Melody Maker Simon Reynolds interviews The Stone Roses, 3rd June 1989

'I'LL BE SEVERELY DISAPPOINTED IF WE HAVEN'T HAD A NUMBER ONE BY THE END OF 1989, COS THE TIME IS RIGHT.' THIS IS IAN BROWN, LEAD SINGER WITH MANCHESTER'S STONE ROSES. A BAND WHOSE ALLEGIANCE TO THE INCENDIARY SPIRIT OF CLASSIC SIXTIES ROCK HAS INSPIRED COMPARISONS WITH HENDRIX, EARLY FLOYD, LOVE AND THE BEATLES. BUT, AS SIMON REYNOLDS DISCOVERED WHEN HE MET BROWN AND GUITARIST JOHN SQUIRE, THE ROSES AREN'T SO MUCH INTERESTED IN CELEBRATING THE PAST AS FACING UP TO THE FUTURE

THE STONE ROSES ARE THE LATEST instalment in the resurrection insurrection. You know the argument by now: "perfect pop" usually denotes a desperately faint echo of a past that cannot be surpassed, only nodded to with sad-eyed, elegaic deference, but there's a precious few who make the dream of "perfect pop" blaze true. Last year, The House Of Love were the classicist exponents of this alchemy, My Bloody Valentine and Loop the most incendiary.

This year, The Stone Roses are the sole new recruits so far in sight.
Hendrix, early Floyd, Love, The Beatles, are all present, but not as "sources" or "reference points", rather as fuel to the furnace of a transcendent and truly distinct identity. And there are suggestions of a "future" as well as a "golden age" on the debut album. "I Wanna Be Adored" begins as a dub calvacade through shroud after shroud of AR Kanish wraith-guitar. "Don't Stop" is its preceding song, "Waterfall", played backwards, and it sounds like weir cascading upwards in sheer defiance. What could have been a mere period piece, is actually one of the most sacramental things you'll hear this year, a shrine-in-the-sky.

The record's great, live is something else again. The Stone Roses have a live presence that's mesmeric, from singer lan Brown’s stark-staring eyes and microphone-wanking arrogance to effects-man Cressa's freaky dancing. They're far out and they're gonna go far.

THE Stone Roses domain is the bittersweet-"the sweet ache" of poignancy, "cruel beauty" but it takes a while before you realize just how citrus-sharp the bitter in their bittersweet is, before you wince at the acrid undercurrents of violence beneath the sugar-spun surface. Brutal put-downs of discarded lovers, outlandish fantasies of revenge, images of arson and stoning people to death, abound. "Shoot You Down" has a chorus that goes "I'd love to do it/And you know you've always had it coming."

But it seems I'm well off the mark when I suggest to lan Brown and guitarist John Squire, that the spectre of misogyny may possibly be rearing an ugly head John: "Why do you think of women? Are you misogynist?"


lan: "The song about stoning someone is 'Bye Bye Badman'."
So what is it about?

John: "Insurrection".

You feel a lot of rage?

"Yeah, a lot of things make me mad"

But what about "I Am The Resurrection" -
"You're a no-good washed-up baby who'd look better dead"?

lan: "Some people would look better dead. It's not about a woman though. 'Today's the day she swore to steal what she never could own/And rac from this hole you call home.' You only have to listen to 'Waterfall' to know that anything else on the album couldn't have any misogynist connotations."

Maybe misogyny's the wrong word. But your songs do seem to run a gamut from utter idealism to bitter disillusion

John: "Those are the limits, yeah."

Do you particularly favour the contradiction of sweet surfaces cloaking vicious feelings?

lan: "We once wanted to call ourselves the Angry Young Teddy Bears. Someone wrote once that we were Teddy Bears capable of a nasty bite."

"Made Of Stone", "Elephant Stone", stoning to the death - where does the stone fetish come from?

"A Japanese journalist told us she thought we were trying to subconsciously hypnotise people by using the word 'stone'."

Petrify them?

John: "The word 'I' turns up and more often than the word 'stone'. So we're self-obsessed masons, maybe."

lan: "We're all made of stone, aren't we? Or we might as well be."

Why do you say that?

"So many twats about. Tense people."

And you see yourself as un-tense?

"We're not tense at all." It's true, they seem tranquil verging on catatonic. In case you haven't guessed, I should explain that lan and John, inseparable friends since the age of 11 and the creative core of the group, are laconic in the extreme, soft-spoken to the point of near-inaudibility, and wear an almost tangible aura of not suffering fools gladly.

"The tense people," continues John, "are the people who make money for the sake of it, and f*** people over in the process. That's the main problem."

Do you have political ideals, or at least notions of how you'd like things to be?

John: "Yeah, everybody should be a millionaire. Everybody on the planet"

Ian: "You can't help it, can you? We drive into London and we just turn off the motorway and we see people living under a bridge. What's it all about?"

Do you feel antagonism towards the South, see it as the fount of all the evil in this country?

lan: "No, not at all. I think that's dangerous, that North/South divide. It's a dumb generalisation. People are people, and your attitude's your attitude. There's a lot of pro-Mancunian people: you do a gig in London and you get people from Coventry or Southampton chanting 'Manchester, Manchester'. But there are a lot of wankers in Manchester."

