In early October of 1989, having already overwhelmed Britain with a classic debut album and a series of triumphant shows, The Stone Roses found themselves in Germany at a venue called the Luxor Club.

There exists a recording of what transpired that night, and one can find it on the web or at your local record fair, with about 125 other different Roses bootlegs and bootleg DVDs. This one is titled Etched in Stone, fair play as puns go. The Luxor Club apparently had a billiard table, which its patrons, as one can easily discern on the bootleg, enjoyed playing regardless of singer Ian Brown, who gets himself a touch lathered up at the lack of, shall we say, audience participation. “You don’t move much, do you?” he says, to not much response. A German heckler yells something; a punter answers with “shut up ‘ya Kraut bastard!”

For the first two songs, the opening I Wanna Be Adored followed by Elephant Stone, and a portion of the third, the Roses are simply flat, like they can’t be arsed to do anything but get through the gig. And then, for whatever reason — anger, pride, art — a reversal is at hand. Locating this sort of transformation, so abrupt as to change the mood of a room, and yet so subtle as to be contained in a few bars of music, can be a bit of a challenge, but let us opt for the moment John Squire lays into the guitar solo of Made Of Stone, after which the Roses sound as though they would like to rip your head off, but not before first informing you of their collective genius.

By the time of their album and genre defining I Am The Resurrection, the longest version of the song the Roses would ever play, Ian Brown is swagger incarnate. Between the beats of Reni’s drum intro, decidedly not content with what he has witnessed, Brown has a go at reality: “You think it’s enough don’t you to pay your money to see us/Well, do you know what I mean, it works the other way/We paid our money to see you”. A pause, for drama as much as meter one presumes, before the final directive and the march into the belly of the beast. “Let’s see you man!”

This story plays out, appropriately, with a sound you never would have imagined, and yet, once heard, is all but impossible to shake free of.

“I Wanna Be Adored. I already am.” Manchester International, 10/5/85

For a band with only two proper albums, the first a massive success, the other, to most, a massive disappointment, The Stone Roses would appear to have a disproportionate number of unreleased recordings available.

So what is it then about these Roses, that they continue to mean so much? Say one thing about the band: if you’re only aware of what has been released officially, you’re missing a body of work we may properly call art that extends the parameters of a two-album career almost indefinitely.

All votes for The Who on a good night, The Stones in support of Exile On Main Street, The Beatles on the Reeperbahn and Dylan with The Hawks in 66 will have to be counted later, but it could well be that there has never been a better live band in rock and roll than The Stone Roses.

From the band’s inception, people taped the Roses. Half a dozen or so of the early, punk shows have found homes on bootleg CDs, a marvel really, considering that there couldn’t have been more than 100 people at most of those first few gigs. For sound quality, there is The Ultimate Live Rarities: two sets, one from Stockholm 30/4/85, the other featuring the Roses at home in Manchester, later the next month. The Roses, for their part, are abominable. Brown shouts and taunts, the prevailing idea seemingly that the Roses will tell you how great they are almost as means of getting themselves to believe it.

What The World Is Waiting For, a July 87 show from the Manchester International 1, is the earliest evidence of the Roses getting on with becoming the Roses. Tell Me, the token punk number, closes the set, but not before we’re treated to fascinating, work-in-progress versions of Elephant Stone, Where Angels Play and originals The Sun Still Shines and Your Time Will Come (which the Roses would never release in any form). Extra verses, codas, backing vocals — it’s all slightly gappy, but more importantly, the music on What The World Is Waiting For is close to pure melody — the jangle in John Squire’s guitar work, what might as well be a layer of silk spread across Reni’s drums. And while the world lambasts him as a singer, and even Roses bootleg sites and forums are replete with lines like “a great gig, Brown isn’t too bad at least”, it is crucial to understanding the range of the Roses’ collective musical genius to discard, in sound, if not song structure, formalism or anything approaching it. On bootleg after bootleg, good and bad, there is no-one who sings like Ian Brown. It just happens to work out that his particular art, in the context of the Roses’ music, was not a blend of beauty and perfection, but of intent and conveyance, beauty of a different sort, but beauty all the same.

“Oooohhh… still some tense people…” Walsall Junction 10, 3/6/89 London ICA. Glasgow Rooftops. Brunel University. The Hacienda.

