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

Author:John Robb
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409034186
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

THE STONE ROSES DÉBUT ALBUM RELEASED AT LAST: MAY 1989

That album, the soundtrack of the period and the kick start of a new rock’n’roll generation still sounds as fresh today as it did years ago. For ever ending up near top of lists of classic records it’s easily survived the past decade. Even the doubters at the time who dismissed the band as ‘hype’ have had to swallow their words.

The Roses’ début is up there with all the classic British rock’n’roll records and proved that a British band could easily throw off the yoke of The Beatles and the other heavyweight classics that mostly crush the spirit of any upcoming band. This record is as good if not better than most of those so-called classics.

Opening like their best gigs with ‘I Wanna Be Adored’, the album was thought out, planned. The track listing was perfect, all ebbs and flows. The bass chugs in, lulling the listener into a strange unease as the crystalline guitar announced itself with a series of sound FX before the chords slash in. There is no other way you could start this album, ‘Adored’, once planned to be the Roses’ follow-up single to ‘So Young’, is now virtually the anthem to a new pop generation. The song, Brown’s third person paean to sin and craving for adoration, neatly uncoils itself. The beauty of ‘Adored’ is the way it is so easily misunderstood – in the context of an arrogant singer intoning the lyrics in front of the adoring faithful it took on a meaning quite different from what Brown intended. But then that’s the beauty of pop, misinterpretation, making the song mean whatever you want.

Riding in on that bassline, the song, written almost right back at the beginning of the Roses’ career, finally finds its home, at the front of the album and, finally, at the beginning of their live set after spending four years floating around in the middle of the set list since its début in Sweden.

‘I Wanna Be Adored’ slowly uncoils, all menacing, ominous and yet riding on a total pop melody. It’s a great opener to an album.

‘She Bangs The Drums’, the song that eventually gave the band their first Top Forty hit later that July, is a glorious, near Monkees, pop rush. Every twist and turn of the song seems to be crammed with another riff, another hook; hooks that sound at once so familiar and yet you can’t quite place where you heard them before. The Roses having the imagination to twist pop into new shapes. Great lyrics as well from the songwriting duo with Ian’s uplifting swagger bounding along on the edge of pure arrogance.

John weighs in with the lyrics to the chorus planting a seed of self-doubt in the song, but all that is lost in the music. The Roses literally swagger their uplifting pop out of the grooves of the record. Two songs in and we’re already celebrating a classic record.

The other single pulled from the album,

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