Following up that iconic debut was never going to be easy and taking five years to do it only increased the pressure but the Stone Roses much misunderstood second album really does stand the test of time. If many thought the follow up to the iconic debut should have been either an album of effortless sublime guitar shimmer like the debut or the sinuous funk infused grooves of Fools Gold then the final release was another music in a very different kitchen.

At their peak the Stone Roses seemed a shoe in for world domination. Not only leading the charge but huge and moving the music forward, embracing the dancefloor in a new sonic hybrid of Sly funk and indie shimmer. At this stunning pinnacle, they could have done the smart thing and banged out the second album whilst they were peaking with the ‘Fools Gold’ single. It would have been an album of funky loose groove jams that were also hinted at on the next single ‘One Love’ and its sensational B-side ‘Something’s Burning’- arguably the band’s best take on the sticky groove. This period saw a collision of Can, Public Image, Sly Stone, post punk, Hendrix and funk with all the band’s own melodic and musical strengths. This funkoid Roses could have formed the kernel of a great follow-up album and redefined the band permanently as the kings of the loping groove.

That would have been the moment.

Instead, they disappeared for five years and moved apart with different drugs, different musical tastes and different lives. When a band loses its four headed monster closeness and its intensity and its drive, it often can never get it back. The magic moment when the mates against the world, last gang in town vibe has gone can never be recovered. It’s a natural part of the process- who wants to sit in a transit van or a studio for ever! You get older, you change and you move on. Yet somehow in the middle of this, they still created a great second album that is often overlooked because it didn’t fit in with the myth.

The band had done a pretty effective job of disappearing off the scene after the 1989/90 dominance. By the time the rest of the world had caught up with them with all the British bands either doing their version of the Stone Roses under the banner of Britpop  the Roses had exited leaving the Britpop party to rage on without the mentors and the masters who were beavering away in various studios like Rockfield in Wales like mysterious never seen wizards trying to make sense of what they had.

The Roses were never conventional. Their release schedule had gaps and always seemed to miss albums out like the scrapped Martin Hannett produced debut album that didn’t sound or feel right. Its non-release left space for the classic debut proper- the same happened with Second Coming with the Fools Gold era album never happening, it was straight to what would have technically been the fourth album with its added Zep-lore. Yet there was still nods to what could have been and they somehow still delivered a funk chassis with the liquid gold rhythm section of Reni and Mani at their best on many of the tracks. These groove tracks entwine with the layers of guitars or are surrounded by classic songwriting like Ten Story Love Song or the Led Zep dark magus magic of Love Spreads which sees The Second Coming almost living up to its cheeky title.

In the pre-internet age the idea that a band could disappear so effectively seems insane but the Roses had become invisible until that sudden re-emergence making their mystique all the more powerful.The Roses worked at their own pace but time waits for no man and when the album finally came out, Oasis were already storming the scene.By the end of 1994 the Roses were legends from another time and yet the album, shrouded in mystery and expectation, was released that Christmas to much anticipation.

The Stone Roses second album came out with the same sort of build up and suffocating expectation as the Clash’s second album. On release the reviews had the same sense of deflation that has totally skewed the record’s place in history. Of course, it didn’t change the world or create a youthquake like the iconic debut; it was only a great rock n roll record but the expectation altered its perception.

The problem both iconic bands had was that to release one life changing album that defines a generation becomes an impossible hurdle to follow. As I detailed in my book about the band, the Roses spent years recording the second album. At their peak they had looked like they were on the fast track to big time, the proper big time of stadiums and American success of Oasis but their inbuilt, punk rock bullshit detector would see them implode long before this becoming the John The Baptist precursor to the Gallagher’s Jesus Christ Superstar.

The Roses return was already a mixture of massively heightened expectations and muted disinterest. Oasis were now the top dogs. The two bands had been recording a mile apart from each other in Rockfield and Monnow Valley. A pre fame Liam Gallagher had nervously visited the Roses late one night in a famous encounter. The bands had also met at WH Smiths in Wales near the studio- Noel and Liam bumping into Ian Brown- the baton was passed over, the same baton the Brown had picked up from the Clash when he sneaked into the Westway wonders recoding on ‘Bankrobber’ in the now defunct Pluto Studios in Manchester.

The Roses relaunch toyed with their mystical guru status – there was no hype or endless front covers. The first press for ‘Second Coming’ was that famous Big Issue front cover. In normal terms, this was media suicide to not go the traditional press route but the Roses were so far off the beam by now that it was perfect. It also raised a fortune for the magazine and their street sellers, a million miles away from the cocaine music biz of trad British media. It was a cheeky, amusing move, and very punk.

The interview set the tone for the whole campaign, with the band operating behind a shroud of smoke. They had always been fond of the tease thing, stretching out the tension. It was part of their music and part of their vibe. It was now part of their whole set-up. The very idea of releasing an album that close to Christmas, when all the pop schlock comes out, getting in the way of number one was a crazy risk that would help to cloud the record’s impact, but the Roses always had a lot of front.

