"The Stone Roses: War and Peace" by Simon Spence

Like all pop acts hailed as “cult”, the Stone Roses have had a fair bit of drivel written about them. The fact that a large chunk of the band’s ‘active’ years was spent dithering behind closed doors (be it in solicitors’ offices or in recording studios) didn’t help. Nor, for that matter, did the Roses’ notoriously hostile stance towards the press. As the newly reformed Manchester legends prepare to play in Belgium, a timely biography reminds us what made the Stone Roses arguably the most influential British band of the late eighties/early nineties.

The five-year gap between their 1989 era-defining eponymous debut and its successor, The Second Coming, contributed to the band’s downfall. Even moderately knowledgeable Roses fans know how the band recorded and rerecorded  their second album in various studios, using a total of three producers and frittering away a reported £250,000 in the process. By the end of the recording sessions, the band bore little resemblance to the close-knit unit they once were. But then again, copious amounts of money + pressure to deliver + access to Manchester’s top drug dealers = guaranteed disaster.

If the Stone Roses are associated with flares and psychedelia, it is lesser known that singer Ian Brown and guitarist Jon Squire’s early influences come from the opposite end of the rock spectrum, namely punk (Generation X, Empire) and Oi! (Angelic Upstarts). Or that Brown wasn’t the singer but the bassist in the first, embryonic incarnation of the Roses, under the name The Patrol.

Like fellow Mancunians Morrissey and Mark E Smith, Brown is a stubborn contrarian, taking immense pleasure in catching people off-guard. Yet, for all his cocksureness, one cannot help but share the pain he feels at the demise of the Roses (i.e. Squire’s departure) in 1996. Perhaps the most interesting character in Spence’s book, however, is the improbable Gareth Evans, the gold bullion dealer who became the band’s manager, having no music background whatsoever. Dishonest, hapless and downright incompetent he may have been at times (especially when getting the Roses a contract with a heavy metal label bearing a similar name to the one intended), but it’s only after he was sacked that the band started losing focus and drifting apart.

While not as scholarly or authoritative as, say, Peter Guralnick’s two-part Elvis biography, War & Peace nonetheless shows more insight than most previous Roses books. Simon Spence (whom nineties fetishists may remember as the frontman of indie pranksters Fabulous) made a point of basing his book on hard fact and first-hand interviews rather than rehashed soundbites or, worse, speculation. If you're after a Stone Roses biography, this is the one.

Viking, 325 pages, €32.05 (hardback)

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