This week's bust up in the Stone Roses camp means nothing. In the music industry time is not a great healer - money is.
What’s £12 million among friends?
Well, let’s do some quick math – there are four members of the Stone Roses so we make that £3 million each. And let’s not forget that the £12 million we mention is only the “estimated earning potential” of the Roses’ current reunion tour of the UK (and Ireland) so if and when they spread their wings for a global jaunt, they really will be rolling in wonga.
It sure puts Ian Brown’s bust up this week in Amsterdam with drummer Alan 'Reni' Wren into perspective. "The drummer’s gone home . . . the drummer’s gone home . . ." said Brown, throwing his hands in the air in a non-monkey man style as he apologised for the lack of an encore before employing an old Mancunian term of affection to describe his band mate.
It may have put the frighteners on anybody clutching their tickets to the band’s upcoming show in the Phoenix Park on July 5 but rest assured, both Reni and Brown, the man who once said he’d rather see his children homeless than put the Roses back together, know what side their contract is buttered on.
Many bitterly divided acts have reformed for what cynics warmly call the IRS tour and when it comes to internecine in-fighting in the music industry, time is not a great healer – money is. Sterling and dollar signs provide great comfort for bands inflicted with grinding resentments.
A few nights before that Amsterdam fall out, it was all hugs and good cheer in the Roses camp at Barcelona’s Razzmatazz club (wouldn’t it be great if the Roses were playing a small venue in Dublin and not a corner of the biggest city park in Europe?) and we haven’t heard any tales of bitter rows from last night’s gig in Sweden (yet) so this is just par for the course for a band as volatile as The Stone Roses.
Which brings us onto a more important question – what will they play when they hit The Park?
Well I conducted a scientific review of four shows of the comeback tour (I looked up the set lists online) and here are the findings – obviously I Wanna Be Adored and I Am The Resurrection open and close the sets (except for Amsterdam), and the gigs largely consist of songs from the band’s celebrated debut album with a smattering of old tracks such as Standing Here, Sally Cinnamon and Mersey Paradise.
Personally I’d like to hear What the World Is Waiting For in The Phoenix but what’s this? The Stone Roses are playing very few songs from album number two, the infamously delayed, protracted and quite silly, The Second Coming.
When the band broke cover to perform a surprise gig in Warrington last May, they gave the shocked audience Love Spreads and Tightrope; in Barcelona Ten Storey Love Song reared its unlovely head; in Amsterdam it was Tightrope, Love Spreads and Ten Storey; and last night in Sweden just two of those songs made it on the final set list.
What can it mean pop fans? After all these years, are the Roses themselves finally willing to face up to the reality that The Second Coming was a bit of a stinker or is it time to reappraise the album and conclude that it is a lost classic in the same way some people run around telling you Heaven’s Gate and Showgirls are actually lost treasures of modern cinema?
In other words, is it time to give The Second Coming a second coming?
When it finally limped out after protracted recording sessions (perfectionism? Good weed? Great local? In-fighting?) at Rockfield Studios in Wales in December 1994, it was met with almost universal derision from the music press.
At the time I recall digging (because digging was the right word for the band’s new dad rock direction) Ten Storey Love Song (complete with wobbly vocals) and the thunderous Zep-out of Driving South. I also admit a fondness for the hard drivin’ (yeah! Baby) strut of Love Spreads and even the six-minute acid rock freak out of Daybreak was a right laff. However, the rest of The Second Coming was a soupy mess which was probably handed over to Geffen Records with a post-it note attached saying, “Will this do?”
The music press went nuts. In a bad way. This was back when the music press actually had some semblance of power and what hurt them the poor lambs the most was that the band they’d held up as the blistering beacon of The Future only five years previously were actually now grooving to the cosmic ley lines of rock’s past.
Funnily enough, The Second Coming was actually a very timely and fashionable album.
It was released in the same year as Primal Scream’s Rolling Stones homage Give Out But Don't Give Up, and not long before Paul Weller’s career-rehabilitating Stanley Road. And didn’t rock’s (new) “The Future” Oasis start doing long protracted guitar solos as early as their third album?
Anyway by the time The Stone Roses rolled into Páirc Uí Chaoimh in Cork for Féile '95 the wheels had truly fallen off the wagon. Reni had fled for real and when they took to the stage after an ebullient set from the ascendant Blur, the Roses looked and sounded like a motley bunch.
Seventeen years later the arisen heroes hit the Phoenix Park with Squire back in the line up, Reni safely behind his drum kit, and Mani’s bobbing and weaving around the stage. As for Mr Brown, has his duck squawk of a voice improved with age and money?
So don’t expect too much from The Second Coming and we doubt if Brown will throw anything in from his patchy solo career (although F.E.A.R. would be most welcome) and we hope there won’t be anything from Squire’s post-Roses band The Sea Horses.
If there is, it won’t be just the drummer who’ll be going home early.
Alan Corr