Even now, the names of some of the venues on the Roses’ winter and spring 1989 tours have a mythical ring to them. At Walsall Junction, the Roses were unable to conduct their sound check, owing to Reni’s mother being in hospital. Mani’s bass is high in the mix on Stoned In Walsall, and a vibrant mix it is, like you’re down the front. Elephant Stone is outrageously danceable, and at this particular show, we can hear a moment the Roses were becoming not only known for, but counted on providing, at gig after gig — a feeling of blissed-out, sonic freedom that was more than music, and more than emotion — often like taking the piss out of the Muses themselves. ‘Seems like there’s a hole in my dreams’, Brown sings, ‘Or so it seems/Nothing means/Anything/Anymore’. He holds the note, Mani’s bass leaps up, Reni is all over his kit and John Squire’s guitar jolts the beat, the sound of an instrumental bridge pulling a lyric inside out. For the last number, in one of its most enduring bootleg versions, we arrive again, as we will so often, at I Am The Resurrection. ‘Last chance to dance’ Brown declares. And perhaps the dancing is everything.

Any bootleg from 1989 is worth acquiring, and most from 1988 — especially if you’re not too hung up on sound quality — but a number distinguish themselves in illuminating the Roses’ artistry, and in top sound as well. All The Colours Fade, from the Roses’ first major ’89 show, at the Haçienda, comes to mind, as does This Is The One, the Roses’ set at the Anti-Clause 28 concert, a protest against anti-homosexual legislation, from the Manchester International 2 the year before, an indication of how captivating the band could be even prior to the monumental ’89 shows.

“That was my favourite gig of all time, killed me dead, changed me fuckin’ life”, said Liam Gallagher, the less terse version of his brother’s ‘No Roses, no Oasis’ statement. Shrewsbury Park Lane should also be called out: besides featuring one of the most spirited Roses sets, this one from May 1989, it also contains the evening’s soundcheck, as does See How Quite You Can Be, from Lancaster Polytechnic. The Roses fan has not profited from nearly all that fandom offers until he has heard Ian Brown, to a near empty hall, save his band mates and techs, walking the stage, singing, as though lost to himself, the verses of Resurrection a cappella.

The last few years have seen the push for Roses bootlegs extend to the DVD world, while studio material has at last appeared on CD. Regarding DVDs, the frequently excellent TV Appearances Compilation — these things tend to be a little lean on title originality — offers promos, interviews, Sugar Spun Sister from the Haçienda and the officially available “amateurs, amateurs!” “whistle it down” exchange between Brown and Late Show presenter Tracey MacLeod, following a power cut during Made Of Stone — a generation-defining bit of cheek for sure.

The two-DVD set, Brixton Academy, contains both shows the Roses performed in early December ’95 that Ian Brown termed their best gigs, in better sound than the available albums. For the studio bootlegs, you need exactly three: The Ultimate Rarities, 93-94 In The Studio and Second Coming Rehearsal Sessions: In The Studio 2. The Ultimate Rarities features an acoustic demo version of She Bangs The Drums that is at once charming, heartbreaking, naïve and prescient; its two minutes reveal the Roses at their very essence, the sweet peal of Brown’s voice and what is tantamount to a declaration of intent: cherub betwixt devil and prophet, all the while in earnest. And for sublimely structured, rippingly loud rock and roll, the four out-takes from May 1988 rival anything you will ever hear.

The Second Coming collections boast material from those sessions in radically different guises than we are accustomed to, forsaking blues structures for more rhythmically complex funk workouts, including two Reni solo spots, frenetic John Squire-led jams and a demo of Love Spreads more in debt to Duane Eddy than Jimmy Page. And for 20 minutes, we listen in on Ian Brown as he tries to teach himself Redemption Song on guitar, making a mistake, having another go, his voice technically perfect, perfectly pitched and beautiful. Different times, different ways to say things.

“You should have… excuse me…” Rome, 3/5/95

And then there is the other side of the Roses. When the Roses were bad, they were fascinatingly bad, and there’s a slew of bootleg CDs and DVDs that range from disappointing to shockingly inept. Most of these recordings focus on the Second Coming era of ’95 and into ’96, after Reni had quit and been replaced by Robbie Maddix on the drums, who was, to put it mildly, a weakness. The CD Reading Festival of the August ’96 set is certainly well known, with John Squire having left the band late the year before, and Aziz Ibrahim replacing him on guitar. If, for whatever reason, the CD is not enough for you, there is also a DVD version, complete with paunchy dancing girl.

Reading was far from alone as a poor Roses gig, and there almost certainly has never been a major rock band that fluctuated so wildly between their peaks and troughs. Stoned Kids, from Boston, and Faraway Reni! from Chicago, are thoroughly lacklustre shows — band mistakes, instruments out of tune, Brown deciding not to sing for verses at a stretch — though the Chicago date does feature the only extant live version of I Am The Resurrection without coda. Still, precious little rivals the ghoulish absurdity of Rome Art Palladium from May 1995. Pop in an Ed Wood video, play a Shaggs disc or the last Stooges show, pull down your shades and fuse MC Hammer and Flashdance if you must. But then play this bootleg which has everything from a sequence in which each member of the band is in a different key, to a singer who excuses himself in the middle of a song and begins coughing, and you are apt to view your previous choices those of a cultured aesthete.

