I think the worst clause was the band got no royalties at all off...wait for it....CDs! Their manager Gareth Evans must be in competition for the most incompetent manager in music history.
Undoubtedly. The Roses in 1995 were stubborn and hungry with new members and something to prove. The Roses in 2012-17 was like watching Sean Connery in Diamonds Are Forever. There, but having already left once, running a victory lap with no stakes and no chance of losing.
I didn't know that! What a fool. Someone somewhere was making a lot out of them. No wonder they stopped recording for Silvertone.
I heard that the contract was sprinkled with clauses which were only there to be negotiated away, never intended to be included in the final deal. Instead, it was just signed as was and no one could believe it.
i was a Roses nut in the mid 90s, so talk about the 95 bootlegs up to the embarrassing finale of Reading 96 does take me back. Lets remember its Robbie Maddix playing drums now and he isnt Reni, so stuff like Waterfall sounds nothing like the original. The jamming i recall is pretty much bass/drums being a back up for Squire noodling between Daybreak and Breaking into Heaven. Less jamming and more familar licks every night ( i do recall squire belts out the exact melody for what years later became Ian Browns 'Cant see me' ) Also felt Daybreak was much better live on those 95 shows than on the record, which i feel is pretty limp Recall Squire saying the keyboardist was recruited without him even knowing, which shown how dysfunctional they had become as a band
"Can't See Me" was taken from an unfinished Roses jam, with a Reni loop and Mani bass. The Silvertone contract included a clause around being enforceable on planets as yet undiscovered (!).
There was a spate of major label contracts that attempted to enforce zero royalties on CD's as they were a new format that needed to recoup its investment, allegedly.
Fantastic! Was at that gig - came down from Scotland for it. Haven’t seen this for years since I watched it on VHS.
They were big. 89-90 kids in schools (including me) were raving about the new sound that was coming out. Some quite tribal at the time who wouldn't accept the Charlatans or any other that appeared later stating they were copying the Roses despite the vast difference in their sound. I remember swapping a bummed shirt for a taped copy of the Roses album. Of course there would be "Johnny come latelys" by the second album after all they had gained a reputation by then especially from those that followed on from Madchester through to the Britpop era name dropping them all the time. That doesn't mean they weren't big at the time of "Stone Roses" because they most definitely were. Unpopular music doesn't get that well known the other side of the country from where it is part of a scene. The kids in Lincoln would not have heard of some underground band that wasn't popular that didn't get that much radio play other than John Peel playing the earlier songs and then Richard Skinner playing Made of Stone. Even before the album, Sally Cinnamon was quite well known. It was on the Indie chart for nearly a year. Music mags were quite popular back then. People knew who they were even if Radio 1 was playing hours of Stock Aitken and Waterman instead.
I was 16 when that album came out and it was huge with our age group. It seemed every boy in school had a copy of it on cassette. On school trips it was played on the coach, every party it was discussed and played. Other bands like the Monday’s were popular but the Stone Roses were THE band for a year or two. I love that album. I also really like the second album. It’s flawed in places with a few fillers but about 2/3 of the album is up there for me. It’s just a shame there was so much expectation for its eventual release that it was bound to be a disappointment. Got to see them at Brixton for the first time in that tour. I quite like the couple of singles that came out a few years back. It was just great to hear new material. Saw them at possibly their final gig at Hampden Park. As much as it was a great experience you can’t help feeling frustrated at them at their lack of output over the years. 2 albums and a handful of singles isn’t much to show regardless of how great the debut is. Especially as it felt like they ruled the world back in 89/90.
I've seen a lot of great bands live over 45 years of gig going, and the reformed Stone Roses of the past decade were right up there with the very best of them. The mid 90s version was decent, but without Reni they wrre, as Stummer said of the alarm, a shadow of a copy of the band... the reformation, much like the Pistols first 'come back' tours, saw a tight unit with something to prove, and prove it they did.
How I wish the entire Heaton Park gig was available on DVD ... "Fools Gold" at the end of the Made Of Stone documentary that Shane Meadows did, was a blinder.
ive always wonders where all the fans came from. In 95 the were playing town halls. If the band had have jammed out on the comeback the people there would have been in tears at the sight of such things as proper guitar solo's. The band took the easy money. the sr are clearly two separate bands. Theres the 95 incarnation and then theres what went before. Personally I find their bubblegum pop prior to 95 to be generally bland. Its a case of never the twain and each to their own.
