And yet nobody cared.ĭriving home in the Chorley Guardian van, somebody said: “Well, that’s the 80s over.” It felt true. The sound was appalling and their performance was messy. For some reason, Ian Brown was holding a huge inflatable globe. By the time the Stone Roses came on after sunset, people were climbing on the sound towers and dancing anywhere they could find a square of space. The People's Archiveīut then the music started: DJs Dave Haslam, Paul Oakenfold and Frankie Bones MC Tunes, Madchester’s court jester, was there seemingly only to play his lone hit, The Only Rhyme That Bites, over and over. When the Roses announced a massive outdoor gig – after shows in Blackpool and at Alexandra Palace that had become the stuff of legend – there was no way I going to miss it.įans and a van – not this writer’s – en route to see the Stone Roses. The Stone Roses fed my hunger for that, but also opened the door to the Madchester scene that saw the exhilarating collision of indie pop and house music. I hadn’t heard of them: at the time, my tastes ran to the jangling indie-rock of the C86 movement. My relationship with the Stone Roses had begun the year before, when I found a loose cassette tape of their self-titled album under the seat of a train from Manchester to Wigan. I was 20 in 1990, and had been working for a year as a trainee reporter at the Chorley Guardian in Lancashire. Here were 27,000 people crammed into a field surrounded by the chemical factories of Widnes to watch one of the most all-advised, badly organised and shambolic gigs ever held. H istory tells me that the Stone Roses at Spike Island was, in musical terms, awful: the band seemed bored, the sound was weak.

Spike island