141. The Stone Roses
Etihad Stadium
18 June 2016
Memory cheats us. Nostalgia takes the scraps and airbrushes them into greatness in our heads, and you would be forgiven for applying that concept to The Stone Roses, a band that only made one good album and vanished like a spliff in a student union.
However, we must remember that back in the late Eighties, when music had become either shoulder-padded synth mulch pumped out of the Stock, Aitkin and Waterman house of horrors or it was mullet-adorned men crying into saxophones, The Stone Roses burst out of Manchester like a Technicolor jolt, part jangle, part jackboot, part funk. They fused Byrdsian sparkle with the beat of the warehouse rave.
Fast forward a few decades and they have released two songs in twenty years, but they’re flogging out stadiums like it’s Beatlemania. Why? Don’t ask. Manchester isn’t. It’s busy throwing the world’s biggest wake for its own youth, and everyone’s high on communal memory.
From the first throbbing bassline of “I Wanna Be Adored”, the whole thing plays out like a 60,000-person house party for people who still think Spike Island was a documentary. This is a homecoming like no other, men who have spent years being told never to show emotion are dancing like someone threw a snaking hosepipe into the crowd.
Ian Brown still stands staring at the crowd with council estate menace. Mani’s frozen in time and white double denim, and Reni still grooves out that backbeat with a grin like one of those felines from nearby Cheshire.
Then “Fools Gold” happens: eleven minutes of hypnotic, elastic funk, and it starts to make glorious, transcendent sense. “Love Spreads” stomps. “Made of Stone” soars. And when “I Am the Resurrection” finally collapses in a wall of joyous squall, it becomes abundantly clear that this isn’t just about music. It’s memory, a Mancunian mass with The Stone Roses as the high priests of this ancient rave cult, reminding us all that even if bands fall apart, the feeling doesn't.
With the last bars fading away, my pal and I head off into the Stella fugue of central Manchester by night, still a bit misty eyed, not because of any emotional reaction to the gig, but because some knob-head had set a smoke grenade off nearby. Manchester was hopping, drunks fell out of bars, lasses sprawled in micro-dresses flashing their knickers at passers-by like surrender flags. Just a regular Saturday in Manchester and it was fun as hell.