The second single from dream team Gallagher-Squire is out and starts with a warbly solo straight out of the Silvertone-era of the Stone Roses and shimmies into a catchy chorus, the likes of which first made Liam Gallagher a star. I like that these two know what they do well and double-down and triple-down on it for all the chips on the table.
It was trendy–nay, required–that famous people of the 90s hate being famous. Not for Liam Gallagher or his now estranged brother. If anyone loved being famous it was the Gallaghers, and they let you know it in every interview. So it’s no surprise to me to see Liam lean on that fame with a video stuffed to the brim with clips from his days in Oasis and Squire’s days in the Stone Roses. They know why we’re interested in this partnership and they’re going to deliver it until we’re sweaty and tired.
The first two singles from the duo have piqued interest enough that I am genuinely excited for the release of the full monty. I’m old enough not to care if it doesn’t hit the same highs as their previous bands and will be happy to sit back and pick from it what I can. Gallagher and Squire will happily serve it in splatters and swells.
A few years ago a friend and coworker asked me, a dedicated Beatles fanatic, why I would support Manchester City as my Premier League team. Shouldn’t it be Liverpool, if anyone? Well, I guess so, yeah. But I told him that my gateway to EPL wasn’t the Fabs at all, but an entirely different branch of my musical family tree: Johnny Marr. Because he was a very vocal City fan and I was a very vocal fan of his, I went the way of the Blue.
But all family trees are complicated and sometimes families disagree. And so it comes with great frustration that a new collab from The Stone Roses is not with City, but their cross-town rivals, Manchester United!
Launched this week with a cool short video featuring players from throughout United’s modern era lauding the Old Trafford (the Man U home pitch) over The Stone Roses’ “This Is The One” is a handy piece of marketing. Football/Soccer culture is steeped in tradition and nostalgia, so it’s a pretty nice stroke to create this pairing. James Holroyd, Chief Commercial Development Officer at Manchester United, summed it up: “This collection recognises our joint histories in a way that connects with both older fans and the new generation of supporters.”
Watch the video below and check out the entire line here.
If you‘ve watched any documentaries on the nascent punk scene in England in the 70s you have heard the story of how it seems every band that mattered had its start at one event: Sex Pistols’ appearance at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England, on June 4, 1976. Accounts vary, of course because that’s how legends are, but it’s generally agreed that around 40 people were at this event. And despite a relatively small showing, the number of bands formed from this one event is astonishing. They include Joy Division, The Smiths and The Fall, all who had members in attendance at the show. It was a watershed moment for indie and punk music and a watershed moment for Manchester in particular.
Fast forward 20-odd years and you have another watershed moment with The Stone Roses at Spike Island, an event that looms large in brit pop history and can also be pinned as the moment Oasis formed as an idea.
“Maybe it was the drugs, but I think it was the music as well. I remember seeing them at Blackpool, Spike Island, and it was just… it’s youth, innit – you look back and nothing will ever compare to it: you’re young, you’ve got no kids, if you’ve got a job, who gives a fuck? You’ve got no bills to pay, you’re going back home to your mam, she’s cooking you breakfast, fucking life is free and easy, you know what I mean? And when you hear it, you go back to them times.”
This is what Liam Gallagher said when serving as editor of the first edition of NME Gold– a 100-page selection of exclusive interviews and features. Noel Gallagher was there too and has gone as far as describing the Stone Roses at Spike Island as “the blueprint” for Oasis. It was…a moment.
And now it’s come full circle with Liam Gallagher and The Stone Roses guitarist John Squire announcing a new album, and a single out next month. Gallagher in particular has been teasing this partnership for months in tweets and interviews, but it seems we’re finally Here Now.
Supergroups are a tricky thing. Great tastes don’t always taste great together, but I’m excited to hear it and am happy to just to see John Squire putting out new music.
The first single, “Just Another Rainbow,” will be released on Jan. 5 and a 7? can be pre-ordered via their website.
It’s day-whatever in the never ending 2020 election and despite the long, drawn out process, there aren’t really any surprises. Sure, expectations weren’t met as far as a blue wave sweeping across the Senate and state houses, but those expectations were more wishes and dreams than realistic results. We are, after all, in a country where a lunatic has maintained a 40+ percent approval rating. In the end, the characters are playing their parts as we would expect, as in a trite sitcom, which is maybe all we are anyways.
Sitcoms have a formula and one of the truest components of that formula is the Golden Moment (known in the biz as the “moment of shit,”) where all the loose ends are bound up and the lessons of the day are learned. Here we are as a nation at our moment of shit and I have to wonder what lessons have we learned?
First: A Beginning
There’s been a bit of chatter out there about Abraham Lincoln and his first inaugural address. The south had seceded and Lincoln wanted to cool shit down and speak directly to those people who’d left the Union. Lincoln knew that the cost of a civil war would be terrible (though ultimately a cost we’d have to carry) and tried to plead with the south to reconsider:
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Lincoln was an optimist. He believed in the human spirit and that deep, deep down we are good people, bonded more by what we have in common than divided by our differences.
From Ripples, due March 1 on Virgin EMI. Single out now on Black Koi.
In June, 2017 Ian Brown teased an audience at what is to date, the Stone Roses’ last show. As things at Hampden Park in Glasgow came to a close, Brown reportedly said, “Don’t be sad it’s over, be happy that it happened.”
Nobody from the band has commented on if the band has broken up again, let alone why, but by looking at the first video from Brown’s new album we can venture a guess: “I don’t need ’em.”
