The Stone Roses - Second Coming
- FaceOff - עימות חזיתי
- 2 hours ago
- 4 min read
Written By: Moti Kupfer
Release date - 5.12.94
When “The Stone Roses” released their groundbreaking debut album in May 1989, they became the dominant voice of the Manchester groove. "Madchester "was a musical scene built on pure good-time energy, and “The Stone Roses” were its most inviting and emblematic faces. But like every passing trend, even the baggy trousers eventually disappeared from the world.
Almost overnight, “The Stone Roses” found themselves trapped under a bad contract with the “Silvertone” label they were signed to. "The Roses" took the label to court and fell into a legal mess, unable to record or release a single song.
The case was dragged on until May 1991, when "the Roses" finally managed to break free from “Silvertone” and signed with “Geffen”. But “Silvertone” appealed the ruling and froze the band for another year. Around the same time they were stuck in legal proceedings, the dream of Manchester turned into a nightmare.
Ian Brown remembers: "…a feeling of community strength … coming out of a club at the end of the night feeling like you were going to change the world. Then guns come in, and heroin starts being put in ecstasy. It took a lot of the love-vibe out".
Drugs meant money. Money meant gang wars for control of the market. "The Roses" actually watched a gang leader get shot at a reggae show during 1990. But it was a series of violent incidents at the "The Haçienda" club that finally broke the camel’s back. “The Stone Roses” disconnected themselves from club culture.
The band’s bassist Mani moved to a small village in South Wales. Fourteen people he knew died from heroin in a single year. “Kids I’d known since I was seven. I’ve seen people I’ve never ever thought would take the drug, fucked. Me, I’ll turn my back on them people, however much it hurts me. That’s why I moved out of Manchester, I don’t wanna be near it.”
Against the backdrop of a dying Manchester scene and endless legal battles, “The Stone Roses” struggled to find their way back musically. They spent much of 1992–93 traveling through Europe and, in a sense, enjoyed the fruits of the “Geffen” deal, which brought them 20 million dollars in exchange for recording five albums.
In the summer of 1993 they finally began working on their second album, “Second Coming”, released on 05.12.1994. It was an album that instantly cut away from the hazy optimism of "the Roses" of ’89 and into a band that had experienced both death and birth. Drummer Reni had two sons, guitarist John Squire became a father to a daughter, Ian Brown had a son, and even bassist Mani was expecting to become a new father later that year.
More "cooked", and more mature, the 1994 version of "The Stone Roses" were focused on heavier themes such as the origins of humanity, crimes committed by the British Empire, and the way escaped slaves in South America often joined Indigenous tribes.
This time Squire wrote all the songs except three. His pyrotechnic solos and wonderful riffs dominate the record. He described the album as an exercise in “neo-classical homo-erotic eclecticism”, an exploration of the most masculine aspects of rock — speed and noise, machines and explosions.
On “Second Coming”, "the Roses" turned their backs on their psych-dance rock sound, letting Squire take the reins, write most of the songs, and unleash pyrotechnic solos steeped in the 1970s blues-rock of “Led Zeppelin” and “The Allman Brothers”.
This was the album where the guitarist fully embraced the sound of the Les Paul guitar. The result is a much darker record, marked by his confident playing and the fat, punchy tones heard across many tracks, including “Driving South” and “Love Spreads”.
In the 11-minute-and-19-second epic opener called “Breaking Into Heaven”, a not-so-subtle hint toward “Stairway to Heaven”?, Squire created layers of sound with his Les Paul guitar to build harmonies that were later manipulated.
After a promising start, which included four songs completed in the first four weeks (among them the wonderful “Ten Story Love Song”), the work stalled and bogged down. Together with producer John Leckie (“Radiohead”), the band slipped into a year-and-a-half spiral of new distractions: archery, a billiard room, an indoor pool, a sauna, and a jacuzzi - all inside a shared house lent to them by a local millionaire. “It was heaven in every sense of the word,” claimed Mani.
One person’s heaven is another’s hell. For John Leckie, the entire period was a disaster. In the end he quit and was briefly replaced by engineer Paul Schroeder, who stepped into the producer role until he too left in February 1994. The band then appointed “Rockfield’s” in-house engineer Simon Dawson as producer. Dawson’s idea was simple: he preferred live recording.
But John Leckie’s work did not go to waste. Elements of it - like the long intro to “Breaking Into Heaven” — were kept, as were the drum tracks for “Ten Storey Love Song” and “How Do You Sleep”.
Maybe it had to do with Ian Brown’s voice. Brown’s singing is one of the key elements of the album, squeezing enormous emotion out of John Squire’s lyrics. “It’s never easy singing someone else’s words,” Brown said.
If you set aside the myth created around the debut album, “The Stone Roses” delivered a wonderful second album that is often overlooked, simply because it didn’t fit the world’s expectations of a follow-up by a band that had influenced with such intensity. A single life-changing, generation-defining album becomes an impossible barrier to overcome. “The Stone Roses” spent years recording their second album. At their peak they looked like they were on the fast track to becoming a stadium band with American-level success. Looking back, “Second Coming” may not have produced a long list of anthems, but it brought with it a fresh-yet-familiar sound from a band that dared, twice, to astonish the world.
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