Live Review: The Stone Roses @ First Direct Arena, Leeds


Stone Roses

Ian Brown onstage with the Stone Roses at Wembley Stadium, London. June 2017. (Alberto Pezzali / Live4ever)




It’s said that when the filaments inside your brain become spliced it’s called synaesthesia, a condition that allows a few of us to hear colours, taste words, or co-experience what another person feels.

In mass phenomenal terms, a similar effect can be observed when watching The Stone Roses; tonight most of the people inside Leeds’ First Direct Arena aren’t just listening to the them, but passing what happens through a set of filters dragged from memory – the times, the places, the people all blurring into one spangled reminiscence grafted onto the present.

Why they’re here is open to speculation. Theories on motivation vary from a last pay day before implosion or delivering the aircraft hangar venue tour which an outfit of their status deserves. Either way, the expectant crowd are far from rushing to judgment. The build up is certainly low-key and with no support act a DJ is left to seemingly hit shuffle on a playlist of acid house-era staples (and the Ramones) before, as tradition demands, the brassy regret of The Supremes’ Stoned Love triggers the sort of anticipatory roar you imagine was once heard by Christians and lions.

Whilst first impressions aren’t exactly no frills, there are remarkably little concessions to the stardom consecutive sold out shows befit. Instead, Ian Brown stands centre stage flanked by the hirsute John Squire to his left, Mani to his right, with the metronomic Reni behind all three of them. Drinking in the rhapsodic welcome before they even play a note, it’s hard to not marvel at the remarkable grip they have on a certain section of Britain, especially for an outfit with so little catalogue. The key to this effect perhaps lies in just how good that album-and-a-half of twentieth century tunes was, postcards from the hugs n’ drugs times from which they can create a greatest hits set like almost no other.

It’s one thing being able to say that of course, but another to actually pull it off. The rumbling bass and Squire’s opening chords to I Wanna Be Adored unlock a fervour; gone the song’s hubristic swagger may be, but it’s hard to deny that whatever the four individuals thoughts about the long term are, the collective mindset is one of knowing they still have the goods. Part song, mostly karaoke, its sweetness and hallucinogenic tilt are lost in the din, but subtlety reduces the aura of brotherhood and is discarded.

As expected their near perfect debut album is well exercised and the source of the night’s best moments. The rest of the set almost feels at times like it’s interjecting, although the bluesy wail of Love Spreads lays a deeply rutted groove, and the early material – Elephant Stone, Mersey Paradise, Sally Cinnamon – all serve as reminders that at the start The Stone Roses were as much C-86 as they were pseudo-hip street punks.

A glance around the venue shows their inter-generational appeal is undeniable. Everywhere dads and lads/lasses are losing it in equal measure, the old ones not really the old ones but just songs from a mythical, pre-internet era all ages seem to connect with. Brown doesn’t do much between them, taking his frontman responsibilities with a shrug and muttering something incoherent about Leeds having the coolest music festival, only displaying true signs of animation when being perturbed at the presence of drug hunting sniffer dogs outside the venue’s entrance.

The man might’ve been taking no chances, but he needn’t have bothered as the evening’s highs were all strictly natural. The regicidal fripperie of Elizabeth My Dear came and went, succeeded by a skin tight working of Fools Gold, but then the moment, the crowd rapidly coming up almost as one to the point of that unconscious epidemic of synasthesia. Under its spell, Brown’s hit and miss voice and the slight instrumental flatness of it all were overwhelmed by Made Of Stone, She Bangs The Drums and This Is The One’s cry to group hypnosis; everyone was somewhere else, not hearing, but experiencing, instead cocooned in shared memories all created from inside one great big dream.

Closer I Am The Resurrection was this sensation at its most attenuated, the extended, funky jam of its second half a victory lap in a race the quartet never ran. Thank yous and farewells later, The Stone Roses glow is undimmed, a band which can do no wrong, even if that is by doing almost nothing for almost twenty years. Their gift is as a good times jukebox, a scrapbook of then and now, living clippings.



Only time will tell if this will be enough to keep them in the present tense.

(Andy Peterson)


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