The Stone Roses by Simon Spence

Author:Simon Spence
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

11.

Madchester

Top of the Pops was the spark that ignited a frenzy for all things Manchester. The Mondays had brought ‘Madchester’ into the public domain with their new EP Madchester Rave On (produced by Martin Hannett), and the term became a catch-all to describe what would become a golden age of Mancunian cultural dominance.

Keith Jobling, the Mondays’ video-maker, coined the word while writing a music-driven film script called Mad Fuckers. Factory Records boss Tony Wilson ran with it from there, forcing the word on a reluctant Mondays. ‘It did sum up an atmosphere,’ said Jobling. ‘Manchester stunk of marijuana everywhere you went. It was a very lawless period, hedonistic, and it did go a bit mad.’

Brown would become the face of Madchester, and his street stance was widely imitated. Unlike his Mondays’ counterpart Shaun Ryder, Brown had the poster-boy looks and distinctive cartoonish style that, in the business of commercial pop, was paramount. He was on his way to becoming an icon. ‘I’m not particularly keen but I’m aware it could happen, probably will happen,’ he said. ‘I’m aware there’s people who will use my face to fill their wallets, who can suck me in, then, when they want to, shit me out again.’

Gareth Davies now fended off demands for the Roses to appear on TV programmes as diverse as Panorama and Blue Peter. The band said no to all, and Top of the Pops was to be their final performance together on British TV. Interviews to the press would also now be sparse, though deft handling by Davies and publicist Philip Hall kept this non-compliance well hidden. The band did come close to appearing on Channel 4’s The Last Resort, hosted by Jonathan Ross – even after Ross slighted them on TV. ‘We had planned to rehearse in the normal way and go through the whole thing,’ said Davies. ‘Then when it came to cuing them in live on TV, the band would just rest their instruments against the amplifiers and walk off, and there’d just be white noise. But they decided not to do [the show] in the end.’

There had been talk of a gig at Manchester’s 9,000-capacity GMEX Centre before Christmas 1989, but the band would not play live again for nearly six months following Alexandra Palace. They didn’t need to. In the UK, their album – which had dropped out of the Top 40 a week after its release – began selling again, and the popularity of the band’s T-shirts became a licence to print money. T-shirts, above all else, became a key market, as Madchester became as much about the look as the music. Jobling created two of the best: ‘Madchester’ and ‘Just Say No To London’. Leo Stanley, at the Identity shop based in Afflecks Palace, produced the ‘AND ON THE SIXTH DAY GOD CREATED MANchester’ T-shirt and other variations thereof. For many, the cloth became mightier than the chord. The Roses admitted to being obsessed with clothes but stuck to expensive, and rare, French, Spanish and Italian T-shirts and tops.

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