October 2011 Archives

Frankly it was a terrible place for a gig. The room was wide instead of long and the stage, if you could call it such, was bang in the middle facing a bar which was no more than 10 foot (or 3 metres if you prefer) away.

The reason I hesitate to call it a stage is that essentially it was no more than a raised seating platform which barely accommodated a full band and at weekends masqueraded as a micro dance-floor. It was also enclosed by chrome bars (see below) which might've doubled for a crash-barrier if anyone had been inclined to rush the stage - they never were.

Then there was the décor to contend with. Someone had clearly taken the theme of 'disco bar' a little too far, every wall was a glittering or reflective surface and the not-high ceiling sported a number of mirrored balls or half-mirrored where there was not enough space for a full version.

The arguments are redundant, The Roses are reforming.

You can't have missed the news and you probably have a view. If you were at all interested in the beginning then you probably fall into two camps - the can't waits or the can't be bothereds.

I'm not sure we need to debate their reasons for doing so, why does it matter? Maybe it is for money and if so would it really make them any different from any major touring act at the moment? Do you really think the others are only doing it for love, that they don't have their pension plan in mind?

The bigger question is whether they can recapture the glory. As a live act they never really amounted to much but they also never really over-played. After 1990 they were barely seen live in the UK at all so the demand has always been there - there are countless thousands who grew up with their music but never had the chance to witness the 'spectacle'.

For me, and many of my (and later) generations for a while The Roses were omnipotent and their debut album was a crystallisation of various scenes moulded into one work of brilliance. Can we really be cynical about the majesty of I Am The Resurrection or the genius of Fools Gold?

In times of recession we need hope and there's enough goodwill and genuine hope out there that this time they can make it work. Enough time has elapsed that we can forget the comedy delays of their second album take it all back to the beginning and start again. We need a band like The Stone Roses, time will tell whether it's actually The Stone Roses that we need.

In the next blog I will over-elaborate on my personal role in the Roses and their first of very few Birmingham performances.

It's perhaps easier to see what the producers of TOTP had in mind, keeping the older male audience perhaps, with this performance from Legs & Co:

A natural part of the aging process is the discovery that things you considered fundamental or essential in your childhood have no relevance at all to your children. There's a photo currently circulating in social-media-land which depicts a cassette tape and a pencil with the legend that 'our children will never know the correlation between the two'.

They're right of course but it goes further than that: my kids would barely have knowledge of a cassette tape anyway and their kids probably won't have much need for a pencil. I occasionally wander into this cul de sac of thought surmising on what the future holds and the past has left behind - the term cul de sac is appropriate, fitting both the dead-end nature of this thinking using a phrase that no-one uses or needs anymore. Not that I needed to explain that of course.

At any rate this process began with an episode of Top Of The Pops from September 30th 1976 broadcast on BBC4 last week as part of a repeat series they're undertaking week by week with old episodes of the programme. I sat and watched it with some horror in the company of my 15 year old daughter. Sadly it wasn't a classic.