"I'm slightly mystified by the great appeal of the Stone Roses," sighed an exasperated late night DJ on Radio One at the end of 1989 as they gained multiple entries in his Festive Fifty. "I was gonna say that they sound to me at times like Herman's Hermits, but that's not quite true either. I do that just to annoy you."
It was a dull bank holiday weekend at the end of May 1990 and a number of friends were venturing towards a place called Spike Island. Not only did their destination not sound particularly seductive, it wasn't really an island at all, more a sort of toxic wasteland near the Mersey, surrounded by chemical factories. They'd gone to watch a band whose eponymous album had rarely been ejected from the sixth form common room tape deck that year. Back when the Top 40 was organised by an elderly team of accountants named Stock, Aitken and Waterman, it had been thilling to watch The Stone Roses battle it out alongside chart heavyweights like Milli Vanilli and New Kids On The Block (and yes, they're also touring next year) on Top Of The Pops. 'Fool's Gold' and 'I Am The Resurrection' were formidable indie disco floorfillers. I probably wasn't "allowed" to go to what promised to be the baggy generation's Woodstock, but then again I don't really recall wanting to attend that desperately either.
In the Melody Maker the following week, Everett True commented on the baggies who were out in force. "There's no shortage of floppy Reni hats, Ghandi glasses, newly-pressed flared jeans or Stone Roses tee-shirts on view," he observed. "There's also an interminable amount of Inspiral Carpets / Shaun Ryder look-alikes." By the time they'd performed though, he recalled that both band and audience were "strangely subdued."
"If Alexandra Palace was an ignominious failure," he concluded, "good intentions blown away on a sea of bad sound, Spike Island was even more so. The grander the scale, the harder they fall."
"This is bollocks," one attendee was overheard to moan. "You can't hear nowt. It's like being at a fucking Tammy Wynette concert."
"This is bollocks," one attendee was overheard to moan. "You can't hear nowt. It's like being at a fucking Tammy Wynette concert."
It was a total fiasco. Turns out I didn't miss much after all.
Five years later, in a career plagued by misfortune and ineptitude, John Squire decided to go mountain biking in California. This decision would prove to be a pivotal moment in the career of another band from the north of England who'd spent 14 years on the sidelines. Fracturing his collarbone in an accident allowed Pulp to snatch their Glastonbury headline slot and deliver a triumphant performance which would catapult them to fame and fortune.
"We're in a different universe to The Stone Roses, but I was looking forward to seeing them," said Jarvis Cocker shortly afterwards in Vox Magazine. "So I wasn't pleased with the way we got to be on the bill, but we couldn't turn it down. Like, we'd just written a song we played there called 'Sorted For E's And Wizz'. Again, I'm not that into fate but the title came from me talking to this girl about when she went to Spike Island. That was her main memory, all these blokes walking around saying: 'Is everybody sorted for E's and Wizz?' It just seemed like a totally appropriate place to play it for the first time."
For the Roses though, it all ended just over a year later at Reading, not with a bang but a whimper. Or rather, a Simply Red session musician and a sort of tuneless howl. The muffled screams you can hear are presumably the result of people hacking off their own ears, as their live experience is taken to previously unreached levels of discomfort.
"It ain't over until the flat laddie sings," a passing Britpop singer was heard to mutter.
And so to 2011, and in a hotel just a few minutes walk from my office, the original members have gathered in front of the press for the first time in 15 years to announce their reformation. (Do we still need to organise these conferences? Can't you just tweet the details?) Yet I find myself completely unwilling to give any fucks. Firstly, let's take THAT album.
Upon its arrival, even the debut from Kitchens Of Distinction faired better in the NME reviews section. Jack Barron declared it to be "as inviting as a bathtub of purple jelly left over from the S*x*i*s," and even dismissed a colleague who, "after chomping a hit of LSD-impregnated graph paper" had claimed it was the greatest record ever made. "There again," Barron continued, "he thought he was having a conversation with Bugs Bunny at the time and I definitely don't have a tail."
Public Enemy, Frankie Knuckles and Derrick May were making more relevant music. For an album embraced by the acid house revellers, it contains few traces of anything musical from punk onwards.