You have no truck with the idea of a Manchester spirit, a grand tradition of obstreperous outsiders like The Fall, The Smiths, New Order?

lan: "It's this theme of Manchester as grey and moping, this whole poverty-as-romance idea. It's rubbish. The sick thing is that people read that and take up that sort of lifestyle. Sit alone in a bedsit and mope. That scene was set up by Joy Division and New Order".

Thinking again about the songs on the album, it seems like almost all of them o are so ambiguous you could take them as either poisoned love songs or political tirades. But "Elizabeth, my dear..." is pretty explicit: "it's curtains for you/Elizabeth, my dear..."

lan: "We're all anti-royalist, anti-patriarch. Cos it's 1989. Time to get real. When the ravens leave The Tower, England shall fall, they say. We want to be there shooting the ravens."

John: "Just a bunch of cattle rustlers, the royal family."

THERE are bands who, while hating the English ruling class, have imagined a populist patriotism, and looked back to the un-official history of popular insurrection and intransigence in this country.

John: "That's not exclusive to England though, is it?"

lan: "The sooner the differences between cultures and traditions are eroded, the better for everybody".
Some people see national differences as what gives people their soul.

John: "They're very shallow people, if that's all they need."

Are either of you at all religious-minded? The music has an almost devout feel at times.

Joh "But all that's towards human beings. You don't have to rally round the flag of some church to celebrate humanity."

lan: "The other day I had these Jehovah's Witnesses come round to my house, and they tried to convince me that the Pope was the Devil's representative on Earth. So I told them that Jesus I was the world's first communist. So they left. They were genuinely enraged."

John: "I think I've got divine knowledge and complete ignorance of everything. Except about clothes."

We gaze for a while at their flared jeans, laid out on the hotel room floor to avoid creasing: parallels for John, 24-inchers ("for that slight swish") for lan. "They're probably just as important as England falling, actually, flares."

It's rather bracing to encounter people with such explicit and unsparing loathing for this country. Most people have some kind of residual affection, if only for the place, the shape of the post boxes

lan: "Oh, there are plenty of things I like about England, it's a love/hate relationship."

John: "It's when it's rammed down your throat and it's expected of you. You can't help but rebel against it."
So if you got into the same situation as The Beatles, being awarded MBEs, for services to the rectification of the balance of payments deficit etc you'd return them?

John: "Throw 'em back."

lan: "Stuff 'em up their arses, very hard. British Empire! A bunch of public schoolboys playing about. They still give 'em out, don't they, and there's no British Empire anymore. And the Empire was stolen and people were murdered. The British were the first people to set up concentration camps, in the Boer War and in India. They don't tell you these things. They stick up statues in Pall Mall, but they don't tell you the guy just sat in a bunker and sent other people off to shoot and get shot.

But there are still statues of them and it's rammed down every schoolboy's throat, our glorious past. If ordinary people want these people as their heroes then let them keep them. Winston Churchill. He's the guy who sent the Army to shoot miners in 1924, cos they went on strike. And he's seen as one of the greatest men in British history, and I think that's sick."

Churchill also wanted the American and British armies not to stop at Berlin, but to drive the Russians, our allies, back to the Volga and crush communism for good.

John: "And at Liverpool the royal family had a boat moored permanently in case the Germans won, so they could evacuate to Canada. It was all set up. And still you get working people waving Union Jacks on the corner. I can't understand it." Is this just a inchoate fury, or do you have a creed? Would you call yourselves marxists, or socialists, or what?

John: "I haven't found anything yet.
Individualism, that's what I believe in. Freedom."

lan: "People won't do anything, they're too apathetic. They'll just think, 'oooh, look at that funny group that don't like the royal family'."

John: "But we don't see pop music as a way of changing things anyway. That's not what we set out to do with the group at all. If we really wanted to change the world we'd be involved in politics."

lan: "I still think there could be a revolution in England, it'll just take time, because it's only 45 years that working class people have been able to get an education. And that's where it starts."

Some people would say that school is just a form of detention and stultification, its only goal to make you employer-friendly, adjusted to being stuck in a room for prolonged periods of boredom?
"It is. Factory or university, that's all it prepares you for."

Did you learn anything stimulating at school?

John: "Learnt what it's like to run round with a gang.
History was all right. I didn't listen to most of the stuff."

lan: "When I was at school, I realized that working wasn't the way."

What did your families think when you started to take the band seriously?

"'Get a proper job.' 'What's a proper job?', is what I used to say. Still haven't had an answer. I don't think anyone should do anything unless it's stimulating. I don't think there's any reason to do anything you don't like. Cos time's far more important than money. You don't actually need money to have a good time. All I need is people to have a good time. John's different: he likes to be on his own."

A FEW years back it was still possible to live well on the dole, if you trimmed back your wants, learned to use the facilities and your imagination, and had like-minds in the same situation. Now the Government is committed to destroying dole culture because that breathing space between education and work is a thinking space, in which all kinds of radicalism can fester. Dole culture is where all the bands come from.

