Tag archives for John Squire

Here’s a thing: What do the found­ing mem­bers of The Stone Roses have to do to shoot down spec­u­la­tion of a reunion?

I was struck by John Squire’s medium-hopping attempt to quell the lat­est rash of sto­ries. The man who has for years tried to dis­tance him­self from his musi­cal past and rein­vent him­self as an artist-not-musician finally faced the ques­tion head-on by tak­ing a piece of his art, and scrawl­ing on it a state­ment appar­ently about the future (or the lack of it) of the Roses.

I was impressed by the imag­i­na­tive way that this tar­geted the cen­tral prob­lem. The pub­lic (prompted by the press), or the press (patro­n­ised by the pub­lic) already has its story: the res­ur­rec­tion of The Stone Roses. It’s a done deal. It just hasn’t hap­pened yet. And any­thing John Squire says is viewed through the prism of “the reunion”. It’s “John Squire’s lat­est word on the reunion”.

What Squire has achieved is to take this fore­gone con­clu­sion, over which he has no con­trol, and turn it into a con­clu­sion over which he has some con­trol: a good, steady focus on his art. Sim­ple and effective.

The rub: he hasn’t done him­self any favours with the word­ing of his response. “I have no desire what­so­ever,” he wrote, “to des­e­crate the grave of sem­i­nal Man­ches­ter pop group The Stone Roses.”

Now, I gen­uinely hope and believe that he means: “I am never, ever going to take part in a reunion of The Stone Roses”.

But let me inter­pret what Squire has said: “I would will­ingly reform The Stone Roses, and bring them back bet­ter than ever, and enhance their legacy fur­ther”. Or: “don’t worry, I won’t des­e­crate the grave”. Or: “I don’t want to do this, but that doesn’t mean I won’t”.

Whether it’s a per­nick­ety point or not, it just doesn’t dampen any sus­pi­cions that he might be leav­ing the way open for some future lucra­tive rift-healing. The spec­u­la­tion won’t stop com­ing round.

And it leads me to won­der what — if he really wanted to cease the whis­pers for­ever ‘n’ ever — John Squire would have to do. Words won’t do the trick. Too many artists — musi­cians in par­tic­u­lar — have gone back on their ‘never again’ for it ever to be an effec­tive response. The Spe­cials, Pix­ies, Cream, Led Zep­pelin, Pink Floyd, Duran Duran, Span­dau Bal­let, just in the last cou­ple of years.

So what else would Squire have to do? Burn his gui­tars? He could always get more gui­tars, at the expense of some starry-eyed record company.

No no. The only way I can think of him doing it is to take a meat cleaver to his right hand: “say good­bye to the oppos­able thumb that clutches the plec­trum that plays the open­ing notes of ‘I Wanna Be Adored’” [/slice/].

It’d be very Van Gogh.

I am not, I feel it polite to clar­ify, sug­gest­ing that John Squire should actu­ally do this. But it is the only ges­ture I can think of that would con­vince me that he is fully in con­trol of the non-resurrection of The Stone Roses. It would be a com­mit­ment to say, what’s done is done, and I will never have a change of heart. Or if I have a change of heart, I’m pre­pared to not be able to act on it.

Only now of course do I remem­ber the one-armed drum­mer from Def Lep­pard, and realise that even a thum­bec­tomy wouldn’t guar­an­tee a result.

Ah well, back to the draw­ing board. Maybe they should reform. Maybe that’s the only thing that would quell the desire for a reformation.