1. Tell Me
The band disowned their earliest recording, but the presence of this song on the soundtrack of Mat Whitecross’s sparky though sycophantic film Spike Island (2012), a dramatisation of their most famous gig, emphasises how much it has affected fans. The group was formed in Manchester in the early 1980s by childhood friends Ian Brown and John Squire, and went through various lineups. Then Brown toured England and Europe on his customised pink scooter, while Squire made models for an animation company. When the duo re-formed as the Stone Roses, with guitarist Andy Couzens (later of the High), bassist Pete Garner and drummer Alan “Reni” Wren, they attempted to record a debut album in 1985 with the producer Martin Hannett. The group shelved the results, which were a legendary bootleg until it was released – to the band’s dismay – as Garage Flower in 1996. Only the double A-side debut single So Young/Tell Me emerged at the time, and it holds up surprisingly well. Squire’s scratchy, frantic guitar on this song sounds as if it was recorded in a rave-ready warehouse and Brown’s angry but cocksure yelp reveals his well of self-confidence. “I love only me / I’ve got the answers to everything … and there’s a place for me anywhere,” he swaggered. John Robb reported that formative sets would end with this song, Brown strutting through the crowd eyeballing individuals as he delivered the lyric.
2. Made of Stone
It sounded, said Squire, like “making a wish and watching it happen, like scoring the winning goal in a World Cup final on a Harley Electra Glide dressed as Spider-Man”. It’s hard to disagree. Made of Stone is one of Ian Brown’s top three Stone Roses songs – and the one they were playing on The Late Show in 1989 when the power went down and Brown bellowed about the BBC being “amateurs … wasting our time!” This first single from their debut album is the one to hold up when someone claims the Roses were musically oikish and lyrically simplistic. Squire’s guitar and Gary “Mani” Mounfield’s bass wrap around each other seductively. The lyrics, meanwhile, evoke fiery death on the road – in this case, that of Squire’s art muse Jackson Pollock – and encapsulate the bittersweet feeling of being young and broke but as free as it gets. “Sometimes I fantasise / When the streets are cold and lonely / And the cars they burn below me / Don’t these times fill your eyes?” is as perfect as a pop lyric gets.
3. She Bangs the Drums
She Bangs the Drums is another contender for the definitive Stone Roses song on an album full of them. The hi-hat tingles with anticipation, the bass builds with hair-raising determination and finally Squire’s guitar soars, coupled with the lovesick opening couplet “I can feel the Earth begin to move / I hear my needle hit the groove.” To call it a simple song is to disregard the beauty of its construction; this song boiled three decades of guitar pop down to the bare bones of the euphoria of meeting someone you desperately want to be with and hearing a song you can’t stop playing. Listening to She Bangs, only stony hearts will fail to see why a generation fell hard for the Roses. It’s the sound of that brief but beautiful moment when the teen years become hopeful young adulthood. “The past was yours but the future’s mine / You’re all out of time” were lines utterly justified by the song.
4. Standing Here
Like the Beatles’ A Day in the Life, the B-side to She Bangs the Drums was two songs in one. The first, a noisy, languid guitar groove, was nice enough, with Brown’s loping lyric assuring that “I really don’t think you could know that I’m in heaven when you smile.” The second, which appeared in the last two minutes of the song, was a minor revelation. Over a shuffling beat, Brown’s voice apes Art Garfunkel at his most subdued, a precise study in male vulnerability and tenderness as he repeats the mantra: “I could park a juggernaut in your mouth / And I can feel a hurricane when you shout / I should be safe forever in your arms.” It was the moment that most set them apart from the armies of mooning, faux-sensitive lads who scrambled in their footsteps. The Stone Roses were a masculine band, but even amid the meatiest guitar solos they never stooped to being macho, and whenever they expressed admiration for women it was as an equal partner.
5. This Is the One
You could pick 10 of the 11 songs from the debut album and declare them the Stone Roses’ best, but that wouldn’t capture the breadth and underrated quality of their B-sides, standalone singles and later work (and it would mean leaving out the essential Fool’s Gold). To give the first phase of their career a fair shout, the mighty I Wanna Be Adored and Waterfall have been omitted here. But it’s impossible to leave behind the sparkling This Is the One, the last track to be added to the record. It’s a glorious May bank holiday of a song, leading to an extended coda of battered drums, churning electric riffs and Brown’s yearning repetition of the title. “I’d like to leave the country / For a month of Sundays / Burn the town where I was born,” he hollers, flying high above the clouds away from the staleness of rainy days on housing estates.
