The Stone Roses looked like every lad I'd known and filled me with northern pride
Late November 1989. The Berlin Wall had just fallen, the House of Commons was newly televised, and New Kids on the Block (NKOTB) were No 1. At school, my classmates were now crazy about the band. On non-uniform day one of them showed me how she had sewn a Marky Mark patch on to her old Brosette jeans. It was, I suppose, a time of great change.
Top of the Pops that week was presented by the indomitably perky Jackie Brambles and Jenny Powell, and alongside NKOTB’s rendition of You Got It (the Right Stuff), there was music from Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville, Bobby Brown, Jeff Wayne, and performances from boyband Big Fun, Fine Young Cannibals, the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses.
It’s always hard to explain the place Top of the Pops once occupied in the national psyche. It was TV that was at once homely and a gateway into the future. It is difficult, too, to explain the effect of that evening of watching two Mancunian bands who sounded faintly deranged and looked vaguely grubby, and were about as far away from cleancut Big Fun as one could imagine. They played Hallelujah and Fool’s Gold respectively and left the country in a mild state of confusion.
I had just turned 12 and had only experienced this feeling once before – two years earlier, dancing to La Bamba at the community centre disco, when I had looked over to see a group of half-drunk teenagers wearing Smiths Tshirts, with flowers in their back pockets. In that moment, I realised Los Lobos wasn’t really where it was at.
Similarly, it wasn’t that I felt an immediate love for Fool’s Gold or its creators, though it all seemed compelling, subversive and strange. Rather, what I felt was a sense of kinship. The accent in Ian Brown’s vocal was pleasingly familiar in its northernness, as were the band themselves, there under the studio lights looking pale and disillusioned and carrying the unquestionable air of trouble.
Madchester was already a cultural force. The previous weekend, the Stone Roses had headlined Alexandra Palace, and that very week, the band had blown a fuse during a live performance on BBC Two’s the Late Show, with Brown audibly lambasting the BBC technicians for “amateurism” as presenter Tracey MacLeod tried to fill the sudden programming gap. Back home in Wigan, we felt it more tangibly. The jeans had grown wider, the haircuts more bowl-like. People walked differently, with a limber, loose-kneed shuffle that moved at its own pace, that seemed somehow to take up more room.
Madchester made a rousing backdrop for those of us growing up in the north-west. That its heroes were not perfectly coiffed popstars or smouldering American rockers, but looked like every lad you had ever known, only enhanced the sense of proximity. I recall watching a report on the local news – vox pops with northern teenagers, an interview with the founder of Joe Bloggs jeans, a light-hearted exploration of the baggy scene – and feeling a new allegiance to my scruffy, overlooked part of Britain.
It seemed half the world was obsessed with Manchester then. Visitors came from far afield to shop at Affleck’s Palace and queue for the Haçienda. It wasn’t the first time the city’s music had attracted attention, of course – the Smiths, the Fall, Joy Division and New Order had all summoned the tourists – though this time, it felt more allconsuming. “What is there about this deeply unlovely city that’s nurtured so much great music?” wondered one MTV report on Madchester. Whatever it was – rain, post-industrial boredom, drugs, ley lines – those of us in the north-west felt new pride in our unloveliness.
I was young when I began going to pubs and clubs and though it had been a couple of years since the Stone Roses’ debut by then, the band was still a mainstay on the region’s dancefloors and jukeboxes. The opening notes of I Am the Resurrection or Waterfall always brought rapture to the room. The dance, at close range, was like a rainmaker ritual amplified by trousers; from a distance it was beautiful, writhing, radiant. “Children in a frenzy,” as Tony Wilson once put it. “Top people, top buzz, top music, top atmosphere, no hostility, unity. Unity,” one teenage Madchester fan told MTV.
A few years ago I found myself in Widnes, on the set of Spike Island, the Mat Whitecross and Chris Coghill film set against the backdrop of the infamous Stone Roses concert of May 1990, when the band played to a crowd of 27,000 people in an unlikely corner of Cheshire. I stood in the icy rain and watched Elliott Tittensor hand-in-hand with Emilia Clarke, and the extras who rushed in and danced to I Wanna Be Adored, mushroom-haired, baggy-trousered, faces golden with bonfire light. They shot the scene over and over and the song played on repeat. And as the rain turned to hail and my fingers froze, I stopped taking notes and instead thought about the the way the intricate beauty of John Squire’s guitar hovered around Brown’s roughshod voice. I wondered if the teenagers dancing before me could ever understand what the band had meant to this part of the north, 23 years earlier.
More recently, I spoke with the writer and broadcaster Stuart Maconie about the way that northern confidence had once been manifested in its architecture. “I am a big fan of that period of northern might that you see in a lot of the civic buildings,” he told me. “You see that in a lot of Manchester’s Cottonopolis-era architecture. A sort of swagger in bricks.”
It’s an image that has stuck with me and that rose up again this week as I revisited the Stone Roses’ debut 30 years after its release. What I loved about that band, that time, that scene, was that it felt something like those buildings: music that reflected the new might of a community. Civic music, unity, swagger made of stone.