"You can't even get grants like you could five years ago. What I used to do is apply for a grant for a cooker, put in a holiday form at the same time, and when the cheque arrived go to France or Italy. That's what they want though, they're trying to restrict your movement. And when your movement's restricted... Berlin 1933."

John: "But you're not taught in school to be freethinking and enterprising. So there are only a few who can make something of being in a dole culture and having all that free time. They just sit there banging their head against the wall. They have to cop out, join in, and get a job. I think you have to find a way of being the system, and find it as fast you can. Living in a city makes it a lot easier."

IT is unusual to meet a band that have ideas about anything apart from music. (Unusual enough to meet a band that have ideas about music either, come to think of it.)

lan: "Most bands are into it so as to have a licence to get pissed and shout at girls from van windows. The whole idea of that appals me. That's why when you said misogynist, it upset me. I don't like macho people."

John: "It's the ultimate racism, when you consider that there are more women than men. To relegate all women to second class...

lan: "It's all from men's own insecurities. It's their problem."

Do you tend to idealise girls that you fall for?

John: "Worship them? Yeah..."

And there's bitter disillusionment when the reality departs from the image?

"I disappoint myself far more than other people disappoint me. Days that I spend in bed when I should have got up. There are loads of thing to do, aren't there?"

John paints: the action painting splurge of The Stone Roses' sleeves is his handiwork. Did he always harbour ambitions to be creative?

"I've always liked doing it, but never saw it as a way out, until the group. Always made Airfix kits and stuff like that."

lan: "I always got my dad to make them, I couldn't do'em."

Do you find the anti-materialist idealism of the counter culture appealing or inspiring?

lan: "They copped out, though. They didn't achieve anything. No, not all."

John: "They didn't have Walkmans then. Or CDs or videos."

lan: "They told us in this bit of water you can't do that. You have to wear a tie. Dress restrictions. It's only little things, but the fact that you can't get into clubs with jeans that might have cost you £35 but you could buy an Oxfam suit for £2 and they'd let you in. I was in a club last night and there were 19-year-old lads walking around with ties on, looking really uncomfortable. They're out for a relaxing evening, all tensed up, with a tie round the neck. Can't get in without a jacket on. But it's accepted, isn't it? Dress code. Civilised, free society, and there's a dress code."

It's surprising how rare it is for anyone in Britain to speak out against the Royal Family.
"Willie Hamilton and The Sex Pistols are the only people who've had a go. And Morrissey, in his own little way."

You don't go along with the idea that they're just symbols, and not the real perpetrators of evil?

"They are the real evil because they go along with it. Decorum. Tradition. All that."
You've no slight sympathy for Charles who frets about his roles, worries about the disadvantaged, modernist architecture, and tried to wield a benign influence?

"None at all. I'd like to see him dead. I'd like to shoot him. He owns acres and acres of land, with big houses, that he's never seen. And there are people living in squalor some of those places. No sympathy at all.
"You can tell a lot about people, if they're royalist. People who tell you they got a real thrill when they saw the Princess in the flesh. 'The highlight' of their lives."

People like being put in their place, I I guess. Then again, you could argue that pop has the same function, providing people with figures to worship. "I Wanna Be Adored" sounds like you're into the idea of people having idolatrous feelings towards you.

"No. It's worrying. But it's inevitable, and I'd rather it was us than some people I could mention. There are some disturbing people in pop David Bowie for one... He's obviously a knobhead, and for him to have that kind of adulation, it's worrying. But it wouldn't worry me if we had it, cos we're all right. At the moment. But it's worrying that any human being idolises another one, they all let you down anyway. It's like you're looking for someone else to do what you would like to do. But it's inevitable, by being in a group, putting records out, we're setting ourselves up for it."

Do you get obsessive letters?

"Yeah, there are some people out there who are seriously disturbed and lost in the world. And you find yourself turning into a social worker. We get get kids who travel around from Chester or Dudley, kids from provincial towns who have city attitudes and don't fit in their own environment. They don't know you, but they listen to a song, and they watch you a couple of times, and then they unburden every problem they've got."

So is "I Wanna Be Adored" more about relationships than about wanting to be the object of starlust?

"No, it's for everyone, cos everyone does want to be adored. Nobody wants to be hated."

But then "Shoot You Down", with its lyric about being choked by someone's unwanted love, kinda implies that it's better to adore than to be adored.

"If you're being adored by the wrong person, it's a pain in the arse! But the songs aren't all about relationships, aren't even all on a one-to-one basis."

Do you worry about having responsibility for all these young minds?

John: "No. Do you? Cos you're doing something that affects people's minds when they're impressionable."
Well, yeah, you sometimes wonder whether all the words get in the way. Whether the process of trying to intrigue and motivate people to listen to something, inevitably ends up conditioning what they find in it.

lan: "There's a fine line you've got to find between dictating and saying nothing. Like, in this conversation, we're gonna come across as real serious people, but we're not.

"We're anti-trivia, above all else. Pro-quality. There's no reason why we shouldn't be Number 1. We wanna be. I'll be severely disappointed if we haven't had a Number 1 by the end of 1989. Cos the time is right. Anything's possible."