Moonlighting

Now and again I like to spread my wings and write things for other blogs and websites. I wrote a piece about the Stone Roses reforming and John Robb kindly published it on his constantly updating Louder Than War site. He had the good grace to call it “poignant and beautifully written.” Here’s a wee extract:

The memories are flooding back. Every time I hear Fools Gold I get a Pavlovian rush of the smell of warm chestnuts, cooking on a November London street on the way to the Ally Pally. The old bootlegs come back out and Glasgow Green sounds better than I remember. Their best ever gig, some say. I hated it.

The thumping intro tape, all drum loops and backwards guitar-as-siren had finished and through the blasts of rave whistles and shouts of excitable Scots, nerves taut with anticipation and expectation, the low rumble of I Wanna Be Adored began its fade in. The hi-hat (always the hi-hat) kick started that idiotic shuffle dance that most of us would continue for the next hour and a half. With bass and drums as canvas, a head down John teasingly splashed huge dollops of psychedelic feedback squall on top, reverberating to the back of the tent and returning twice as loud, twice as intense. And then, finally, the riff. Thousands of out of tune voices singing along, lost in our own wee world, lost in the right here and right now, in a tent in the East End of Glasgow, the most important place on Earth. This was brilliant! This was E times ten! This was…….. FUCK YOU! A punch. Right in the face. Right in my face. Right at the top of my nose. Two eyes streaming with tears, dumbstruck and trying to work out what had just happened. One of my extended crowd, a friend of a friend who’d been on the train with 20 of us from Irvine, noticed me holding my face. “Who was it? Who was it? We’ll do him.” As I shrugged in the negative and wiped the gunge from my face I saw the wee bastard slink his way into the crowd. Gone. He sneaked a half glance back, knowing he’d got away. My lot quickly got back to the main event. I couldn’t. This party was over. Here I was being soaked by the sweat of 7000 lunatics as it dripped from the roof of this massive tent, my own snot down the front of my brand new top and a throbbing between my eyes that pulsed in perfect time to every note coming from Mani’s bass. Second Summer of Love? Not for me. Forget Reading in ’96, this was the day the music died. When our band became their band. Band of The People? The wrong sort of people if you ask me. Once, you liked The Stone Roses instead of Bon Jovi or Wet Wet Wet. Now the twonks that liked Bon Jovi and Wet Wet Wet also liked The Stone Roses. Them and the neds. Aye, The Stone Roses were now a ned band. The music snob in me knew this was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Now get yerself over to Louder Than War for the full unedited version.

Includes previously unpublished photos like the one above taken by my pal Gordon at Rooftops in June 1989…..

…and look what I found up my loft – only my crappy old bootleg from Rooftops that I recorded on my Dad’s wee dictaphone. It’s digitising as I type.