Stoned Love. On and on and on and on.

Sometimes it’s not about the hard-to-find, the rare, the obscure, the long-forgotten must-have on that uber-hip label. Nope. Sometimes it’s the simple things. The sun comes out, a smile breaks out and you need to state the bloody obvious – She Bangs The Drums by The Stone Roses is magic. And so were the b-sides.

The Stone Roses were the soundtrack to my summer of 1989, but if you’ve been here before you’ll know that already. She Bangs The Drums was released right at the height of the baking hot summer (if memory serves me correctly) and in discography terms is the middle cog in a great run of 1! 2! 3! singles, sandwiched between the band’s first great single, Made Of Stone and the band’s last great single, Fools Gold. She Bangs The Drums is unashamed pure pop, guitar-driven and saccharine sweet with a great pay -off line in the vocals.

“Kiss me where the sun don’t shine. The past is yours but the future’s mine…you’re all out of time.”

Aye, The Stone Roses came from Manchester, but they despised the city’s musical legacy. They hated The Smiths and they would never have dreamed of signing for Factory. So what if their youthful arrogant streak wore off on certain other monobrowed bands of the locality, at that moment in time The Stone Roses were the greatest thing on the planet. They were my Beatles and my Stones and by the time of Fools Gold they were my Family Stone too.

 

 

She Bangs The Drums was released at a time when vinyl was king (“I can feel the earth begin to move, I feel my needle hit the groove” and all that), when bands thought carefully about what to put on the b-sides and is a perfect summation of all The Stone Roses stood for at that time. Guitar riffs, fantastic drumming, those whispered vocals (thankfully not as out of tune as they usually were in the live setting). The other tracks are just as good.

Mersey Paradise with its see-sawing 12 string chiming guitars, tambourines on hi-hats and a terrific “oh yeah..!” whispered vocal break in the last chorus would’ve made a great single in itself, but clearly the self-belief in the band at this time was such that they could stick a song like Mersey Paradise on a b-side. Plus, they were working up to Fools Gold which is much better.

Standing Here took up all of the second side of the 12″. It was pure proto-Hendrix, all squealing guitars, feedback and riffs! riffs! riffs! before falling apart into a coda that ebbed and flowed like the California surf itself. For a while it was my party piece. My crappy electric guitar would feedback brilliantly whenever I held a particular note on the 13th fret and I could replicate the intro pretty faithfully. I never did master the wee incidental riffs behind the vocals though.

Simone was the extra track on the CD single. It’s one of those backwards sound collage thingys that John Squire was fond of putting together, where he takes a standard Stone Roses track, plays it backwards through the mixing desk and adds all manner of stuff on top. Simone takes the backing track for the relatively obscure Where Angels Play (released on the Australian version of the I Wanna Be Adored single) and builds it into something of an ambient oddity. The pinnacle of this aproach is, of course, Don’t Stop, the backwards version of Waterfall that’s on the debut album. All the rage for listening to whilst on whatever you were on in the second summer of love.

Bonus track!

Something I’ve meant to do for ages! I took Simone, reversed it using Audacity, et voila! The instrumental version of Where Angels Play, with added whoosing noises and general pseudo-psychedelic tomfoolery. Who needs John Leckie?