Oh no, it’s The Stone Roses

Artrockers,
I was never much of a Stone Roses fan, largely because of the Ian Brown's unbearably out of tune vocals, which, on the only occasion I saw them Live drove me to the back of the crowd after 2 songs and back into the street after 3, trying to work out what was wrong with my ears because I seemed to be the only person there who noticed. But my ears were entirely exonerated when I saw a clip of them (The Stone Roses that is, not my ears) on TV a few weeks later - if anything Brown was even more out of tune than I recalled.

Mine was a voice in the wilderness of course, as history now informs. And I did buy Fools' Gold, it was a good thing, how John Leckie got the vocals in tune I'll never know, but he did - clever guy. I suppose the appeal of The Stone Roses was based in their attitudinous approach and the fact that they celebrated the newly cool Ecstasy, a band you could drop 'letters' to even if you weren't into acid house - a halfway house for those too timid for the illegal rave scene, they, and their baggy cohorts were a safe alternative, a band, we understood bands, as did a music business desperate to climb on the rave-bus but with no idea of how to market the main stay of the scene - DJs. The Stone Roses became the safe option for record company bosses baffled and terrified by a movement they had no control over or even basic understanding of.