6. I Am the Resurrection
The Stone Roses’ use of religious imagery in their songs is often seen as a simple declaration of faith, but John 11:25 probably wasn’t written in the expectation it would one day be adapted into “I am the resurrection and I am the life / I couldn’t ever bring myself to hate you as I’d like.” The closing song on the band’s first record previews the pseudo-religious touches that Second Coming would revel in, and has an extended, one-take instrumental coda that occupied more than half of the song’s more than eight-minute running time. “The only thing I did to excess were guitar solos,” joked Squire to the Guardian in 2002. This one is finely honed and perfectly balanced, wringing an abundance of leftover joy from the first album like a sugar-fuelled child racing around the living room.
7. Fool’s Gold
Released six months after the debut album and not included on it, Fool’s Gold was the Roses’ first UK Top 10 single and was, arguably, the song that made their reputation. The band performed it on Top of the Pops the same week the Happy Mondays played Hallelujah, a mainstream arrival for the Madchester sound when indie still suggested some kind of deviation from the mainstream. It also fits into a most unlikely lineage, with its funk-laden drumbeat lifted from the James Brown song Funky Drummer, which Squire apparently discovered on a breaks compilation he found at Manchester’s Eastern Bloc Records store. The lyrics – inspired by The Treasure of the Sierra Madre – record Brown’s disdain for avarice, but there’s also a sense of pilgrimage; unsurprising, given that it was recorded at Sawmills studios in Cornwall, which is accessible only by boat at high tide or a long walk through a forest.
8. Love Spreads
In 1994, almost five years after the Stone Roses had released new music, Steve Lamacq and Jo Whiley played the first single, Love Spreads, from The Second Coming on Evening Session – and a collective intake of breath came from the indie nation. Some listeners were probably shocked by the size of its debt to Led Zeppelin, particularly the breakdown to hi-hat and a single wailing guitar note just after 3.00, but there’s no doubt the Roses’ biggest hit – it reached No 2 just before Christmas – had acute focus and poise. Squire’s noisy guitar riffs churn through the track, and Reni and Mani’s groove-laden backing complements Brown’s swaggering assertion: “The messiah is my sister / Ain’t no king, man, she’s my queen.” It’s a dusty, old, desert-blues rocker, but the anti-patriarchal message imagining Jesus as a black woman and the quality of the playing elevate this song above its contemporaries. They were never a group to overexplain their songs, but one interviewer did draw out of Squire that “it’s about the hijacking of religion”. Noteworthy fact: one of the bearded prospectors just after 3.40 in the video by Steven Hanft is apparently Beck.
9. Begging You
On first listen to Second Coming, Begging You might have seemed the most abrasive song, the least in keeping with the rest of the record’s focus on fusing trad-rock styles with the band’s undoubted alchemy as players. But more than 20 years on, it still sounds fresher than most of its contemporaries. Its lyrical content is odd but pleasingly rhythmic, and it crams in references to Aesop’s Fables. “The fly on the coach wheel told me that he got it / And he knew what to do with it / Everybody saw it / Saw the dust that he made,” lands blows on overweening personalities like that of the fly from Aesop’s story, desperately trying to claim credit for the dust that the wheel he’s sitting on is kicking up. One for the band’s many high-profile imitators, perhaps? Anyway, aside from a guitar figure used almost as punctuation by Squire, the song is all at the bottom end, a deep, heavy repeated riff engineered by Mani and Reni. It is to drum and bass what the Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows was to acid house. And, though the two songs coincidentally sounded alike, that similarity didn’t unfairly flatter the huge and intuitive abilities of their composers.
10. Ian Brown – FEAR
Such was the press-stoked, decade-and-a-half clamour for a Stone Roses reunion, that the quartet’s solo activities in that period have been unfairly written off by many. Reni laid low, briefly appearing with his band the Rub (he was a decent lead singer and guitarist). Mani added bass to many of Primal Scream’s finest moments, including all of XTRMNTR. Squire launched the pleasant guitar-pop quartet the Seahorses, and a couple of low-key solo records. Meanwhile, Brown’s work, with hindsight, was significant. In 11 years he released six albums (five of them went Top 10) and had 15 Top 40 singles, from the martial anthem My Star, about the militarisation of space exploration, to the jaw-droppingly confrontational antiwar tirade Illegal Attacks, featuring Sinéad O’Connor. From 2001, the stoned, playful FEAR – the title was an acronym for each line of lyrics – and its swooping, melancholy string lines marked the point when even diehards accepted Brown’s work on its own terms.