A week before the magazine came out I had bumped into the band in the street in Manchester as they were on the way to do the interview. It was one of the last times that Reni was with them and the four of them were rushing out of a Manchester city centre hotel and we had an excited chat about the upcoming album and the mystery shrouded band.

The band were in great spirits that day. It was the first sighting of them for years. The last time I had seen Reni was on the same street a couple of years before, and we walked back to Hulme. He told me a lot of stuff about the album, as well as his shoes and about how great it was that the album had breakbeats on it instead of his drumming and how he was sampling and looping his drums in the studio, which seemed strange coming from the best drummer of his generation.

He also claimed he was skint!

As the music was drip released, questions were asked. When the needle hit the groove, would the record change the world like the debut? Could it mean as much? Soon after the Big Issue interview, Love Spreads got its first radio play. We were driving back from a gig over the moors in a van driven by the Roses’ pre Mani bass player Pete Garner. We stopped the van and turned the radio onto full and listened to the track as it blasted across the bleak moors and into the starlit sky.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYFK1R-wUwg

‘Love Spreads’ sounded amazing that night, with the cold chill of the moon lighting up the background. The song was magical and mystical with its strange quasi-religious lyrics and its rumbling dark power. It’s nmh one of the great comeback singles with a mystery and weirdness and an intangible genius that the Roses at that point of time were after. The video compounded this- fuzzy cine 8 snatches of the band goofing around and disappearing from view, it perfectly matched their intangible.

A tape of the album arrived the next day and I immersed myself in it. Having written about the band for years I got the tape first from the great Hall Or Nothing PR people (who unbeknownst to them, I had gifted the Roses to after meeting ex- Roses manager Gareth Evans on the train to London years.. Evans has asked if I could write about the band for the NME after my 1987 feature on them in Sounds. I pointed out to him that you could only write for one music paper at a time and gave him the numbers of two PRs- the great Jeff Barrett and the then more established Hall Or Nothing. Both were the best PR’s in the business, who only did the best bands and were also approachable and always had time for the bands and the journalists and I explained that Hall Or Nothing were bigger and more established t the time and he rang them first.

Into the vacuum arrived an album that wasn’t playing easy to get. I looked at the pre-release cassette. Even the sleeve was different. It was darker, meaner, harder to make out and hinting at something more menacing than the Jackson Pollock pop art of the debut album.  This time there was a collection of songs that were not instantly accessible melodically and were far heavier than the debut. It sounded different and yet felt so similar. It didn’t have the euphoric, pure crystalline pop of the debut and came with a darker world weariness with a new slinkiness in its grooves. There was also an added misty mountain hop element of Led Zeppelin to the record which was musically controversial at the time. The remnants of the punk generation had a problem with Led Zeppelin but they were a great band whose grooving, neo-folksy rock n roll defied fashion and gave John Squire especially, a blank canvas to play with, yet the Roses would put their own stamp on the classic sound.

Track by track the album unfurled its mystery from the mysterious skronk noise that swirled at the album intro.  Just like I Wanna Be Adored on the debut, The Second Coming kicked off with a swathe of meditative Zen-like feedback and a now rural music concrete before segueing into a tape of a river behind the studio in Buckley with the cold river water sluicing down the mountain sonically captured by Ian Brown on a portable DAT player.

The track then fuses gently into Reni’s drum pattern with a tribal workout that sounds almost like Fleetwood Mac’s great ‘Tusk’. Squire kicks in and we’re off into the album’s debut eleven and a half minutes track, ‘Breaking Into Heaven’. Mani and Reni are on fire and the bass is groove supreme as the bassist owns the song. There are shades of Jimmy Page with some of the guitar licks with the loose, slithering guitar playing that sees John defly decorating the song with a six string genius and Reni is, as ever, King Groove.

There are several layers of guitar- most of them forwards and some of them sliding in backwards, joining the occasional backwards snares that slurp in and out of the collage. ‘Breaking Into Heaven’ floats with a delicate beauty and a real godlike groove, defying the fractious situation the band found themselves in at the time with the molten music bonding them as producer Simon Dawson told the Melody Maker.

“We spent a lot of time getting the backing tracks feeling good. They’d go in and just jam it for maybe a few days. They’d sort of play it all afternoon and maybe get bored with it and play something else and come back to the first song later with a slightly different feel. They just like playing together as a band, so that’s what they wanted to try and capture. If you want to make an album that sounds live, it’s as simple as that. They did spend a lot of time jamming in the studio, and a lot of different feels came out of that.”

Ian Brown sings with a strong, nasally northern accent. It’s a million miles away from the American blues tradition and stamps a northern stamp all over the song. His voice is husky and rough – full of Manchester street life, defining the time and space as a singer should, putting a stamp on the proceedings whilst the band were stretching and flexing like a cat, playing to their strengths and creating that wall of mystique that over the years has strengthened the album.