As for the Roses’ Second Coming comeback, before they returned to England at the end of the year, Magic Club Ride (September, Japan) and San Francisco Fillmore Club (May) are the high points. But while the latter features a thrilling group performance of what is assuredly the Roses’ strongest American gig, there is nothing like the Rome show. Of course, there was Trimalchio In West Egg before there was The Great Gatsby. Context, I suppose — and so I offer you contrast:

“Manchester in the area! We’re international, we’re continental… hello… but we’ll settle for Glasgow.” Blackpool Empress Ballroom, 12/8/89

“Is it louder than the Blackpool show or do you want louder?” Glasgow Green, 9/6/90

The best Roses bootlegs are among the best music the genre of rock’n’roll has ever produced. The two most famous and popular among collectors are the two referenced above, though the Roses’ English tour from December ’95 merits consideration as well as some of the band’s finest music. On home soil for the last time as a functioning unit, and having figured a way out from under their early Second Coming lethargy and Maddix’s drumming, the Roses discovered, as The Beatles did nearly 30 years earlier, that the rhythm is in the guitars — or at least it can be placed there — and on bootlegs Stoned And Dethroned? from Leeds Town and Country, and Welcome To The Resurrection, from Leicester, one can hear the Roses in a month-long run that resulted in a near unmatchable clutch of recordings. At some shows, Brown interpolates lyric fragments of All Along The Watchtower into Tears, and the sound, at its full throttle volume, is ravishing. Boots from the final shows in Manchester, available on In’t Milk Brilliant and Manchester 22/12/95, slot nicely into the hoary ‘like you’d been there’ category. “Make a wish for Christmas” Brown says before the Resurrection encore. Enter, then, the beat.

Fans like these recordings because the audio quality is better than many of the earlier shows: an easy reason to recommend, apart from the fabulous performance, the famous Blackpool show from August 1989 available on a number of bootleg CDs (Shoot You Down, The Flashback, Blackpool Live). For the Roses, it was a defining concert, a crystallisation of their ascent and success, a celebration of the so-called English summer of love and the much maligned ecstasy craze.

Glasgow Green is different. After staging their massive gig at Spike Island earlier in the year, it was here that the Roses played their last show together with Reni on drums under a big top tent, in stifling heat. The theme seemed to be one of redemption and reproof, the one at having failed to deliver on the promise of Spike Island, the other to attest to the fact that the Roses could still overwhelm you, like no other band.

Large-scale, gig-as-event shows had been something of a problem for the band, and Glasgow Green was offered as a return to form. The Alexandra Palace show, for instance, (It Ain’t Where You’re From), from November ’89, proved a disappointment when whoever was manning the sound neglected to flip the delay until the start of I Wanna Be Adored, which at the Ally Pally was the third-to-last song. But the manner in which the Roses recovered was startling, a volley of brilliance that kept upping itself: Adored, then the closer of Resurrection which morphed into the first public performance of Fool’s Gold, one of just nine versions that exist in bootleg form, with only six featuring John Squire on guitar and Reni at the drums. It is one of rock’s towering accomplishments of percussion, a veritable maze of rhythm. Realising the fact that you could get a doctorate writing on the five existing versions of Eric Dolphy performing God Bless The Child, but that you’d be laughed out the door with mentioning the Roses and their bootleg versions of Fool’s Gold, seems near farcical upon hearing the Roses in full flight. Or, perhaps, it’s all in accord with the progression of artistic acceptance. Dues, like.

But it is Glasgow Green, from June of 1990, that is the most revered of the Roses’ unreleased recordings and rightly so. Ian Brown said he wanted the sweat to rise off the people, bounce off the big top ceiling and come raining down. In any event, heated. For the Roses’ fan, the opening Adored, Squire’s guitar intro snaking and slithering all over itself before lurching into the refrain — the crowd singing along to a guitar riff — is absolutely mental. From another perspective, but still like-minded, here is the rock and roll equivalent of Böhm’s Tristan Und Isolde or Miles Davis and his quintet at Philharmonic Hall in 1964, absolute mania all the same. For an artist, on behalf of his fellow artists, to reference two of the collective’s greatest performances, each at the other, is odd, especially the one before the other occurs. I can think of no other instance save the Roses at Blackpool, somehow aware of future happenings in Glasgow, and the Roses at Glasgow Green looking back, a group aware of their meaning, import and, especially, that theirs was a music bound to last, as though it could have been otherwise.

“We paid our money to see you.” Very well. How about some more hands up then, all for the good cause.

Reviewed by Colin Fleming
Record Collector 2007