THE BIG TOP, GLASGOW GREEN
I HAVE seen the future of the much-vaunted indie/dub groove crossover and it gladdened my heart. I have seen hundreds of floppy fringed hormone cases flip their wigs to a sound so heavy and, hell, modern that it caught in your throat. I have seen a venue in which every punter, not just the front rows, shook themselves silly to a band of yobbish, youthful swaggering shitkickers with the future in their sweaty grasp Unfortunately that was The Charlatans at The Mayfair last Thursday. The Stone Roses at Glasgow Green, on the other hand, poured buckets of listless sonic slurry over their over charged, over-drugged audience in a venue that, thanks to its unique acrylic properties, literally pissed on you. It was a bad trip.
Few things in life are as billed. Tonight's venue, Glasgow Green, is, in the main, a verdant stretch of parkland situated right in the heart of Glasgow's post-industrial city centre. Any gig here, in the crystal shadow of the sumptuous Winter Gardens, is bound to have the angels on its side. The billowing marquee that will house tonight's show has, however, been pitched on the site's one blockspot, a gravel wasteland on the lip of the River Clyde. It has barely had time to recover from last week's Big Day, and the piles of detritus form a depressing welcome for the 8,000 devotees this humid Saturday evening.
The compound itself brings to mind Dante's Second Circle of Hell. The acrid stench of frying onions from hotdog stalls mingles queasily with dope fumes. Even though the Roses have waded through the opening "I Wanna Be Adored" and are presently occupied with on appallingly muddy "Elephant Stone", hundreds of fans are loitering in the compound, glassy-eyed, dehydrated, maybe demoralised by the mumbling, muffled output from the PA, Smiley faces in the "O sweeten the sign announcing tee-shirts at £10 a throw.
Inside the tent, if's Tardis time, From the outside, the construction looked like a quaint, turreted plastic fun castle. Inside, however, the dimensions are roughly congruent with the worst of Britain's converted aircraft hangars and conference centres. Only the unmistakable kinetic contours of lan Brown's Supermarionation stage shuffle prove that the dots in the next postcode are the real Manc-coy and not some scam-friendly imposters. Inside, of course, it's a sauna set to music.
The thousands who brave the crippling humidity obviously consider this no bad thing and rapturously receive a perfunctory run-through of the set premiered in Stockholm and consolidated on Spike Island, ie all the hih, "One Love", "Something's Burning" and a "Fools Gold that segues into "Where Angels Play has come to be expected, the band are on auto-pilot, both distant and distanced from the school-kids and unwaged urchins who have blown a month's spending money on this shindig. The only words uttered by Brown all evening are "TA" that follows "Waterfall". His one unscripted action is to hold a "Stone Roses at Glasgow Green tee-shirt aloft during "Sally Cinnamon".
Bad venue, bad sound, bad attitude. As Everett True noted, apropos Spike Island, the fineries of punter-satisfaction and professional pride are mere bagatelles to the Roses these days. Doing it is of no importance to them, but rubbing their success info the faces of the doubters and sceptics is.
What we come across more than anything else tonight, though, was the band's ennui with even this pettiest of satisfactions. Why bother going to the trouble of avoiding traditional rock touring habits when all you have to offer your relocated audience is a dose of Sex Pistols surliness to the power of 107 Even the Pistols cared passionately about not caring. The Stone Roses, however, can't even motivate themselves that for. They may well be our first true post-modem pop band, in that the cumulative ebbs and flows of culture have sapped them of any vestige of real emotion or opinion. every rock stance and icon has been permuted into infinity, the only attitude left is resignation.
The Stone Roses are, in reality, little more than the sound of a sigh made flesh. How else do you explain the airy ambivalence of their music, of Squire's untethered, over-chorused guitar lines, Brown's wandering whines or the druggy, Flaydian pointillistic new material? The claim that the band have now nailed their colours firmly to the mast of club culture were similarity blasted into atoms by The Charlatans gig, by the sight of a band so wired they made the Roses look opportunistic by comparison. Just at the Roses came along and made Morrissey the relic he is, The Charlatans will in time show how risibley unmotivated and stupefied The Stone Roses really are.
Tonight was more blind man's zoo than rock'n'roll circus. If we're lucky it might tum out to be the night The Stone Roses finally Topped themselves.
Allan Brown
Melody Maker
