The Stone Roses's debut album: is it actually bollocks?

AN entire generation grew up venerating The Stone Roses’ eponymous 1989 album, but is it an all-time classic or psychedelic shite?

Ian Brown can’t sing: tracks 1-11

It is a major failing of a rock band to have a singer who can’t sing. Ian Brown can’t sing live, famously, but neither is he any great talent in the studio. Try to choose your favourite track from the album based purely on the powerful, mellifluous vocal. You can’t. That’s a problem.

The lyrics aren’t great either: tracks 3, 5, 7, 9

There’s a certain anthemic power to claiming that this is the one or that you personally are the resurrection. Lyrics about sugar spun sisters and waving goodbye to bad men are more Donovan at his hippie heights. Yes, you smoke weed – or more realistically in 80s Manchester, squidgy black – but so does Snoop Dogg and he made Nuthin’ But A G Thang.

Bad vocals and lyrics are not compensated for by extra guitar: tracks 10 and 11

John Squire was very, very good at playing the guitar. So good that, as all egomaniac guitarists do, he decided that all issues could be ironed out by layering on overdubs and, for the final track, finishing with a lengthy guitar workout and two false endings. But, as the 1970s and Second Coming proved, you can have too much guitar.

One track’s backwards: track 4

You were pissing about in the studio. It sounded interesting. You and your stoned mates grooved on it. That doesn’t mean it needs to go on the fucking album, you curtain-haired pricks. Any decent record label would have stepped in and stopped this. The Roses were on Silvertone.

Madchester: tracks 2, 3, 8, 10

The historic fusion of rock music and dance music, ie funky drums under an indie song, was at the heart of Madchester, a movement barely remembered today for good reason. At the time it was an epochal shift that changed music forever. Six years later it was stamped flat by Britpop. Now it’s Northern filler between the Smiths and Oasis.

Nobody else ever liked them: tracks 1-11

True brilliance finds an audience. Movies that were flops succeed, books nobody read become classics. Nobody likes The Stone Roses who didn’t love them then. Not Americans, not millennials, not even you at the cash-in reunion shows. Yeah. It was just the drugs.

Let's move to the county town and crime hotspot of Kent! This week: Maidstone

What’s it about?

Thirty miles and 35 years south east of London, Maidstone is the county town of Kent. Not Canterbury, with its cathedral, place in history and swanky gin bars. Maidstone, with its vape shops, rancid river and indiscriminate violence from shirtless drug addicts.

When David Brent was musing on nearby towns in The Office, he said ‘There’s nothing wrong with Maidenhead. Not Maidstone – that is a shithole.’ So even a character created to thrive in Home Counties commuter belt crapness firmly draws the line at this soulless and derelict disaster.

Any good points?

For about 40 fucking quid there’s a slow but direct train service to London Victoria, which is handy if you want to go and see Hamilton. Which nobody in Maidstone does, because racism.

There’s the aforementioned river Medway, which regularly has sewage pumped into it and saw wild swimmers projectile vomiting and hospitalised this summer.

And there’s TVS Television Centre, which used to be where Jools Holland was filmed, meaning in theory Kanye West, Adele and Metallica have nipped out for a pint at the Fox & Goose, just down the road, turn right after the big Tesco. They make Supermarket Sweep there now.

The best thing to ever happen to the town was in the 1990s, when the council commissioned a large floral sheep called Shorn. A back-and-forth of vandalism, outrage and repairs continued for five years until the folly was removed, but it’s still discussed to this day. Which goes to show just how little happens here.

Wonderful landscape?

Are you kidding? What survives of the traditional market town was been ridden roughshod over by concrete-crazed 1970s planners, detemined that big, shit office blocks and car parks would draw businesses out of London. An orgy of urban ruination followed.

Every brick of Maidstone acts as fortification to protect the picturesque hop fields and farmland to the south from the lawless depravity of Chatham, Gillingham and Rainham to the north. As such the town is like the wall Trump never built: a borderline and last frontier where Kentish men shoplift 2.5 litre bottles of Frosty Jack’s.

Hang out at?

Locals congregate outside one of three courthouses, awaiting news of friends and family, or nearby at the Wetherspoons which is knowingly named The Society Rooms.

If news from the court was bad, why not loiter outside the prison? For eight years it was the home of Reggie Kray, perhaps the town’s sanest and most upstanding resident.

For rest and relaxation, however, try the gardens next to the Carriage Museum where bone-thin drunks clutching cans of Strongbow Dark Fruit have been singing Build Me Up Buttercup on loop for the past eleven years.

Where to buy?

Anywhere else. But if your ankle tag demands you stay local then why not try taking over a network of weed dealers in the estates around Shepway or Parkwood? You’ll have a job on your hands, so maybe consider it a project.

Upmarket buyers might be tempted by Len House, a conversion of an abandoned Peugeot garage into luxury flats approved in 2020. Drawbacks include it being above a sewerage outlet into the river Len, and the developers half-demolishing the building then abandoning the site in 2021 with no intention of ever returning.

From the streets:

Martin Hollis, 47, said: “They say Kent is the Garden of England. Not Maidstone. This is more the rotting patio decking of England.”