, I stopped playing because that was a devastating blow—to lose one of your best mates. Ian was fucking heartbroken. I hated John for a little while for doing that. But with the benefit of hindsight, I can understand his reasons for doing it.

What do you think they were?
He wanted to go for himself, I suppose. I truly think that maybe someone at Geffen was getting in his head and saying, "It's you. These guys are fucking nothing." I may be wrong about that. It was devastating. And I wasn't about to jump ship and drop Ian at that time so I decided to give it a go, just as a bit of solidarity with the kid because I love him and he's my brother. Maybe it was a wrong thing for us to do, maybe we should have just quit then. But we gave it a go. We're fighters. Things in life don't always work out. But you look at the guy now [Ian] and he's more into music and life than he ever has been. Same as myself. Same as John. I think from bad situations good things can come. I think we're all singularly enjoying ourselves as much as we ever did.

I know John and Ian are still not talking.
You know, they're both grown men and they're both fucking fathers and they should just get together in a room and kiss and makeup. Because at the end of the day, music's music, but friendship is all. I'm still friends with all the guys. People should just put the shit behind them. Every day I walk down the street people ask me if we're going to re-form and all that. It's still hot news, for people in Britain especially. One day I would really love to. Just to fucking do it right. It's heartbreaking to see two people who've grown up together not communicating anymore. At the end of the day, it's only music.

It's ironic that the Stone Roses started off as this almost utopian project of peace, happiness and love, then devolved into something which was very much the opposite.
Well, there comes a time when the party has to stop, man. Even if in an ideal world, we don't want it to. I think that's happened with every great band in the world. They all drift apart. They all want different things. There's a lot of interference from outside forces. There's nothing you can do. We always said we'd run it as long as we enjoyed it and once we started enjoying it, we called it a day.