Yet a decade later, that same record was charging it's way up those meaningless 'Best Ever' lists which magazine editors seem to take delight in clogging up their pages with, and by 2003 it had inexplicably been heralded a "generational touchstone" by a band who had supposedly saved British rock music, a life-changing opus which had taken pole position in the NME's Best Albums Of All Time list with relative ease. By 2006 it was an artefact that had "crushed doleful, Thatcherite inertia under waves of very positive, very uplifting and very British psychedelia," and which had "made every other band in the country redundant." And as they grace their front cover again for the first of two consecutive weeks, the NME's excessive coverage to bands who no longer exist appears to include the frankly astonishing claim that they actually invented rhythm.
Whilst part of the way we process popular culture is to re-evaluate, disregarding the worst and elevating the best from any particular period or genre, it feels as if the music press have been fervently intent on upholding the reverence of bands like The Roses for the last two decades, to the extent that we're all too often engulfed in a tidal wave of nostalgia.
But should I really be wasting valuable time and energy on slagging a tour that I could simply turn a blind eye to? After all, very few other bands from that era could shift 220,000 tickets in just over an hour. I probably shouldn't, especially since I thoroughly enjoyed seeing the reunited Pulp this summer, and that's despite that, as he handed out sweets to the kids and asked them about which discos they frequented, Jarvis's supply teacher attire meant his audience probably feared he'd more likely quiz them on coastal erosion or plate tectonics than play a gig.
The thing is though, Pulp never vehemently denied the possibility of a reconciliation at every available opportunity, and Pulp's repertoire amounts to considerably more than half a dozen tracks which could be convincingly hailed as musical brilliance, a bucket load of filler, five years spent arsing about in Wales, an horrifically bloated second album and some of the most atrocious live shows imaginable.
Even so, why is there such a need for veteran acts to consistently dominate the festival headlining slots, all bereft of new ideas, pretending to like each other again and willing to piss on their own legacy in order to pocket some filthy lucre to top up their retirement funds? Research by Music Week reported found that, of the headline artists announced in the first part of this year for seven of the summer's biggest music festivals, just two out of 19 broke through during the past three years. Yet in 2007 more than half of the 20 headline acts at the same festivals were relatively new artists. This year, Pulp notched up six festival dates in the UK alone. Primal Scream accumulated even more, and they're touring a record that's 20 years old. Ker-ching, indeed.
Even so, why is there such a need for veteran acts to consistently dominate the festival headlining slots, all bereft of new ideas, pretending to like each other again and willing to piss on their own legacy in order to pocket some filthy lucre to top up their retirement funds? Research by Music Week reported found that, of the headline artists announced in the first part of this year for seven of the summer's biggest music festivals, just two out of 19 broke through during the past three years. Yet in 2007 more than half of the 20 headline acts at the same festivals were relatively new artists. This year, Pulp notched up six festival dates in the UK alone. Primal Scream accumulated even more, and they're touring a record that's 20 years old. Ker-ching, indeed.
In an era saturated with re-issues, re-packages, revivals, remakes and rehashes, there's barely time to listen to all the new stuff, in the hope that it might turn out to be as incredible as the record from Colin Stetson or The Caretaker or Death Grips or Dirty Beaches or Prurient or Cut Hands or Dub Phizix. The most popular digital commercial radio station in the UK is reportedly, wait for it, Absolute 80's. I mean, seriously, why? I want to know what music will be like in 2012 and who the innovators will be. I want to stumble across a band as mind-meltingly wonderful as Congolese musicians Konono No.1, like I did at this year's Field Day. Or Factory Floor. Or Omar Souleyman. I have no time or indeed any desire to spend an entire morning abusing my redial and refresh keys in an attempt to re-live a misremembered past by idolising a massively overrated group from my formative years. My point is that these reunion shows, much like Spike Island, will have very little to do with music at all. And that, as the recently reunited Steps would say, is a Tragedy. As Simon Reynolds writes in his terrific book 'Retromania', "History must have a dustbin, or history will be a dustbin, a gigantic, sprawling garbage heap."
Watching the Roses now as supposed rock messiahs, it's obvious that these people were single-handedly responsible for ushering in an era where boorish, "proper" blokes dressed in casual sportswear played "real" music. Like, with an guitars an' shit. They influenced a deluge of stupefyingly dull sounding bands who thought that overwhelmingly mediocre dad-rock was the way forward. Most of them have now, thankfully, faded into obscurity. (Oh. Hi Kasabian, I forgot you were still lurking at the back). Furthermore, watching Ian Brown's ridiculously arrogant monkey dancing, it's clear they are also to blame for the existence of Oasis (their reunion tour is currently pencilled in for 2015). I suppose it could be worse though. The Seahorses could reform.
