Fact #163853

Roddy McKenna (A+R man, Zomba Music) : Zomba at that time was very successful with pop and dance acts, but I’d wanted for at least a year to move it into the rock side of things. I wanted to set up a separate label for that, which turned out to be Silvertone.

We got the Stone Roses because Zomba sent me down to Wales to hear a second-rate U2 imitation band, which I really hated, and I was feeling very low in the car on the way home until I put on a demo tape I’d been sent, which had This Is the One on it. I loved it so much, I put it on repeat all the way back to London.

As soon as I could, I went up to see them at the International in Manchester and then met them in their manager’s office, which was opposite the club. I was very conscious that with acts like Samantha Fox and Billy Ocean on Zomba’s label, Jive, they might be reluctant to come with us, so I made the point that because they’d be our only rock act, I’d be able to give them my full attention, which I think helped swing the balance away from Rough Trade, who were also trying to sign them, but only for a singles deal.

Ian Brown : Originally we'd recorded Elephant Stone for Rough Trade but then Silvertone/Zomba came in with a longer, eight-LP deal. So that's why we went with Zomba.

Roddy McKenna : Elephant Stone had been produced by Peter Hook of New Order, but Geoff Travis of Rough Trade had brought the producer John Leckie in to mix it. I had always loved John’s production work with Pink Floyd, Simple Minds and others so he was one of my first choices for the Roses album.

Andrew Lauder : Silvertone certainly wasn't formed for the Stone Roses. I'd been in negotiations with Zomba about bringing my rock experience to them in some way. It was obviously better to do this under the banner of a new label, so I came up with the name Silvertone and, virtually on the day I signed my deal with Zomba, 18 April, 1988, they told me they had just signed this band that might be ideal for the new label. So I took the demo tape home with me, and really liked it.

Ian Brown : We'd signed the deal in April, and then we'd written Bye Bye Badman, Shoot You Down, Elizabeth My Dear. We wrote most of that first album in the few weeks after inking the deal, ‘cos we'd blagged the record company. We told Silvertone that we had about 30 or 40 songs, but we only had about eight. We'd scrapped loads of songs.

Andrew Lauder : The first time I saw them live was at an Anti-Clause 28 gig in the International 2 in Manchester on 30 May, where they supported James. They hadn't played for a while, so they were a bit rusty, but the best parts of the set were brilliant, and I more or less made up my mind to work with them there and then. John Leckie was there that night too...

John Leckie : I'd seen them in rehearsals, but that was the killer gig, really. I thought they were fantastic, and I just couldn't wait to get them in the studio. It was just the right time with the right band. I never doubted that it would be special. The demo was strong, a lot of it pretty similar to the record. My job was mostly just to tidy them up a bit.

Roddy McKenna : The recording team was completed by bringing in Paul Schroeder, a young engineer who had worked with a lot of my acts at the time. I knew John could give the band all the studio expertise they needed, but Paul understood more about the kind of dub/acid house music that the band loved.

Andrew Lauder : The first batch of recording was done in Battery Studios, about sixty days, up in Maybury Gardens, North London, starting on 17 June, which we'd chosen largely because it was owned by Zomba. Silvertone, having only just been set up, was operating out of a Portakabin in the Zomba car park, which meant I could pop in and out of the studio to see how things were going whenever I liked.

Ian Brown : Proper good times. We were in London, recording at night.

John Leckie (producer) : The reason we recorded at night was just because it was cheaper.

Ian Brown : We'd all get a taxi back at seven in the morning and we all shared a house on Kensal Rise. We were skint, they'd give £10 a day for food, which was a load for us.

John Leckie : It was funny working with the Roses and knowing them and living with them. When all the publicity came out - these drunken, drug-taking hooligans, sex-mad, drug-mad, drink-mad - but they weren't. They didn't drink, I'd drink more beers than them. Ian doesn't drink beer, they have an occasional glass of wine with a meal, there's no big boozing, no bottles of Jack Daniels or anything like that.

John Squire : It was mostly recorded on an SSL desk, and it just didn't sound fat or hard enough. From a guitar point of view I see my approach as the main failing; I completely deconstructed what I played live and rewrote everything for the studio. That just seems a bit simple, and the switch from chordal to solo stuff just doesn't seem to work. The album just doesn't have the stamp of a real guitar player to me, apart from a couple of the solos. It sounds like a two guitar band, which we weren't.

John Leckie : I was hugely impressed with the band. All four of them were special. You had a great drummer, a great guitarist who was pulling up all sorts of sounds, Mani was a brilliant bass player and supporter of the whole thing. The chemistry was just right with all four of them. That's what I got off on, really. There was no-one in control. It was four equal guys who had a great feeling of positivity about them.

One of the things I tried to do whenever possible was to record the group live, playing together without a click track. It seems an obvious way for a group to make a record, but it's pretty unusual these days. They're not very accurate players, I must admit, but what we went for was the feeling. What I really wanted to do was capture not so much their live sound but the character of the band.

