Garbage Days Revisited #1: The Stone Roses - "Second Coming" (1994)

 

"Listen up sweet child o'mine, have I got news for you/Nobody leaves this place alive, they'll die here, join the queue..." - The Stone Roses, Breaking Into Heaven

So welcome to a new series on Nite Songs. And yes, it's another retrospective column. In this one, we'll take a look at albums which, while the bands who made them haven't exactly been forgotten (if they had been then they'd be in Sounds From The Junkshop), seem to have been treated somewhat unkindly by history. And while it will lean a little bit on some of my personal experiences growing up where it has to, this is more about why these albums deserve a second listen and, just maybe, a re-evaluation. And unlike SFTJ this won't be confined to the nineties and noughties either (yes I know we haven't really dealt with the noughties yet on SFTJ but we will get there eventually!) as we look back through rock history through a bit of a wider prism.

Anyway, starting us off, probably one of the most divisive albums of the last 30 odd years. I mentioned in the SFTJ article on Lush how as a teenager I kind of ended up falling in with a rag tag group who were basically the kids in our year at school who were into guitar music. The other guys in the group were predominantly into listening to shoegazing and grunge although there was a whole range of tastes in there from a few such as myself who liked the Wonder Stuff and Carter USM to a few metalheads-in-training through to a couple of lads who'd got into Madchester through their older brothers.

Inevitably, as nearly always seems to happen when you get a group of teenagers who are into music spending most of their weekends together getting intoxicated on what little we could cadge from whoever would buy it for us, the conversation eventually came up "Hey, maybe we should form a band!" And so four of us did. It was two of the grunge/shoegaze lot on vocals and drums, muggins here on bass and one of my best mates at the time on guitar. He was easily the most gifted out of the four of us musically and he was very much a Madchester devotee with his two favourite bands being the Stone Roses and the La's.

So the four of us would sit in various people's bedrooms (usually our drummer as he had his kit set up in there and it was a bugger to move elsewhere) trying to play stuff we knew and liked. And as our guitarist was the one who probably knew what he was doing more than the rest of us a lot of it would be excuses for him to break his John Squire licks out - we'd cover Elephant Stone and Mersey Paradise as well as the La's' I Can't Sleep and Son Of A Gun. Which left the other three of us to fight over the remaining four songs. We'd usually end up covering Today by the Smashing Pumpkins (who all of us liked) and I managed to get the guys to crowbar our version of Caught In My Shadow by the Wonder Stuff in on occasion. We might even have had a couple of (terrible) originals at this point but I think that probably came later. Either way, it was probably a minor miracle we even got as far as the two gigs we eventually managed in a couple of north Leeds pubs where we weren't even old enough to order our own drinks before hitting sixteen and going into sixth form where we all kind of drifted off to different social groups put a (probably merciful) stop to things.

As the guitarist and myself would often find ourselves thwarted at the weekend get-togethers with the other guys in terms of getting the albums we wanted played in favour of hearing Nevermind or Ten or Going Blank Again or Badmotorfinger or In bastard Utero for the umpteenth bastard time. Because of this, we'd sometimes head over to each others' houses on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon - he was kind of teaching me bass at this point as my previous musical experience had been two years of trying and failing miserably to play the violin in the school orchestra - and listen to the stuff that we wanted to listen to. So I'd bring over my Carter and Senseless Things albums and he'd cue up his Stone Roses, Inspiral Carpets and Happy Mondays ones.

As I've said, the guy was a Roses devotee and was forever trying to get me into their first album. The thing is...even 30 years on, while it's an album I definitely like I really struggle to see the view that it's an absolute classic of its time. A good half of it is absolutely killer - Made Of Stone, Waterfall, She Bangs The Drums, I Wanna Be Adored, I Am The Resurrection, This Is The One, hell I'd even put Bye Bye Badman in there at a push. But there's still a fair bit of filler - let's be honest, Shoot You Down and Sugar Spun Sister aren't exactly essential and exactly what the point of Don't Stop is I've still yet to figure out.

So yeah, around 1994 or so my view of the Roses was they were decent enough but I wouldn't consider myself a mega-fan by any stretch of the imagination. But as the year started to draw to a close, you couldn't open a copy of NME or Melody Maker without speculation that their second album would be dropping soon. The group had been silent for nearly four years (cynical cash-in re-releases by their old label Silvertone aside) while sorting out record company issues. The comeback single, Love Spreads, got mixed reviews and was like pretty much nothing else they'd ever released before, a big riff-spewing beast that was a million miles away from Sally Cinnamon etc. The fishing hat and flares brigade's reaction ranged from bewilderment to outright hostility but as someone whose music taste was getting heavier at the time through the likes of Terrorvision, Therapy? etc, I really liked this new riffed-up Roses sound. Likewise, the album got decidedly mixed reviews with a lot of old school Madchester fans reacting with downright puzzlement to it and even now it's still held up by a lot of people as a classic case of second album folly. I remember running into my guitarist mate at school that week who I knew would have already bought the album and asking him about it. "Oh don't listen to them reviews," he said, "It's brilliant. I'll do you a tape!"

