When the Stone Roses went from midnight telly to ubiquity in that couple of short months over the summer of 1989, they could do no wrong. By mid-July, they’d gone from underground to overground, the nation’s t-shirts were getting looser and everyone’s trouser legs were getting subtly wider, creeping downwards and outwards in direct proportion to the decaying dead ends of the Smiths quiffs their owners had stubbornly held onto until the next important band came along. And here they were, Bloggsed up and baggy, bandy-legged and cocksure with the tunes to match, an aural golden sunrise and then some.
She Bangs The Drums was released on July 17th and there on side 2 (and also side 1 if you have one of the many mis-pressed copies) was the track that we’d been desperate to find since first hearing it a month beforehand when the group played Rooftops in Glasgow. That setlist that Grant Canyon swiped from the edge of the stage, written, as it turned out, in John Squire’s own elegant hand, had it called ‘Standing’, but on record it was given its Sunday name: Standing Here.
Stone Roses – Standing Here
Beea-woo!
That first guitar bend has you sitting straight up.
Bee-ah-ee-ah-ee-aaaoooww!
When that sixth note cracks and breaks into controlled feedback, the hairs on the back of your hands prickle. Spidey senses tingle. This is gonnae be a good one.
Standing Here is peak Stone Roses. It is at once rockin’ and rhythmic, swirling and psychedelic, a proto blast of Hendrixian histrionics deftly played across six strings yet somehow replete with the wobble-headed shuffle beat and groovy, elasticated, tight-but-loose bassline that quickly came to define the group.
A 7th chord crashes, the snare shuffles and Ian Brown, a singer who’s currently on top of the world, sings about standing on a hilltop and surveying what he sees. What he really sees is the prize; best band in the country by a mile. He’s drifting through the city, he’s swinging through the trees, he’s looking through your window, he’s everywhere…and he really is in the summer of 1989. John Squire freeforms his frazzled blues on top of the sugar-coated groove and we’re properly off and running. By the second verse he’s firing off riffs you can whistle, even 35 years later when the song pops randomly into your head.
By the second verse too, there are lovely, low in the mix ‘woo-ooh‘ backing vocals, not noticed back in the day when I was cranking my own ham-fisted version of the lead guitar track atop the heavenly choir, but a vocal line that emerged one day from the heady stew and presented itself like a gift from above, Stone Roses still surprising all these years later.
I don’t think you think like I do, goes Ian, and the group bounces around him before John leans into a guitar break, bluesy and bendy and just on the right side of rockist for all the purists who worship at the altar of indie. Throughout the track, the group instinctively knows when to drop out, when to allow the vocal to shine, or to highlight a stut-stut-stuttering bass part or yet another supreme guitar hook. And throughout it all, Reni shuffles ambidextrously, the head-down, piston-powered engine of the band, the funkiest drummer of them all, elevating his band above all peers with each successive paradiddle or technicolour cymbal splash. He’s the difference. Every time.
Then the ending. There’s not a Stone Roses bootleg on the planet that can make Ian Brown sound passable as a singer, especially over the quieter, contemplative parts, but on record he’s the consummate angel, God’s choirboy taking us home as the band ebbs and flows its way to a gentle end, waves crashing on the sand as they lullaby us back to a regular, standing heartbeat. John Leckie did an awful lot of the heavy lifting in that studio.
All the best bands have great b-sides. Standing Here might not even be the Stone Roses’ best b-side, but it’s quite the b-side all the same. Put the needle back to the start just one more time, will ye?
Plain Or Pan 