Cruising around on a low-rider bike to a clavichord-driven jam, Ian Brown stops by the riverside to occasionally noodle out the various bits of the song. First a three-note guitar solo, then the heavily Mani-like bass line, and finally a quick shot of Ian behind the kit. It all ends in dramatic fashion as Brown tosses a guitar into the river, perhaps a not-too-subtle message for John Squire?
All things considered, it’s a cool song. But I can’t help wondering how it would sound with the backing of his bandmates. It seems tailor made for Squire’s wah funk guitar work, and maybe somewhere in the vaults is a version of just that? Given the unpredictability of the Roses, we may never know. Or we might? Who knows?
In the meantime, go for a ride with the Monkey King and let’s hope the rest of the album is this cool.
Well, the NME has done it again. Whether through constant haranguing via the publication of rumors, amazing sources with inside information, or dumb luck and wishful thinking, the voice of British music news has seemingly brought about another reunion. And this is no ordinary reunion, but one of the least likely and most wanted among anglophiles: The Stone Roses.
After 17 years, the band that launched Madchester will play two confirmed dates in June, 2012 and then a reported “world tour” to follow. Additional dates have not been announced and this is where I get worried: June is a long ways away and the Roses have never been the most reliable band. Not to be a buzz kill on your ecstasy-fueled rave, but a lot can happen in eight months…or worse, nothing at all.
The Stone Roses, October 2011
The Stone Roses’ fame begins in earnest in the summer of 1989 when their debut album spread its druggy-pop sensibilities around the world, from one hip record store to another until little baggy jean communities popped up like pimples on a fresh face. Despite their legend, the Roses were never a HUGE band on the scale of U2 or Depeche Mode, but their influence was felt and it was deep. The release of their nearly ten minute dance-rock classic “Fool’s Gold” (originally the b-side to “What the World Was Waiting For”) established the band among the hip as THE BAND of the moment, especially in the UK where they were a big commercial success.
Whether tempted by dollar signs or friendlier confines, the Stone Roses decided it was time to leave their label Silvertone and fulfill their promise to rule the world. Little did they, or anyone else, know that they’d be tied down in court for four years unable to release new material until they’d extracted themselves from a five-year contract.
Never one humbled by their fame, The Stone Roses finally returned with their second album, The Second Coming. While aging better than initial reviews would have you believe, it was less than rapturous and the band finally broke down in 1996 when guitarist John Squire left the band barely a year after drummer Reni had already called it quits. It was a whimpering end to a spectacular band.
For nearly two decades the band’s image grew beyond its actual history and a band with two albums and a handful of singles was now revered as “the last great British band.” Nobody—not Oasis, not The Libertines, not The Arctic Monkeys—could touch their legacy. It was such that John Squire scrawled the following words on a piece of his art in 2009:
“I have no desire whatsoever to desecrate the grave of seminal Manchester pop group The Stone Roses.”
Which leads us to this week. Rumors of their reunion have come and gone for years. It seemed ridiculous to even consider given the public acrimony between Squire and singer Ian Brown. But time heals and here we are. And make no mistake, I am excited. Enough that I have already declared that I will break my top price ceiling of $50 to see any artist live. I will do what I must to see any US dates. But I am worried. The Stone Roses were never a great live band. Ian Brown’s not a strong vocalist and Squire’s guitar playing hasn’t been heard in years. Reni himself said that drummers should hang up their sticks when they hit 35—this was AT the press conference announcing their reunion!
But let’s not dwell on all that. One of the pillars of musical upbringing has reunited to shower us in their house music-inspired pop. Let’s rave on and hope that the wheels don’t come off until we’ve had a chance to dirty up our baggies and sway in our bucket hats one more time.
That summer was my own personal season in Hell. I’d just finished my freshman year of college and found myself back in my hometown not for another summer hurrah, but working third-shift at a soap factory while my friends were playing lifeguard at the local pools or hustling ice cream to suburban moms. To top it off my girlfriend had just dumped me…again.
The first time could be forgiven since we’d never broached the subject of exclusivity. I guess that was because I assumed she was as enamored with me as I was with her and simply couldn’t contemplate another person in the mix. I was wrong.
I first found out about it at a bonfire party out by the gravel pits on the outskirts of town. Someone had a boombox that was blaring “Life is a Highway” while the Coors Light and wine coolers took hold. Some people tried to feign horror that such a song would even get air-time but the truth was that song and so many others like it were the life blood of the radio dials. It was awful, yes, but it also held a supreme position on the soundtrack of that summer despite not even being a new song. It was inescapable.
It seems silly now, ludicrous even, but at the time I swear it was not only plausible…it almost worked.
In December 1991 I flew to the UK to meet up with Jake, who was on foreign study in Aberdeen, Scotland. It was my first solo foray out of the country and the realization of a lifelong Anglophile dream. The foundation of my friendship with Jake was based on our mutual love for The Beatles, and by extension, British musical culture. Our obsession for the Fabs morphed into an obsession with The Smiths and eventually Madchester bands like The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays. High on our list of tour stops was Manchester, the home to so many of our heroes.
Because of my cheekbones, people think I’m a crackhead. When the Roses first came out, the early reviews used to call me simian. I had to look that up at the time. Then they used to call me androgenous. Then somewhere down the line, through all the Madchester thing, it became, “He’s a crackhead.” I’ve never even tried crack, I’ve never taken heroin. I didn’t start smoking weed until I was 22.
So there you have it, straight from the monkey’s mouth. Ian Brown is a square…with crackhead cheekbones.
