Stone Roses Still Blooming Good

One of the holy grails of rock music is the making of an album that defies time. The Stone Roses achieved this with their 1989 self-titled debut, a shimmering melodic masterpiece with a dark heart. From the Jackson Pollock inspired cover with its paint-trail puzzle to the ecstatic, epic final track “I am the resurrection”, the Manchester band made a record both of its time and timeless.

The Stone Roses oozes confidence, tunefulness and a swaggering self-belief that has messianic overtones. Fading in your first song on the first side of your first album with a pulsing bass-line over distortion shows, frankly, major league balls. “I wanna be adored” captures the essence of the Roses; melody and lyrical darkness. Ian Brown wants to be adored, but like Robert Johnson, Faust and others throughout the mythology of music and literature, he has to cut a deal with the devil. But, Brown proclaims, he doesn’t have to sell his soul—the devil is already in him. And his reward for this exchange? To be adored. How narcissistic, how pop star. What ecstasy-driven grandiosity. 

It gets better. First single “She bangs the drum” heaps on more swooning melody and “Waterfall” almost levitates with jangle-guitar luminescence. But like all soaring trips, there’s the come down. For “Don’t stop”, the band reverse big chunks of “Waterfall”, add new vocals, effects, and a great big dollop of Revolver-era Beatles. After the classic/updated 60s psych-pop feel of the first three songs, it’s all a bit unsettling.

Then down to earth we come with the boppy bounce of “Bye Bye Badman”. Rhythmically and melodically, the song seems upbeat and sunny. But the lyrics reference the civil disturbances in France in the late 60s, providing an obscure link to the lemons on the LP cover via the fruit being used by 1968 rioters to counteract tear gas fired by police.

The best power pop has a melancholy, if not a darkness, at its heart. This is true of The Stone Roses, and you can hear it in the minor cadences of “(Song for my) Sugar Spun Sister”. It’s there, too, in the lyric of “Shoot you down”. And it rocks forward and backward across the verse and chorus of “Made of stone”. As for the eight minute torrent of the album-closing “I am the resurrection”, the contrast between the Summer of Love melodic core and the lyric is striking, to say the least.

Don't waste your words I don't need anything from you

I don't care where you've been or what you plan to do

It’s like The Stone Roses are ramming classic pop songwriting with late-eighties come-down. “I am the resurrection” is basically a three-and-a-half minute single with a surging, spinning, multi-hued coda that carries the listener along for five minutes of freak-out bliss. And you know what? At the end you might be exhausted but you’ll wanna spin it again. All of it. Because you adore it.

The Stone Roses set the musical agenda for almost a decade after its release. The Gallagher brothers were paying close attention, as were many others. And thirty-plus years on, it is an album that still grabs you and holds you tight.

© Bruce Jenkins 2020