Perhaps the politest thing you can say about the Stone Roses’ comeback single All for One is that it met with a mixed response. Many people who heard it seemed faintly aghast, or a bit mortified on the band’s behalf, although a certain kind of dutiful fortysomething bloke, for whom it’s an article of faith that the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut is the greatest album ever made, loudly defended it. You can hear them bellowing along to the song as though it were made of the same impermeable stuff as I Am the Resurrection or She Bangs the Drums in fan videos of the band’s recent gig in Halifax, warming up for their Manchester stadium shows. Others seemed delighted for other reasons: if you always thought the Stone Roses’ unimpeachable genius was a load of arrant cobblers, or, at the very least, a reputation built on pretty slender foundations, well, here was some pretty compelling evidence for the prosecution.
If Beautiful Thing isn’t a single that’s going to convince the naysayers, it’s at least a substantial improvement on its predecessor. That sounds like faint praise – frankly, anything you could listen to without being gripped by the fear you might die of embarrassment before it ends would be an improvement on its predecessor – but Beautiful Thing is a decent enough song. It does a lot of things the Stone Roses are famous for doing. There are guitars played through a wah-wah pedal over a breakbeat, in the manner of Fool’s Gold. It opens with what sounds like a burst of the song played backwards, in the style of the tracks that used to pad out their 12in singles in the late 80s – Guernica, Simone, Full Fathom Five – and there’s a moment about four and half minutes in where Ian Brown’s vocals are submerged with reversed reverb, which seems to be a nod to Don’t Stop. The lyrics deal with a lot of Brown’s preoccupations: Jesus, sisters, glancing references to drugs, stern admonishments of shadowy forces that apparently threaten to “steal the vibe”.
What it doesn’t have is the hazy mysteriousness of Fool’s Gold, a track that abandoned the standard verse-chorus structure in favour of something that recalled the exploratory approach of Can: it was pretty audacious to release a single whose vocal melody was secondary to the cyclical, unchanging bassline. Here, despite the track’s length – seven minutes – and the extended instrumental passages in which John Squire’s guitar playing sounds as fluid and effortless as ever, everything seems much more straightforward: the hook is the chorus. In fact, for all the nods to the band’s back catalogue, what Beautiful Thing really sounds like isn’t the Stone Roses in their imperial phase so much as something that might have turned up on one of Ian Brown’s subsequent solo albums: solid, rather than earth shattering.
