The Colorado Sound Playlist2:02pm I Wanna Be Adored (Remastered 2009) by The Stone Roses from The Stone Roses (Remastered 2009)
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The Delete BinThe Stone Roses Play “Love Spreads”
Listen to this track by legendary Mancunian quartet and comeback kids The Stone Roses. It’s “Love Spreads”, their 1994 single as featured on their second LP, the appropriately titled Second Coming. That single and the album had the challenging task of following up the band’s almost universally lauded self-titled debut record from 1989. That previous release had helped define an era for modern rock fans in Britain and elsewhere. It also seemed foresee the next decade when the divisions between rock, pop, and dance music weren’t so rigid and impermeable.
Where that kind of success for a debut record is always welcome for any band trying to make a name for themselves, it has its downsides, too. The second album that follows it has to live up to the hype. The Stone Roses proved to be a textbook example of this phenomenon where a good record often pales in comparison to the great record that came before it. No wonder it took five plus years to make! At least that’s what many in the music press and in fandom concluded; that the pressure of making a follow-up album as good or better than their debut was the reason for the delay.
As with most received wisdom on things like this, it was more complicated than that. The band did spend a long, long time recording tracks for the record, working with several producers over a period of years while doing so. But other factors including changing musical landscapes, legal issues with their label that delayed the release of new material, and a lack of playing live together regularly were other contributing factors. So were personal losses and obligations to family between all four members.
When Second Coming came out at the tail end of 1994, reviews of the album seemed to reflect the common reaction of being underwhelmed, even if it sold very well. In retrospect, this seems more like a self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of the music press. They expected to be disappointed and so they were. An album or a song written and recorded in real time and space can rarely compete with how an audience imagined it was going to sound like based on a build up of nebulous and preconceived notions. Expectation and reality can be a difficult gap to bridge in this respect.
Still, “Love Spreads” represented a magnificent return by anyone’s standards, reaching a very respectable number two on the UK charts after its release in November 1994. The song works against the idea of trying to be innovative or experimental to prove that the band were still on the cutting edge. Instead, it leans into British guitar rock classicism, aligned to Led Zeppelin and Free more so than to My Bloody Valentine or Spiritualized. It’s less about a culturally provocative artistic construction honed and crafted in a studio, and more about what a rock band should sound like when you see them live.
Maybe this is what was at the root of the so-so album reviews in some music publications. Yet, the gambit pays off handsomely on a sheer visceral excitement level on this cut. Lead vocalist Ian Brown’s delivery in his own accent is decidedly punk rock with shots of blues rock-inspired melodic flourishes to contrast it. Guitarist John Squire proves himself to be a monster riff master with a white hot and razor-sharp slide part that is now iconic. Rhythm section Mani on bass and Reni on drums are symbiotic, locked in together on a darkly compelling and murky groove.
Even the song’s subject matter is decidedly classic in nature. In essence, “Love Spreads” is a kind of amped up gospel blues tune, not unlike “In My Time of Dying” and with a similar Zeppelinesque slide part. But it goes beyond that template and adds its own elements that make it socially relevant for its time.
The imagery the lyrics conjure are religious in nature, shot through with sensuality, violence, and sociopolitical subversion. It suggests the image of Christ on a cross, with arms spread in suffering but also in openness. The messiah in question hanging arms-wide on a cross is a Black woman who ain’t no King, man, she’s our Queen.
“She didn’t scream
She didn’t make a sound
I forgive you boy
But don’t leave town
Cold black skin
Naked in the rain
Hammer flash in the lightning
They’re hurting her again”
~ “Love Spreads” by The Stone Roses
The song was partially based on John Squire’s reading of Rosalind Miles’ The Woman’s History of the World (1988), which is an examination of how patriarchy has undercut and reshaped history at the cost of truth about women’s integral roles to affect social change throughout history. The song goes beyond that work’s second-wave feminism perspective by placing a woman of colour as its central figure. But otherwise, this tune doesn’t deal in polemics but rather in vivid symbolism and in a strong lyrical takeaway that carries emotional impact ranging from outrage to devotion to the divine feminine.
This is not to say that “Love Spreads” is intended to be an incendiary political song about feminism, necessarily. It’s more accurate to say that it’s a song about a process of personal transformation through a change of perspective. It’s a song about what it is to learn something you didn’t expect to learn, and to be shocked by not knowing about it before. The song also contains another element, which is the responsibility to share whatever you’ve learned with others as an act of communal edification; let me put you in the picture, let me show you what I mean.
In this, “Love Spreads” contains the last vestiges of idealistic late-Eighties club culture and spirit in Manchester. That scene made each progression and success into a collective victory for a whole community of participants, bands and audience alike. This was before crime, violence, drug deaths, and unsustainable business practices undid it all. With the loss of the idealistic we’re all in this together vibe, and with Britpop irony, artifice, and distance taking its place by 1994-95, the momentum for The Stone Roses to continue where they left off was also lost.
As such, the comeback record from an era-defining band expected to rekindle the late-Eighties communal spirit between audience and band five plus years later turned into a last gasp instead. Maybe this was another reason that so many felt underwhelmed by The Stone Roses’ follow-up. Instead of defining the era they were in, they were just another charting band in the era of Oasis. For The Stone Roses, the long-awaited second coming was just a passage that led to another exit.
The Stone Roses fragmented soon after the release of Second Coming, breaking up in 1996. Each member branched into into various solo efforts, joining existing bands, and forming new ones in the intervening years. They reunited again in the 2010s and released a brace of new singles, only to dissolve again by 2017.
To learn more about how The Stone Roses made Second Coming, read this interview with producer and engineer Simon Dawson.
For more on the Madchester scene of which The Stone Roses were an integral force, check out this article Madchester remembered from The Guardian.
Enjoy!
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