This was a record made in its time, this was not the tripped out sixties or the excess of the seventies, this was a band who were fusing rock tradition to something of their time with the Mancunian vowels to shaping the songs and this very northerness leaking through the songs’ epic reach, making sense of John Squire’s lyrics in his own way.

Already the difference between the two albums was becoming apparent- on the debut The Roses played as a team, as a sum of their parts but now they are all plying their separate paths, all chasing those Squire guitars and yet somehow making it work.

Not that Reni was panicking; his drums were effortlessly brilliant throughout with deceptively simple skip beats and great timings jamming to the breakbeats. This guy is a constant, totally amazing and locked in with Mani is one of the great rhythm sections. Reni never even changed the skins on his kit and was still using the same drum kit from the first album. He was also not averse to messing around with his rhythms. As Simon Dawson remembers.

“Reni is well into taking bits of something, sticking it into a sampler and re triggering it and see what comes out, getting a groove from that. We’d go down that line for weeks sometimes.”

The following track ‘Driving South’ is a twelve bar Zep boogie driving in on a mean riff and a dark sardonic humour that stakes out very different territory than the band’s earlier work. ‘Ten Storey Love Song’ starts off with a flurry of sound, attempting to find the song before the song’s pure pop perfection slopes in. When it comes in, it sends the heart soaring. Heaps of melody pile up, each change in the song is yet another great tune heaped up all the way to the chorus. The anthemic song is the album’s musical link to the pristine pop of the old days, melodically and lyrically.

Brown’s vocal on this is great one of the key points of the track and somehow dredges an innocence from the song whilst Squire’s guitar is a simple chime and nails the melody down, the whole song sounds as effortless and timeless as the band’s iconic debut.

‘Ten Storey Love Song’ segues straight into ‘Daybreak’ which again moves along great fractured drums and bass with the groove machione honed to perfection in endless jams. It has that late sixties vibe to it – the blues boom Fleetwood Mac period so beloved by the late Beatles and many on the Manc scene like Noel Gallagher. After setting the stall with the guitar workouts, there is an air of plaintive folksiness with the campfire shakes of  ‘Your Star Will Shine’ which is an acoustic workout with the added dark spice of the line about the bullet being aimed ”right between your daddy’s eyes’.

Brown’s one and only self written track ‘Straight To The Man’ changes the flow with its shuffling groove and off-kilter bounce, giving it a wonk swagger all of its own making. Its eccentricity and off kilter charm is a pointer to an upcoming solo career from the singer and is one of the standout tracks on the album. It packs a swagger that Shaun Ryder would  also capture with Black Grape’s debut album a few months later. The experimentation continues with ‘Begging You’, which sees the Roses finally cut a track that could be perceived as indie/dance. Early nineties, Roses were already au fait with loops and samples, sometimes running the loops through monitors in the studio and jamming along to them, building up whole new tracks from the collision. The song is a disturbed helter skelter of pile driving, neo-industrial machine groove and was perfect for remixing when it finally came out as a single months later, when it was reworked several times.

Bringing it all back home, the band then gather round the campfire for the pagan folk intro of ‘Tightrope’ that evokes the mysterious air of the Welsh hills, losing that city urban howl for the remote Welsh hills. The folkiness of the Roses is something they had played with before, like on the debut album’s ‘Elizabeth My Dear’ and some of the melodies in other songs. As the album now starts to build to its climax they dust down more blues rock with ‘Good Times’ and the smouldering guitar workout of the yearning ‘Tears’ with its excuisite guitar playing before another hint of their earlier effortless shimmer guitar pop of ‘How Do You Sleep’ that features some great guitar playing that builds to one of the band’s perfect climaxes with ‘Love Spreads’ closing the album with its zig zag wanderer guitar slide and biblical lyrics. The song is one of The Roses total classics and is as good as anything they ever wrote.

And that was it, unless you left the CD running for about ten minutes till it hit track 64, when you were treated to The Roses dossing around with violins and a plinky plonk piano for a very drunken sounding exit.

‘Second Coming’ is a lost classic. It was always on a hiding to nothing. For fans who expected a genuine second coming the record was inevitably going to be an anti-climax burned by the sky high experiences of the late eighties. The record could never capture the same sort of heady euphoria that the debut had but then 1989 was a year of E fueled good to be alive optimism that the Roseds had soundtracked – nothing could be that perfect every again.

The Stone Roses were weighed down by their perfect past and the wheels were coming off and the album is tainted with the gradual art of falling apart of the band and yet…and yet it drips a melodic mystery and sylph-like brilliance that stands up on repeated listenings over the years. The debut album may have meant more because of its timing, but the Second Coming is the classic that may have arrived too late, but is full of beauty and intrigue.

Being overlooked adds to allure and each listen sees new angles and new textures and new moods as the album gradually unfurls in front of you. Maybe they did actually break into heaven after all. ed