The track that caused the most problems was This Is The One. There was always a big question as to whether it should go on the record. It worked really well live, a bombastic thing that got faster and faster and was pretty spectacular, a bit Nirvana-ish. But we had to work hard on getting the dynamics right and making the speed changes work smoothly.

Ian Brown : I think Leckie listened to Waterfall and thought it sounded like Simon and Garfunkel, so he's turned the bass and drums down. He's gone for that Byrds, Sixties thing. But Mani was the best white bass player that I'd heard, and I wish that was more audible on the record

John Leckie : Don't Stop is simply the original demo of Waterfall run through John's Portastudio so that two tracks play backwards. They played it to me and I just said, 'That has to go on the record.'

John Squire : It's the tape of Waterfall backwards, with the bass drum triggered, and the only real overdubs are the vocals and a bit of cowbell. I wrote the lyrics by listening to Waterfall backwards and writing down what was suggested, what the vocal might have been. It's good fun doing that, because you sort of remove your involvement from the song, you don't really know what's going to come next.

Ian Brown : It was accidental. It sounded great backwards…That's my favourite thing on the first LP. There's twenty seconds at the end that's killer, the little rhythm that comes in.

John Leckie : I Am The Resurrection took a bit of time too. We wanted something epic to end the album and that was the song they'd been ending their live set with, and so we literally built that massive crescendo ending piece by piece, a painstaking process.

Roddy McKenna : When they played live, they had this point in the set when they’d go crazy, a kind of Sympathy For The Devil bit, and I’d suggested they should turn that into a separate track. As I remember it, they’d done a demo of it at some studio up north, which sounded really good, but when they tried again later, it wasn’t happening. I suggested they should take the ending from the demo, and use it as the end of the finished version of I Am The Resurrection.

John Squire : We had some bits left over on tape which we just dropped in at exactly the right point - that little rhythm guitar bit at the end. Also the acoustic jangly stuff on the end section, too; I'd recorded it on this little Philips ghetto blaster and I got the engineer to drop it in. It's a bit out of time, because we were just pressing 'play' to try and get it in sync. I think we only tried it twice, so it's a bit out of time. I like it, though.

John Leckie : I remember when we were finished at Battery Studios, the builders came in and tore it down to make more offices for Zomba, so we were the last band ever to use that studio, although Battery subsequently opened up again elsewhere.

Ian Brown : We finished it off in Rockfield in Wales, UK, Europe. You're four years on the dole, suddenly you're in a country studio with someone cooking for you and a bag of weed in your pocket. Yeah, great.

Anne Ward (accountant, Rockfield Studios) : They came out here to Monmouth from the 5th to the 18th of January in 1989, and they were the first band to use our re-furbished Coachhouse Studio with all its new equipment. We found them to be very down-to-earth, a nice bunch of lads who made the place their second home. In fact, when they came back to make their second album, they were booked in for two weeks and stayed for eighteen months.

Roddy McKenna : I remember going down and eating with them at Rockfield, and they were really happy with how it was going, particularly with Reni’s drumming.

The final sessions were at Konk Studios in London, starting on 23 January 1989. I spent a day playing pool with them down there. John was in some back room working out guitar parts, while Ian and Mani were smoking dope and listening all the time to obscure hip-hop and house and dub-reggae tracks which, at that time, was very unusual for a rock band. People sometimes characterise Stone Roses as John Squire’s band, but he was actually a more conventional musician. Without the others, there probably wouldn’t have been all those dance influences.

John Leckie : Elizabeth My Dear and Shoot You Down were done at Konk.

John Squire : I like the guitar playing on Bye Bye Badman. I worked through the guitar parts for that in this little breeze-blocked room at the back of the studio where all the air conditioning and mains switches were. I was just sat there with my little Portastudio sitting on top of its cardboard box; we were getting right down to the wire in terms of time, and when I went in to record I still didn't really know the part.

John Leckie : But then he came in and did it pretty much in one take… At the end, there was pressure to get it finished and maybe there were things we could have done better. But it's character that makes records special, not fine detail and technical tightness.

We were also briefly in Livingstone Studios and actually finished off at Abbey Road, in Studio 2, where we mixed Shoot You Down and Waterfall.

Ian Brown : When we'd finished recording, Leckie comes up to us and says 'Listen, this is really good. You're going to make it'. And I remember thinking 'I know'. It could've been even better. Mani and Reni didn't get their thing down as heavy as it was in rehearsals.

Mani (bass player) : What we wanted to do was to get the songs recorded with the same power and dynamics as they had live, but John Leckie took a lot of that away, but also added something else. I think he made the songs a bit too sweet. I think we'd have probably wanted The Stone Roses LP to sound a bit more like Second Coming, just with the power - but it ended up sounding like Herman's Hermits or something. Still, Leckie did a good job. A lot of people still stop me in the street now and say 'Thanks for changing my life', and it's like, 'We've made a record man!'. Sometimes, when you're in the eye of the storm, it's hard to understand what it does to people, your music.