Being A Fan

17 Dec

But there can be few bands since The Beatles who really captured the imaginations and inspired idolatry in the way that The Stone Roses did. After all, the first song on their first album was called “I Wanna Be Adored”. And whether you interpret that as the way Ian Brown and the rest of the band members themselves felt, or the way that their fans then felt about themselves, it’s a song that is so filled with positive energy, & definitely lends itself to encouraging worship.

And it wasn’t just the music the fans loved. It was the attitude, the clothes, the V signs to the establishment. Some might say it had all been done before, but if you were a teenager, as I was, The Stone Roses were exactly what you needed. I remember on one no-uniform day in school, myself and two other boys in the class all wore Stone Roses t-shirts and flares. The flares I wore were actually an old pair of my dad’s, rather than the fashionable, baggy Joe Bloggs jeans, which I was mocked a bit for, but I really didn’t care.

And so it came to pass that, around 5 or so years later, Ian Brown would wear my Cardiff City shirt on stage at a Stone Roses gig in Newport. This event has been talked about a lot, mainly for the fighting after the gig, as documented in the Soul Crew book amongst other places. According to Mani in an interview with a fanzine shortly afterwards:

“This bag fat Welsh valley boy, a big fat smelly greasy man he was, I saw him take his Cardiff away shirt off and he threw it on stage.”

Thanks for the compliment, Mani, but I think I should finally give my side of the story… I’d gone to the gig wearing a Stone Roses shirt underneath, and a Cardiff shirt on top, perhaps cos I kind of felt that Cardiff were now more important to me than The Stone Roses. Basically, the band had just played what I thought was a cracking version of “Breaking Into Heaven”, and I decided to throw my Cardiff shirt onstage, so that my Stone Roses shirt (a “What the World Is Waiting For” shirt, in fact, the same one I wore to school that time, and the same one I ripped apart after the band split up) was now showing.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cH7rJ-ykLQo]

Ian Brown picked up the shirt and looked at it. He then lit up a cigarette. I had the impression he was looking at me, so I then lit up a cigarette too (this was in the time when you could smoke indoors, of course). Then Ian put the shirt on. There was a lot of chanting and stuff. I was kind of in shock for a while. He kept it on for about 3 songs before taking it off, if I remember rightly. Afterwards, as the four of us who went walked towards my brother’s car, we looked round and saw the riot taking place. I had a feeling it had something to do with the shirt, but didn’t know for certain. I wanted to go back, but my brother decided we should just drive off. And that’s it really. Never meant to start a riot.

But actually throwing the shirt onstage..well, it was just one of those things fans do! And now, in light of the fact that the band has reformed, and the question of just what happened to the shirt even came up in the press conference the band put on to announce their comeback, perhaps it’s time the question was finally answered. Does Ian Brown in fact know what happened to what has now become a relic? Does anyone know?!

Footnote: If you look close up at the photo of Ian wearing the shirt, you’ll see what looks like two badges on the sleeves. One is a Heart Foundation badge – I thought it’d be funny to show I was “wearing my heart on my sleeve”. The other is a metal Stone Roses badge, depicting the Newport shield, which I’d actually bought that night. My brother bought one too. They’re quite valuable now – my brother quite often got asked if he’d sell his while he was in university in Manchester.

A version of this article first featured in Square Issue 4 (aka Cool Magazine), published 2009

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