And so it was that Friday night that I found myself sat in my room cueing up the C60 he'd done for us with bated breath. Hands up, when I first heard Breaking Into Heaven with its ridiculous five minute plus long ambient intro, I was starting to think that the reviewers were right even though it did eventually kick into a decent tune. However, the storming riff of Driving South quickly won me back over - now THIS I could definitely get on board with, a proper swampy slice of Britrock with the whole "selling your soul at the crossroads" theme to the lyrics. And also hearing Ian Brown sing the lyrics "Well you ain't too young or pretty and you sure as hell can't sing, any time you wanna sell your soul I've got a toll-free number you can ring" definitely made me chuckle. The song may be down as being written by John Squire but I'd be amazed if Brownie hadn't had some sort of input into that bit.

Ten Storey Love Song (the second single from the album and a second Top 10 hit) would turn out to be another favourite of mine and would usually feature prominently on any mixtape I'd put together for any girl daft enough to consider me worth dating in that era (ah the days when we'd put mixtapes together for girls we fancied or were actually going out with. Christ, it's no wonder my record with the opposite sex was so abysmal back then. Anyway...) Anyone who says Second Coming doesn't have the tunes its predecessor did, this is the one you play 'em.

If Daybreak kind of drifts off into the fog and loses momentum a bit (not a bad song it just feels like a jam that should have stayed in the studio), the gentle/sinister Your Star Will Shine and Brown's funky Straight To The Man (which kind of points the way forward to his solo career looking back at it) see the group getting things back on track quickly. They also prove that this is a good varied album as well which I always thought was one of the main flaws with the band's debut.

Third single Begging You sounded absolutely terrifying the first time you heard it but oddly addictive by the third or fourth (similar to the Boo Radleys' C'mon Kids album a couple of years later) while the acoustic campfire singalong of Tightrope may have gone down like a cup of cold sick among the fans but I remember really liking it - for one thing it was a nice easy song to learn and fun to play and I'd sometimes dig it out at parties where there were girls present and a guitar lying about (again, see my earlier comment about my success rate with the ladies back then).

Good Times is a bit of a blip - kind of blues-rock by numbers but Tears (the one both me and my mate gravitated towards) is a real standout, a proper John Squire guitar masterclass. Hand on heart, I have never been a guitar nerd - even when I first moved from being a bass player to a rhythm guitarist in my early twenties, my heroes were people who could come up with a good solid riff like Billy Duffy or Malcolm Young rather than people who could widdle up and down the fretboard like Malmsteen or Bonamassa, But I remember on hearing this one and my jaw pretty much hitting the floor thinking "How does he do that?..."

The sinister revenge anthem How Do You Sleep? ("So raise your glasses, here's a toast to wasted lives, may all their ghosts come back to haunt you and tell you how they died") and the aforementioned Love Spreads bring things to a close (apart from a hidden track which sounds like a bunch of stoners trying to play the theme from the Laurel & Hardy '80s cartoon) and that's yer lot.

Like I say, both myself and my guitarist mate really enjoyed Second Coming but it became clear early on that we were in a minority. Even now though, I'll stick up for it and say that I honestly prefer it to the group's much more celebrated debut - it's heavier, more varied and apart from a couple of slightly pedestrian numbers, is a pretty damn good collection of songs. It definitely had an effect on my mate who, having realised where the group had got their influences from, started digging out old Led Zep and Deep Purple albums and really took his playing up a level. Sensing an opportunity I tried to get him into some of the Britrock stuff I was listening to but while he instantly took to Terrorvision, I couldn't quite talk him round to appreciating Therapy? or the Wildhearts. About six months later, our little band broke up and towards the end of '95 we'd put another one together but by this time the music scene had changed again and our new group was pretty much a straightforward Britpop outfit (we were listening to a lot of Shed Seven at this point which should probably give you a clue). Again, we managed about two or three gigs in local pubs before university beckoned and we all went our separate ways.

The onset of Britpop pretty much set the Roses on a path to a slow painful demise as well. They should theoretically have been well-poised to surf that wave but by now Oasis had very much established themselves as the big dog in the Manchester yard and on the back of Second Coming's critical mauling the group were pretty much relegated to being a second division outfit in the scheme of things. Long time drummer Reni was given his cards in early 1995 and by the end of the year John Squire had gone as well after butting heads with Ian Brown once too often (allegedly). Brown and bassist Mani put together a new line-up featuring guitarist Aziz Ibrahim, drummer Robbie Maddix and keyboardist Nigel Ippinson with an aim to putting a third album and planned their big comeback gig for the Reading Festival '96.

....yeah. Suffice to say that didn't go to plan...

Within a matter of weeks, the band was no more. Brown would go off to a hit and miss solo career (albeit with a few gems scattered in there), Mani would join Primal Scream and Squire would go on to form dismal sub-Oasis clodhoppers the Seahorses. I have to be honest, the long-awaited Roses reunion about ten years ago came and went without me paying much attention to it - I think my thoughts were that it was unlikely they'd play anything from Second Coming anyway and like I say, while I think the first album's okay I'm just not what you'd call a mega-fan of it. I don't think I even heard the group's comeback single (or if I did I don't remember it which is never a good sign).

Anyway, while I can totally see why Second Coming threw those Stone Roses fans who'd come on board with She Bangs The Drums etc for a total loop, as someone who arguably gravitated more towards Britrock than Britpop, I still think it's an under-rated effort and, I'll say it again, the best and most consistent album they did. Give it another listen, especially if your music taste leans more towards the rock end of the spectrum than indie, you might just be surprised...