THE STONE ROSES LEEDS POLYTECHNIC
30/6/89

THE last date of their tour sees The Stone Roses playing with a looseness and aggression that brings their perfect pop to the brink of chaos. Tonight they're a heartquake of poignacy, lachrymous and lacerating, the marble of their sculpted songs shattered into a million fluorescent atoms.

The Stone Roses are cool because, unlike most indie bands today, who painstakingly search out the most arcane and perverse reference points-Blue Cheer, Tim Hardin, The Incredible String Band, et al-they go straight for the blindingly obvious (Pistols, Stones, Hendrix, Beatles) as if to say: who wants to be a footnote in pop history. In fact, they're a bit like an alternate universes version of the Pistols, one where Glen Matlock prevailed over the use of minor chords and Beatles-ism. (Their charisma is uncannily midway between the Fab Four's deadpan wit and the Pistols' mordant intransigence.)

So they're very traditional; but there is stuff going on here that looks to the Nineties. The intro to "Adored" is a dub-shuddering cascade of angel dust, as petrifying a spell-bind as A.R. Kane's "Up". And the influence of house and Seventies funk (all they listen to, apparently) is percolating through into the music. What strikes you most about the Roses live is the sheer effervescent funk of their sound. Sightless beneath his B-boy hat, Rene's drumming is positively fatback, the seething cymbals adding so much fizz to the feel.

lan Brown, the patent star, we know about. John Squire is one of the new breed of self-effacing axe heroes. He's evidently one of those impassive, withdrawn types, like Terry Bickers, whose intensity is vented entirely through is playing. And through those action-painting sleeves too, of course.

The only outright aural Jackson Pollockism tonight is the coda to "I Am The Resurrection" (which always closes the show), a pyrotechnical spree stretched out to at least three times its vinyl length, a "3rd Stone From The Sun" tidal wave of halycon chaos, with the band muthafunkin' in Squire's illustrious, lustrous wake.

Stone Roses' pouring, imploring fountainhead of rapture is one of the ennobling rock experiences of the moment.

Simon Reynolds
Melody Maker