John Robb - The Stone Roses and the Resurrection of British Pop

and the Resurrection of British Pop

John Robb

The Stone Roses revolutionised British pop. Think back... there hadnt been a great British street band, a peoples band, since punk rock. And it took a band from Manchester, after an awkward couple of years trying to find their direction, to suddenly flower, fusing dance and rock with natural ease. Embracing their rock n roll past while looking to the future, their LP The Stone Roses is acknowledged as one of the most important albums of all time.

In this fully revised and updated edition of The Stone Roses and the Resurrection of British Pop, John Robb takes us on an exhilirating journey from the heady early days of the Roses to their emergence as an inspiration to a generation.

Setting the blueprint for the resurgence of UK rock n roll in the 1990s, the Roses inimitable style continues to influence bands well into the new century. This classic biography puts the band in their rightful place in musical history.

JOHN ROBB first met an embryonic Stone Roses in the post-punk fall-out of the early eighties when his band used to rehearse next door to theirs. As a result he was the first journalist to document their remarkable rise to the top in a series of articles for the national music press and attended show after classic show that saw them change the face of British music.

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Epub ISBN 9781409034186
Version 1.0

Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing,
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London SW1V 2SA

Ebury Press is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

Copyright John Robb 2001

John Robb has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This edition published by Ebury Press in 2001
First published in Great Britain in 1997

www.eburypublishing.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 009187887 X

Andy McQueen the true believer, Jake Lingwood, Maria Cosgrove, The Gold Blade Gambinos, Peter Garner, Andy Couzens, Hall Or Nothing, Dave Simpson, Will Odell, The Roses Nation.

Roses fansite I Am Without Shoes
http://odell.connect-2.co.uk

Roses fansite Hobbits stone roses heaven
http://www.ianbrown.freeserve.co.uk

John Robb
http://www.johnrobb.co.uk

The Stone Roses were the most legendary band of the late 1980s. They changed British pop by putting a cool street band back into the mainstream; they made pop and guitars cool again. They tried to operate outside the pop system and got themselves bogged down in a morass of court cases, bad career moves and chemical lifestyles.

And then they grew up and realised that they werent really friends any more.

Just like real life really.

They were part of their times, but they were also a catalyst for the future. They took trad guitar music and breathed new life into it, and when they put out Fools Gold they virtually invented the perfect 1990s pop record.

This was a book that had to be written. Its a book about the band, the lifestyle. Its written from the streets of Manchester, and shares the same rehearsal rooms and venues, even the claustrophobic tour bus during their slow and grubby rise to the top; it staggers around Ed out of its head at their climax, and it sits around waiting for something to happen in their five-year stretch of doing nothing very much. It tracks the last stand and the downfall; and it enjoys their solo years, basically its there at every stage, tracking the myth of The Stone Roses, feeling the force of a peoples band pushed into the mainstream and beyond.

It grows up with the band from punk, through mod and the teenage gang wasteland, through the dreary 1980s, and explosion of good time that was acid house, and on into the 1990s.

It was a bastard difficult book to write, as looking at the past through a cloud of righteous skunk had warped many minds. But in this updated and revised edition Ive elicited loads more new information, got the Roses to do some reminiscing and the result is the most complete and detailed history of this seminal band. Its a good job that I was there and sharp as fuck, or this tale of pop perfection would have been lost in the mists of time.

John Robb

And then suddenly the 1980s were over; the dreariest pop decade on record was finally getting the big heave-ho. The signs were all around: acid house had scorched the minds of a new generation, the iron curtain was crumbling, Ecstasy was all over the place opening the doors to a drug binge that dwarfed that of the 1960s. Meanwhile, Manchesters The Stone Roses (along with fellow home-town pop hooligans, The Happy Mondays), ignored for so long, were getting ready to gatecrash the pop party.

And it was here in the flash Empress Ballroom in Blackpool on 12 August 1989 that the first rumblings that something was stirring in rocknroll and about to headbutt its way into the mainstream were being felt. The ornate Victoriana was filled with mad fuckers, indie heads, stoners and house fiends looking for some rocknroll crossover.

Suddenly The Smiths seemed to be a long time ago. In pop a few months can seem like a lifetime. Here were new gods for old, bowl cuts for quiffs, baggy cuts replacing indie styles. This was the dawning of a new pop era.

Manchester had been backing the Roses for several years but now it was time to go overground, to go beyond the cult underground status that had trapped any cool band from the last ten years.

The thousands of fans milling around the Blackpool streets knew that they were at an historic event. The Stone Roses had seized the times and there was an air of pop revolt where things were changing fast and you were either on the bus or off it.

Bob Stanley from Melody Maker was already head over heels in love with the Roses, he described them as Four blokes from the Stretford end and four teenage Jesus Christs. Pop perfection. NME called them the future, the resurrection.

A new generation was coming through with new styles a clumsy appropriation of the flare and the baggy, loose-fitting clobber dictated by the sweat and freedom of the rave cultures, flares that appalled the punk warriors who had fought a mean style-war years before against the extra width. The Roses fans had taken the look and completed it with Renis beanie hat. It had been a long time since an audience had dressed like the band, a long time since a band had been a lifestyle; and Ian Brown, the totem of the new look, was playing today.