10. The Stone RosesThe Stone Roses
By this time I was at the absolute peak of my powers. I wasn’t to know that my life was going to tumble into an abyss six months later. This was the height of my glory years as I call them now. I was completely contemporary with the Stone Roses. I had heard rumours of them from friends in Manchester in the way that you couldn’t now. People might see this on the list and go, “For fuck’s sake, can you not be any more obvious”, like that bit in High Fidelity with Jack Black, making his compilation.
But it can’t be denied. Even beyond all the popular acclaim and the lads getting into it and Britpop and all that stuff, it is just phenomenal. This was a firm favourite, all the singles, I remember I was quite liberated at this time. Before Madchester people didn’t dance to things that they didn’t know and they only danced in a certain way at my club. When house music started and everyone started to loosen up and kids started wearing baggy gear, for the next six months it was amazing. I would play ‘I Am The Resurrection’ and in the middle I would segue into a 60s baggy track, ‘Peace Frog’ by The Doors, which had a similar vibe. It mixed really well, before going back into the end of ‘I Am The Resurrection’.
My club was called The Wasp Factory after the Iain Banks book. I did it at Glasgow University and Strathclyde Uni. It was still a long while before our band got together, I had no thoughts of putting a band together, I was living the dream. A specific highlight was when they first played at Glasgow. The night before, they played in Edinburgh, at this place where I had the good fortune that they used to get me to DJ when they had indie bands in. So I played before and after the Stone Roses gig.
The guys came over, looked through my records, picked out some tracks for me to play and signed my records. I was still a pretty fresh-faced young guy, and I wasn’t starstruck because they weren’t stars yet. But they were very cool, very nice. I hadn’t met many people in bands before, and they were the nicest – very soft spoken, really sweet guys. And it was good to be like that, the girls adore you, and the girls just loved them.
They were brilliant – I followed them, they played the next night in Glasgow, which was tops. And we drove down to Leeds the next night. I was about to go on this precipice where my health took a real dive during the summer of 1989, and I couldn’t listen to any music because I was so debilitated. So I didn’t listen to the Stone Roses for a while, by which time it became this huge thing. I reluctantly came back to them years later because the album had such quality about it.
