When the NME named it the greatest album of all time a few years ago there was understandably a backlash against it.  To paraphrase the cynics ‘Oh come on, the greatest album of all time!  Fuck Off!’  Even the Roses lead singer Ian Brown lent his weight to the ‘no’ campaign saying it doesn’t even compare with records like Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On?’  Of course, they were all right.


It is clearly not the greatest album of all time.  For a start there isn’t one.  It was only given that accolade because the people at NME who did the ‘greatest albums’ feature would have been going through their formative years when it was released.  Same as I was.

The Stone Roses appeared during a musical period that had become pretty dismal.  The punks came along, lasted two fucking minutes and fucked things up for the next fifteen years.  Some arse-wipe hailed 1977 year zero and then every fucker in a band was too scared to come up with anything that even resembled a pop-song or sound remotely like anything pre 1977.   

The result? New-wave, new-romantics, synth pop, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Pet Shop Boys, U fucking 2, the incredibly un-cool Queen (of course history was gradually rewritten post Live Aid to erase this fact).

Did any of that speak to teenage kids?  Did it fuck.

Then this C60 tape (god I’m an old fucker) started doing the rounds at our school with this fuzzy album called The Stone Roses, with Fools Gold tagged on at the end.  Yeah it did sound a bit like the old days (retro hadn’t been invented yet), but it also sounded like nothing else I’d ever heard.  And moreover it spoke to a generation of teenagers who got nothing out of all of the bands named above. 

Everything about it was cool, the songs, the lyrics, the band themselves, even the album cover.  And you could have been in that band, that could have been your mate’s band.  No gold lame suits, no make up, no rock-god posturing.  Just four ordinary lads that made rainy, industrial Manchester seem like the coolest place on earth

Sure the production isn’t quite as polished as what is about now, but you have to look at what was happening at the time to appreciate how good it felt and what it achieved.  It helped put popular music back where it belonged.  In the hands of teenage kids with guitars; a zeitgeist (pretentious word alert!) which still prevails to this day, for better and (often) for worse.

It wasn’t their second album that was the second coming, it was this one.

Posted In Classic Albums, May 25 2009. Words - Thomas