Coming up Roses

Old bands never die, they merely reform. The music industry not being what it once was, a reunion tour has become an almost compulsory step for ex-acts of a certain vintage. Surely, though, the Stone Roses were different? After the much-delayed and ultimately disappointing second album followed by a slow, painful implosion and years of bitter recriminations, they looked to be one of the few bands destined to remain in the past tense.

The wave of excitement that followed last year’s historic press conference and the giddiness I shared with thousands of others after successfully getting tickets to the Manchester homecoming shows were therefore more than justified. And yet, the question remained as to whether a reunion was the right decision.

Sure, it was a financial no-brainer, but artistically the Roses resided in a rarified place that only a band who started out with such magnificent promise yet failed to live up to their true potential could ever reach. As undignified as the band’s last days were, they perversely created a near-mythical legacy. The exact details of how it all went wrong became lost in the fog of time - all that was left was one era-defining album and a tantalising promise of what might have been. Why on earth would they risk shattering the illusion by doing anything so conventional as getting back together?

And so it was inevitable that in the intervening months the excitement would wane, to the point where many were reconsidering the trip to Heaton Park. The announcement of many more gigs including a European warm-up tour diluted the idea of being there from the very start of the new Phase II Roses. Tales of Reni leaving the stage and assorted bust-up rumours didn’t help to shake the feeling that maybe all this was a very bad idea. And that Ian Brown could never really hold a tune could he?

Several recent articles by contemporary journalists such as John Harris have dared to re-evaluate history, suggesting for example that Spike Island, far from being the tour de force of popular legend, was in reality an utter shambles with appalling sound and underwhelming support acts (not helped by the booking of someone called Frankie Bones instead of the altogether more famous “Godfather of House” Frankie Knuckles).

This of course is the same John Harris who urged readers of his fulsome sleevenotes to the Complete Stone Roses compilation to "Tell your grandchildren" that the band had created as much magic as Dylan, Hendrix or the Sex Pistols. Distance always has a tendency to obscure the truth, of course, but sometimes the truth isn't how we remember it. So: could these four middle-aged blokes turn the clock back 20 years and recapture a magical past that possibly never existed to begin with? No pressure, then.

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My own expectations for Saturday’s gig were not helped by the announcement of the support acts, as it's allocation was by far the worst of the three nights. We got there in time for The Wailers. They played all the obvious old numbers, which would have been fine if any of us were remotely interested in reggae. Despite some of the crowd being into it, surely this was a case similar to Spike Island where the band had chosen the support they wanted rather than who would best suit the occasion.

And then came Beady Eye. Now, Oasis were forever accused of being stuck in the past but, in the early days at least, Noel Gallagher’s genius was in filching well-worn riffs and building thrilling modern rock songs around them. The curious thing with this band is just how closely every song resembles a different old classic whilst utterly failing to rise above the level of meat-and-potatoes stodge. Liam, Gem, Andy and the other blokes (including a keyboardist who appeared to be in disguise, perhaps to conceal his embarrassment) go way beyond “retro” - there must have been ancient hunter-gatherers who made more progressive music by banging rocks against their cave walls. Except of course when they busted out a couple of Oasis songs, for which the crowd went bananas.

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Managing expectations is never easy. I’d seen both Ian Brown and John Squire perform Roses songs in the past. The former was close to how I imagined the real thing to sound; the latter doing a half-assed Fools Gold while supporting REM in the early 2000s was emphatically not. As is the modern way, we could get a pretty good idea of where on the spectrum this gig would fall by perusing the reviews of the previous night’s performance. These suggested that we wouldn’t be disappointed.

By 9pm the rain had stopped and expectations had reached fever pitch as the band took to the stage. I Wanna Be Adored kicked in and in all honesty Brown could have been singing as far out of tune as he liked and nobody would have noticed, as we were all too busy bellowing the words back at him. It sounded as good as one could reasonably expect, bearing in mind the outdoor setting, our distance from the stage and the passage of time.

It looked rather impressive too, the stage design with screens stretching all the way across being the best I’ve seen at a gig, and all four main players suitably attired - Brown in leather jacket (removed to reveal iconic T-shirt later on), Squire looking much younger than his years and Reni in the trademark hat. As for Mani, it’s fair to say the years have not been so kind but he looked appealingly surprised throughout, like he couldn’t quite believe what was happening - understandably so.

The setlist bore no surprises, comprising the entire first album and most of the obvious singles and B-sides. Purists might have preferred Elephant Stone or What the World Is Waiting For instead of Something’s Burning or Standing Here, say, and masochists would have been disappointed at the lack of Second Coming material bar Love Spreads and Ten Storey Love Song, but you can’t please everyone.

What struck me as the set progressed was that the boundary between what on the surface are two markedly different studio albums isn’t quite as solid as I’d thought, basically because my favourites tend to be obvious “big tunes” which rely more on melody. The band clearly always had a fondness for jamming, informed by their diverse, genre-spanning tastes, and there were elements of the second record’s Led Zep riffage here in the lengthy instrumental sections of Fools Gold and I am the Resurrection amongst others.

Even though their musical chops were never in doubt, this was still a highly nimble and fluid performance for four fellas who until recently hadn’t played together for decades. Squire was particularly impressive throughout a near-2 hour-set. The art world’s loss appears once more to be music’s gain. Ultimately, we were way beyond a "take the money and run" level of performance here.

And if the set sagged slightly in the middle, it was only the usual lull from which all long gigs suffer. Then they sensibly saved a solid run of favourites till the end, starting with Made of Stone through She Bangs the Drums and finishing with the inevitable I am the Resurrection. The latter was such a cornerstone of so many of our university club nights that it’s no exaggeration to say it helped cement my friendships with my two best uni friends. And here we were many years later, going nuts for it again. Quite a moment.

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A gig is never just about the bare facts of the music. It absorbs so many facets of time, place and mood to become a unique and indefinable beast. You can buy a ticket to a gig for £65, but you can’t buy the memories that have fed into it, or those that it creates.

Part of the reason the Roses’ music had such an effect on me was from discovering it while at uni in Manchester (Salford really - close enough), a city whose very air seemed imbued with the spirit of so many departed bands. And whilst that may be, scientifically speaking, utter bollocks, that didn’t make it feel any less true at the time and nor does it now. Before getting the train home on Sunday, we did our own brief reunion tour of our old uni campus and the houses and flats where we used to live. It brought back memories we’ll never be able to entirely recreate. For three nights in a park north of Manchester though, four old men nearly did just that.