Fact #127049

THE STONE ROSES AT SPIKE ISLAND, MAY 27, 1990 - an Eye Witness Account researched and compiled by Johnny Black

Paul Oakenfold (DJ) : My all-time favourite gig was one that I played at - The Stone Roses at Spike Island. The atmosphere there was just electric - it was an amazing gig and very important for me to see that amount of people there, all celebrating what was the pinnacle of this whole scene which I’d been a big part of.

Phil Jones (promoter) : The money had been put up by The Roses’ managers, Gareth Evans and Matthew Cummings…

Ian Brown (vocalist, Stone Roses) : We had a wanker running it. We trusted him. We're not the kind of people that put on a show where people have their sandwiches taken off them at the gate. That reflects on you, cos the kids think 'Oh, they're doing that'. The way people were treated on that day was despicable. The sound wasn't good enough cos he didn't spend enough money on the PA…

Phil Jones : The band felt it was big enough to headline its own festival, and the main stipulation was that it should be somewhere that there had never been a rock gig before. We looked at Speedway tracks in Essex, we checked out the site where the Phoenix Festival is now held, but when we heard about little Spike Island in the Mersey Estuary, where the Halton Annual Fair was always held, we thought it sounded perfect and absolutely unique.

Ian Brown : We had loads of opposition. We had to have about 20 meetings with them - some councillors trying to make their names, y’know, saying it was a drugs party and all that kind of stuff.

Phil Jones : We had no idea how many people to expect, because the group was getting so big so fast. We put one advert in the NME, and from that we sold all the tickets. By the time the posters went up, the tickets were all gone.

Ian Brown : Two days before, the council tried to take the drinks licence off us and the Chief Constable said, ‘No, let them have it.’

Phil Jones : We started to hit problems early on. It was very hot and sunny when we were preparing the site, and the roadies started to complain about sunburn, but they weren’t getting brown. It got so bad that some of them went to see a local doctor and it turned out that there was a chemical factory not far from the site and, after several days exposure to whatever it was pumping out, they were getting chemical burns.

Come the day, we had sold 29,500 tickets, and I reckon at least another 3,500 must have got in one way or another but, according to the licence we’d been granted, the island only had a capacity of 32,000.

Ian Brown : On the morning of the day there were people in barges and boats trying to knock our bridges down. They had a petition of, I think it was 80, to try and stop it.

Pennie Smith (photographer) : The place felt like a P.O.W. camp after the allies had arrived, but you were still trapped there. From 10.00am until about 8.00 that evening, when the band went on, there was nothing to do and yet the crowd stayed calm and peaceful, which can only have been down to massive drug consumption.

Ian Brown : The DJs we wanted to play weren’t given long enough. We thought it was in our hands until the actual day. The promoters could have done more for people.

John Robb (journalist/musician) : The significance of Spike Island wasn’t so much in the event itself, but that it was the zeitgeist. It was the first time in years that fans were out in force dressed the same way as the band, with the Reni hats and the flared trousers, like a streetsy, harder version of the American West Coast hippy thing.

Bob Stanley (St Etienne) : Spike Island came in the wake of two brilliant gigs, one at Alexandra Palace in London, and one at the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool, so the anticipation was enormous. I’d driven up from London and it was a bit depressing to find yourself in a horrible field, surrounded by huge electric pylons, factories and chemical plants.

Phil Jones : Things got a bit scary in the afternoon. It wasn’t just that we were two thousand over-capacity, but the Mersey was in full Spring flow and rising rapidly, so the island was physically getting smaller. I was genuinely worried that we might have to evacuate. We had a helicopter ferrying people in and out, but I had to stop it because the landing site got flooded.

Andy Fyfe (journalist) : We got to the site at three in the afternoon, by when the backstage beer had all been drunk and people were fighting over the froth from the bottom of the barrels. The band’s rider was also all consumed. The treatment of the fans was pretty despicable, just a couple of burger vans and one beer tent for 30,000 people.

Paul Slattery (photographer) : The beer drought was largely overcome in the backstage area by the use of dope. There was loads of spliff around, literally clouds of marijuana smoke drifting from every direction.

Phil Jones : There was a drama while Thomas Mapfumo was on stage with his African drum group. We’d learned that some bloke was ferrying people across in a boat to get them in free. I went down to the waterside with the security guys and we had a shouting match with him across the water. It was just a tiny rowing boat but every time we went off to deal with other stuff, he’d start again and we’d have to go back. In the end we put a brick through the bottom of his boat.

Dave Haslam : I went on, I think, about six thirty, to do some DJ-ing and, although the other DJs were fine, they’d been playing the wrong stuff and the crowd wasn’t really responding. For me, though, it was a hometown gig and I probably knew half the crowd by name, so I played all the things I knew went down well at The Hacienda, The Charlatans, 808 State, Primal Scream, St Etienne and Sympathy For The Devil by the Stones.

Pennie Smith : The Roses arrived about an hour before they went on. I had expected them to be nervous, so I was being careful not to be the intrusive rock photographer but, as it turned out, being with them backstage, there was no sense that it was anything other than just another gig to them.

