The Very Best of The Stone Roses

• Year: 2002
• Rating: 9/10
• Cat. No: 9260382

Track listing:

1. I Wanna Be Adored
2. She Bangs The Drums
3. Ten Storey Love Song
4. Waterfall
5. Made Of Stone
6. Love Spreads
7. What The World Is Waiting For
8. Sally Cinnamon
9. Fools Gold
10. Begging You
11. Elephant Stone
12. Breaking Into Heaven
13. One Love
14. This Is The One
15. I Am The Resurrection

They defined an era, a culture, and ushered in the commercial resurgence of British guitar music. Yet, frustratingly, they never fulfilled their enormous promise or massive potential, dithering for a full five years on an ill-fated, bloated and underwhelming second album, and ironically missing out on the great mid-90s boom that was Britpop despite releasing Second Coming just as it was about to take off.

No band of the last 25 years, not even Oasis at the height of their success, ever made such an impact as The Stone Roses. Call it a fortuitous combination of timing and talent, but the Madchester scene led by the Roses and Happy Mondays not so much rearranged the music industry furniture as kicked down its door and trashed the place with unrestrained, pharmaceutically-aided, glee.

The independent scene of the 1980s had existed almost in its own vacuum, a procession of jangly nobodies attemtping to emulate Manchester's other greatest sons The Smiths, whose distinctive, innovative and charasmatic brand of alternative pop would usually be the Indie crowd's only chart representative. Until 1989, and The Stone Roses' debut, no guitar pop album could hope to sell more than 200,000 - although Morrissey and co. mostly enjoyed either #1 or #2 albums, their sales were largely confined to a loyal fanbase and concentrated into a matter of weeks rather than months.

Intially, there was little sign that The Stone Roses would, or could, be anything more than an excellent indie band, enjoying moderate commercial rewards for their melodic, dynamic assimilation of chiming chords and classical 60s vocal stylings. A succession of singles - Sally Cinnamon, Made Of Stone, Elephant Stone, She Bangs The Drums - cemented their standing as a band to watch, but the #36 peak for She Bangs The Drums was the apex of their Top 40 achievements by the time the epnoymous debut album arrived in April 1989.

The Stone Roses' defining moment would come later that year with the Fools Gold single, an awesome crossbreed of funky drumming, elastic basslines, buzzsaw guitars and psychedelia. Storming the charts simultaneously with the Happy Mondays' Madchester Rave On E.P., Indie-Dance was born. Fools Gold is the one song, more than anything else, which sealed the band's reputation. Included here in all its full 10-minute glory, Fools Gold still stands as the high watermark of The Stone Roses' brief but glittering reign as the most exciting, and important, UK band of their time. Without it, there is no doubt that first album (which didn't even feature the track) would never have sold in the such groundbreaking quantities, to become the first independent guitar album to go platinum with in excess of 300,000 copies shifted in 1989 and 1990. Small fry in the post-Britpop world, perhaps, but a very big deal back then.

If their rise to prominence had a degree of serendipity about it, the same could not be said of what followed after Fools Gold laid the world at their feet, there for the taking. One of the great "What If?"'s of rock history remains that concerning The Stone Roses, and just what might have been had the triumph of Fools Gold led to further glory rather than proved to be the beginning of the end. When faced with the immediate task of a follow-up single in the summer of 1990, a tune-free ramble titled One Love was the result. Though it made #4, it's fair to say their currency was at such stratospheric levels they could get away with releasing any old rubbish.

By the time of 1994's Second Coming, public disappointment over One Love and the band's subsequent inertia appeared to be banished when the album's introductory single Love Spreads debuted at #2. Truth be told, the sub-Zeppelin riff-fest was hardly in the league of earlier Roses material, and worse still, the album itself wasn't up to scratch either. Just two tracks had any hint of the old magic - Ten Storey Love Song (a rehash of She Bangs The Drums) and Begging You (Fools Gold Part 2), but even at its best Second Coming was trading on former glories. Had the explosive Begging You appeared as a single in 1990 or 1991, for instance, as opposed to 1995, there is little doubt its chart performance would have been significantly better than #35.

The Stone Roses had become victims of their failure to captilise on the possibilities open to them, and it would prove fatal. It's no coincidence that by 1994 another Manchester band loaded with a brazen attitude bordering on arrogance, and blessed with a set of skyscraping rock anthems, would effectively pick up where The Stone Roses left off. Oasis, however, while avoiding the pitfalls of letting expectation become paralyzing, ultimately lost their momentum as well, through the equally self-inflicted means of alienating fans with too many below-par albums.

There have been several Roses compilations already, so why the need for another?, one might ask. Well, The Very Best Of is the first to cover their entire recording career, from the Revolver releases in 1987 and 1988, through their Silvertone heyday, right up to their inglorious Geffen swansong. The track sequencing leans heavily towards the first album, even going as far as opening and closing in identical fashion (I Wanna Be Adored/She Bangs The Drums; This Is The One/I Am The Resurrection). Recognition of their iconic place in the Roses canon, or plain lazy? Perhaps a bit of both.

There is new and original sleeve artwork from Squire, in his trademark Pollock-esque style, plus extensive liner notes. All the best Stone Roses songs are present and correct, while no dubious remixes or crude edits rear their head to ruin the show. The Very Best Of therefore has an air of authority in its presentation, a sense that the job hasn't merely been left to some hack at the record company.

Recently, founding member and main songwriter John Squire has hinted at the possibility of a Stone Roses reunion, but whether the rifts which broke the band up can be satisfactorily healed remains to be seen. The obvious financial gains from any reformation could be a decisive factor, since neither Squire nor singer Ian Brown have exactly set the industry alight with their respective post-Roses projects. Mid-table solo success is all very well, but The Stone Roses had the makings of Champions League glory, and they know it.

Review copyright © Liam Carey, 2002.

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