The Roses in 1995 were playing places much smaller than they were. They stopped touring the moment they became 'big'. In early 1989 they played to 200 people in Walsall, where in early 1990 they could have easily played 2 nights at the 4,500 capacity AVLC 9 miles down the road. In 1995, they played around 25 UK shows in venues of 2-5k, so maybe 75,000 tickets in total and they could have easily played double that. Demand was high and they could have played two arena shows in six or seven cities and sold them all out. Tickets for the town hall tour were very hard to get and resale demand was high : on the night of the Wolves gig I was offered by a tout £100 outside before the gig. I spent three hours dialling the Wolves Civic box office to get through. In 1995 The Roses were distant legends who many people had never seen. There were plenty of people in 1995 who didn't get to see them, and got their chance in 2012. Effectively, demand for The Roses in 2012 would have been similar to say, The Beatles reforming for stadium shows in 1987.
its called an opinion. BTW. Where did all the extra fans come from? They went from playing in front of 1000 people to 60000 without even making a record. I have heard many of the comeback gigs and i find it lifeless. We all like different things and we live in the age of people going to gigs to be seen going to gigs rather than to see the band. They aren't fans.
Well your opinion is incorrect, a lot of Stone Roses fans love both albums, I'm one of them. I don't know about the new fans, I wasn't remotely interested in the reunion, they should've let sleeping dogs lie in my opinion but then there's the money to think of.
I guess the recent gigs were big on nostalgia. Lots of 40-odd year olds very drunk at the Hampden show. Not the most pleasant of audiences I’ve been in. Then there’s also people like my friend who brought his son to along who’s just getting into music and knew all the songs from his dad playing them for years. He loved that show, his first proper gig. I guess at least in the U.K. they are now a Rolling Stones type band in terms of being a big nostalgia draw without making any new relevant music. Plus we know the Stone Roses are a volatile band and there is an element of it being your last chance to possibly see them.
Yeah, I remember feeling happy that the band could finally make some money! They are all parents and likely the reunion allowed then to send the kids to better schools. Also, although the new songs still divide the opinion I think it's laudable that they tried to create new music.
the stone roses inhabit this weird but highly desirable middle ground between, say, the smiths and oasis, where they get to keep their ’indie’/youth culture credibility (forever entrenched in second summer of love narratives) and simultaneously cultivate a deep populist appeal (four lads who were godlike geniuses, best debut album ever, etc), all without ceding an inch of integrity. no mildly disappointing dadrock follow-ups or tepid reunion tours can make a dent in that legacy i mean there’s a film about some kids going to the stone roses spike island concert. that’s the plot. it’s like woodstock-level fart-huffing at this point in the grand scheme of things, silvertone might have been the best thing that ever happened to them: imagine a timeline where the roses put out a string of disappointing releases starting in ’92, hopping between britpop and trip hop as the decade wears on, chasing prodigy money before being eclipsed by coldplay or something. instead they got to return as heroes from exile
Whatever Aziz or Nigel Ippinson brought to the band, I remember a shock \ horror article in one of the music mags (probably Select) revealing the musical past of the newbies. Aziz had been in Simply Red, Ippinson in OMD & Robbie Maddix in Rebel MC. The general thrust was, having such people in a band like the Roses that had always been an outlaw gang / us against the world type of thing (no coincidence Squire was a big fan of the Clash) was "betraying the spirit" or somesuch. Nowadays I think that kind of thing is just a pose to sell records, but back then I was outraged. The guitarist was in Simply Red! Boo hiss! Aziz is actually a damn good guitarist but I didn't give a toss when I was 19.
Have you heard the European and American shows from April-May 1995? The next-to-last show in L.A. is passable, and the very last one in San Francisco is really good, but every single one before that is absolutely dire. Brown sounds like he's utterly bored and can't be bothered to sing (and when he does, is massively out of tune), Squire is vamping all over the place but hasn't mastered the noodling in the longer songs yet, and Maddix can't catch a cue to save his life and is desecrating the older tunes (Mani is okay). There's a guy in England who used to sell all the Roses' bootlegs and such, and he described and rated all of them on his website. This is how he describes their show in Rome, on May 3rd, 1995: Ian is worse than at Reading in places, Maddix is terrible, sounding clumsy, being out of time for half the performance, going too fast for the song. Squire makes blatant mistakes. Sounds very rushed, like they want to do the gig and leave ASAP. On 'Love Spreads', Squire plays at a different pitch to Mani and Ian, and Ian starts the second verse of 'Daybreak' straight away! Ian sounds a bit out of his head actually – at the start of 'Tightrope', when he is starting to sing, he sings, “You should have… excuse me”, and begins coughing. Then, asking "why should I get this bootleg", he writes: To have what is possibly the worst Roses gig ever. This was not an atypical performance of spring 1995. I have some tracks from that spring that are good-ish, but there isn't a single gig in its entirety I can get through all the way (and I'm one of the world's biggest Roses fans) until the last two shows in California. I think the worst one I ever heard was the show in Boston -- a disgrace. And the one in Berlin, very early in the tour, is also dreadful in the extreme. They did get their impetus back at the Feile Festival in Ireland that August, with the 'surprise' (to Squire) keyboard player in tow, and they did play some scorchers after that, until late December when the tour ended. But the whole vibe around their live shows in spring 1995 was one of dysfunctional incompetence. What happened in autumn 1995 was that Ian Brown (and his chum, Robbie Maddix) started feeling his oats again... but by then, Squire had checked out and was making plans for his future away from the band.