Ian Brown : I was 100% relaxed. If all these people had come to see us, they wanted it. So why should I have been nervous?

John Robb : There were loads of people backstage, like Shaun Ryder, Ian McCulloch, Nigel Pivaro from Coronation Street, Peter Hook, 808 State, but it was more like a family and friends thing rather than ligging. I ran into Sonic Boom of Spacemen Three. We sat in his car behind the stage and he played me their new album, which sounded fantastic. Just as I was walking away from the car that I saw what looked like these tiny figures walking up this huge ramp to the stage which was about 25 feet high. I started to run and got to the front just as the whole place just exploded, the entire crowd just bouncing up and down to I Wanna Be Adored.

Phil Jones : About five minutes after they went on, I was in the bar trying to have a relaxing drink when an ambulance guy came up to me and whispered in my ear that a kid had just died in front of the stage. When something like that happens, it totally destroys you. Here was this thing we’d all worked months to put together as a great, joyful celebration and some poor kid loses his life right in the middle of it. I couldn’t believe it.

Roger Barrett (site manager) : What had happened was that, because there had been no rain, the ground was dry and dusty so, when the crowd leapt up as one for the Roses, it kicked up a huge dust cloud. To make matters worse, having formerly been a chemical plant, the dust was toxically polluted. Several kids immediately had asthma attacks, and this one lad in the thick of the crush stopped breathing and had a heart attack.

Phil Jones : On stage, the band knew nothing about it, but we were all in shock for about ten minutes until word came back by radio that in fact the boy hadn’t died. He was on his way to Whiston Hospital in Widnes in an ambulance. Thank god he survived. As a result of that incident, the Health and Safety Executive now routinely check for dust levels before any outdoor gigs.

Paul Slattery : I saw the gig from the side of the stage, where I was photographing them. There was a huge lighting tower, like a giant robot, out beyond the crowd, and the rig on stage was one of the most astonishing I’d ever seen, with lights that rotated and raised and lowered. As it started to get darker, of course, the effect of the lights really kicked in. Because the stage was so high and so vast, the band looked kind of dwarfed by the enormity of it all, but they certainly rose to the occasion, and I could see they were all grinning at each other, having a brilliant time.

Paul Oakenfold : The music was great and the band were great. It was an important gig, basically, for an awful lot of people and I’m really proud that I was part of it.

Bob Stanley : I was disappointed because I’d thought Blackpool was absolutely brilliant. This didn’t seem to me like a great Roses performance, more like they were on auto-pilot. It should have been brilliant but, in retrospect, the best thing about it was being able to say you were there. In some ways, it was actually the beginning of the end.

Sarah Champion (journalist) : It ‘happened’ right at the end of the Roses set, just as we’d all given up hope. The haunting acoustics of Elizabeth My Dear, followed by an awesome version of I Am The Resurrection. Spacey guitar riffs, spiralling out over the mudbanks of the Mersey, lit up by the glow of a crescent moon. A pink Floyd-scale lighting rig, cart-wheeling beams criss-crossing the sky like Berlin border lights.

Bob Stanley : By the end, your hair felt very odd and greasy, like it was totally coated with chemicals from the factories.

Andy Fyfe : I tried to make way from the arena to the backstage hospitality area hoping I might finally get a drink, but the crowd was so dense that I was literally picked up off my feet and dragged along with them towards the bridge, which would take me right off the island. Hillsborough was still fresh in people’s minds then, so this was quite frightening. Fortunately someone from backstage saw me, and reached over to pluck me up over the fence.

Phil Jones : We all stood in the production office afterwards, swigging champagne, and feeling generally pleased with ourselves, and I distinctly remember Ian Brown saying to Shaun Ryder, ‘So Shaun William Ryder, what did you think of that?’ and Shaun says ‘Well, it was all right, man.’

About half past one, I was driving home to Manchester along the M62, starving because the food had run out early in the day. I pulled into Birchwood service station and asked for a big plate of chips but the woman said ‘Sorry love. We haven’t even got a stick of chewing gum’. Long before I got there, the place had been over-run by coachloads of kids going back from the gig, all of them starving, and they’d eaten the place empty.

Pennie Smith : As a festival, it was a bit of a non-event, but the significant thing was that the tribes had come out for the first time, and for a huge number of people it was their first exposure to this community

John Robb : Spike Island was where the 90s started. The Roses provided the dream and set the template for every British guitar band of the 90s.

Paul Oakenfold : While we weren’t really thinking about it at the time, the gig marked the beginning of the merging of those two dance and indie sounds together and, without really realising it, we’d merged two cultures - a band and a DJ.

Noel Gallagher : Spike Island? A cultural watershed, great bands, great setting, great vibe, shit sound. A pity no-one other than the Fab Five got anything from it.
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Jarvis Cocker (Pulp) : In 1991, we did a Radio Sound City concert some years later at The Leadmill (Sheffield). After we’d played, I got talking to some girl who was telling me about going to Spike Island to watch the Stone Roses. She told me how everyone was shouting, 'Get sorted for Es and whizz'. That’s where the inspiration for our song [and number two hit] came from.
(Source : https://www.m-magazine.co.uk/features/picture-this-pulp-the-leadmill-sheffield/)